Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

SEVENTY

I remained on Neyu for forty years after Lua Tawana left the archipelago. None of my surviving co-parents was in any greater hurry to leave the island. Banastre was the first to depart for another continent, followed by Tricia, but they both returned at irregular intervals, often making special trips to coincide with Lua’s visits. I continued to see Mica socially and even got together with Ng at widely spaced but fairly regular intervals. Although we had never been a close family the fact that the five survivors had shared a significant loss continued to bind us together.

Of exactly whatit was that bound us I was unsure. It wasn’t grief in any ordinary sense of the word, and it may have been something for which New Humans had not yet invented a word. Immediately after the tragedy my co-parents had seemed to outside observers to be exaggeratedly calm and philosophical, almost as if the loss of three spouses was simply a minor glitch in the infinitely unfolding pattern of their lives, but I knew that even if they did not know how best to express it, the effect of the deaths upon them had been profound. They had all grown accustomed to their own emortality, almost to the extent that they had ceased to think about death at all, and the simultaneous loss of three co-spouses had introduced a strange and almost unaccountable rift into the pattern of their affairs. They were not the same afterward, any more than I had been the same after losing Grizel to the Kwarra.

I was less affected than any of them, not merely because I had gone through it before but because I was a man who had lived for centuries in the most intimate contact with the idea of death. The shock of our mutual loss was not nearly as strange to me as it was to them, nor did it seem unaccountable. I often found myself attempting to persuade my ex-spouses that the tragedy had had its positive, life-enhancing side, repeating with approval what Lua had said about wanting to conserve the bad feeling and pontificating about the role played by death in defining experiences as important and worthwhile.

Mica understood, I think—but Tricia never did. We had been close once, but Samuel Wheatstone’s foolery drove us apart irrevocably, and she ended up thinking of me as a traitor to her personal cause as well as an opponent of her philosophical cause.

When that cause went the same way as all fashionable movements Samuel Wheatstone went with it. He dropped out of public view, although the memory of his remarkable mask was not easily put away—perhaps not as easily as the mask itself. I doubt that he ever replaced his artificial eyes with tissue-cultured replicas of those with which he had been born, but I doubt that he kept the more exotic embellishments with which he had decorated his skull. Most of those had been purely for show. Such cyborg modifications as did become briefly popular among the Earthbound were mostly of the same kind—essentially cosmetic even when they did have ostensible functions. Tricia’s were entirely cosmetic, but they always seemed to me to be rather tasteless. Francesca might have made a much better model for the wilder excesses of ET fanaticism, had she lived.

Given that natural selection had adapted the human body very carefully to the requirements of life at the Earth’s surface, it is hardly surprising that its conventional form met most people’s needs and desires. Although suitskins designed for Earthly use had become much cleverer over time, they remained relatively meek and unobtrusive passengers on the human body. The inhabitants of the outer system, on the other hand, had very different needs and desires, and theirsuitskins had become so inventive that it was easy to argue that all the human beings who did not live on the Earth’s surface were heavily cyborgized simply by virtue of the clothing they wore.

Off-world examples had prompted the Cyborganization fad but from the point of view of most off-worlders the wayward tides of Earthly fashion were the whims of the irredeemably decadent. The highkickers were seriousabout the possibilities of cyborgization, and there were many among them who felt that if cyborgization was the price they would have to pay to establish authentic Utopias in the ice-palace cities that awaited them on Titan and the Uranian moons, then it was a price well worth paying. There were not quite so many who felt that the work of galactic exploration ought to be the province of cyborgized humans rather than silver-piloted probes, but there were enough of them to force the progress of human-machine hybridization into ever-more-adventurous channels.

Every message I received from Emily Marchant in the thirtieth century seemed to come from a different person. Before 2900 even the high-kickers had been careful to retain their own faces, but Samuel Wheatstone’s extravagant reconstruction of his own appearance had accurately reflected the demise of that particular taboo. Emily was never one to support ornamental cyborgization, but she lost her former inhibitions about letting her artificial augmentations show. Her first set of artificial eyes was carefully designed to resemble the ones they replaced, but her second wasn’t, and the parts of her suitskin overlaying the flesh of her face gradually abandoned their attempts to reproduce the appearance that had once lain “beneath” them.

I asked Emily many questions about her metamorphosis, but she rarely thought them worth answering, and the long time delay between exchanges made it easy for her to ignore them. Her transmissions were always full of her own news, her own hopes, and her own fears—among which the fear of robotization and the fear of losing her identity did not seem to figure at all.

I found all this rather disturbing, but Emily seemed to find my own priorities equally strange and became increasingly insistent that the entire population of the Earthbound had become dangerously insensitive to the situations developing outside the system.

“It’s as if the hard-core Hardinists have washed their hands of the whole affair,” she complained in one message, delivered from the heart of one of her finest virtual ice-palaces. “Having despaired of exercising any control over the terraformation of Maya they seem to have decided that Earth is their only concern. I know they don’t censor the news, but they do exert an enormous influence on its agenda, and Earth’s casters seem to have followed their lead in dismissing almost all of the information-flow from outside the system as irrelevant and uninteresting. It’s notirrelevant, Morty. It’s infinitely more important than 99 percent of what happens on the Earth’s surface.

“No one on Earth seems to be in the least troubled by the attrition rate of the kalpa probes. People down there seem to think that because so many of the old Arks went missing it’s not surprising that so many of the kalpas have lost contact, but the cases aren’t similar at all. Something’s happening out there, Morty, and it has consequences for all of us. The Fermi paradox has been around so long that it’s lost its power to amaze or frighten the Earthbound, but we can still feel its urgency. Given Earth, Ararat, and Maya, the galaxy ought to be full of mature civilizations broadcasting away like crazy, but it’s not—and the search for possible Type-2 civilizations has drawn a complete blank. The discovery of Ararat and Maya tells us that we can’tbe alone, but it’s no longer a question of wherethe hell are they. The question we ought to be asking—all of us, Morty, not just the highkickers—is whatthe hell are they?

“Whoever’s out there is much less like us than we’ve been prepared to assume, and the one thing we can be sure of is that contact is just around the corner, even if it hasn’t been made already. We’re beginning to believe that most of the missing Arks and nearly all the missing kalpas have made contact with something, but we can’t begin to guess what it is—and the Earthbound don’t even seem to care. We’re worried that while we’re renewing ourselves constantly the population of Earth is growing contentedly old, relaxing into a lotus-eater existence. Nobody out here uses robotizationas a term of abuse any more, but we think that something like what we used to mean by that term has already happened to the Earthbound. They’ve become insular, self-satisfied, and lazy. They’ve lost their progressive impetus to the extent that they can’t even seem to realize that something is badly wrongin the inner reaches of the galaxy, and that it matters”

The overwhelming majority of my Earthbound friends and acquaintances would have said, unhesitatingly, that Emily was talking nonsense. They would have judged that her fears were symptoms of “outer-system paranoia”—a phrase whose use had become so earnest that its users tended to forget that it was a mere slogan and not a real disease. The new breed of Continental Engineers thought of themselves as progress personified, and the Tachytelic Perfectionists considered themselves to be the most ardent campaigners for change that Garden Earth had ever entertained, so charges of decadence simply bounced off them. The idea that the galactic center was home to some unspecified menace seemed to contented Earthdwellers to be silly scaremongering.

When I put some of the points made in Emily’s messages to Mica Pershing her reaction was typical, and exactly what I’d expected.

“The outer system people are all crazy,” she said. “Tricia loses her sense of proportion sometimes when she talks about the benefits of cyborgization, but at least she has a sensible notion of what might count as a benefit. The outer-system people have been carried away by mechanization for mechanization’s sake. They think that because it’s possible to design suitskins that will let them operate in hard vacuum for days on end and live on the surface of Titan almost indefinitely that those are worthwhile things to do. They don’t just want to fly spaceships, they want to bespaceships—and they’re starting to cultivate the anxieties of spaceships. Deep space is a horrible and hostile environment, and the universe is full of it. Planets are where life belongs, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that comfortable planets are few and far between—and that the farness in question consists of a vile abyss of emptiness. Of course malfunctions happen, even in the most carefully designed systems. Silvers fail—even the high-grade silvers built into kalpa probes. It’s only to be expected—and the only people who find the prospect unthinkable are people who are on the brink of giving up their own humanity in order to becomethe next generation of kalpas. Earth is where all realprogress takes place, because no matter how far the Oikumene extends Earth will always be its one and only heart, humankind’s one and only home”

Had I been anyone other than Emily Marchant’s trusted confidante I might have agreed with Mica, but it would have seemed disloyal to do so—and I was not at all sure that Emily was wrong.

“Even if all that’s true, the Earthbound shouldn’t lose sight of the farther horizons,” I told Mica, earnestly. “We’re fast approaching the day when Earth’s billions will be a minority within the Oikumene—and once that balance has shifted, the spacefarers’ majority will grow and grow. How long will it be before they’rethe human race and Earth is just a quaint and quiet backwater where the old prehuman folks jealousy preserve their ancient habits?”

“Personally,” Mica told me, “I don’t think it will ever happen. I think the expansion into space has just been a fad, like Cyborganization. I think it’s hitting its natural limits now and that your friend’s panic is the first symptom of a fundamental change in attitude. I think the outward urge will wither and die, and that the outer system people will begin to reclaim their humanity. When we’ve built the new continent, they’ll be able to return to Earth—and as soon as the possibility materializes, they’ll be lining up to do it. The cyborgs will revert to honest flesh, and the fabers will grow legs.”

I could imagine exactly what Emily would have said to that—and so, I presume, could Lua Tawana, who announced when she visited Neyu to celebrate her fortieth birthday that she had decided to leave Earth. She had secured a job on the moon, but her ultimate aim was to go to Titan and make that her home for a century or two.

“It’s where the future is,” she told us, “and where the real movers and shakers are. If I’m to take an active part in making the future, that’s where I have to be. Here, I could only help to build another continent just like all the rest. There, I can help to build a world like none that has ever been seen or imagined before. And after Titan, who knows?”

SEVENTY-ONE

The ninth volume of the History of Death, entitled The Honeymoon of Emortality, was launched on 28 October 2975. The knot of supportive data was slight by comparison with its predecessors, but the accompanying commentary was extensive—which led many academic reviewers to lament the fact that I had given up “real history” in favor of “popular journalism.” Even those who were sympathetic suggested that I had begun to rush my work, although those who remembered that it had originally been planned as a seven-volume work were not slow to assert that the contrary was the case and that I was procrastinating because I had become afraid of the letdown effect of finishing it.

The main focus of the commentary was the development of attitudes to longevity and potential emortality following the establishment of the principle that every human child has a right to be born emortal. The reason that it was more lightly supported than any of its predecessors was simply that it needed less support. I still believe that it was unnecessary to make a fetish of gathering every last public statement ever made on the subject into a single knot, let alone that I should have made far more effort to trawl private archives for relevant comments.

The central stream of my argument dutifully weighed the significance of the belated extinction of the “nuclear” family and gave careful consideration to the backlash generated by the ideological rebellion of the Humanists, whose quest to preserve “the authentic Homo sapiens”had once led many to retreat to islands that the Continental Engineers were now integrating into their “new continent.” I was, however, more interested in less inevitable social processes and subtler reactions. I felt—and still feel—that I had more interesting observations to make on the spread of such new philosophies of life as neo-Stoicism, neo-Epicureanism, and Xenophilia.

My main task, as I saw it, was to place these oft-discussed matters in their proper context: the spectrum of inherited attitudes, myths, and fictions by means of which mankind had for thousands of years wistfully contemplated the possibility of extended life.

In fulfilling this task, I contended that traditional attitudes to the idea of emortality—including the common reactionary notion that people would inevitably find emortality intolerably tedious—were essentially an expression of “sour grapes.” While people thought that emortality was impossible, I pointed out, it made perfect sense for them to invent reasons why it would be undesirable anyhow, but when it became a reality, the imaginative battle had to be fought in earnest. The burden of these cultivated anxieties had to be shed, and a new mythology formulated—but that process had been painfully slow. The gradual transformation of the “eternal tedium” hypothesis into the “robotization” hypothesis represented direly slow progress.

My commentary flatly refused to give any substantial credit to the fears of those mortal men who felt that the advent of emortality might be a bad thing. I was as dismissive of the Robot Assassins and the original Thanaticists as I was of the Humanists. Despite what my fiercest critics alleged, however, I did make a serious attempt to understand the thinking of such people and to fit it into the larger picture that my Historyhad now brought to the brink of completion.

It was inevitable, in a world that still contained millions of self-described New Stoics, that my evaluation of their forebears would attract vitriolic criticism. When I condemned the people who first formulated the insistence that asceticism was the natural ideological partner of emortality as victims of an “understandable delusion” I knew that I was inviting trouble, but I did it because I thought that I was right, not because I thought that the controversy would boost my access fees.

It did not surprise my critics in the least, of course, that I commended neo-Epicureanism as the optimal psychological adaptation to emortality. Even those who did not know enough biographical details to judge that I had been a lifelong, if slightly unsteady, adherent of “careful hedonism” had inferred from the earlier parts of my study that I was an ardent champion of self-knowledge and avoidance of excess. The cruelest of the early reviewers did venture to suggest that I had been so halfhearted a neo-Epicurean as almost to qualify as a neo-Stoic by default, but I was well used by then to treating criticism of that nature with deserved contempt.

One of the appendixes to The Honeymoon of Emortalitycollated the statistics of birth and death during the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth centuries, recording the spread of Zaman transformations and the universalization of ectogenesis on Earth and the extension of the Oikumene throughout and beyond the solar system. I recorded acknowledgments to numerous faber scholars based on the moon and Mars for their assistance in gleaning information from the slowly diffusing microworlds and the first wave of their descendant starships. I noted that because the transfer of information between data stores was limited by the speed of light, Earth-based historians might have to wait centuries for significant data about the more distant human colonies, but I promised that I would do my best to update the statistics as and when I could.

These data showed, slightly to my surprise, that the number of individuals of the various humankinds that now existed had already begun to increase more rapidly than ever before by the time of my birth. I could not help but recall, as I noted that conclusion, the lectures I had received from Papa Domenico on the subject of the alleged sterility of the “realist” philosophy and the supposedly inevitable victory of “virtualism.” What, I wondered, would Papa Domenico have thought of Emily Marchant and the highkickers? What would he have thought of a human race whose “virtualist Utopians” were now a small minority? I consigned to a footnote the observation that that although Homo sapiens sapienshad become extinct in the twenty-eighth century there was as yet no consensus on the labeling of its descendant species.

Although it generated a good deal of interest and a very healthy financial return, many lay reviewers were disappointed that the coverage of The Honeymoon of Emortalitydid not extend to the present day. The surviving Cyborganizers—predictably grateful for the opportunity to heat up a flagging controversy—reacted more noisily than anyone else to this “manifest cowardice” but I had decided that it would be more sensible to reserve such discussions to a tenth and concluding volume of my magnum opus.

The conclusion of my ninth commentary promised that I would consider in all due detail the futurological arguments of the Cyborganizers as well as the hopes and expectations of other contemporary schools of thought. As I had told Emily when she visited the moon, I still had every intention of completing my Herculean labor by the end of the millennium, and I urged my loyal readers to be patient for just a little while longer.

SEVENTY-TWO

I didn’t bother to find another place to live before I left Neyu for good. For several years I led a contentedly rootless existence, traveling far more widely about the mainstreams and backwaters of Garden Earth than I had ever contrived to do before.

In my first 480 years I had seen hundreds of archaeological sites and thousands of museums but relatively little of the casters’ hit parade of “the wonders of the world.” Once, when I enlisted the help of my domestic silver in adding up the time I had spent away from my various homes I found that I had spent more hours inside mountains than sampling the glories of the managed ecosphere. It would have been easy enough to perform a second set of calculations with regard to the time I had spent in virtual environments, but I did not do so. I had no doubt that I had spent far many more hours sampling the delights of imaginary landscapes than real ones even in more recent centuries, let alone in the early years I had spent exploring Papa Domenico’s beloved Universe Without Limits.

Now that further alternatives to Earthbound life appeared to be emerging almost yearly from the mists of possibility, not only in the outer system but also in the colony worlds, it was starkly obvious that every person born on Earth had to make the choice that Lua Tawana had recently made: to stay or to seek one’s fortune in the infinite. I was part of the older generation in the fashionable reckoning of the day, and my neighbors on Neyu always assumed that I had made my choice long before, but I had never entirely shaken off the confusion that had surrounded my descent from Mare Moscoviense. I was still committed to the neo-Epicurean ethic of permanent growth and I refused to consider the matter settled. I felt as young as I ever had, and I certainly didn’t want to be reckoned an element of the Earthbound’s supposed decadence. I decided that I would have to renew my decision to remain Earthbound at least once in every century and that it ought to be an informed decision, based on intimate experience of what Garden Earth had to offer to those who chose to remain.

As the thirtieth century wound down, therefore, I made judicious use of the healthy earnings of the more recent volumes of my Historyto roam around all six of the old continents. I made a particular point of visiting those parts of the globe that I had missed out on during my first two centuries of life, although ingrained habit ensured that I took care to include all those sites of special historical interest that had somehow slipped through the nets of my previous itineraries.

Everything I saw was transformed by my habit-educated eyes and the sheer relentlessness of my progress into a series of monuments: memorials of those luckless eras before men invented science and civilization and became demigods. I visited a hundred cities and at least as many agricultural and “protected wilderness” areas. I toured a thousand limited ecosystems, both recapitulative and innovative. I also took care to locate and visit many old friends, including as many of my former marriage partners as I could find.

The Lamu Rainmakers had long since ceased to make mere rain, but they had not lost their commitment to ecological management. Axel, Jodocus, and Minna were still on Earth and all enthusiastic Gardeners. Even more remarkably, they were still in regular touch with one another. They provided the best evidence I had ever found, outside my own admittedly unusual relationship with Emily Marchant, that friendship could endure forever even though the friends maintained the pace of their own personal evolution. I found them much changed—and was mildly surprised that they thought the same of me.

“You’re not as self-protective as you used to be, Morty,” Axel observed. “Less defensive.Life on the moon must have loosened you up—I’ve noticed that a lot of returners never quite readapt to allthe correlates of gravity. You should have known better than to take on that Cyborganizer, though. He was always going to make you look slow.”

“I never realized back in the twenty-sixth that you were so well connected,” Jodocus marveled. “The number of times you told us about meeting Julius Ngomi inside a mountain and saving Emily Marchant’s life! They’re two of the most important people in the Oikumene now! So tell me—what’s on the agenda of this big meeting they’re planning to settle the future of the human race?”

I didn’t like to admit that I had only the faintest idea, gleaned from reading between the lines of Emily’s VE-monologue communications, so I told Jodocus that the fate of Jupiter was likely to be a significant bone of contention. He nodded sagely, as if I had provided official confirmation of his own suspicions.

“The Type-2 people seem to be getting their act together at last,” he observed. “Maybe they’re right to reckon that we’ve been fully fledged Type-1 for a couple of centuries and that it’s high time we started stocking Earth’s orbit with a string of protoworlds. I suspect that’s what the new generation of smart multifunctional spaceships is really designed for, although all the talk is of atmosphere diving in the gas giants and ice breaking on Titan and Europa. Transmutation makes far more sense than that old second star nonsense—and a Type-2 progression is the rational response to the news that Earthlike planets are fewer, farther between, and far less useful than we dared to hope.”

Jodocus seemed to know more about such matters than I did, or was at least prepared to pretend that he did, but I was content to let him think that I knew far more than I was prepared to make public, and I returned our conversation to the safer ground of twenty-sixth-century Africa.

Minna seemed to have her feet more firmly planted on terra firma than any of the others. After dutifully chiding me for letting things slide so far for so long she was the one who filled me in on recent family history.

“Camilla’s on Europa now,” she told me, “investigating the possibility of making an ecosphere for the core ocean that can accommodate modified humans—the ultimate merpeople. It wouldn’t be a sealed ecosphere. It would be fully connected to the rest of the Oikumene by continuous traffic through the ice shell, using the new smart spaceships. Keir’s still working in harness with silvers, but spaceship AIs are the ones he’s involved with now He’s here, there, and everywhere—the satellites of all the outer planets—but he’s still active in the Rad Libs. He’s too far out right now to communicate regularly. Eve’s still in the Well, though. She was in the Arctic last time I heard from her. She’s like you—always liked things a few degrees colder than the rest of us. Ocean currents are her thing now, but it’s such a political minefield that she never seems to be able to get anything done.Couldn’t stand it myself. Give me fresh water any day—it was a political hot potato in Africa back in the twenty-sixth but nowadays putting lakes and rivers in place is all plain sailing, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

I forgave her the pun.

Having spent some time with my first marriage partners it seemed only appropriate to spend a little with Sharane Fereday. She had been through a dozen more marriages since ours, but she was temporarily unattached. Unlike the Rainmakers, she could see only similarities between my new and old selves, but her comparisons were not as uncomplimentary as they would once have been.

“I often think that people like you are better fitted to emortality than people like me,” she confided. “You need a steady pace to stay long distances, and I’ve always been an existential sprinter. I feel as if I’ve lived my life in fits and starts. It’s had its rewards, of course, but I think I can see the advantages of the steady slog far better now than I could when we were married. I admire you, Morty, I really do. I admire the way you stuck to that history of yours until it was finished. Tenacity is an underrated virtue.”

“It’s not quitefinished,” I pointed out. “The donkey work’s done and dusted, but I’m still pondering and polishing the final commentary. To tell you the truth, I feel that some of my critics are right about my procrastinating slightly more than is necessary or reasonable. Sometimes, I wonder if I can actually bear to put the last full stop in place—but I’ve sworn to finish it by the end of the millennium, and I will. It’ll be launched long before the end of December 3000.”

“And what will you do then?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Perhaps I’ll write something else—something very different. I had wondered about becoming some sort of Gardener, but having spent so much time with the Rainmakers in the last couple of years I’ve recovered all my old doubts about my suitability for that kind of work. I’ve been wondering incessantly about off-planet possibilities, of course. My daughter’s become almost as clamorous as Emily Marchant in her insistence that spacefaring is the only way to make proper use of indefinite longevity, but I’m not sure about my suitability for that either. I’ve seen a lot of Garden Earth these last few years, and I feel at homehere in a way that I wouldn’t like to lose. I’m glad I’ve lived on the moon, and I’d certainly like to visitthe outer system some day, but I’m not sure that I’d ever want to go into space to live—even to one of these new Earths that Type-2 people want to build in Earth orbit.”

“I know what you mean,” Sharane agreed. “If what the casters say about these smart spaceships is true, it will soon become as easy to take tourist trips round the system as it is to tour Earth. When the day comes, I’ll be glad to see the sights. The VE reproductions are great, but they’re not the real thing. I don’t want to become a citizen of the outer darkness, though. I’m Earthbound through and through. All my husbands criticize me for living in the past, but the past is what made us—what we areis the sum of the past, and if we want to extrapolate ourselves in order to live in the future we have to keep our consciousness of the past up to scratch. Youunderstand that, don’t you Morty? You’re only one who ever got close to figuring out that part of me.”