The Last Woman

By Philip Matthews

Jasmun Chrodin: ‘Then she is the Last Woman. It was a subject that long fascinated members, you know. The only reason it never became another bone of contention is because no one in the Society was interested enough in the subject. As far as they were concerned, it seemed a small price to pay for the translation of the whole of humanity that just one human being gets left behind.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Matthews
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005538804

Philip Matthews

Writer's life, hidden, frugal, self-absorbed, no TV or social media, a few good friends - but the inner life, ahhhhh. Recommend it to anyone.

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THE LAST WOMAN

PHILIP MATTHEWS

Do I dare disturb the universe?

T.S. Eliot

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 9781005538804

Copyright Philip Matthews 2021

Suddenly awake, he sees a notice just centimetres from his eyes:

To your left there are two buttons, one red, one green

follow instructions below carefully

1: press red button

2: count: one and two and three and

3: now press green button

4: do not move until yellow light flashes and buzzer sounds

5: sit up slowly when capsule opens

6: be thankful that you are still alive

7: step out of capsule and cross to table on your right

He manages all this without thinking, despite the pressure of increasing anxiety, and finds another notice on the table:

There should be a drinking bottle already prepared for you within the alcove on the table. Drink slowly and steadily without otherwise moving. There will be some discomfort as feeling returns to your body, so sit in the nearby chair if necessary. Do not move until all the tingling has left your body, especially your limbs. When you are ready, leave the Down room by the door with the red stripe. You will find another note in the next room.

Dress yourself, using the overall and footwear made available here. You should now walk the length of this room a number of times, at least until your head is clear. Once done, cross and sit at the desk. You should read the document you find there with great care. It is important that you fully understand the situation you are in now. Once you have done this to your satisfaction, pass on through the door with the blue stripe. You will find a final notice there on the console, which will help you make the final assessment of your present situation.

IMPORTANT: YOU SHOULD READ THIS NOTE WITH THE GREATEST CARE AND ATTENTION.

Your name is Alain Partrigor, born 26 August 2647. You were selected to take part in a special mission, the details of which were until now unknown to you – these will be outlined below. It was envisaged that while this mission would take approximately ten years, you would need be present only at two stages, so that you would age in total only about three weeks during that period.

However, a fault developed in this craft such that it was no longer possible to predict the length of the mission. As a consequence, Mission Centre decided that you should put yourself down again until such time as the craft comes in contact with base again. This would ensure that you would not age further regardless of the length of the mission. Therefore, you can accept that once you are revived you will be within hailing distance and should be back at base within a matter of days.

MISSION BRIEFING: Reports from the Qizork Sector suggest that ruins of an alien civilization have been found on a planet in the Myhraic system. Evidence so far gleaned by local researchers suggest that this race was very advanced and that records stored there might be of great benefit to us. Therefore, a Mission was planned to send a survey vessel to retrieve as much of these records as possible and return them to Yortbort for further analysis. As the vessel is fully automated it was decided that a non-specialist could be used to sign off the various stages of the Mission.

You are this non-specialist. In case you have a memory problem after who knows how long down, let me give you a potted autobiog. Until offered this posting – with very good recompense – you were undertaking postgrad research at Yortbort University, a very self-conscious supporter of the newly revived interest in an ancient subject called metaphysics. While they cited your intelligence and industry as recommendations for this post, the truth is that you were probably regarded as the most expendable educated person on the planet.

You may have realised by now that you wrote this document, and it only remains for me – before I go down – to wish you the very best of good luck when you finally get around to reading this – sometime in the near or far future. Alain 15 May 2673.

Check the following details:

Date

Location

Also, given the (unknown) time you have been down, you should check both food and water: on lower right side of console.

The radio apparatus I ringed with green tape, to your left. Wait until base – or whoever – contacts you first. That way you will have the frequency to use to communicate.

Docking etc will be automated by either base or the vessel.

Read a book or something while you wait. There are some in your quarters – out by that sliding door at the back of the deck.

There are no windows, so don’t go looking for one.

The date reads: 31.12.2999. Location reads: unknown quadrant. Only the concentrate biscuits have survived. Only the emergency bottled water remains available. A low red light is flashing on the radio apparatus, which might indicate that the radio is either signalling or is simply on standby.

He sits at the console for a very long time, consumed by a dull steady anxiety, as though he too is on standby. He has only one memory: a tree just come into leaf, bright red at this stage, glaring highlights in the lurid spring sunlight of equatorial Yortbort. In this memory, he is just waiting too.

It takes a good while before a thought does cross his mind: a suspicion that the date showing on the console is just the limit possible for that program. That means he is more than three hundred years into the future. And the location? It is with relief that he recognises the irony he can now feel: he is also off the map, as it were.

It’s the distance that the irony gives him – that familiar detachment – that allows him to stand up and walk out of the room through the sliding door at the back. His quarters are easily found: there is only one door in the short corridor, at the end. Two books lie on a small table off to his right. There is a narrow bed along the other side. A partially open folding door reveals toilet facilities.

Two books: a thick one by a G.W.F. Hegel, dense archaic text, heavily annotated with a variety of coloured inks. The second a slim volume of poetry, also archaic text, but at least immediately familiar to him. He reads a few lines:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all –

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

It is enough: the feeling is like a completion, enough for now and always possible. He lays the book down on the table again and crosses to the bed. He lies out on his back, arms down by his sides. He lies there looking at that tree with the red leaves until he falls asleep.

The thirst panics him at first, like being in a deep pit, dark and in some way not silent. No, he cannot place himself – though he tries only fleetingly – it is enough to feel the need to ease the thirst. Even the novelty of his surroundings has no effect on him as he finds his way along the short corridor. What does irritate him – away off to one side, it seems – is the anonymous quality of the place, the white walls, floors and ceilings: everything white under the strain of the sheeny light that oozes from all the surfaces. It’s a light that acts to underline the coarseness of the thirst, a smooth indifference that leaves him feeling isolated with only the rough grain in his throat to enliven him.

The larger room he finds at the end of the corridor is no better: flashing lights at a desk at the far end, an overwhelming sense of silence like a tantalising absence. And he is listening intently, the silence as though funnelling into him, white too, but bearing a surprising promise, as though silence is always no more than a preparation for sound.

This insight is so strange – and yet so certain – that he stops in the middle of this room, standing there as though waiting. And sure enough, the thought comes: why doesn’t darkness promise light? It never does. Thinking, he sees how darkness is so complete, how it draws him on, the nearest experience of infinity available to him. This should be enough thinking to satisfy him for now. But, no, he must press on. Why is silence – that other absence – not complete in itself? The answer comes to him immediately: because he can see the silence.

Now he is satisfied. And being thus satisfied, he thinks of water. At the console, he examines the layout of the control panel. The screen is still displaying the information he had asked for. It’s obvious to him that only the food and water entries have a red star-like symbol to their left. He presses the symbol against the water item. The action over to his left is silent, yet he knows something has happened. Sure enough, a section of the wall has slid open to reveal what can only be a food dispenser of some kind. There is also an arrangement whereby he can draw out a little table and a flat panel that would serve as a seat at this table. The screen here lists a series of items, against each of which is one of two symbols, for either liquid or solid. Only two of these items are lit: water, bottled, and biscuit concentrate. He presses the water entry. At once a little panel opens to reveal a bottle containing water.

The water is slightly chilled and it flows in his throat like a cold molten lava: exactly so, both ice cold and yet a sensation of burning. It hollows him, that is how it affects him: like inside he is an enormous dark cavern, very silent. He finds the little panel to sit on, his elbows resting on the little table, before he ventures a second mouthful of the water. He is thinking that while he is in the flesh only twenty six years old, some other part of him is now hundreds of years old, how many he doesn’t know, except that they are many, possibly many more than he can think just now. That is the cavern inside him, so much empty time, centuries of it. And yes, the second stream of water creates less of a sensation, but even so it is as though it trickles down through this vast silent dark cave to his gut.

Thinking of this cave now suggests food. He presses the biscuit entry, and sure enough again another panel opens and presents him with a little tray upon which there are two of the concentrate biscuits. He expects to eat dust: instead he is pleasantly surprised to find that, though dry on his palate, the crumbly texture has a very definite flavour, even a slight aroma. The following mouthful of water acts to enhance this flavour, while the texture retains its grain, rolling in his throat along with the water. A novel experience, much better than he expected. And then there is another pleasant surprise. Though the bulk of the two biscuits was small to consume, they have filled his stomach with a light and easy mass, the sensation of the residual flavour as though permeating his entire body.

There is always this problem with satisfaction: it only serves to highlight dissatisfaction, should a reason for such dissatisfaction be present. This situation does not last long. He is laid out on the bed again, replete in one area but haunted by a longing in another. This longing has no name: instead it is defined for him by what is present about him – the indifferent shell that surrounds him to protect him from who knows how many light-years, light-centuries, of dark emptiness. He would panic but even panic needs a place to go to: if you are fleeing from something you must have somewhere to flee towards. Strictly, he knows he should implode into a nothingness – pressed into that non-state by such an inconceivably vast emptiness – but some quality in him can withstand that very great pressure, a quality that has no presence other than not allowing nothingness to take him over.

He falls asleep.

Awake again, there is still that sensation of vastness, but this time as though the vast emptiness outside his protective shell has in some way accepted his presence. He knows it is a condition that will allow him live with his present situation: he must expand to fill the reality he knows, even if this is – for him now – an empty universe. It is only when he has accepted this condition that he becomes aware of the nagging sensation in his gut: he badly needs to relieve himself. He doesn’t ask himself how such a mundane need should prompt such an apparently significant decision as submitting to an empty universe. But what he does recognise is that the act of emptying himself of waste matter does have a continuity with feeling a reconciliation with what is now his reality.

The moment he rolls off the bed on to his feet he feels himself embraced by habit. He unzips and rolls down the overall, then steps naked into the toilet enclosure. He accepts the familiarity of the place, the waste bowl to the left, the Refresher unit to the right. He sits on the bowl, his body responding at once out of habit, all waste evacuated in less than a minute, the electrostatic charge cleaning him just as quickly. About to stand up, he suddenly sees a face he does not immediately know, but which is overwhelmingly familiar to him. It does take time, he desperately searching the emptiness that should be his memory, then one word: mother. It’s like a screen lighting up: the slender woman with her habitual anxious expression, peering as always in expectation of trouble. Nothing could assuage that unease of hers, no amount of love and consideration. And only the passing comment by one of her more cynical associates at the college to him as a teenager to shed light on this strange – and surely unwarranted – state: that his mother had adopted this stance as a way of keeping trouble at bay. And his father had agreed when he passed this observation on to him – he looking for reassurance here from the person who probably knew her best – why everyone loves little puppies: they enhance your sense of power, your confidence.

And his father now. The one word he always thought of when he saw his father: leeway. Essentially an obstacle that could be – that needed to be – skirted: thus the kind of administrator who allows his staff do their work, both he and his staff confident that this work would be done efficiently, some leeway perhaps but no slacking, no cutting corners. Always affable, the proverbial velvet glove boss. And as a father? He had never needed to do this, but he knew in his heart that if he ever had a real problem his father would do everything in his power to help him. No question about that, ever.

The images ease, so he can get to his feet and align himself on the Refresher. Even before the charge surges across his flesh he remembers that those images are many hundreds of years old: that is, his parents are long dead. It is appropriate that he shivers with this realisation even as he shivers – as he always does – as the charge climaxes and his entire body spasms with the electric release. He might be cleansed now, but he feels soiled to remember how flip he has just been about his parents – his mother, especially – the degree to which Yortbort’s big-city glibness has influenced him. He sees his mother now – he a child just home from school – how she would turn as he entered the room, a brightness in her eyes like no other. He has no words for that look of hers. How she seemed to open to him an inwards reach without limit. There can be no name put on that, even though that vulnerable woman is long dead now and he only realising this just minutes before. And his father? No, he will go no further now, walking back into his quarters and reaching for the overall on the bed. Too many images now, too many memories flooding back. And all he can think is:

All dead.

He lies out on the bed again, eyes closed: crying though no tears flow: the finality of death overwhelming him.

Now he feels as though he has a shell, more like a snail than say a sea creature: slow and draggy, a stain in his train. The room with the flickery console repels him, but he must stop to eat and drink again. Eating and drinking are also habitual already now, the more so given the plainness of what is available to him. And also the habit of thought associated for him with the plain repetitive activity of eating. Death: what other thought is there just now? A memory wants to intrude, but he forces himself to think about death, about absence – about no going back. A mistake here, wrong thought: he sees her so clearly, even after so long. Abigail. An old fashioned name deliberately chosen by her reactionary mother, meant to resonate somewhere or somewhen in the great open universe. How mysterious love is, relating the unknowable to the unknowable. He can see her so clearly and yet knowing as he always knew that she was just the shell, that who he loved resided way back behind this plain put-upon girl, half demented by her fussy mother. And who was he in this farrago? When he looked at Abigail – even when she was only eleven and sitting just across from him in the classroom – he felt as though he was a projection of his mother, strangely so like a light that might fail at any time.

Trepidation, always that trepidation. But when they were sixteen, at the Oblonsky’s party, and she asked him why he never called to see her anymore: what could he tell her about spent seed? She standing in front of him in that darkened room, her pert breasts silhouetted against light from the veranda, how could the brute reality of sex, of just their bodies alone, cross the divide between them? And he did tell her then, very plainly too – actually helpless to do otherwise – that he loved her. And no doubt the fervour just then in his voice must have revealed just how he did not believe that word, its puerile inadequacy. And she did recoil, hand to her breast – whether to shield herself or prevent something escaping her was not at all clear to either of them. They did try, months of patient dates, evenings with parents, with friends, with everyone else except each other. Yes, they could have conjoined, children, family life, on and on into old age and grandchildren, consoled that their seed would live on. And then dead for ever.

The truth was that their love was already consumed, lasting an instant but so much learned: knowing love like knowing that nothing else really mattered. And yet. And yet the memory of that moment: no going back, only the memory to carry forward, like a light that could illuminate an even greater truth someday. No: he thinking now at the little table, surrounded by the great nothingness outside this thin shell: love is a promise, an insight into a very great event. Now that he is nowhere and with everyone dead a long way behind him, he can see that fact so clearly. Love is real, beyond death.

Well, the other room makes a difference, at least it is long and bare, except for a table and some square device at its centre. And there is also the note he had left himself. He sees his name and date of birth, then realises he wrote this when his parents – and everyone else he knew – were still alive. It’s the tone of the note that works on him: a kind of practical aplomb that is so unlike himself, then or now. Almost breezy: he is surprised that he could be like that at such a moment. Of course, he didn’t know that he wasn’t going to wake up for hundreds of years, but he could still allow that possibility. And they were packing him off for ten years just to fulfil some minor bureaucratic function, though paying him enough to allow him do research for maybe thirty years. No need to suck up for an academic post anywhere. And those alien remains? Did they lead to any advances?

That gives him pause. What kind of universe is it now? For an instant he is intensely interested, then he subsides into what he realises now is a state of dejection, death like a marker leaving a trail of gloom. Yet the truth is that he never did interest himself in scientific advances, simply accepting the conveniences developed as a matter of course. He will do the same likewise now, no matter what magic they have managed to wrought. It is a strange thing how no matter what mankind achieves to ease the burden of living, the same basic questions remain unanswered. It was awareness of this simple fact that brought him to study, first of all, history, then what his teachers called the development of thought: how human thinking grew around one basic