Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“He does,” Ziru Majumdar assured me. “We’re neighbors out on Hallett. Ours is quite a progressive community, you know—except that you don’t know, being such a hermit. But you are writing a History of Death, aren’t you, Mortimer? We rather hoped that you might prove to be a kindred spirit. Perhaps you will, once we’ve had the chance to get to know one another a little better.”

“Perhaps I will,” I said, in a voice steeped in deep archaic ice. Somehow, the fact that he had heard of me even though we’d never met didn’t please me at all.

THIRTY-TWO

Ziru Majumdar was right about the side effects of semi-anesthetization, if nothing else. During the four days that I was immobilized I continually drifted in and out of sleep and was never quite sure when my most vivid dreams thrust themselves into consciousness whether I was passively living the experiences in VE or actively conjuring them up from the depths of my unconscious.

Members of the New Human Race are generally thought to dream far less frequently and far less vividly than their forebears, but the average diminution in REM sleep time is only 30 percent. The fact that we rarely become conscious that we are dreaming, and always forget our dreams even if we wake into them, has more to do with the efficiency of our IT than the actual loss of dream sleep. It’s widely believed that the actual diminution in REM sleep is due to the fact that our adventures in VE have taken over some of the psychological functions of dreaming, but that’s mere conjecture. The experiments that were supposed to prove the case had to be called off because too many of the subjects refused to continue when they began to suffer various kinds of psychosomatic distress. Had I been one of them, I expect that I’d have been one of the first to cry off.

I had attempted IT-controlled lucid dreaming on several occasions during my first marriage. Jodocus and Eve had been enthusiasts, and Jodocus had even gone so far as to obtain a bootleg suite that allowed him to sample the notorious nanotech-VE experience, some of whose twenty-third– and twenty-fourth-century users were rumored to have died of shock when launched into illusions that were far too convincing. I had not liked the gentler varieties much and had refused to have anything to do with the bootleg. I politely set aside the assurances Jodocus gave me that if I only took time out to practice I would eventually develop the skill necessary to get the most out of my dreaming.

While I lay in that bed in Amundsen City I began to regret that I had not persisted. Had I learned to get along with lucid dreams in Lamu, I might not have been so meekly at their mercy in Amundsen. Even if I had been able to exercise a degree of control over the contents of my deliria—as Jodocus or Eve would surely have been able to do—I would not have been able to escape them, but they could not have made my imprisonment wretched. As things were, I woke up with a start on several occasions, sometimes crying out as I did so.

Mercifully, I can no longer remember what it was that terrified me so. Dreams leave no objective record even when one’s flesh is stuffed full of monitors and helplessly spread-eagled in a room whose walls have more than the usual ration of eyes and ears. I presume that I relived the Coral Sea Disaster more than once and dived into the waters of the Kwarra a hundred times and more, always hopelessly. I probably met snakes and crocodiles, and leopard-seals. I must have fallen into deep ice-caves, where I writhed in fear of being crushed and watched my fingers and toes swell with frostbite. I may well have taken the plunge into the realultimate wilderness of outer space, where I was doubtless seized by a motion sickness so profound as to make my sufferings aboard Genesisseem tame.

At any rate, I had nightmares, and they were bad.

Mister Majumdar was not in the least sympathetic. To him, fear—like pain and misery—were merely parts of life’s rich tapestry, to be welcomed with fascination and savored to the full.

“I like nightmares,” he told me. “They’re so wonderfully piquant. I wish I had more of them, but it’s not the same if they’re deliberately induced. Synthetic fear is as unsatisfactory as synthetic pain and synthetic pleasure. That’s why no VE sex is ever quite as good as the best fleshsex, no matter how cleverly it’s programmed. It’s undeserved”

Personally, I had always felt that no fleshsex was ever quite as good as any half-way competent VE sex, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell Ziru Majumdar that. I wasn’t even going to take issue with the curious notion that virtual experience was somehow “undeserved,” although it seemed to me that even amateurs worked hard enough on the personalizations of their sex programs to take much fuller credit for the quality of the experience than they ever could in haphazard coition with an actual partner.

“How’s your frostbite?” I asked, thinking that it would redirect his obsession to safer ground.

“I’ve blanked it,” he confessed, with a small embarrassed laugh. “It’s a rather crude and unfurnished sensation—a mere ache, with no real personality.”

He sounded like a wine snob criticizing a poor vintage.

“It’s good to know that I haven’t missed much,” I said, drily.

“According to the newstapes,” he said, presumably because it was he who now felt a need to shift the conversational ground, “it’s only a matter of time before the whole biosphere gets frostbite. Unless we can somehow see to it that the sun gets stirred up again.”

He was referring to recent press releases by scrupulous students of the sunspot cycle, who had proposed that the virtual disappearance of Sol’s blemishes signaled the advent of a new Ice Age. As a historian, I was unimpressed by the quality of the evidence that purported to show that past “little Ice Ages” had been correlated with periods of unusual solar inactivity, but the world at large seemed to be unimpressed for quite different reasons. Given that Antarctica was becoming such a fashionable place to live, few people saw any cause for anxiety in the prospect of glaciers slowly extending across the Northern Hemisphere. It was more likely to raise real estate prices on the steppes than lower them.

“We can take it,” I said, cheerfully. “Anyhow, it’s better to accept it than start messing about with the sun. Continental engineering is one thing, but I don’t think our fusion techs are quite ready to move up to the big one—not until they’ve practiced a bit with Próxima Centauri and Barnard, at least. You and I have nothing to worry about. We like ice—why else would we live on the shore of the Ross Sea?”

“Right,” he said. He seemed glad to find something on which we could agree, but he was the kind of man who couldn’t resist tempting fate. “Not that I have any sympathy for Gaean Liberationists and Mystics, of course,” he added, with a blithe disregard for the possibility that I might.

Gaean extremism was discovering new extremes with every decade that passed, buoyed by the idea that the human race was now so securely established throughout the solar system that we ought to return the entire Earth to “fallow ground” by refusing to issue any further child licenses. According to the latest Gaean Lib avant garde, the recent interglacial periods were simply Gaea’s fevers, the birth of civilization had been a morbid symptom of the planet’s sickness and human culture was a mere delirium that could and should be replaced by a much healthier noosphere based in the elusive protosentience of dolphins, cephalopods, and mysterious species yet to come.

“Oh, the Libs and the Mystics aren’t so far wrong,” I said, mischievously. “Agriculture was, at best, an imperfect answer to the predicament of expanding population. What might human beings have become by now, I wonder, if we’d devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to spiritual evolution instead of embracing the crude violence of the plough and the milking machine?”

The most frightening thing of all was that it didn’t seem to cross his mind that I might be joking. He obviously paid more attention to the lunatic fringe TV channels than I did—he heard that kind of stuff all the time, argued with leaden seriousness.

“Well, yes,” he said. “That’s a fair point.”

“It’s just colorful rhetoric,” I told him, with a sigh. “Even the people who indulge in it all the time don’t mean it literally. It’s just a form of play.”

“Think so?” Ziru Majumdar seemed to find this proposition just as novel and just as appealing as the one it was attempting to explain. “Well, perhaps. Having been delirious myself for a while when I was down that hole I’m tempted to take the notion of culture-as-delirium a little more seriously. I can’t be sure whether I was asleep or awake, but I was certainly lost.I don’t know about you, but I always find even the very best VEs a bit flat.I sometimes use illicit psychotropics to give delusion a helping hand, but they don’t really help—they just make me confused and a trifle nauseous.”

Now that he was sounding like Jodocus I felt that I was on safer ground.

“That’s a natural side-effect of the protective efforts of our internal technology,” I told him.

“I know,” he replied. “Nanomachines always do their job a little toowell because of the built-in safety margins. It’s a real problem, existentially speaking. It’s only when our IT reaches the limits of its capacity that it lets really interesting things begin to happen. We need to think again about the standard programs so that we can give ourselves and our children a little more rope. We first-generation New Humans have grown up in cotton wool, thanks to the anxieties of a dying breed. We shouldn’t carry forward their mistakes.”

The tone of the conversation had been light until then, but that disturbed me. “Are you a parent, Ziru?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level—and succeeding quite well, thanks to the anesthetics.

“Not yet,” he said. “Soon, I hope. Cape Hallett’s a good place to rear a child. Challenging environment, progressive community.”

“Yes,” I said, weakly. “I suppose it might be.”

I couldn’t help but wonder how many of my own parents would have agreed with him—and how far they might have been persuaded to go along with his weirder arguments.

THIRTY-THREE

The room in which Ziru Majumdar and I were confined was by no means short of facilities. Three of its walls were equipped with window screens, so that if we cared to turn our heads away from one another we could select entirely different vistas on which to look out. If, on the other hand, we were feeling in a collaborative mood, we could both look straight ahead at some mutually agreed spectacle. The VE hoods with which our bedheads were equipped were basic models, but they were not at all uncomfortable. The only thing that was difficult to understand, in view of all this generous provision, was why Doctor Sung had seen fit to put the two of us together rather than giving us private rooms.

“It was a purely clinical judgment,” she told me, when I eventually asked. “Actual human contact aids recovery from injury. It’s a psychosomatic effect, but it’s quite real. If it turns out that patients can’t stand the company we select for them we shuffle them around—and if, after three tries, it turns out that we’ve stumbled on one of those rare curmudgeons for whom hell really is other people, we isolate the poor misfortunate. It’s nice and normal people like you and Mister Majumdar who maintain my confidence in human nature and the published literature. You’re both doing very well.”

I honestly couldn’t tell if she was telling me a pack of lies, perhaps to cover up the fact that the hospital was so overcrowded with accident victims that they were forced to put two patients in rooms intended for one until their busy shamirs could add an extra story or hollow out an extra set of basements. I was very careful to keep my skepticism to myself. I didn’t dare use the bedhead VE apparatus to check up on the alleged literature, just in case my usage was being monitored—for purely clinical reasons, of course.

“I think she’s right,” Ziru Majumdar said, when Doctor Sung had left the room in the wake of this conversation. “We are doing well, and I think the fact that we’ve been forced to get to know one another has helped. You live alone, and I live in a little enclave of like-minded souls. I presume that we both select our virtual acquaintances on the grounds of congeniality. We live in a world in which it’s very easy to cultivate pleasant acquaintance, and the only occasions when we risk the effects of differencefor long periods of time are during marriages, especially marriages contracted for parenthood, when we actively seek diversity for the child’s sake. It’s good for us, once now and again, to be forced into the company of others at random. You and I are not alike, Mortimer, but I have enjoyed our conversations and I think I have obtained some profit from our time together. I hope that you feel the same.”

Did I?

I wasn’t at all sure, although I suspected that my skeptical attitude to the doctor’s story might be symptomatic of the fact that I didn’t really want to believe that my confinement with Mister Majumdar had any clinical benefits. I couldn’t say that out loud, of course, so I assured him that he was a very interesting person and that I felt myself to be richer for having had the benefit of his points of view.

Not unnaturally, he took that as permission to prattle on at even greater length, expanding on his personal philosophy.

“I think we might have to go to the very brink of extinction to reach the cutting edge of experience,” he told me, presenting the notion as if it were a wonderful and hard-won discovery, made while he was trapped in the crevasse, not knowing whether the rescuers would get to him in time. “You can learn a lot about life, and about yourself, in extreme situations. They’re the really vividmoments, the moments of real life.We’re so safe nowadays that most of what we do hardly counts as living at all.”

I tried to object to that, but he overrode my objection, pressing on relentlessly.

“We exist,” he said, indisputably, before going on to less obvious assertions “we work, we play, but we don’t really testourselves to see what we’re really made of. If we don’t try ourselves out, how will we know what we’re really capable of and what kinds of experiences we need to maximize our enjoyment of life? I’m from the Reunited States, where we have a strong sense of history and a strong sense of purpose; we learn in the cradle that we have a rightto life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—but we grow up with protective IT so powerful that it circumscribes our liberty, operating on the assumption that the pursuit of happiness has to be conducted in comfort.You’re a historian, I know, and a historian of death to boot, but even you can have no idea of the zestthere must have been in living in the bad old days. Not that I’m about to take up serious injury as a hobby, you understand. Once in a while is plenty.”

“Yes it is,” I agreed, shifting my now-mobile but furiously itching leg and wishing that nanomachines weren’t so slow to compensate for trifling but annoying sensations. “Once in a while is certainly enough for me. In fact, I for one will be quite content if it never happens again. I don’t think I need any more of the kind of enlightenment which comes from experiences like that. I was at ground zero in the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, you know—my ship was flipped over by the uprush of hot water when the mantle broke through the crust below us.”

“Were you?” he said, in rapt fascination. “What was it like?” He was eleven years younger than I; he had been much the same age as Emily Marchant when the Decimation was unleashed and had been living deep in the American Midwest, beyond the reach of the tidal waves.

I felt an obscure sense of duty urging me to bring him back down to Earth, to insist that tragedy is tragedy and that there is no nobility in the imminent threat of destruction—but I knew that there was nothing I could say that would have any such effect.

“It was like being shipwrecked, scalded and adrift at sea for days on end, in company with a little girl who’d just lost all twelve of her parents,” I said—remembering as I formed the words that the random pairing of Emily Marchant and myself had been so enormously beneficial to both of us as to reduce any clinical benefit of my acquaintance with Ziru Majumdar to utter triviality.

“It must have been terrible,” he admitted—but I could tell that his was a definition of the word “terrible” that carried subtle nuances I hadn’t encountered before. I could tell too that they weren’t the produce of a purely idiosyncratic eccentricity. I was uncomfortably aware, even then, that Ziru Majumdar’s was the voice of a new ideology: a new rival for the neo-Epicurean synthesis that had resolved the conflicts embodied in my marriage to Sharane.

I missed not being able to slip on the bed’s VE hood and telephone one of my parents. There were plenty of other people I could have called, including my erstwhile companion-in-misfortune Emily, but every single one of them was a true emortal and I wanted to consult the opinions of someone who wasn’t, someone who knew what the threat of death was really like and how valuable life was.

For the first time, while I lay in that hospital bed, I began to miss my dead parents not merely as individuals and intimates but as representatives of a vanishing people. For the first time, I began to wonder whether true emortals had been as well prepared for Utopia as I had previously assumed.

“It wasterrible,” I told him, using the word to mean exactly what I intended it to mean, and nothing more—but language is a collaborative business, as fantastic in its fashion as history.

THIRTY-FOUR

I lived on Cape Adare for a further fifteen years after my brief incarceration with Ziru Majumdar. The experience did not serve to make me any more sociable, and my acquaintance with Majumdar did not ripen into friendship. I had nothing further to do with the steadily expanding Cape Hallett community.

When other dwellings began to be raised on Adare itself I fully intended to keep myself to myself, offering no welcome of any kind to my neighbors, but they had other ideas. They issued invitations, which I found hard to refuse, and I got to know a dozen of them in spite of my own lack of effort. I had not yet got out of the habit of thinking of myself as a member of the “young generation” of the New Human Race and was surprised to find that the newcomers were all younger than I, almost all of them being products of the baby boom facilitated by the Decimation.

My new neighbors were not insulted by my reluctance to involve myself in what they clearly saw as a collaborative adventure. They understood that I must have come to the cape in search of solitude and when I told them that I was finalizing the third part of my History—which I still envisaged as a seven-part work—they were happy to maintain a polite distance in order to spare me unnecessary distractions.

What little I saw of the social life of the self-styled “Cape Adare exiles” was not unappealing. Their fondness for real-space interaction presumably followed on from the fact that they had had more than the usual number of contemporaries in childhood, with a consequential abundance of flesh-to-flesh interaction. Their tiny society was, however, hemmed in by numerous barriers of formality and etiquette, which I found aesthetically appealing. In different circumstances I might have entered into the game, but the moment was not right.

Although the invitations I received to visit my new neighbors in their homes did represent a honest attempt to include me in their company, their primary motive was to show off the bizarre architecture of their dwellings. The rapid development of the Antarctic continent had encouraged the development of a new suite of specialized shamirs designed to work with ice.

In the earliest days of gantzing technology the most extravagantly exploited raw materials had been the most humble available—mud, sand, even sea salt—and Leon Gantz had seen his inventions as a means of providing cheap shelter for the poorest people in the world. After the Crash, however, the world’s social and economic priorities had changed dramatically, and the relevant biotechnologies had undergone a spectacular adaptive radiation even before PicoCon had married them to their own fast-evolving inorganic nanotech. From then on, the idea of working exclusively in a single superabundant substance had been more or less set aside by Earthbound gantzers.

In space, of course, things were different—but in space, everything was different.

The shamirs entrusted with the rebuilding of the world’s great cities in ostensible response to the Decivilization Movement had been extraordinarily versatile and clever, combining all manner of materials into the prototypes of modern hometrees. While I was a child, brought up by parents who had all been touched, albeit lightly, by the Decivilization credo, no one had imagined that Earthbound homemakers would ever return to the use of single-substance shamirs—but no one had anticipated the Great Coral Sea Disaster, and no one had properly thought through the consequences of moving UN headquarters to Amundsen City.

Interim measures to provide shelter for the people dispossessed by the tidal waves had renewed interest in working with sand and sea salt, and the development of Amundsen’s satellite towns had produced a new challenge to which the latest generation of gantzers had risen with alacrity.

The homes of the Cape Adare exiles were not simple ice sculptures. They did not have the full range of pseudobiological features that one would expect to find in hometrees designed for warmer regions because there was little point in fixing and redeploying solar energy and no problem at all in obtaining and circulating fresh water, but in every other respect they were hi-tech modern homes. Their walls and conduits required living skins at least as complex as a human suitskin—but these and all their other biotech systems were transparent. They were not optically perfect, but that was no disadvantage. Quite the reverse, in fact; the main reason for the new fashionability of ice castles was the tricks they played with light. Snowfields and glaciers are white and opaque, as were the igloos that legend hailed as humankind’s last experiment in ice dwelling, but the ice castles of Cape Adare were marvellously translucent.

From the outside the ice castles looked like piles of kaleidoscopically jeweled prisms; from the inside they were incredibly complex light-shows that changed with every subtle shift of exterior illumination.

Even in winter, when the sky seemed utterly uniform in its leaden grayness, the light within an ice castle was blithely mercurial. In midsummer, when the sun rolled around the horizon without ever quite setting, it was madly and brilliantly restless: the distilled essence of summer rhapsody. To visit one was exhilarating, but no one with my capacity for psychosomatic disorder could ever have lived in one. I was astonished that anyone could, but the young exiles had adapted to their surroundings with casual ease and had become connoisseurs of perpetually flickering light.

“I suppose it’s an acquired taste,” I said to Mia Czielinski, the proud owner of the most spectacular of the Cape Adare ice palaces. “I’m just not sure that I’ve got enough time and enough mental fortitude to acquire it.”

“We all have the time,” she replied, censoriously. “As for mental fortitude—how can you possibly consent to miss out on anyvaluable experience? If we have eternity to play with, do we not have a duty to explore its possibilities?”

I could see that she had a point. She was not merely an emortal but an emortal raised by emortal parents, who had done their work under the influence of theories very different from those to which my own parents had paid heed.

“I’m only one man,” I said to Mia Czielinski. “We’re all individuals, and it’s the differences in our experience that shape and make us.”

“Not any more,” she said. “This is the Age of Everyman, when every single one of us may entertain the ambition to experience all human possibilities.”

I remember thinking, although I was too polite and too cautious to say it aloud, that one of us had a very poor understanding of transfinite mathematics.