Finally, Bright Eyes came to the city.
Thomas would not enter. The twisted rope-pillars of smoke that still climbed relentlessly to the dark sky; the terrible sounds of steel cracking and masonry falling into empty streets; the charnel-house odor. Thomas would not go in.
But Bright Eyes was compelled to enter. Into that last debacle of all. From where it had begun.
The dead were everywhere, sighing soundlessly with milk-white eyes at a tomorrow that had never come. And each fallen one soundlessly spoke the question of why. Bright Eyes walked with the burden of chaos pulsing in him. This is what it had come to.
For this, his race had gone away. That the ones with hair, the men they had been called, they had called themselves, could stride the Earth. How cheap they had left it all. How cheap, how thin, how sordid. This was the last of it, the last of the race of men. Dust and dead.
Down a street, women pleading out of death for mercy.
Through what had been a park, old men humped crazily in rigorous failure to escape.
Past a structure, building front ripped away as if fingernails had shorn it clean. Children’s arms, pocked and burned, dangling. Tiny hands.
To another place. Not like the place from which Bright Eyes had come, but the place to which he had journeyed. No special marker, just…a place. Sufficient.
And then it was, that Bright Eyes sank to his knees, crying. Tears that had not been seen since before Man had come from caves, tears that Bright Eyes had never known. Infinite sadness. Cried. Cried for the ghosts of the creatures with hair, cried for Men. For Man. Each Man. The Man who had done away with himself so absurdly, so completely. Bright Eyes, on his knees, sorrowing for the ones who had lived here, and were gone, leaving him to the night, and the silence, and eternity. A melody never to be heard again.
He placed the skulls. Down in the soft white ash. Unresponsive, dying Earth, receiving its burden testament.
Bright Eyes, last of a race that had condemned itself to extinction, had condemned him to living in darkness forever, and had had only the saving wistful knowledge that the race coming after would live in the world. But now, gone, all of them, taking the world with them, leaving instead—no fair exchange—charnel house.
And Bright Eyes; alone.
Not only their race had been destroyed, in vain, but his, centuries turned to mud and diamonds in their markerless graves, had passed in futility. It had all, all of it, been for nothing.
So Bright Eyes—never Man—was the last man on Earth. Keeper of a silent graveyard; echoless tomb monument to the foolishness, the absurdity, of nobility.
Pretty people have it easier than uglies. It smacks of cliché, and yet the lovelies of this world, defensive to the grave, will say, ’tain’t so. They will contend that nice makes it harder for them. They get hustled more, people try to use them more, and to hear girls tell it, their good looks are nothing but curse, curse, curse. But stop to think: at least a good-looking human being has that much going for openers. Plain to not-so-nice-at-all folk have to really jump for every little crumb. Things come harder to them. The reasoning of the rationale is a simple one: we worship the Pepsi Generation. We have a pathological lemming drive to conceal our age, lift our faces, dress like overblown Shirley Temples, black that gray in the hair, live a lie. What ever happened to growing old gracefully, the reverence of maturity, the search for character as differentiated from superficial comeliness? It be a disease, I warn you. It will rot you from the inside, while the outside glows. It will escalate into a culture that can never tolerate
The Discarded
Bedzyk saw Riila go mad, and watched her throw herself against the lucite port, till her pinhead was a red blotch of pulped flesh and blood. He sighed, and sucked deeply from his massive bellows chest, and wondered how he, of all the Discards, had been silently nominated the leader. The ship hung in space, between the Moon and Earth, unwanted, unnoticed, a raft adrift in the sea of night.
Around him in the ship’s saloon, the others watched Riila killing herself, and when her body fell to the rug, they turned away, allowing Bedzyk his choice of who was to dispose of her. He chose John Smith—the one with feathers where hair should have been—and the nameless one who clanged instead of talking.
The two of them lifted her heavy body, with its tiny pea of head, and carried it to the garbage port. They emptied it, opened it, tossed her inside, redogged and blew her out. She floated past the saloon window on her way sunward. In a moment she was lost.
Bedzyk sat down in a deep chair and drew breath whistlingly into his mighty chest. It was a chore, being leader of these people.
People? No, that was certainly not the word. These Discards. That was a fine willowy word to use. They were scrap, refuse, waste, garbage themselves. How fitting for Riila to have gone that way, out the garbage port. They would all bid goodbye that way some day. He noted there was no ‘day’ on the ship. But some good something—maybe day, maybe night—each of them would go sucking out that port like the garbage.
It had to be that way. They were Discards.
But people? No, they were not people. People did not have hooks where hands should have been, nor one eye, nor carapaces, nor humps on chests and backs, nor fins, nor any of the other mutations these residents of the ship sported. People were normal. Evenly matched sets of arms and legs and eyes. Evenly matched husbands, wives. Evenly distributed throughout the Solar System, and evenly dividing the goods of the System between themselves and the frontier worlds at the Edge. And all happily disposed to let the obscene Discards die in their prison ship.
“She’s gone.”
He had pursed his lips, had sunk his perfectly normal head onto his gigantic chest, and had been thinking. Now he looked up at the speaker. It was John Smith, with feathers where hair should have been.
“I said: she’s gone.”
Bedzyk nodded without replying. Riila had been just one more in the tradition. They had already lost over two hundred Discards from the ship. There would be more.
Strange how these—he hesitated again to use the word people, finally settled on the word they used among themselves: creatures—these creatures had steeled themselves to the death of one of their kind. Or perhaps they did not consider the rest as malformed as themselves. Each person on the ship was different. No two had been affected by the Sickness in the same way. The very fibers of the muscles had altered with some of these creatures, making their limbs useless; on others the pores had clogged on their skin surfaces, eliminating all hair. On still others strange juices had been secreted in the blood stream, causing weird growths to erupt where smoothness had been. But perhaps each one thought he was less hideous than the others. It was conceivable. Bedzyk knew his great chest was not nearly as unpleasant to look upon as, say, Samswope’s spiny crest and twin heads. In fact, Bedzyk mused wryly, many people might think it was becoming, this great wedge of a chest, all matted with dark hair and heroic-seeming. Uh-huh, the others are pretty miserable to look at, but not me, especially. Yes, it was conceivable.
In any case, they paid no attention now, if one of their group killed himself. They turned away; most of them were better off dead, anyhow.
Then he caught himself.
He was starting to get like the rest of them! He had to stop thinking like that. It wasn’t right. No one should be allowed to take death like that. He resolved, the next one would be stopped, and he would deliver them a stern warning, and tell the Discards that they would find landfall soon, and to buck up.