For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.
At the end of one path were the Overlords. They had preserved their individually, their independent egos; they possessed self-awareness and the pronoun “I” had a meaning in their language. They had emotions, some at least of which were shared by humanity. But they were trapped, Jan realized now, in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. Their minds were ten-perhaps a hundred-times as powerful as men’s. It made no difference in the final reckoning. They were equally helpless, equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies.
And at the end of the other path? There lay the Overmind, whatever it might be, bearing the same relation to man as man bore to amcr.ba. Potentially infinite, beyond mortality, how long had it been absorbing race after race as it spread across the stars? Did it too have desires, did it have goals it sensed dimly yet might never attain? Now it had drawn into its being all that the human race had ever achieved. This was not tragedy, but fulfilment. The billions of transient sparks of consciousness that had made up humanity would flicker no more like flreffies against the night. But they had not lived utterly in vain.
The last act, Jan knew, had still to come. It might occur tomorrow, or it might be centuries hence. Even the Overlords could not be certain.
He understood their purpose now, what they had done with Man and why they still lingered upon Earth. Towards them he felt a grcat humility, as well as admiration for the inflexible patience that had kept them waiting here so long.
He never learned the full story of the strange symbiosis between the Overmind and its servants. According to Rasha
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verak, there had never been a time in lus rac&s history when the Overmind was not there, though it had made no use of them until they had achieved a scientific civilization and could range through space to do its bidding.
“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 pull 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 ;ell 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.”
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“What do you mean?” asked Jan.
‘When our ships entered your skies a centmy 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 thefuture-of those dosing 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 cirde 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. Y~t 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 memmy was somehow independent of time. To it, the future and the past were one. l’hat was why, thousands of years ago, men hadalreadyglimpsedadistortedimageoftheOverlords,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
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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 ageing 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 Suffivan eighty terrestrial years ago, that the last generation of mankind was already in the womb.