The Fountains of Youth (16 page)

T
he Decimation was undoubtedly
the
pivotal event in the early history of the New Human Race. That was only partly due to the nature of the catastrophe, which was uniquely well equipped to bring an appalling abundance of death into a world of emortals. Its timing was equally important, because its significance would have been markedly different had it happened a century earlier or later.

In 2542 the world was still congratulating itself on the latest and last of its many victories over the specter of mortality. Human culture was saturated with the elation of a job completed after much unanticipated confusion and complication and all the true emortals—even the lucky few born more than half a century before me—were still young. Even those who had attained their nineties still
thought
of themselves as young; those like myself, only just emerged from adolescence, knew that we had a long period of apprenticeship to serve before we would be properly fitted to take up the reins of progress from the last generation of the Old Human Race. We knew that the nanotech-rejuvenated false emortals would still be running the world in 2600 but that we would come into our inheritance by slow degrees in the twenty-seventh century. Even those of us who were being groomed for the ultimate responsibility of ownership were not impatient to assume their new duties, and those of us whose portion of the stewardship of Earth would be far leaner were perfectly content to
mark time
, postponing all our most important decisions until the appropriate time.

I have explained how my own experience in the Coral Sea Disaster helped to focus my own ambition and determination. My sense of urgency did not make me hurry my work—I knew from the beginning that it would be the labor of centuries—but it gave me a strong sense of direction and commitment. People more distant from the epicenter of the event might not have been affected as abruptly or as profoundly, but they were affected. The changes in my personal microcosm reflected more ponderous changes in the social macrocosm of Earthbound humanity.

The research that I did for the third instalment of
The History of Death
—which began, of course, long before the second was finalized—necessitated a great deal of work on the early history of the major world religions, which my theoretical framework compelled me to view as social and psychological technologies providing arms and armor against death. I could hardly have spent so much time thinking about the birth of the great religions without also thinking about their obliteration, even though that had happened in an era belonging to a much later section of my
History.
Nor could I think about their obliteration without thinking about their replacement.

In 2542 the most common opinion about the fate of religion was that it had begun to fade away when science exposed the folly of its pretensions to explain the origin and nature of the universe and humankind and that its decline had been inexorable since the eighteenth century. It seemed to me, however, that the early assaults of science and utilitarian moral philosophy had only stripped away the outer layers of religion without ever penetrating to its real heart. It made more sense to see religion as a casualty of the ecocatastrophic Crash that followed the rapid technological development and population growth of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

When the human species came through that trial by fire, thanks to Conrad Helier’s provisions for the first so-called New Human Race, its members were determined to jettison the ideologies that seemed to have played a part in formulating the Crisis that led to the Crash, and religion was first on the hit list. It seemed to me that religion had been scapegoated—perhaps not unjustly, given the vilely overextensive use that the followers of the major religions had themselves made of scapegoating strategies. The tiny minorities that had hung on to religious faith despite the post-Crash backlash had, in my view, obtained due reward for their defiance of convention in that they had kept arms and armor against the awareness of death. Their contemptuous neighbors presumably thought such arms and armor unnecessary while the nanotechnologies developed by PicoCon and Omicron A still held out the possibility and the hope that serial rejuvenation would provide an escalator effect leading everyone to true emortality—but I thought that they were wrong.

As I labored through the latter half of the twenty-sixth century, it
began to seem odd to me that religion had not bounced back from its post-Crash anathematization. I began to wonder why the small sects that survived had not provided the seeds of a revival as soon as it became obvious that nanotech repair could not beat the Miller Effect. Perhaps they would have done if the Zaman transformation had not made its debut so soon after the reluctant acceptance by the world’s centenarians that they could not and would not live forever. Perhaps it would have done in any case, had there not been another overarching ideology holding the empty intellectual ground.

This other ideology was, of course, the work ethic. As a historian, I knew of abundant evidence to show that individuals who were suddenly impoverished after having enjoyed a good standard of living invariably reacted in one of two ways. Either they gave way to total despair or they set themselves to work with relentless assiduity, never relaxing unless and until they regained their former economic status and sometimes not even then. After the Crash, that psychology became applicable on a worldwide scale; once the despairing had taken themselves out of account by the simple expedient of dying, the world had been left in the care of those whose obsessive desire was to restore all the richness, complexity, and productivity of the ecosphere.

The post-Crash world was, of course, constantly resupplying itself with potential hedonists as each new generation of children grew to rebellious adolescence, but all the twenty-second century documents at which I glanced gave me evidence of the dramatic imbalance of power which continually nipped that rebellion in the bud, effortlessly converting the temporary rebels into dutiful workaholics.

That imbalance of power was only partly due to the strength of the work ethic itself; it was greatly enhanced by shifting demographics. Before the Crash, the young had always outnumbered the old, and they had been far more vigorous. Even the primitive technologies of longevity in place before the Crash had increased the democratic authority of the old, but the advent of Internal Technology and nanotech repair gave them the physical vigor to make that authority stick. After the Crash, the old vastly outnumbered the young.

The demographic gap opened up between 2095 and 2120, between the advent of the chiasmalytic disruptors that caused the plague of sterility
and the mass production of Helier wombs, ensured that the imbalance was never significantly redressed, even when the new hatcheries were at full stretch. The demographic structure of the population made it absolutely certain that no youthful rebellion could be any more than a storm in a teacup. The prejudices of the old became enormously powerful—and that included their prejudice against religion as well as their unshakable commitment to the work ethic.

So powerful was that commitment, in an era in which many people born in the late twenty-second century were still alive at the beginning of the twenty-fifth, that the Great Exhibition of 2405—the first flowering of Creationist ambition—still seemed shocking to many people. Such pioneers of the twenty-fifth century cult of youth as the second Oscar Wilde appalled so many of their own contemporaries that they were driven to extremes of posture and endeavor, but they hardly made a dent in the prevailing ideological wisdom.

It was this powerful work ethic that filled the breach left by religion, in providing arms and armor against the awareness of death. Like determined secularists in the pre-Crash eras, the people of the post-Crash era balanced the inevitability of their own mortality against their achievements in life and the storehouse of wealth and wisdom that they would be able to pass on to the next, even longer-lived generation. The inertia of that situation was easily adequate to carry the culture of the false emortals into the twenty-sixth century—and might have carried it into the twenty-seventh without significant amendment had it not been for the interruption of the Decimation: the first event in five hundred years to cause a widespread questioning of fundamental matters of principle and priority.

One response to the Decimation was to extol the virtues of the work ethic even more highly, to construe the catastrophe as proof that ceaseless toil was the only way to secure the stability and Utopian perfection of the ecosphere and the econosphere. But this was not the only response; others were led by the drift in history to feel that the work ethic had betrayed them and that New Humanity ought not to live by toil alone.

There were, I suppose, few better exemplars of this new ideological conflict than myself and Sharane Fereday. It was, however, our marriage
rather than our divorce that offered a pointer to future history. As individuals, we failed to reconcile our differences, but intellectual history marches to a different drum, in which thesis and antithesis must in the end by reconciled by synthesis. While Sharane and I parted, the world groped toward a new balance, and that balance was neo-Epicureanism: a philosophy which asserted that it was not only possible to mix business and pleasure but absolutely necessary in a New Human context.

I had already tried to make that compromise within my marriage, but Sharane had been unwilling to meet me halfway—or, indeed, to admit that I had actually come anywhere near halfway in my attempt to reach out to her. Once we had parted, however, I set out to use my solitude bravely in order to become a much better neo-Epicurean.

I
took the business of my own remaking very seriously. Taking what inspiration I could from the Greek myths I had analyzed so painstakingly in
Death in the Ancient World
, I took great care to do nothing to excess, and I tried with all my might to derive an altogether
appropriate
pleasure from everything I did, work and play alike. I took equally great care to cultivate a proper love for the commonplace, training myself to a finer pitch of perfection than I had ever achieved before in all the techniques of physiological control necessary to physical fitness and quiet metabolism.

I soon convinced myself that I had transcended such primitive and adolescent goals as happiness and had cultivated instead a truly civilized
ataraxia:
a calm of mind whose value went beyond the limits of ecstasy and exultation. By the time I reached my 150th birthday I was sure that I had mastered the art and science of New Humanity and was fully prepared to meet the infinite future—but that conviction was, unfortunately, a trifle hubristic.

After the publication of
Death in the Ancient World
I lived for twenty more years in Alexandria, although my portion of the credit left unused by Mama Sajda and Mama Siorane allowed me to move from the caps tack to the outer suburbs. I rented a simple villa that had been cleverly gantzed out of the desert sands: sands that still gave an impression of timelessness even though they had been restored to wilderness as recently as the twenty-fifth century, when Egypt’s food economy had been realigned to take full advantage of new techniques in artificial photosynthesis.

In 2669, when I felt that it was time for a change, I decided that I would like to live for a while in a genuine ancient wilderness—one that had never been significantly transformed by the busy hands of humankind. There were, of course, few such places remaining, and the busy hands of humankind were already at work in all of them. I did not want to return to the Himalayas, so I looked again at the other possibility
that my foster parents had seriously considered: Antarctica. They had rejected it because of the rapid development of Amundsen City and its immediate environs, but the Continent Without Nations was a true continent, and it still harbored several unspoiled regions. I knew that they would not long remain so—by the end of the century, I figured, it would no longer be possible to find anything that could pass muster as authentic wilderness—but that knowledge only convinced me that I had better indulge my whim while I still could.

I finally settled on Cape Adare on the Ross Sea, a relatively lonely spot where my nearest human neighbors would be conveniently out of sight beyond the glacial horizon.

I moved into a tall edifice modeled on a twentieth-century lighthouse, from whose windowed attic I could look out at the edge of the ice cap and watch the penguins at play. I worked hard on the third part of my
History of Death
, which had now reached an era that was tolerably well reflected in actual documents and could therefore be pursued through the Labyrinth in reasonable comfort. I took care, though, to balance my labors sensibly. I spent a great deal of time in recreational virtual environments and cultivated a better appreciation than I had ever had before of the rewards of virtual travel, virtual community, and virtual eroticism. I was reasonably contented and soon came to feel that I had put the awkward turbulence of my early life firmly behind me.

I had hardly anyone to talk to, all my parents having died and all but a couple of the virtual relationships I had restored in the wake of my first divorce having lapsed again during my second marriage, but I did not care. I had lived long enough with my parents to imagine their responses to my new situation, and my imagined responses were far more conclusive than any real ones could have been.

“This is exactly what I feared,” Mama Siorane would have said. “Forever is a long time to be a hermit.”

“It’s because forever is a long time,” I retorted, “that there’s time enough to be a hermit without any fear of waste.”

“I’ve always told you to be yourself,” Mama Eulalie would have said, “but are you really certain that this is the self you want to be?”

“It’s the self I have to be, for now,” I retorted, “if I’m to design better selves for the future.”