Saltus: /’saltəs/ •n poetic/literary a sudden transition; a breach of continuity. ORIGIN C17: from L., lit. ‘leap’.
For the days that stretch out ahead hold more sorrow than joy, and the body whose limbs once gave you pleasure will soon give you none, when you’ve lived past your prime. And when the Caregiver comes, he ends all lives the same way. Hades is suddenly real—no lyre, no dancing, no marriage-song. There is nothing but Death. By any measure, it is best never to have been born. But once a man is born, the next best thing, by far, is for him to return, as soon as he can, to the place he came from. For once youth—with its mindless indulgence—goes by, is there a single punishing blow that won’t find him? Any misfortune that doesn’t attack his life? Envy, feuding, revolt, battle, and murder! And finally, old age: despised, decrepit, lonely, friendless old age takes him in — there he keeps house with the worst of all evils.
Sophocles: Oedipus at Kolonos; Trans. Robert Bagg
Repository of Human Experience
Statement of Intent
The United Nations established the Repository of Human Experience (R.H.E.) in the year 2053. Housed in ground-stations around the globe, the R.H.E. will provide a deep-time post-extinction record of human accomplishment and knowledge for the benefit of the next intelligent species to evolve on or visit the earth. It is a vast undertaking, and the work is ongoing.
The R.H.E. recognises and records the lives of many individuals. Its principal criteria for selection are achievement in a recognised field and uniqueness of experience. Millions more whose lives might otherwise pass unrecorded are selected by annual lottery.
Deposition 91GK637
I, Khristos (Kit) Zachariades, meet the second of these criteria.
01:17:43 European Standard Time
09-22-2091
This text is automatically converted from audio recordings. Ellipses indicate the removal of untranscribable content. Intentional breaks in the recording are indicated by Ω.
This process may be subject to minor errors.
Transcript 001
Unidentified human male: It is a strange business, this talking to myself. I do, of course, if only to break the silence, but I doubt it makes sense, what I say.
Acquiring voice profile.
My helpmate, Wendy, is so used to our routine I rarely need to instruct him, and even then, I’m not sure he’s listening.
As for you, I’m speaking but you’re not listening either.
Not yet anyway.
But introductions: I am Khristos Zachariades. Everyone calls me Kit.
Voice profile acquired. Khristos Zachariades, designated witness. Tagged as Kit.
Kit: An Englishman by birth and by father, I survive alone on an island in the Aegean. Greece was my mother’s country. The summers are hot and the winters cold. My age, thank you for asking, is sixty-four years eight months and fourteen days. No doubt you are aware of the significance.
You are hearing me through a Com-Tech audio recorder and transmitter hanging round my neck. Never worn it before and it’s lighter than I thought. Powered by my movement and uploads data to a passing satellite. Assuming there’s any left. It also monitors my heartbeat. When that ceases it transmits the final recording and my name and location are entered in a virtual book of the dead.
Where was I? I’m talking to myself. Old men generally do. Certainly, I recall old men doing it and dare say Papa would have done so, if Mama would have let him. Unluckily, he never got the chance to try her patience, so how she might have reacted to his chattering is mere guesswork; informed guesswork, but nonetheless not what happened. But as I’m not, in fact, talking to myself but to you, my friend, I’ll try to make sense, for both our sakes.
Maria Zachariades was not among the favourites for the honour of giving birth to the last child. No television cameras or press reporters sought her out. Before the Barren, some four hundred thousand children were born every day and though the tide of new souls was ebbing, hour by hour, ten thousand were due after me. I was only predicted to be among the last-born. Not the last.
No woman had conceived for nine months. American evangelists called it divine retribution and waited to be saved. In the east, the mullahs blamed the great Shaitan of the West. India and Pakistan blamed each other. Moscow blamed everyone. China, which had long fought its citizens’ natural fecundity, blamed no one and stayed silent. Science was baffled. Humans were the only species affected; and now the last of the last generation were arriving and our birth was a global event.
Buddhist monks scoured Tibet and Northern China for the last Dalai Lama, priests sought a saviour in Israel and Palestine. In the Amazon, the media and the authorities battled, desperate to discover an isolated tribe where the cycle of birth continued and equally desperate to ensure any such tribe remained uncontaminated. In Kashmir, a child was torn from her mother’s breast and slaughtered by a mob: She was a witch, they said. She blocked our women’s bellies with clay.
That was the world awaiting me.
But to continue with introductions. How am I? Thank you for asking. I’m well as can be expected: white-haired and stiff in the joints, but physically and mentally intact. I hope you are well, but fear I can’t comment on your situation, or perhaps do justice to my own. How am I? is a question that can be taken several ways, but I’ll begin in the here and now, flat on my back and rubbing a bruised shoulder while gazing into the slow, dark immensity of space.
Wendy, what are those?
My helpmate has followed me up the ladder and is staring at me from the entry to the roof space. He’s more agile than his bulk suggests.
Unidentified: What do you see, Kit?
Acquiring voice profile.
Kit: Come here and I’ll show you.
Wendy’s voice comes from a speaker in his torso. His face is a hemisphere of black acrylic. It’s reflecting the light of my torch. That noise is Wendy clambering over the wooden floor to join me. This recorder doesn’t have video, so I’ll try and be descriptive for your benefit. I’m pointing at the crack of night sky. Wendy’s looking.
Unidentified: Stars. It is night.
Kit: I mean those stars, those particular stars.
I’ve moved to let Wendy see. The robot is staring at the sky. An image of the sky has appeared on the acrylic hemisphere.
Voice profile acquired. Identification: Wen-Di Helpmate series four. Tagged as Wendy.
Wendy: Please indicate.
Kit: I’m tapping the cluster of stars on the screen. It’s far brighter than my naked eyes can see.
Wendy: They are the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters.
Kit: I’ve never noticed before, but Wendy’s quiet, unhurried voice reminds me of Papa.
Wendy: A star cluster within the constellation of Taurus. Seven stars are visible to the human eye but many more by aid of telescope. They are four hundred light years from Earth. In Greek myth they are the daughters of Atlas and Pleione.
Kit: Wendy does not see knowledge as an ever-expanding cloud but as discrete chunks to be mined a piece at a time. He has told me nothing I didn’t know but I wanted to hear his voice, and for you to hear his voice. As for the Pleiades, I would add that the name comes from the Greek word plein, which means to sail. The Ancient Greeks used the Pleiades’ reappearance to herald the season of fair weather when it was safe to put to sea. Likewise, their departure marks the beginning of the storm-ridden months when a safe passage was far less certain.
That is my here and now: gazing at starlight. But I should begin at my beginning.
So my mother told it, I had stuck fast in her womb. The doctors waited for me to release my hold; not understanding that it was my mother who held me. My stirring in her womb was the protest of a prisoner.
My mother knew I would be her only child and was determined I should have the best start in life. Prize money of thirty million dollars was at stake. Women across the globe gave birth in tears as their dream of riches vanished and there were hasty disagreements across the time zones as the world asked how the moment of the last birth would be decided.
My rivals preceded me, emerging into the world bewildered and unaware of the hope and sadness resting upon them. Each was the last born of a family, a community, a nation. To Angola, a girl; to Russia, a son; to… In London, Maria Zachariades held fast and the cameras of Sky3D and OK Channel appeared at her bedside to record the exclusive moment.
I know all this almost by rote. Thanks to my mother’s iron will, I would have the greatest reception ever given a human being, but, as she never failed to remind me, the effort nearly killed her. To India a son, to China a son… her body exhausted, my mother lay down. She had done her best for me but now nature held sway and I blindly kicked and fought to escape her, as if rehearsing for the next thirty years. In Hawaii, a Vietnamese maid was receiving an emergency Caesarean. She had been playing the same game as my mother, delaying for wealth and fame, but her physician lifted out a silent girl, noosed by her umbilical. One minute and twenty-five seconds later, screaming and red-faced, I took my first breath.
Two billion people witnessed my birth and within an hour the entire world knew my name. In laboratories across the world biologists and geneticists glanced up at TV screens, looked one to another, and then turned back to the glass phials of reluctant ova and uncomprehending sperm.
The maternity theatres darkened. Midwives washed their hands and drove home. Books of children’s names became curios overnight and Nestlé withdrew its baby milk formula to ironic applause.
At my mother’s breast, I gained weight; ignorant for the moment of the fuss I caused. In time, the Chinese revealed the details of the Shenyang Incident, and the world learned the terrible truth. The global collapse in human fertility was not an accident of nature or the anger of a god but caused by man and man alone.
Ω
The pain in my shoulder has eased and I’ll go down soon. That I see the faint stars of the Pleiades tells me my eyes are still good but seeing them while lying in the roof space of my home means I am experiencing a problem that has beset humanity ever since we crawled for shelter within a cave or hollow tree.
My roof leaks.