Summer 2007 (25 page)

The setting sun reflects pink off the upturned petals
cloaking the hills. The last man regrets not taking his son up here before,
sickly or not. He thinks his son would have liked to explore these hills, feel
his bony feet slip in the mud. He would have run through the ruins and hollered
at the vast, free sky. At least, he would have liked a length of the gray cloth
the last man and his father found so many years ago: sewn with golden strands
for the sun and red strands like the stems of the
ban mara
daisies.

#

Literacy fades years before the last man dies. The older
generation of his people remember how to read, but they don’t teach the young
ones. Reading seems frivolous, indulgent, a luxury like brocade or peacock
feathers or reminiscing about long summer evenings when men chewed betel nuts
and women chattered while the lowering sun lengthened their shadows until an
ordinary human presence had the heft of a god’s.

#

Two generations before the light-eyed child was born,
her grandmother would have screamed at Grandpa Burn and kicked his skull
downstream. Her mother would have cried over Grandma Starve’s aged bones,
cursing the fact she would never live to acquire a stoop.

The light-eyed child places her hands over their hollow
sockets and returns to playing.

#

The last lie is not a single lie but a group of lies,
uttered by the last man’s people and the light-eyed child’s people, by children
and elders, by men and women, by the stoic and the red-eyed.

Don’t worry, Mama, Grandpa, sir, honey, lover, child,
heart-keeper, mine. You’re going to get better. You’re going to be all right.

#

The last man leaves his son awhile and climbs a
formation of rocks on the other side of the cave mouth. The tallest one leans
on a pair of others like an old man asking for support. Below, a thousand foot
drop sinks into a ravine blanketed in daisies.

The last man selects a small gray stone and pitches it
down. As it plummets, he tries to fit the idea of such distance into his head:
how things so high can fall so far.

Before it hits, he’s distracted by a rush of wind as a
raven flies past him. He waves it away. It dives past the cave, headed for his
son. The last man climbs down to chase it off and misses the moment when the
rock hits the ground.

By the time the last man reaches his son, the boy’s left
eye is gone. The thread of his intestines trails across the stony ground.

He remembers sitting with his son, then a five year old,
coaxing him to eat yak meat and lichen. The little boy turned away, fanning his
hands in front of his face.

A little more, just a little more. Come on,
the
last man said. It hurt the boy to chew; it hurt him to swallow; it hurt him to
have food in his stomach.

A few steps away, the last man’s wife stood, staring,
the glint of her reddened eyes bright in the darkness. The next day she’d leave
him for the fat man who lived near the cave mouth, the one with who had another
wife already. She didn’t need to vocalize; the words were written in the taut
line of her mouth: Why squander time on the dying when we’ll reach death’s door
soon enough ourselves?

Truthfully, the last man had heard the ravens fly toward
his son as soon as he climbed the rocks. He’d known what the birds would do.
But it wasn’t until he threw the stone that his mind had the sense to distract
him from trying to confront mortality while the wind of falling rushed around
his own ears, too.

#

The last man is tone deaf and the light-eyed child
doesn’t like to sing because it reminds her that her voice is piping and high
when it should be resonant and bass, so the last music mankind makes is subtle
and strange. It’s the last man grunting in answer to the raven’s sporadic caws;
it’s the light-eyed child splashing in the river to the beat of her heart; it’s
the last man’s fingers drumming on his son’s hollow belly.

#

The light-eyed child’s people don’t live long enough to
suffer from their lack of men. The third wave disease, the one that killed a
tenth of them in a night, reawakens in its surviving hosts after its long
period of incubation and strangles the entire population by dawn.

The dusk before, as the last man prepares to throw a
stone down a cliff, the light-eyed child runs back to camp to find her mother.
The sky dims. Pale stars emerge. The two of them stroll to a spring to fetch
clean water with which to cook the evening meal of kangaroo meat flavored with
peppermint leaves.

#

The last word the light-eyed child’s mother says before
she starts to choke is
whakahohoro:
hurry.

#

The last man becomes grateful for things he should
despise: the red-tinted sky, the stench of his son’s decaying corpse, the
coldness of his soiled trousers. His last hour stretches, but not in the way a
bored afternoon expands across a child’s landscape. His last hour is the petal
of an orchid browning from the outside in. It’s a cloud blowing across the sky
puff by puff, until without ever moving as a single entity, it soars away into
the blue expanse. It’s a grain of sand, unnoticed until held up close - whoever
would have known it was crimson? And smelled like salt? And shaped like a
crescent moon?

#

The last piece of technology mankind invents is a bundle
of lyrebird feathers and wallaby bones and blue lizard tongues wrapped in sugar
glider fur which the light-eyed child’s people believe a woman can use to draw
sickness out of a loved one. It possesses no magic, but it serves a purpose: it
busies hands and buoys hearts.

#

The light-eyed child lives a few hours longer than the
rest of her people. She clutches her mother’s hand through her breathless
contortions, and when they’re over, she cradles her mother’s blue, arthritic
fingers.

As she runs out of breath herself, she wonders if her
skeleton will wear jewelry with spokes and chains like Grandpa Burn and Grandma
Starve. She wonders who will dig up her bones.

#

The puddles of rainwater could sustain the last man a
few days yet, but he stops drinking. He watches the ravens’ reflections in the
dirty water and repeats, “Trasa, trasa.” Though his mouth is dry, it isn’t
thirst he’s referring to.

#

Though the last man and the light-eyed child live on
opposite sides of the globe, they die within hours of each other. It is one of
those improbable vagaries of fate which become probable given enough time and
opportunity, like calculus stirring simultaneously in the brains of Newton and
Leibnitz, evolution in Darwin and Wallace, relativity in Einstein and
Smoluchowski. The last two humans are simply the final pair to march hand in
hand into an unexplored realm.

#

The last animal to see a living human is a raven. She
watches the last man’s final exhalation and waits a moment to be sure he won’t
rise and hurl another stone in her direction. His body sags. She paces her
perch. All remains still.

She swoops.

Fiction:
Make a Joyful Noise by Charles de Lint

Part I

Every one thinks we’re sisters, but it’s not as simple
as that. If I let my thoughts drift far enough back into the long ago–the
long long ago, before Raven stirred that old pot of his and poured out the stew
of the world–we were there. The two of us. Separate, but so much the same
that I suppose we could have been sisters. But neither of us remember parents,
and don’t you need them to be siblings? So what exactly our relationship is, I
don’t know. We’ve never known. We just are. Two little mysteries that remain
unchanged while the world changes all around us.

But that doesn’t stop everyone from thinking they know
us. In the Kickaha tradition we’re the tricksters of their crow story cycles,
but we’re not really tricksters. We don’t play tricks. Unless our trick is to
look like we’d play tricks, and then we don’t.

Before the Kickaha, the cousins had stories about us,
too, though they were only gossip. Cousins don’t buy into mythic archetypes
because we all know how easy it is to have one attached to your name. Just ask
Raven. Or Cody.

But gossip, stories, anecdotes…everybody seems to have
something to pass on when it comes to us.

These days it’s people like Christy Riddell that tell
the stories. He puts us in his books–the way his mentor Professor Dapple
used to do, except Christy’s books are actually popular. I suppose we don’t
mind so much. It’s kind of fun to be in a story that anyone can read. But if we
have to have a Riddell brother in our lives, we’d much prefer it to be Geordie.
There’s nothing wrong with Christy. It’s just that he’s always been a bit
stiff. Geordie’s the one who knows how to have fun and that’s why we get along
with him so well, because we certainly like to have fun.

But we’re not only about mad gallivanting and cartwheels
and sugar.

And we’re not some single entity, either.

That’s another thing that people get wrong. They see the
two of us as halves of one thing. Most of the time they don’t even recognize us
when they meet us on our own. Apart, we’re just like anybody else, except we live
in trees and can change into birds. But when you put the two of us together,
everything changes. We get all giddy and incoherence rules. It’s like our being
near each other causes a sudden chemical imbalance in our systems and it’s
almost impossible to be anything but silly.

We don’t particularly mind being that way, but it does
make people think they know just who and what and why we are, and they’re
wrong. Well, they’re not wrong when the two of us are together. They’re just
wrong for who we are when we’re on our own.

And then there are the people who only see us as who
they want us to be, rather than who we really are–though that happens to
everybody, I suppose. We all carry around other people’s expectations of who we
are, and sometimes we end up growing into those expectations.

* * *

It was a spring day, late in the season, so the oaks
were filled with fresh green foliage, the gardens blooming with colour and
scent, and most days the weather was balmy. Today was no exception. The sun
shone in a gloriously blue sky and we were all out taking in the weather. Zia
and I lounged on the roof of the coach house behind the Rookery, black-winged
cousins perched in the trees all around us, and up on the roof of the Rookery,
we could see Lucius’s girlfriend Chlöe standing on the peak, staring off into
the distance. That meant that Lucius was deep in his books again. Whenever he
got lost in their pages, Chlöe came up on the roof and did her wind-vane
impression. She was very good at it.

“What are you looking at?” we asked her one day.

It took her a moment to focus on us and our question.

“I’m watching a wren build a nest,” she finally said.

“Where?” Zia asked, standing on her tip toes and trying
to see.

“There,” Chlöe said and pointed, “in that hedge on the
edge of Dartmoor.”

Neither of us were ever particularly good with
geography, but even we knew that at least half a continent and an ocean lay
between us and Dartmoor.

“Um, right,” I said.

Other times she said she was watching ice melt in
Greenland. Or bees swarming a new queen above a clover field somewhere in
Florida. Or a tawny frogmouth sleeping in an Australian rainforest.

After awhile we stopped asking. And we certainly didn’t
fly over and ask her what she was looking at today. We were too busy
lounging–which is harder to do on a sloped roof than you might
think–until Zia suddenly sat up.

“I,” she announced, “have an astonishingly good idea.”

I’d just gotten my lounging position down to an absolute
perfection of casualness, so I only lifted a questioning eyebrow.

“We should open a store,” she said.

“Selling what?”

“That’s just it. It will be a store where people bring
us things and we put them in the store.”

“And when it gets all filled up?”

She grinned. “Then we open another. We just keeping
doing it until we have an empire of stores, all across the country.”

“We don’t have the money to buy anything,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s why they’d have to just give us the
stuff. We’ll be like a thrift shop, except we wouldn’t sell anything we got.”

“That seems greedy. What do we need with things?”

“We can give everything away once we’ve established our
empire. It’s just for fun.”

“It seems more like a lot of work.”

She sighed and shook her head. “You are so veryvery
lazy.”

“That’s because today is a day especially made for being
lazy.”

“No, today’s a day for building an empire of stores and
if you won’t help, I’ll do it myself.”

“I’ll help later.”

She nodded. “When all the hard work will probably be
done.”

“That’s the risk I’ll have to take.”