Adventures in the Far Future

by Donald A. Wollheim

Julith’s voice rose a little. “But those people are us/”

  “And the folk of Alpha Centauri and Procyon and Sirius and—oh, hundreds of other stars. Yet all of you together are only one tiny drop in the quadrillions of the Galaxy. Don’t you see, Julith, you have to move for the good of all of us?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I know all that.” She got up, shaking herself. “Let’s go swimming.” Jorun smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ll wait for you if you want to go.”

  She nodded and ran off down the beach, sheltering behind a dune to put on a bathing-suit. The Terrans had a nudity taboo, in spite of the mild interglacial climate; typical primitive irrationality. Jorun lay back, folding his arms behind his head, and looked up at the darkening sky. The evening star twinkled forth, low and white on the dusk-blue horizon. Venus—or was it Mercury? He wasn’t sure. He wished he knew more about the early history of the Solar System, the first men to ride their thunderous rockets out to die on unknown hell-worlds—the first clumsy steps toward the stars. He could look it up in the archives of Corazuno, but he knew he never would. Too much else to do, too much to remember. Probably less than one per cent of mankind’s throngs even knew where Earth was, today—though, for a while, it had been quite a tourist center. But that was perhaps thirty thousand years ago.

  Because this world, out of all the billions, has certain physical characteristics, he thought, my race has made them into standards. Our basic units of length and time and acceleration, our comparisons by which we classify the swarming planets of the Galaxy, they all go back ultimately to Earth. We bear that unspoken memorial to our birthplace within our whole civilization, and will bear it forever. But has she given us more than that? Are our own selves, bodies and minds and dreams, are they also the children of Earth?

  Now he was dunking like Kormt, stubborn old Kormt who clung with such a blind strength to this land simply because it was his. When you considered all the races of this wander-footed species—how many of them there were, how many lands of man between the stars! And yet they all walked upright; they all had two eyes and a nose between and a mouth below; they were all cells of that great and ancient culture which had begun here, eons past, with the first hairy half-man who kindled a fire against night. If Earth had not had darkness and cold and prowling beasts, oxygen and cellulose and flint, that culture might never have gestated.

  I‘m getting illogical. Too tired, nerves worn too thin, psychosomatic control slipping. Now Earth is becoming some obscure mother-symbol for me.

  Or has she always been one, for the whole race of us?

  A sea gull cried harshly overhead and soared from view.

  The sunset was smoldering away and dusk rose like fog out of the ground. Julith came running back to him, her face indistinct in the gloom. She was breathing hard, and he couldn’t tell if the catch in her voice was laughter or weeping.

  “I’d better be getting home,” she said.

  III

  THEY FLEW slowly back. The town was a yellow twinkle of lights, warmth gleaming from windows across many empty kilometers. Jorun set the girl down outside her home.

  “Thank you, good sir,” she said, curtseying. “Won’t you come in to dinner?”

  “Well-”

  The door opened, etching the girl black against the ruddiness inside. Jorun’s luminous tunic made him like a torch in the dark. “Why, it’s the starman,” said a woman’s voice.

  “I took your daughter for a swim,” he explained. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “And if we did, what would it matter?” grumbled a bass tone. Jorun recognized Kormt; the old man must have come as a guest from his farm on the outskirts. “What could we do about it?”

  “Now, Granther, that’s no way to talk to the gentleman,” said the woman. “He’s been very land. Won’t you come eat with us, good sir?”

  Jorun refused twice, in case they were only being polite, then accepted gladly enough. He was tired of cookery at the inn where he and Zarek boarded. “Thank you.”

  He entered, ducking under the low door. A single long, smoky-raftered room was kitchen, dining room, and parlor; doors led off to the sleeping quarters. It was furnished with a clumsy elegance, skin rugs, oak wainscoting, carved pillars, glowing ornaments of hammered copper. A radium clock, which must be incredibly old, stood on the stone mantel, above a snapping fire; a chemical-powered gun, obviously of local manufacture, hung over it. Julith’s parents, a plain, quiet peasant couple, conducted him to the end of the wooden table, while half a dozen children watched him with large eyes. The younger children were the only Terrans who seemed to find this removal an adventure.

  The meal was good-and plentiful: meat, vegetables, bread, beer, milk, ice cream, coffee, all of It from the farms hereabouts. There wasn’t much trade between the few thousand communities of Earth; they were practically self-sufficient. The company ate in silence, as was the custom here. When they were finished, Jorun wanted to go, but it would have been rude to leave immediately. He went over to a chair by the fireplace, across from one in which Kormt sprawled.

  The old man took out a big-bowled pipe and began stuffing it. Shadows wove across his seamed brown face, his eyes were a gleam out of darkness. “Ill go down to City Hall with you soon,” he said. “I imagine that’s where the work is going on.”

  “Yes,” said Jorun. “I can relieve Zarek at it. I’d appreciate it if you did come, good sir. Your influence is very steadying on these people.”

  “It should be,” said Kormt. “I’ve been their Speaker for almost a hundred years. And my father Gerlaug was before me. and his father Kormt was before him.” He took a brand from the fire and held it over his pipe, puffing hard, looking up at Jorun through tangled brows. “Who was your greatgrandfather?”

  “Why—I don’t know. I imagine he’s still alive somewhere, but-”

  “I thought so. No marriage. No family. No home. No tradition.” Kormt shook his massive head, slowly. “I pity you Galactics!”

  “Now please, good sir—” Damn it all, the old clodhopper could get as irritating as a faulty computer. “We have records that go back to before man left this planet. Records of everything. It is you who have forgotten.”

  Kormt smiled and puffed blue clouds at him. “That‘s not what I meant.”

  “Do you mean you think it is good for men to five a life that is unchanging, that is just the same from century to century—no new dreams, no new triumphs, always the same grubbing rounds of days? I cannot agree.”

  Jorun’s mind flickered over history, trying to evaluate the basic motivations of his opponent. Partly cultural, partly biological, that must be it. Once Terra had been the center of the civilized universe. But the long migration starward, especially after the fall of the First Empire, drained off the most venturesome elements of the population. That drain went on for thousands of years.

  You couldn’t call them stagnant. Their life was too healthy, their civilization too rich in its own way—folk art, folk music, ceremony, religion, the intimacy of family life which the Galactics had lost—for that term. But to one who flew between the streaming suns, it was a small existence.

  Kormt’s voice broke in on his reverie. “Dreams, triumphs, work, deeds, love and life and finally death and the long sleep in the earth,” he said. “Why should we want to change them? They never grow old; they are new for each child that is born.”

  “Well,” said Jorun, and stopped. You couldn’t really answer that kind of logic. It wasn’t logic at all, but something deeper.

  “Well,” he started-over, after a while, “as you know, this evacuation was forced on us, too. We don’t want to move you, but we must.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Kormt. “You have been very nice about it. It would have been easier, in a way, if you’d come with fire and gun and chains for us, like the barbarians did long ago. We could have understood you better then.”

  “At best, it will be hard for your people,” said Jorun. “It will be a shock, and they’ll nee
d leaders to guide them through it. You have a duty to help them out there, good sir.”

  “Maybe.” Kormt blew a series of smoke rings at his youngest descendant, three years old, who crowed with laughter and climbed up on his knee. “But they’ll manage.”

  “You can’t seem to realize,” said Jorun, “that you are the last man on Earth who refuses to go. You will be alone. For the rest of your life! We couldn’t come back for you later under any circumstances, because there’ll be Hulduvian colonies between Sol and Sagittarius which we would disturb in passage. You’ll be alone, I say!”

  Kormt shrugged. “I’m too old to change my ways; there can’t be many years left me, anyway. I can live well, just off the food-stores that’ll be left here.” He ruffled the child’s hair, but his face drew into a scowl. “Now, no more of that, good sir, if you please; I’m tired of this argument.”

  Jorun nodded and fell into the silence that held the rest. Terrans would sometimes sit for hours without talking, content to be in each other’s nearness. He thought of Kormt, Gerlaug’s son, last man on Earth, altogether alone, living alone and dying alone; and yet, he reflected, was that solitude any greater than the one in which all men dwelt all their days?

  Presently the Speaker set the child down, knocked out his pipe and rose. “Come, good sir,” he said, reaching for his staff. “Let us go.”

  They walked side by side down the street, under the dim lamps and past the yellow windows. The cobbles gave back their footfalls in a dull clatter. Once in a while they passed someone else, a vague figure which bowed to Kormt. Only one did not notice them, an old woman who walked crying between the high walls.

  “They say it is never night on your worlds,” said Kormt.

  Jorun threw him a sidelong glance. His face was a strong jutting of highlights from sliding shadow. “Some planets have been given luminous skies,” said the technician, “and a few still have cities, too, where it is always fight. But when every man can control the cosmic energies, there is no real reason for us to five together; most of us dwell far apart. There are very dark nights on my own world, and I cannot see any other home from my own—just the moors.”

  “It must be a strange life,” said Kormt. “Belonging to no one.”

  They came out on the market-square, a broad paved space walled in by houses. There was a fountain in its middle, and a statue dug out of the ruins had been placed there. It was broken, one arm gone—but still the white slim figure of the dancing girl stood with youth and laughter, forever under the sky of Earth. Jorun knew that lovers were wont to meet here, and briefly, irrationally, he wondered how lonely the girl would be in all the millions of years to come.

  The City Hall lay at the farther end of the square, big and dark, its eaves carved with dragons, and the gables topped with wing-spreading birds. It was an old building; nobody knew how many generations of men had gathered here. A long, patient fine of folk stood outside it, shuffling in one by one to the registry desk; emerging, they went off quietly into the darkness, toward the temporary shelters erected for them.

  Walking by the line, Jorun picked faces out of the shadows. There was a young mother holding a crying child, her head bent over it in a timeless pose, murmuring to soothe it. There was a mechanic, still sooty from his work, smiling wearily at some tired joke of the man behind him. There was a scowling, black-browed peasant who muttered a curse as Jorun went by; the rest seemed to accept their fate meekly enough. There was a priest, his head bowed, alone with his God. There was a younger man, his hands clenching and unclenching, big helpless hands, and Jorun heard him saying to someone else: “—if they could have waited till after harvest. I hate to let good grain stand in the field.”

  Jorun went into the main room, toward the desk at the head of the line. Hulking hairless Zarek was patiently questioning each of the hundreds who came, hat in hand, before him: name, age, sex, occupation, dependents, special needs or desires. He punched the answers out on the recorder machine, half a million lives were held in its electronic memory.

  “Oh, there you are,” his bass rumbled. “Where’ve you been?”

  “I had to do some coney work,” said Jorun. That was a private code term, among others: coney, conciliation, anything to make the evacuation go smoothly. “Sorry to be so late. Ill take over now.”

  “All right. I think we can wind the whole thing up by midnight.” Zarek smiled and clapped him on the back to go out for supper and sleep. Jorun beckoned to the next Terran and settled down to the long, almost mindless routine of registration. He was interrupted once by Kormt, who yawned mightily and bade him good night; otherwise it was a steady, half-conscious interval in which one anonymous face after another passed by. He was dimly surprised when the last one came up. This was a plump, cheerful, middle-aged fellow with small shrewd eyes, a little more colorfully dressed than the others. He gave his occupation as merchant—a minor tradesman, he explained, dealing in the little things it was more convenient for the peasants to buy than to manufacture themselves.

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,” said Jorun. Coney statement.

  “Oh, no.” The merchant grinned. “I knew those dumb farmers would be here for hours, so I just went to bed and got up half an hour ago, when it was about over.”

  “Clever,” Jorun rose, sighed, and stretched. The big room was cavernously empty, its lights a harsh glare. It was very quiet here.

  “Well, sir, I’m a middling smart chap, if I say it as shouldn’t. And you know, I’d like to express my appreciation of all you’re doing for us.”

  “Can’t say we’re doing much.” Jorun locked the machine.

  “Oh, the apple-knockers may not like it, but really, good sir, this hasn’t been any place for a man of enterprise. It’s dead. I’d have got out long ago if there’d been any transportation. Now, when we’re getting back into civilization, there’ll be some real opportunities. Ill make my pile inside of five years, you bet.”

  Jorun smiled, but there was a bleakness in him. What chance would this barbarian have even to get near the gigantic work of civilization—let alone comprehend it or take part in it. He hoped the little fellow wouldn’t break his heart trying.

  “Well,” he said “good night, and good luck to you.”

  “Good night, sir. We’ll meet again, I trust.”

  Jorun switched off the lights and went out into the square. It was completely deserted. The moon was up now, almost full, and its cold radiance dimmed the lamps. He heard a dog howling far off. The dogs of Earth—such as weren’t taken along—would be lonely, too.

  Well, he thought, the job’s over. Tomorrow, or the next day, the ships come.

  IV

  HE FELT VERY tired, but didn’t want to sleep, and willed himself back to alertness. There hadn’t been much chance to inspect the ruins, and he felt it would be appropriate to see them by moonlight.

  Rising into the air, he ghosted above roofs and trees until he came to the dead city. For a while he hovered in a sky like dark velvet, a faint breeze murmured around him, and he heard the remote noise of crickets and the sea. But stillness enveloped it all, there was no real sound.

  Sol City, capital of the legendary First Empire, had been enormous. It must have sprawled over forty or fifty thousand square kilometers when it was in its prime, when it was the gay and wicked heart of human civilization and swollen with the lifeblood of the stars. And yet those who built it had been men of taste, they had sought out genius to create for them. The city was not a collection of buildings; it was a balanced whole, radiating from the mighty peaks of the central palace, through colonnades and parks and leaping skyways, out to the temple-like villas of the rulers. For all’ its monstrous size, it had been a fairy sight, a woven lace of polished metal and white, black, red stone, colored plastic, music and light-everywhere light.

  Bombarded from space; sacked again and again by the barbarian hordes who swarmed maggot-like through the bones of the slain Empire; weathered, shaken by the slow slid
ing of Earth’s crust; pried apart by patient, delicate roots; dug over . by hundreds of generations of archaeologists, treasure-seekers, the idly curious; made a quarry of metal and stone for the ignorant peasants who finally huddled about it—still its empty walls and blind windows, crumbling arches and toppled pillars held a ghost of beauty and magnificence which was like a half-remembered dream. A dream the whole race had once had.

  And now we’re waking up.

  Jorun moved silently over the ruins. Trees growing between tumbled blocks dappled them with moonlight and shadow; the marble was very white and fair against darkness. He hovered by a broken caryatid, marveling at its exquisite leaping litheness; that girl had borne tons of stone like a flower in her hair. Further on, across a street that was a lane of woods, beyond a park that was thick with forest, lay the nearly complete outline of a house. Only its rain-blurred walls stood. But he could trace the separate rooms; here a noble had entertained his friends, robes that were fluid rainbows, jewels dripping fire, swift cynical interplay of wits like sharpened swords rising above music and the clear sweet laughter of dancing girls; here people whose flesh was now dust had slept and made love and lain side-by-side in darkness to watch the moving pageant of the city; here the slaves had lived and worked and sometimes wept; here the children had played their ageless games under willows, between banks of roses. Oh, it had been a hard and cruel time; it was well gone but it had lived. It had embodied man, all that was noble and splendid and evil and merely wistful in the race, and now its late children had forgotten.

  A cat sprang up on one of the walls and flowed noiselessly along it, hunting. Jorun shook himself and flew toward the center of the city, the imperial palace. An owl hooted somewhere, and a bat fluttered out of his way like a small damned soul blackened by hellfire. He didn’t raise a windscreen, but let the air blow around him, the air of Earth.

  The palace was almost completely wrecked, a mountain of heaped rocks, bare bones of “eternal” metal gnawed thin by steady ages of wind and rain and frost, but once it must have been gigantic. Men rarely built that big nowadays, they didn’t need to; and the whole human spirit had changed, become ever more abstract, finding its treasures within itself. But there had been an elemental magnificence about early man and the works he raised to challenge the sky.