Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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FORTY-THREE

The most familiar public face of the Thanaticist cult, in 2732, was a woman named Emmanuelle Standress. She often insisted that she was merely a representative of the reclusive Hellward Lucifer Nyxson, but it was widely believed that there was no such person and that the Thanaticist Manifesto had been cooked up by a committee. She readily agreed to a live debate with me. Having studied her previous TV appearances I decided that she was unlikely to get the better of me. She was much younger than I—in her mid-fifties—and I could not help but think of her as a mere child ripe for instruction.

I can understand now that I was rather naive. EdEnt’s stage managers must have laid much more elaborate plans than I suspected at the time. From their point of view, my new “career” as a public figure was something to be plotted with care, and they must have decided in advance what complications they were going to introduce into the plot in order to provide it with an adequate climax. I didn’t know that my confrontation with Standress was merely a taster and that another was being carefully held in reserve. Emmanuelle Standress presumably understood the way the game was played far better than I did—she must, of course, have known that she was merely the challenger employed to build up audience anticipation for the realchampionship bout.

As I’d expected, Standress took much the same argumentative line as my old marriage-partner Keir, suggesting that I’d been too narrowly focused on my own work to grasp its wider implications.

“You’re an academic historian, after all,” she said, delicately veiling the tacit sneer. “A cloistered pedant, preoccupied with matters of detail, unable to see the wood for the trees. By your own admission, you’re only three-sevenths of the way to your conclusion, and it’s understandable that you don’t want to get ahead of yourself—but we don’t need to wait. We can already see the whole pattern and the central message. Without suffering and death, life is incomplete. If New Humans are to experience the entire spectrum of available experience, we must refuse nothing, including suffering in all its myriad forms—and, ultimately, death itself.”

“If we’re to refuse nothing,” I retorted, “then we ought not to accept death until we have run the entire gamut of intermediate experiences—and we have no reason, as yet, to think of that range as anything less than infinite. If we can survive the cruel accidents of misfortune, we certainly shouldn’t consent to die by our own hands, or even endanger ourselves unnecessarily, until the very end of time—or as close to it as we can get.”

“Many of us will undoubtedly do their level best to do exactly that,” she came back. “So many, in fact, that will they run the risk of dedicating all their resources to the task and losing sight of everything else. The instincts of self-preservation can easily become neurotically anxious and robotically stereotyped. It’s partly for the benefit of the mechanically minded that others choose to exercise their freedom to be different: their freedom to sample extreme experiences without submitting their appetites to be jaded by eternity.”

“‘Submitting their appetites to be jaded by eternity’!” I echoed, with all the contempt I could muster, for the manner of the phrase as well as its content. “Do you imagine that the martyrs of old were afraid of boredom?Are you so contemptibly stupid that you think they died in order that their hardier companions should not lose sight of that which surrounded them and never let them alone: the most brutal fact of their existence? No! The martyrs of old died in the attempt to make the inevitable meaningful. They tried with all their might to deploy faith as a means of transforming the ignominy of death into something fine and noble. They did it because they had no alternative;it was a measure of their desperation. They were heroic because, although they could not avoid death, they would not accept it for what it was. The imagination was their only weapon, and the pretense that death was not the end was their best strategy. There is all the difference in the world between their situation and ours. We have not entirely escaped death, which stalks us in a hundred sly guises, but we have a weapon infinitely more powerful than any possessed by the Old Human Race: we have emortality, and all the strategies that its use opens up. Ourheroism is not that which makes the best of a bitter necessity, but the far better kind, which makes the most of a golden opportunity. Our heroes are those who live longest and best, whose imagination makes the most of life.”

“Your commentaries are more honest than the man behind them,” my opponent alleged, by way of retaliation. “They speak clearly of the self-dissatisfaction that you cannot now admit. They tell the truth that you cannot yet admit to yourself: that your life, like the life of so many of your fellow emortals, is already derelict and desolate, already decayed into routine and repetition, and that it stands in desperate need of redemption. Imagine a world composed of Mortimer Grays! Imagine a world that had no Hellward Nyxsons to disturb and disturb it, to display the faces of fear and terror, to play the part of dreams and darkness. What are people like you, without people like us, but the living dead? Why are you so ungrateful for the gift that we offer, when every word that you have written proclaims your own fascination for every intricate detail of lost mortality and all its torments?”

“An unwanted gift is not a gift at all,” I told her, reverting to defensive mode. “An unnecessary gift that causes offense is an insult. We have the past to inform us of the awful reality of death, in far more detail than your efforts could ever contrive. Your hollow mockery of that past, which transforms its tragedy into play, is an insult to every mortal who ever lived and ever emortal who ever will. I study death in order to discover how best to live, and if I have not yet succeeded it is because my studies are incomplete, not because they require an abrupt perversion into nightmare.”

I think I did tolerably well in that first debate, considering that I never realized that it was merely a preliminary bout. EdEnt must have thought so too, because they didn’t wait long before setting me up for a tilt at the top man: the man many considered to be the New Human Race’s first significant devil’s advocate.

Yes, the casters declared, there wasa Hellward Lucifer Nyxson. Moreover, he was now prepared to emerge from obscurity to defend the principles of his crusade against the belated objections of the man who had done so much to inspire the movement: that unlikely Judas of Thanaticism, Mortimer Gray.

FORTY-FOUR

Somewhat to my surprise, the pseudonymous Hellward Nyxson was rather less strident than Emmanuelle Standress had been. His name was by far the most flamboyant thing about him; his sim’s face was tailored to a conservative model of handsomeness, and the VE from which he spoke was blandly staid, without the slightest hint of the pornography of death in its decor. His mild tone was presumably intended to upset whatever strategy I had prepared, as was the unexpected angle of his attack.

“I like your work very much,” he said, softly, “not merely because it is so wonderfully comprehensive, but because I admire your defiant justification of what some would consider a flawed method. Like you, I am adamant that we cannot understand history unless we can use our imagination as cleverly as is humanly possible, to put ourselves in the shoes of the people of the past. If we are to understand them, we must try with all our might to see the world as they saw it, and I think you have come as close as any man alive to an understanding of the mortal condition, save for one tiny flaw.”

He left it to me to say, “What flaw?” Having been wrong-footed by his tone and manner, I was foolish enough to walk straight into the trap, handing the tempo of the contest to him.

“You reveal the limitations of your own imagination when you refuse to give mortals full credit for their faith. You insist in regarding faith as a kind of self-delusion: a confidence trick calculated to exercise a psychological placebo effect. Because you cannot believe in heaven, or in reincarnation, or in personal redemption through suffering, you refuse to accept that the beliefs of the men of the past could be anything but self-deception—and you insult them further by proclaiming that they were heroes for having successfully lied to themselves. What do you think theirresponse to your analysis would be?”

By this time, I had realized my earlier mistake. I was ready for the second trap and casually ignored his question.

“Are you arguing that there isa heaven,” I asked him, scornfully, “or are you merely speaking in favor of reincarnation? Perhaps you really do believe in the redemptive value of suffering?”

“I am content to admit that I do not know what, if anything, lies beyond death,” Nyxson relied, suavely, “but I respect the right of every human being not to be told what he or she should or should not believe or what possibilities he or she should or should not explore. Why do you think that you have the authority to deny your fellows that right?”

“It’s not for either of us to tell people whether or not they should submit themselves to torture, or even to commit suicide,” I admitted, “but you seem to be mistaken as to which of us is dishonestly overreaching his duty. You’re the one who exhorts others to take their own lives, while remaining stubbornly alive yourself. My main concern is to stop you pretending that my work lends any support to your monstrous crusade.”

“But it does,” Nyxson replied, very mildly. “You may say that it was not intended to do so, but now that the work has been committed to the Labyrinth any reader who cares to do so may come to his or her own conclusions as to its implications. The simple and undeniable fact is that many of those recently embarked on what you choose to call a ‘monstrous crusade’ have taken considerable inspiration from your history. Your work has assisted them in the work of imagining the mortal condition, and it has helped to persuade them that there might be something desirable in that condition. You do not agree, as is certainly your right, but readers of your work do not need your assent in order to take their own inferences from it. You are, after all, a historian, not a writer of fiction. Your task is to provide a true account of what happened in the past and why, not to prescribe what attitude others should adopt to that account.”

“The account is incomplete,” I pointed out. “When it is whole, I doubt that anyone will be able to misconstrue it as a hymn of praise for the mortal condition.”

As parries go, that one was fatally weak.

“Perhaps, in that case, you should not have begun to publish before the work was complete,” Nyxson observed, “and I look forward to seeing future chapters—including, of course, your account of Thanaticism, which will doubtless be as scrupulous as your account of early Christianity. But all histories are incomplete, and all truths too. No matter how long we might live, we are all hemmed in by time and by the insufficiency of our wisdom. You might be content to regard all questions as settled, and to pretend that all mystery has been banished from the human world, but others are not. There will always be people in the world who are not content to live within prescribed limits or to limit their experiences to the narrow range that others consider good for them. There will always be people in the world who will want to think the supposedly unthinkable and do the supposedly impossible. Most will fail, but those who succeed are the true custodians of progress.”

“That sounds very pretty,” I countered, with an overt sneer that probably lost me far more sympathy than it won, “but what we’re actually talking about is people maiming and killing themselves. That’s not progress—it’s madness.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Nyxson, casually, “but there’s method in the madness, and a message too. If Thanatic martyrdom were merely a matter of unhappy individuals testing the limits of existence to eventual destruction you might be right to accuse me of hypocrisy, but I intend to remain alive because the martyrs to come will require someone to speak for them. My part in their adventure will be to explain what they’re doing and to spell out the message constituted by their deaths for the benefit of those who lack the wit to read it.”

The next trap in line was yawning in front of me but I didn’t see it. It might not have made much difference if I had—I probably wouldn’t have been able to avoid it.

“According to you,” I said, “once the first Thanaticist deaths have occurred, it will be for each and every one of us to make up our own minds what their implications are.”

“But of course,” he said, with carefully exaggerated graciousness. “As an enthusiastic commentator yourself, however, you surely have no objection to my making a well-informed guess.”

“Please do,” I said, trying to sound sarcastic. In retrospect, I should have known that I was losing the fight in the only place that mattered—the minds and hearts of EdEnt’s audience—but at the time I was possessed by such a powerful sense of my own Tightness that it was difficult for me to imagine that anyone could fail to see the force of my arguments.

“Now that the last false emortals are coming to the end of their lives,” Hellward Lucifer Nyxson said, in a tone that was all sweet reason, “we are in danger of thinking of death merely as a matter of history: as something put away, save for the occasional regrettable accident. It is not, and the purpose of Thanaticism is to provide a sharp reminder of the fact. Only a historian could take the view that the New Human Race’s achievement of emortality was a triumph won against tremendous odds. Any biologist could tell you that from the point of view of the ecosphere it was the discovery of death that was the triumph.

“For the first two billion years of Gaea’s lifetime, all life was emortal. The simplest of her children—bacteria, algae, protozoa—still partake of that emortality, constantly reincarnating themselves by fission. They made progress, I suppose—but how slow that progress was, until death came upon the scene! Within the last few hundred million years, Gaea finally achieved a kind of adolescence. Sexual reproduction provided organisms with a means of harnessing change, and progress then began in earnest—but the price that had to be paid for that progress was death. Death loosed the straitjacket of emortality and set Gaea free to make children of a much better kind—including the human beings who brought the art of death to such perfection as to destroy almost all their siblings and to bring Gaea herself to the brink of sterility.

“Only a historian could produce an account of death that ignores everything but human attitudes to it—attitudes steeped in ignorance even in the minds of the all-wise NewHuman Race. But we know that as a human embryo develops in a Helier womb its form is sculpted by death, and we know that it is the permanent withering of synaptic connections that creates the preferred pathways in the brain that provide the electrical foundations of the personality.

“You have called Thanaticists fools, and I will admit that, at least in the sense that we are the jesters who have appointed themselves to whisper in the ears of emortal men the necessary reminder that they must still die. No matter now long we live, Mister Gray, we all must die eventually. It is a bitter necessity, but it is a necessity nevertheless, and we must not fall into the trap of thinking that it is a necessity only because it cannot be avoided. Death is the price that we pay for progress: for the progress of the race, and the progress of the individual.

“The Coral Sea Disaster and the rapidity of our current expansion into the outer reaches of the solar system have made room for the millions of children that have been born in the last hundred years, but the colonists of space are beginning to expand their own numbers, and the Continental Engineers have promised that there will be no more Decimations. We must now face the fact that if we are to make room for new generations of Earthbound children, we can only do so by dying, and by dying voluntarily. It is the duty of every New Human not merely to plan for life but to plan for death, and it is the duty of every Thanaticist not merely to make that necessity clear but to hail everyone who makes the decision to die as a hero and a glorious example to us all. You may disapprove of that cause, stigmatizing it as the pornography of death, but have you considered the alternative?”

The question was rhetorical—he did not pause long enough to let me reply. I assume that he was reading from a private autocue.

“In due course, Mister Gray,” Nyxson went on, inexorably, “your history will have to take account of the Robot Assassins, who took the view that even false emortals had become unhuman by virtue of freezing the etching processes of death. Perhaps you will feel free to deplore them, and to call them mad—but I hope that you will make a conscientious attempt to see the force of their argument, just as I hope that you will make a conscientious attempt to see the force of ours. You may feel that their fears died with false emortality and the apparent conquest of the so-called Miller Effect, by which the rejuvenation of brain tissue reactivated the withered synapses and thus wiped out the individual who had formerly inhabited the brain, but I do not. I believe that the New Human Race’s apparent conquest of death is nothing of the sort and that what you are pleased to imagine as eternal life will inevitably turn into a kind of suspended animation. It is the duty of every truly human being to resist that kind of robotization, and the only resistance that is possible, or conceivable, is that we consent to die when we have exhausted our potential for self-renewal. That is the price we have to pay for progress.

“These are the messages that the imminent deaths of the first true Thanaticist martyrs will try to put across, Mister Gray: first, the message that we cannot be free of death because death is what makes us what we are; and second, the message that it is only by embracing and welcoming death that we can sustain the hope that our children will ever become anything more.”

I felt that it was all wrongheaded, of course, but I could see that there was enough truth in it to dispel the notion that it was madness, or nonsense, or an incoherent argument unworthy of a serious reply. Unfortunately, I had no adequately eloquent reply ready. I tried, of course, but I floundered inelegantly, and Nyxson cut me to ribbons.

FORTY-FIVE

I realized once my humiliation was complete that I should never have left myself in the position of needing to replyto Hellward Nyxson at all. I should have done everything in my power to force my opponent into that ignominious position—but the relatively evenhanded exchange of spite in which I had participated with Emmanuelle Standress had lulled me into a false sense of security.

I understood, once the fiasco was over, that Nyxson had been carefully hoarding the moment of his first personal appearance, waiting for the right moment to spring himself on the world. I was unlucky to have been elected as the sounding board off which his manifesto speech would be bounced, but the choice made good tactical sense from his point of view. A professional caster would never have given him so much rope; he needed a debate with an opponent who was set up to be swept aside, at least in the eyes of EdEnt’s consumers.

I had set out on the treacherous path of TV celebrity in order to assert that my work had been misunderstood, not realizing that no one in the world except me gave a damn about whether it had or hadn’t. My inept pursuit of my own agenda was never going to make the slightest difference in opposition to Hellward Nyxson’s showmanship. From his point of view, of course, my only function in life was to make him look more eloquent. Unfortunately, I could not help but oblige.

I was a mere stepping-stone, and the author of the Thanaticist Manifesto stepped on me good and hard.

The only consolation I could take from my brief encounter with Hellward Nyxson was that the whole thing had been mere show business. I told myself that Axel was right: that Thanaticism really was a thing of the moment, a TV-powered fad that would attract far more attention than it deserved for a little while and then fade away. I reminded myself that I, by contrast, was a patient historian, not yet halfway through a work that would take another century to complete.

One day, as even Nyxson had pointed out, I would have the job of fitting the brief history of Thanaticism into my entire history of death—and when I came to do so, I would have the final word. In the meantime, all I could do was to lick my wounds.

“You can’t possibly blame yourself,” Axel assured me. “It wouldn’t have mattered what you’d said in that stupid debate.” Jodocus, Eve, and Minna all concurred, although Camilla gave the distinct impression that she thought it wasmy fault that Nyxson had had such an easy ride.

Even Keir was soothing, after his own fashion. “Madness has its own momentum,” he said. “You couldn’t have stopped it even if you had outflanked him. The EdEnt people could have stamped on it, but they’re just the PR arm of Fossilized Hardinism. Demand management requires that there always has to be something new on the surface, although the system itself must remain absolutely rigid. Nothing will change until we can redeem Gaea from the curse of private ownership.”

“Are you sure the Rad Libs aren’t just one more faddish media phenomenon?” I asked him, churlishly. “They get their fair share of EdEnt spacetime.”

“I’m sure,” he said, confidently. “We’re the revolution that’s waiting to happen. We can afford to play the long game.”

I almost wished that Keir was right, and that I too was a Gaean at heart, prepared to play the long game and casually able to write off every individual human death as one small step in the direction of Mama’s liberation.

Hellward Nyxson was not allowed to rest on his laurels following his victory over me. His next opponent, Chan Chu Lin, took a very different tack, accusing him of having a hidden agenda. He was, Chu suggested; merely the front man for a generation of young people who knew that they would never inherit the earth unless their elders could be persuaded to surrender it voluntarily. Nyxson crushed that accusation with ease, arguing that the generation to which he belonged was far too intelligent to be guilty of mere impatience.

“Those of my peers who want to inherit the earth,” he said, “know perfectly well that its present owners regard their stewardship as a duty rather than a privilege and will be only too willing to surrender their authority when they find more interesting employment. The vast majority, mercifully, have no such desire.”

His subsequent opponents were not so easily quashed, but Nyxson had made his point and grabbed his moment of opportunity. Thanaticism was hot news, and hence hot philosophy. All death was, of course, news in a world populated almost entirely by emortals, but the Thanaticist “martyrs” who took their cue from Standress and Nyxson took great care to make their deaths verynewsworthy by making a great song and dance about what they were doing. The whole purpose of the first true Thanatic suicides was to make a public spectacle of self-destruction.

To begin with, the newscasters and their avid audiences were only too ready to collaborate with Thanaticist ambitions. The twenty-sixth-century fashion that had derided the TV audience as “vidveg” had passed away with the Wildean Creationists who had pioneered it, but we new humans had been a trifle premature in deciding that our own viewing habits were more sophisticated and more socially responsible. The avidity of the media coverage poured gasoline on the flames.

Unlike the suicides falsely claimed by Nyxson’s followers as martyrs, most of whom had been over a hundred, those inspired by his idiot crusade were mostly very young. The movement scored its first spectacular succès de scandale when a sixty-five-year-old woman named Valentina Czarevna took her crucifixion to the limit in 2733. The cult’s most fervent adherents had already begun to cry out that everyone who had lived more than threescore years and ten had already violated the fundamental Thanaticist ethic, but most of those who committed suicide in the name of Thanaticism were somewhat younger. People of my age were far less vulnerable to the tides of fashion.

As the number of Thanaticist martyrs multiplied, so did the variety of the means they selected, although they always preferred violent deaths. They usually issued invitations and waited for large crowds to gather before putting their plans into action. Jumping from tall buildings and burning to death were the most popular methods in the beginning, but these quickly ceased to be interesting. As the Thanaticist revival progressed, those adherents prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice sought increasingly bizarre methods in the interests of maintaining media attention and outdoing their predecessors. EdEnt’s masters soon changed tack, deploring the suicides and ostentatiously refusing to broadcast them, but it was obvious to everyone that they were merely anticipating the fact that the familiarity would breed audience contempt.

The total number of individuals involved in the Thanaticist “movement” was very small. In a world population of more than three billion, a handful of deaths per week was a drop in the ocean, and the maximum attained by self-appointed Thanatics was less than fifty in a month. “Quiet” suicides continued to outnumber the ostentatious Thanatics by a factor of five or six throughout the period when the pornography of death attained its climatic phase.

Even so, it seemed terrible thing at the time, and I could not help but take a keen personal interest in every development. I confess that in spite of my fierce determination to maintain a scrupulous objectivity befitting a historian, my opinions drifted slightly with the tide of fashion.