The Fountains of Youth (42 page)

“And what will you do then?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Perhaps I’ll write something else—something very different. I had wondered about becoming some sort of Gardener, but having spent so much time with the Rainmakers in the last couple of years I’ve recovered all my old doubts about my suitability for that kind of work. I’ve been wondering incessantly about off-planet possibilities, of course. My daughter’s become almost as clamorous as Emily Marchant in her insistence that spacefaring is the only way to make proper use of indefinite longevity, but I’m not sure about my suitability
for that either. I’ve seen a lot of Garden Earth these last few years, and I feel
at home
here in a way that I wouldn’t like to lose. I’m glad I’ve lived on the moon, and I’d certainly like to
visit
the outer system some day, but I’m not sure that I’d ever want to go into space to live—even to one of these new Earths that Type-2 people want to build in Earth orbit.”

“I know what you mean,” Sharane agreed. “If what the casters say about these smart spaceships is true, it will soon become as easy to take tourist trips round the system as it is to tour Earth. When the day comes, I’ll be glad to see the sights. The VE reproductions are great, but they’re not the real thing. I don’t want to become a citizen of the outer darkness, though. I’m Earthbound through and through. All my husbands criticize me for living in the past, but the past is what made us—what we
are
is the sum of the past, and if we want to extrapolate ourselves in order to live in the future we have to keep our consciousness of the past up to scratch.
You
understand that, don’t you Morty? You’re only one who ever got close to figuring out that part of me.”

Most of it was mere flattery, of course—the polite conversation of old acquaintances who no longer had anything left to forgive—but it was good to hear that I had a special place in her memory.

E
mily confirmed what Jodocus Danette had inferred about the crucial importance of the impending conference at which the leading lights of the Oikumene’s many factions would come together face-to-face. Everyone, it seemed, accepted the necessity of some such encounter in the flesh. VE conferencing apparently made it too easy for representatives of the various factions in the dispute to retreat to entrenched positions. Nothing less than a physical gathering could carry sufficient symbolic weight to engender the spirit of give-and-take that would be necessary if the Earthbound and the highkickers were to sort out their rapidly multiplying differences—and even that might not be enough.

Despite the widespread agreement as to its urgent necessity, Emily told me not to expect the conference to happen any time soon. Such elementary matters as finding a venue, setting the agenda, and deciding on the terms of discussion were proving frustratingly difficult, involving a great deal of time-delayed diplomatic wrangling.

“There’s no way
we’rt
going to agree to come down to Earth,” she told me, defiantly. “That would be symbolically loaded to an unacceptable degree. On the other hand, we can understand why Ngomi doesn’t want to bring his people all the way out here, even as far as Jupiter—and there are symbolic reasons why neither side would be entirely happy about conducting discussions in old Jove’s shadow. If we meet on Mars the Martians will insist that their so-called problems are far more important than they really are, and the asteroids are faberweb territory. Even the moon is an unsuitable compromise because of the faber majority on the far side. It looks as if we might have to settle for empty space, but even the location of the empty space in question is a hot issue—and in the meantime, the unanswered questions are festering away. I wish that you Wellworms hadn’t so completely lost your sense of urgency. The situation’s becoming absurd.”

I wished that I could cut in with a few helpful suggestions, but I couldn’t. Her message had been hours in transit and my reply would double the interval.

“The only thing we’ve all managed to agree on so far,” she continued, “is that we have to make some kind of arrangement before the turn of the millennium—and we’re insisting that no matter what you arithmetical pedants might say, that means the end of 2999 rather than 3000. It looks as if it won’t be a day sooner, but we’ll have to sort out a venue by then. If I can come to Earth afterward, Morty, I will—just for a visit, you understand—but I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high. It may well be that the only chances we’ll get to meet face-to-face once this miserable century’s done will depend on your willingness not merely to come out of the Well but to come all the way to the frontier. The new-generation spaceships will make that a lot easier, of course, but you’ll still have to get your head around the idea.”

I
was
trying, in my slow and one-paced fashion, to get my head around that and many other ideas, but I had never even had Sharane’s fervor for novelty, let alone Emily’s, and it wasn’t easy.

It didn’t become any easier to come to an understanding of the new existential predicament of the various humankinds when I heard—not from Emily, in the first instance—that the aptly named starship worldlet
Pandora
had effected the first meeting between humans and the products of an alien ecosphere.
Pandora’s
faber inhabitants did not have to discover another “Earthlike” world in order to do this. Some freak of chance had allowed them to make a deep-space rendezvous with another, much smaller starship.

This was big news, but it had been so long awaited that its arrival seemed slightly anticlimactic. The letdown was reinforced by the fact that the aliens were not quite as alien as futuristic fantasies had always implied. That the alien vessel was so similar to the ancient Ark
Hope
in terms of its design was perhaps expectable, but no one had expected its crew to look so much like the human ambassadors granted the privilege of greeting them.

Like
Pandora
, the alien starship had a crew entirely composed of individuals who had been extensively bioengineered and even more extensively cyborgized for life in zero gee. Because
Pandora’s
population consisted entirely of fabers, many of whom had undergone extensive functional cyborgization, the “humans” and the “aliens” who contrived this allegedly epoch-making contact resembled one another rather more
than they resembled unmodified members of their parent species. The fundamental biochemistries controlling the “ecosphere-imposed templates” of the two species were slightly different, but the main consequence of this difference was that the two sets of fabers enthusiastically traded their respective molecules of life, so that their own genetic engineers could henceforth make and use chromosomes of both kinds. The aliens also used stripped-down versions of their own DNA analogue in exactly the same ways that humans employed what had once been called para-DNA in shamirs and other gantzing systems.

“What kind of freedom is it,” I asked Eve Chin, with whom I was staying at the time, “that makes all the travelers of space into mirror images of one another? What kind of infinite possibility will there be in the further exploration of the galaxy if it turns out that every starfaring civilization within it has automatically taken the road of convergent evolution?”

“You’re exaggerating,” Eve told me. “The news reports are playing up the similarity between the Pandorans and the aliens, but it seems to me that it isn’t really as close as all that. Freedom won’t breed universal mediocrity in space any more than it has on Earth.”

I wasn’t so sure. Planetary atmospheres are infinitely variable, whereas hard vacuum is the same everywhere, and the physical attributes of planetary surfaces are subject to all kinds of whims that are rigorously excluded from artificial habitats.

“When I lived on the moon the fabers were talking about six-handed and eight-handed variants,” I recalled, “but we haven’t heard much about them lately. The four-handed model seems to have unique advantages.”

“But cyborgization adds another major dimension of variability,” Eve pointed out.

“Most of the differences between individual cyborgs are the result of cosmetic modifications,” I said, dubiously. “The strictly functional adaptations produce a fairly narrow range of stereotypes, and the
Pandora
pictures suggest that the aliens have adapted themselves to the same range of functions.”

Eve wouldn’t shift her position. “Adaptation to zero gee isn’t an existential straitjacket, Morty,” she insisted. “Infinite possibility is still
available. One set of coincidences doesn’t prove that the next aliens we encounter will be stamped from the same mold. Anyway, far too much media space-time is being wasted on these coincidences. There’s something else that the news reports aren’t telling us, isn’t there? Don’t you get a distinct sense that certain matters are being set aside, left carefully unmentioned?”

Actually, I hadn’t. Even when Eve raised the possibility, I concluded almost immediately that she had become slightly paranoid by virtue of her long entanglement in the complex diplomatic wrangles that immediately enveloped anyone who proposed the slightest alteration in Earth’s ocean currents.

It turned out that I was wrong and Eve was right, but because I didn’t take her suspicions seriously to begin with, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility that the people who were actually monitoring the Pandorans’ transmission were keeping secrets. It never occurred to me to ask Emily any awkward questions when she sent me an uncharacteristically muted account of her own response to the news.

T
he tenth and last part of my
History of Death
, entitled
The Marriage of Life and Death
, was launched into the Labyrinth on 7 April 2998. It was not, from a purist point of view, an exercise in academic history, although I certainly considered it to be a fitting conclusion to my life’s work. It did deal in considerable detail with the events as well as the attitudes of the thirtieth century, thus bringing the whole enterprise up to date, but the balance of futurological speculation and historical analysis was far too evenhanded to please narrow-minded academicians.

The commentary element of
The Marriage of Life and Death
discussed neo-Thanaticism and Cyborganization as philosophies as well as social movements, annoying many of my critics and surprising almost all of them. What surprised them was not so much that I had chosen to dabble in rhetoric as that the rhetoric in question treated both movements with considerably more sympathy than I had shown in either of my two public debates with Samuel Wheatstone,
alias
Hellward Lucifer Nyxson.

My commentary also touched upon several other recent and contemporary debates, including those that were currently attempting to settle vital questions about the physical development of the solar system. The discussion was introduced by an innocuous examination of the proposal that a special microworld should be established as a gigantic mausoleum to receive the bodies of all the solar system’s dead, but it soon diversified into issues that some reviewers thought—mistakenly, I believe—to be irrelevant to a history of death. I tried to be scrupulously evenhanded in my treatment of the ongoing disputes, but I found it impossible to describe the history of such phenomena as the Type-2 Movement without making some attempt to evaluate their goals. I could not compare and contrast spacefarers’ and Earthdwellers’ attitudes to death without linking those attitudes to the various projects in which spacefarers were engaged and the various visions and ambitions guiding those projects.

The title of my commentary was an ironic reflection of one of its
main lines of argument. I contended that mankind’s war with death had reached its final balance, but I took care to remind my readers that this was not because death had been entirely banished from the human world. Death, I insisted, would forever remain a fact of life and its influence on fundamental human psychology must be recognized and respected. I argued that the infallible perpetuation of the human mind would never become possible, let alone routine, no matter how far biotechnology might advance or how much progress the cyborganizers might make in their material metamorphoses. The victory that humankind had achieved, I argued, was not and never would be a conclusive conquest; it had reached its conclusion because the only conclusion that was or had even been conceivable was a sensible reconciliation and the establishment of death within its proper place in human affairs. Having said that, however, I took some trouble to compliment the Cyborganizers for their bold attempts to widen the scope of human experience, and I did concede that any significant transformation of the quality of life has important consequences for the existential evaluation of death.

For the first time, I took the side of the neo-Thanaticists in declaring that it was a good thing that dying remained one of the choices open to human beings and a good thing that the option should occasionally be exercised. I still had no sympathy with the exhibitionism of public executions, and I was particularly scathing in my criticism of the element of bad taste in self-ordered crucifixions and other Thanaticist excesses, but only because such ostentation offended my Epicurean sensibilities. Deciding upon the length of one’s lifetime, I said, must remain a matter of individual taste. While one should not mock or criticize those who decided that a short life suited them best, one should not attribute more significance to their suicides than those suicides actually possessed.

At the risk of being obvious, I took care to stress that it was a thoroughly good thing that people were still markedly differently from one another even after half a millennium of universal emortality. However conducive it might be to Utopian ease and calm, I argued, it would not be good for the species if we were ever to become so similar that it became impossible for people to think one another seriously misguided or even deranged. Again, I complimented the Cyborganizers for trying to
discover new modes of human experience, including those that seemed to more conservative minds to be bizarre.