[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction November 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
What more fitting place for the last man on
Earth to live in than a museum? Now if only
he could avoid becoming an exhibit himself!
For twenty-five years, no one came. In the seventy-sixth year of his
life, Brian Van Anda was still trying not to remember a happy boyhood.
To do so was irrelevant and dangerous, although every instinct of his
old age tempted him to reject the present and dwell in the lost times.
He would recall stubbornly that the present year, for example, was
2096; that he had been born in 2020, seven years after the close of the
Civil War, fifty years before the Final War, twenty-five years before
the departure of the First Interstellar. (It had never returned, nor
had the Second Interstellar. They might be still wandering, trifles of
Man-made Stardust.) He would recall his place of birth, New Boston,
the fine, planned city far inland from the ancient metropolis that the
rising sea had reclaimed after the earthquake of 1994.
Such things, places and dates, were factual props, useful when Brian
wanted to impose an external order on the vagueness of his immediate
existence. He tried to make sure they became no more than that--to shut
away the colors, the poignant sounds, the parks and the playgrounds of
New Boston, the known faces (many of them loved), and the later years
when he had briefly known a curious intoxication called fame.
It was not necessarily better or wiser to reject those memories,
but it was safer, and nowadays Brian was often sufficiently tired,
sufficiently conscious of his growing weakness and lonely unimportance,
to crave safety as a meadow mouse often craves a burrow.
* * * * *
He tied his canoe to the massive window that for many years had been a
port and a doorway. Lounging there with a suspended sense of time, he
was hardly aware that he was listening. In a way, all the twenty-five
years had been a listening. He watched Earth's patient star sink toward
the rim of the forest on the Palisades. At this hour, it was sometimes
possible, if the Sun-crimsoned water lay still, to cease grieving too
much at the greater stillness.
There was scattered human life elsewhere, he knew--probably a great
deal of it. After twenty-five years alone, that, too, often seemed
almost irrelevant. At other times than mild evenings, hushed noons or
mornings empty of human commotion, Brian might lapse into anger, fight
the calm by yelling, resent the swift dying of his echoes. Such moods
were brief. A kind of humor remained in him, not to be ruined by sorrow.
He remembered how, ten months or possibly ten years ago, he had
encountered a box turtle in a forest clearing, and had shouted at it:
"_They went thataway!_" The turtle's rigidly comic face, fixed by
nature in a caricature of startled disapproval, had seemed to point up
some truth or other. Brian had hunkered down on the moss and laughed
uproariously--until he observed that some of the laughter was weeping.
Today had been rather good. He had killed a deer on the Palisades,
and with bow and arrow, thus saving a bullet. Not that he needed to
practice such economy. He might live, he supposed, another decade or
so at the most. His rifles were in good condition and his hoarded
ammunition would easily outlast him. So would the stock of canned
and dried food stuffed away in his living quarters. But there was
satisfaction in primitive effort and no compulsion to analyze the why
of it.
The stored food was more important than the ammunition. A time would
come soon enough when he no longer had strength for hunting. He would
lose the inclination for trips to cross the river. He would yield
to such laziness or timidity for days, then weeks. Some time, when
it became months or years, he might find himself too feeble to risk
climbing the cliff wall into the forest. He would have the good sense
then, he hoped, to destroy the canoe, thus making of his weakness a
necessity.
* * * * *
There were books. There was the Hall of Music on the next floor above
the water, probably safe from its lessening encroachment. To secure
fresh water, he need only keep track of the tides, for the Hudson had
cleaned itself and now rolled down sweet from the lonely, uncorrupted
hills. His decline could be comfortable. He had provided for it
and planned it. Yet gazing now across the sleepy water, seeing a
broad-winged hawk circle in freedom above the forest, Brian was aware
of the old thought moving in him:
"If I could hear voices--just once, if I could hear human voices...."
The Museum of Human History, with the Hall of Music on what Brian
thought of as the second floor, should also outlast his requirements.
In the flooded lower floor and basement, the work of slow destruction
must be going on. Here and there, the unhurried waters could find their
way to steel and make rust of it, for the waterproofing of the concrete
was nearly a hundred years old. But it ought to be good for another
century or two.
Nowadays the ocean was mild. There were moderate tides, winds no longer
destructive. For the last six years, there had been no more of the
heavy storms out of the south. In the same period, Brian had noted a
rise in the water level of a mere nine inches. The window-sill, his
port, was six inches above high-tide mark now.
Perhaps Earth was settling into a new, amiable mood. The climate had
become delightful, about like what Brian remembered from a visit to
southern Virginia in his childhood.
The last earthquake had come in 2082--a large one, Brian guessed, but
its center could not have been close to the rock of Manhattan. The
Museum had only shivered and shrugged; it had survived much worse than
that, half a dozen times since 1994. After the tremor, a tall wave had
thundered in from the south. Its force, like that of others, had mostly
been dissipated against the barrier of tumbled rock and steel at the
southern end of the submerged island--an undersea dam, Man-made though
not Man-intended--and when it reached the Museum, it did no more than
smash the southern windows in the Hall of Music, which earlier waves
had not been able to reach. Then it passed on up the river, enfeebled.
The windows of the lower floor had all been broken long before that.
* * * * *
After the earthquake of '82, Brian had spent a month boarding up all
the openings on the south side of the Hall of Music--after all, it was
home--with lumber painfully ferried from mainland ruins. That year, he
had been sixty-two years old and not moving with the ease of youth:
a rough job. He had deliberately left cracks and knotholes. Sunlight
sifted through in narrow beams, like the bars of dusty gold Brian could
remember in a hayloft at his uncle's farm in Vermont. It was quite
pleasant.
The Museum had been built in 2003. Manhattan, strangely enough, had
never been bombed, although, in the Civil War, two of the type called
"small fission" had fallen on the Brooklyn and Jersey sides--so Brian
recalled from the jolly history books that had informed his adolescence
that war was definitely a thing of the past.
By the time of the final War, in 2070, the sea, gorged on the melting
ice caps, had removed Manhattan Island from history. Everything left
standing above the waters south of the Museum had been knocked flat
by the tornados of 2057 and 2064. A few blobs of rock still marked
where Central Park and Mount Morris Park had been, but they were not
significant. Where Long Island once rose, there was a troubled area of
shoals and tiny islands, probably a useful barrier of protection for
the receding shore of Connecticut.
Men had yielded the great city inch by inch, then foot by foot; a full
mile in 2047, saying: "The flood years have passed their peak and a
return to normal is expected."
Brian sometimes felt a twinge of sympathy for the Neanderthal experts
who must have told each other to expect a return to normal after the
Cro-Magnons stopped drifting in.
In 2057, the island of Manhattan had to be yielded altogether. New York
City, half-new, half-ancient, sprawled stubborn and enormous upstream,
on both sides of a river not done with its anger. But the Museum stood.
Aided by sunken rubble of others of its kind, aided also by men because
they still had time to love it, the Museum stood, and might for a long
time yet--weather permitting.
It covered an acre of ground well north of 125th Street, rising a
modest fifteen stories, its foundation secure in that layer of rock
which mimics eternity. It deserved its name: here men had brought
samples of everything, literally everything known in the course of
humanity since prehistory. It was, within human limits, definitive. In
its way, considering how much the erosion of time must always steal
from scholars, it was perfect.
* * * * *
No one had felt anything unnatural in the refusal of the Directors
of the Museum to move the collection after the Museum weathered the
storm of 2057. Instead, ordinary people, more than a thousand of them,
donated money so that a mighty abutment could be built around the
ground floor, a new entrance designed on the north side of the second.
The abutment survived the greater tornado of 2064 without damage,
although, during those seven years, the sea had risen another eight
feet in its old ever-new game of making monkeys out of the wise.
It was left for Brian Van Anda alone, in 2079, to see the waters slide
quietly over the abutment, opening the lower regions for the use of
fishes and the more secret water-dwellers who like shelter and privacy.
In the '90s, Brian suspected the presence of an octopus or two in the
vast vague territory which had once been parking lot, heating plant,
storage space, air-raid shelter, etc. He couldn't prove it; it just
seemed like a comfortable place for an octopus.
In 2070, plans were under consideration for building a new causeway to
the Museum from the still expanding city in the north. In 2070, also,
the final War began and ended.
When Brian Van Anda came down the river late in 2071, a refugee
from certain unfamiliar types of savagery, the Museum was empty of
the living. He had spent many days in exhaustive exploration of
the building. He did that systematically, toiling at last up to the
Directors' meeting room on the top floor. There he observed how they
must have been holding a conference at the very time when a new gas was
tried out over New York in the north, in a final effort to persuade the
Western Federation that Man is the servant of the state and that the
end justifies the means.
Too bad, Brian sometimes thought, that he would never know exactly what
happened to the Asian Empire. In the little paratroop-invaded area
called the Soviet of North America, from which Brian had fled in '71,
the official doctrine was that the Asian Empire had won the war and
that the saviors of humanity would be flying in any day to take over.
Brian had doubted this out loud, and then stolen a boat and got away
safely at night.
Up in the meeting room, Brian had seen how that new neurotoxin had been
no respecter of persons. An easy death, though--no pain. He observed
also how some things survive. The Museum, for instance, was virtually
unharmed.
* * * * *
Brian had often recalled those months in the meeting room as a sort
of island in time, like the first hour of discovering that he could
play Beethoven; or like the curiously cherished, more than life-size
half-hour back there in Newburg, in 2071, when he had briefly met and
spoken with an incredibly old man, Abraham Brown, President of the
Western Federation at the time of the Civil War. Brown, with a loved
world in almost total ruin around him, had spoken pleasantly of small
things--of chrysanthemums that would soon be blooming in the front
yard of the house where he lived with friends, of a piano recital by
Van Anda at Ithaca, in 2067, which the old man remembered with warm
enthusiasm.
Yes, the Museum Directors had died easily, and now the old innocent
bodies would be quite decent. There were no vermin in the Museum. The
doorways and floors were tight, the upper windows unbroken.
One of the white-haired men had a Ming vase on his desk. He had not
dropped from his chair, but looked as if he had fallen comfortably
asleep in front of the vase with his head on his arms. Brian had left
the vase untouched, but had taken one other thing, moved by some
stirring of his own never-certain philosophy and knowing that he would
not return to this room, ever.
Another Director had been opening a wall cabinet when he fell; the
small key lay near his fingers. Plainly their discussion had not been
concerned only with war, perhaps not at all with war--after all, there
were other topics. The Ming vase would have had a part in it. Brian
wished he could know what the old man had meant to choose from the
cabinet. Sometimes, even now, he dreamed of conversations with that
man, in which the Director told him the whole truth about that and
other matters; but what was certainty in sleep was in the morning gone
like childhood.
For himself, Brian had taken a little image of rock-hard clay,
blackened, two-faced, male and female. Prehistoric, or at any rate
wholly primitive, unsophisticated, meaningful like the blameless motion
of an animal in sunlight, Brian had said: "With your permission,
gentlemen." He had closed the cabinet and then, softly, the outer door.
"I'm old," Brian said to the red evening. "Old, a little foolish, talk
aloud to myself. I'll have some Mozart before supper."
* * * * *
He transferred the fresh venison from the canoe to a small raft hitched
inside the window. He had selected only choice pieces, as much as he
could cook and eat in the few days before it spoiled, leaving the rest
for the wolves or any other forest scavengers who might need it. There
was a rope strung from the window to the marble steps that led to the
next floor--home.
It had not been possible to save much from the submerged area, for its
treasure was mostly heavy statuary. Through the still water, as he
pulled the raft along the rope, the Moses of Michelangelo gazed up
at him in tranquility. Other faces watched him. Most of them watched
infinity. There were white hands that occasionally borrowed gentle
motion from ripples made by the raft.
"I got a deer, Moses," said Brian Van Anda, smiling down in
companionship, losing track of time. He carried his juicy burden up the
stairway.
His living quarters had once been a cloakroom for Museum attendants.
Four close walls gave it a sense of security. A ventilating shaft
now served as a chimney for the wood stove Brian had salvaged from a
mainland farmhouse. The door could be tightly locked; there were no
windows. You do not want windows in a cave.
Outside was the Hall of Music, an entire floor of the Museum,
containing an example of every musical instrument that was known or
could be reconstructed in the 21st century. The library of scores and
recordings lacked nothing--except electricity to play the recordings.
A few might still be made to sound on a spring-wound phonograph, but
Brian had not bothered with it for years; the springs were rusted.
He sometimes took out the orchestra and chamber music scores, to
read at random. Once his mind had been able to furnish ensembles,
orchestras, choirs of a sort, but lately the ability had weakened.
He remembered a day, possibly a year ago, when his memory refused to
give him the sound of oboe and clarinet in unison. He had wandered,
peevish, distressed, unreasonably alarmed, among the racks and cases of
woodwinds in the collection, knowing that even if the reeds were still
good, he could not play them. He had never mastered any instrument
except the piano.
"But even if I could play them," he muttered, now tolerantly amused, "I
couldn't do it in unison, could I? Ah, the things that will bother a
man!"
* * * * *
Brian recalled--it was probably that same day--opening a chest
of double basses. There was an old three-stringer in the group,
probably from the early 19th century, a trifle fatter than its modern
companions. Brian touched its middle string in an idle caress, not
intending to make it sound, but it had done so. When in use, it would
have been tuned to D; time had slackened the heavy murmur to A or
something near it. That had throbbed in the silent room with a sense
of finality, a sound such as a programmatic composer--Tchaikovsky,
say, or some other in the nadir of torment--might have used as a tonal
symbol for the breaking of a heart. It stayed in the air a long time,
other instruments whispering a dim response.
"All right, gentlemen," said Brian. "That was your A." He had closed
the case, not laughing.
Out in the main part of the hall, a place of honor was given to what
may have been the oldest of all instruments, a seven-note marimba of
phonolitic schist discovered in Indo-China in the 20th century and
thought to be at least 5,000 years of age. The xylophone-type rack was
modern; for twenty-five years, Brian had obeyed a compulsion to keep
it clear of cobwebs. Sometimes he touched the singing stones, not for
amusement, but because there was an obscure comfort in it. Unconcerned
with time, they answered even to the light tap of a fingernail.
On the west side of the Hall of Music, a rather long walk from Brian's
cave, was a small auditorium. Lectures, recitals, chamber music
concerts had been given there in the old days. The pleasant room held
a twelve-foot concert grand, made by Steinway in 2043, probably the
finest of the many pianos in the Hall of Music.
Brian had done his best to preserve this, setting aside a day each
month for the prayerful tuning of it, robbing other pianos in the
Museum to provide a reserve supply of strings, oiled and sealed up
against rust. No dirt ever collected on the Steinway. When not in use,
it was covered with stitched-together sheets. To remove the cover was a
sober ritual; Brian always washed his hands with fanatical care before
touching the keys.
Some years ago, he had developed the habit of locking the auditorium
doors before he played. Even with the doors locked, he would not glance
toward the vista of empty seats--not knowing, nor caring much, whether
this inhibition had grown from a Stone Age fear of seeing someone there
or from a flat, reasonable certainty that no one could be.
* * * * *
The habit might have started (he could not remember precisely) away
back in the year 2076, when so many bodies had drifted down from the
north on the ebb tides. Full horror had somehow been lacking in the
sight of all that floating death. Perhaps it was because Brian had
earlier had his fill of horrors; or perhaps, in 2076, he already felt
so divorced from his own kind that what happened to them was like the
photograph of a war in a distant country.
Some of the bodies had bobbed quite near the Museum. Most of them
had the gaping wounds of primitive warfare, but some were oddly
discolored--a new pestilence? So there was (or had been) more trouble
up there in what was (or had been) the Soviet of North America, a
self-styled "nation" that took in east New York State and some of New
England.
Yes, that was probably the year when he had started locking the doors
between his private concerts and an empty world.
He dumped the venison in his cave. He scrubbed his hands, blue-veined
now, but still tough, still knowing Mozart, he thought, and walked--not
with much pleasure of anticipation, but more like one externally
driven--through the enormous hall that was so full and yet so empty,
growing dim with evening, with dust, with age, with loneliness. Music
should not be silent.
When the piano was uncovered, Brian delayed. He flexed his hands
unnecessarily. He fussed with the candelabrum on the wall, lighting
three candles, then blowing out two for economy. He admitted presently
that he did not want the serene clarity of Mozart at all right now.
This evening, the darkness of 2070 was closer than he had felt it for
a long time. It would never have occurred to Mozart, Brian thought,
that a world could die. Beethoven could have entertained the idea
soberly enough; Chopin probably; even Brahms. Mozart would surely have
dismissed it as somebody's bad dream, in poor taste.
Andrew Carr, who lived and died in the latter half of the 20th century,
had endured the idea from the beginning of his childhood. The date of
Hiroshima was 1945; Carr was born in 1951; the inexhaustible wealth of
his music was written between 1969, when he was eighteen, and 1984,
when he died in an Egyptian jail from injuries received in a street
brawl.
"If not Mozart," said Brian to his idle hands, "there is always The
Project."
* * * * *
Playing Carr's last sonata as it should be played--as Carr was supposed
to have said he couldn't play it himself--Brian had been thinking of
that as The Project for many years. It had begun long before the
war, at the time of his triumphs in a civilized world which had been
warmly appreciative of the polished interpretive artist, although no
more awake than any other age to the creative one. Back there in the
undestroyed society, Brian had proposed to program that sonata in the
company of works that were older but no greater, and play it--yes,
beyond his best, so that even critics would begin to see its importance.
He had never done it, had never felt that he had entered into the
sonata and learned the depth of it. Now, when there was none to hear
or care, unless maybe the harmless brown spiders in the corners of the
auditorium had a taste for music, there was still The Project.
"_I_ hear," Brian said. "_I_ care, and with myself as audience I want
to hear it once as it ought to be, a final statement for a world that
couldn't live and yet was too good to die."
Technically, of course, he had it. The athletic demands Carr made on
the performer were tremendous, but, given technique, there was nothing
impossible about them. Anyone capable of concert work could at least
play the notes at the required tempos. And any reasonably shrewd
pianist could keep track of the dynamics, saving strength for the
shattering finale in spite of the thunderings that must come before.
Brian had heard the sonata played by others two or three times in the
old days--competently. Competency was not enough.
For example, what about the third movement, that mad Scherzo, and the
five tiny interludes of sweet quiet scattered through its plunging
fury? They were not alike. Related, perhaps, but each one demanded a
new climate of heart and mind--tenderness, regret, simple relaxation.
Flowers on a flood--no. Warm window-lights in a storm--no. The
innocence of an unknowing child in a bombed city--no, not really.
Something of all those, but much more, too.
What of the second movement, the Largo, where, in a way, the pattern
was reversed, the midnight introspection interrupted by moments of
anger, or longing, or despair like that of an angel beating his wings
against a prison of glass?
It was, throughout, a work in which something of Carr's life and Carr's
temperament had to come into you, whether you dared welcome it or not;
otherwise, your playing was no more than a bumbling reproduction of
notes on a page.
Carr's life was not for the contemplation of the timid.
* * * * *
The details were superficially well known. The biographies themselves
were like musical notation, meaningless without interpretation and
insight.
Carr had been a drunken roarer, a young devil-god with such a consuming
hunger for life that he had choked to death on it. His friends hated
him for the way he drained their lives, loving them to distraction and
always loving his work a little more. His enemies must have had times
of helplessly adoring him, if only because of an impossible transparent
honesty that made him more and less than human.
A rugged Australian, not tall but built like a hero, a face all
forehead and jaw and glowing hyperthyroid eyes. He wept only when he
was angry, the biographers said. In one minute of talk, they said,
he might shift from gutter obscenity to some extreme of altruistic
tenderness, and from that to a philosophical comment of the coldest
intelligence.
He passed his childhood on a sheep farm, ran away to sea on a freighter
at thirteen, studied like a slave in London with a single-minded
desperation, even through the horrors of the Pandemic of 1972. He
was married twice and twice divorced. He killed a man in an imbecile
quarrel on the New Orleans docks, and wrote his First Symphony while he
was in jail for that. And he died of stab wounds in a Cairo jail. It
all had relevancy. Relevant or not, if the sonata was in your mind, so
was the life.
You had to remember also that Andrew Carr was the last of
civilization's great composers. No one in the 21st century approached
him--they ignored his explorations and carved cherry-stones. He
belonged to no school, unless you wanted to imagine a school of music
beginning with Bach, taking in perhaps a dozen along the way, and
ending with Carr himself. His work was a summary and, in the light of
the year 2070, a completion.
Brian was certain he could play the first movement of the sonata
acceptably. Technically, it was not revolutionary, but closely loyal
to the ancient sonata form. Carr had even written in a conventional
double-bar for a repeat of the entire opening statement, something that
made late 20th century critics sneer with great satisfaction. It never
occurred to them that Carr expected a performer to use his head.
The bright-sorrowful second movement, unfashionably long, with its
strange pauses, unforeseen recapitulations, outbursts of savage
change--that was where Brian's troubles began. It did not help him to
be old, remembering the inner storms of twenty-five years ago and more.
* * * * *
As the single candle fluttered, Brian realized that he had forgotten
to lock the door. That troubled him, but he did not rise from the
piano chair. He chided himself instead for the foolish neuroses of
aloneness--what could it matter?
He shut his eyes. The sonata had long ago been memorized; printed
copies were safe somewhere in the library. He played the opening of
the first movement, as far as the double-bar; opened his eyes to the
friendly black and white of clean keys and played the repetition with
new light, new emphasis. Better than usual, he thought.
Now that soaring modulation into A Major that only Carr would
have wanted just there in just that sudden way, like the abrupt
happening upon shining fields. On toward the climax--_I am playing
it, I think_--through the intricate revelations of development and
recapitulation. And the conclusion, lingering, half-humorous, not
unlike a Beethoven ending, but with a questioning that was all Andrew
Carr.