The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  When visiting Mia Czielinski and my other neighbors on Adare I had thought of “adaptation” to the ice palaces as a mere matter of soothing reflexive discomfort and disturbance, but what Emily’s architecture demanded was something far more complex and far reaching. I was woefully inadequate to the task—and I knew that I would never be prepared to put in the kind of work that would have been necessary to raise my perceptiveness even as far as mediocrity.

  “Can’t you get the same effects with glass?” I asked Emily, wondering why the earliest gantzers had not discovered a similar art form when they had first begun to work with biotech-fused sand.

  “Similar,” she admitted, “but they’re much harder to manage. Not worth the effort, in my opinion, although artists in the tropic zones have already joined the competition. Most of the light-management work in an ice palace is done by the skin that mediates between the warm spaces and the cold walls. Quite apart from the fact that glass working doesn’t require membranes of that sort, they’re brand-new technology, unique to the new generation of shamirs.”

  “But glass houses have been around for a long time,” I observed. “Surely somebody glimpsed these kinds of possibilities.”

  “Back in the twenty-second century the main priority was making sure that glass houses were safe, in the sense that they wouldn’t break if you threw stones at them,” she told me. “They were so crude, optically speaking, that it’s no wonder that nobody managed to lay foundation stones for this kind of artwork. In those days, gantzing was just a matter of sticking things together and making sure they stayed stuck. You got a lot of glitter, but there was no practical way to increase the scale and delicacy of the prismatic effects. Ice-palace-like effects couldn’t be foreshadowed in glass even in the twenty-fourth century, when the first true shamirs came in.”

  “Well,” I said, looking up into the heady heights of a kaleidoscopically twisted spire, “you’ve certainly made up for lost time. This is the work of a genius.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said, with sincere modesty. “Once you’ve mastered a few simple tricks the effects are easy to contrive. I got a head start because I devised the techniques—now that I’ve shown the way, real architects are beginning to take over the reins.”

  “But you’re still learning,” I pointed out. “You could stay ahead of the game if you put your mind to it. Maybe it’s time for you to move on to work in glass.”

  “Absolutely not. Ice is my medium. But there’s ice and ice. This is just a beginning. As soon as the twenty-eighth gets under way I’ll be off to where the real action is.”

  “The Arctic?” I said, foolishly.

  “Hardly,” she said. “There’s no scope here for real hands-on work.”

  It finally dawned on me that by “here” she meant Earth, and that what she’d meant when she’d first mentioned the next step on her journey—the one that she knew I wouldn’t be able to take—she’d meant a journey into space.

  “This is just the beginning,” she added, while I was still working it out. “When the twenty-eighth century gets under way, I want to be where the real action is.”

  “The moon?” I said, foolishly.

  “Titan, Dione, and Enceladus,” she replied. “Then on to Nereid and Triton. So far, the colonists of the outer planet satellites have only been digging in, excavating nice warm wombs way down where the heat is. For five hundred years we’ve been imagining the conquest of space as if we were moles. Glass is poor stuff by comparison with ice, but water ice might not be the optimum. All this is just icing on a cake, Morty. It’s not even continental engineering. The next generation of shamirs will lay the groundwork for planetary engineering. Not boring old terraformation—real planetary engineering. Give me four hundred years, Morty, then come visit me in the ice palaces of Neptune’s moons, and I’ll show you a work of art.”

  All I could say in response to that, in my feeblest manner, was, “You’re going to the far edge of the Oikumene? That’s as far from home as you can go.”

  “For the moment. It won’t seem so far once the kalpas report in—but for now, it’s where the opportunities are.”

  “But you’re rich,” I said, redoubling my foolishness. “You have more credit than you’ll need for a millennium and more. You don’t need to leave Earth to seek your fortune.”

  “Not that kind of opportunity, Morty,” she said, without a hint of mockery or censure. “The opportunities of the future. Once you’ve caught up with the twenty-seventh century, you know, you’ll have to catch up with the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth, and in the end, you’re bound to run into the present. Then, even you will have to look forward—and that will mean looking upward. I know you can do it, Morty, and I know you will, when you’re ready. You learned to swim, eventually, and you haven’t had a headache for days. You’ve adapted to this kind of enlightenment. It’s only a matter of time before you can see the way the world is going—the way the Oikumene is going.”

  “Enlightenment” was what the architects of ice palaces called their new art. I’d always thought it a mere affectation, more than a trifle disrespectful to the heroes of the eighteenth-century revolutions in thought and theory—but I realized when Emily used the word that it was layered far more deeply with deliberate ambiguities than I’d previously understood.

  “There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, mechanically having not quite recovered my composure. “The Gaean extremists will never turn it into a nature reserve. We’ll have to keep making room for new generations by exporting a percentage of the population, but there’ll always be a role for the old. For educators. For historians”

  “But you’re not old, Morty,” Emily reminded me. “Youth shouldn’t be a mere preparation for being old. Neither should adulthood. You can’t decide now what you’ll be in three hundred or three thousand years’ time—and if you can, you shouldn’t. One day, Morty, your history of death will be finished—and it will be no good sitting down to start a history of life, because that’s just the other side of the same coin. You’ll have to start on the future, just like the rest of us. It wouldn’t do you any harm to get a little practice, would it?”

  “It’s not like that,” I told her, although I wasn’t sure that I could even convince myself of it. “I may be a historian, but I live my everyday life in the present, just like everybody else. There’s nothing wrong with being contentedly Earthbound.”

  “You’ve been living in a fake lighthouse for more than twenty years,” she pointed out, “without even realizing that an entire city of light was growing up just over the horizon. Don’t you think that says something about the kind of person you’re in danger of becoming?”

  Her rhetoric had come a long way since she was eight years old, and I hadn’t been able to resist its force even then.

  “I’m not a recluse,” I told her, realizing as I said it that it was exactly what I was. “I’m just trying to be myself,” I added, realizing as I said it that I still had not the slightest idea what that was supposed to mean.

  “But you can see the light, can’t you?” she said, pointing up into the magical spire. “You can see that there are new possibilities before us now. You can see that wherever we live our everyday lives, we’re looking out on to an infinite stage. The universe is waiting for us, Morty, and we can’t keep it waiting forever just because we’re busy playing in our tiny little garden.”

  “Sharane used to say that play is all there is,” I told her, reflexively. “She used to say that when all the threats and dangers had been eliminated, play was all that was left to lend purpose to existence.”

  “Sharane was a fool,” said Emily, without an atom of doubt in her voice. “She couldn’t even spell her name correctly.”

  Emily knew, of course, that Mama Siorane had contrived a death on Titan that everyone she knew out there had considered glorious. It seemed that she was determined to do likewise.

  “I’m thinking of moving,” I told her, improvising f
uriously. “Somewhere new. Somewhere hot. South America, maybe.”

  “To work on the fourth part of the History of Death” she said. She wasn’t one of my parents, so she didn’t try to make it sound like an insult or a condemnation, but I couldn’t help hearing it that way.

  “It’s important,” I said. “It’s relevant. And it can’t be put off for a thousand years. The past is perishable, Em. If we don’t work to keep it alive, it dies. The artifacts crumble. The documents evaporate. Even ice palaces melt. All this is temporary. Somebody has to keep track of it all. Somebody has to provide the continuity. I have to stay in touch. I could work on the moon, but that’s as far as you can go in the Universe Without Limits without losing touch with Earth. One day, historians will have to work with a much broader canvas, extending all the way to the Oort Halo, and probably beyond, but if that job’s to be done properly, the groundwork will have to be laid. I’m sorry you’re going. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

  “We’ll keep in touch,” she promised. “No more overlooking messages, no more wondering if one of us is avoiding the other.”

  “It won’t be the same,” I said. “You can’t have a conversation with someone in the outer system—the time delay won’t allow it. All I ever got from Mama Siorane was a series of lectures.”

  “Letters, Morty, not lectures,” she said. “You’re a historian remember? You know what it was like back in the good old days, when people in London needed the Penny Post to keep in touch with people in Canterbury because it was a five-day journey on foot.”

  Always the pedant, I had to point out that by the time they had the Penny Post, mail coaches had cut that kind of journey to a matter of hours—but she was right, in principle. From Mama Siorane I’d had lectures; from Emily I would get letters—and I would always be able to see her face, and even touch her VE sim.

  “I’ll still be sorry,” I said, stubbornly. “My parents are all dead. You’re all that I have left from that phase of my existence.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You just can’t be bothered to look for the rest of it while you’re stuck in the distant past. It’s time to move on, Morty—and I don’t mean South America. It’s time to reacquaint yourself with the world you live in.”

  She was right, of course. I promised that I would, but I probably wouldn’t have kept the promise very well if the world had given me a choice. I would have changed in my own good time, at my own plodding pace, if I hadn’t been moved to more urgent action by forces beyond my control. As it happened, however, I was soon snatched up by a catastrophe that seemed at first, at least to my unready understanding, to be as furious and as far-reaching in its fashion as the Great Coral Sea Disaster.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The third part of The History of Death, entitled The Empires of Faith, was decanted into the Labyrinth in August 2693. In a defensive introduction I announced that I had been forced to modify my initial ambition to write a truly comprehensive history and acknowledged that my previous hyper-Gordian knot had not been worthy of the name of aleph because it had been so overly ethnocentric. I explained that I hoped to correct this fault by degrees but admitted that I was unlikely ever to attain a genuinely universal breadth. I promised, however, to do my utmost to be eclectic and to provide my future commentaries with as much supportive justification as was practicable.

  This apology was not as sincere as it was designed to seem. It might have been more honest to admit that I did not wish to be a mere archivist of death and feared getting bogged down in the sheer mass of the data that pertained to my current and future researches. I could not regard all episodes in humankind’s war against death as being of equal interest, and I wanted to be free to ignore those which I thought peripheral and repetitive. I was more far interested in interpretation than mere summary.

  I justified that in my text by arguing that insofar as the war against death had been a moral crusade, I felt fully entitled to draw morals from it.

  This preface, understandably, dismayed those critics who had already urged me to be more dispassionate. Some academic reviewers were content to condemn the new volume without even bothering to inspect the rest of the commentary, although that sector of the book was no longer than the equivalent sector of the second part and seemed to me to benefit from a rather more fluent style. It is, of course, possible that the reviewers were put off by the abundance of the data collated in support, which was indeed fearsome.

  Other critics complained of my commentary that the day of “mute text” was dead and gone and that there was no place in the modern world for arguments whose primary illustrations resolutely refused to move, but I disregarded them as mere fashion victims. The imminent death of unembellished text had been announced so many times before that the new attempt to bury it seemed puerile.

  Unlike many of my contemporaries, whose birth into a world in which religious faith was almost extinct had robbed them of all sympathy for the imperialists of dogma, I proposed that the great religions had been one of the finest achievements of humankind. I regarded their development as a vital stage in the evolution of society, considering them as social technologies whose use had permitted a spectacular transcendence of the former—tribal and regional—limits of community.

  Faiths, I suggested, were the first instruments that were capable of binding together different language groups, and even different races. It was not until the spread of the great religions, I pointed out, that the possibility came into being of gathering all men together into a single common enterprise.

  I was not recklessly incautious in offering these observations. I took care to regret that the principal product of this great dream had been two millennia of bitter and savage conflict between adherents of different faiths, and between adherents of different versions of the same faith. I was not content, however, simply to praise the ambition while deploring its misshapen outcome. I retained some slight sympathy for those jihads and crusades in whose formulation people had tried to attribute more meaning to the sacrifice of life than they ever had before.

  I had already examined, in the first part of my history, the implications of the fact that one of the most common pre-Crash synonyms for human being—derived, of course, from the ancient Greek—was mortal, and that the term had continued to carry even greater significance once the prospect of emortality was in sight. Now I examined the implications of the the most common Latin-derived synonym for human being: individual

  To describe humans as “undivided ones” is to take it for granted that death divides, and that the mortal part of humanity is neither the only nor the most vital part. This blatant fiction, I suggested, was the most powerful of all the weapons deployed by primitive mortals in their psychological war against death. Whereas other historians of my own day thought it a hastily improvised crutch, I saw it as an item of field artillery, parent of the heavy cannon of prophecy and scripture.

  My comparative analysis of the great religious traditions was, I hope, reasonably evenhanded. I tried to pay appropriate compliments to all of them. Inevitably, the summation that attracted the most criticism, in a world that was still host to more than four million self-proclaimed Buddhists, three million Jews, two million Hindus and nearly three hundred thousand followers of Islam, was that of Christianity—the only great religion to have been officially declared extinct.

  To tell the truth, I was particularly fascinated by the symbology of the Christian mythos, which had taken as its central image the death on the cross of Jesus and had tried to make that one image of death carry an enormous allegorical load. I was entranced for a while by the idea of Christ’s death as a force of redemption and salvation: by the daring pretense that this person had died for others. I extended my argument to take in the Christian martyrs, who had added to the primal crucifixion a vast series of symbolic and morally significant deaths. This collectivity of legends, I suggested, ought to be regarded as a colossal achievement of the imagination, a crucial victory by which death and its handmai
den, pain, were dramatically transfigured in the theater of the human imagination.

  I was somewhat less impressed by the Christian conversion of the idea of death as a kind of reconciliation: a gateway to heaven, if properly met; a gateway to hell, if not. It seemed to me to be less ambitious as well as less original than the central motif of the crucified Christ. The idea of absolution from sin following confession, particularly the notion of deathbed repentance, seemed to me to be a tolerably daring raid into the territories of the imagination previously ruled by fear of death, but later confusions imported to the mythos along with the idea of God’s grace were an obvious spoliation. Even so, Christian eschatology had served its purpose, and whatever its imperfections the various versions of that eschatology had been at least as effective as those of its rival faiths.

  This entire collectivity of legends, I proposed, ought to be regarded as a colossal achievement of the imagination: a crucial victory by which death and its handmaiden, pain, were dramatically transfigured in the theater of the human imagination. The fact that Christianity was now extinct was, I suggested, eloquent testimony to the efficiency with which it had done its work. In a world that had tamed and all-but-conquered death, its carefully calculated absurdities had no utility whatsoever.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Perhaps paradoxically, the majority of my critics were no better pleased by my account of the defects of Christianity than my account of its strengths. Few of my fellow historians were able to accept my view of religions as systems of psychological armaments, and their refusal even to board my train of thoughts robbed them of all sympathy for its subsequent stations, let alone its terminus. Many of them were quick to point out that it was what I applauded in Christianity that had sealed its doom on the world stage.