Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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FIFTY-FIVE

During my latter years in Mare Moscoviense I was often visited by Khan Mirafzal, the faber with whom I had crossed swords on terrestrial TV. The culture of the fabers was so much more geared to face-to-face interaction than that of lunar footsloggers, let alone the thoroughly privatized societies of Earth, that it was a rare faber who would not “drop in” if he happened to be passing the residence of a friend he had not seen for a month or more. When he returned to the moon briefly from the microworld in the asteroid belt that was now his home, Mirafzal automatically came along in person to find out how I was getting along.

His own news was, inevitably, rather more interesting than mine.

Mirafzal explained to me that the microworld on which he lived was being fitted with an antimatter drive that would take it out of the system and into the infinite. Its prospective voyagers were going to great pains to make sure that it was properly equipped for its departure and Mirafzal was one of those charged with the duty of keeping close track of technical progress in the inner system to make sure that no opportunity went unseized.

“We’ll keep in touch by radio, of course,” he said, “but we need to be sure that we’re in a position to take advantage of any new developments that come up while we’re deep in interstellar space.”

Mirafzal was a kind and even-tempered man who would not have dreamed of adopting salesmanlike tactics to convince me of the error of my Earthbound ways, but he was also a man with a sublime vision who could not restrain his enthusiasm for his own chosen destiny. He swept aside my mildly skeptical observations about the prospect of being enclosed in such a tiny space for hundreds of years with the same faces and voices. It was with him that I had the conversations that I couldn’t yet have with Emily, and to him that I exposed my doubts about the direction in which I ought to be going. He was a good listener, and he took me seriously. He was the only faber I knew who did not laugh when I used footslogger metaphors in all seriousness, and he even condescended to use them himself.

“I have no roots on Earth, Mortimer, in any metaphorical sense whatsoever,” he assured me, when I wondered whether even he might become homesick in the great void beyond the Oort Cloud. “In my being, the chains of adaptation have been decisively broken. Every man of my kind is born anew, designed and synthesized. We are the self-made men, who belong everywhere and nowhere. The wilderness of empty space that you find so appalling is our realm and our heritage. I am homesick now, but when the voyage begins, I will be doing what I am designed to do.”

“But you’ve lived alongside unmodified humans throughout your formative years,” I pointed out. “You’ve always lived amid the scattered masses of the solar family. To you, as to me, the utter desolation of the void will surely be strange and alien.”

“Nothing is strange to us,” he assured me. “Nothing is foreign and nothing is alien.”

“My point exactly,” I replied, wryly.

He smiled politely at the joke, but would not retreat from his position.

“Blastular engineering has incorporated freedom into our blood and our bones,” he said, “and I intend to take full advantage of that freedom. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of my nature.”

“While my own blastular engineering served only to complete the adaptation to life on Earth that natural selection had left incomplete,” I mused, applying his logic to my own situation. “Given that I can never be free from the ties that bind me to Earth, perhaps I have no alternative but to return.”

“That’s not so,” he countered. “Natural selection would never have devised emortality, for natural selection can only generate change by death and replacement. When genetic engineers found the means of setting aside the curse of aging they put an end to naturalselection forever. The first and greatest freedom is time, my friend, and you have all the time in the world. You can become whatever you want to be. If you wish, you may even become a faber of sorts—although I gather that you have no such ambition. What doyou want to be, Mortimer?”

“A historian,” I told him, reflexively. “It’s what I am because it’s what I want to be.”

“All well and good, for now,” he conceded, “but history isn’t inexhaustible, Mortimer, as you well know. It ends with the present day, the present moment, and no matter how slowly you can recapitulate its achievements, you’ll have to arrive in the present someday. The future, on the other hand, is…”

“Given to your kind,” I said, although I assumed that he was going to say infinite.“I know all that, Mira. I don’t dispute any of it. But what exactly isyour kind, given that you rejoice in such freedom to be anything you want to be?”

“Not yet,” he said. “We’ve hardly scratched the surface of constructive cyborgization. That will open up a whole new dimension of freedom.”

“And reopen all the old arguments about robotization,” I added. “The older I get, the more sense those arguments seem to make. Once your little world is lost in the emptiness, effectively cut off from everything else in the universe, how will you avoid the trap of endless repetition? How will you maintain spontaneity, change, difference?”

“Earth is just a bigger spaceship,” Mirafzal reminded me. “The whole solar system is a narrow room—and will one day become exactly that, complete with enclosing walls, if the Type-2 enthusiasts get their way. Even if a rival sect of cosmic engineers eventually wins through, it will only change the decor—and after humankind attains Type-2, the galaxy will become the playground of the Type-3 visionaries. Spontaneity, change, and difference have to come from within, Morty. Cyborgization isn’t robotization; it’s enhancement, not mechanization.”

“And spacefarers will be its pioneers, figuring out how to do it and why while all the lazy footsloggers live on the capital of Earth’s evolutionary momentum,” I conceded, with a sigh. “Maybe you’re right, Mira. Maybe it is just my legs that weigh my spirit down—but if so, then I’m well and truly addicted to gravity. I can’t cast off the past like a worn-out suitskin. I know you think I ought to envy you, but I don’t. You think that I and all my kind are clinging like a terrified infant to Mother Earth while you and your kind are achieving true maturity, but I really do think that it’s important to have somewhere to belong.”

“So do I,” the faber said, quietly. “I just don’t think that Earth is or ought to be that place. It’s not where you start from that’s important, Mortimer, it’s where you’re going.”

“Not for a historian,” I protested, feebly.

“For everybody,” he insisted. “History ends, Mortimer. Life doesn’t—not any more.”

FIFTY-SIX

While I continued to lived on the moon I was half-convinced that Khan Mirafzal was right, although I never followed any of his well-meant advice. The remaining half of my conviction was otherwise inclined. I couldn’t accept that I was trapped in a kind of existential infancy any more than I could see myself as a victim of lotus-eater decadence. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if I’d had one of my close encounters with death while I was on the moon, but I didn’t. The dome in which I lived was only breached once, and the crack was sealed before there was any significant air loss. It was a scare, but it wasn’t a life-endangering threat. The longer I stayed in Mare Moscoviense, the more I came to think of the moon as Antarctica without the crevasses, but with nosier neighbors.

It was always inevitable, I think, that I would eventually give in to my homesickness for Garden Earth and return there, having resolved not to leave it again until my history of death was complete, but there was one more challenge awaiting me after Khan Mirafzal had left the moon for the last time. There was one person in the solar system who had the power to affect me far more deeply in face-to-face confrontation than he and all his kind—and even the footsloggers of Titan sometimes visited the moon.

I received Emily’s message telling me that she had embarked on a shuttle heading for the moon within days of the news coming through that Hope, one of the ancient Arks launched during the early phase of the Crash with a cargo of SusAn-preserved potential colonists, had settled into orbit around an Earthlike planet orbiting a G-type sun some fifty-eight light-years away in Sagitarius.

This news was, of course, fifty-eight years old, but it was no less sensational for that. AI-directed kalpa probes had located more than a dozen life-bearing planets, but we only had hard evidence of multicellular life on two of them, neither of which could be described as “Earthlike” no matter how much generosity was granted to the label. Hope’sfirst broadcast spoke of a world whose atmosphere was breathable with the aid of face masks, with abundant plant life and animals sufficiently similar to those of Earth to allow talk of “insects,” “reptiles,” “birds,” and “mammals.”

Hopehad been sent out to find exactly such a world, ripe for colonization. The generations of its mortal crew had clung hard to that determination while news had followed them that Earth’s ecosphere had not been conclusively blighted. New data regarding the scarcity of planets that could be classified as “terraformable” must have poured into the ship’s data banks while it crawled through the void, but even that had not persuaded the ship’s masters to turn around. Now, they considered their decision to have been vindicated, and their initial howl of triumph was headline news even on Earth.

By the time Emily’s ship actually arrived on the moon, however, the news flow from the world that Hope’scaptain had named Ararat was by no means so enthusiastic. The primitive nanotech systems deposited on the surface had made good progress in gantzing dwellings out of the alien soil, but attempts to adapt local reproductive systems to the manufacture of human foodstuffs had run into trouble, and the first people brought out of SusAn in order to work on the surface—not all of whom survived the revival process—were experiencing unexpected problems of psychological adaptation.

Although the SusAn systems installed on Hopehad been rendered obsolete several centuries before there were some similar systems still in operation, in which the worst of the first generation of criminals sentenced to SusAn imprisonment were still confined, so the news that long-term freezing down seemed to have unwelcome psychotropic effects was not entirely irrelevant to the Earthbound.

Emily was less enthusiastic about the discovery than I had expected, but she made much of the elementary fact that other “Earthlike” planets did exist.

“The real crux of the matter isn’t Hope’schances of establishing a human population on the surface of Ararat,” she argued, “but the evidence they’ve found of an extinct species of intelligent humanoid indigenes. That’s as close as we can come to proof of the fact that we aren’t alone in the galaxy without actually shaking hands with our mirror images. One humaniform race might be a fluke, but where there’s two there must be many more, even if one of the two is already defunct.”

“They’re not entirelysure that the sentients are extinct,” I told her. “Even if they’re still around, though, it doesn’t really proveanything. We’ve been scanning the sky for radio messages for a very long time now, so any other human races that have reached our level of technical sophistication must be very discreet. We mustn’t forget that Hopeis a strange historical anomaly, launched in a blind panic. Our entire philosophy of cosmic exploration has changed since it went out. Other humaniform races might be busy doing exactly what we’re now busy doing: remaking their spacefarers physically and psychologically.”

“We, Morty?” she echoed, twitching an eyebrow. She was lightly cyborgized, and had almost certainly undergone some subtle somatic engineering, but her appearance was much as I remembered it—and mine must have been exactly as she remembered it. Neither of us was the type to go in for cosmetic modification for fashion’s sake.

“I mean the fabers,” I admitted. “The forebears of the future human races: the six-handed, the eight-handed, and all the others that are still a twinkle in the imaginative eye.”

“I’m an old-fashioned ganzter,” she reminded me. “My job is adapting inorganic environments to suit the purposes of the humaniform, not the other way around.”

“Purposes?” I queried. “I thought you were an artist.”

“And all art is useless? I never had you pegged as a neo-Wildean, Morty. I’m the kind of artist who believes in the perfect combination of function and beauty.”

I was mildly surprised to hear that, given that coverage of Titan’s new skylines on the lunar news was usually careful to stress that however imposing they might seem the ice palaces were uninhabitable. When I put this point to Emily, she said: “Uninhabitable as yet.They’re not just pieces of sculpture, Morty—they’re greenhouses. We haven’t yet managed to distribute the heat as efficiently as we might, but it’s only a matter of time and hard work. Titan will never bathe in the kind of solar deluge that powers Earth’s biomass, although some of us are giving serious consideration to ways and means of increasing its meager portion. But it’s still an energy beneficiary, and it’s sitting next door to the second-biggest lode of raw materials in the system. It won’t be easy to manage the economics of exchange, but the day will come soon enough when life on the surface of Titan will be a great deal easier and more comfortable than life in the lunar air traps. If luck is with us we’ll both live to see it. Even if Titan’s core weren’t reasonably warm it could still be done, but the geothermal kick-start will make it a lot easier. Believe me, Morty—all those glittering castles are potential real estate, and within a hundred years, or one-fifty at the most, they’ll be the realest estates on the market.”

“At which point,” I said, “you’ll doubtless become richer by a further three or four orders of magnitude.”

“It’s not about getting rich,” she said. “There isn’t going to be any Hardinist Cabal on Titan. We figure that the highkickers are mature enough not to fall prey to the tragedy of the commons. Forget the Gaean Libs, Morty—we’re the next and last Revolution.”

I had to admit that “highkickers” was a much more flattering label than “footsloggers.” I knew that she’d have heard all the jokes about can-can and can-do, so I didn’t even try to sharpen my wit on the term. There wasn’t time enough to waste on that kind of nonsense.

FIFTY-SEVEN

Emily hadn’t come to the moon for a vacation and she was very busy, but she had adopted highkicker notions of personal space and the value of face-to-face contact, so I saw a lot more of her than I might have expected. When she did find time to relax I showed her the sights, such as they were. We went out of the dome together, in ultralight suitskins, so that we could look at the stars and feel the authentic lunar surface beneath our feet.

Because Titan had an atmosphere Emily didn’t see the true profusion of the stars very often, but that didn’t prevent her waxing lyrical about the wondrous sights that the cosmos presented to the inhabitants of the outer system. The view from the moon comprised exactly the same stars, and farside light-pollution was minimal, but mere logic couldn’t shake Emily’s conviction that everything looked better out on Civilization’s Edge. I suppose that it must have been easy to reach that opinion while Saturn dominated the sky. In Mare Moscoviense we never saw Earth.

“One day,” I told her, “I’ll have to come see it all for myself. VE tourism isn’t the same. Now that I’ve experienced Earth-based VEs from a lunar-gravity vantage point I’m even more alert than I used to be to their artificiality.” She knew that it was mere talk, of course. I was already in intensive training for the return to full gravity. She’d come along to the gym with me to put in little centrifuge time on her own account, and we’d played the usual lunatic games with massive dumbbells.

“Why wait, Morty?” she asked, softly. “Why one dayinstead of now?”

“I’ve got work to do,” I said. She knew that too. I’d shown her everything, including the new data webs I was patiently building and knitting together. She hadn’t paid much attention, just as I hadn’t paid much attention while she was shopping for new-generation gantzers that were just as gray and slimy as the ones that had become obsolete five minutes before.

“Oh yes,” she said, with deadly unenthusiasm. “Two more volumes of your precious History of Death.”

“Actually,” I confessed, a trifle belatedly, “it’s going to take more than two. Maybe I can cram it into three, but at present I’m thinking four.”

“Which would make it the longest procrastination in history, I suppose,” she said, cruelly. “Let’s see—the first version of the first part was deposited in 2614, and the fifth in 2849. That means that we can expect the ninth and last in 3082—except, of course, that it’ll only be the first version, so you’ll have to tinker round with it for another… what shall we say? A couple of hundred years? Say 3300 to make it a round number. By which time you’ll be seven hundred and eighty years old. It’s just as well that you don’t believe all that doom-laden Thanaticist cant about robotization and the necessity of making a good death before we become mere machines, isn’t it?”

“The research is going very well,” I told her, “and I’m more focused now than I used to be. I’m hoping to have the whole thing wrapped up well before the turn of the millennium.”

“Will anybody care?” she asked. “When did the last false emortal die? Fifty years ago? Don’t bother to tell me the exact date—it doesn’t make any difference. The war against death is over, Morty. It doesn’t matter any more. The point is to find the best way to live withoutdeath.”

“Finding the best way to live without death is part and parcel of the war against it,” I insisted.

“And have your studies brought you a single step closer to finding that best way?” she continued, implacably. “Have you found an answer that can satisfy you, Morty?” She didn’t need to add, Have I?It went without saying that neither of us had found any such thing– as yet.It also went without saying that Khan Mirafzal and his kin were hotter favorites to find an answer adequate to their own kind than any footslogger, no matter how high she could kick.

“I have time,” I said, defensively. “I’m emortal.”

“So are the murdering bastards tucked away in twenty-first-century SusAns,” she said, “just so long as they never come out. I forgot about them, of course, when I tried to remember when the last false emortal died. And there’s dear old Adam Zimmerman too—assuming that he isn’t just a guiding myth invented to stoke up the zeal of the the Ahasuerus Foundation’s Zamaners. How old is henow, if he actually exists? Nine hundred, almost to the day! Our invitations to the birthday party must have gotten lost in the ether. How much time there is to waste, when you think about it!”

“My work isn’t a waste,” I told her, stubbornly. “It’s not irrelevant. If you hadn’t left Earth before the Thanaticists got going, you’d understand that the war against death isn’t over.”

“No,” she said, in a different and darker tone. “It isn’t. I’ve lost three good friends in the last five years, and I’ll lose half a hundred more before the ice palaces are teeming with the latest kind of Utopians. I live every day with the possibility that they might be the ones who’ll lose me, but I’m not prepared to hide out in the bomb shelters indefinitely. I’m not prepared to reduce the horizons of my life to those of a glorified life raft. I want to be part of the Revolution, Morty, not part of the problem that makes the Revolution necessary.”

“That’s not fair,” I complained, meaning the suggestion that I was still psychologically becalmed in the life raft we’d shared when she was a child.

“What’s fairgot to do with it, you great oaf?” she answered, smiling like a faber surrounded by her children. One day, I realized, Emily might be surrounded by highkicking children of her own, busy with the work of populating a brand-new world with skylines more wondrous than any in the system, and perhaps even out of it. On the other hand, she might have moved on, beyond even the satellites of Uranus and Neptune, to some very-nearly-but-not-quite Earthlike world capable of providing a realchallenge to a sculptor of her abilities.

“I have to finish it,” I told her. “It’s what I am. I won’t apologize for that because I don’t think I owe you or the world any kind of apology for what I am orwhat I do.”

“No,” she conceded. “You don’t owe me or the world anything. I just don’t want you to be left behind”

“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, as I’d always told everyone who seemed to need telling. “Maybe I’m one of the ones who’s destined to remain there forever.”

“So what are you doing hanging about on the moon?” she said. “It’s just Antarctica without ice palaces, and noisier neighbors. I’ve seen you in the centrifuge and I know you’re ready. Your legs are positively itching to get to grips with all that gee force.”

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, legwise,” I admitted. “Maybe I stuck around just to see youfor one last time, before you get so far ahead of me that you’ll be way out of reach.”

“Oaf,” she said, tenderly. “Footslogger. Groundhog. Welldweller. You know that I fell in love with you in that stupid life raft, don’t you? You know that all the nonsense you trotted out to keep my mind off the danger we were in cut right to my heart. You made me, Mortimer Gray.”

I could have said straight out that she’d made me too, but she couldn’t have taken it as a compliment in that form. “That’s the way it works,” I said, instead. “Any two elementary particles that have ever been closely associated continue to modify one another’s movements no matter how far apart they move. I never understood exactly why, but I think it’s something to do with the beauty and charm of their constituent quarks—and if it isn’t, it ought to be.”