Only the last man or woman on or off Earth will have the last word on anything but we can each have our own last word. Moments before his death, Ramacan thinks:
"As for him, he had had many centuries of life, and he realized now what a deep inward weariness there had been in him. Death, he thought, death is the longest voyage of all. Without death there is no evolution, no real meaning to life, the ultimate adventure has been snatched away." (pp. 98-99)
Without death, we would eventually forget our earlier lives and effectively become different people in any case. This is the unique and unexamined predicament of Edgar Rice Burroughs' character, John Carter.
Meanwhile, Avi, whom we quoted before, remains in denial:
"...was this a dream, a sudden madness of horror and death?
"Death - no, no, no, she couldn't die, she was one of the immortals, she mustn't die!" (p. 99)
And what occurs in the very next sentence after Avi has thought this? Poul Anderson readers should be able to anticipate it:
"The wind blew and blew." (ibid.)
By blowing while she thinks and then continuing to blow, this wind expresses the indifference of nature to any organism that thinks that it should live forever. Death waits faithfully whether we are Ramacan or Avi which is why I disagree with Dylan Thomas who wrote:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-copied from here.
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