(Why he considered her a 'she' could not be explained. She began to appear slowly, a flicker at the limits of his nonperception. All that's left is the search the want the desire the love. The words have been corroded by the gentle acid of time. He desires some He loves to No objects remain within his mental grasp. He hears without ears He thinks thoughtless thoughts that revolve in circles and make little eddies of emptiness in the not-quite-nothing of his mind.

He drifts through this lack of anything at infinitely greater than no speed at all. Eternity lies as far behind him as it does ahead. He exists (if that's the word) in an everlasting now, as a state of nothingness less substantial than a vacuum, smaller than infinity, larger than thought. The will-be is far beyond his powers of contemplation. He tries to think about things as they are, and finds he can't quite manage that, either. He tries to think about things as he had known them, and finds he can't. All things are eventually the same-and in eternity, eventually equals always.) He must once have had a name, a handle to his soul, but that was back before the eternity/instant when he had existed in corporeal form. He is the last of his kind, if he is a 'he. Eternity is a terrible place to endure alone. It is a reminder that the ultimate loneliness is not the experience of the last man alive, but the last man dead. 'The Last Ghost' was a finalist in the balloting for the 1971 Nebula Awards. His short story 'Sweet Dreams, Melissa,' concerning a new-generation computer brought up to think it's a little girl, was anthologized in Best SF: 7966, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, and also in The Eleventh Galaxy Reader, edited by Frederik Pohl. Goldin edited the forthcoming collection The Alien Condition, and he assisted editor David Gerrold with the collections Protostars and Generation. His hobby is zookeeping, and !he current inventory of his menage lists cats, mice, chipmunks, fish, snakes, a rat, an iguana, a chameleon, a land crab, a hamster, a parrot and an alligator. He left the Navy's employment to become, in his words, 'a fulltime, starving writer.' He is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America, World Future Society, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and the SFWA Speakers' Bureau. He received his bachelor's degree in astronomy from UCLA in 1968 and then was employed for almost three years as a physicist/space scientist for Navy Space Systems. He began writing at the age of thirteen and first sold a story when he was eighteen.

STEPHEN GOLDIN The Last Ghost STEPHEN GOLDIN was born February 28, 1947, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Alien Condition by Stephen Goldin