Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

FORTY-NINE

I would have remained aloof and apart from the recreational disease craze had I been able to, but my determination to pay no attention only made its adherents more anxious to attract my notice. It was inevitable that one of them would eventually succeed, and the one who did was Hadria Nuccoli.

Hadria Nuccoli was by no means the first Thanaticist to make her way to Cape Wolstenholme in person, or the first to attempt to gain entry to my home in spite of my refusal to invite her in. I daresay that almost all of her predecessors had been entirely harmless, and perhaps not entirely charmless, but I suppose it was only to be expected that the predator who combined the utmost determination with the utmost ingenuity would be the most dangerous of the lot.

Had I been living in an orthodox hometree even Hadria Nuccoli might have found housebreaking impossible. One advantage of an all-organic structure is that it is virtually seamless. In an emergency, all its doors and windows close reflexively and seal themselves with natural glues that bind as powerfully as the very best shamirs. Anyone who takes a blade or a degantzing solution to a living structure meets active resistance as well as raising an instant neural alarm. Stone, by contrast, is passive, and such alarms as can be fitted into it tend to be mere webs of copper wire and optical fiber. The kind of nanotech that can colonize and subvert such alarm systems is not readily available and it does not come cheap, but anyone who takes the trouble can render a mere household system impotent. Once that is done, the business of dissolving stone with gantzing agents designed for demolition becomes a mere formality: slow but sure.

The internal refurbishment of my living space had fitted all the inner walls with multilayered organics, but the solid frame put severe restrictions on the thickness of that tegument, and it yielded easily enough to simple brute force. Hadria Nuccoli came armed with drilling and cutting apparatus designed to deal with Titanian ice; the frail walls of my house had no chance against that kind of equipment.

Thus it was that she arrived in my bedroom, unannounced, at three o’clock on the morning of 16 January 2822.

I woke up in confusion, almost as disorientated as I had been on that dreadful night when the Genesishad flipped over—but on this occasion the confusion was more rapidly transformed into naked terror. When I caught sight of my uninvited visitor she was still carrying the cutting torch, and the mask she wore to protect her eyes from its furious fire made her look like some kind of alien monster.

I thought at first that the masked invader had come to use the torch on me, intent on slicing me from head to toe. My terror abated slightly when she tossed the tool aside and pulled the mask from her head—but only slightly.

I recognized her face, although I could not put a name to it immediately. Hadria Nuccoli had called several times to ask for admission, and my ever-dutiful silver had carefully made a record of her face and name. I had glimpsed it on several occasions, always incuriously.

Although she seemed less inhuman without the protective mask I knew that this was an enemy far more frightening than the scalding Coral Sea, because this was an active enemy, who meantto do me harm, and the intensity of the threat she posed was in no way lessened by the fact that she had claimed while begging me to meet her that she was a devout admirer of my work. Although she was still recognizable, she looked markedly different from the picture stored by the silver. Her skin now bore an almost mercuric luster, and she was already in the throes of a terrible fever.

“Stop there! Stay back!” I cried, flattening myself against the wall behind my bed and raising my bedsheet as if it might armor me against her advance.

I felt extremely vulnerable, having recently reverted to sleeping naked beneath a smart sheet instead of wearing a sleepskin. Neither a sleepskin nor a conventional suitskin would have been adequate protection against whatever infection she carried—I would probably have needed a spacesuit to insulate myself completely—but I would have felt a great deal better had my modesty been better guarded. I was slightly surprised when she obeyed my command, but she had come to talk as well as to act.

“Don’t be afraid, Mortimer,” she said, in a voice hoarsened by trachéal mucus. “I’ve come to help you, not to hurt you. I’ve come to bring you out of the tomb of life and back to the world of flood and fire. I’ve come to set you free.”

I knew that she must have disabled the external alarms, but I also knew that my silver must have put out a mayday as soon as she started work on the living tissues of the house. The police would be able to get a drone to the scene in a matter of minutes—but as I looked past her at the ragged gap in the wall I saw that she’d set up some kind of shamir to seal the breach in the stone wall. There was no way she would be allowed to get away again, but my silver was only a glorified answer-phone; even with police collaboration, it would find it extremely difficult to disable the intruder before she could hurt me.

At the very least, I had to buy time.

“I amfree,” I assured my unwelcome visitor. “This is my home, not a tomb. I’m always in the world. I work in the Labyrinth for eight or ten hours a day, and I spend a further six or eight in recreational VEs. I’m perfectly happy with the quality of my experiences, and I certainly don’t need the kind of excitement you’re trying to give me. If I don’t want it, it isn’t a gift.”

I would have felt a lot safer if my visitor had stood still in order to plead her case, but she seemed incapable of that. Her desire to keep moving was as irresistible as her desire to communicate. The derangement of her body and brain by whatever designer disease was consuming her was not yet powerful enough to make her fall down or impair her crazed eloquence.

“Come with me!” she begged, as I huddled back against the wall, desperate to evade her spasmodically clenching fingers. “Come with me to the far side of life, and I’ll show you what’s there. There’s no need to be afraid! Even death isn’t the end, just a new beginning—but this isn’t death, just a better way of being. Disease is the metamorphosis that frees us from our caterpillar flesh to soar as spirits in a mass-less world blessed with infinitely more light and color than any mere VE. I have come to be your redeemer, Mortimer—the redeemer for whom you have waited far too long. Love me as I love you, dear Mortimer: only love me, and you will learn. Let me be your mirror; drown yourself in me!”

She made a lunge for me as she spoke the last few words, but I dodged aside and she stumbled. Her uncanny fever was interfering with her motor responses, and she couldn’t get up immediately, but when I made a bid for the door she was quick enough to block the way.

“Don’t be silly!” I implored her. “Help is on the way. Even if you were to contaminate me, I’d be in hospital within the hour.”

I knew that I wasn’t getting through to her. Her own speech wasn’t completely incoherent, but that didn’t mean that she could listen or understand what I said to her.

She came after me again, and I had to grab a chair, using the legs to fend her off. I didn’t know whether it would do any good—for all I knew, I might have been infected already simply by virtue of breathing the same air—but the notion that she might actually lay her fevered hands upon me seemed particularly horrible.

“There’s no return from eternity, Mortimer,” she babbled on, the words beginning to tumble over one another in spite of their adequate grammar and syntax. It was as if she had programmed her voice to deliver her message whether or not she could keep conscious control of it—and perhaps she had. “This is no ordinary virus created by accident to fight a hopeless cause against the defenses of the body,” she went on. “The true task of medical engineers, did they but know it, was never to fight disease but always to perfectit, and we have found the way. I bring you the greatest of all gifts, my darling: the elixir of life, which will make us angels instead of men, creatures of light and ecstasy. We were fools to think that we had drunk at the fountain of youth when we had only armored our bodies against the ravages of age. Youth is a state of mind. The finest flame burns hot and brief, my love, and must be shared. What you call life is petrifaction of the soul.”

I kept moving all the time, while her movements grew jerkier. As she came to resemble a mere marionette I thought that it was only a matter of time before her strings broke, but she stubbornly refused to collapse.

I tired before she did, and she tore the chair from my grasp. I found myself backed into a corner, with nowhere to go.

FIFTY

The flesh of my persecutor’s face was aglow with silver, and it seemed impossible that she could still be upright, but she was in the grip of a terrible supernatural urgency, and she pounced like an angry cat, catching me by the arms.

I tried to knock her down. If I had had a weapon in hand I would certainly have used it, with all the force I could muster. It probably wouldn’t have done any good. I doubt that she would have felt any pain, and no matter how badly disabled her internal technology might have been, I wouldn’t have been able to disable her with anything less than a sledgehammer.

In the very last moment, I gave in.

There seemed to be no sensible alternative but to let her take me in her arms and cling to me. Nothing else could possibly soothe her. When she finally wrapped her arms round me, therefore, I wrapped mine around her.

We hugged.

I was afraid for her as well as for myself. I didn’t believe, then, that she truly intended to die. I wanted to keep us both safe until help arrived.

My panic faded while I held Hadria Nuccoli in my arms, only to be replaced by some other emotion, equally intense, to which I could not put a name. I made every effort to remind and convince myself that it hadn’t ever mattered whether she infected me or not, given that medical help would soon arrive.

“This is the only real life,” she murmured, as the script she had somehow internalized wound down to its amen. “Emortality makes a sepulchre of the flesh. If we are to become more than human, we must live more fervently, burn more brightly, die more extravagantly.”

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “Help will be here soon. Everything will be fine.”

I was right about the help, but wrong about the everything.

My naive faith in medical science and internal nanotechnology left me completely unprepared for the kind of hell that I endured before the attending doctors got the bug under control. Nature had never designed diseases capable of fighting back against the ministrations of IT, but the makers of new plagues were cleverer by far.

As the infection ran its vicious course I wished, over and over again, that I were able to live the experience as Hadria Nuccoli presumably lived it, not as hell but as passion, but I couldn’t do it. I was an emortal through and through. I couldn’t abide that kind of fervor, that kind of extravagance. All I wanted was the restoration of peace of mind and metabolic calm. While my nanotech armies fought tooth and nail against enemies the likes of which they had never faced before for possession of the battleground of my flesh, all I was capable of wanting was to be still and self-controlled.

I could not help but wonder, afterward, whether I had already begun to aspire to the robot condition. I couldn’t help asking myself whether, as Hadria Nuccoli would presumably have argued, I was fleeing from true human potential because I was incapable of loving anything but the sepulchral death-in-life that was the emortal condition.

Was it conceivable, I wondered, that she might have been right about the nature of the authenticfountain of youth?

I concluded, on due reflection, that she was wrong in every respect. That may have been why, in the end, I lived and she died. On the other hand, the nanotech injected into her body by the doctors may simply have arrived too late to turn the tide.

I wept for her when they told me she’d died and wished with all my heart that she hadn’t, even though I knew that if there were tears on the far side of life, she would be lamenting my inability to join her.

Although it was entirely unlike my previous close encounters with death, my infection by Hadria Nuccoli was just as disturbing in its own way. I tried to regard it as a minor hiccup in the settled pattern of my life—something to be survived, put away and forgotten—but I couldn’t quite put the pattern back together again.

The last thing I’d expected when I set out to write a History of Deathwas that my explanatory study might actually assist the dread empire of death to regain a little of the ground it had lost in the world of human affairs. Even though the Thanaticists and their successors were willfully misunderstanding and perverting the meaning of my work, I felt that my objectivity had been fatally contaminated when the protective walls of my home had been breached, and that the stain would not be easily eradicated. I knew that I still owed it to the Thanaticists as well as to everyone else to make the true message of my work clear, but while my own mind was less than perfectly clear that task seemed impossible.

I felt that I could not stay on Cape Wolstenholme and that I could never live in such a frail dwelling again.

I had to move again—but where could I go? Where on Earth, and in what kind of home, could I recover the equilibrium I had lost and the objectivity that would always be under threat while there were people like Hadria Nuccoli in the world?

The answer was simple enough, once I had made up my mind. If there was nowhere on Earth, 1 had to take the step that Mama Siorane had urged me to take more than a hundred years before—the step that Emily Marchant also wanted me to take. I had to find a vantage point from which the trials and travails of Earthbound humanity could be seen from a proper distance, dispassionately.

I remembered while I lay in the hospital, without any companion to keep me company, that one of my last live appearances on TV had taken place in a VE that reproduced an image of a lunar observatory. It had been selected as the appropriate site for a discussion in which a faber named Khan Mirafzal had argued, rather vehemently, that Thanaticism was evidence of the fact that Earthbound man was becoming decadent. I had heard distinct echoes of Mama Siorane and Emily in his fierce insistence that the progressive future of humankind lay outside Earth, in the microworlds and the distant colonies.

Like Emily, Khan Mirafzal had claimed that humans genetically reshaped for life in low gravity or for the colonization of alien worlds were immune to Thanaticist follies because it was perfectly obvious that all the projects and possibilities that beckoned to them required longevity and calm of mind. Everyone who lived in space tended to wax lyrical about the supposed decadence of the Earthbound, much as the extreme Gaean Liberationists did, but as I reflected on my plight in the hospital I recalled that Mirafzal’s arguments had been balanced by an unusually coherent idea of the intellectual virility of the “outward bound.”

“While the surface of the earth still provided challenges, those who dwelt upon it knew that they were not yet complete,” he had said, when we first met, “but now that it offers only limitations, its inhabitants are bound to grow introspective. Not all introspection is unhealthy, but even at the end of the psychological spectrum opposite to Thanaticism there is closure, imprisonment, and stultification. The L-5 habitats may seem to the Earthbound to be the ultimate in physical enclosure, but the people who live within them—especially those like myself, who have forsaken heavy legs in order to have the benefit of four arms—know that the whole universe awaits us. We are citizens of infinity and must therefore be citizens of eternity. We have changed ourselves in order to become champions of change.”

The moderator of our conversation had dutifully pointed out that the surface of Earth was still changing and that there were many among the Earthbound who were determined to see that it never became fixed and sterile.

“The central doctrine of Planned Capitalism is continuous change within a stable frame,”Mirafzal had countered, “I’m not talking about change for the sake of commerce. There’s no fashion on the moon. I’m talking about future evolution: expansion into the galaxy; meetings with other minds; adaptation to all kinds of circumstances; life without boundaries and without the possibility of boundaries. That requires a very different psychology. The Earthbound can have no idea of what it is like to be truly human until they step outside their frame into reality.”

At the time, it had seemed like mere cleverness, talk for talk’s sake, like everything else on TV. Now, I figured that it was high time I tested it out. I would have called Emily had she been close enough to Earth, but she was too far away; Khan Mirafzal seemed to be the best available substitute. He was pleased to hear from me and more than glad to have the opportunity to repeat his arguments in more sympathetic circumstances. He talked, and I listened. I allowed myself to be convinced and decided to leave Earth, at least for a while, to investigate the farther horizons of the human enterprise.

In 2825 I flew to the moon. After some hesitation, I settled in Mare Moscoviense. I thought it best to try out the side that faces away from Earth so that I might benefit from a view composed entirely of stars.

FIFTY-ONE

Emily was, of course, highly delighted when I told her of my decision, and she sent a message back from Io that was overflowing with enthusiastic congratulations. I was slow to reply to it because I felt slightly guilty about concealing my true motives for making the move. She thought I was being bold, whereas I was actually going into hiding, and I dared not even try to explain that to Emily. I excused my tardiness by telling myself—and her, when I finally did get around to replying—that I had to concentrate on the business of adapting myself to a new world and a new society.

As I had expected, I found life on the moon very different from anything I’d experienced in my travels around the Earth’s surface. It wasn’t so much the change in gravity, although that certainly took a lot of getting used to, or the severe regime of daily exercise in the centrifuge that I had to adopt in order to make sure that I might one day return to the world of my birth without extravagant medical provision. Nor was it the fact that the environment was so comprehensively artificial or that it was impossible to venture outside without special equipment; in those respects it was much like Antarctica. The most significant difference was in the people.

Mare Moscoviense had few tourists—tourists mostly stayed Earth-side, making only brief trips farside—but most of its inhabitants were nevertheless just passing through. It was one of the main jumping-off points for emigrants, largely because it was an important industrial center. It was the site of one of the solar system’s largest factories for the manufacture of shuttles and other local-space vehicles, and it was host to hundreds of nanotech studios and shamir manufactories. It was one of the chief trading posts supplying materials to the microworlds in Earth orbit and beyond, so many of its visitors came in from the farther reaches of the solar system.

When I arrived in Moscoviense the majority of the city’s long-term residents were unmodified, like me, or lightly modified by reversible cyborgization. A substantial minority of the permanent population and a great many of those visiting were, however, fabers like Khan Mirafzal, genetically engineered for low-gee environments. Most of their adaptations were internal and subtle, but the one that had won them their name was the most conspicuous. Every faber possessed four hands, being equipped with an extra pair of “arms” instead of legs. All but a few of the public places in Moscoviense were designed to accommodate their kind as well as “walkers.” All the corridors were railed and all the ceilings ringed.

The sight of fabers swinging around the place like gibbons, getting everywhere at five or six times the pace of walkers, was one that I found subtly disturbing to begin with. Fabers couldn’t live, save with the utmost difficulty, in the gravity well that was Earth. They almost never descended to the planet’s surface. By the same token, it was difficult for men from Earth to work in zero-gee environments without extensive modification, surgical if not genetic. For this reason, the only “ordinary” men who tarried in highly specialized faber environments weren’t ordinary by any customary standard. The moon, with its one-sixth Earth gravity, was one of the few places in the inner solar system where fabers and unmodified men frequently met and mingled. Even the L-5 colonies were divided by their rates of spin into “footslogger territories” and “faberwebs.”

I had always known about fabers, of course, but like so much other “common knowledge” the information had lain unattended in some unheeded pigeonhole of my memory until direct acquaintance ignited it and gave it life. By the time I had lived in Moscoviense for a month that unused reserve of common knowledge had turned into a profound fascination.

It seemed to me that fabers lived their lives at a very rapid tempo, despite the fact that they were just as emortal as members of their parent species. For one thing, faber parents normally had their children while they were still alive, and very often they had several at intervals of only twenty or thirty years. An aggregate family of fabers often had three or even four children growing up in parallel. In the infinite reaches of space, there was no population control, and no restrictive “right of replacement.” A microworld’s population could grow as fast as the microworld could acquire extra biomass and organize more living space. Then again, the fabers were always doingthings. Even though they had four arms, they never seemed to leave one dangling. They seemed to have no difficulty at all in doing two different things at the same time, often using only one limb for attachment. On the moon this generally meant hanging from the ceiling like a bat while one exceedingly busy hand mediated between the separate tasks being carried out by the remaining two.

I quickly realized that it wasn’t just the widely accepted notion that the future of mankind must take the form of a gradual diffusion through the galaxy that made the fabers think of Earth as decadent. From their viewpoint, the habits and manners of the lunar footsloggers seemed annoyingly slow and sedentary. The Earthbound, having long since attained control of the ecosphere of their native world, seemed to the fabers to be living a lotus-eater existence, indolently pottering about in its spacious garden, and unmodified spacefarers seemed to the fabers to have brought that deep-seated indolence with them into environments where it did not belong.

The most extreme fabers, in this and other respects, were the “converts” who had attained that state by means of somatic engineering rather than having been born four-handed. Many footsloggers did not regard the converts as “real” fabers and emphasized this point by referring to the faber-born as “naturals,” borrowing an obsolete term that false emortals had once applied to the earliest Earthbound ZTs. The converts, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the formulators and best practitioners of faber philosophy.

Most fabers weren’t contemptuous of legs as such, but converts were often inclined to draw nice distinctions in their arguments about the relative worth of different variants of humankind. They would give their wholehearted endorsement to the hypothetical spacefaring folk who would one day be given legs by genetic engineers in order that they might descend to the surfaces of new and alien worlds, but they would be casually dismissive of those emigrants from Earth who insisted on hanging on to the legs their ancestors had bequeathed to them in order to enjoy the fruits of the labors of past generations.

Such airy discussions came as a shock to me, because I was suddenly able to see Mama Siorane as the faber converts must have seen her rather than as she had seen herself—as a flawedpioneer who had never quite had the courage of her convictions, who had gone all the way out to Titan but had stopped short of modifying her own unfortunately mortal flesh. I was very conscious of the fact that Emily was following in Mama Siorane’s footsteps, and I could not help but wonder whether she would take up the challenge of the converts and trade her emortal feet for emortal hands.

Papa Ezra, by contrast, was a hero even to converts despite that he had hung on to his legs till he died. The name of Ezra Derhan meant nothing to anyone on Earth, but it was familiar in every household on the moon and in the micro worlds. Papa Ezra had madeconverts and had contributed to the perfection of the Zaman transformations with which every faber infant was now equipped. In Mare Moscoviense in 2825 hardly anyone had heard of Mortimer Gray, historian of death and unsuccessful scourge of the Thanaticists, and only one person in five was impressed if I introduced myself as a friend of Emily Marchant, gantzer extraordinaire and ice-palace designer, but everyonereacted when I mentioned that I was the foster son of Ezra Derhan.

I quickly came to understand that although unmodified men were still the majority population of the moon in 2825, they were no longer the dominant population, politically or ideologically. Faber attitudes were already recognized there, tacitly if not explicitly, as the attitudes that humankind would one day export to the farther reaches of the galaxy. Faber attitudes constituted the philosophy of that fraction of the human race that was not merely new but blessed with a new sense of purpose. It was hardly surprising that they considered Earthbound humanity to be decadent or that they took such aberrations as Thanaticism for glaring symptoms of that decay.