Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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FIFTY-TWO

Where I had lived on Earth, it had always seemed to me that one could blindly throw a stone into a crowded room and stand a fifty-fifty chance of hitting either an ecologist or a historian. In Mare Moscoviense, the only ecologists were humble engineers who helped maintain the life-support systems, and the population of historians could be counted on the fingers of an unmodified man. This was in a city of a quarter of a million people. Whether they were resident or passing through, the people of the moon were far more preoccupied with the inorganic than the organic, and far more interested in the future than the past.

When I told them about my vocation, my new neighbors were likely to smile politely and shake their heads.

“It’s the weight of those legs,” the fabers among them were wont to say. “You think they’re holding you up, but in fact they’re holding you down. Give them a chance and you’ll find that you’ve put down roots.”

If any unmodified man dared to inform a faber that “having roots” wasn’t considered an altogether bad thing on Earth, the faber would laugh.

“Get rid of your legs and learn to swing,” the faber would say. “You’ll understand then that human beings have no need of roots. Only reach with four hands instead of two, and you’ll find the stars within your grasp. Leave the past to rot at the bottom of the deep dark well, and give the heavens their due.”

I quickly learned to fall back on the same defensive moves that most of my unmodified neighbors employed in such combative exchanges. “You can’t break all your links with solid ground,” we told the fabers, over and over again. “Somebody has to deal with the larger lumps of matter that are strewn about the universe, and you can’t go to meet real mass if you don’t have legs. It’s planets that produce biospheres and only biospheres can produce such luxuries as breathable air and recyclable carbon.”

“Nonsense,” the fabers replied. “Wherever there are oxides there’s oxygen, and wherever there’s methane there’s carbon. Nanotech can do anything that natural-born life can do. A biosphere is just a layer of slime on the outside of a ball, and the slime gets in your eyes. You have to wipe them clean to see properly.”

“If you’ve seen farther than other men,” the footsloggers would tell their upstart cousins, “it’s not because you can swing by your arms from the ceiling—it’s because you can stand on the shoulders of giants with legs.”

Such exchanges were always cheerful. It was almost impossible to get into a realargument with a faber because their talk was as intoxicated as their movements. They did relax, occasionally, but even on the rare occasions when all four of their arms were at rest their minds remained effervescent. Some unmodified humans accused them of chattering, but any attempt on the part of the churlish and the morose to make “ape-man” or “monkey” into a term of abuse was forestalled by the fabers’ flat refusal to accept them as such.

“Footsloggers were just one more link in the great chain of primate being,” they would say, amiably. “We’re the cream of the ape-man crop, the main monkeys. You’re just another dead end, like gorillas, big-headed Australopithecines, and lumpen Neanderthals. The partnership between hand, eye, and brain is what gave humans their humanity, and we have the very best of that.”

If an unmodified human countered with the suggestion that they too might be superseded in their turn, they only chuckled with delight. “We surely will,” they would say. “We’re already working on it. Just as soon as we can redesign the brain to make it viable, four arms won’t be enough. Just wait until the realspider monkeys get their eight-handed act together.”

It went without saying, of course, that the vast majority of fabers were Gaean Liberationists—but such ideas came so naturally to them that they did not seem nearly as extreme in faber rhetoric as they did when they were spoken in the voice of someone like Keir McAllister. “The well belongs to the unwell,” the fabers were fond of saying. Even on the moon, which was a gravity well of sorts, the statement was a cliché. There were many others of the same ilk:

The well will climb out of the Well, when they find the will.

The sick stick, the hale bail.

Hey diddle diddle, footsloggers fiddle, monkeys jump over the moon.

Some of these saws were annoying—especially “History is bunk, fit for sleeping minds,” which was frequently quoted at me when I told fabers what kind of work I did—but I soon learned not to take them as insults.

In spite of the freedom with which such opinions were laughingly offered, there were few unmodified men on the moon who did not like fabers. I suppose that those who could not stand them quickly retreated into the depths of the Big Well or passed on to those habitats that spun at great speed.

Once I had grown used to lunar banter I began to take it in good part and even to thrive upon it. It made a refreshing change from the kinds of conversation that I had grown used to during the previous hundred years, and I was glad that no vestige of my Earthly notoriety tainted the atmosphere of Moscovience. Even Khan Mirafzal, when I met him in person, made only fleeting reference to our first meeting in VE. He greeted me as a friend with whom he had briefly lost contact, not as an adversary who had dared to try to understand the craziness of Thanaticism.

As I adapted physically and psychologically to the conditions on the far side of the moon, my mood was progressively lightened, and I began to perceive the quirky wisdom of those who proposed that the satellite was not governed by gravity at all, but by levity. I retained enough of my intellectual seriousness to do my work, to which I remained thoroughly dedicated, but I began to smile more frequently and to spend far less time in VE. I put the nightmarish legacy of Thanaticism behind me and even came to see my sojourns on Cape Adare and Cape Wolstenholme as periods of unfortunate disequilibrium. I brought a new zest to my Herculean labors, and it seemed to me that they had never gone so smoothly.

It was in that spirit that I finally got around to restoring communication with Emily Marchant, my conscience and my inspiration.

“You were right about the galaxy,” I told her, in the next long monologue I launched into the remoter regions of the system. “It does look far more inviting when there’s no atmosphere to blur its face. You were right about the other galaxies too. I never expected to be able to see so many with the naked eye, and whenever I calculate the distance that I’m able to see my head spins. I do miss blue sky, and naked vegetation, but I’m not homesick yet. Visiting Earth-imitative VEs is just as false as visiting lunar VEs used to be, and the fact that I’ve so many memories of the actuality serves to emphasize the unreality of the virtual experience, but it adds an extra dimension to my objectivity. Time on the moon will make me a better historian in more ways than one. I haven’t quite got the hang of identifying myself imaginatively with fabers—and the attempt has certainly exposed the limit of that old cliché about putting oneself in the other man’s shoes—but I’m getting there.

“The moon’s not an ideal place to work, of course. It’s in the Labyrinth, but it has no physical archives—none, at any rate, that are relevant to my current period. It does have compensating advantages of its own, though. I never thought that it was possible to have so much flesh-to-flesh contact with other people outside of a marriage, and the tangibility of social contacts hereabouts makes up for the artificiality and inorganic dominance of the living space. I thought I’d achieved true maturity while I was living and working on Adare, but Moscoviense has shown me the limitations of the person I was then. This is a place where people really can grow up and leave their roots behind. Even though I’m not properly built for it, I can use the ceiling holds the fabers use and keep my feet off the ground for hours on end. I couldn’t do it in a real faberweb, of course, but there’s just enough gravity on the moon to let me feel free without having to brave the big zero.

“I’ll be happier here, I think, than I’ve ever been before, once I’m fully accustomed to the strangeness of it all.”

I spoke too soon, of course. I never did become fullyaccustomed to the strangeness of it all. But I was happy for a while—maybe not happier than I’d ever been before, but happy enough.

PART FOUR Maturity

In the earliest phases of combat, scientific knowledge was far less efficient as a weapon in the war against death than religious faith. The quest for a scientific definition of death exposed a complex web of conclusions as physicians debated the relative merits of cessation of heartbeat, cessation of respiration, the dying of the cornea, insensibility to electrical stimuli, and the relaxation of sphincter muscles as evidence of irrecoverable demise. Skeptics compiled catalogs of case histories of people buried alive and urban legends recorded macabre cases of childbirth as a result of “necrophilia” practiced by monks or mortuary assistants. Ryan, in 1836, introduced a new distinction between somatic death—the extinction of personality—and molecular death—the death of the body’s cells, noting that the former was rarely instantaneous and the latter never. Prizes were offered in nineteenth-century France for an infallible sign of death, and the failure of all attempts to claim such prizes resulted in the official provision of mortuaries where bodies might lay until the onset of putrefaction settled the matter beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Anthropologists and psychologists made little progress in their early attempts to comprehend and explain attitudes to death and the ritual treatment of corpses. Hertz observed but could not fully rationalize the fact that many death rites involved a two-phased process, the first dealing with “wet” corruptible flesh and the second with “dry” remains such as bones and ashes. He understood that the first phase of interment, cremation, or storage constituted a symbolic removal of the dead person from the realm of “natural”, whereas the secondary rite—the scattering of ashes, the assembly of ossuaries, the equipment of graves with monumental masonry and so on—emphasized the continuity of a human community whose members were all making their painstaking way from cradle to grave, but he had no other analogy to draw upon than that between funeral rites and the “rites of passage” by which boys became men. Freud fared no better, being unable to see belief in the soul’s survival of death as anything but a delusory wishfulfilment fantasy, and funeral rites as anything more than expressions of terror and anxiety, and was led in consequence to hypothesize egoistic “death instincts” which seemingly arose as the natural antithesis of the sexual-reproductive “life instincts.”

–Mortimer Gray

Commentary, Part Five of The History of Death, 2849

FIFTY-THREE

I was not exaggerating when I told Emily that the sight of the sky unmasked by an atmospheric envelope had a profound effect on me. She must have known as well as I did, however, that the inhabitants of the moon did not see such sights very often. The Earthbound sometimes speak of the “domed cities” of the moon as if they were vast hothouses, like Earthly cities enclosed by crystal shells, but they aren’t.

Like the colonists of Io and Europa, the moon’s inhabitants are bur-rowers, and the vast majority of their dwellings are far beneath the surface. No one lives in edifices like the one I rented on Cape Adare, from whose high windows one can look out on a bleak and cratered landscape. Windows are a great rarity on the moon, and there are fewer in Moscoviense than in the nearside cities whose tourists love to be able to look up at the blue Earth hanging stationary in the sky.

There are, of course, a few lunar workers who routinely go out on to the surface, in buggies or in suits, for whom looking up at the stars is almost an everyday experience, but the vast majority of the entities that trundle back and forth across the bare rock are machines animated by AIs, and most of those requiring human intelligence to guide them are remotely operated. The average citizen of Moscoviense, faber or footslogger, had to go to considerable trouble to see the stars. Newcomers made such efforts often enough, but anyone who had been resident long enough to consider himself a lunatic was likely to have lost the habit.

I was no exception.

In my early years in Moscoviense I carried everywhere the teasing consciousness that I was living on an airless world whose roof was set beneath a star-filled sky. Subject as I was to every psychosomatic disorder that was going, I really did feel a quasimagnetic pull, which those stars seemed to exert upon my spirit. I really did give serious consideration to the possibility of applying for somatic modification for low gee and shipping out with emigrants to some new microworld or to one or other of the satellites of Jupiter. All footsloggers living on the moon were subject to a constant flow of subtle propaganda urging them to take “the next step” by removing themselves to some more distant world where the sun’s bountiful radiance was of little consequence, where people lived entirely by the fruits of their own efforts and their own wisdom—but the very constancy of the propaganda eventually dulled its effect.

As time went by, I ceased to make the effort to go up to the observation ports and study the stars. Having no reason to go out on to the surface, once I had exhausted the excuse that it was there, I left it to its own devices. In brief, I settled in—the operative word being in.I adapted myself to life in the interior of the moon and became as claustrophilic as the great majority of its longtime residents. One-sixth gee became normal and no longer made me feel light-headed—with the result that the once-ever-present awareness of the universe of stars faded away, and the power of Papa Domenico’s Universe Without Limits gradually reclaimed the psychological territory it had briefly ceded.

Seen objectively, Mare Moscoviense was a sublunar labyrinth, more in tune with the vast virtual Labyrinth that existed in parallel with it than any city on Earth. There were, however, some significant differences between the view from the moon and the view from Earth, and the most significant of all was the news.

When I first went to the moon I fully intended to shun the TV news, not so much because I feared that news of Earth might make me feel homesick but because I felt that I had burned my fingers once by dipping into the world beyond the headlines, and that once was enough. I had not realized, though, how different the news on the moon would be. It was, I suppose, a foolish mistake for a historian to make, but I had always thought of the news as being thenews, summarized but reasonably comprehensive. It had never occurred to me that Earthly TV was so preoccupied with Earthly affairs that the greater part of the information flowing in from the more distant reaches of the Oikumene was condensed to irrelevance. Nor had it occurred to me that on the moon, a mere 400,000 kilometers away, the Big Well would be considered so much more remote than the burgeoning ice palaces of faraway Titan that Earthly affairs would be relegated to the footnotes of the story stream. In fact, the Earthbound news I had long been used to was replaced on the moon by news that flatly refused to be confounded by astronomical distances.

Lunar news fascinated me, first as a phenomenon and then as a precious source of insight into the human adventure, and its fascination never wore thin. Its consumption began to take up an increasingly large fraction of my spare time when the novelty of the flesh-to-flesh contacts about which I had enthused to Emily wore off.

As the years began to drift by, I reverted yet again to the quiet life of a recluse. I never applied for any kind of somatic modification or cyborgization that would have made life in one-sixth gee feel more comfortable. After taking the first big step that brought me to the moon, and the smaller one that enabled me to take such a liking to the fabers, I hesitated over any other. In spite of all my representations to Emily, my heart and mind remained fundamentally Earthbound.

Sometimes, even I thought of my failure to seek further physiological adaptation as a kind of cowardice—a neurotic reluctance to cut the symbolic umbilical cord connecting me to Earth. Sometimes, even I accepted that reluctance as compelling evidence of my infection by the decadence that the fabers attributed to Earthbound humanity. In such moments of self-doubt I was wont to imagine myself as an insect born at the bottom of a deep cave, who had—thanks to the toil of many preceding generations of insects—been brought to the rim from which I could look out at the great world but dared not take the one small extra step that would carry me out and away. When I went in search of excuses, though, I readily extended the analogy to recall unlucky insects drawn to candle flames, whose combination of instinct and daring proved fatal.

By the time I had been on the moon for twenty happy years I found my thoughts turning back to the Earth more and more frequently and my memories of its many environments becoming gradually fonder. The careful manner in which Earth was relegated to the periphery of the human community by the lunar news gave me a valuable new perspective on Earthbound life, but the longer I lived with that perspective the more convinced I became that I was now properly equipped for life on Earth in a way that I had never been before. I began to think of my sojourn on the moon as a holiday from my real life. It was not, of course, a vacation from my work, which continued apace, but it came to seem like a pause in the pattern of my life as a whole: an interval in which I could collect myself and make ready for a resumption of the ordinary course of my affairs.

When I tried to explain my new state of mind to Emily I found myself hesitating over the wisdom of honesty, but I couldn’t lie to her.

“It’s just nerves, Morty,” she assured me, in one of her exhortatory missives. “You’re ditheringagain. You’ll have to get over it eventually, so why not now? If you go back down the Well, you’ll only have to climb out again. Come to Titan now, while everything here is new, and we’ll go on to Nereid together when the time comes.”

Her pleas did not have the desired effect. If anything, they called forth the same stubbornness that I had cultivated long before as armor against Mama Siorane’s similar exhortations. I reminded myself that Earth was, after all, my home. It was not only myworld, but the home world of allhumankind. No matter what Emily might think, or what my faber friends might say, I began to insist both privately and publicly whenever the issue was raised that the Earth was and would always remain an exceedingly precious thing, which should never be forgotten, and that all spacefarers ought to respect and revere its unique place in human affairs.

When the fabers mocked and Emily grew annoyed I dug in my heels.

“It would be a terrible thing,” I told them all, “were men to spread themselves across the entire galaxy, taking a multitude of forms in order to occupy a multitude of alien worlds, and in the end forget entirely the world from which their ancestors had sprung. Travel far, by all means, but never forget that you have only one true home.”

“Oh, Morty,” was Emily’s belated reply from the wilderness without Saturn’s rings, “will you neverlearn?” But I was older than she, if only by a few years, and I honestly thought that I had now acquired the greater maturity, the better understanding of how to live in the future.

FIFTY-FOUR

The fifth volume of the History of Death, entitled The War of Attrition, was launched on 19 March 2849. Even my sternest critics conceded that it marked a return to the cooler and more comprehensive style of scholarship exhibited by the first two volumes. The chief topic and main connecting thread of the commentary was the history of medical science and hygiene up to the end of the nineteenth century.

The move from contemplation of the history of religion to consideration of the history of science—even a science as misconceived and superstition ridden as pre-twentieth-century medicine—facilitated my adoption of a more analytical pose. Because my main concern was with a very different arena of the war between mankind and mortality, the tenor of my rhetoric was much more acceptable to my peers.

To many of its lay readers, on the other hand, The War of Attritionwas undoubtedly a disappointment. There was nothing in it to comfort the few who still retained a ghoulish interest in the past excesses of Thanaticism. Readers whose primary interest was in the follies of the human imagination must also have found it less fascinating than its predecessors, although it did include material about Victorian tomb decoration and nineteenth-century spiritualism, which carried forward arguments from volume four.

The flow of access fees was very satisfactory for the first six months of the new chapter’s labyrinthine existence, but demand tailed off fairly rapidly when it was realized how different the work was from its predecessors. The vastness and density of its Gordian knot of supportive data made it very difficult for anyone to navigate a course through the entire work, so the few educators and professional historians who condescended to make use of it had to return again and again. I was confident that the flow of income would not dry up entirely, but I knew that I would have to tighten my belt a little if I were to continue to cope with the moon’s ferocious indirect tax regime.

The lack of popular enthusiasm for The War of Attritionwas not, of course, counterbalanced by any conclusive redemption of my academic reputation. Like many earlier scholars who had made contact with a popular audience, I was considered guilty of a kind of intellectual treason, and I knew that I would continue to be frozen out of the scholarly community in spite of my determined attempts at rehabilitation until the academic consensus accepted that I had served my sentence. The stigma attached to my name in academic circles might even have been increased by a few popular reviews that suggested there was much in the new volume to intrigue the inhabitants of a world whose medical science was so adept that almost everyone enjoyed perfect health as well as eternal youth. These reviews suggested that there was a certain piquant delight to be obtained from recalling a world in which everyone was—by modern standards—crippled or deformed, and in which everyone suffered continually from illnesses of a most horrific nature for which no effective treatments were available.

Some commentators felt that my treatment of early medical practitioners was unnecessarily scathing, whereas others thought it unduly generous. It was, of course, both—how could it be otherwise? What could one say of a so-called profession whose practitioners had stubbornly ignored for more than two thousand years the only sensible piece of advice offered by its so-called father, Hippocrates? I did not, of course, make much headway in the difficult business of trying to ascertain which few of the eighty-seven volumes of the Hippocratic Collection actually were by Hippocrates, but I was content to attribute to him the one crucial observation that treatment was best avoided because most active interventions worked to the detriment of the patient. For 2200 years doctors persisted blindly and pigheadedly in applying treatments that increased the danger in which their patients stood.

Even when the scientific method became a common mode of thought doctors remained crassly oblivious to its benefits, preferring to heed the vile counsels of ignoble tradition. How was it, I wondered, that the greatest English minds of the late eighteenth century, assembled together by Erasmus Darwin in the aptly named Lunatic Society, should have penetrated so many secrets of nature and technical practice without ever once applying their trained vision to Darwin’s own profession?—with the result that his beloved son died of blood poisoning caused by a septic finger. How could any historian be less than scathing in chronicling such stupidity?

On the other hand, I was careful to give credit where it was due, complimenting medical practice as the most efficient accessory of religion in the psychological warfare that humankind waged against its ultimate enemy. The treatments that were so woefully ineffective in any material sense, even to the extent of being physically injurious, made a contribution nevertheless to the morale of the race. Seen as quasi-magical rituals, more akin to funerary rites than curative practices, early medicine became a much healthier—or, at any rate, a much more courageous—affair.

I have to admit that there were some passages in the commentary of The War of Attritionthat could be deemed to partake of the “pornography of death and suffering.” Its accounts of the early history of surgery and midwifery were certainly bloodcurdling, and its painstaking analysis of the spread of syphilis through Europe in the sixteenth century could be consumed by readers so inclined as a horror story made all the nastier by its clinical narration.

I was particularly interested in syphilis because of the dramatic social effects of its sudden advent in Europe and its significance in the development of prophylactic medicine. My argument was that syphilis had been primarily responsible for the rise and spread of Puritanism, repressive sexual morality being the only truly effective weapon against its spread. I then deployed well-tried sociological arguments to the effect that Puritanism and its associated habits of thought had been importantly implicated in the rapid development of Capitalism in the Western World. This chain of argument allowed me to put forward the not altogether serious suggestion that syphilis ought to be regarded as the root cause of the economic and political systems that eventually came to dominate the most chaotic, the most extravagantly progressive, and most extravagantly destructive centuries of human history. I left it to my readers to recall that the present owners of the world still referred to their economic manipulations as “Planned Capitalism.” The levity of life in the moon might have removed a little too much gravity from my analysis at that particular point.

The history of medicine and the conquest of disease were, of course, topics of elementary education in the twenty-ninth century. There was supposedly not a citizen of any nation to whom the names of Semmelweis, Jenner, and Pasteur were unknown—but disease had been so long banished from the world, and it was so completely outside the experience of ordinary men and women, that what people “knew” about it was never really brought to consciousness and never came alive to the imagination. Although recreational diseases were still relatively commonplace in the Big Well in the 2840s, popular usage of words such as smallpox, plague, and cancerwas almost exclusively metaphorical.

I would have liked The War of Attritionto remind the world of certain issues that, though not exactly forgotten, had not been brought to mindwhile the diehard explorers of extreme experience had been injecting themselves with all manner of tailored germs, but I cannot pretend that it did. It is at least arguable that it touched off a few unobtrusive ripples whose movement across the collective consciousness of world culture was of some moment, but I dare not press the point. The simple fact is that the name of Mortimer Gray was no longer notorious in 2849, and his continuing work had not yet become firmly established within the zeitgeist.