Arthur Clarke: Childhood’s End

“But why does it need you?” queried Jan. “With all its tremendous powers, surely it could do anything it pleased.”

“No,” said Rashaverak, “it has limits. In the past, we know, it has attempted to act directly upon the minds of other races, and to influence their cultural development. It’s always failed, perhaps because the gulf is too great. We are the interpreters — the guardians. Or, to use one of your own metaphors, we till the field until the crop is ripe. The Overmind collects the harvest — and we move on to another task. This is the fifth race whose apotheosis we have watched. Each time we learn a little more.”

“And do you not resent being used as a tool by the Overmind?”

“The arrangement has some advantages: besides, no one of intelligence resents the inevitable.”

That proposition, Jan reflected wryly, had never been fully accepted by mankind. There were things beyond logic that the Overlords had never understood.

“It seems strange,” said Jan, “that the Overmind chose you to do its work, if you have no trace of the paraphysical powers latent in mankind. How does it communicate with you and make its wishes known?”

“That is one question I cannot answer — and I cannot tell you the reason why I must keep the facts from you. One day, perhaps, you will know some of the truth.”

Jan puzzled over this for a moment, but knew it was useless to follow this line of inquiry. He would have to change the subject and hope to pick up clues later.

“Tell me this, then,” he said, “this is something else you’ve never explained. When your race first came to Earth, back in the distant past, what went wrong? Why had you become the symbol of fear and evil to us?”

Rashaverak smiled. He did not do this as well as Karellen could, but it was a fair imitation.

“No one ever guessed, and you see now why we could never tell you. There was only one event that could have made such an impact upon humanity. And that event was not at the dawn of history, but at its very end.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jan.

“When our ships entered your skies a century and a half ago, that was the first meeting of our two races, though of course we had studied you from a distance. And yet you feared and recognized us, as we knew that you would. It was not precisely a memory. You have already had proof that time is more complex than your science ever imagined. For that memory was not of the past, but of the future — of those closing years when your race knew that everything was finished. We did what we could, but it was not an easy end. And because we were there, we became identified with your race’s death. Yes, even while it was still ten thousand years in the future! It was as if a distorted echo had reverberated round the closed circle of time, from the future to the past. Call it not a memory, but a premonition.”

The idea was hard to grasp, and for a moment Jan wrestled with it in silence. Yet he should have been prepared; he had already received proof enough that cause and event could reverse their normal sequence.

There must be such a thing as racial memory, and that memory was somehow independent of time. To it, the future and the past were one. That was why, thousands of years ago, men had already glimpsed a distorted image of the Overlords, through a mist of fear and terror.

“Now I understand,” said the last man.

The Last Man! Jan found it very hard to think of himself as that. When he had gone into space, he had accepted the possibility of eternal exile from the human race, and loneliness had not yet come upon him. As the years passed, the longing to see another human being might rise and overwhelm him, but for the present, the company of the Overlords prevented him from feeling utterly alone.

There had been men on Earth as little as ten years ago, but they had been degenerate survivors and Jan had lost nothing by missing them. For reasons which the Overlords could not explain, but which Jan suspected were largely psychological, there had been no children to replace those who had gone. Homo sapiens was extinct.

Perhaps, lost in one of the still-intact cities, was the manuscript of some later-day Gibbon, recording the last days of the human race. If so, Jan was not sure that he would care to read it; Rashaverak had told him all that he wished to know.

Those who had not destroyed themselves had sought oblivion in ever more feverish activities, in fierce and suicidal sports that were often indistinguishable from minor wars. As the population had swiftly fallen, the aging survivors had clustered together, a defeated army closing its ranks as it made its last retreat.

That final act, before the curtain came down for ever, must have been lit by flashes of heroism and devotion, darkened by savagery and selfishness. Whether it had ended in despair or resignation, Jan would never know.

There was plenty to occupy his mind. The Overlords’ base was about a kilometre from a deserted villa, and Jan spent months fitting this out with equipment he had taken from the nearest town, some thirty kilometres distant. He had flown there with Rashaverak, whose friendship, he suspected, was not completely altruistic. The Overlord psychologist was still studying the last specimen of Homo sapiens.

The town must have been evacuated before the end, for the houses and even many of the public services were still in good order. It would have taken little work to restart the generators, so that the wide streets glowed once more with the illusion of life. Jan toyed with the idea, then abandoned it as too morbid. The one thing he did not wish to do was to brood upon the past.

There was everything here that he needed to maintain himself for the rest of his life, but what he wanted most was an electronic piano and certain Bach transcriptions. He had never had as much time for music as he would have liked, and now he would make up for it. When he was not performing himself, he played tapes of the great symphonies and concertos, so that the villa was never silent. Music had become his talisman against the loneliness which, one day, must surely overwhelm him.

Often he would go for long walks on the hills, thinking of all that had happened in the few months since he had last seen Earth. He had never thought, when he said goodbye to Sullivan eighty terrestrial years ago, that the last generation of mankind was already in the womb.

What a young fool he had been! Yet he was not sure that he regretted his action; had he stayed on Earth, he would have witnessed those closing years over which time had now drawn a veil. Instead, he had leap-frogged past them into the future, and had learned the answers to questions that no other man would ever know. His curiosity was almost satisfied, but sometimes he wondered why the Overlords were waiting, and what would happen when their patience was at last rewarded.

But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind, but now it seemed to Jan that this was what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness.

Jan had always been a good pianist — and now he was the finest in the world.

It was Rashaverak who brought him the news, but he had already guessed it. In the small hours of the morning a nightmare had awakened him, and he had not been able to regain sleep. He could not remember the dream, which was very strange, for he believed that all dreams could be recalled if one tried hard enough immediately after waking. All he could remember of this was that he had been a small boy again, on a vast and empty plain, listening to a great voice calling in an unknown language.