The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  A few of my critics, studiously ignoring the nature of the world with which I was trying to deal, argued that my intense study of the phenomena associated with the idea of death had become so personal simply because I had become so personally involved with Thanaticism. Others suggested that I had become so utterly infatuated with the ephemeral ideas of past ages that they had taken predatory control over my own imagination, and that I had become too wrapped up in my own unique contest with a hooded but toothless death whose scythe had lost its edge.

  I took what comfort I could in the conviction that by the time my work was complete there would be no room for such misunderstandings, that the whole would be seen for what it really was and its worth properly evaluated.

  I knew that I would have a good deal more work to do before I had broadened the concerns of Fear and Fascination sufficiently to take in the whole world, but I cannot deny that I was slightly disheartened by the element of mockery that often crept into criticisms of my commentary. My recently renewed reclusiveness was further intensified by this sense of injury, and I came to feel that my home by the Orinoco was too exposed, its environs too crowded with predators far more insidious than alligators.

  I was tempted to go back to Antarctica, but Cape Adare was now ill fitted to serve as any kind of refuge. Instead, I decided to remove myself to the other extremity of the civilized world. In 2774 I took up residence in an ancient stone residence—albeit one internally refitted with all modern conveniences—on the tip of Cape Wolstenholme, at the neck of Hudson’s Bay in Canada.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Twenty-eighth-century Canada was an urbane, highly civilized, and rather staid region of the Reunited States. It was as distinct from the spectral array of the New York-San Francisco Mainline, in its own idiosyncratic fashion, as the Old Southern Confederacy and the Latin Satellites. Its people seemed to be uniformly modest, intelligent, and down-to-earth—the sort of folk who had no time for such follies as Thanaticism. Cape Wolstenholme seemed, therefore, to offer an ideal retreat, where I could continue to throw myself wholeheartedly into my work and leave the world behind the headlines to feed a closeted store of data to which I would get around in my own good time.

  I handed over full responsibility for answering all my calls to a brand-new state-of-the-art Personal Simulation program, which grew so clever and so ambitious with practice that it soon began to give to casters interviews that were retransmitted on broadcast television. Although the silver offered what was effectively “no comment” in a carefully elaborate fashion I eventually thought it best to introduce into its operating system a block that restrained its ambitions—a block that was intended to ensure that my face dropped out of public sight for at least half a century. Having fully experienced the rewards and pressures of celebrity, I felt not the slightest need to extend that phase of my life, even via an artificial alter ego.

  The one person with whom I maintained contact faithfully was Emily Marchant, partly because she was the most precious person in the Oikumene and partly because she had been too far from Earth to witness my inglorious involvement with the Thanaticist panic. Her messages to me seemed to come out of an earlier and better world, and they were full of pleas to join her in the making of a future that would be even better.

  “The Earthbound know nothing of the universe in which they live,” she told me, in an entirely characteristic lyrical moment. “The atmosphere surrounding the Well is a chrysalis from which we must emerge if we are to be what we were always destined to be. You may think that you have seen the stars and the galaxies in VE, but the people who called the world of Virtual Experience a Universe Without Limits had no idea what the actual limits of sensation were. Morty, you have to come out of the Well, at least as far as the moon. Once you’ve seen the stars as they are, you won’t be able to go back.”

  I couldn’t take that sort of rhetoric seriously. I knew that she’d been carried away by the zeal of the recent convert and had lost her sense of proportion. I had always found it difficult to take Mama Siorane seriously on the admittedly rare occasions when she had insisted on referring to the Earth as “the Well.”

  “Leave Earth to the Thanaticists,” Emily said, on another occasion, long after the heyday of Thanaticism was past. “Out here, death is still a threat to be avoided, and everyone wants to live as long and as gloriously as she can. Earth is already rotting, Morty—but Titan hasn’t yet begun to breathe.”

  I told myself that she didn’t have the least idea what she was talking about, as far as Earth and the Earthbound were concerned, and that she was probably as far off the mark in her estimation of the potentiality of the cold satellites of the gas giant worlds. My business, I was utterly convinced, was with Earth and solid history, not Titan and wild optimism. I never stopped replying to her messages with mechanical regularity, but I did stop listening to their exhortations.

  It must have seemed to the majority of the Earthbound that Thanaticism had already petered out as the turn of the century approached. The word eventually ceased to appear in the headlines. In fact, its last followers had “gone underground”—which is to say that Thanaticist martyrs no longer attempted to stage their exits before the largest audiences they could obtain but instead saved their performance for small, carefully selected groups. This was not a response to persecution but merely a variation in the strange game that they were playing: indulgence in a different kind of drama.

  I knew about this development because there was no let up in the communications with which diehard Thanatics continued to batter my patient AI interceptor. My presence at a martyrdom had become one of the few remaining prizes, avidly sought by aficionados in spite of the fact that my debate with Hellward Lucifer Nyxson had been long forgotten by everyone except the diehards themselves.

  Although my patient silver took care of all my communication with the world outside, I could not resist the temptation to look over its shoulder occasionally as it parried the thrusts of the now-esoteric Thanaticists. I took due note, therefore, of a gradual shift in Thanaticist philosophy, which deemphasized brutal martyrdom in favor of long-term flirtations with danger. Such flirtations constantly exposed the cultists to the risk of death while keeping the skillful and the fortunate permanently in the game. Some were content to indulge in life-threatening sporting contests, often of a bizarre nature, but others preferred to cultivate a calculatedly unhealthy interest in disease.

  Although a few twenty-eighth century Thanaticist martyrs had used diseases as a means of suicide the majority of “soft Thanatics” had always been content to pose as connoisseurs of exotic experience, in much the same spirit as my old acquaintance Ziru Majumdar. The continuation of their interests long after the initial moral panic had abated stimulated a small-scale but thriving black market in designer carcinogens and bioengineered pathogens.

  Although the original agents of smallpox, cholera, bubonic plague, and syphilis were long extinct, the modern world abounded in clever genetic engineers who could synthesize similar viruses with very little effort. As the twenty-eighth century died and the twenty-ninth began, the less scrupulous among them found eager clients for a whole range of new and particularly horrid diseases. Those maladies that afflicted the mind as well as, or instead of, the body were particularly prized by the hard-core cognoscenti.

  Recreational schizophrenia almost broke through to the mainstream of psychotropic usage at one point, but in the main the followers of the new fad steered well clear of casters and their hoverflies. As is the way of such things, however, the initial determination of the reformed Thanaticists to evade the lurid exposure that had typified the efforts of their predecessors soon became newsworthy in itself. The more evasive the residual adherents of the movement became, the greater became the motivation of their pursuers.

  Inevitably, the new trend began to spread beyond the ranks of self-styled Thanaticists. As large numbers of people began to toy with the idea that disease was something that could be temporarily and interestingly
indulged, without any real danger to life or subsequent health, the entire black market began to move slowly but steadily toward legitimacy and mass production. My silver began to find more and more instances in which arguments about death that I had popularized were quoted—usually without acknowledgement—with reference to recreational disease. It became fashionable to state as accepted common sense that whatever had ceased to be a dire necessity in human reckoning “naturally” became available as a perverse luxury, subject to purely aesthetic consideration.

  None of this would have mattered much, but for one thing. Thanaticist martyrdom had not been infectious, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense, but recreational diseases were more versatile. Those that were mass produced were subjected to rigorous quality control, but those that had emerged from illicit sources while the client base had been small and exclusive had not been so carefully designed. It required only a few of the the people caught up in the fad to refuse to restrict themselves to noninfectious varieties for a serious social problem to develop.

  The world had been free of devastating epidemics since the heyday of the chiasmalytic transformers that had precipitated the final phase of the Crash, but the renewed challenge to twenty-eighth-century medical technology was undoubtedly serious and was recognized as such.

  Because of the threat to innocent parties who might be accidentally infected, the self-infliction of communicable diseases was quickly outlawed in many nations. Some governments were slow to act, but Canada was not among the them. Even in that ultracivilized land, however, the laws were too often broken.

  FORTY-NINE

  I would have remained aloof and apart from the recreational disease craze had I been able to, but my determination to pay no attention only made its adherents more anxious to attract my notice. It was inevitable that one of them would eventually succeed, and the one who did was Hadria Nuccoli.

  Hadria Nuccoli was by no means the first Thanaticist to make her way to Cape Wolstenholme in person, or the first to attempt to gain entry to my home in spite of my refusal to invite her in. I daresay that almost all of her predecessors had been entirely harmless, and perhaps not entirely charmless, but I suppose it was only to be expected that the predator who combined the utmost determination with the utmost ingenuity would be the most dangerous of the lot.

  Had I been living in an orthodox hometree even Hadria Nuccoli might have found housebreaking impossible. One advantage of an all-organic structure is that it is virtually seamless. In an emergency, all its doors and windows close reflexively and seal themselves with natural glues that bind as powerfully as the very best shamirs. Anyone who takes a blade or a degantzing solution to a living structure meets active resistance as well as raising an instant neural alarm. Stone, by contrast, is passive, and such alarms as can be fitted into it tend to be mere webs of copper wire and optical fiber. The kind of nanotech that can colonize and subvert such alarm systems is not readily available and it does not come cheap, but anyone who takes the trouble can render a mere household system impotent. Once that is done, the business of dissolving stone with gantzing agents designed for demolition becomes a mere formality: slow but sure.

  The internal refurbishment of my living space had fitted all the inner walls with multilayered organics, but the solid frame put severe restrictions on the thickness of that tegument, and it yielded easily enough to simple brute force. Hadria Nuccoli came armed with drilling and cutting apparatus designed to deal with Titanian ice; the frail walls of my house had no chance against that kind of equipment.

  Thus it was that she arrived in my bedroom, unannounced, at three o’clock on the morning of 16 January 2822.

  I woke up in confusion, almost as disorientated as I had been on that dreadful night when the Genesis had flipped over—but on this occasion the confusion was more rapidly transformed into naked terror. When I caught sight of my uninvited visitor she was still carrying the cutting torch, and the mask she wore to protect her eyes from its furious fire made her look like some kind of alien monster.

  I thought at first that the masked invader had come to use the torch on me, intent on slicing me from head to toe. My terror abated slightly when she tossed the tool aside and pulled the mask from her head—but only slightly.

  I recognized her face, although I could not put a name to it immediately. Hadria Nuccoli had called several times to ask for admission, and my ever-dutiful silver had carefully made a record of her face and name. I had glimpsed it on several occasions, always incuriously.

  Although she seemed less inhuman without the protective mask I knew that this was an enemy far more frightening than the scalding Coral Sea, because this was an active enemy, who meant to do me harm, and the intensity of the threat she posed was in no way lessened by the fact that she had claimed while begging me to meet her that she was a devout admirer of my work. Although she was still recognizable, she looked markedly different from the picture stored by the silver. Her skin now bore an almost mercuric luster, and she was already in the throes of a terrible fever.

  “Stop there! Stay back!” I cried, flattening myself against the wall behind my bed and raising my bedsheet as if it might armor me against her advance.

  I felt extremely vulnerable, having recently reverted to sleeping naked beneath a smart sheet instead of wearing a sleepskin. Neither a sleepskin nor a conventional suitskin would have been adequate protection against whatever infection she carried—I would probably have needed a spacesuit to insulate myself completely—but I would have felt a great deal better had my modesty been better guarded. I was slightly surprised when she obeyed my command, but she had come to talk as well as to act.

  “Don’t be afraid, Mortimer,” she said, in a voice hoarsened by trachéal mucus. “I’ve come to help you, not to hurt you. I’ve come to bring you out of the tomb of life and back to the world of flood and fire. I’ve come to set you free.”

  I knew that she must have disabled the external alarms, but I also knew that my silver must have put out a mayday as soon as she started work on the living tissues of the house. The police would be able to get a drone to the scene in a matter of minutes—but as I looked past her at the ragged gap in the wall I saw that she’d set up some kind of shamir to seal the breach in the stone wall. There was no way she would be allowed to get away again, but my silver was only a glorified answer-phone; even with police collaboration, it would find it extremely difficult to disable the intruder before she could hurt me.

  At the very least, I had to buy time.

  “I am free,” I assured my unwelcome visitor. “This is my home, not a tomb. I’m always in the world. I work in the Labyrinth for eight or ten hours a day, and I spend a further six or eight in recreational VEs. I’m perfectly happy with the quality of my experiences, and I certainly don’t need the kind of excitement you’re trying to give me. If I don’t want it, it isn’t a gift.”

  I would have felt a lot safer if my visitor had stood still in order to plead her case, but she seemed incapable of that. Her desire to keep moving was as irresistible as her desire to communicate. The derangement of her body and brain by whatever designer disease was consuming her was not yet powerful enough to make her fall down or impair her crazed eloquence.

  “Come with me!” she begged, as I huddled back against the wall, desperate to evade her spasmodically clenching fingers. “Come with me to the far side of life, and I’ll show you what’s there. There’s no need to be afraid! Even death isn’t the end, just a new beginning—but this isn’t death, just a better way of being. Disease is the metamorphosis that frees us from our caterpillar flesh to soar as spirits in a mass-less world blessed with infinitely more light and color than any mere VE. I have come to be your redeemer, Mortimer—the redeemer for whom you have waited far too long. Love me as I love you, dear Mortimer: only love me, and you will learn. Let me be your mirror; drown yourself in me!”

  She made a lunge for me as she spoke the last few words, but I dodged aside and she stumbled. Her uncanny f
ever was interfering with her motor responses, and she couldn’t get up immediately, but when I made a bid for the door she was quick enough to block the way.

  “Don’t be silly!” I implored her. “Help is on the way. Even if you were to contaminate me, I’d be in hospital within the hour.”

  I knew that I wasn’t getting through to her. Her own speech wasn’t completely incoherent, but that didn’t mean that she could listen or understand what I said to her.

  She came after me again, and I had to grab a chair, using the legs to fend her off. I didn’t know whether it would do any good—for all I knew, I might have been infected already simply by virtue of breathing the same air—but the notion that she might actually lay her fevered hands upon me seemed particularly horrible.

  “There’s no return from eternity, Mortimer,” she babbled on, the words beginning to tumble over one another in spite of their adequate grammar and syntax. It was as if she had programmed her voice to deliver her message whether or not she could keep conscious control of it—and perhaps she had. “This is no ordinary virus created by accident to fight a hopeless cause against the defenses of the body,” she went on. “The true task of medical engineers, did they but know it, was never to fight disease but always to perfect it, and we have found the way. I bring you the greatest of all gifts, my darling: the elixir of life, which will make us angels instead of men, creatures of light and ecstasy. We were fools to think that we had drunk at the fountain of youth when we had only armored our bodies against the ravages of age. Youth is a state of mind. The finest flame burns hot and brief, my love, and must be shared. What you call life is petrifaction of the soul.”