The Man Who Lost the Sea (29 page)

The Immune—that’s what we’re called. But that’s a misnomer. We got it, all of us. It’s just that we didn’t die of it. So, although Mankind was dead, we weren’t just yet.

Mankind was dead … Humanity wasn’t. I guess these things are open to definition. There were, by the time we got them all together, six hundred and four of us left of all the billions. We were all strong and healthy, and most of us young. We could live, learn, love. We could not propagate. So much for Mankind.

We were, all of us, devoted to a single idea, and that was that Humanity should not perish. Humanity in the sense of aspiration, generosity—if you like, nobility: that was what we were dedicated to preserve. It was too late for us to use it. We’d only just realized what it was, when the new encephalitis appeared. Perhaps we realized it
because
the encephalitis appeared. However we came by it, we had it, and we had to pass it on, or it was all too ludicrous a tragedy.

We decided to give it to the otters.

Like many another simple truth, the fact that the otters would be the next ones had been obvious and undisclosed. We were bemused by the fact that other animals—dogs, for example, and the higher apes, and (remember how exciting that was?) the contemplative porpoise—they all had intelligences like ours, in kind if not in quality. It was possible to think like a porpoise, or like a dog. It was a high conceit indeed to assume that the Next One would have an intelligence like ours. Once we were ready to discard that cocky notion, it became clear that the otter, a tool-using animal far earlier in its evolution than we had been, and possessed of a much more durable sense of humor, was logically our successor.

We despaired for ourselves; I want to make that quite clear. Our mourning was deep and bitter. But it must be made quite as clear that we passed through this mourning and emerged on the other side, as befit our maturity. We emerged late, and, for ourselves, uselessly; but emerge we did, mature we had become. You see what we were, for all our individual youth. We were the Elders of earth, and carried our insigne with a very real dignity. Too, we were each of us, all of us, wealthy and powerful beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone, ever—there were so few of us, so well trained, with such resources (and no need to save). Any of us could wave a hand and move a mountain. Yet the big thing—the real thing—was that sense of purpose and of dignity we had brought through the terror and the death; a greater purpose, and a dignity more real, than (but for a feeble flicker or two) mankind had ever known before. Proud we were, of course; but pride is a silly little word to use for such a thing. Humbly, we liked ourselves. And it was this above all we were dedicated to keeping alive. The otters would have civilization, with or without us, probably, but the achievement of this ultimate
dignity—
that was something we alone could teach them. Only a Man could reach that height. Death gave us this noble knowledge. Life—the New One’s life—gave us this purpose. And now they would have it in their own lifetime.

And what a task it had been! For we were too advanced, and the otters far too primitive, for us to impress anything upon them while we shared the earth with them. We would be dust for many thousands
of years before they began to communicate even with one another. We had no intention of speeding up their pre-history. Let them be what they were, strong, adaptable, ubiquitous. Let them content themselves with floating on their backs, holding shellfish on their chests, cracking them open with a stone, until the day came when of their own accord they found that was not enough. Let them kindle their own light.

But we were determined that once it was burning it should never flicker or dim. There would be no dark ages for the otters. We would reduce basic knowledge to its essence, put these in the most understandable form, and leave them like milestones (a statement and a promise, each) along the way.

For the milestones we chose the new alloy 2-chrome-vanadium-prime, which came to be called bicrovalloy. (Ah, what cities that might have built!) Properly fabricated, it could be formed into rods, bars, sheets; once irradiated, it would not, almost could not, change its form or state. This was no molecular lattice, nor even a net of atoms. It can best be described as a matrix of nuclei. Then thirty-foot sheets, supported only at the edges, could bear thousands of pounds at the center without bending more than a few thousandths. A hundred feet of quarter-inch rod, held horizontally by one end, showed no detectable sag. Drawn to a point, it would write on diamond as on wax; plates of it cooled to within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero and—or—raised to twenty million degrees, showed only a slight improvement of their finish. And what a finish! Silver-gilt, with a touch of peach …

On plates of bicrovalloy, then, man’s wisdom was scribed. The task was enormous, but it was the only task we had. We had first to amass the necessary knowledge, then to distill it (and distill it again, and again, and again), and finally to codify it in such a way that the new race, the parameters of whose intelligence we could know only vaguely, would when ready for it be able to take and use it. When they had mastered fire, they must have ceramics. When they began working metal, they must have alloying and heat treatment. At a certain point in this mastery, they must be given knowledge of the power of steam. And so on. But nothing, if possible, before they were ready.

Placement of bicrovalloy plates, bearing the pertinent simple illustrations, in pottery-clay pits was self-evident, concealing them in likely lodes of minable metals was not so easy, for they must be hidden far enough down to make sure that their discovery was no accident. We gave language, numbers. And the ultimate secrets—ethical, spiritual as well as technological—these must be triply concealed, so that they would come out as a series of revelations, each a discovery, each a hint of the next, with everything in our power done to ensure they get it neither too soon nor, through over-concealment, not at all.

And so it was that the four equations of Einstein’s General Field Theory, together with Heisenberg’s addenda, were placed in the most inaccessible vault of all—in the mantle of the earth itself, in the bottom of the great bore under two miles of ocean where, in the twentieth century, we had reached our peak as engineers, seekers after knowledge. I need not go into the details of this ultimate achievement. For all our dedication, our immense resources, and our newer techniques, it was far harder for us to reach the bore than it had been for our forefathers to dig it.

The concealment of this final bicrovalloy plate was (it seemed at the time) our climactic conquest. I look back on those days with affection and sadness. It was a time of contemplative pride. We kept busy, of course, but our work was done. We had, in a fashion, survived our own death. We existed in a timeless moment, neither afterlife nor immortality, after the end of one great flowering and before the beginning of another. Humankind, the very death of humankind—that was behind us. The otters had not even begun; this was eons before their birth as the Next Ones. So in this period we walked proudly, humbly conscious of our true usefulness and nobility. We had carried the torch.

And then—

Then De Wald produced the last equation.

De Wald had worked ceaselessly even before our project had begun, even before the first recorded case of the new encephalitis had claimed the first of its billion of victims. His material was the remarkable mathematical achievements of Heisenberg, and his goal a single expression
which would not only encompass Einstein’s four, but which would distill even Heisenberg’s into something as clear as e=mc
²
.

We had conferences and excited discussions, of course, but they were ritual (we had time for ritual then, and a great liking for it); everyone knew what was to be done. We had known because of the supreme
rightness
of such a discovery at such a time. Some talked about poetic justice and some about God; myself—I am not a scientist—I attributed it to Art. For our kind to end with a whimper, to be proven futile, or to have our work left in any way unfinished—this was Bad Art. De Wald’s discovery, on the other hand, coming at just this time, was Art at its peak. One might almost say it justified everything, viewed objectively—even the tragic death of mankind. In a million years, through the eyes of another species, this would be the greatest story ever told …

Joyfully we set about the sizable task of recovering the now outdated set of bicrovalloy plates from the very flesh of the earth’s body. And meanwhile the new plate was prepared—the old one could not be changed or added to, of course. Oh, it was good, good to be back at work again!

Then we were ready for the final placement. This of all times was the time to have a ceremony, and we planned a beautiful one. Grogerio himself would compose special music, and naturally no one but Fluger would design the dais on which the recovered plate and the ultimate one would lie side by side during the ceremony. And I was not in the least surprised when they came to me for an ode. Not in the least reluctant, either: for if created art comes from inspiration, surely there was enough and to spare in such an assignment.

I requested that I be left alone at the beautiful seaside spot on the night before the ceremony. I had already done a draft of the ode, but I knew what that vigil would do for the final version.

And indeed, the whole mood of the place and the time was perfect for such an effort. The last of the people left late in the afternoon, and I made myself comfortable in a spot where I could, at a glance, take in sea and sky, the silver beach and Fluger’s beautiful dais, raised on two of his dizzying, gravity-defying arches. The
rightness
I mentioned earlier—this was a case in point. It has been said
many times that neither a Fluger arch nor bicrovalloy could exist without the other.

And the sun went down in a blaze: how right! Even as we …

And in the east, a leaching of the firmament, and the loom of the moon … to be a new light on earth …

Then, wonder of wonders, there was a splash in the whispering surf and a small blackness oozing through the illumined dark. Oh, I thought, awe-struck: it can’t be, but … yes; nothing could be more right … and then the moon struck upward with its metal edge, and cracked the cup of darkness, and I could see I was right in this rightness—it was a large male sea-otter snaking through the sand, working up toward the dais.

Exactly facing me, and not thirty yards way, he froze; had I not known where he was, I might have taken him for a hummock of sand or its deepening shadow. But I did know where he was, and in the growing light I could see the sensitive twitch of his comic mustache. I was not deceived as to the subject of his gaze, either, for I know his kind. An otter never looks directly at anything, any more than a bird does. One eye was regarding his beloved sea, and the other the dais. I, directly ahead of him, was unsuspected. And how perfect a picture this made, in all its symbolisms … how very right!

He turned in his quick lithe way and scuttled toward the dais, occasionally stopping in the otter’s brief sudden pauses, as if one of his motivating wires were loose at the battery.

Silently, bemused and bemagicked, I followed. For in a moment like this, it must be so; it must be so: I alone—I, possibly the most perfectly qualified person on Earth and in all history to appreciate such a priceless picture, I would see this minion of the far-distant New Ones in the very shrine of all that was highest of Humanity.

And of course I was right—I was right—what could go wrong with such an enchantment? All the Powers of all the Souls of all Good Art would not permit anything, in such a moment, but what was right.

The otter, when at last I had crept round the dais and up behind the curtains and could see him, crouched motionless before and between the two bicrovalloy plates, the one just recovered, bearing
Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s revelations, and the other which had just been fabricated to replace it.

I thought (a very whisper of a thought, lest I think too loudly and ripple this tableau): Are you praying, little one?

The otter rose suddenly on his hind legs and put his forepaws on the reclaimed plate. He seemed, in his clumsy, fumbling little way, to be caressing its surface. And the strangest feeling came over me, of shame, of that special kind of guilt one feels on having committed a faux pas, a
gaffe
, an in-itself petty kind of social offense which nonetheless it is acutely painful to remember. I felt like an intruder, a spy of the most ignorant and clumsy sort. To spare myself any more to brood on in the future, I removed the one wrong thing in that symphony of rightness—myself. Noiselessly I sank down behind the curtain and slipped into the sand below, and I was congratulating myself on being perhaps alone among men to have such perfect sensibility.

Rather than disturb him at whatever accidental orisons he was performing up there above me, I sat quietly until at last I saw him scampering off toward the sea. He had snatched up some bit of trash or jetsam from somewhere, and I saw him digging at the water’s edge with it. I could just make out the two plump clams he unearthed, and then he was gone into the surf. I rose to catch, perhaps just once more, a single last glimpse of this creature, fellow to my most magic moment, and (as was only right) I did. He was floating joyfully on his back in the moonlight, with a clam on his strong chest. He struck it deftly with his crude tool, gulped it from the shattered shell, threw his unwanted trash upward into the moonlight, and was gone beneath the waves.

I gazed after the graceful clever little rascal, loving him … and turned toward my vigil-spot, all abrim with inspiration … and had I gone there, I surely should have written one hell, one hell of a
hell
uva ode … but instead I strode back up on the dais, to relive that incredible moment.

In the brilliant moonlight I gazed down at the shrine of humanity, all its dignity and its worth, and at all the meanings of this mighty gesture of faith in the life that had been and the life that was to be,
when my eyes took in … took in what, some unmeasured time later—it might have been an hour—my mind was able to take in …