Wainer Read online

plentyof women, and Reject women did well with men.

  But the Rash, in the end, had everything that really counted.

  Well, there was only such work that a Reject could do. But none of itfitted Wainer. He tried all the arts at one time or another before hefinally settled on music. In music there was something vast andelemental; he saw that he could build. He began, and learned, but didlittle actual work. In those beginning years, he could be found almostalways out by the Sound, or wandering among the cliffs across the River,his huge hands fisted and groping for something to do, wondering,wondering, why he was a Reject.

  * * * * *

  The first thing he wrote was the _Pavanne_, which came after his firstreal love affair. I cannot remember the girl, but in a thousand years Ihave not forgotten the music. It may surprise You to learn that the_Pavanne_ was a commercial success. It surprised Wainer, too. The Rasheswere actually the public, and their taste was logical. Most of all theyliked Bach and Mozart, some Beethoven and Greene, but nothing emotionaland obscure. The _Pavanne_ was a success because it was a love piece,wonderfully warm and gay and open. Wainer never repeated that success.

  That was one of the few times I ever saw him with money. He received theregular government fee and a nice sum in royalties, but not quite enoughfor a trip into space, so he drank it all up. He was happy for a while.He went back to the music clubs and stayed away from the beaches, butwhen I asked him if he was working on anything else, he said no, he hadnothing else to write.

  Right after that, he fell in love again, this time with his mother.

  The longevity treatment was still fairly new; few had stopped toconsider that, as men grew older, their mothers remained young, astender and fresh as girls in school, and there is no woman as close to aman as his mother. Inevitably, a great many men fell in love that way.Wainer was one. His mother, poor girl, never suspected, and it was pureanguish for him. It was some time before he had recovered enough to talkabout it, and by then he was thirty. One of the ways he recovered was bywriting more music.

  There were a lot of lesser works, and then came the First Symphony.

  Looking back over the centuries, I cannot understand how the thing wasso controversial. The Rashes wrote of it harshly in all their papers.The Rejects almost unanimously agreed that it was a masterpiece. Imyself, when I heard it, became aware that Wainer was a great man.

  * * * * *

  Because of the controversy which raged for a while, Wainer made somemoney, but the effect of the criticism was to keep him from writing foryears. There is something in that First Symphony of the Wainer of lateryears, some of the hungry, unfinished, incomprehensible strength. Wainerknew that if he wrote anything else, it would be much like the First,and he recoiled from going through it all again. He went back to thebeaches.

  He had something rare in those days--a great love for the sea. I supposeit was to him what space is to others. I know that the next thing hewrote was a wild, churning, immortal thing which he called Water Music;and I know that he himself loved it best of anything he wrote, except,of course, the Tenth Symphony. But this time was worse than the last.The only ones who paid any attention to Water Music were the Rejects,and they didn't count.

  If Wainer had been a true composer, he would have gone on composingwhether anyone cared or not, but as I have said, he was not really anartist. Despite the fact that he was the greatest composer we have everknown, music was only a small thing to him. He had a hint, even then,that although he had been born on Earth there was something in him thatwas alien, and that there was so much left to do, so much to be seen,and because he could not understand what it was that fired him, heground himself raw, slowly, from within, while walking alone by therocks on the beaches.

  When I saw him again, after I took ship as a surgeon to Altair, he wasforty, and he looked--I borrow the phrase--like a man from a land wherenobody lived. Having written no music at all, he was living again ongovernment charity. He had a room, of sorts, and food, but whatevermoney he got he drank right up, and he was such a huge and haggard manthat even Rejects left him carefully alone. I did what I could for him,which wasn't much except keep him drunk. It was then that he told meabout his feeling for space, and a great many other things, and Iremember his words:

  "I will have to go out into space some day. It is almost as if I used tolive there."

  Shortly after that, the coughing began. But it came very seldom andseemed no more than a common thing. Because there was no longer any suchthing as disease, neither Wainer nor I thought much about it, exceptthat Wainer went and got some pills from the government. For a longwhile--we may be thankful for that, at least--the cough did not botherhim.

  And so the years passed.

  * * * * *

  When Wainer was forty-two, he met the girl. Her name was Lila. She was aRash, a teacher of mnemonics, and all I can remember of her are thedark-brown lovely eyes, and the warm, adoring face. She was the onlywoman that Wainer ever really loved, except perhaps his mother, and hechose to have his child by her.

  Because of the population problem, a man could have one child then everyhundred years. Wainer had his child by Lila, and although he was veryhappy that the boy turned out to be a Rash, he never paid him muchattention.

  He was about fifty then and beginning to break down. So that he couldsee Lila often and with pride, he wrote a great deal during those years,and his lungs were collapsing all that while. It was out of that periodthat he wrote all his symphonies from the Second to the Ninth.

  It is unbelievable; they were all purely commercial. He tossed them outwith a part of his mind. I cannot help but wonder what the rest of thatmind was doing.

  I can see him now, that gaunt and useless man, his great muscled armschained to a pen, his stony, stretching legs cramped down beneath adesk....

  I did not see him again for almost ten years, because he went away. Heleft New York for perhaps the only time in his life, and began to wanderacross the inland of the American continent. I heard from him rarely. Ithink it was in one of those letters that he first mentioned the painthat was beginning in his lungs.

  I never knew what he did, or how he lived during those ten years.Perhaps he went into the forests and worked and lived like a primitive,and perhaps he just walked. He had no transportation. I know that he wasnot wholly sane then, and never was again until the end of his life. Hewas like a magnificent machine which has run out of tune for too manyyears--the delicate gears were strained and cracking.

  (The old man paused in the utter silence, while several tears droppeddown his cheek. None of Them moved, and at last he went on.)

  Near the end of the ten years, I received a package from him in themail. In it was a letter and the manuscript to the Storm in SpaceOverture. He wanted me to register the work and get the government fee,and he asked me the only favor he had ever asked of anyone, that I gethim the money, because he was going into space.

  He came back some weeks later, on foot. I had gotten the money fromRejects--they had heard the Overture--it was enough. He brought Lilawith him and was going to make reservations. He was heading, I think,only as far as Alpha Centauri.

  It was too late.

  * * * * *

  They examined him, as someone should have a long time ago, as someonewould have if he had only ever asked, but in the end it would have madeno difference either way, and it was now that they found out about hislungs.

  There was nothing anyone could do. At first I could not believe it.People did not get sick and die. _People just did not die!_ Because Iwas only a Reject and a surgeon, no Rash doctor had ever told me thatthis had happened before, many times, to other men. I heard it not fromthe Rashes, but from Wainer.

  His lungs were beginning to atrophy. They were actually dying within hisbody, and no one as yet knew why, or could stop it. He could be keptalive without lungs, yes, for a long while. I asked if we could graft alun
g into him and this is what I was told: Because no one had yetsynthesized human tissue, the graft would have to be a human lung, andin this age of longevity there were only a few available. Those few, ofcourse, went only to important men, and Wainer was nothing.

  I volunteered a lung of my own, as did Lila, as did many Rejects. Therewas hope for a while, but when I looked into Wainer's chest I saw formyself that there was no way to connect. So much was wrong, so muchinside him was twisted and strange that I could not understand how hehad lived at all. When I learned of the other men who had been likethis, I asked what had been done. The answer was that nothing had beendone at all.

  So Wainer did not go out into space. He returned instead to his singleroom to sit alone and wait, while the cool world around him progressedand revolved, while the city and its people went on without notice,while a voucher was being prepared somewhere, allowing the birth ofanother child because citizen Wainer would soon be dead.

  What could the man have thought, that huge, useless man? When he sat byhis window and watched the world moving by,