He knew, instantly and without fear, that they were alive, and that they were aware of him.
Renfrew made his way to the suiting room, counted the intact suits that were hanging there and came up with the same number he remembered from before the buggy accident. No sign of any damage to the racked helmets.
He suited up and stepped out into Martian daylight. The forms were still there, surrounding the base like the weathered stones of some grand Neolithic circle. Yet they seemed closer now, and larger, and their transformations had an accelerated, heightened quality. They had detected his emergence; they were glad of it; it was what they had been waiting for.
Still there was no fear.
One of the shapes seemed larger than the others. It beckoned Renfrew nearer, and the ground he walked upon melted and surged under him, encouraging him to close the distance. The transformations became more feverish. His suit monitor informed him that the air outside was as cold and thin as ever, but a sound was reaching him through the helmet that he'd never heard in all his time on Mars. It was a chorus of shrill, quavering notes, like the sound from a glass organ, and it was coming from the aliens. In that chorus was ecstasy and expectation. It should have terrified him, should have sent him scurrying back inside, should have plunged him into gibbering catatonia, but it only made him stronger.
Renfrew dared to look up.
If the aliens gathered around the base were the crew, then the thing suspended over the base - the thing that swallowed three-fifths of the sky, more like a weather system than a machine - had to be their ship. It was a vast, frozen explosion of colours and shapes, and it made him want to shrivel back into his skull. The mere existence of the aliens and their ship told him that all he had learned, all the wisdom he had worked so hard to accrue, was at best a scratch against the rock face of reality.
He still had a long, long way to go.
He looked down, and walked to the base of the largest alien. The keening reached a shrill, exultant climax. Now that he was close, the alien's shape-and-size shifting had subsided. The form looming over him was stable and crystalline, with the landscape behind it faintly visible through the refracted translucence of the alien's body.
The alien's voice, when it came, felt like the universe whispering secrets into his head.
'Are you feeling better now?'
Renfrew almost laughed at the banality of the question. 'I'm feeling . . . better, yes.'
'That's good. We were concerned. Very, very concerned. It pleases us that you have made this recovery.'
The keening quieted. Renfrew sensed that the other aliens were witnesses to a one-on-one conversation between him and this largest entity, and that there was something utterly respectful, even subservient, in their silence.
'When you talk about my recovery . . . are you saying . . .' Renfrew paused, choosing his words with care. 'Did you make me better?'
'We healed you, yes. We healed you and learned your language from the internal wiring of your mind.'
'I should have died out there. When I tipped the buggy . . . I thought I was dead. I knew I was dead.'
'There were enough recoverable patterns. It was our gift to remake you. Only you, however, can say whether we did a good enough job.'
'I feel the same way I always did. Except better, like I've been turned inside out and flushed clean.'
'That is what we hoped.'
'You mind if I ask . . .'
The alien pulsed an inviting shade of pink.
'You may ask anything you like.'
'Who are you? What are you doing here? Why have you come now?'
'We are the Kind. We have arrived to preserve and resurrect what we may. We have arrived now because we could not arrive sooner.'
'But the coincidence . . . to come now, after we've been waiting so long . . . to come now, just after we've wiped ourselves out. Why couldn't you have come sooner, and stopped us fucking things up so badly?'
'We came as fast as we could. As soon as we detected the electromagnetic emanations of your culture . . . we commenced our journey.'
'How far have you come?'
'More than two hundred of your light-years. Our vehicle moves very quickly, but not faster than light. More than four hundred years have passed since the transmission of the radio signals that alerted us.'
'No,' Renfrew said, shaking his head, wondering how the aliens could have made such a basic mistake. 'That isn't possible. Radio hasn't been around that long. We've had television for maybe a hundred years, radio for twenty or thirty years longer . . . but not four hundred years. No way was it our signals you picked up.'
The alien shifted to a soothing turquoise.
'You are mistaken, but understandably so. You were dead longer than you realise.'
'No,' he said flatly.
'That is the way it is. Of course you have no memory of the intervening time.'
'But the base looks exactly the way it did before I left.'
'We repaired your home, as well. If you would like it changed again, that is also possible.'
Renfrew felt the first stirrings of acceptance, the knowledge that what the alien was telling him was true.
'If you've brought me back . . .'
'Yes,' the alien encouraged.
'What about the others? What about all the other people who died here - Solovyova and the ones before her? What about all the people who died on Earth?'
'There were no recoverable forms on the Earth. We can show you if you would like . . . but we think you would find it distressing.'
'Why?'
'We did. A lifecrash is always distressing, even to machine-based entities such as us. Especially after such a long and uninterrupted evolutionary history.'
'A lifecrash?'
'It did not just end with the extinction of humanity. The agent that wiped out your species had the capacity to change. Eventually it assimilated every biological form on the planet, leaving only itself: endlessly cannibalising, endlessly replicating.'
Renfrew dealt with that. He'd already adjusted to the fact that humanity was gone and that he was never going to see Earth again. It did not require a great adjustment to accept that Earth itself had been lost, along with the entire web of life it had once supported.
Not that he was exactly thrilled, either.
'Okay,' he said, falteringly. 'But what about the people I buried here?'
Renfrew sensed the alien's regret. Its facets shone a sombre amber.
'Their patterns were not recoverable. They were buried in caskets, along with moisture and microorganisms. Time did the rest. We did try, yes . . . but there was nothing left to work with.'
'I died out there as well. Why was it any different for me?'
'You were kept cold and dry. That made all the difference, as far as we were concerned.'
So he'd mummified out there, baked dry under that merciless sterilising sky, instead of rotting in the ground like his friends. Out there under that Martian sun, for the better part of three hundred years . . . what must he have looked like when they pulled him out of the remains of his suit? he wondered. Maybe a bleached and twisted thing, corded with the knotted remains of musculature and tissue: something that could easily have been mistaken for driftwood, had there been driftwood on Mars.
The wonder and horror of it all were almost too much. He'd been the last human being alive, and then he had died, and now he was the first human being to be resurrected by aliens.
The first and perhaps the last: he sensed even then that, as godlike as the Kind appeared, they were bound by limits. They were as much prisoners of what the universe chose to allow, and what it chose not to allow, as humanity, or dust, or atoms.
'Why?' he asked.
A pulse of ochre signified the alien's confusion.
'Why what?'
'Why did you bring me back? What possible interest do I hold for you?'
The alien considered his remark, warming through shades of orange to a bright venous red. Like an
echo, the shade spread to the other members of the gathering.
'We help,' the leader told Renfrew. 'That is what we do. That is what we have always done. We are the Kind.'
He returned to the base and tried to continue his affairs, just as if the Kind had never arrived. Yet they were always out there whenever he passed a window: brighter and closer now as evening stole in, as if they had gathered the day's light and were now reradiating it in subtly altered shades. He closed the storm shutters but that didn't help much. He did not doubt that the ship was still poised above, suspended over the base as if guarding the infinitely precious thing that he had become.
Renfrew's old routines had little meaning now. The aliens hadn't just brought the base back to the way it had been before he crashed the buggy. They had repaired all the damage that had accrued since the collapse of Earthside society, and the base systems now functioned better than at any point since the base's construction. As mindless as his maintenance tours had been, they had imposed structure on his life that was now absent. Renfrew felt like a rat that'd had his exercise wheel taken away.
He went to the recreation room and brought the system back online. Everything functioned as the designers had intended. The aliens must have repaired, or at least not removed, his implant. But when he cycled through the myriad options, he found that something had happened to Piano Man.
The figure was still there - Renfrew even knew his name now - but the companion he remembered was gone. Now Piano Man behaved just like all the other generated personalities. Renfrew could still talk to him, and Piano Man could still answer him back, but nothing like their old conversations was now possible. Piano Man would take requests, and banter, but that was the limit of his abilities. If Renfrew tried to steer the conversation away from the strictly musical, if he tried to engage Piano Man in a discussion about cosmology or quantum mechanics, all he got back was a polite but puzzled stare. And the more Renfrew persisted, the less it seemed to him that there was any consciousness behind that implant-generated face. All he was dealing with was a paper-thin figment of the entertainment system.
Renfrew knew that the Kind hadn't 'fixed' Piano Man in the sense that they had fixed the rest of the base. But - deliberately or otherwise - their arrival had destroyed the illusion of companionship. Perhaps they had straightened some neurological kink in Renfrew's brain when they put him back together. Or perhaps the mere fact of their arrival had caused his subconscious to discard that earlier mental crutch.
He knew it shouldn't have meant anything. Piano Man hadn't existed in any real sense. Feeling sorrow for his absence was as ridiculous as mourning the death of a character in a dream. He'd made Piano Man up; his companion had never had any objective existence.
But he still felt that he had lost a friend.
'I'm sorry,' he said to that polite but puzzled face. 'You were right, and I was wrong. I was doing fine just the way things were. I should have listened to you.'
There was an uncomfortable pause, before Piano Man smiled and spread his fingers above the keyboard.
'Would you like me to play something?'
'Yes,' Renfrew said. 'Play "Rocket Man". For old times' sake.'
He allowed the Kind into Tharsis Base. Their crystalline forms were soon everywhere, spreading and multiplying in a mad orgy of prismatic colour, transforming the drab architecture into a magical lantern-lit grotto. The beauty of it was so startling, so intoxicating, that it moved Renfrew to tears with the knowledge that no one else would ever see it.
'But it could be different,' the leader told him. 'We did not broach this earlier, but there are possibilities you may wish to consider.'
'Such as?'
'We have repaired you, and made you somewhat younger than you were before your accident. In doing so we have learned a great deal about your biology. We cannot resurrect the dead of Earth, or your companions here on Mars, but we can give you other people.'
'I don't follow.'
'It would cost us nothing to weave new companions. They could be grown to adulthood at accelerated speed, or your own ageing could be arrested while you give the children time to grow.'
'And then what?'
'You could breed with them, if you chose. We'd intervene to correct any genetic anomalies.'
Renfrew smiled. '"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids." At least, that's what a friend of mine told me once.'
'Now there is nowhere but Mars. Doesn't that make a difference? Or would you rather we established a habitable zone on Earth and transplanted you there?'
They made him feel like a plant, like some incredibly rare and delicate orchid.
'Would I notice the difference?'
'We could adjust your faculties so that Earth appeared the way you remembered. Or we could edit your memories to match the present conditions.'
'Why can't you just put things back the way they were? Surely one runaway virus isn't going to defeat you.'
The alien turned a shade of chrome blue that Renfrew had learned to recognise as indicative of gentle chiding. 'That's not our way. The runaway agent now constitutes its own form of life, brimming with future potential. To wipe it out now would be akin to sterilising your planet just as your own single-celled ancestors were gaining a foothold.'
'You care about life that much?'
'Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that.' The chrome blue faded, replaced by a placatory olive green. 'Given that Earth cannot be made the way it was, will you reconsider our offer to give you companionship?'
'Not now,' he said.
'But later, perhaps?'
'I don't know. I've been on my own a long time. I'm not sure it isn't better this way.'
'You've craved companionship for years. Why reject it now?'
'Because . . .' And here Renfrew faltered, conscious of his own inarticulacy before the alien. 'When I was alone, I spent a lot of time thinking things through. I got set on that course, and I'm not sure I'm done yet. There's still some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Maybe when I'm finished--'
'Perhaps we can help you with that.'
'Help me understand the universe? Help me understand what it means to be the last living man? Maybe even the last intelligent organism in the universe?'
'It wouldn't be the first time. We are a very old culture. In our travels we have encountered myriad other species. Some of them are extinct by now, or changed beyond recognition. But many of them were engaged on quests similar to your own. We have watched, and occasionally interceded to better aid that comprehension. Nothing would please us more than to offer you similar assistance. If we cannot give you companionship, at least let us give you wisdom.'
'I want to understand space and time, and my own place in it.'
'The path to deep comprehension is risky.'
'I'm ready for it. I've already come a long way.'
'Then we shall help. But the road is long, Renfrew. The road is long and you have barely started your journey.'
'I'm willing to go all the way.'
'You will be long past human before you near the end of it. That is the cost of understanding space and time.'
Renfrew felt a chill on the back of his neck, a premonitory shiver. The alien was not warning him for nothing. In its travels it must have witnessed things that caused it distress.
Still, he said: 'Whatever it takes. Bring it on. I'm ready.'
'Now?'
'Now. But before we begin . . . don't call me Renfrew any more.'
'You wish a new name, to signify this new stage in your quest?'
'From now on, I'm John. That's what I want you to call me.'
'Just John?'
He nodded solemnly. 'Just John.'
PART FOUR
The Kind did things to John.
While he slept, they altered his mind: infiltrating it with tiny crystal avatars of themselves, performing prestigious feats of neural rewiring. When he woke he still felt like himself, still
carried the same freight of memories and emotions that he'd taken with him to sleep. But suddenly he had the ability to grasp things that had been impenetrably difficult only hours earlier. Before the accident, he had probed the inlets of superstring theory, like an explorer searching for a navigable route through a treacherous mountain range. He had never found that easy path, never dreamed of conquering the dizzying summits before him, but now, miraculously, he was on the other side, and the route through the obstacle looked insultingly easy. Beyond superstring theory lay the unified territory of M-theory, but that too was soon his. John revelled in his new understanding.