The Fountains of Youth (23 page)

When the TV current affairs shows of the early twenty-eighth century began their earnest debate as to whether all of this madness might be reborn, I assumed that it was just talk for talk’s sake. Perhaps I underestimated the influence of the pundits and the power of talk for talk’s sake to generate self-fulfilling prophecies, but I cannot deny that I was dead wrong.

Most of the people who had begun, like Ziru Majumdar, to question whether the technologies to which they owed their preservation from pain, disease, and aging were denying them something in terms of experience were content merely to dabble with pain and other sensations associated with physical injury. Once such dabbling began, there was an inevitable temptation to take it further and further, testing and extending its limits. Among these supposed “connoisseurs of human experience” there emerged a curious kind of hierarchy, in which those who explored further and more complex extremes of discomfort and distress won considerable praise and prestige from the less daring.

The revival of Thanaticist ideas was at first purely theoretical. Although many hobbyist masochists became fond of asserting that the ultimate human experience must be the one that emortals had postponed indefinitely, there was no immediate rush to put aside the delay. There was, however, extensive experimentation with increasingly elaborate exercises in “recreational torture.” As time went by, and these activities became increasingly ingenious and daring, the leading proponents of the new philosophy of extreme experience began to look around for “martyrs,” who might be prepared to go all the way.

There had always been suicides in the true emortal population—indeed, once a firm line had been ruled beneath the death toll of the Decimation, suicide became the commonest cause of death in three-quarters of the Earthly nations, outnumbering accidental deaths by a facto
of three in the most extreme cases. Such acts were, however, motivated by personal idiosyncrasy. None of the first dozen Thanaticist martyrs, all of whom were posthumously hailed, had committed suicide for any reason remotely linked to the cause of sensation seeking. I daresay that they would all have been horrified to be hailed as heroes and potential role models, but they were not around to object.

I would have been unpleasantly surprised by the developments of the 2710s and 2720s even if I had remained a mere spectator, but I did not. The new Thanaticists would probably have taken a considerable interest in my work anyway, simply because I was now well established in the scholarly sectors of Labyrinth as the leading historian of death. As chance would have it, though, they rose to prominence within twenty years of the publication of the third part of the project: the one that dealt so extensively, and so sympathetically, with the ancient martyrs of Christendom.

My interpretation of the myth of Christ and those who had followed him to horrible and ignominious destruction was publicly hailed by the prophets of the new Thanaticism as a major inspiration, and it was publicly claimed as proof of the respectability of their philosophy. The so-called Thanaticist Manifesto of 2717, which carried the ridiculous and obviously pseudonymous byline “Hellward Lucifer Nyxson,” quoted from
The Empires of Faith
—though not so extensively as to be in breach of copyright—and held up my work as an example to everyone interested in recovering the full range of sensations that early humans had been “privileged to enjoy.” The claim that anything I had written could be taken as support for the absurd manifesto was nonsensical, but it was read and heard by millions more people than ever bothered to look at the history itself.

My ideas were swiftly usurped, horribly perverted and lasciviously adopted—in their perverted forms—as key items of Thanaticist lore. The Thanaticists claimed that their own expeditionaries to the extremes of human experience were, like the Christian martyrs and their model, suffering and dying
on behalf of others.
According to Nyxson and his more vociferous followers, Thanaticist martyrs were nobly crucifying themselves so that the New Human Race would not lose touch with the more exotic possibilities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of self-knowledge.

I tried to protest, of course, but at first I protested privately and entirely in vain. I sent messages to people who misquoted and misrepresented me, begging them to desist, although I could not contrive to discover the real identity of Hellward Lucifer Nyxson. Such replies as I received were content to assure me that I had misunderstood the import of my own work. It quickly became clear that I would need to react more forcefully if I were to have any effect at all—but I had no idea how to go about it.

While I dithered, events moved on rapidly and relentlessly. Thanks to false advertisements by the most outspoken Thanaticists, I became a hero of the movement: not merely an inspiration but a guiding light. The trails I had laid down in the Labyrinth to collate data regarding the myriad forms of Christian martyrdom and make them more easily navigable became a handbook for young Thanaticists bent on innovative self-mutilation. For a while, they all drew back from the brink of the ultimate sacrifice, but the 2720s saw an epidemic of “recreational crucifixions” whose willing victims vied to set new records for self-suspension by ropes or nails, in various different positions.

It would have been bad enough had the crucified only claimed Christ for their inspiration, but the majority made the specific claim that it was
my
account of the meaning of the Christ myth that had inspired their adventures. Connoisseurs of other kinds of torture were equally enthusiastic to declare that it was my reinterpretation of the Golden Legend that had given multifarious examples of the various saints to the emortals of the twenty-eighth century and made them newly meaningful.

Invitations to crucifixions, scarifications, and burnings began to pile up in the files of my answering machine. I refused them all, but they kept on coming.

One side effect of the unwanted publicity was that my history began to produce a decent income. Unfortunately, the money that poured into my account seemed to me to be steeped in blood, tainted by torture. I was reluctant to spend it and stopped trying to give it away when many of the intended recipients refused it on exactly the same grounds.

I hoped for a while that the fad would soon pass, preferably before any lives were actually sacrificed, but the cult continued to grow, feeding
vampirically on the naive fascination of its emortal audience. Gaea’s latest fever was cooling as the new Ice Age began, its crisis having passed, but the accompanying delirium of human culture had evidently not yet reached and surpassed what Ziru Majumdar called “the cutting edge of experience.”

F
rom the very beginning, I found notoriety inconvenient. At first, I attempted to keep a low profile, programming my answerphone AI to stall all inquiries, whatever their source or nature. But I soon realized that the strategy was assisting others to misquote and misrepresent me, and that my private protests were futile.

I had previously assigned the duty of answering my phone to a low-grade sloth, but I had been dissatisfied with its service for some time. I suspected that it was at least partly to blame for the fact that Emily’s message telling me that she was in Antarctica had gone astray. Now I had the perfect excuse to replace it. I obtained a clever silver, although I begrudged the weeks of hard work that I had to devote to its education.

By the time I had equipped my new servant to put my side of the story, however, there had grown up a considerable clamor demanding that if I objected to the Thanaticists’ view of my work I ought to plead my own case and submit to proper cross-examination. No matter how cleverly my new sim could be equipped to argue on my behalf it remained a sim, and therefore a sham, whose employment was easily made to seem like cowardice.

Had I not been living in a place as remote as La Urbana there would have been far more people beating a path to my actual door, but the fact that those who did make the trip found it arduous made them all the more determined not to be turned away. One or two were Thanaticists embarked on insane pilgrimages; the remainder was evenly divided between legmen for the casters and morally panicked opponents of the new movement who wanted me to stand up against my betrayers and denounce them with all the force I could muster.

I had never felt so desperately alone. The last of my parents had now been dead more than half a century, but I had never felt the lack of them so sharply. Emily had already left L-5 for the outer system and the time delay was beginning to make virtual conversation with her too difficult to serve any real consolatory function. In desperation, I forgave Sharane
Fereday for the ignominies she had heaped upon me prior to our parting, and called her. I should have known better.

Although Sharane had not become a wholehearted Thanaticist, she was by no means sympathetic to my plight. Her advice, though liberally given, was of little use. She explained at great length why it would do me no harm at all to expand the range of my own allegedly meager experiences. It should not have surprised me in the least that she had become a convert to the ardently curious philosophy of Ziru Majumdar, but it felt like a kind of treason nevertheless.

Fortunately, the veterans of my previous divorce proved to be more generous and more helpful, although they were too hardheaded to be capable of taking the matter very seriously. There was, alas, little or no consistency in their advice.

“They’re just harmless lunatics, Morty,” Axel told me. “It’ll all be a nine days’ wonder. All you have to do is ignore them, and they’ll eventually go away.” Jodocus took the same dismissive line, but the others were a little more forthcoming.

“You have to stand up to them,” Minna advised. “You have to make your own position clear. Don’t consent to be bullied, or they’ll walk all over you. I know you can get the better of them, if you’ll just make the effort.” Eve wasn’t quite so bullish about it, but she agreed that I ought to issue a detailed and formal account of my true position.

Any hope I might have had that Camilla would provide a casting vote soon vanished when I called her. “Personally,” she opined, breezily, “I don’t care how many of them mutilate themselves. I just wish they’d stop messing about with half-measures and go all the way. Think of it as surgery, removing one more cancer from Gaea’s body. I only wish the Rad Libs were suicidally inclined. Did you know that Keir’s still with them—actually on their so-called steering committee? I thought
he
was as mad as a New Human could be until this Thanaticist folly came along. Thanaticism is going to work to the Rad Libs’ advantage, don’t you think? How can anyone call the Libs and Mystics crazy while this kind of thing is going on? I know it’s not your fault, but I wish you’d been a little more careful, Morty—heaven only knows whether you can repair the damage.”

Despite their name, the Rad Libs with whom Keir was now allied
were not quite the most radical of the Gaean liberationists. They were advocates of a drastic reduction of the numbers of Earthbound humanity rather than the total abandonment of Earth. There had always been “reductionists” in the Gaean ranks, but the new Ice Age had swelled their numbers and increased the fervor of their demands. As Camilla said, the activities of the recreational crucifixionists were making their policies seem somewhat less ridiculous.

I had hesitated over calling Keir, who had left the Rainmakers long before the divorce, but I was intrigued by Camilla’s news. Curiously enough, he was more enthusiastic than any of the others. “Morty!” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you for months. I read your commentary—all three parts. I even delved into the data stream.”

“I’m flattered,” I said.

“No need. It’s good—but you really ought to put in some more about the mythical Gaea. The
real
mythical Gaea, that is, not the sanitized one. There’s too much twentieth-century sentimentality loaded into the notion of Mother Earth, even now. I mean, Gaea gave birth to Uranus before mating with him—and their first crop of children were all monsters! Uranus couldn’t stand the sight of them, so what did she do? Gave Chronos a sickle and told him to go cut Daddy’s balls off, that’s what! The blood that flooded from the wound brought forth yet another generation of children. All right up your street, I would have thought.”

“Uranus didn’t die,” I pointed out, utterly mystified by the direction the conversation was taking.

“Maybe not, but he did retire from the Earthly scene forever. Castration became the price of new and better life, Morty—the twenty-second century in a nutshell. Then the sky-god vanished into the sky. That’s us, Morty. We have to go—not today or tomorrow, mind, but we will have to go eventually. Reductionism is the first step, and the sooner we get used to the idea the sooner we can plan a sensible timetable. We’ve been properly born, thanks to Ali Zaman, and we have to start making preparations for giving way, not just for more of our own kind but for Gaea’s next generation: products of a whole new evolutionary sequence.”

I couldn’t tell whether Keir’s advocacy of a more extreme reductionism meant that the position of the entire Rad Lib movement was becoming more extreme or whether he was on the brink of defection to the
cause of an even smaller minority. “The new human race will never abandon Earth entirely,” I told him.

“Maybe not
entirely
,” he admitted, giving the impression that he was reluctant to admit even that, “but that doesn’t stop us making room for new kinds. We’ve grown up, and it’s time for all but a few sane stewards to fly the nest. Isn’t that what your
History
is aiming toward? I know I’m reading between the lines, but that’s surely the direction it’s going. If we stick around, we’re still keeping company with death, right? These new Thanaticists are just the first symptom of continued infantilism, no? A horrible example to us all.”

“I’m not a Gaean, Keir,” I told him, mildly appalled by the cavalier way in which he had contrived to read his own ideas into my text. “Not even in a moderate sense. I’m a neo-Epicurean.”