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Read Ebook: Wainer by Shaara Michael Ashman William Illustrator
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Ebook has 77 lines and 7855 words, and 2 pages
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:
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.
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."
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