I am speaking to you now from a period about twenty thousand terrestrial
years after the date at which the whole preceding part of this book was
communicated. It has become very difficult to reach you, and still more
difficult to speak to you; for already the Last Men are not the men they
were.
Our two great undertakings are still unfinished. Much of the human past
remains imperfectly explored, and the projection of the seed is scarcely
begun. That enterprise has proved far more difficult than was expected.
Only within the last few years have we succeeded in designing an
artificial human dust capable of being carried forward on the sun’s
radiation, hardy enough to endure the conditions of a trans-galactic
voyage of many millions of years, and yet intricate enough to bear the
potentiality of life and of spiritual development. We are now preparing
to manufacture this seminal matter in great quantities, and to cast it
into space at suitable points on the planet’s orbit.
Some centuries have now passed since the sun began to show the first
symptoms of disintegration, namely a slight change of colour towards the
blue, followed by a definite increase of brightness and heat. Today,
when he pierces the ever-thickening cloud, he smites us with an
intolerable steely brilliance which destroys the sight of anyone foolish
enough to face it. Even in the cloudy weather which is now normal, the
eye is wounded by the fierce violet glare. Eye-troubles afflict us all,
in spite of the special glasses which have been designed to protect us.
The mere heat, too, is already destructive. We are forcing our planet
outward from its old orbit in an ever-widening spiral; but, do what we
will, we cannot prevent the climate from becoming more and more deadly,
even at the poles. The intervening regions have already been deserted.
Evaporation of the equatorial oceans has thrown the whole atmosphere
into tumult, so that even at the poles we are tormented by hot wet
hurricanes and incredible electric storms. These have already shattered
most of our great buildings, sometimes burying a whole teeming province
under an avalanche of tumbled vitreous crags.
Our two polar communities at first managed to maintain radio
communication; but it is now some time since we of the south received
news of the more distressed north. Even with us the situation is already
desperate. We had recently established some hundreds of stations for the
dissemination, but less than a score have been able to operate. This
failure is due mainly to an increasing lack of personnel. The deluge of
fantastic solar radiation has had disastrous effect on the human
organism. Epidemics of a malignant tumour, which medical science has
failed to conquer, have reduced the southern people to a mere remnant,
and this in spite of the migration of the tropical races into the
Antarctic. Each of us, moreover, is but the wreckage of his former self.
The higher mental functions, attained only in the most developed human
species, are already lost or disordered, through the breakdown of their
special tissues. Not only has the racial mind vanished, but the sexual
groups have lost their mental unity. Three of the sub-sexes have already
been exterminated by derangement of their chemical nature. Glandular
troubles, indeed, have unhinged many of us with anxieties and loathings
which we cannot conquer, though we know them to be unreasonable. Even
the normal power of ‘telepathic’ communication has become so unreliable
that we have been compelled to fall back upon the archaic practice of
vocal symbolism. Exploration of the past is now confined to specialists,
and is a dangerous profession, which may lead to disorders of temporal
experience.
Degeneration of the higher neural centres has also brought about in us a
far more serious and deep-seated trouble, namely a general spiritual
degradation which would formerly have seemed impossible, so confident
were we of our integrity. The perfectly dispassionate will had been for
many millions of years universal among us, and the corner-stone of our
whole society and culture. We had almost forgotten that it has a
physiological basis, and that if that basis were undermined, we might no
longer be capable of rational conduct. But, drenched for some thousands
of years by the unique stellar radiation, we have gradually lost not
only the ecstasy of dispassionate worship, but even the capacity for
normal disinterested behaviour. Everyone is now liable to an irrational
bias in favour of himself as a private person, as against his fellows.
Personal envy, uncharitableness, even murder and gratuitous cruelty,
formerly unknown amongst us, are now becoming common. At first when men
began to notice in themselves these archaic impulses, they crushed them
with amused contempt. But as the highest nerve centres fell further into
decay, the brute in us began to be ever more unruly, and the human more
uncertain. Rational conduct was henceforth to be achieved only after an
exhausting and degrading ‘moral struggle’, instead of spontaneously and
fluently. Nay, worse, increasingly often the struggle ended not in
victory but defeat. Imagine then, the terror and disgust that gripped us
when we found ourselves one and all condemned to a desperate struggle
against impulses which we had been accustomed to regard as insane. It is
distressing enough to know that each one of us might at any moment,
merely to help some dear individual or other, betray his supreme duty
toward the dissemination; but it is harrowing to discover ourselves
sometimes so far sunk as to be incapable even of common loving-kindness
toward our neighbours. For a man to favour himself against his friend or
beloved, even in the slightest respect, was formerly unknown. But today
many of us are haunted by the look of amazed horror and pity in the eyes
of an injured friend.
In the early stages of our trouble lunatic asylums were founded, but
they soon became over-crowded and a burden on a stricken community. The
insane were then killed. But it became clear that by former standards we
were all insane. No man now can trust himself to behave reasonably.
And, of course, we cannot trust each other. Partly through the prevalent
irrationality of desire, and partly through the misunderstandings which
have come with the loss of ‘telepathic’ communication, we have been
plunged into all manner of discords. A political constitution and system
of laws had to be devised, but they seem to have increased our troubles.
Order of a kind is maintained by an overworked police force. But this is
in the hands of the professional organizers, who have now all the vices
of bureaucracy. It was largely through their folly that two of the
antarctic nations broke into social revolution, and are now preparing to
meet the armament which an insane world-government is devising for their
destruction. Meanwhile, through the breakdown of the economic order, and
the impossibility of reaching the food-factories on Jupiter, starvation
is added to our troubles, and has afforded to certain ingenious lunatics
the opportunity of trading at the expense of others.
All this folly in a doomed world, and in a community that was yesterday
the very flower of a galaxy! Those of us who still care for the life of
the spirit are tempted to regret that mankind did not choose decent
suicide before ever the putrescence began. But indeed this could not be.
The task that was undertaken had to be completed. For the Scattering of
the Seed has come to be for every one of us the supreme religious duty.
Even those who continually sin against it recognize this as the last
office of man. It was for this that we outstayed our time, and must
watch ourselves decline from spiritual estate into that brutishness from
which man has so seldom freed himself.
Yet why do we persist in the forlorn effort? Even if by good luck the
seed should take root somewhere and thrive, there will surely come an
end to its adventure, if not swiftly in fire, then in the ultimate
battle of life against encroaching frost. Our labour will at best sow
for death an ampler harvest. There seems no rational defence of it,
unless it be rational to carry out blindly a purpose conceived in a
former and more enlightened state.
But we cannot feel sure that we really were more enlightened. We look
back now at our former selves, with wonder, but also with
incomprehension and misgiving. We try to recall the glory that seemed to
be revealed to each of us in the racial mind, but we remember almost
nothing of it. We cannot rise even to that more homely beatitude which
was once within the reach of the unaided individual, that serenity
which, it seemed, should be the spirit’s answer to every tragic event.
It is gone from us. It is not only impossible but inconceivable. We now
see our private distresses and the public calamity as merely hideous.
That after so long a struggle into maturity man should be roasted alive
like a trapped mouse, for the entertainment of a lunatic! How can any
beauty lie in that?
But this is not our last word to you. For though we have fallen, there
is still something in us left over from the time that is passed. We have
become blind and weak; but the knowledge that we are so has forced us to
a great effort. Those of us who have not already sunk too far have
formed themselves into a brotherhood for mutual strengthening, so that
the true human spirit may be maintained a little longer, until the seed
has been well sown, and death be permissible. We call ourselves the
Brotherhood of the Condemned. We seek to be faithful to one another, and
to our common undertaking, and to the vision which is no longer
revealed. We are vowed to the comforting of all distressed persons who
are not yet permitted death. We are vowed also to the dissemination. And
we are vowed to keep the spirit bright until the end.
Now and again we meet together in little groups or great companies to
hearten ourselves with one another’s presence. Sometimes on these
occasions we can but sit in silence, groping for consolation and for
strength. Sometimes, the spoken word flickers hither and thither amongst
us, shedding a brief light but little warmth to the soul that lies
freezing in a torrid world.
But there is among us one, moving from place to place and company to
company, whose voice all long to hear. He is young, the last born of the
Last Men; for he was the latest to be conceived before we learned man’s
doom, and put an end to all conceiving. Being the latest, he is also the
noblest. Not him alone, but all his generation, we salute, and look to
for strength; but he, the youngest, is different from the rest. In him
the spirit, which is but the flesh awakened into spirituality, has power
to withstand the tempest of solar energy longer than the rest of us. It
is as though the sun itself were eclipsed by this spirit’s brightness.
It is as though in him at last, and for a day only, man’s promise were
fulfilled. For though, like others, he suffers in the flesh, he is above
his suffering. And though more than the rest of us he feels the
suffering of others, he is above his pity. In his comforting there is a
strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer to smile at his
own pain. When this youngest brother of ours contemplates with us our
dying world and the frustration of all man’s striving, he is not, like
us, dismayed, but quiet. In the presence of such quietness despair
wakens into peace. By his reasonable speech, almost by the mere sound of
his voice, our eyes are opened, and our hearts mysteriously filled with
exultation. Yet often his words are grave.
Let his words, not mine, close this story:
Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair
spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those
bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable
potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon,
seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be
nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty
in the eternal form of things.
Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short
flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of
All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the
All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling
caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little
capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a
fledgling’s knowledge. His admiration is a nestling’s admiration for the
things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the
food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through
him, and is not heard.
Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and
terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that
the Whole should use him.
But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced
by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty?
Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of
the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some
phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never
be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such
perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is
not for him in his littleness.
But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a
brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix
of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in
the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we
may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful
for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a
fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.