Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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FORTY-SIX

I never took part in another live debate after having been so comprehensively upstaged by Hellward Nyxson, but I did continue to give occasional interviews to casters, and even to pose as an expert—in which capacity I soon found a settled line of my own to peddle with practiced efficiency, like every other habitual media whore.

The questions I was asked once the backlash against Thanaticism began went relentlessly back and forth over the same reactionary ground. Is the new fascination with death a kind of social sickness? How disturbed should we be by the discovery that the sanity on which New Humans pride themselves has proved to be so fragile? Ironically, honesty forced me to moderate my own opposition lest I should find myself condemning my own work along with Nyxson’s crusade.

“The contemporary fascination with death is by no means inexplicable, nor is it necessarily unhealthy,” I argued, earnestly and frequently. “In the days when death was inescapable, people were deeply frustrated by the imperious imposition of fate. They resented it with all the force and bitterness they could muster, but it could not be truly fascinatingwhile it remained a simple and universal fact of life. Now that death is no longer a necessity, it has perforce become a luxury. Because it is no longer inevitable, we no longer feel an oppressive need to hate and fear it, and this allows us to take an essentially aestheticview of death. The transformation of the imagery of death into a species of pornography is perfectly understandable, no matter how regrettable it may be.

“Planning a life is an exercise in story making. Living people are forever writing the narratives of their own lives, deciding who to be and what to do, according to various aesthetic criteria. In olden days, death was inevitably seen as an interruptionof the business of life, cutting short life stories before they were—in the eyes of their creators—complete. Nowadays, people have the opportunity to plan wholelives, deciding exactly when and how their life stories should reach a climax and a conclusion. We may not share the aesthetic sensibilities of those who decide to die young, but there is a discernible logic in their actions. It is not helpful to dismiss them as madmen.

“We assume that our biotechnologies and nanotechnologies have given us the power we need to regulate our mental lives, but we have resisted roboticization. The freedom of the human will is rightly considered our most precious possession, setting us apart from even the cleverest AIs. We must recognize and accept that this freedom will occasionally be exercised in strange ways and should be prepared to defend the rights of the strangers in our midst. The decision to die young, even though one might live forever, is an exercise of freedom.”

The Thanaticists were by no means displeased by my adoption of this argument, and Hellward Nyxson took to describing me as his “first convert.” The more lavishly I embroidered my analogy, declaring that ordinary emortals were the feuilletonistes, epic poets, and three-decker novelists of modern life whereas Thanaticists were the prose-poets and short-story writers who liked to sign off with a neat punchline, the more the diehard Thanatics grew to like me. I receive many invitations to attend suicides, and my refusal to take them up only served to make my presence a prize to be sought after.

Perhaps I should emphasize that I was then, as I am now, entirely in agreement with the United Nations Charter of Human Rights, whose ninety-ninth amendment guarantees the citizens of every nation the right to take their own lives and to be assisted in making a dignified exit should they so desire. I continued to harbor strong reservations about the way in which the Thanaticists construed the amendment and to detest their solicitation of suicide, but I never sympathized with those extremists who argued for the amendment’s repeal while the Thanaticist Panic was at its height in the 2730s. The item’s original intention had been to facilitate self-administered euthanasia in an age when that was sometimes necessary, not to guarantee Thanatics the entitlement to recruit whatever help they required in staging whatever kinds of exit they desired, but a principle is a principle and must be upheld.

Some of the invitations I received during the latter phase of the Thanaticist craze were exhortations to participate in legalized murders, and these became more common as the exhaustion of ready models forced later “martyrs” to become more extreme in their bizarrerie. I refused to have anything to do with such acts, and often urged the would-be martyrs to reconsider their actions, but they continued regardless.

By 2740 the Thanaticist martyrs had progressed from conventional suicides to public executions, by rope, sword, ax, or guillotine. At first the executioners were volunteers—one or two were actually arrested and charged with murder, although none could be convicted—but as the Thanaticists became more desperate to reignite the waning glare of public attention they began campaigning for various nations to re-create the official position of Public Executioner, together with bureaucratic structures that would give all citizens the right to call upon the services of such officials. It was taken for granted at first that they stood no chance of success, but this proved to be a mistake.

Even I, who claimed to understand the cult better than its members, was astonished when the government of Colombia—presumably desirous of taking the lead in the nation’s ongoing competition with Venezuela for recognition as the home of the world’s aesthetic avant garde—actually accepted such an obligation, with the result that Thanaticists began to flock to Maracaibo and Cartagena in order to obtain an appropriate send-off. I was relieved when the UN, following the death of Shamiel Sihra in an electric chair in 2743, added a further rider to the ninety-ninth amendment, outlawing suicide by public execution.

By this time I had given up making media appearances that only seemed to cement my reputation as a Thanaticist sympathizer no matter how hard I tried to backpedal and distance myself from the movement. In 2744 I began refusing all invitations to appear on TV as well as all invitations to take part in Thanaticist ceremonies. It seemed to me that it was time to become a recluse once again.

I had a great deal of work to do on the fourth part of my history, and I had had my fill of distractions.

FORTY-SEVEN

The fourth part of The History of Death, entitled Fear and Fascination, was launched into the Labyrinth on 12 February 2767. Although the furor over Thanaticism had died down, my commentary was immediately subject to heavy access demand. The heyday of the movement was long past, but its atrocities were still fresh in the world’s memory, and it is possible that my title misled some would-be readers into thinking that my commentary would be directly concerned with the Thanaticist creed. Requisitions of material from the first three parts of the history had declined sharply in the 2760s in the wake of the Thanaticism-inspired boom, and I might have set a higher access fee had I realized that the new publication would generate such high demand.

Academic historians were universal in their condemnation of the new commentary, and those who complimented me on the thoroughness with which I had bound together the underlying data were annoyingly few in number. I understood that the enthusiasm with which the publication was greeted by laymen was hardly conducive to academic acclaim, but I felt that I had done the ritual spadework with exemplary efficiency. There were, however, a number of popular reviewers who praised my commentary highly even after discovering that it had nothing explicit to say about the “problem” of Thanaticism. My arguments were recklessly plundered by journalists and other broadcasting pundits in search of possible parallels that might be drawn with the modern world, especially those passages that seemed to carry moral lessons for the few remaining Thanaticists and the legions who feared and were fascinated by them.

The commentary attached to Fear and Fascinationextended, elaborated, and diversified the arguments contained in its immediate predecessor, particularly in respect of the Christian world of the Medieval period and the Renaissance. It had much to say about art and literature, and the images contained therein. It had substantial chapters on the personification of death as the Grim Reaper, on the iconography of the danse macabre, on the topics of memento moriand artes moriendi.It included comprehensive analyses of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and graveyard poetry. These were by no means exercises in conventional criticism; they were elements of a long and convoluted argument about the contributions made by the individual creative imagination to the war of ideas, which raged on the only battleground on which man could as yet constructively oppose the specter of death.

My text also dealt with the persecution of heretics and the subsequent elaboration of Christian Demonology, which had led to the witch craze of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. I gave considerable attention to various thriving folkloristic traditions that had confused the notion of death, especially to the popularity of fictions and fears regarding premature burial, ghosts, and various species of the “undead” who were said to rise from their graves as ghouls or vampires. To me, all these phenomena were symptomatic of a crisis in Western civilization’s imaginative dealings with the idea of death: a feverish heating up of a conflict that had been in danger of becoming desultory.

The cities of men had been under perpetual siege from death since the time of their first building, but in the Middle Ages—in one part of the world, at least—the perception of that siege had sharpened. A kind of spiritual starvation and panic had set in, and the progress that had been made in the war by virtue of the ideological imperialism of Christ’s Holy Cross had seemed imperiled by disintegration. That Empire of Faith had begun to break up under the stress of skepticism, and men were faced with the prospect of going into battle against their most ancient enemy with their armor in tatters.

Just as the Protestants were trying to replace the Catholic Church’s centralized authority with a more personal relationship between men and God, I argued, so the creative artists of the era were trying to achieve a more personal and more intimate form of reconciliation between men and death, equipping individuals with the power to mount their own idiosyncratic ideative assaults.

The Medieval personalization of death, whether as a hooded figure carrying a scythe or as the leader of the dance of death, seemed to me to be part and parcel of the re-creation of human personality. This was the period in which the individual gave way to the ego, in which the humans of the Western World first attained the privilege of uniqueness. As the human personality became unique and idiosyncratic, so did the death of that personality. Death became a visitor knocking at the door and demanding admission. The ghostly voices that had formerly been bound together into an ancestral chorus became distinct as the dead became as distinct and idiosyncratic as the living, demanding specific reparation for particular slights. The ever-present ancestors of the tribe and the demons of general temptation were replaced by lone haunters and possessors who settled upon equally isolated victims. The universal war against death dissolved into a chaotic mass of hand-to-hand combats.

I drew numerous parallels, of course, between what happened in the Christian world and similar periods of crisis that were discernible in other cultures at other times, but I cannot deny that my study of Fear and Fascinationwas ethnocentric in the extreme. It was, I suppose, inevitable that so many of my peers would claim that my cross-cultural analogies were fatally weak and that such generalizations as I attempted were illusory, but that was the temper of the times with which I was trying to deal. No other period in history saw the emergence of such sharp distinctions between the technological and moral progress of different cultures—distinctions that were not significantly eroded even by the global communication systems of the twentieth century, until the Crash came. We take the philosophical and economic bases of the Oikumene too much for granted, and it is difficult for us to imagine the extremity of the inequalities that afflicted the world throughout the Second Millennium.

A few of my critics, studiously ignoring the nature of the world with which I was trying to deal, argued that my intense study of the phenomena associated with the idea of death had become so personal simply because I had become so personally involved with Thanaticism. Others suggested that I had become so utterly infatuated with the ephemeral ideas of past ages that they had taken predatory control over my own imagination, and that I had become too wrapped up in my own unique contest with a hooded but toothless death whose scythe had lost its edge.

I took what comfort I could in the conviction that by the time my work was complete there would be no room for such misunderstandings, that the whole would be seen for what it really was and its worth properly evaluated.

I knew that I would have a good deal more work to do before I had broadened the concerns of Fear and Fascinationsufficiently to take in the whole world, but I cannot deny that I was slightly disheartened by the element of mockery that often crept into criticisms of my commentary. My recently renewed reclusiveness was further intensified by this sense of injury, and I came to feel that my home by the Orinoco was too exposed, its environs too crowded with predators far more insidious than alligators.

I was tempted to go back to Antarctica, but Cape Adare was now ill fitted to serve as any kind of refuge. Instead, I decided to remove myself to the other extremity of the civilized world. In 2774 I took up residence in an ancient stone residence—albeit one internally refitted with all modern conveniences—on the tip of Cape Wolstenholme, at the neck of Hudson’s Bay in Canada.

FORTY-EIGHT

Twenty-eighth-century Canada was an urbane, highly civilized, and rather staid region of the Reunited States. It was as distinct from the spectral array of the New York-San Francisco Mainline, in its own idiosyncratic fashion, as the Old Southern Confederacy and the Latin Satellites. Its people seemed to be uniformly modest, intelligent, and down-to-earth—the sort of folk who had no time for such follies as Thanaticism. Cape Wolstenholme seemed, therefore, to offer an ideal retreat, where I could continue to throw myself wholeheartedly into my work and leave the world behind the headlines to feed a closeted store of data to which I would get around in my own good time.

I handed over full responsibility for answering all my calls to a brand-new state-of-the-art Personal Simulation program, which grew so clever and so ambitious with practice that it soon began to give to casters interviews that were retransmitted on broadcast television. Although the silver offered what was effectively “no comment” in a carefully elaborate fashion I eventually thought it best to introduce into its operating system a block that restrained its ambitions—a block that was intended to ensure that my face dropped out of public sight for at least half a century. Having fully experienced the rewards and pressures of celebrity, I felt not the slightest need to extend that phase of my life, even via an artificial alter ego.

The one person with whom I maintained contact faithfully was Emily Marchant, partly because she was the most precious person in the Oikumene and partly because she had been too far from Earth to witness my inglorious involvement with the Thanaticist panic. Her messages to me seemed to come out of an earlier and better world, and they were full of pleas to join her in the making of a future that would be even better.

“The Earthbound know nothing of the universe in which they live,” she told me, in an entirely characteristic lyrical moment. “The atmosphere surrounding the Well is a chrysalis from which we must emerge if we are to be what we were always destined to be. You may think that you have seen the stars and the galaxies in VE, but the people who called the world of Virtual Experience a Universe Without Limits had no idea what the actual limits of sensation were. Morty, you haveto come out of the Well, at least as far as the moon. Once you’ve seen the stars as they are, you won’t be able to go back.”

I couldn’t take that sort of rhetoric seriously. I knew that she’d been carried away by the zeal of the recent convert and had lost her sense of proportion. I had always found it difficult to take Mama Siorane seriously on the admittedly rare occasions when she had insisted on referring to the Earth as “the Well.”

“Leave Earth to the Thanaticists,” Emily said, on another occasion, long after the heyday of Thanaticism was past. “Out here, death is still a threat to be avoided, and everyonewants to live as long and as gloriously as she can. Earth is already rotting, Morty—but Titan hasn’t yet begun to breathe.”

I told myself that she didn’t have the least idea what she was talking about, as far as Earth and the Earthbound were concerned, and that she was probably as far off the mark in her estimation of the potentiality of the cold satellites of the gas giant worlds. My business, I was utterly convinced, was with Earth and solid history, not Titan and wild optimism. I never stopped replying to her messages with mechanical regularity, but I did stop listening to their exhortations.

It must have seemed to the majority of the Earthbound that Thanaticism had already petered out as the turn of the century approached. The word eventually ceased to appear in the headlines. In fact, its last followers had “gone underground”—which is to say that Thanaticist martyrs no longer attempted to stage their exits before the largest audiences they could obtain but instead saved their performance for small, carefully selected groups. This was not a response to persecution but merely a variation in the strange game that they were playing: indulgence in a different kind of drama.

I knew about this development because there was no let up in the communications with which diehard Thanatics continued to batter my patient AI interceptor. My presence at a martyrdom had become one of the few remaining prizes, avidly sought by aficionados in spite of the fact that my debate with Hellward Lucifer Nyxson had been long forgotten by everyone except the diehards themselves.

Although my patient silver took care of all my communication with the world outside, I could not resist the temptation to look over its shoulder occasionally as it parried the thrusts of the now-esoteric Thanaticists. I took due note, therefore, of a gradual shift in Thanaticist philosophy, which deemphasized brutal martyrdom in favor of long-term flirtations with danger. Such flirtations constantly exposed the cultists to the risk of death while keeping the skillful and the fortunate permanently in the game. Some were content to indulge in life-threatening sporting contests, often of a bizarre nature, but others preferred to cultivate a calculatedly unhealthy interest in disease.

Although a few twenty-eighth century Thanaticist martyrs had used diseases as a means of suicide the majority of “soft Thanatics” had always been content to pose as connoisseurs of exotic experience, in much the same spirit as my old acquaintance Ziru Majumdar. The continuation of their interests long after the initial moral panic had abated stimulated a small-scale but thriving black market in designer carcinogens and bioengineered pathogens.

Although the original agents of smallpox, cholera, bubonic plague, and syphilis were long extinct, the modern world abounded in clever genetic engineers who could synthesize similar viruses with very little effort. As the twenty-eighth century died and the twenty-ninth began, the less scrupulous among them found eager clients for a whole range of new and particularly horrid diseases. Those maladies that afflicted the mind as well as, or instead of, the body were particularly prized by the hard-core cognoscenti.

Recreational schizophrenia almost broke through to the mainstream of psychotropic usage at one point, but in the main the followers of the new fad steered well clear of casters and their hoverflies. As is the way of such things, however, the initial determination of the reformed Thanaticists to evade the lurid exposure that had typified the efforts of their predecessors soon became newsworthy in itself. The more evasive the residual adherents of the movement became, the greater became the motivation of their pursuers.

Inevitably, the new trend began to spread beyond the ranks of self-styled Thanaticists. As large numbers of people began to toy with the idea that disease was something that could be temporarily and interestingly indulged, without any real danger to life or subsequent health, the entire black market began to move slowly but steadily toward legitimacy and mass production. My silver began to find more and more instances in which arguments about death that I had popularized were quoted—usually without acknowledgement—with reference to recreational disease. It became fashionable to state as accepted common sense that whatever had ceased to be a dire necessity in human reckoning “naturally” became available as a perverse luxury, subject to purely aesthetic consideration.

None of this would have mattered much, but for one thing. Thanaticist martyrdom had not been infectious, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense, but recreational diseases were more versatile. Those that were mass produced were subjected to rigorous quality control, but those that had emerged from illicit sources while the client base had been small and exclusive had not been so carefully designed. It required only a few of the the people caught up in the fad to refuse to restrict themselves to noninfectious varieties for a serious social problem to develop.

The world had been free of devastating epidemics since the heyday of the chiasmalytic transformers that had precipitated the final phase of the Crash, but the renewed challenge to twenty-eighth-century medical technology was undoubtedly serious and was recognized as such.

Because of the threat to innocent parties who might be accidentally infected, the self-infliction of communicable diseases was quickly outlawed in many nations. Some governments were slow to act, but Canada was not among the them. Even in that ultracivilized land, however, the laws were too often broken.