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"The Last Man won't understand anything after tonight," Cob Coliath
said, as he did fine and strong work with a butcher's saw. "He will die
tonight, and he says that he's ready for it. His official title is 'The Last
Man Who Remembers,' you know."
"Who remembers what?" asked Tom who was not quite as intelligent as the
others.
"Oh, if anyone else remembered what it was, then he wouldn't be the last
man to remember it," Lion Brightfoot said reasonably. "And when he is finally
dead, then no one at all will know what the old secret was. It was a crumby
thing anyhow, they say. And my father maintains that nobody now left would
understand it even if it were explained to him."
These four boys had arrived on simultaneous requisitions just about two
years before this. They were boys as good as any you will ever find. And the
fact was that men and boys, like everything else, were getting better all the
time. Men now had a thorough understanding of what they were doing when they
put in their requisitions for sons. They were more scientific about it than
ever before, They understood the goal, and they got the results.
"The reason for the world is the enjoyment of the world," was a sound
current ethical-scientific statement, "and the reason for men and boys is the
fulfillment and pleasure of those same men and boys."
The men and boys did fulfill, and they did please themselves. They
lorded it over the universe and they brought it into accord and resonance with
themselves.
2
These four boys who had come from the potting sheds at the same time
were doing quick and hard pork work (the most meaningful and totemistic of all
work). And after they had worked, they must go to their instructions. It would
be that way all their lives: in the mornings, work; all the afternoons,
instructions; in the evenings, enjoyments. Intellectuality and friendship and
art and pleasure were the things that life was built upon, and not one of them
must be slighted.
These boys usually took their basic courses together; and then they took
their majors and minors and corollaries with others who followed the same
specialties. But even in the specialty subjects, there were 'cross-currents,'
meetings between the basic friends. And the instructions must be carried out
as splendidly as the pig-killings and other things.
Boys came to their instruction years with explosive momentum: and the
acquisition of knowledge and skill and understanding was supposed to continue
at an explosive pace all their lives., The perfect balance, the passion, and
the (yes) the serenity, can only come at high speed, as a rapidly spinning top
will have balance and surety and serenity. But when it slows down, then it
wobbles, and sometimes it falls.
When the boys had been in the potting sheds (the fleshpots and the
mindpots) they had developed great bodily and psychic mental intensity, but
they had not been conscious in any of those areas. They had been in the large,
unconscious, amitotic environment of intense activity kept well below the
surface. It was there that the requisitions for sons were fulfilled; it was
there that the selections were made as to what things should rise above the
surface, what things might be kept in harmless somnolence below the surface
forever, and what things must be destroyed while they were still below the
surface to prevent them from making trouble later.
So it was that the boys broke up through the surface of that environment
with bright memories in some areas, and with gappy holes in their memories on
other sections. Into the holes in their memories, other sorts of things might
be flowed during the instructions, things of unrelated substance. But all the
boys broke through that old surface with great power, like porpoises leaping,
like rockets riding on controlled explosions, like shouting stones hurled by
spring-released catapults. And when the boys surfaced they became conscious,
and they were all registered as having the 'given' age of twelve years. (They
might have been in the amitotic environment anywhere from six weeks to six
months: but not twelve years.)
Tom Halfshell went at noon to his instructions in his major of Trumpet
Playing and related subjects. Horns were paramount in the musical part of the
instructions. All boys arrived with the memory of blowing a sort of Triton's
horn in the depths of a sea. Drums and gongs and bells and clanging iron were
important in their music also, and the ratthng and singing woods, and even
strings and keyboards. But it was the horns, and their cousins the pipes, that
were the royal instruments.
Tom Halfshell played the brass trumpet as formal instrument, and the
conch-shell trumpet as informal instrument. And he was good, much better than
any of his fellows, on brass or wood or shell or bone horns, or pig-tooth
whistles or penny whistles, or even on that most royal of all instruments, the
squealing, pig-stomach, Bag-Pipe. And yet he was not at ease with the
pig-pipe, nor it with him.
"You are much better than the other boys, Tom," the instructor told him,
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