The Fountains of Youth (31 page)

The lack of popular enthusiasm for
The War of Attrition
was not, of
course, counterbalanced by any conclusive redemption of my academic reputation. Like many earlier scholars who had made contact with a popular audience, I was considered guilty of a kind of intellectual treason, and I knew that I would continue to be frozen out of the scholarly community in spite of my determined attempts at rehabilitation until the academic consensus accepted that I had served my sentence. The stigma attached to my name in academic circles might even have been increased by a few popular reviews that suggested there was much in the new volume to intrigue the inhabitants of a world whose medical science was so adept that almost everyone enjoyed perfect health as well as eternal youth. These reviews suggested that there was a certain piquant delight to be obtained from recalling a world in which everyone was—by modern standards—crippled or deformed, and in which everyone suffered continually from illnesses of a most horrific nature for which no effective treatments were available.

Some commentators felt that my treatment of early medical practitioners was unnecessarily scathing, whereas others thought it unduly generous. It was, of course, both—how could it be otherwise? What could one say of a so-called profession whose practitioners had stubbornly ignored for more than two thousand years the only sensible piece of advice offered by its so-called father, Hippocrates? I did not, of course, make much headway in the difficult business of trying to ascertain which few of the eighty-seven volumes of the Hippocratic Collection actually were by Hippocrates, but I was content to attribute to him the one crucial observation that treatment was best avoided because most active interventions worked to the detriment of the patient. For 2200 years doctors persisted blindly and pigheadedly in applying treatments that increased the danger in which their patients stood.

Even when the scientific method became a common mode of thought doctors remained crassly oblivious to its benefits, preferring to heed the vile counsels of ignoble tradition. How was it, I wondered, that the greatest English minds of the late eighteenth century, assembled together by Erasmus Darwin in the aptly named Lunatic Society, should have penetrated so many secrets of nature and technical practice without ever once applying their trained vision to Darwin’s own profession?—with the result that his beloved son died of blood poisoning caused by a
septic finger. How could any historian be less than scathing in chronicling such stupidity?

On the other hand, I was careful to give credit where it was due, complimenting medical practice as the most efficient accessory of religion in the psychological warfare that humankind waged against its ultimate enemy. The treatments that were so woefully ineffective in any material sense, even to the extent of being physically injurious, made a contribution nevertheless to the morale of the race. Seen as quasi-magical rituals, more akin to funerary rites than curative practices, early medicine became a much healthier—or, at any rate, a much more courageous—affair.

I have to admit that there were some passages in the commentary of
The War of Attrition
that could be deemed to partake of the “pornography of death and suffering.” Its accounts of the early history of surgery and midwifery were certainly bloodcurdling, and its painstaking analysis of the spread of syphilis through Europe in the sixteenth century could be consumed by readers so inclined as a horror story made all the nastier by its clinical narration.

I was particularly interested in syphilis because of the dramatic social effects of its sudden advent in Europe and its significance in the development of prophylactic medicine. My argument was that syphilis had been primarily responsible for the rise and spread of Puritanism, repressive sexual morality being the only truly effective weapon against its spread. I then deployed well-tried sociological arguments to the effect that Puritanism and its associated habits of thought had been importantly implicated in the rapid development of Capitalism in the Western World. This chain of argument allowed me to put forward the not altogether serious suggestion that syphilis ought to be regarded as the root cause of the economic and political systems that eventually came to dominate the most chaotic, the most extravagantly progressive, and most extravagantly destructive centuries of human history. I left it to my readers to recall that the present owners of the world still referred to their economic manipulations as “Planned Capitalism.” The levity of life in the moon might have removed a little too much gravity from my analysis at that particular point.

The history of medicine and the conquest of disease were, of course,
topics of elementary education in the twenty-ninth century. There was supposedly not a citizen of any nation to whom the names of Semmelweis, Jenner, and Pasteur were unknown—but disease had been so long banished from the world, and it was so completely outside the experience of ordinary men and women, that what people “knew” about it was never really brought to consciousness and never came alive to the imagination. Although recreational diseases were still relatively commonplace in the Big Well in the 2840s, popular usage of words such as
smallpox, plague
, and
cancer
was almost exclusively metaphorical.

I would have liked
The War of Attrition
to remind the world of certain issues that, though not exactly forgotten, had not been
brought to mind
while the diehard explorers of extreme experience had been injecting themselves with all manner of tailored germs, but I cannot pretend that it did. It is at least arguable that it touched off a few unobtrusive ripples whose movement across the collective consciousness of world culture was of some moment, but I dare not press the point. The simple fact is that the name of Mortimer Gray was no longer notorious in 2849, and his continuing work had not yet become firmly established within the zeitgeist.

D
uring my latter years in Mare Moscoviense I was often visited by Khan Mirafzal, the faber with whom I had crossed swords on terrestrial TV. The culture of the fabers was so much more geared to face-to-face interaction than that of lunar footsloggers, let alone the thoroughly privatized societies of Earth, that it was a rare faber who would not “drop in” if he happened to be passing the residence of a friend he had not seen for a month or more. When he returned to the moon briefly from the microworld in the asteroid belt that was now his home, Mirafzal automatically came along in person to find out how I was getting along.

His own news was, inevitably, rather more interesting than mine.

Mirafzal explained to me that the microworld on which he lived was being fitted with an antimatter drive that would take it out of the system and into the infinite. Its prospective voyagers were going to great pains to make sure that it was properly equipped for its departure and Mirafzal was one of those charged with the duty of keeping close track of technical progress in the inner system to make sure that no opportunity went unseized.

“We’ll keep in touch by radio, of course,” he said, “but we need to be sure that we’re in a position to take advantage of any new developments that come up while we’re deep in interstellar space.”

Mirafzal was a kind and even-tempered man who would not have dreamed of adopting salesmanlike tactics to convince me of the error of my Earthbound ways, but he was also a man with a sublime vision who could not restrain his enthusiasm for his own chosen destiny. He swept aside my mildly skeptical observations about the prospect of being enclosed in such a tiny space for hundreds of years with the same faces and voices. It was with him that I had the conversations that I couldn’t yet have with Emily, and to him that I exposed my doubts about the direction in which I ought to be going. He was a good listener, and he took me seriously. He was the only faber I knew who did not laugh when
I used footslogger metaphors in all seriousness, and he even condescended to use them himself.

“I have no roots on Earth, Mortimer, in any metaphorical sense whatsoever,” he assured me, when I wondered whether even he might become homesick in the great void beyond the Oort Cloud. “In my being, the chains of adaptation have been decisively broken. Every man of my kind is born anew, designed and synthesized. We are the
self-made men
, who belong everywhere and nowhere. The wilderness of empty space that you find so appalling is our realm and our heritage. I am homesick
now
, but when the voyage begins, I will be doing what I am designed to do.”

“But you’ve lived alongside unmodified humans throughout your formative years,” I pointed out. “You’ve always lived amid the scattered masses of the solar family. To you, as to me, the utter desolation of the void will surely be strange and alien.”

“Nothing is strange to us,” he assured me. “Nothing is foreign and nothing is alien.”

“My point exactly,” I replied, wryly.

He smiled politely at the joke, but would not retreat from his position.

“Blastular engineering has incorporated freedom into our blood and our bones,” he said, “and I intend to take full advantage of that freedom. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of my nature.”

“While my own blastular engineering served only to complete the adaptation to life on Earth that natural selection had left incomplete,” I mused, applying his logic to my own situation. “Given that I can never be free from the ties that bind me to Earth, perhaps I have no alternative but to return.”

“That’s not so,” he countered. “Natural selection would never have devised emortality, for natural selection can only generate change by death and replacement. When genetic engineers found the means of setting aside the curse of aging they put an end to
natural
selection forever. The first and greatest freedom is time, my friend, and you have all the time in the world. You can become whatever you want to be. If you wish, you may even become a faber of sorts—although I gather that you have no such ambition. What
do
you want to be, Mortimer?”

“A historian,” I told him, reflexively. “It’s what I am because it’s what I want to be.”

“All well and good, for now,” he conceded, “but history isn’t inexhaustible, Mortimer, as you well know. It ends with the present day, the present moment, and no matter how slowly you can recapitulate its achievements, you’ll have to arrive in the present someday. The future, on the other hand, is…”

“Given to your kind,” I said, although I assumed that he was going to say
infinite.
“I know all that, Mira. I don’t dispute any of it. But what exactly
is
your kind, given that you rejoice in such freedom to be anything you want to be?”

“Not yet,” he said. “We’ve hardly scratched the surface of constructive cyborgization. That will open up a whole new dimension of freedom.”

“And reopen all the old arguments about robotization,” I added. “The older I get, the more sense those arguments seem to make. Once your little world is lost in the emptiness, effectively cut off from everything else in the universe, how will you avoid the trap of endless repetition? How will you maintain spontaneity, change, difference?”

“Earth is just a bigger spaceship,” Mirafzal reminded me. “The whole solar system is a narrow room—and will one day become exactly that, complete with enclosing walls, if the Type-2 enthusiasts get their way. Even if a rival sect of cosmic engineers eventually wins through, it will only change the decor—and after humankind attains Type-2, the galaxy will become the playground of the Type-3 visionaries. Spontaneity, change, and difference have to come from within, Morty. Cyborgization isn’t robotization; it’s enhancement, not mechanization.”

“And spacefarers will be its pioneers, figuring out how to do it and why while all the lazy footsloggers live on the capital of Earth’s evolutionary momentum,” I conceded, with a sigh. “Maybe you’re right, Mira. Maybe it is just my legs that weigh my spirit down—but if so, then I’m well and truly addicted to gravity. I can’t cast off the past like a worn-out suitskin. I know you think I ought to envy you, but I don’t. You think that I and all my kind are clinging like a terrified infant to Mother Earth while you and your kind are achieving true maturity, but I really do think that it’s important to have somewhere to
belong.”

“So do I,” the faber said, quietly. “I just don’t think that Earth is or ought to be that place. It’s not where you start from that’s important, Mortimer, it’s where you’re going.”

“Not for a historian,” I protested, feebly.

“For everybody,” he insisted. “History ends, Mortimer. Life doesn’t—not any more.”

W
hile I continued to lived on the moon I was half-convinced that Khan Mirafzal was right, although I never followed any of his well-meant advice. The remaining half of my conviction was otherwise inclined. I couldn’t accept that I was trapped in a kind of existential infancy any more than I could see myself as a victim of lotus-eater decadence. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if I’d had one of my close encounters with death while I was on the moon, but I didn’t. The dome in which I lived was only breached once, and the crack was sealed before there was any significant air loss. It was a scare, but it wasn’t a life-endangering threat. The longer I stayed in Mare Moscoviense, the more I came to think of the moon as Antarctica without the crevasses, but with nosier neighbors.

It was always inevitable, I think, that I would eventually give in to my homesickness for Garden Earth and return there, having resolved not to leave it again until my history of death was complete, but there was one more challenge awaiting me after Khan Mirafzal had left the moon for the last time. There was one person in the solar system who had the power to affect me far more deeply in face-to-face confrontation than he and all his kind—and even the footsloggers of Titan sometimes visited the moon.

I received Emily’s message telling me that she had embarked on a shuttle heading for the moon within days of the news coming through that
Hope
, one of the ancient Arks launched during the early phase of the Crash with a cargo of SusAn-preserved potential colonists, had settled into orbit around an Earthlike planet orbiting a G-type sun some fifty-eight light-years away in Sagitarius.