Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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FIFTY-EIGHT

It turned out that my legs weren’t quite as ready for the return to the Big Well as they seemed. The centrifuge can prepare returning lunatics for the shock of bottoming out, but it can’t prepare them for the sheer relentlessness of gravity. While you have levity at your beck and call it’s easy to think that you won’t miss it, but when it’s four hundred thousand kilometers out of reach it suddenly seems like a precious resource gone to waste.

A curious thing happened to me when I got back to Earth and booked into a rehab hostel. While I was enjoying my first long session in the swimming pool—although I wasn’t doing much actual swimming—I was joined by a tall man with unusually dark skin, whose walk as he crossed the polished floor suggested that his legs were not in the least need of readaptation. He swam several languorous lengths before making his way over to the lane in which I was dawdling.

“Hello, Mortimer,” he said. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

As soon as he suggested that I oughtto recognize him I did. It wasn’t so much the hue of his skin as the manner of his speech that tipped me off.

“All history is fantasy,” I quoted at him. “I was only a boy when we met, Mister Ngomi. It was more than three hundred years ago.”

He smiled broadly. “Call me Julius,” he said. “They said we’d never manage to keep hold of our early memories, didn’t they? The falsies, that is. Because serial rejuves and too much nano in the brain left theirmemories pretty much wiped out, they assumed we’d be the same, serially reincarnate within the same body. It’s good to be able to prove them wrong, isn’t it?”

“There’s not much else I remember from those days but bare facts,” I confessed. “You made an impression. It was so unexpected—the inside of the mountain, I mean. The kind of thing of which indelible traces are made. Did you actually come here lookingfor me?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I did.”

“Why?” I asked, guardedly. I remembered him clearly enough to be sure that his wasn’t the kind of job you did for a hundred years or so and then put behind you. If he’d been a finger of the invisible hand then, he was probably a thumb by now, maybe even one of the eyes that guided the hand.

“Emily Marchant,” he said, bluntly.

My memory of recent events was much sharper than time-worn indelible impressions. I could still replay the words within my mind, hearing them spoken in her own voice. 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.

“What about Emily Marchant?” I said, frostily.

“Don’t be like that,” he said, still grinning. “I’m not about to ask you to betray any intimate secrets. It’s just that the walls on the moon don’t have nearly as many ears and eyes as the walls on Earth—and the ice palaces of Titan might as well be on another world for all the worthwhile intelligence we get from them”

I didn’t laugh at the incredibly weak joke. “So what?” I said. “Didn’t the Sauls and their cozy circle make a Faustian bargain five hundred years ago that allowed them to keep ownership of Earth in exchange for their assistance in giving everyone with ambition a slice of the cosmic pie? Isn’t it a little late to decide that you want to own the entire solar system?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he said. “You’re a historian, Mortimer. The next section of your masterwork will deal with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so you must be acquainted with the elementary principles of Hardinism.”

“The institution of private property is good because it motivates owners to protect their resources from the ruinous depredations of greed,” I said. “It sounds fine in theory, but if there’s one thing intensive study of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries makes clear, it’s that owners can be every bit as greedy and destructive as competitors fighting to maximize their own returns from a common resource.”

“Hardinism is all about goodownership,” Ngomi informed me, perfectly straight-faced for once. “The Hardinist creed equates good ownership ship with responsible stewardship.What did Emily Marchant tell you about Jupiter?”

I honestly thought that it was a trick question. “Last time she was there,” I told him, “Titan was still in orbit around Saturn.”

“Don’t be disingenuous, Mortimer,” he retorted. “We aren’t interested in the petty Utopia that she and her friends are designing for her pretty glass houses, any more than we’re interested in the fabers’ plans to convert the entire asteroid belt into a fleet of starships to facilitate the Diaspora of the many-handed. Jupiter is different. There could be a real conflict of interest over Jupiter. You might think that it’s all a long way off, but if you and I expect to live forever and a day, we have to settle potential conflicts as early as possible, in case they fester and infect the whole Oikumene. As you’re so fond of saying, there’ll always be Earth-bound humans, and their long-term interests have to be protected. If that means staking a claim to Jupiter, so be it.”

I stared at him for a full half-minute, wishing that my head—the only part of me that wasn’t benefiting from the buoyancy of the water—didn’t seem quite so heavy. “I honestly don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Mister Ngomi,” I said. “I will admit that I wouldn’t tell you anything that Emily said to me in confidence, but I wouldn’t lie to you about it either. If Emily and the other rich folk in the outer system have any plans for the development of the Jovian satellites, she certainly didn’t mention them to me. I assume that all the good reasons the outward bounders had for letting Europa and Ganymede alone still hold.”

“It’s not the Jovian satellites we’re concerned about,” Ngomi said. “It’s the planet itself.”

I jumped to what seemed to me to be the natural conclusion. “Are you talking about the Type-2 movement?” I asked, uncertainly.

There had been a lot more talk about the Type-2 crusade of late, even among people who believed that the third millennium was far too soon to start planning for the day when the Oikumene would want to exploit the entirety of the sun’s energy by building a series of superstructures in Earth’s orbit. When asked where the mass would come from—as they frequently were nowadays, by the same casters who had once solicited my views on Thanaticism—Type-2 visionaries were fond of pointing out that Jupiter had enough mass to make a hollow compound sphere with a radius of one astronomical unit and some fifty meters separating the inner and outer shells, always provided that you could transport and transmute it.

I couldn’t believe that the Titanians were seriously involved with Type-2 persiflage, though; they were working on a very different timescale. By the time the Type-2 cowboys got to square one Emily and her fellow outlookers would presumably be halfway to the galactic center. Then I remembered, slightly belatedly, what she’d said about the possibility of improving Titan’s meager ration of the sun’s energy and guessed what Julius Ngomi was really talking about.

“I suppose I am, in a manner of speaking,” Ngomi replied, “but even you and I aren’t likely to live long enough to see the sun boxed in. It’s not so much what wemight want to do with Jupiter, way down the time line, as what theymight want to do with it much sooner.”

“Which is?” I parried, unwilling to tip my hand.

He looked at me as long and hard as I’d looked at him. Even at three hundred and some, most Earthbounders spend too much time in VE to know how to keep a straight face under intense inspection, but I’d just got back from thirty-odd years on the moon, where people look into one another’s faces far more frequently, and I’d learned how to mask my lies. As it happened, though, I didn’t have anything significant to hide.

“Rumor has it that they want to set it alight,” Ngomi told me, eventually. “They think the outer system could do with a little more native heat, and they figure that they ought to be able to get a fusion reaction going that will turn Jupiter into the system’s second sun, if they can only build robots capable of working at the core.”

The idea was an old one, but it didn’t have a newsworthy movement behind it—and that, I realized, was exactly the point. It was an idea that would never generate any kind of movement among the Earthboundbecause the Earthbound had nothing to gain by it. On the other hand, if Type-2 really were fated to gain historical momentum over the centuries and the millennia, however slowly, the Earthbound might well have something to loseby it. Rightly or wrongly, the Earth’s owners saw themselves as good and responsible stewards, duty-bound custodians of the future of humankind as well as Garden Earth.

“She really didn’t mention Jupiter at all,” I said, too quickly to stop myself as I belatedly realized that Ngomi’s purpose in broaching the subject wasn’t actually to find out whether Emily Marchant had unthinkingly tossed me a valuable nugget of information but to let me in on his side of the argument: to invite me to plight my ideological troth to him, the invisible hand and the legions of the Earthbound. I was ashamed of the reflex that made me wonder why he was bothering, given that I was a mere historian, irrelevant to the course and causes of humankind’s future. Hadn’t I tried with all my might to persuade Emily and Khan Mirafzal that I wasn’tirrelevant and that the history of death still had lessons to teach us because the ultimate war was still going on, in its patient and muted fashion?

“That’s all right,” said Julius Ngomi, serenely. “Don’t worry about it. Feel free to mention this conversation to her, of course, next time you update her on what’s happening way down here in the Well.”

All the walls on Earth had ears and eyes. No VE conversations, however great the time delay to which they might be subject, were immune from the attentions of clever eavesdroppers. Of course Mister Ngomi wanted me to raise the subject, given that Emily hadn’t seen fit to raise it herself.

“Is she really that important?” I asked him. “I knew she was rich, but not thatrich.”

“She’s a very talented lady,” Julius Ngomi said, before swimming away to the far end of the pool and disappearing from my life for another few centuries. “She takes her art very seriously indeed. We’ve always had a great respect for authentic visionaries because that’s what we’vealways tried to be.”

FIFTY-NINE

The sixth part of the History of Death, entitled Fields of Battle, was launched on 24 July 2888. Its subject matter was war, but my commentary didn’t pay much attention to the actual fighting of the wars of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. My main concern was with the mythologyof warfare as it developed in the period under consideration, and with the ways in which the development of the mass media of communication transformed the business and the perceived meanings of warfare. I began my main argumentative sequence with the Crimean War because it was the first war to be extensively covered by newspaper reporters, and the first whose conduct was drastically affected thereby.

Before the Crimea, I argued, wars had been “private” events, entirely the affairs of the men who started them and the men who fought them. They had had a devastating effect on the local populations of the arenas in which they were fought but had been largely irrelevant to distant civilian populations. The British Timeshad changed all that by making the Crimean War the business of all its readers, exposing the government and military leaders to public scrutiny and to public scorn. Reports from the front had scandalized the nation by creating an awareness of how ridiculously inefficient the organization of the army was and what a toll of human life was exacted upon the troops in consequence—not merely deaths in battle, but deaths from injury and disease caused by the appalling lack of care given to wounded soldiers. That reportage had not only had practical consequences, but imaginative consequences. It had rewritten the entire mythology of heroism in an intricate webwork of new legends, ranging from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the secular canonization of Florence Nightingale.

Throughout the next two centuries, I argued, war and publicity were entwined in an intimate and tightly drawn knot. Control of the news media became vital to propagandist control of popular morale, and governments engaged in war had to became architects of the mythology of war as well as planners of military strategy. Heroism and jingoism became the currency of consent; where governments failed to secure the right public image for the wars they fought, they fell. I tracked the way in which attitudes to death in war, especially to the endangerment of civilian populations, were dramatically transformed by the three so-called World Wars and by the way those wars were subsequently mythologized in memory and fiction.

My commentary dwelt at great length on the way the first World War was “sold” to those who must fight it as a war to end war and on the consequent sense of betrayal that followed when it failed to live up to this billing. I went on to argue, however, that if the sequence of global wars were seen as a single event, then their collective example really had brought into being an attitude of mind that ultimately forbade wars. This was, of course, rather controversial. Many modern historians had lumped together the First and Second World Wars as phases of a single conflict, but the majority tended to deny that the idea of the “Third World War” had ever had any validity and that the conflicts of the twenty-first century were of a very different kind. My peers were used to arguing that although the plague wars and their corollaries had indeed infected the whole world they were not international conflicts and thus belonged to an entirely different conceptual category. I disagreed, proposing that if one set aside the carefully managed public representations of the global wars as so much false advertising, one could easily see that none of them had really been contests for national hegemony.

Other historians had become fond of distinguishing the plague wars from their predecessors on the grounds that they were actually nasty but necessary “class wars” waged by the world’s rich against underclasses that might otherwise have swept them away by revolution. Orthodox Hardinists always added that these underclasses would also have destroyed the ecosphere in the ultimate “tragedy of the commons.” Such apologists were also careful to say that if the plague of sterility really had been a war then it was the last and best of the goodand responsiblewars.

I swept all such distinctions casually aside. I suppose that my refusing to see any of the world wars as an unmitigated disaster was not so very unorthodox, but my refusal to see them as horrific examples of the barbarity of ancient man certainly was. I argued that the trumpery nationalism that had replaced the great religions as the main creator and definer of a sense of human community was a poor and petty thing, but I did not condemn it as an evil. I admitted that the massive conflicts engendered in its name were tragic, but I insisted that they were a necessary stage in historical development. All the empires of faith, including the tawdry empires of patriotism and nationalism, were utterly incompetent to complete their self-defined tasks, but they were necessary in spite of that. They were always bound to fail, and their disintegration was always bound to be bloody, because they were brave but hopeless attempts to make a virtue of dire necessity, but they served their temporary purpose.

As one more transfiguration of the meaning of death, temporarily redeeming the ultimate evil by enshrouding it in nobility while also laying bare the appalling hollowness of exactly those pretensions, the global wars had bridged the historical gap between the senility of religion and the maturity of science. Not until the scientifically guided global wars had done their work and run their course, I argued, could the groundwork for a genuinehuman community—in which all mankind could properly and meaningfully join—be properly laid. The foundations of the ultimate world order had to be laid in the common experience of all nations, as part of a hard-won and well-understood universal heritage.

I repeated yet again that no matter who the citizens of particular nations had appointed as their enemies, the only realenemy of all humankind was death itself. Only by facing up to death in a new way, by gradually transforming the role of death as part of the means to human ends, could a true human community be made. Even the petty wars of the bloodiest period in human history, whatever their immediate purpose in settling economic squabbles and pandering to the megalomaniac psychoses of national leaders, had played an essential part in the shifting pattern of history. They had, I insisted, provided a vast, all-encompassing, and quite invaluable carnival of destruction—a carnival that could have no other ultimate outcome but to make human beings weary of the lust to kill, lest they bring about their extinction.

Some reviewers condemned Fields of Battleon the grounds of its evident irrelevance to a world that had banished war, but I was heartened by the general tenor of its reception. A few critics descended to sarcasm in welcoming the fact that my thesis had returned to the safe track of true history, dealing exclusively with things safely dead and buried, but there was clear evidence that the earlier parts of my work had now grown sufficiently familiar for the whole enterprise to be treated with respect.

My brief notoriety had not been entirely forgotten, and certainly not forgiven, in academic circles but it seemed to me that the good effects of that publicity were at last beginning to outweigh the bad. The Historywas now being taken seriously even by many who were unsympathetic to its stance, and my theories were now firmly established on the world’s intellectual agenda. Several reviewers actually confessed that they were now looking forward to the next installment of the story.

SIXTY

When I was ready to leave the rehab center I shopped around for an inexpensive place to live. I wanted a complete contrast to my life on the moon, so I immediately rejected Antarctica and the Ice Age-afflicted parts of the Northern Hemisphere. I didn’t want to return to Africa or South America, so that narrowed my choices considerably. When I found myself recoiling in a quasi-reflexive manner from the thought of living in Oceania I became slightly anxious. I told myself that emortals could not afford to accumulate hang-ups and that it was high time I put the legacy of the Coral Sea Catastrophe firmly behind me.

I eventually decided to rent an apt-capsule in Neyu, one of the virginal islands of New Tonga.

Once the devastation of the original Creationist Islands had been repaired—although the vast majority of the ecological microcosms had been replaced rather than restored—the Continental Engineers had raised new islands by the score from the relatively shallow sea. New Tonga was a blue-sea region rather than a vast tract of LAP-gel, but it was neither a wilderness reserve nor a glorified fish farm.

Insofar as there was an avant garde among Earthbound genetic artists, the virgin isles of New Tonga were the stomping ground of its members. I was mildly interested in that avant garde because one of its factions—the Tachytelic Perfectionists—had borrowed rhetoric from the Thanaticists in openly proclaiming themselves to be “artists in death,” working with ephemeral artificial organisms designed to live very briefly within a context of ferocious competition and natural selection.

The capstack in which my apt was located was an architectural fantasia of which even Emily might have approved, although it was anything but icy. It was bright and gaudy, complex without being confused. The many textures of its outer tegument recalled the rinds of fruit and the chitinous shells of marine mollusks, and its multitudinous tiny windows were somewhat reminiscent of the facets of an insect’s compound eye.

I could not, of course, select my immediate neighbors. I was dismayed at first to find that not only were there no Tachytelic Perfectionists living in the building, but that the faction in question was regarded as something of a joke by the geneticists who did live there. The great majority of the biotechnologists who lived in the caps tack did not consider themselves to be “artists” at all, and those who did were classical Aesthetes cast in the antique mould of the second Oscar Wilde.

My closest neighbors, whose most voluble spokesman was a woman of my own age named Mica Pershing, were mostly steadfastly utilitarian island builders. They were firmly committed to a newly emergent alliance between old-fashioned gantzers and organic engineers. Mica explained to me after welcoming me into their midst that she and her associates were perfectly happy to accept the label of Continental Engineers, but she took care to emphasize the contention that they were a new breed, not to be confused with their forerunners.

“We’re the trueContinental Engineers,” she told me. “Being more than three hundred years old, I sometimes get accused of belonging to the old guard by the up-and-coming centenarian youngsters, but I’m as forward-looking as any of them. I expect you get that sort of thing yourself—or is the profession of history the precious exception wherein experience receives its proper due?”

I assured her that it was not, although it certainly ought to have been.

During the previous three hundred years I had been briefly acquainted with many people who would have styled themselves Continental Engineers, but most of those I had recently encountered had been ambitious to move to the next logical stage of that career path, becoming Planetary Engineers. I had not realized, although it would have been obvious had I cared to study the logic of the situation, that the emigration of those so minded was bound to leave behind a hard core of fundamentalists, who would see the art and craft of Continental Engineering as a quintessentially Earthbound discipline. My neighbors on Neyu had no ambition to join the terraformers on Mars or the palace builders on Titan; even their obsession with the remaking of Garden Earth was highly specialized.

The first self-appointed Continental Engineers to make a real impact on the popular imagination, way back in the twenty-first century, had done so by mounting a campaign to persuade the United Nations to license the building of a dam across the Straits of Gibraltar. Because more water evaporates from the Mediterranean than flows into it from rivers, that plan would have considerably increased the land surface of southern Europe and Northern Africa. It had, of course, never come to fruition, but its dogged pursuit had won the Engineers a whole series of consolation prizes. Their island-building activities had been boosted considerably by the Decimation.

More recently, the climatic disruptions caused by the advancing Ice Age had given Continental Engineering a further boost, allowing its propagandists to promote the idea of raising new lands in the tropics as a refuge for emigrants from the newly frozen north. The “old-fashioned gantzers” among them had been so busy for the previous two centuries that they had become increasingly assertive, protesting loudly against anyone who dared to suppose that their attitudes were as obsolescent as their tools. Mica was a fairly typical specimen.

When I moved to Neyu the actual endeavors of the resident gantzers were still heavily dependent on traditional techniques that Emily Marchant would have regarded as laughably primitive. The basics of island building had not changed in half a millennium: crude bacterial cyborgs that did little more than agglomerate huge towers of cemented sand provided the foundations, and “lightning corals” did the finishing work. Such techniques were perfectly adequate to the task of creating great archipelagos of new islands. The Continental Engineers’s progressives were, however, already thinking at least two steps ahead.

Even the “moderates” based in New Tonga and its sister states saw the ever-increasing network of bridges connecting the new islands as a blueprint for the highways of a new Pacific continent twice the size of Australia. Their extremists were already talking about New Pangaea and New Gondwanaland: rival versions of a grand plan to take technical control over the whole set of Earth’s tectonic plates and institute a new era of macrogeographical design.

The biologists who were now collaborating with the Continental Engineers had already begun planting vast networks of “enhanced seaweeds” in the most suitable enclaves of the blue-sea region. The algae in question were enhanced in the sense that they combined the best features of kelps and wracks with surface features modeled on freshwater-dwelling flowering plants, especially water lilies.

The most obvious result of the Engineers’ hard labor was that Neyu was not surrounded by the blue sea at all but by floral carpets that extended to the horizon and far beyond. These uneven carpets included many “islands” of their own: stable regions that could sustain farms of an entirely new kind.

The initial disappointment caused by the dearth of Tachytelic Perfectionists in my immediate vicinity was soon offset by the discovery of what my nearest neighbors were actually doing. I was delighted to have the opportunity of observing their new and bolder adventures at close range.