Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Most of it was mere flattery, of course—the polite conversation of old acquaintances who no longer had anything left to forgive—but it was good to hear that I had a special place in her memory.

SEVENTY-THREE

Emily confirmed what Jodocus Danette had inferred about the crucial importance of the impending conference at which the leading lights of the Oikumene’s many factions would come together face-to-face. Everyone, it seemed, accepted the necessity of some such encounter in the flesh. VE conferencing apparently made it too easy for representatives of the various factions in the dispute to retreat to entrenched positions. Nothing less than a physical gathering could carry sufficient symbolic weight to engender the spirit of give-and-take that would be necessary if the Earthbound and the highkickers were to sort out their rapidly multiplying differences—and even that might not be enough.

Despite the widespread agreement as to its urgent necessity, Emily told me not to expect the conference to happen any time soon. Such elementary matters as finding a venue, setting the agenda, and deciding on the terms of discussion were proving frustratingly difficult, involving a great deal of time-delayed diplomatic wrangling.

“There’s no way we’rtgoing to agree to come down to Earth,” she told me, defiantly. “That would be symbolically loaded to an unacceptable degree. On the other hand, we can understand why Ngomi doesn’t want to bring his people all the way out here, even as far as Jupiter—and there are symbolic reasons why neither side would be entirely happy about conducting discussions in old Jove’s shadow. If we meet on Mars the Martians will insist that their so-called problems are far more important than they really are, and the asteroids are faberweb territory. Even the moon is an unsuitable compromise because of the faber majority on the far side. It looks as if we might have to settle for empty space, but even the location of the empty space in question is a hot issue—and in the meantime, the unanswered questions are festering away. I wish that you Wellworms hadn’t so completely lost your sense of urgency. The situation’s becoming absurd.”

I wished that I could cut in with a few helpful suggestions, but I couldn’t. Her message had been hours in transit and my reply would double the interval.

“The only thing we’ve all managed to agree on so far,” she continued, “is that we have to make some kind of arrangement before the turn of the millennium—and we’re insisting that no matter what you arithmetical pedants might say, that means the end of 2999 rather than 3000. It looks as if it won’t be a day sooner, but we’ll have to sort out a venue by then. If I can come to Earth afterward, Morty, I will—just for a visit, you understand—but I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high. It may well be that the only chances we’ll get to meet face-to-face once this miserable century’s done will depend on your willingness not merely to come out of the Well but to come all the way to the frontier. The new-generation spaceships will make that a lot easier, of course, but you’ll still have to get your head around the idea.”

I wastrying, in my slow and one-paced fashion, to get my head around that and many other ideas, but I had never even had Sharane’s fervor for novelty, let alone Emily’s, and it wasn’t easy.

It didn’t become any easier to come to an understanding of the new existential predicament of the various humankinds when I heard—not from Emily, in the first instance—that the aptly named starship worldlet Pandorahad effected the first meeting between humans and the products of an alien ecosphere. Pandora’sfaber inhabitants did not have to discover another “Earthlike” world in order to do this. Some freak of chance had allowed them to make a deep-space rendezvous with another, much smaller starship.

This was big news, but it had been so long awaited that its arrival seemed slightly anticlimactic. The letdown was reinforced by the fact that the aliens were not quite as alien as futuristic fantasies had always implied. That the alien vessel was so similar to the ancient Ark Hopein terms of its design was perhaps expectable, but no one had expected its crew to look so much like the human ambassadors granted the privilege of greeting them.

Like Pandora, the alien starship had a crew entirely composed of individuals who had been extensively bioengineered and even more extensively cyborgized for life in zero gee. Because Pandora’spopulation consisted entirely of fabers, many of whom had undergone extensive functional cyborgization, the “humans” and the “aliens” who contrived this allegedly epoch-making contact resembled one another rather more than they resembled unmodified members of their parent species. The fundamental biochemistries controlling the “ecosphere-imposed templates” of the two species were slightly different, but the main consequence of this difference was that the two sets of fabers enthusiastically traded their respective molecules of life, so that their own genetic engineers could henceforth make and use chromosomes of both kinds. The aliens also used stripped-down versions of their own DNA analogue in exactly the same ways that humans employed what had once been called para-DNA in shamirs and other gantzing systems.

“What kind of freedom is it,” I asked Eve Chin, with whom I was staying at the time, “that makes all the travelers of space into mirror images of one another? What kind of infinite possibility will there be in the further exploration of the galaxy if it turns out that every starfaring civilization within it has automatically taken the road of convergent evolution?”

“You’re exaggerating,” Eve told me. “The news reports are playing up the similarity between the Pandorans and the aliens, but it seems to me that it isn’t really as close as all that. Freedom won’t breed universal mediocrity in space any more than it has on Earth.”

I wasn’t so sure. Planetary atmospheres are infinitely variable, whereas hard vacuum is the same everywhere, and the physical attributes of planetary surfaces are subject to all kinds of whims that are rigorously excluded from artificial habitats.

“When I lived on the moon the fabers were talking about six-handed and eight-handed variants,” I recalled, “but we haven’t heard much about them lately. The four-handed model seems to have unique advantages.”

“But cyborgization adds another major dimension of variability,” Eve pointed out.

“Most of the differences between individual cyborgs are the result of cosmetic modifications,” I said, dubiously. “The strictly functional adaptations produce a fairly narrow range of stereotypes, and the Pandorapictures suggest that the aliens have adapted themselves to the same range of functions.”

Eve wouldn’t shift her position. “Adaptation to zero gee isn’t an existential straitjacket, Morty,” she insisted. “Infinite possibility is still available. One set of coincidences doesn’t prove that the next aliens we encounter will be stamped from the same mold. Anyway, far too much media space-time is being wasted on these coincidences. There’s something else that the news reports aren’t telling us, isn’t there? Don’t you get a distinct sense that certain matters are being set aside, left carefully unmentioned?”

Actually, I hadn’t. Even when Eve raised the possibility, I concluded almost immediately that she had become slightly paranoid by virtue of her long entanglement in the complex diplomatic wrangles that immediately enveloped anyone who proposed the slightest alteration in Earth’s ocean currents.

It turned out that I was wrong and Eve was right, but because I didn’t take her suspicions seriously to begin with, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility that the people who were actually monitoring the Pandorans’ transmission were keeping secrets. It never occurred to me to ask Emily any awkward questions when she sent me an uncharacteristically muted account of her own response to the news.

SEVENTY-FOUR

The tenth and last part of my History of Death, entitled The Marriage of Life and Death, was launched into the Labyrinth on 7 April 2998. It was not, from a purist point of view, an exercise in academic history, although I certainly considered it to be a fitting conclusion to my life’s work. It did deal in considerable detail with the events as well as the attitudes of the thirtieth century, thus bringing the whole enterprise up to date, but the balance of futurological speculation and historical analysis was far too evenhanded to please narrow-minded academicians.

The commentary element of The Marriage of Life and Deathdiscussed neo-Thanaticism and Cyborganization as philosophies as well as social movements, annoying many of my critics and surprising almost all of them. What surprised them was not so much that I had chosen to dabble in rhetoric as that the rhetoric in question treated both movements with considerably more sympathy than I had shown in either of my two public debates with Samuel Wheatstone, aliasHellward Lucifer Nyxson.

My commentary also touched upon several other recent and contemporary debates, including those that were currently attempting to settle vital questions about the physical development of the solar system. The discussion was introduced by an innocuous examination of the proposal that a special microworld should be established as a gigantic mausoleum to receive the bodies of all the solar system’s dead, but it soon diversified into issues that some reviewers thought—mistakenly, I believe—to be irrelevant to a history of death. I tried to be scrupulously evenhanded in my treatment of the ongoing disputes, but I found it impossible to describe the history of such phenomena as the Type-2 Movement without making some attempt to evaluate their goals. I could not compare and contrast spacefarers’ and Earthdwellers’ attitudes to death without linking those attitudes to the various projects in which spacefarers were engaged and the various visions and ambitions guiding those projects.

The title of my commentary was an ironic reflection of one of its main lines of argument. I contended that mankind’s war with death had reached its final balance, but I took care to remind my readers that this was not because death had been entirely banished from the human world. Death, I insisted, would forever remain a fact of life and its influence on fundamental human psychology must be recognized and respected. I argued that the infallible perpetuation of the human mind would never become possible, let alone routine, no matter how far biotechnology might advance or how much progress the cyborganizers might make in their material metamorphoses. The victory that humankind had achieved, I argued, was not and never would be a conclusive conquest; it had reached its conclusion because the only conclusion that was or had even been conceivable was a sensible reconciliation and the establishment of death within its proper place in human affairs. Having said that, however, I took some trouble to compliment the Cyborganizers for their bold attempts to widen the scope of human experience, and I did concede that any significant transformation of the quality of life has important consequences for the existential evaluation of death.

For the first time, I took the side of the neo-Thanaticists in declaring that it was a good thing that dying remained one of the choices open to human beings and a good thing that the option should occasionally be exercised. I still had no sympathy with the exhibitionism of public executions, and I was particularly scathing in my criticism of the element of bad taste in self-ordered crucifixions and other Thanaticist excesses, but only because such ostentation offended my Epicurean sensibilities. Deciding upon the length of one’s lifetime, I said, must remain a matter of individual taste. While one should not mock or criticize those who decided that a short life suited them best, one should not attribute more significance to their suicides than those suicides actually possessed.

At the risk of being obvious, I took care to stress that it was a thoroughly good thing that people were still markedly differently from one another even after half a millennium of universal emortality. However conducive it might be to Utopian ease and calm, I argued, it would not be good for the species if we were ever to become so similar that it became impossible for people to think one another seriously misguided or even deranged. Again, I complimented the Cyborganizers for trying to discover new modes of human experience, including those that seemed to more conservative minds to be bizarre.

I made much of the thesis that a proper contrast with death is something that can and does illuminate and add meaning to the business of life. Although death had been displaced from the evolutionary process by the biotechnological usurpation of the privileges of natural selection, I observed, it certainly had not lost its role in the formation and development of the individual human psyche: a role that was both challenging and refining. I declared that grief, pain, and fear were not entirely undesirable things, not simply because they could function in moderate doses as stimulants but also because they were important forces in the organization of emotional experience.

The valueof experienced life, I argued, depends upon a proper understanding of the possibility and reality of death, which depends in turn upon a knowledge and understanding of grief, pain, and fear. The proper terminus of man’s long war with death was, therefore, not merely a treaty—let alone an annihilation—but a marriage: a reasonable accommodation in which all faults were understood, accepted, tolerated, and forgiven.

I asserted in my conclusion that death’s power over the human imagination was now properly circumscribed but that it would never become entirely impotent or irrelevant. I proposed that man and death now enjoyed a kind of social contract in which the latter’s tyranny and exploitation had been reduced to a sane and acceptable minimum but still left death a meaningful voice and a manipulative hand in human affairs. To some of my longtime readers it seemed that I had adopted a gentler and more forgiving attitude to the old enemy than had ever seemed likely while I was organizing the earlier parts of my study. They were, of course, divided among themselves as to whether or not this was a good thing.

In the months that followed its release the concluding part of my Historywas very widely read, but not very widely admired. Many readers judged it to be unacceptably anticlimactic. A new wave of Cyborganizers had become entranced all over again by the possibility of a technologically guaranteed “multiple life,” by which “facets” of a mind might be extended into several different bodies, some of which would live on far beyond the death of the original flesh. They were grateful for the concessions I had made but understandably disappointed that I refused to grant that such a development could or would constitute a final victory over death. The simple truth was that I could not see any real difference between old arguments about “copies” and new ones about “facets.” I felt that such a development, even if feasible, would make no real difference to the existential predicament because every “facet” of a parent mind would have to be reckoned a separate and distinct individual, each of which must face the world alone.

Many Continental Engineers, Gaean Liberationists, and Outward Bounders—unmodified men as well as fabers—also claimed that the essay was narrow-minded. Various critics suggested that I ought to have had far more to say about the life of the Earth itself, or the emergence of the new “DNA ecoentity” that had already extended its tentacles as far as neighboring stars. Many argued that I should have concluded with some sort of dramatic escalation of scale that would put the new life of emortal humankind into its “proper cosmic perspective.”

The readers who found the most to like in The Marriage of Life and Deathon a first—perhaps rather superficial—reading were fugitive neo-Thanaticists, who were quick to express their hope that having completed my thesis, I would now recognize the aesthetic propriety of joining their ranks. More than one of them suggested, not altogether flippantly, that the only proper conclusion to which my history could be brought was my own voluntary self-extinction. Khan Mirafzal, when asked by a caster to relay his opinion back from his Maya-bound microworld, opined that it was quite unnecessary for me to take any such action, given that I and all my Welldwelling kind were already immured in a tomb from which we would never be able to escape. I assume that he, like the neo-Thanaticists, was concealing a certain seriousness within the obvious joke. When I was asked by the same caster whether my work was really finished, I agreed with him that the tenth and last part would require far more updating than the previous nine and that I would have to keep adding to it for as long as I lived. I insisted, however, that I had no plans to contrive an exit merely for the sake of putting an end to that process.

SEVENTY-FIVE

Although I was no longer staying with Eve when the final part of my Historywas launched I was still in the Arctic. My memories of my long sojourn on Cape Adare had by now been deeply steeped in fond nostalgia—a nostalgia further exaggerated by the one brief visit I had recently paid to the Antarctic continent, which had changed out of all recognition. The Arctic ice cap was now the last place in the world where one could see seemingly limitless expanses of “natural ice.”

Although the latest Ice Age was officially over, most of its effects having been carefully overturned by the patient corrosive efforts of the Continental Engineers, the north polar ice-cap was still vast, and a wide ring of desolation surrounded the ice palaces at the geographical pole. Eve called this ring “the last true wilderness of Earth,” and although I could have quibbled with the meanings she attached to the terms lastand trueI could see what she meant.

There were far fewer ice palaces on the northern ice-cap than I had expected to find, although there had been extensive engineering of the ice-clad islands as well as the region of the pole itself. The bulk of the population of the so-called Upper Circle was concentrated in northern Canada and Greenland, on ice that had a solid foundation, but there were tens of thousands of people living in various structures much farther north than Severnaya Zemlya. Eve was one of them, although the accounts she gave me of her work tended to give the misleading impression that she spent almost as much time under the ice cap as on top of it. The kinds of suitskins that had been developed for use in the deep-set oceans of Titan and Europa also facilitated adventures in the cold depths of the Earthly oceans, but Eve and her associates were still figuring out how best to make use of them.

When I set up home on the ice sheet myself I didn’t intend to stay long, but it seemed as good a place as any to reflect on my options now that my history was finished and to see in the new millennium. There was an inevitable sense of letdown once I’d made the final deposit but I had had plenty of time to prepare for that, and I knew that I would be able to keep on adding to the final part and refining the earlier ones more or less indefinitely.

Several of my closest acquaintances sent messages of congratulation to the Arctic that were distinctly ambiguous. They all seemed to think that it was a bad idea for me to “hide myself away in such a desolate place.” Some were even prepared to assert that they understood my state of mind better than I did myself, but I had no intention of giving way to their various entreaties. The loudest of those entreaties were from Mica, Axel, and Minna, all of whom urged me to return to the Pacific and join the pioneers of the Seventh Continent. Several of my old faber friends in Mare Moscoviense, on the other hand, tried to persuade me that it was high time I returned to the far side of the moon, thus putting Earth—literally if not figuratively—behind me.

I put them all off. The only person whose congratulatory message excited me at all was Emily’s, for reasons that had nothing to do with well-meant advice.

“It looks as though I willget another chance to see you on Earth,” she told me. “The big conference is presently scheduled for the middle of next year, and it looks as if Earth orbit will be the compromise point. We’d prefer it to take place farther out, but we’re prepared to give way on that point if Ngomi’s Hardinist hard-liners will allow us to lay on the actual platform. You Wellworms may think you’re up-to-date on smart spaceship technology, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Anyway, I’ll come down as soon as the big argument is over, whatever the outcome might be.”

Emily did not actually omit the customary quota of good advice, but I had already heard enough of that to let it wash over me. “Even the longest book,” she pointed out, with a breathtaking lack of originality, “eventually runs out of words, but the job of building worldsis never finished.” I had heard much the same from a dozen “Wellworms,” although they, of course, thought that the work of constructing a single world would be adequate to fill millennia.

“Even if the time should one day come when we can call thiscontinent complete,” Mica had said—referring, of course, to Pacifica—“there’ll be others. We still have to build that dam between the Pillars of Hercules, and if only we can coordinate our aims with those of Eve’s mob, we might really be able to do something with the oceans.” Even Jodocus had concurred with that, although he had added the rider that when Garden Earth was finally finished, adding a few clones to the home orbit would fill a few more millennia without creating the least necessity for any “true human” to venture farther afield than was necessary to collect the requisite mass.

I couldn’t, as yet, find a new sense of mission in any of the directions suggested by my friends, but I wasn’t downhearted about that and I wasn’t in any hurry. Nor was I unduly depressed by the fact that I couldn’t even contemplate sitting down to start another book. In composing the history of death, I thought, I had already written thebook. The history of death was also the history of life, and I couldn’t imagine that there was anything more to be added to what I’d done save for an endless series of updates and footnotes.

Yet again, I attempted to give serious consideration to the possibility of packing up and leaving Earth—perhaps with Emily, if and when she condescended to drop in after her conference. I found, though, that I still remembered far too well how the sense of wild excitement I’d found when I first lived on the moon had faded into a dull ache of homesickness. The spaces between the stars, I knew, belonged to the fabers, and the planets circling other stars would belong to people adapted before birth to live in their environments. I felt that I was still tied by my genes to the surface of the Earth, and I didn’t yet want to undergo the kind of cyborgizational metamorphosis that would be necessary to fit me for the exploration of other worlds. I still believed in belonging, and I felt very strongly that Mortimer Gray belonged to Earth, however decadent its society might have become in the jaundiced eyes of outsiders.

Despite my newfound sympathy for the more contemplative kinds of Thanaticism I had told the caster the simple truth—I didn’t harbor the slightest inclination toward suicide. No matter how much respect I had cultivated for the old Grim Reaper, death was still, for me, the ultimate enemy. I did, however, find a certain spiritual solace in the white emptiness of the polar cap. I felt comfortable and contented there, and I got into the habit of taking long walks across the almost featureless surface, renting a six-limbed silver-animated snowmobile of which I eventually grew quite fond.

As a historian, of course, I was familiar with the old saying that warns us that he who keeps walking long enough is bound to trip up in the end, but I took no notice of it. Like Ziru Majumdar several hundred years before and on the far side of the world, I convinced myself soon enough that I knew every nook and cranny of the landscape, whose uniform whiteness made it seem far flatter and less hazardous than it actually was.

If I ever thought about the possibility of falling into an unexpected crevasse, as poor Majumdar had done, I thought of it in exactly those terms—as the slight possibility of suffering a minor inconvenience, which could not have any worse result than a few broken bones and a few days in hospital.

My imagination was, alas, inadequate. On 25 July 2999 I suffered the gravest misfortune of my 480-year life—graver even than the one that had overtaken me in Great Coral Sea Disaster.

Strictly speaking, of course, it was not I who stumbled but the vehicle I was in. Although such a thing was generally considered to be quite impossible, it fell into a cleft so deep that it had no bottom at all, and it ended up sinking into the ocean depths beneath the ice cap, taking me with it.