Wainer

By MICHAEL SHAARA

Illustrated by ASHMAN

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Certainly, life has a meaning—though sometimes it takes a lifetime to learn what it is.

The man in the purple robe was too old to walk or stand. He was wheeled upon a purple bench into the center of a marvelous room, where unhuman beings whom we shall call "They" had gathered and waited. Because he was such an old man, he commanded a great sum of respect, but he was nervous before Them and spoke with apology, and sometimes with irritation, because he could not understand what They were thinking and it worried him.

Yet there was no one left like this old man. There was no one anywhere who was as old—but that does not matter. Old men are important not for what they have learned, but for whom they have known, and this old man had known Wainer.

Therefore he spoke and told Them what he knew, and more that he did not know he was telling. And They, who were not men, sat in silence and the deepest affection, and listened....

William Wainer died and was forgotten (said the old man) much more than a thousand years ago. I have heard it said that people are like waves, rising and riding and crumbling, and if a wave fell once on a shore long ago, then it left its mark on the beach and changed the shape of the world, but is not remembered. That is true, except for the bigger waves. There is nothing remarkable in Wainer's being forgotten then, because he was not a big wave. In his own time, he was nothing at all—he even lived off the state—and the magnificent power that was in him and that he brought to the world was never fully recognized. But the story of his life is probably the greatest story I have ever heard. He was the beginning of You. I only wish I had known.

From his earliest days, as I remember, no one ever looked after Wainer. His father had been one of the last of the priests. Just before young Wainer was born in 2430, the government passed one of the great laws, the we-take-no-barriers-into-space edict, and religious missionaries were banned from the stars. Wainer's father never quite recovered from that. He went down to the end of his days believing that the Earth had gone over to what he called "Anti-Christ." He was a fretful man and he had no time for the boy.

Young Wainer grew up alone. Like everyone else, he was operated on at the age of five, and it turned out that he was a Reject. At the time, no one cared. His mother afterward said that she was glad, because Wainer's head even then was magnificently shaped and it would have been a shame to put a lump on it. Of course, Wainer knew that he could never be a doctor, or a pilot, or a technician of any kind, but he was only five years old and nothing was final to him. Some of the wonderful optimism he was to carry throughout his youth, and which he was to need so badly in later years, was already with him as a boy.

And yet You must understand that the world in which Wainer grew up was a good world, a fine world. Up to that time, it was the best world that ever was, and no one doubted that—

(Some of Them had smiled in Their minds. The old man was embarrassed.)

You must try to understand. We all believed in that world; Wainer and I and everyone believed. But I will explain as best I can and doubtless You will understand.

When it was learned, long before Wainer was born, that the electronic brains could be inserted within the human brain and connected with the main neural paths, there was no one who did not think it was the greatest discovery of all time. Do You know, can You have any idea, what the mind of Man must have been like before the brains? God help them, they lived all their lives without controlling themselves, trapped, showered by an unceasing barrage of words, dreams, totally unrelated, uncontrollable memories. It must have been horrible.

The brains changed all that. They gave Man freedom to think, freedom from confusion: they made him logical. There was no longer any need to memorize, because the brains could absorb any amount of information that was inserted into them, either before or after the operation. And the brains never forgot, and seldom made mistakes, and computed all things with an inhuman precision.

A man with a brain—or "clerks," as they were called, after Le Clerq—knew everything, literally everything, that there was to know about his profession. And as new information was learned, it was made available to all men, and punched into the clerks of those who desired it. Man began to think more clearly than ever before, and thought with more knowledge behind him, and it seemed for a while that this was a godlike thing.

But in the beginning, of course, it was very hard on the Rejects.

Once in every thousand persons or so would come someone like Wainer whose brain would not accept the clerk, who would react as if the clerk were no more than a hat. After a hundred years, our scientists still did not know why. Many fine minds were ruined with their memory sections cut away, but then a preliminary test was devised to prove beforehand that the clerks would not work and that there was nothing that anyone could do to make them work. Year by year the Rejects, as they were called, kept coming, until they were a sizable number. The more fortunate men with clerks outnumbered the Rejects a thousand to one, and ruled the society, and were called "Rashes"—slang for Rationals.

Thus the era of the Rash and Reject.

Now, of course, in those days the Rejects could not hope to compete in a technical world. They could neither remember nor compute well enough, and the least of all doctors knew more than a Reject ever could, the worst of all chemists knew much more chemistry, and a Reject certainly could never be a space pilot.

As a result of all this, mnemonics was studied as never before; and Rejects were taught memory. When Wainer was fully grown, his mind was more ordered and controlled and his memory more exact than any man who had lived on Earth a hundred years before. But he was still a Reject and there was not much for him to do.

He began to feel it, I think, when he was about fifteen. He had always wanted to go into space, and when he realized at last that it was impossible, that even the meanest of jobs aboard ship was beyond him, he was very deeply depressed. He told me about those days much later, when it was only a Reject's memory of his youth. I have lived a thousand years since then, and I have never stopped regretting that they did not let him go just once when he was young, before those last few days. It would have been such a little thing for them to do.

I first met Wainer when he was eighteen years old and had not yet begun to work. We met in one of those music clubs that used to be in New York City, one of the weird, smoky, crowded little halls where Rejects could gather and breathe their own air away from the—as we called them—"lumpheads." I remember young Wainer very clearly. He was a tremendous man, larger even than You, with huge arms and eyes, and that famous mass of brownish hair. His size set him off from the rest of us, but it never bothered him, and although he was almost painfully awkward, he was never laughed at.

I don't quite know how to describe it, but he was very big—ominous, almost—and he gave off an aura of tremendous strength. He said very little, as I remember; he sat with us silently and drank quite a bit, and listened to the music and to us, grinning from time to time with a wonderfully pleasant smile. He was very likable.

He was drawn to me, I think, because I was a successful Reject—I was just then becoming known as a surgeon. I sincerely believed that he envied me.

At any rate, he was always ready to talk to me. In the early days I did what I could to get him working, but he never really tried. He had only the Arts, You see, and they never really appealed to him.

(There was a rustle of surprise among Them. The old man nodded.)

It is true. He never wanted to be an artist. He had too much need for action in him, and he did not want to be a lonely man. But because of the Rashes, he had no choice.

The Rashes, as You know, had very little talent. I don't know why. Perhaps it was the precision, the methodicity with which they lived, or perhaps—as we proudly claimed—the Rejects were Rejects because they had talent. But the result was wonderfully just: the Rejects took over the Arts and all other fields requiring talent. I myself had good hands; I became a surgeon. Although I never once operated without a Rash by my side, I was a notably successful surgeon.

It was a truly splendid thing. That is why I say it was a good world. The Rash and Reject combined in society and made it whole. And one thing more was in favor of the Reject: he was less precise, less logical, and therefore more glamorous than the Rash. Hence Rejects always had plenty of women, and Reject women did well with men.

But the Rash, in the end, had everything that really counted.

Well, there was only such work that a Reject could do. But none of it fitted Wainer. He tried all the arts at one time or another before he finally settled on music. In music there was something vast and elemental; he saw that he could build. He began, and learned, but did little actual work. In those beginning years, he could be found almost always out by the Sound, or wandering among the cliffs across the River, his huge hands fisted and groping for something to do, wondering, wondering, why he was a Reject.

The first thing he wrote was the Pavanne, which came after his first real love affair. I cannot remember the girl, but in a thousand years I have not forgotten the music. It may surprise You to learn that the Pavanne was a commercial success. It surprised Wainer, too. The Rashes were actually the public, and their taste was logical. Most of all they liked Bach and Mozart, some Beethoven and Greene, but nothing emotional and obscure. The Pavanne was a success because it was a love piece, wonderfully warm and gay and open. Wainer never repeated that success.

That was one of the few times I ever saw him with money. He received the regular government fee and a nice sum in royalties, but not quite enough for a trip into space, so he drank it all up. He was happy for a while. He went back to the music clubs and stayed away from the beaches, but when I asked him if he was working on anything else, he said no, he had nothing else to write.

Right after that, he fell in love again, this time with his mother.

The longevity treatment was still fairly new; few had stopped to consider that, as men grew older, their mothers remained young, as tender and fresh as girls in school, and there is no woman as close to a man as his mother. Inevitably, a great many men fell in love that way. Wainer was one. His mother, poor girl, never suspected, and it was pure anguish for him. It was some time before he had recovered enough to talk about it, and by then he was thirty. One of the ways he recovered was by writing more music.

There were a lot of lesser works, and then came the First Symphony.

Looking back over the centuries, I cannot understand how the thing was so controversial. The Rashes wrote of it harshly in all their papers. The Rejects almost unanimously agreed that it was a masterpiece. I myself, when I heard it, became aware that Wainer was a great man.

Because of the controversy which raged for a while, Wainer made some money, but the effect of the criticism was to keep him from writing for years. There is something in that First Symphony of the Wainer of later years, some of the hungry, unfinished, incomprehensible strength. Wainer knew that if he wrote anything else, it would be much like the First, and he recoiled from going through it all again. He went back to the beaches.

He had something rare in those days—a great love for the sea. I suppose it was to him what space is to others. I know that the next thing he wrote was a wild, churning, immortal thing which he called Water Music; and I know that he himself loved it best of anything he wrote, except, of course, the Tenth Symphony. But this time was worse than the last. The only ones who paid any attention to Water Music were the Rejects, and they didn't count.

If Wainer had been a true composer, he would have gone on composing whether anyone cared or not, but as I have said, he was not really an artist. Despite the fact that he was the greatest composer we have ever known, music was only a small thing to him. He had a hint, even then, that although he had been born on Earth there was something in him that was alien, and that there was so much left to do, so much to be seen, and because he could not understand what it was that fired him, he ground himself raw, slowly, from within, while walking alone by the rocks on the beaches.

When I saw him again, after I took ship as a surgeon to Altair, he was forty, and he looked—I borrow the phrase—like a man from a land where nobody lived. Having written no music at all, he was living again on government charity. He had a room, of sorts, and food, but whatever money he got he drank right up, and he was such a huge and haggard man that even Rejects left him carefully alone. I did what I could for him, which wasn't much except keep him drunk. It was then that he told me about his feeling for space, and a great many other things, and I remember his words:

"I will have to go out into space some day. It is almost as if I used to live there."

Shortly after that, the coughing began. But it came very seldom and seemed no more than a common thing. Because there was no longer any such thing as disease, neither Wainer nor I thought much about it, except that Wainer went and got some pills from the government. For a long while—we may be thankful for that, at least—the cough did not bother him.

And so the years passed.

When Wainer was forty-two, he met the girl. Her name was Lila. She was a Rash, a teacher of mnemonics, and all I can remember of her are the dark-brown lovely eyes, and the warm, adoring face. She was the only woman that Wainer ever really loved, except perhaps his mother, and he chose to have his child by her.

Because of the population problem, a man could have one child then every hundred years. Wainer had his child by Lila, and although he was very happy that the boy turned out to be a Rash, he never paid him much attention.

He was about fifty then and beginning to break down. So that he could see Lila often and with pride, he wrote a great deal during those years, and his lungs were collapsing all that while. It was out of that period that he wrote all his symphonies from the Second to the Ninth.

It is unbelievable; they were all purely commercial. He tossed them out with a part of his mind. I cannot help but wonder what the rest of that mind was doing.

I can see him now, that gaunt and useless man, his great muscled arms chained to a pen, his stony, stretching legs cramped down beneath a desk....

I did not see him again for almost ten years, because he went away. He left New York for perhaps the only time in his life, and began to wander across the inland of the American continent. I heard from him rarely. I think it was in one of those letters that he first mentioned the pain that was beginning in his lungs.

I never knew what he did, or how he lived during those ten years. Perhaps he went into the forests and worked and lived like a primitive, and perhaps he just walked. He had no transportation. I know that he was not wholly sane then, and never was again until the end of his life. He was like a magnificent machine which has run out of tune for too many years—the delicate gears were strained and cracking.

(The old man paused in the utter silence, while several tears dropped down his cheek. None of Them moved, and at last he went on.)

Near the end of the ten years, I received a package from him in the mail. In it was a letter and the manuscript to the Storm in Space Overture. He wanted me to register the work and get the government fee, and he asked me the only favor he had ever asked of anyone, that I get him the money, because he was going into space.

He came back some weeks later, on foot. I had gotten the money from Rejects—they had heard the Overture—it was enough. He brought Lila with him and was going to make reservations. He was heading, I think, only as far as Alpha Centauri.

It was too late.

They examined him, as someone should have a long time ago, as someone would have if he had only ever asked, but in the end it would have made no difference either way, and it was now that they found out about his lungs.

There was nothing anyone could do. At first I could not believe it. People did not get sick and die. People just did not die! Because I was only a Reject and a surgeon, no Rash doctor had ever told me that this had happened before, many times, to other men. I heard it not from the Rashes, but from Wainer.

His lungs were beginning to atrophy. They were actually dying within his body, and no one as yet knew why, or could stop it. He could be kept alive without lungs, yes, for a long while. I asked if we could graft a lung into him and this is what I was told: Because no one had yet synthesized human tissue, the graft would have to be a human lung, and in this age of longevity there were only a few available. Those few, of course, went only to important men, and Wainer was nothing.

I volunteered a lung of my own, as did Lila, as did many Rejects. There was hope for a while, but when I looked into Wainer's chest I saw for myself that there was no way to connect. So much was wrong, so much inside him was twisted and strange that I could not understand how he had lived at all. When I learned of the other men who had been like this, I asked what had been done. The answer was that nothing had been done at all.

So Wainer did not go out into space. He returned instead to his single room to sit alone and wait, while the cool world around him progressed and revolved, while the city and its people went on without notice, while a voucher was being prepared somewhere, allowing the birth of another child because citizen Wainer would soon be dead.

What could the man have thought, that huge, useless man? When he sat by his window and watched the world moving by, and looked up at night to the stars, and when he drank cool water, or breathed morning air, or walked or sat or lay down, what was there for him to think?

He had one life, the same as any man, one time to be upon the Earth, and it was ending now as a record of nothing, as a piece of loneliness carved with great pain, as a celestial abortion, withered, wasted. There was nothing in his life, nothing, nothing, which he had ever wanted to be, and now he was dying without reason in a world without reason, unused, empty, collapsing, alone.

He went down to the beach again.

In the days that came, he was a shocking sight. What was happening became known, and when he walked the streets people stared at the wonder, the sickness, the man who was dying. Therefore he went out to the beaches and slept and took no treatments and no one will ever know what was in his mind, his million-faceted mind, as he waited to die.

Well, it was told to me at last because I knew Wainer, and they needed him. It was told hesitantly, but when I heard it I broke away and ran, and in the clean air of the beach I found Wainer and told him.

At first he did not listen. I repeated it several times. I told him what the Rashes had been able to learn. He stood breathing heavily, face to the Sun, staring out over the incoming sea. Then I knew what he was thinking.

The Rashes had told me this:

The atrophy of the lungs was not all that happened, but it was the major thing, and it came only to Rejects. After years of study, it could be stated, cautiously, that the disease seemed to be in the nature of an evolutionary change. For many years they had probed for the cause of the Rejects, and the final conclusion—to be kept from the people—was that there was some variation in the brain of the Reject, something subtly, unfathomably different from the brain of a Rash. And so it was also with the lungs, and with other parts of the body. And the scientists thought it was Evolution.

I told this to Wainer, and more, while peace spread slowly across his rugged face. I said that the nature of life was to grow and adapt, and that no one knew why. The first cells grew up in the sea and then learned to live on land, and eventually lifted themselves to the air, and now certainly there was one last step to be taken.

The next phase of change would be into space, and it was clear now what Wainer was, what all the Rejects were.

Wainer was a link, incomplete, groping, unfinished. A link.

It meant more to him, I think, than any man can ever really understand. He had a purpose, after all, but it was more than that. He was a creature with a home. He was part of the Universe more deeply than any of us had ever been. In the vast eternal plan which only You and Your kind can see, Wainer was a beginning, vital part. All the long years were not wasted. The pain of the lungs was dust and air.

Wainer looked at me and I shall never forget his face. He was a man at peace who has lived long enough.

(Because They knew much more than the old man could ever know, They were utterly, nakedly absorbed, and the silence of the room was absolute. The old man tired and closed to the end, while They—unbreathing, undying, telepathic and more, the inconceivable next phase in the Evolution of Man—listened and learned.)

He lived for another six months, long enough to take part in the experiments the Rashes had planned, and to write the Tenth Symphony. Even the Rashes could not ignore the Tenth.

It was Wainer's valedictory, a sublime, triumphant summation, born of his hope for the future of Man. It was more than music; it was a cathedral in sound. It was Wainer's soul.

Wainer never lived to hear it played, to hear himself become famous, and in the end, I know, he did not care. Although we could have saved him for a little while, although I pleaded with him to remain for the sake of his woman and his music, Wainer knew that the pattern of his life was finished, that the ending time was now.

For Wainer went out into space at last, into the sweet dark home between the stars, moving toward the only great moment he would ever have.

The Rashes wanted to see how his lungs would react in alien atmospheres. Not in a laboratory—Wainer refused—but out in the open Sun, out in the strange alien air of the worlds themselves, Wainer was set down. On each of a dozen poisonous worlds he walked. He opened his helmet while we tiny men watched. He breathed.

And he lived.

He lived through methane, through carbon dioxide, through nitrogen and propane. He existed without air at all for an incredible time, living all the while as he never had before, with a wonderful, glowing excitement. And then at last there was that final world which was corrosive. It was too much, and Wainer smiled regretfully, holding himself upright with dignity by the base of an alien rock, and still smiling, never once moving to close his helmet, he died.

There was a long pause. The old man was done.

They looked at him with the deep compassion that his own race had denied to those who were different or lesser than themselves.

One of Them arose and gently spoke.

"And now you are the last of your kind, as alone as Wainer was. We are sorry."

There was no bitterness in the old man's voice. "Don't be. Wainer was content to die, knowing that he was the link between us and You. Yet neither he nor You could have been if humanity had never existed. We had our place in the endless flow of history. We were, so to speak, Wainer's parents and Your grandparents. I, too, am content, proud of the children of Man."