Not only their race had been destroyed, in vain, but his , centuries turned to mud and diamonds in their markerless graves, had passed in futility. It had all, all of it, been for nothing.
So Bright Eyes — never Man — was the last man on Earth. Keeper of a silent graveyard; echoless tomb monument to the foolishness, the absurdity, of nobility.
The Discarded
Pretty people have it easier than uglies. It smacks of cliché, and yet the lovelies of this world, defensive to the grave, will say, ‘tain’t so. They will contend that nice makes it harder for them. They get hustled more, people try to use them more, and to hear girls tell it, their good looks are nothing but curse, curse, curse. But stop to think: at least a good-looking human being has that much going for openers. Plain to not-so-nice-at-all folk have to really jump for every little crumb. Things come harder to them. The reasoning of the rationale is a simple one: we worship the Pepsi Generation. We have a pathological lemming drive to conceal our age, lift our faces, dress like overblown Shirley Temples, black that grey in the hair, live a lie. What ever happened to growing old gracefully, the reverence of maturity, the search for character as differentiated from superficial comeliness? It be a disease, I warn you. It will rot you from the inside, while the outside glows. It will escalate into a culture that can never tolerate The Discarded.
BEDZYK SAWRIILA GO MAD, and watched her throw herself against the Lucite port, till her pinhead was a red blotch of pulped flesh and blood. He sighed, and sucked deeply from his massive bellows chest, and wondered how he , of all the Discards, had been silently nominated the leader. The ship hung in space, between the Moon and Earth, unwanted, unnoticed, a raft adrift in the sea of night.
Around him in the ship’s saloon, the others watched Riila killing herself, and when her body fell to the rug, they turned away, allowing Bedzyk his choice of who was to dispose of her. He chose John Smith — the one with feathers where hair should have been — and the nameless one who clanged instead of talking.
The two of them lifted her heavy body, with its tiny pea of head, and carried it to the garbage port. They emptied it, opened it, tossed her inside, redogged, and blew her out. She floated past the saloon window on her way sunward. In a moment she was lost.
Bedzyk sat down in a deep chair and drew breath whistlingly into his mighty chest. It was a chore, being leader of these people.
People? No, that was certainly not the word. These Discards. That was a fine willowy word to use. They were scrap, refuse, waste, garbage themselves. How fitting for Riila to have gone that way, out the garbage port. They would all bid good-bye that way some day. He noted there was no ’day’ on the ship. But some good something — maybe day, maybe night — each of them would go sucking out that port like the garbage.
It had to be that way. They were Discards.
But people? No, they were not people. People did not have hooks where hands should have been, nor one eye, nor carapaces, nor humps on chests and backs, nor fins, nor any of the other mutations these residents of the ship sported. People were normal. Evenly matched sets of arms and legs and eyes. Evenly matched husbands, wives. Evenly distributed throughout the Solar System, and evenly dividing the goods of the System between themselves and the frontier worlds at the Edge. And all happily disposed to let the obscene Discards die in their prison ship.
“She’s gone.”
He had pursed his lips, had sunk his perfectly normal head onto his gigantic chest, and had been thinking. Now he looked up at the speaker. It was John Smith, with feathers where hair should have been.
“I said: she’s gone.”
Bedzyk nodded without replying. Riila had been just one more in the tradition. They had already lost over two hundred Discards from the ship. There would be more.
Strange how these — he hesitated again to use the word people , finally settled on the word they used among themselves: creatures — these creatures had steeled themselves to the death of one of their kind. Or perhaps they did not consider the rest as malformed as themselves. Each person on the ship was different. No two had been affected by the Sickness in the same way. The very fibers of the muscles had altered with some of these creatures, making their limbs useless; on others the pores had clogged on their skin surfaces, eliminating all hair. On still others strange juices had been secreted in the blood stream, causing weird growths to erupt where smoothness had been. But perhaps each one thought he was less hideous than the others. It was conceivable. Bedzyk knew his great chest was not nearly as unpleasant to look upon as, say, Samswope’s spiny crest and twin heads. In fact , Bedzyk mused wryly, many people might think it was becoming, this great wedge of a chest, all matted with dark hair and heroic-seeming. Uh-huh, the others are pretty miserable to look at, but not me, especially. Yes, it was conceivable.
In any case, they paid no attention now, if one of their group killed himself. They turned away; most of them were better off dead, anyhow.
Then he caught himself.
He was starting to get like the rest of them! He had to stop thinking like that. It wasn’t right. No one should be allowed to take death like that. He resolved, the next one would be stopped, and he would deliver them a stern warning, and tell the Discards that they would find landfall soon, and to buck up.
But he knew he would sit and watch the next time, as he had this time. For he had made the same resolve before Riila had gone.
Samswope came into the saloon — he had been on KP all ’day’ and both his heads were dripping with sweat — and picked his way among the conversing groups of Discards to the seat beside Bedzyk.
“Mmm.” It was a greeting; he was identifying his arrival.
“Hi, Sam. How was it?”
“Metsoo-metz,” he gibed, imitating Scalomina (the one-eyed ex-plumber, of Sicilian descent), tipping his hand in an obvious Scalominian gesture. “I’ll live. Unfortunately.” He added the last word with only a little drop of humor.
“Did I ever tell you the one about the Candy-Ass Canadian Boil-Sucker?” He didn’t even smile as he said it; with either head. Bedzyk nodded wearily: he didn’t want to play that game. “Yeah, well,” Samswope said wearily. He sat silently for several long moments, then added, with irony, “But did I tell you I was married to her?” His wife had turned him in.
Morbidity ran knee-deep on the ship.
“Riila killed herself a little bit ago,” Bedzyk said carelessly. There was no other way to say it.
“I figured as much,” Samswope explained. “I saw them carrying her past the galley to the garbage lock. That’s number six this week alone. You going to do anything, Bedzyk?”
Bedzyk twisted abruptly in his chair. He leveled a gaze at a spot directly between Samswope’s two heads. His words were bitter with helplessness and anger that the burden should be placed upon him. “What do you mean, what am I going to do? I’m a prisoner here, too. When they had the big roundup, I got snatched away from a wife and three kids, the same as you got pulled away from your used car lot. What the hell do you want me to do? Beg them not to bash their heads against the Lucite, it’ll smear our nice north view of space?”
Samswope wiped both hands across his faces simultaneously in a weary pattern. The blue eyes of his left head closed, and the brown eyes of his right head blinked quickly. His left head, which had been speaking till now, nodded onto his chest. His right head, the nearly-dumb one, mumbled incoherently — Samswope’s left head jerked up, and a look of disgust and hatred clouded his eyes. “Shut up, you — fucking moron!” He cracked his right head with a full fist.