Galaxy Magazine (November 1954) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1954-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Music Master of Babylon

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By EDGAR PANGBORN

Illustrated by KRIGSTEIN

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What more fitting place for the last man 6n Earth to live in than a museum? Now if only he could avoid becoming an exhibit himself!

FOR twenty-five years, no one came. In the seventy-sixth year of his life, Brian Van Anda was still trying not to remember a happy boyhood. To do so was irrelevant and dangerous, although every instinct of his old age tempted him to reject the present and dwell in the lost times.

He would recall stubbornly

that the present year, for example, was 2096; that he had been born in 2020, seven years after the close of the Civil War, fifty years before the Final War, twenty-five years before the departure of the First Interstellar. (It had never returned, nor had the Second Interstellar. They might be still wandering, trifles of Man-made Stardust.) He would recall his place of birth, New Boston, the fine, planned city far inland from the ancient metropolis that the rising sea had reclaimed after the earthquake of 1994.

Such things, places and dates, were factual props, useful when Brian wanted to impose an external order on the vagueness of his immediate existence. He tried to make sure they became no more than that—to shut away the colors, the poignant sounds, the parks and the playgrounds of New Boston, the known faces (many of them loved), and the later years when he had briefly known a curious intoxication called fame.

It was not necessarily better or wiser to reject those memories, but it was safer, and nowadays Brian was often sufficiently tired, sufficiently conscious of his growing weakness and lonely unimportance, to crave safety as a meadow mouse often craves a burrow.

84

HE tied his canoe to the massive window that for many years had been a port and a doorway. Lounging there with a suspended sense of time, he was hardly aware that he was listening. In a way, all the twenty-five years had been a listening. He watched Earth's patient star sink toward the rim of the forest on the Palisades. At this hour, it was sometimes possible, if the Sun-crimsoned water lay still, to cease grieving too much at the greater stillness.

There was scattered human life elsewhere, he knew—probably a great deal of it. After twenty-five years alone, that, too, often seemed almost irrelevant. At other times than mild evenings, hushed noons or mornings empty of human commotion, Brian might lapse into anger, fight the calm by yelling, resent the swift dying of his echoes. Such moods were brief. A kind of humor remained in him, not to be ruined by sorrow.

He remembered how, ten months or possibly ten years ago, he had encountered a box turtle in a forest clearing, and had shouted at it: "They went thataway!" The turtle's rigidly comic face, fixed by nature in a caricature of startled disapproval, had seemed to point up some truth or other. Brian had hunkered down on the moss and laughed

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

uproariously—until he observed that some of the laughter was weeping.

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