Harlan Ellison - Approaching Oblivion - Road Signs On the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow

How the endless sleeping memories of the peoples who had lived there were gathered up as the sun went nova; how they streamed into the sensu and the tanger and the other empathy machines, to be codified and stored and then taken back to the human worlds, to the New Colony, to sustain the weary existences of those who had no fresh dreams of their own.

And he closed with words about how he hated it.

“But the worlds are empty, aren't they?” she asked, and then put her face once more to his tensing flesh.

He could not speak. Not then.

But later he said, yes, they were empty.

Always empty, she asked.

Yes, always empty.

You're a very humane race.

I don't think there's anything left of humanity to us. We do it because it's for a greater good. And he laughed at the words, greater good. His fingers roamed over her body. He grew excited once more. It had been so long ago.

“On my world,” she said, “we live much warmer than you. In times past, my race had the power of flight. We have a heritage of sky. Closed in like this makes me uneasy.” He held her in the circle of his arms, his thigh between her long legs, and he drew his fingers down through her thick, deep blue hair.

“I know words and songs from four hundred years of myself and my race,” he said, “and I wish to God I could think of something more potent to use, but '1 love you' and 'Thank you' are the only ones that come to mind…those, and 'The Earth moved,' but I'd better not use it, or I'll start to laugh, and I don't want to laugh.”

He slid his hand down to her stomach. She had no navel. Very small breasts. Extra ribs. She was very beautiful.

“I'm happy.”

“When we care, we have a way of making it last much longer. Would you?”

He nodded and her head lay at his shoulder and she felt him move. She sat up, kneeling before him in the nimbus. Her earring was hollow, and from it she took a tiny jewel that pulsed with pale light. She crushed it under his nose and leaned forward so she could inhale the pale light mist that sprang up from the dead jewel. Then she lay down again, precisely fitting in to the waiting space.

And in a moment they began again…

…as she took him with her to her world.

A warm world, all sky, with a single sun that held the same pale light as the jewel she had used to drug him. They flew, and he saw her people as they had been ten thousand years before. Lovely with wings, bright with the expectation of a thousand years of life.

Then she let him see how they died. In the night.

They fell from the sky like tracers of light, brilliant, burning. Onto the great dust deserts already filled with the ashes of their ancestors.

Her voice was warm and soft in his mind. “My people live with the sky for a thousand years; when their time comes, they go to rest with all those who came before them.

“The deserts of dust are the resting places of my race, generation upon generation, returned to their primal dust… waiting for the ten thousand years to pass until they are reborn.”

The world of sky and dust swam in his mind and as though it were captured in the catch eye it faded back and back; he was looking down on the world of the phoenix creatures from deep space, and he knew why she had drugged him, why she had taken him into her mind's memory, why she had come to him.

The death he had programmed had been the death of her sun, her world. Her people.

They came back to the nimbus within the suite in the moonstone vessel. He could not move, but she turned him so he could stare out through the cycle port at the emptiness where her world had been. Only dust remained. And she let him hear one last trailing scream from that world, at the moment of its death; the wail of her race that would never rise from its own dust and ashes.

The ten thousand years might pass, but the phoenix people would never again soar through their skies.

“Can you hear me? Can you speak? I want you to know why.”

His mouth was thick and his speech was clumsy, but he heard her and he could speak and he said he understood. She bent to him and took his face in her cool hands. “Centuries ago, my ancestors were sent away. They were…” her hesitation was filled with pain and loneliness, “…imperfect.” She turned away for a moment and he saw high on her back two knots of atrophied muscle, and the vision of winged men and women came to him as it had in the vision she'd let him see, and he understood that, too. Then she turned back, stronger. “There were a few like them in every generation, and they gave birth to others who gave birth to us. But no more. Now we are so few, so very few. Now almost all the people are gone.”

“It was a mistake,” he said. She could not tell what he had said through the drug, and he repeated it. She looked at him and nodded gently; but she was stronger.

“You said there was very little left of humanity in your race. That is the truest thing you could have said. What I do is what will be done to all of you. There are a few more of my race, and when they are gone there will be others, of other races. And they will finish the job. You may not be the first, but you will certainly not be the last. Your time is past. You had your chance and turned it against every race you ever met. And now that your time is done, you think you'll take everyone with you.”

He could not regret dying, as he knew he would die. She was right. The time for men had come and gone, and what they did now was useless, but more than useless…it was senseless.

Unlike her people, men did not have the good grace to go off alone and die. They tried, in their deranged way, to drag the universe into the grave with them. Not just the leaching off of preserved memories for the momentary amusement of the jaded and corrupt, but everything men did, now that they owned the universe. It was better that the human race be aided in its slovenly demise than to be allowed to leave nothing but ashes when it vanished at last.

He had killed her race, lying sleeping, waiting to be reborn in flames. So he could not hate her. Nor did she need to know that she brought him the dearest gift he had ever received. It was the end of summer and he was content knowing he would not have to wait for the chill of winter to descend on his race.

“I'm happy,” he said.

She may have known what he meant. He thought she knew: her eyes were moist as she bent to him for the final time, and kissed him.

There were flames and heat as great as a nova and then there was nothing but ash that floated freely in the nimbus.

When they came to the suite of the sensu programmer, none of them knew they were looking at the last days of men. Only Keltin, the Designer, seemed to understand, in some deep racial way, and he said nothing.

But he smiled in expectation as the moonstone ship sailed away into the eternal night.

Palatine, Illinois; Los Angeles, California/1972

“She'll be listening, Paulie, you can bet on that,” I said to him, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “She ain't dead, Paulie, nobody like her could ever really die.” But he didn't care, Paulie didn't. All he knew was that one fine listener, that girl he'd dug and loved and spent so many notes on, she was gone. Some bad thing had happened and Ginny was dead, in her family's crypt out in the boneyard, and they wouldn't even allow Paulie to come to the funeral. Rich parents, Ginny's parents, and they was bugged at her first for having left the family and the old escutcheon, and second for having taken up with what they called “a broken down wastrel jazz musician.”

Which was flat-out not true. Paulie was the best.

People like that have no idea what it's like, hearing a horn like Paulie. Bright as a penny, and soft and quick and full of tiny things being said close into your ear…that was Paulie. You can know Miles, and you can remember Brownie, and you can talk it up that Diz uses a fine axe, and still not take it away from Paulie. He's what Chet Baker might have become, if he hadn't turned himself inside out and lost it all, or (and Hentoff called me a whack one night when I said this to him) if Bix had lived and gone through swing and bop and funk and cool and soul crap. But that's just my feeling, falling down on the way Paulie phrases, and his soft blue stuff, and the airy changes. That's just my bag, so forget it; has nothin' to do with Paulie and Ginny, except I wanted to make it clear that Paulie was good. Maybe great, even. No one can tag great, I'm hip, but Paulie was as close to it as I'll ever care to go.