The Last Ghost - Stephen Goldin, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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VERSION 1.0 dtd 032700STEPHEN GOLDINThe Last GhostSTEPHEN GOLDIN was born February 28, 1947, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hebegan writing at the age of thirteen and first sold a story when he waseighteen.He received his bachelor's degree in astronomy from UCLA in 1968 and thenwas employed for almost three years as a physicist/space scientist for NavySpace Systems. He left the Navy's employment to become, in his words, "afulltime, starving writer." He is a member of Science Fiction Writers ofAmerica,World Future Society, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and the SFWASpeakers' Bureau. His hobby is zookeeping, and !he current inventory of hismenage lists cats, mice, chipmunks, fish, snakes, a rat, an iguana, achameleon, a land crab, a hamster, a parrot and an alligator.Goldin edited the forthcoming collection The Alien Condition, and heassistededitor David Gerrold with the collections Protostars and Generation. He hastwonovels in progress.His short story "Sweet Dreams, Melissa," concerning a new-generationcomputer brought up to think it's a little girl, was anthologized in BestSF: 7966,edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, and also in The Eleventh GalaxyReader, edited by Frederik Pohl."The Last Ghost" was a finalist in the balloting for the 1971 NebulaAwards. It is a reminder that the ultimate loneliness is not the experienceof thelast man alive, but the last man dead.Eternity is a terrible place to endure alone.He is the last of his kind, if he is a "he. " (Gender is an arbitrarydifference. All things are eventually the same-and in eternity, eventuallyequals always.) He must once have had a name, a handle to his soul,but that was back before the eternity/instant when he had existed incorporeal form. He tries to think about things as he had known them,and finds he can't. He tries to think about things as they are, and findshe can't quite manage that, either. The will-be is far beyond his powersof contemplation.He exists (if that's the word) in an everlasting now, as a state ofnothingness less substantial than a vacuum, smaller than infinity, largerthan thought. Eternity lies as far behind him as it does ahead. He driftsthrough this lack of anything at infinitely greater than no speed at all.He sees with non-eyes. He hears without ears He thinks thoughtlessthoughts that revolve in circles and make little eddies of emptiness inthe not-quite-nothing of his mind.He searches forHe wants aHe desires someHe loves toNo objects remain within his mental grasp. The words have beencorroded by the gentle acid of time. All that's left is the search; thewant; the desire; the love.She began to appear slowly, a flicker at the limits of his nonperception.(Why heconsidered her a "she" could not be explained. There was just an aspectabouther that was complementary to him.) His unthoughts raced in puzzlement. Shewas a newness in his stale cosmos, where nothing ever changed. He watchedher as she took on a form even less substantial than his own. He watchedwithhis crumbling mind at a crossroad, afraid to approach, evenmore afraid to run from her in fear. (If, that is, there were anyplace torun in eternity.)She gained awareness suddenly, and started at the alien strangeness ofher new environment. The eerie infinitude produced within her a waveof awe commingled with fear. She could, as yet, perceive only herselfand the barren continuum around her.She spoke. (What came out was not sound, but could be interpreted ascommunication.) "Where am I?"The action was a simple one. It seemed utterly new to him, but downsomewhere among the shards of his memory it was all tantalizinglyfamiliar. He trembled.She perceived his being, and turned her attention toward him. "Whatare you? What's happened to me?"He knew the answers-or rather, he had known them. As it had witheverything else, infinity had eaten away at these chunks ofinformation too in what was left of his mind. It had all been soimportant once. So important! That was why he was what he was, andwhy he wasn't what he wasn't."Please!" she begged him. Hysteria edged her voice. "Tell me!"Through mists that swirled down dusty corridors of memory, the wordscame out unbidden. "You are dead.""No! That's impossible! I can't be!"Loud silence."I can't be," she repeated. "Death was conquered more than fivethousand years ago. After our minds were transferred into computerbanks, we became immortal. Our bodies may fail, but our minds go on.Nobody dies anymore . . . ." Her voice trailed off."You are dead," he repeated emotionlessly."Are . . . are you a ghost?" she asked.Though the meaning of the word had been stolen from him, that shredof identity remained: "Yes."She brooded, and large quantities of non-time elapsed. He waited. Hebecame accustomed to her existence. No longer was she an alien thingin his empty universe. She was now a half presence, and he acceptedher as he had come to accept everything else-without comment."I suppose," she said at last, "some sort of equipment failure mighthave temporarily dislodged my personality pattern from the memorybanks. But only temporarily. I'm only half dead so far. As soon as thetrouble is fixed, I'll be all right again. I will be all right, won't I?"' He didn't answer. He knew nothing about equipment failures --or hadforgotten if he ever had known."Equipment failures are supposed to be impossible," she prattled on,trying desperately to convince herself that her comfortable realitywould return again. "Still, in thousands of years even a trillion-to-oneshot might happen. But they'll fix it soon. They've got to. They must.Won't they? Won't they?"She stared at her impassive companion with non-eyes widened bypanic. "Don't just stand there! Help me!"Help. That word found a niche somewhere in the haunted cavern of hismind. He was supposed to help . . . to help . . .The who, or what, or how he was supposed to help eluded him. That is,if he had ever known.They drifted on through the void together, side by side, ghost andalmost-ghost. The unthoughts of the elder spirit were tangled morethan usual, owing to the presence of another after such a lonely periodof timelessness. But it was not a bad tangle; in fact, it was rather niceto share the universe with someone else again. She was a pleasant aurabeside him in an otherwise insensate world.They had both existed for over five thousand years. He wasundoubtedly the older of the pair; but the real difference between themwas that, while he had existed alone for so long that solitude hadnibbled away at his Swiss cheese mind, she had lived those centurieswith other people, other minds-a situation that either cracks onecompletely or produces near-total stability. The latter was the casewith her, and so eventually her initial panic subsided and the clinicalattitude she had held for thousands of years returned."Well, it appears I'm going to be here for a while, so I might as well getacquainted with this place. And since you're the onlything around, I'll start with you. Who are you?""Dead.""Obviously." Her non-voice managed to handle even sarcasm nicely."But don't you have some kind of a name?""No.""Just for a moment she lost her patience. "That's impossible, Gabbv.You must have had a name sometime. What was it?""I don't . . . I don't . . . I don't . . ." His broken-record attempt toanswerwas so pathetic that it touched the maternal instincts that she hadthought long-dead within her."I'm sorry," she said a bit more tenderly. "Let's talk about somethingelse. Where are we?""We are . . .""Dead," she finished with him. Oh Lord, help me have patience with him.He's worse than a child. "Yes, I know that. But I mean our physicallocation. Does it have a name?" ,"No."Stymied again. Her companion was obviously not inclined toconversation, but her analytical mind felt an urgent need to talk, to try tohold on to her sanity under such adverse conditions. "`All right, then, ifyou don't want to talk, do you mind if I do?""No."So she did. She told him about her earliest life, when she had had a body,and about the things she had done and the children she had had. Shespoke of the mind-transferral breakthrough that had finally enabled Manto conquer Death. She told him about the first thousand or so years shehad spent in the computer bank when, exhilarated by the thrill ofimmortality, she had occupied animated robot bodies and engaged in"Death-defying" sports and exciting activities. And she related how eventhis had paled with time, and how she had passed into the current,mature phase of her life, the search for knowledge and wisdom. She toldhow ships had been built to take these computerized people to the stars,and what strange and wonderful things they had found there.He listened. Most of it was incomprehensible to him, for thewords were either unfamiliar or forgotten. His sievelike mind retainedvery little of what she said. But he listened, and that was important. Hesoaked in the experience, the thrill, of anotherpseudobeing communicating with him. -At last she paused, unable to think of anything else to say. "Would youlike to talk now?" she asked.Something burned within him. "Yes.""Good," she said. "What would you like to talk about?"He tried hard to think of something, anything, but once again his brainfailed him.She sensed his difficulty. "Tell me something about yourself," sheprompted."I am dead.""Yes, I know that. But what else?"He thought. What was "himself" that he could tell something about?"I search for"I want a"I desire some"I lov...
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