Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

TWENTY-SIX

I moved into Sharane’s hometree on the island of Crete in September 2619 and we married in March 2621. Even though we had been living together very happily for some months, many of our mutual friends were mildly astonished that we actually formalized the arrangement. The difference in our personalities seemed glaring to others but was quite irrelevant to us.

Solitude, poverty, and intensity of purpose had begun to weigh rather heavily upon me before we met, and my carefully cultivated calm of mind had threatened to become a kind of toiling inertia. Sharane brought a welcome breath of air into an existence that had threatened to become rather stuffy. I always knew, I suppose, that from her point of view I was merely one more amusing distraction in a long sequence, but for her the very essence of life was play. She was not in the least disposed to hide that fact or to be ashamed of it.

“Work is only the means to an end,” she told me. “Play isthe end. Life is a game, because there isn’t anything else it can be—certainly not a job or a mission or even a vocation. Without rules, life has no structure, but if the rules become laws, life loses its freedom and becomes a sentence; they have to be rules of play.People like that mother of yours who can’t spell her name think play is silly, but that’s because they’ve made their own rules too rigid and unforgiving. Play is very serious, especially the kind of play that involves dressing up and pretending. The ancients understood that—that’s why they had exotic costumes and special scripts for use in their most solemn religious ceremonies and sternest legal rituals. The past is an intellectual playground, just like the Labyrinth, and you and I are just happy children delighting in its use and transformation.”

She was certainly unconventional, but she was magnificentlyunconventional, and I loved her for it. The fact that she funded much of the research I put into the second part of my History, and funded it lavishly, did not figure in my calculations at all. I would have married her if she had been as poor as I was—although she, admittedly, would not have married me had those been our circumstances.

I found in Sharane a precious wildness that was unfailingly amusing in spite of the fact that it wasn’t truly spontaneous. Her attempts to put herself imaginatively in touch with the past– literallyto stand in the shoes of long-gone members of the Old Human Race—had a very casual attitude to matters of accuracy and authenticity, but they were bold and exhilarating. For a while, at least, I was glad occasionally to be a part of them, and when I was content to remain on the sidelines I enjoyed the spectacle just as much.

From her point of view, I suppose I was useful in two ways. On the one hand, I was a font of information and inspiration, offering her a constant flow of new perspectives. Thanks to me, she was able to revisit old exploits with a new eye, so that she could remake them in interesting ways. On the other hand, I provided a kind of existential anchorage whose solidity and mundanity prevented her from losing herself in the flights of her imagination. Neither of those roles was infinitely extendable, but they were valuable while they lasted, and she loved me for the style as well as the efficiency of the manner in which I fulfilled them.

It would have been convenient if we had both come to the end of our infatuation at exactly the same time, but even the best pair-bonds rarely split as neatly and as gently as that. As things turned out, I was the one who suffered the disappointment of losing a love that I still felt very keenly, after a mere twenty years of acquaintance and eighteen of formal marriage.

Sharane and I talked for a while, as even young married people do, about the possibility of recruiting half a dozen more partners so that we might apply to raise a child. It would not have been impossible, or even particularly unusual, given that the Decimation had made licenses much more freely available. We settled, however, for filing our deposits in the local gamete bank with a polite recommendation that some future group of co-parents more than a thousand years hence might consider them appropriate for combination. It was the romantic option—and when we split up, neither of us hated the other enough to rescind the recommendation.

What eventually drove us apart was, I suppose, the same thing that had brought us together. The opposite tendencies of our characters fused for a while into a healthy whole, which seemed greater than the sum of its parts—but the robust tautness of the combination eventually decayed into stress and strain.

“You’re too serious,” Sharane complained, as the breaking point approached, echoing Mama Eulalie’s anxieties about my suitability for alliance with such a mercurial creature. “You work too hard, and you’re too hung up on details. Historical research should be a joyful voyage of discovery, not an obsession.”

“I’m not against joy,” I replied, a trifle defensively and more than a trifle resentfully, “but I’m a serious historian. Unlike you, I have to discriminate between discovery and invention.”

“All history is fantasy,” she quoted at me. “Truth is what you can get away with.”

“The fact that all history is fantasy doesn’t mean you can just make it up”I insisted. “It means that even at its most accurate and authoritative, history has an irreducible element of creativity and imagination. Julius Ngomi might have taken that as a license to propagandize, but I’m a real historian. I have to search for the truth that stands up to skepticism and doesn’t simply fold up into a pack of feeble pretenses.”

“You’re such a pedant”she riposted, exasperatedly. “You go on and on about farming being a reluctant and degrading response to ecological disaster, but you’re a farmer through and through. Most people think backbreaking labor is a thoroughly good thing—motor of progress and all that—but you know perfectly well that people were a lot better off when they hunted and gathered for six or seven hours a week and spent the rest of their time sitting under the acacia tree telling one another tall stories. You know it, but you don’t doit. That’s not merely stupid, Morty, it’s perverse”

I tried to resist, but her eyes were flashing.

“To see hard work for what it really is and then to devote your life to it anyway is protracted suicide,” she went on. “Unless the New Human Race can rediscover the delights of play and throw away its whips and spurs we’ll never be able to adapt to emortality. I’ll say one thing for your late Mama Meta: at least she knew that the work ethic belonged in outer space. Okay, so we had to rebuild after the tidal waves—but we’ve done that now, thanks to your little friend’s shamirs. Now, it’s time to get back to the Garden, to begin the Golden Age again. Homo faberis essentially a spacefaring species; those of us who are keeping our legs should accept that we’re Homo ludens.”

“I’m not sure about that,” I countered, reassuming my usual palliative tone. “I was never happy about those war-addicted fools hijacking the label Homo sapiens.We’re the ones who have the opportunity to be true sapients, and I think we ought to take it. Play is great, but it can’t be the be-all and end-all of emortal existence. Those legs that the fabers are discarding are the price we pay for the luxury of keeping our feet on the ground.”

“You think I need youto keep my feet on the ground,” Sharane came back, “but I don’t. I need somebody who doesn’t think that keeping our feet on the ground is a luxury.”

“Touché,” I conceded. “But…”

I knew that the break between us had been completed and rendered irreparable when she wouldn’t even hear my rebuttal. “I’ve been weighed down long enough,” she said, callously. “I need to soar for a while, to spread my wings. You’re holding me back, Morty.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

My first divorce had come about because a cruel accident had ripped apart the delicate fabric of my life, but my second—or so it seemed to me—was itself a horrid rent that shredded my very being. It seemed so vilely unnecessary, so achingly unreasonable, so treasonously uncaused. It hurt.

I hope that I tried with all my might not to blame Sharane, but how could I avoid it? And how could she not resent my overt and covert accusations, my veiled and naked resentments? Once the break became irrevocable, the relationship was rapidly poisoned.

“Your problem, Mortimer,” Sharane said to me, when her brief lachrymose phase had given way to incandescent anger, “is that you’re a deeply morbid man. There’s a special fear in you: an altogether exceptional horror that feeds upon your spirit day and night and makes you grotesquely vulnerable to occurrences that normal people can take in their stride, and which ill befit a self-styled Epicurean. If you want my advice, you should abandon that history you’re writing and devote yourself to something much brighter and more vigorous.” She knew, of course, that the last thing I wanted at that particular moment was her advice.

“Death is my life,” I informed her, speaking metaphorically, and not entirely without irony. “It always will be, until and including the end.”

I remember saying that. The rest is vague, and I’ve had to consult objective records in order to put the quotes in place, but I really do remembersaying exactly those words.

I won’t say that Sharane and I had been uniquely happy while we were together, but I had come to depend on her closeness and her affection, and the asperity of our last few conversations couldn’t cancel that dependency. The day that I found myself alone again in a capstack apartment in Alexandria, virtually identical to the one I had formerly occupied, seemed to me to be the darkest of my life so far—far darker in its mute and empty desolation than the feverish day when Emily Marchant and I had been trapped in the wreck of the Genesis.It didn’t mark me as deeply or as permanently—how could it?—but it upset me badly enough to make it difficult for me to work.

“Twenty years is a long time even for an emortal when you’re more than a hundred years old, Mort,” Marna Sajda told me, when I turned to her for comfort. “It’s time for you to move on.” I would of course have turned to Mama Eulalie had my options not narrowed when she died in 2634.

“That’s what Sharane said,” I told Mama Sajda, in a slightly accusatory tone. “She was being sternly reasonable at the time. I thought that the sternness would crumble if I put it to the test, and I thought that her resolve would crumble with it, but it didn’t.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” she replied, tersely.

Had I been in a less fragile mood, I wouldn’t have been able to say that I was surprised either, but that wasn’t the point, as I tried hard to explain. I was convinced, perhaps foolishly, that Mama Eulalie would have understood.

“I’m truly sorry,” Mama Sajda said, when I was eventually reduced to tears.

“She said that too,” I was quick to point out, not caring that I was piling up evidence to back Sharane’s claim that I had an innately obsessive frame of mind. “She said that she had to do it. She said that she hated hurting me, but she would say that, wouldn’t she?”

Now that forgetfulness has blotted out the greater part of that phase of my life—including, I presume, the worst of it—I don’t really know why I was so devastated by Sharane’s decision or why it should have filled me with such black despair. Had I cultivated a dependence so absolute that it seemed irreplaceable, or was it only my pride that had suffered a sickening blow? Was it the imagined consequences of the rejection or merely the rejection itself that hurt me so badly?

Mama Sajda wanted to help, but only for a week or two. Mama Eulalie had added injury to Sharane’s insult by dying mere years before I had the greatest need of her. She had been 257 years old and had outlasted not only Papa Nahum, who had been born two years after her, but also Mama Meta, who had been seven years younger. Even so, she had not lasted long enough.None of my other co-parents had come to Mama Eulalie’s funeral. Their association with her was too far in the past. Raising me had ceased to be a defining experience for them. I didn’t hold it against them. I figured that none of them was likely to be around for another twenty years, although I’d never have guessed that Mama Siorane would be the last to go, frozen on the crest of a Titanian mountain, looking up at the rings of Saturn. She was the only one who didn’t actually have a funeral, but even I didn’t go to Papa Ezra’s. I was still Earth-bound, reluctant to lose what people like Mama Siorane had begun to refer to as my “gravirginity.”

When I said my last good-bye to Mama Sajda in 2647, too close for spiritual comfort to the place at which I’d failed to save Grizel from drowning in the treacherous Kwarra, I said my last good-bye to that whole phase in my life: to the tattered remnants of childhood, the bitter legacies of first love, and the patiently accepted hardships of apprenticeship. The second part of my History of Deathwas launched the following year, and I was possessed by a strong sense of beginning a new phase of my existence—but I was wrong about that.

I was maturing by degrees, but I still had not served the full term of my apprenticeship.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The second part of The History of Deathwas entitled Death in the Ancient World.It plotted a convoluted but not particularly original trail through the Labyrinth, collating a wealth of data regarding burial practices and patterns of mortality in Egypt, the Kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad, the Indus civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the Yangshao and Lungshan cultures of the Far East, the cultures of the Olmecs and Zapotees, and so on. It extended as far as Greece before and after Alexander and the beginnings of the Roman Empire, but its treatment of later matters was admittedly slight and prefatory, and it was direly neglectful of the Far Eastern cultures—omissions that I repaired by slow degrees during the next two centuries.

The commentary I provided for Death in the Ancient Worldwas far more extensive than the commentary I had superimposed on the first volume. It offered an unprecedentedly elaborate analysis of the mythologies of life after death developed by the cultures under consideration. Although I have revised the commentary several times over and extended it considerably, I think the original version offered valuable insights into the eschatology of the Egyptians, rendered with a certain eloquence. I spared no effort in my descriptions and discussions of tomb texts, the Book of the Dead, the Hall of Double Justice, Anubis and Osiris, the custom of mummification, and the building of pyramid tombs. I refused to consider such elaborate efforts made by the living on behalf of the dead to be foolish or unduly lavish.

Whereas some historians had insisted on seeing pyramid building as a wasteful expression of the appalling vanity of the world’s first tyrant-dictators, I saw it as an entirely appropriate recognition of the appalling impotence of all humans in the face of death. In my view, the building of the pyramids should not be explained away as a kind of gigantic folly or as a way to dispose of the energies of the peasants when they were not required in harvesting the bounty of the fertile Nile; such heroic endeavor could only be accounted for if one accepted that pyramid building was the most useful of all labors. It was work directed at the glorious imposition of human endeavor upon the natural landscape. The placing of a royal mummy, with all its accoutrements, in a fabulous geometric edifice of stone was a loud, confident, and entirely appropriate statement of humanity’s invasion of the empire of death.

I did not see the pharaohs as usurpers of misery, elevating the importance of their own extinction far above that of their subjects but rather as vessels for the horror of the entire community. I saw a pharaoh’s temporal power not as a successful example of the exercise of brute force but as a symbol of the fact that no privilege a human society could extend or create could insulate its beneficiaries from mortality and mortality’s faithful handmaidens, disease and pain. The pyramids, I contended, had not been built for the pharaohs alone but for everyone who toiled in their construction or in support of the constructors; what was interred within a pyramid was no mere bag of bones absurdly decked with useless possessions but the collective impotence of a race, properly attended by symbolic expressions of fear, anger, and hope.

I still think that there was much merit in the elaborate comparisons that I made between late Egyptian and late Greek accounts of the “death adventure,” measuring both the common and distinctive phases of cultural development in the narrative complication and anxiety that infected their burgeoning but crisis-ridden civilizations. I am still proud of my careful decoding of the conceptual geography of the Greek Underworld and the characters associated with it as judges, guardians, functionaries, and misfortunate victims of hubris.

I disagreed, of course, with those analysts who thought hubris a bad thing and argued for the inherent and conscious irony of its description as a sin. Those who disputed the rights of the immortal gods, and paid the price, were in my estimation the true heroes of myth, and it was in that context that I offered my own account of the meaning and significance of the crucial notion of tragedy. My accounts of the myth of Persephone, the descent of Orpheus, and the punishments inflicted upon the likes of Sisyphus, Ixion, and Tantalus hailed those inventions as magnificent early triumphs of the creative imagination.

The core argument of Death in the Ancient Worldwas that the early evolution of myth making and storytelling had been subject to a rigorous process of natural selection, by virtue of the fact that myth and narrative were vital weapons in the war against death. That war had still to be fought entirely in the mind of man because there was little yet to be accomplished by defiance of death’s claims upon the body. The great contribution of Hippocrates to the science of medicine—which I refused to despise or diminish for its apparent slightness—was that the wise doctor would usually do nothing at all, admitting that the vast majority of attempted treatments only made matters worse.

In the absence of an effective medical science—all the more so once that absence had been recognized and admitted—the war against death was essentially a war of propaganda. I insisted that the myths made by intelligent Greeks had to be judged in that light—not by their truthfulness, even in some allegorical or metaphorical sense, but by their usefulness in generating morale.

I admitted, of course, that the great insight of Hippocrates was fated to be refused and confused for a further two thousand years, while all kinds of witch doctors continued to employ all manner of poisons and tortures in the name of medicine, but I believe that I substantiated my claim that there had been a precious moment when the Hellenic Greeks actually knew what they were about and that this had informed their opposition to death more fruitfully than any previous culture or any of the immediately succeeding ones.

Elaborating and extrapolating the process of death in the way that the Egyptians and Greeks had done, I argued, had enabled a more secure moral order to be imported into social life. Those cultures had achieved a better sense of continuity with past and future generations than any before them, allotting every individual a part within a great enterprise that had extended and would extend, generation to generation, from the beginning to the end of time. I was careful, however, to give due credit to those less-celebrated tribesmen who worshiped their ancestors and thought them always close at hand, ready to deliver judgments upon the living. Such people, I felt, had fully mastered an elementary truth of human existence: that the dead are not entirely gone. Their afterlife continues to intrude upon the memories and dreams of the living, whether or not they were actually summoned. The argument became much more elaborate once I had properly accommodated the Far Eastern, Australasian, and Native American data within it, but its essence remained the same.

My commentary approved wholeheartedly of the idea that the dead should have a voice and must be entitled to speak—and that the living have a moral duty to listen. Because the vast majority of the tribal cultures of the ancient world were as direly short of history as they were of medicine, I argued, they were entirely justified in allowing their ancestors to live on in the minds of living people, where the culture those ancestors had forged similarly resided.

In saying this, of course, I was consciously trying to build imaginative bridges between the long-dead subjects of my analysis and its readers, the vast majority of whom still had their own dead freshly in mind.

I think I did strike a chord in some readers and that I triggered some useful word-of-mouth publicity. At any rate, the second part of my history attracted twice as many browsers in its first year within the Labyrinth, and the number of visitations registered thereafter climbed nearly three times as quickly. This additional attention was undoubtedly due to its timeliness and to the fact that it really did have a useful wisdom to offer the survivors of the Decimation.