The Fountains of Youth (33 page)

A curious thing happened to me when I got back to Earth and booked into a rehab hostel. While I was enjoying my first long session in the swimming pool—although I wasn’t doing much actual swimming—I was joined by a tall man with unusually dark skin, whose walk as he crossed the polished floor suggested that his legs were not in the least need of readaptation. He swam several languorous lengths before making his way over to the lane in which I was dawdling.

“Hello, Mortimer,” he said. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

As soon as he suggested that I
ought
to recognize him I did. It wasn’t so much the hue of his skin as the manner of his speech that tipped me off.

“All history is fantasy,” I quoted at him. “I was only a boy when we met, Mister Ngomi. It was more than three hundred years ago.”

He smiled broadly. “Call me Julius,” he said. “They said we’d never manage to keep hold of our early memories, didn’t they? The falsies, that is. Because serial rejuves and too much nano in the brain left
their
memories pretty much wiped out, they assumed we’d be the same, serially reincarnate within the same body. It’s good to be able to prove them wrong, isn’t it?”

“There’s not much else I remember from those days but bare facts,” I confessed. “You made an impression. It was so unexpected—the inside of the mountain, I mean. The kind of thing of which indelible traces are made. Did you actually come here
looking
for me?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I did.”

“Why?” I asked, guardedly. I remembered him clearly enough to be sure that his wasn’t the kind of job you did for a hundred years or so and then put behind you. If he’d been a finger of the invisible hand then, he was probably a thumb by now, maybe even one of the eyes that guided the hand.

“Emily Marchant,” he said, bluntly.

My memory of recent events was much sharper than time-worn indelible impressions. I could still replay the words within my mind, hearing them spoken in her own voice.
There isn’t going to be any Hardinist Cabal on Titan. We figure that the highkickers are mature enough not to fall prey to the tragedy of the commons. Forget the Gaean Libs, Morty
—
we’re the next and last Revolution.

“What about Emily Marchant?” I said, frostily.

“Don’t be like that,” he said, still grinning. “I’m not about to ask you to betray any intimate secrets. It’s just that the walls on the moon don’t have nearly as many ears and eyes as the walls on Earth—and the ice palaces of Titan might as well be on another world for all the worthwhile intelligence we get from
them”

I didn’t laugh at the incredibly weak joke. “So what?” I said. “Didn’t the Sauls and their cozy circle make a Faustian bargain five hundred years ago that allowed them to keep ownership of Earth in exchange for their assistance in giving everyone with ambition a slice of the cosmic pie? Isn’t it a little late to decide that you want to own the entire solar system?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he said. “You’re a historian, Mortimer. The next section of your masterwork will deal with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so you must be acquainted with the elementary principles of Hardinism.”

“The institution of private property is good because it motivates owners to protect their resources from the ruinous depredations of greed,” I said. “It sounds fine in theory, but if there’s one thing intensive study of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries makes clear, it’s that owners can be every bit as greedy and destructive as competitors fighting to maximize their own returns from a common resource.”

“Hardinism is all about
good
ownership,” Ngomi informed me, perfectly straight-faced for once. “The Hardinist creed equates good ownership
ship with
responsible stewardship.
What did Emily Marchant tell you about Jupiter?”

I honestly thought that it was a trick question. “Last time she was there,” I told him, “Titan was still in orbit around Saturn.”

“Don’t be disingenuous, Mortimer,” he retorted. “We aren’t interested in the petty Utopia that she and her friends are designing for her pretty glass houses, any more than we’re interested in the fabers’ plans to convert the entire asteroid belt into a fleet of starships to facilitate the Diaspora of the many-handed. Jupiter is different. There could be a real conflict of interest over Jupiter. You might think that it’s all a long way off, but if you and I expect to live forever and a day, we have to settle potential conflicts as early as possible, in case they fester and infect the whole Oikumene. As you’re so fond of saying, there’ll always be Earth-bound humans, and their long-term interests have to be protected. If that means staking a claim to Jupiter, so be it.”

I stared at him for a full half-minute, wishing that my head—the only part of me that wasn’t benefiting from the buoyancy of the water—didn’t seem quite so heavy. “I honestly don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Mister Ngomi,” I said. “I will admit that I wouldn’t tell you anything that Emily said to me in confidence, but I wouldn’t lie to you about it either. If Emily and the other rich folk in the outer system have any plans for the development of the Jovian satellites, she certainly didn’t mention them to me. I assume that all the good reasons the outward bounders had for letting Europa and Ganymede alone still hold.”

“It’s not the Jovian satellites we’re concerned about,” Ngomi said. “It’s the planet itself.”

I jumped to what seemed to me to be the natural conclusion. “Are you talking about the Type-2 movement?” I asked, uncertainly.

There had been a lot more talk about the Type-2 crusade of late, even among people who believed that the third millennium was far too soon to start planning for the day when the Oikumene would want to exploit the entirety of the sun’s energy by building a series of superstructures in Earth’s orbit. When asked where the mass would come from—as they frequently were nowadays, by the same casters who had once solicited my views on Thanaticism—Type-2 visionaries were fond of pointing out that Jupiter had enough mass to make a hollow compound
sphere with a radius of one astronomical unit and some fifty meters separating the inner and outer shells, always provided that you could transport and transmute it.

I couldn’t believe that the Titanians were seriously involved with Type-2 persiflage, though; they were working on a very different timescale. By the time the Type-2 cowboys got to square one Emily and her fellow outlookers would presumably be halfway to the galactic center. Then I remembered, slightly belatedly, what she’d said about the possibility of improving Titan’s meager ration of the sun’s energy and guessed what Julius Ngomi was really talking about.

“I suppose I am, in a manner of speaking,” Ngomi replied, “but even you and I aren’t likely to live long enough to see the sun boxed in. It’s not so much what
we
might want to do with Jupiter, way down the time line, as what
they
might want to do with it much sooner.”

“Which is?” I parried, unwilling to tip my hand.

He looked at me as long and hard as I’d looked at him. Even at three hundred and some, most Earthbounders spend too much time in VE to know how to keep a straight face under intense inspection, but I’d just got back from thirty-odd years on the moon, where people look into one another’s faces far more frequently, and I’d learned how to mask my lies. As it happened, though, I didn’t have anything significant to hide.

“Rumor has it that they want to set it alight,” Ngomi told me, eventually. “They think the outer system could do with a little more native heat, and they figure that they ought to be able to get a fusion reaction going that will turn Jupiter into the system’s second sun, if they can only build robots capable of working at the core.”

The idea was an old one, but it didn’t have a newsworthy movement behind it—and that, I realized, was exactly the point. It was an idea that would never generate any kind of movement
among the Earthbound
because the Earthbound had nothing to gain by it. On the other hand, if Type-2 really were fated to gain historical momentum over the centuries and the millennia, however slowly, the Earthbound might well have something to
lose
by it. Rightly or wrongly, the Earth’s owners saw themselves as good and responsible stewards, duty-bound custodians of the future of humankind as well as Garden Earth.

“She really didn’t mention Jupiter at all,” I said, too quickly to stop
myself as I belatedly realized that Ngomi’s purpose in broaching the subject wasn’t actually to find out whether Emily Marchant had unthinkingly tossed me a valuable nugget of information but to let me in on his side of the argument: to invite me to plight my ideological troth to him, the invisible hand and the legions of the Earthbound. I was ashamed of the reflex that made me wonder why he was bothering, given that I was a mere historian, irrelevant to the course and causes of humankind’s future. Hadn’t I tried with all my might to persuade Emily and Khan Mirafzal that I
wasn’t
irrelevant and that the history of death still had lessons to teach us because the ultimate war was still going on, in its patient and muted fashion?

“That’s all right,” said Julius Ngomi, serenely. “Don’t worry about it. Feel free to mention this conversation to her, of course, next time you update her on what’s happening way down here in the Well.”

All the walls on Earth had ears and eyes. No VE conversations, however great the time delay to which they might be subject, were immune from the attentions of clever eavesdroppers. Of course Mister Ngomi wanted me to raise the subject, given that Emily hadn’t seen fit to raise it herself.

“Is she really that important?” I asked him. “I knew she was rich, but not
that
rich.”

“She’s a very talented lady,” Julius Ngomi said, before swimming away to the far end of the pool and disappearing from my life for another few centuries. “She takes her art very seriously indeed. We’ve always had a great respect for authentic visionaries because that’s what
we’ve
always tried to be.”

T
he sixth part of the
History of Death
, entitled
Fields of Battle
, was launched on 24 July 2888. Its subject matter was war, but my commentary didn’t pay much attention to the actual fighting of the wars of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. My main concern was with the
mythology
of warfare as it developed in the period under consideration, and with the ways in which the development of the mass media of communication transformed the business and the perceived meanings of warfare. I began my main argumentative sequence with the Crimean War because it was the first war to be extensively covered by newspaper reporters, and the first whose conduct was drastically affected thereby.

Before the Crimea, I argued, wars had been “private” events, entirely the affairs of the men who started them and the men who fought them. They had had a devastating effect on the local populations of the arenas in which they were fought but had been largely irrelevant to distant civilian populations. The British
Times
had changed all that by making the Crimean War the business of all its readers, exposing the government and military leaders to public scrutiny and to public scorn. Reports from the front had scandalized the nation by creating an awareness of how ridiculously inefficient the organization of the army was and what a toll of human life was exacted upon the troops in consequence—not merely deaths in battle, but deaths from injury and disease caused by the appalling lack of care given to wounded soldiers. That reportage had not only had practical consequences, but imaginative consequences. It had rewritten the entire mythology of heroism in an intricate webwork of new legends, ranging from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the secular canonization of Florence Nightingale.

Throughout the next two centuries, I argued, war and publicity were entwined in an intimate and tightly drawn knot. Control of the news media became vital to propagandist control of popular
morale
, and governments engaged in war had to became architects of the mythology of
war as well as planners of military strategy. Heroism and jingoism became the currency of consent; where governments failed to secure the right public image for the wars they fought, they fell. I tracked the way in which attitudes to death in war, especially to the endangerment of civilian populations, were dramatically transformed by the three so-called World Wars and by the way those wars were subsequently mythologized in memory and fiction.

My commentary dwelt at great length on the way the first World War was “sold” to those who must fight it as a war to end war and on the consequent sense of betrayal that followed when it failed to live up to this billing. I went on to argue, however, that if the sequence of global wars were seen as a single event, then their collective example really had brought into being an attitude of mind that ultimately forbade wars. This was, of course, rather controversial. Many modern historians had lumped together the First and Second World Wars as phases of a single conflict, but the majority tended to deny that the idea of the “Third World War” had ever had any validity and that the conflicts of the twenty-first century were of a very different kind. My peers were used to arguing that although the plague wars and their corollaries had indeed infected the whole world they were not international conflicts and thus belonged to an entirely different conceptual category. I disagreed, proposing that if one set aside the carefully managed public representations of the global wars as so much false advertising, one could easily see that none of them had really been contests for national hegemony.

Other historians had become fond of distinguishing the plague wars from their predecessors on the grounds that they were actually nasty but necessary “class wars” waged by the world’s rich against underclasses that might otherwise have swept them away by revolution. Orthodox Hardinists always added that these underclasses would also have destroyed the ecosphere in the ultimate “tragedy of the commons.” Such apologists were also careful to say that if the plague of sterility really had been a war then it was the last and best of the
good
and
responsible
wars.