The Fountains of Youth (15 page)

“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
you
to 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.”

M
y 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
remember
saying 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 Death
was 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.

T
he second part of
The History of Death
was 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 World
was 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 World
was 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.