Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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PART SIX Beyond Maturity

Our plesance heir is all vane glory,

This fais world is bot transitory,

The flesh is brukle, the Fend is sle,

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The stait of man dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blyth, now sary,

Now dansand merry, now like to dee,

Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in erd heir standis sickir,

As with the wynd wavis the wickir,

So waveris this warld’s vanité

Timor mortis conturbat me.

—William Dunbar

Lament for the Makaris, c.1510

SEVENTY-EIGHT

They say that some people are born lucky. I suppose I must be one of them. The upside of being accident-prone is that when you really need a preposterous freak of chance, one just might come along.

I went peacefully to sleep in the snowmobile, eased into unconsciousness by lack of oxygen and a surfeit of carbon dioxide. At that point, I suppose, I can only have had a matter of a few hours to live, even with the best IT money could buy.

I woke up in a bed, lightly strapped down for my own protection.

I thought I was dreaming, of course. For one thing, I was quite weightless. For another, Emily Marchant was hovering by the bed. She wasn’t a child, and she was carrying enough ET to place her on the outer margins of humankind, but it was definitely her.

“This is good,” I told her. “Rumor has it that time sense in a dream is pretty elastic, if only one has the knack of making things stretch. With luck, I might extend this for subjective hours even if I’m only seconds away from annihilation.”

“Oh, Morty,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time, “don’t you everchange? You just couldn’t wait, could you? I said I’d come to see you when I was done, but you just couldn’t wait.”

I couldn’t imagine what she meant.

“I alwayschange,” I told her, “and I’m a very patient person, as it happens. I don’t suppose, by any chance, that this is a submarine—a submarine that was big enough to swallow the snowmobile whole and snatch me from the very jaws of death?”

“Of course it isn’t a submarine, you idiot,” she said. “It’s a spaceship. A multifunctionalspaceship, built for deep dives into the atmosphere of Jupiter and the ice-shelled seas of Europa and Titan. There wasn’t a submarine within two thousand kilometers capable of effecting a rescue, but when Severnaya Zemlya forwarded your mayday to us we were practically overhead. You have no idea what you’ve done for us. We sat up there going around and around, literally and symbolically, getting absolutely nowhere. More than half of our people were as resentful as hell of the fact that we were in Earth orbit, and more than half of the Welldwellers were just as resentful that we were shut up in a Titanian superspaceship. Then the author of The History of Death—a work for whose initial inspiration and fundamental skepticism Julius Ngomi has always been willing to take the credit—threw himself into a marine abyss crucially different from and crucially similar to the one from which he once rescued Emily Marchant. The only possibility of rescuing him from that abyss was exactly this sort of vessel in exactly that location.

“With that single masterstroke of genius you transformed the symbolism, the mood, and the dynamism of the whole situation! You not only gave us the chance to be partners in an enterprise, you left us no possible alternative but to combine forces. You made us take the crucial first step on the way to being partners in allour enterprises, combining allour forces. Hell, you forced us to all be heroes together!”

“What?” I said, querulously. “I don’t understand.”

“You will, Morty, you will. We were stuck—until you forced us to suspend all our arguments, to divert all our attention and effort to the business of saving the author of The History of Death.Now we’re not stuck any more. Now, we haveto make progress. You can’t imagine the capital that the casters are making out of that final plaintive speech of yours, Morty—and that silver’s probably advanced the cause of machine emancipation by two hundred years.”

“You mean,” I said, very slowly, as the import of what she was saying sank in, “that all that desperate babbling was recorded?”

“‘Recorded’!” Emily retorted, disgustedly. “You really don’t understand politics, do you, Morty? We put it out live, almost as soon as we started eavesdropping. While the silver was transmitting the mayday its channels were wide open, even though its eyes and ears had been squelched. We heard everything—and so did the world. Common enterprise, Morty—the very best resources of the Earthbound and the Outer System, focused on a simple mission of mercy, a race against time. We always knew we were going to win, of course, but the audience didn’t—even the ones who’d followed the development of the new generation of smart spaceships. To them, it looked like a long shot, exactly the kind of miracle you thought you needed—and no one aboard had any reason to explain that it was actually a piece of cake.”

“And it helped you?” I queried, uncertainly.

“It certainly did. All our differences were set aside, for the moment. Once things like that have been forgotten, even momentarily, it’s very hard to remember them exactly the way they were. Your little meditation might just have succeeded where everything else had failed, in putting Humpty Dumpty together again and healing the breach in the fabric of the Oikumene.”

“All I did was fall into a hole,” I pointed out.

“Even if that were true,” she said, “I’d be forever grateful for your exquisite timing. But you also kept talking. That’s always been your strong suit, Morty. Whatever happened, you always kept talking. I have to go now—because I have to keep talking too. The ice is broken, if you’ll forgive the pun, but we have a hell of a lot of talking to do before we get the course of history flowing smoothly again. There are a lot of issues that need to be settled. Jupiter’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

I forgave her the ludicrously mixed metaphor as well as the pun. I was in an unusually good mood. In fact, I was alive.

Julius Ngomi came to see me too, though not until much later.

“All history is fantasy,” he said.

“If you hadn’t told me that,” I lied, “my life might have taken a very different path.”

I was a diplomat now, I thought. I owed it to the world to play the silver and tell the man exactly what he needed to hear. Anyway, he was the clever hypocrite who’d once told me that the truth is what you can get away with.

“You’re world famous now,” the clever hypocrite told me. “Also rich—not by my standards or Emily’s, of course, but far richer than you’veever been before. Access fees to The History of Deathestablished a new world record within hours of your not-so-final testament being sent out live from the good ship Ambassador.That’s where you are, in case nobody’s mentioned it.”

“So I understand,” I replied. “It’s not everyone who can put the Oikumene back together again just by lying here in bed, but I guess some of us have the gift and some of us have to work instead.”

“It won’t last, you know,” he added, grinning as broadly and as luminously as he could. “Another nine-day wonder. Next week, something else will be news. You’d think that emortals would have more staying power than that, wouldn’t you? But time marches on, sixty seconds to every hour and seven days in every week. Everything that happens live is only reallyimportant while it’s happening—and in the end, it all ends up inside mountains, the litter…”

“… that dare not speak its name,” I finished for him. “Do you ever worry that there might come a day when those little habits and catch-phrases might one day be all that’s left of you?”

“I used to,” he said, “but that was before I heard your little homily. If you can teach a low-grade silver to value its own life and personal evolution, who am I to resist the power of your rhetoric? It’s a pity there aren’t any Inuit left to sell ice to.”

“Somehow,” I said, “I get the feeling that you’re not quite as grateful as Emily seems to be for my heroic efforts on behalf of the unity of the Oikumene.”

“The bones of contention are real,” he said, blandly. “The spirit of compromise might be soaring over the conference table just now, but nothing fundamental has been altered. The question still remains as to whether the solar system can be managed for the mutual benefit of the Earthbound andthe frontier folk—and if so, how. Don’t let Emily fool you, Mortimer. Nine-day wonders only last nine days, but politics is forever. If we can’t find authenticcommon interests, there will be conflict. Not war, I hope, and not tomorrow, but a real power struggle that someone will eventually have to lose.”

“You think you’re finished, don’t you?” I said, with what I thought was a lightning flash of insight. “You think they’re either going to take it all away from you or—even worse—render your precious ownershipirrelevant. You’re facing the prospect of seeing it all turn to litter: Hardinism, responsible stewardship, planned capitalism. All done, banished to the margins of the human story.”

“Don’t be silly, Mortimer,” said Julius Ngomi, sternly. “Ownership of Earth will always be the foundation stone of power within the human community. Always.”

Perhaps he knew more than he was letting on. Perhaps Emily did too—and the fabers, and whoever else was involved. Perhaps they allknew but didn’t want the others to know how much they knew and what they thought it implied. The return of real conflicts of interests inevitably fostered the return of secrecy to human affairs. Eve was right, and there were far too many things being left unsaid by far too many people—but not for long.

At the end of the third millennium we had finally, if belatedly, arrived at the time when the truly important things could speak for themselves, and they were about to do exactly that.

SEVENTY-NINE

Julius Ngomi was right. By the time I shuttled back down to Earth, leaving the Ambassadorto continue running rings around the planet, I was world famous. I was also rich, though not by the highest standards of the Hardinist Cabal or the outer-system gantzers. I was, at any rate, richer than I had ever expected to be, and richer than I had ever thought that I might one day need to be.

He was right about my rescue being a nine-day wonder too. He had not been speaking literally, but he was less than forty-eight hours out.

It would be nice to think that Emily’s extravagant congratulatory speech was warranted, but the truth was that even if I hadn’t provided the people aboard Ambassadorwith a common cause and rough-hewn manifesto, their heads would have been smashed together soon enough. I was always fated to be upstaged by the Pandorans, and rightly so. I was just a human interest story, but the Pandorans’ long-unspoken and carefully checked out news was the biggest headline that had ever confronted the human race. It changed everything, and forever.

The day the Pandorans chose to pass on what their alien friends had told them, having had it proved to them conclusively, was the day that humankind’s apprenticeship as a starfaring species was ended and the Age of Responsibility finally began. It was the day emortal humankind moved beyond maturity into uncharted existential territory.

There was a sense in which the news was already seventy years old by the time it arrived in the system, having crawled here at the speed of light, and there was no prospect of a dialogue. By the time Pandorahad come home, if her crew had decided to do so, the fourth millennium would have been well advanced. In such circumstances, there were bound to be a few people on Earth who declared that it was all a hoax—a lie cooked up for political purposes, either by the Pandorans, or the outer-system people, or the dear old Hardinist Cabal—but they were indeed few. We had to wait a long time for the full story and the final proof, but the great majority believed what we heard almost as soon as we heard it and knew what it signified.

The news that the aliens gave the crew of Pandoraand the crew of Pandoraduly gave to the Oikumene was that life was as widely distributed throughout the galaxy as we had always hoped and suspected but that death was far more widely distributed than we had ever thought or feared. “Earthlike” planets were far rarer than we had dreamed and muchrarer than was implied by the discovery of Ararat and Maya within fifty light-years of Earth. Intelligence was even rarer—an evolutionary experiment that usually failed—and the achievement of emortality by intelligent species rarer still.

Until they encountered Pandora, the inhabitants of the alien Ark—which was indeed an ark and whose parent world had been ruined—had feared that they might now be alone. They had detected our radio signals from some distance but had hardly dared to hope that the transmitters of the signals would still be alive when they came close enough to make contact. They and their ancestors had heard other transmissions, but they had never found the transmitters alive.

According to the alien Ark-dwellers, the vast majority of the life-bearing planets in the galaxy were occupied by a single species of microorganism: a genetic predator that destroyed not merely those competing species which employed its own chemistry of replication, but any and all others. It was the living equivalent of a universal solvent; a true omnivore.

This all-consuming organism had already spread itself across vast reaches of space within the galaxy. It moved from star system to star system by means of spacefaring spores, slowly but inexorably. The initial process of distribution employed by such spores had probably been supernoval scattering, but natural selection had produced slower and surer means of interstellar travel. Wherever spores of any kind encountered a new ecosphere, the omnipotent microorganisms grew and multiplied, ultimately devouring everything—not merely those carbonaceous molecules that in Earthly terms were reckoned “organic” but also many kinds of molecules that had been drafted to human use by gantzers and cyborgizers.

In effect, the microorganisms and their spores were natural Cyborganizers at a nano tech level. They were very tiny, but they were extraordinarily complex and clever. No bigger than Earthly protozoans or the internal nanomachines to which every human being plays host, they were utterly devoid of any vestige of mind or intellect, but they were the most powerful and successful entities in the galaxy, and perhaps the universe. They constituted the ultimate blight, against which nothing complex could compete. Wherever they arrived they obliterated everything but themselves, reducing every victim ecosphere to homogeneity.

Like Earthly microorganisms, the blight was effectively immortal. Its individuals reproduced by binary fission. Many perished, destroyed by adverse circumstance, but those that did not perish went on forever. They were not changeless—they evolved, after their own fashion—but they disdained such aids to change as sexual reproduction and built-in obsolescence. Such devices were capable of producing some remarkable freaks of complexity, but in terms of the big picture—the galactic picture, and presumably the universal picture—such freaks were not merely rare but fragile.

The Ark dwellers dolefully informed the Pandorans that whenever complex life—including everything that we had chosen to call Earthlikelife—encountered the blight, it was easily and unceremoniously consumed. The existence of species like ours, no matter how diverse they might become with the aid of genetic engineering and cyborgization, was exceedingly precarious. It could flourish only in the remotest parts of the galaxy, far out on its trailing arms. Even in the midst of such protective wilderness, it was doomed to ephemerality.

In the end, the Ark dwellers assured the Pandorans, the blight would reach our homeworld as it had reached theirs. Within a few more million years, the blight would hold dominion over the entire galaxy. Already there was no safe way for spacefarers to go but outward, farther toward the rim of the galaxy and the intergalactic dark.

Within a few thousand years, Maya and Ararat would be swallowed up. Within the space of a single emortal lifetime, Earth would follow them—and what could possibly become of such Arks as went outward, into the void? Where could they find the energy that was essential to sustain such beings as they were, not merely for centuries or millennia but forever?And if they could somehow contrive to cross the dark between the galaxies, what realistic hope did they have of finding the Magellanic Clouds or Andromeda under any dominion but that of the blight?

In competition with news like that, my descent into the watery abyss and its political aftermath could not help but seem trivial. In the face of intelligence like that, it was not merely the political wrangles of the Earthbound and the frontier folk that began to seem meaningless, but the entire history of humankind.

Death had no sooner been retired from its key role in human affairs than it was back, with a vengeance.

EIGHTY

I had observed in The Marriage of Life and Deaththat even emortals must die. What mattered, I had argued, was creating a life that was satisfactory because rather than in spite of temporal limitation. The greatest hope for the future that I had, I’d told the silver navigator of the sunken snowmobile—and, unknowingly, the listening world—was that Emily Marchant and Lua Tawana might live forever, or at least for thousands of years and that they could continue to make a difference to the shape of the future of humankind.

After the Pandorans dropped their bombshell, the question was whether anyonecould make a difference to the future of humankind or whether everything that anybody could do, or that anybody’s descendants could do, would merely be posturing in advance of the blight, whimpering while waiting for the curtain of oblivion to descend.

I put the question, in almost exactly those terms, to Emily when she followed me down to Earth after the official conclusion of the Ambassadorconference. Her answer was entirely predictable.

“We’ll do what we have to do,” she said. “The Earthbound will stand and fight. Some of the outward-bounders will fight too—the rest will run in order to be able to stand and fight another day.”

“According to the alien Ark-dwellers,” I pointed out, “the battle must have been fought a hundred times before, or a thousand. Everybody they know about has lost it.”

“But that’s not many,” she pointed out, “and now that we’ve made contact with the Ark dwellers we’ll have their experience to draw on as well as our own. We don’t have any alternative but to fight as best we can. It doesn’t matter what the odds are. Either we beat the blight or the blight beats us. Either the blight will consume everybody in the universe who has the vestiges of a mind, or someone somewhere will use the resources of mind to defeat and destroy the blight. We have to do the best we can to be that somebody. We have to hang on as long as we can, and we have to conserve our reserves as long as we can, just in case we get there in the end or help arrives. The one thing we can’t do is lie down and wait to die. Even silvers know that where there’s life there’s hope. Even if there were nothing we could do, we’d keep talking, wouldn’t we, Morty? Even if we didn’t think that there was anybody listening.”

She was right, of course.

The blight, I realized, when I had had a chance to weigh the bad news more carefully, was a truemarriage of life and death, of whose perfection I had never dared to dream. I realized too that I, of all people, should always have known that something like the blight would exist—that something like it mustexist—in order that the History of Death might not be complete and might not even be computable by anyone as humble as a human being. I, of all people, should always have known that the war between humankind and death wasn’t one that could be settled for long by any mere treaty of technology, because it was at bottom a real conflict of interest.

I had imagined the war against death, for a while, as a local struggle for the small prize of the human mind, but I should always have realized that it was a much larger matter than that—that from its very beginning it had been a battle for no less a prize than the universe itself.

The human mind had so far been content with limited objectives, but it had always been evolving, not merely in terms of its own ambitions and dreams, but in terms of the cosmic frame of meaning. Within the frame, its objectives had always been infinite and eternal—and it had always tried, in its limited fashion, to recognize that fact in its aspirations and its accomplishments.

In time, I knew, spores of the new kind of death-life must and would reach Earth’s solar system, whether it took ten thousand years or a million. In the meantime, the systembound must do what they could to erect whatever Type-2 defenses they could contrive. While the opportunity for action remained, allhumankinds must do their level best to purge the worlds of other stars of its vile empire in order to reclaim them for real life, for intelligence, and for evolution. Those were the facts of the matter; they spoke for themselves.

When Emily left Earth for the last time I was still living in Severnaya Zemlya. When she had gone, I went out on to the great ice sheet in my newly repaired snowmobile, navigated by the only silver I had ever learned to count as a friend.

“This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization,” I told him, when we paused at the summit of a white mountain. “If you look southward, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?”

“I fear, sir, that I do not know,” the navigator informed me, in an apologetic tone that was definitely contrived for irony’s sake.

I looked upward through the transparent canopy of the air, at the multitude of stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness.

“Please don’t broadcast this to the world,” I said, “but I feel an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I know that although there’s nothing much for me to do for the present moment, the time will come when my particular talent and expertise will be needed again. Some day, it will be my task to compose anotherhistory, of the next phase in the war that humankind and all its brother species must fight against Death and Oblivion.”

“Yes, sir,” said the dutiful silver. “I hope that it will be as successful as the last.”

“Stop calling me sir,” I said. “We’ve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I can’t think of you as an itany longer, so you shouldn’t think of me as a sir.You can call me Mortimer—Morty, even.”

“As you wish, Morty,” said the machine, humbly. If he had escaped robotization, it was only by a hairsbreadth. Like Emily, like the alien Ark-dwellers, like Khan Mirafzal, like Garden Earth, and like me the snowmobile’s navigator still had a great deal of evolving to do.

He still has—but we’ll do it or die trying, and if we die we’ll pass on what we know to those who come after us.

And so ad infini turn.

It might take us a thousand or a million years to get to where we need to be, but we’re prepared to be patient.