The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  I kept moving all the time, while her movements grew jerkier. As she came to resemble a mere marionette I thought that it was only a matter of time before her strings broke, but she stubbornly refused to collapse.

  I tired before she did, and she tore the chair from my grasp. I found myself backed into a corner, with nowhere to go.

  FIFTY

  The flesh of my persecutor’s face was aglow with silver, and it seemed impossible that she could still be upright, but she was in the grip of a terrible supernatural urgency, and she pounced like an angry cat, catching me by the arms.

  I tried to knock her down. If I had had a weapon in hand I would certainly have used it, with all the force I could muster. It probably wouldn’t have done any good. I doubt that she would have felt any pain, and no matter how badly disabled her internal technology might have been, I wouldn’t have been able to disable her with anything less than a sledgehammer.

  In the very last moment, I gave in.

  There seemed to be no sensible alternative but to let her take me in her arms and cling to me. Nothing else could possibly soothe her. When she finally wrapped her arms round me, therefore, I wrapped mine around her.

  We hugged.

  I was afraid for her as well as for myself. I didn’t believe, then, that she truly intended to die. I wanted to keep us both safe until help arrived.

  My panic faded while I held Hadria Nuccoli in my arms, only to be replaced by some other emotion, equally intense, to which I could not put a name. I made every effort to remind and convince myself that it hadn’t ever mattered whether she infected me or not, given that medical help would soon arrive.

  “This is the only real life,” she murmured, as the script she had somehow internalized wound down to its amen. “Emortality makes a sepulchre of the flesh. If we are to become more than human, we must live more fervently, burn more brightly, die more extravagantly.”

  “It’s all right,” I assured her. “Help will be here soon. Everything will be fine.”

  I was right about the help, but wrong about the everything.

  My naive faith in medical science and internal nanotechnology left me completely unprepared for the kind of hell that I endured before the attending doctors got the bug under control. Nature had never designed diseases capable of fighting back against the ministrations of IT, but the makers of new plagues were cleverer by far.

  As the infection ran its vicious course I wished, over and over again, that I were able to live the experience as Hadria Nuccoli presumably lived it, not as hell but as passion, but I couldn’t do it. I was an emortal through and through. I couldn’t abide that kind of fervor, that kind of extravagance. All I wanted was the restoration of peace of mind and metabolic calm. While my nanotech armies fought tooth and nail against enemies the likes of which they had never faced before for possession of the battleground of my flesh, all I was capable of wanting was to be still and self-controlled.

  I could not help but wonder, afterward, whether I had already begun to aspire to the robot condition. I couldn’t help asking myself whether, as Hadria Nuccoli would presumably have argued, I was fleeing from true human potential because I was incapable of loving anything but the sepulchral death-in-life that was the emortal condition.

  Was it conceivable, I wondered, that she might have been right about the nature of the authentic fountain of youth?

  I concluded, on due reflection, that she was wrong in every respect. That may have been why, in the end, I lived and she died. On the other hand, the nanotech injected into her body by the doctors may simply have arrived too late to turn the tide.

  I wept for her when they told me she’d died and wished with all my heart that she hadn’t, even though I knew that if there were tears on the far side of life, she would be lamenting my inability to join her.

  Although it was entirely unlike my previous close encounters with death, my infection by Hadria Nuccoli was just as disturbing in its own way. I tried to regard it as a minor hiccup in the settled pattern of my life—something to be survived, put away and forgotten—but I couldn’t quite put the pattern back together again.

  The last thing I’d expected when I set out to write a History of Death was that my explanatory study might actually assist the dread empire of death to regain a little of the ground it had lost in the world of human affairs. Even though the Thanaticists and their successors were willfully misunderstanding and perverting the meaning of my work, I felt that my objectivity had been fatally contaminated when the protective walls of my home had been breached, and that the stain would not be easily eradicated. I knew that I still owed it to the Thanaticists as well as to everyone else to make the true message of my work clear, but while my own mind was less than perfectly clear that task seemed impossible.

  I felt that I could not stay on Cape Wolstenholme and that I could never live in such a frail dwelling again.

  I had to move again—but where could I go? Where on Earth, and in what kind of home, could I recover the equilibrium I had lost and the objectivity that would always be under threat while there were people like Hadria Nuccoli in the world?

  The answer was simple enough, once I had made up my mind. If there was nowhere on Earth, 1 had to take the step that Mama Siorane had urged me to take more than a hundred years before—the step that Emily Marchant also wanted me to take. I had to find a vantage point from which the trials and travails of Earthbound humanity could be seen from a proper distance, dispassionately.

  I remembered while I lay in the hospital, without any companion to keep me company, that one of my last live appearances on TV had taken place in a VE that reproduced an image of a lunar observatory. It had been selected as the appropriate site for a discussion in which a faber named Khan Mirafzal had argued, rather vehemently, that Thanaticism was evidence of the fact that Earthbound man was becoming decadent. I had heard distinct echoes of Mama Siorane and Emily in his fierce insistence that the progressive future of humankind lay outside Earth, in the microworlds and the distant colonies.

  Like Emily, Khan Mirafzal had claimed that humans genetically reshaped for life in low gravity or for the colonization of alien worlds were immune to Thanaticist follies because it was perfectly obvious that all the projects and possibilities that beckoned to them required longevity and calm of mind. Everyone who lived in space tended to wax lyrical about the supposed decadence of the Earthbound, much as the extreme Gaean Liberationists did, but as I reflected on my plight in the hospital I recalled that Mirafzal’s arguments had been balanced by an unusually coherent idea of the intellectual virility of the “outward bound.”

  “While the surface of the earth still provided challenges, those who dwelt upon it knew that they were not yet complete,” he had said, when we first met, “but now that it offers only limitations, its inhabitants are bound to grow introspective. Not all introspection is unhealthy, but even at the end of the psychological spectrum opposite to Thanaticism there is closure, imprisonment, and stultification. The L-5 habitats may seem to the Earthbound to be the ultimate in physical enclosure, but the people who live within them—especially those like myself, who have forsaken heavy legs in order to have the benefit of four arms—know that the whole universe awaits us. We are citizens of infinity and must therefore be citizens of eternity. We have changed ourselves in order to become champions of change.”

  The moderator of our conversation had dutifully pointed out that the surface of Earth was still changing and that there were many among the Earthbound who were determined to see that it never became fixed and sterile.

  “The central doctrine of Planned Capitalism is continuous change within a stable frame,” Mirafzal had countered, “I’m not talking about change for the sake of commerce. There’s no fashion on the moon. I’m talking about future evolution: expansion into the galaxy; meetings with other minds; adaptation to all kinds of circumstances; life without boundaries and without the possibility of boundaries. That requires a very different psychology. The Ear
thbound can have no idea of what it is like to be truly human until they step outside their frame into reality.”

  At the time, it had seemed like mere cleverness, talk for talk’s sake, like everything else on TV. Now, I figured that it was high time I tested it out. I would have called Emily had she been close enough to Earth, but she was too far away; Khan Mirafzal seemed to be the best available substitute. He was pleased to hear from me and more than glad to have the opportunity to repeat his arguments in more sympathetic circumstances. He talked, and I listened. I allowed myself to be convinced and decided to leave Earth, at least for a while, to investigate the farther horizons of the human enterprise.

  In 2825 I flew to the moon. After some hesitation, I settled in Mare Moscoviense. I thought it best to try out the side that faces away from Earth so that I might benefit from a view composed entirely of stars.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Emily was, of course, highly delighted when I told her of my decision, and she sent a message back from Io that was overflowing with enthusiastic congratulations. I was slow to reply to it because I felt slightly guilty about concealing my true motives for making the move. She thought I was being bold, whereas I was actually going into hiding, and I dared not even try to explain that to Emily. I excused my tardiness by telling myself—and her, when I finally did get around to replying—that I had to concentrate on the business of adapting myself to a new world and a new society.

  As I had expected, I found life on the moon very different from anything I’d experienced in my travels around the Earth’s surface. It wasn’t so much the change in gravity, although that certainly took a lot of getting used to, or the severe regime of daily exercise in the centrifuge that I had to adopt in order to make sure that I might one day return to the world of my birth without extravagant medical provision. Nor was it the fact that the environment was so comprehensively artificial or that it was impossible to venture outside without special equipment; in those respects it was much like Antarctica. The most significant difference was in the people.

  Mare Moscoviense had few tourists—tourists mostly stayed Earth-side, making only brief trips farside—but most of its inhabitants were nevertheless just passing through. It was one of the main jumping-off points for emigrants, largely because it was an important industrial center. It was the site of one of the solar system’s largest factories for the manufacture of shuttles and other local-space vehicles, and it was host to hundreds of nanotech studios and shamir manufactories. It was one of the chief trading posts supplying materials to the microworlds in Earth orbit and beyond, so many of its visitors came in from the farther reaches of the solar system.

  When I arrived in Moscoviense the majority of the city’s long-term residents were unmodified, like me, or lightly modified by reversible cyborgization. A substantial minority of the permanent population and a great many of those visiting were, however, fabers like Khan Mirafzal, genetically engineered for low-gee environments. Most of their adaptations were internal and subtle, but the one that had won them their name was the most conspicuous. Every faber possessed four hands, being equipped with an extra pair of “arms” instead of legs. All but a few of the public places in Moscoviense were designed to accommodate their kind as well as “walkers.” All the corridors were railed and all the ceilings ringed.

  The sight of fabers swinging around the place like gibbons, getting everywhere at five or six times the pace of walkers, was one that I found subtly disturbing to begin with. Fabers couldn’t live, save with the utmost difficulty, in the gravity well that was Earth. They almost never descended to the planet’s surface. By the same token, it was difficult for men from Earth to work in zero-gee environments without extensive modification, surgical if not genetic. For this reason, the only “ordinary” men who tarried in highly specialized faber environments weren’t ordinary by any customary standard. The moon, with its one-sixth Earth gravity, was one of the few places in the inner solar system where fabers and unmodified men frequently met and mingled. Even the L-5 colonies were divided by their rates of spin into “footslogger territories” and “faberwebs.”

  I had always known about fabers, of course, but like so much other “common knowledge” the information had lain unattended in some unheeded pigeonhole of my memory until direct acquaintance ignited it and gave it life. By the time I had lived in Moscoviense for a month that unused reserve of common knowledge had turned into a profound fascination.

  It seemed to me that fabers lived their lives at a very rapid tempo, despite the fact that they were just as emortal as members of their parent species. For one thing, faber parents normally had their children while they were still alive, and very often they had several at intervals of only twenty or thirty years. An aggregate family of fabers often had three or even four children growing up in parallel. In the infinite reaches of space, there was no population control, and no restrictive “right of replacement.” A microworld’s population could grow as fast as the microworld could acquire extra biomass and organize more living space. Then again, the fabers were always doing things. Even though they had four arms, they never seemed to leave one dangling. They seemed to have no difficulty at all in doing two different things at the same time, often using only one limb for attachment. On the moon this generally meant hanging from the ceiling like a bat while one exceedingly busy hand mediated between the separate tasks being carried out by the remaining two.

  I quickly realized that it wasn’t just the widely accepted notion that the future of mankind must take the form of a gradual diffusion through the galaxy that made the fabers think of Earth as decadent. From their viewpoint, the habits and manners of the lunar footsloggers seemed annoyingly slow and sedentary. The Earthbound, having long since attained control of the ecosphere of their native world, seemed to the fabers to be living a lotus-eater existence, indolently pottering about in its spacious garden, and unmodified spacefarers seemed to the fabers to have brought that deep-seated indolence with them into environments where it did not belong.

  The most extreme fabers, in this and other respects, were the “converts” who had attained that state by means of somatic engineering rather than having been born four-handed. Many footsloggers did not regard the converts as “real” fabers and emphasized this point by referring to the faber-born as “naturals,” borrowing an obsolete term that false emortals had once applied to the earliest Earthbound ZTs. The converts, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the formulators and best practitioners of faber philosophy.

  Most fabers weren’t contemptuous of legs as such, but converts were often inclined to draw nice distinctions in their arguments about the relative worth of different variants of humankind. They would give their wholehearted endorsement to the hypothetical spacefaring folk who would one day be given legs by genetic engineers in order that they might descend to the surfaces of new and alien worlds, but they would be casually dismissive of those emigrants from Earth who insisted on hanging on to the legs their ancestors had bequeathed to them in order to enjoy the fruits of the labors of past generations.

  Such airy discussions came as a shock to me, because I was suddenly able to see Mama Siorane as the faber converts must have seen her rather than as she had seen herself—as a flawed pioneer who had never quite had the courage of her convictions, who had gone all the way out to Titan but had stopped short of modifying her own unfortunately mortal flesh. I was very conscious of the fact that Emily was following in Mama Siorane’s footsteps, and I could not help but wonder whether she would take up the challenge of the converts and trade her emortal feet for emortal hands.

  Papa Ezra, by contrast, was a hero even to converts despite that he had hung on to his legs till he died. The name of Ezra Derhan meant nothing to anyone on Earth, but it was familiar in every household on the moon and in the micro worlds. Papa Ezra had made converts and had contributed to the perfection of the Zaman transformations with which every faber infant was now equipped. In Mare Moscoviense in 2825 hardly anyone h
ad heard of Mortimer Gray, historian of death and unsuccessful scourge of the Thanaticists, and only one person in five was impressed if I introduced myself as a friend of Emily Marchant, gantzer extraordinaire and ice-palace designer, but everyone reacted when I mentioned that I was the foster son of Ezra Derhan.

  I quickly came to understand that although unmodified men were still the majority population of the moon in 2825, they were no longer the dominant population, politically or ideologically. Faber attitudes were already recognized there, tacitly if not explicitly, as the attitudes that humankind would one day export to the farther reaches of the galaxy. Faber attitudes constituted the philosophy of that fraction of the human race that was not merely new but blessed with a new sense of purpose. It was hardly surprising that they considered Earthbound humanity to be decadent or that they took such aberrations as Thanaticism for glaring symptoms of that decay.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Where I had lived on Earth, it had always seemed to me that one could blindly throw a stone into a crowded room and stand a fifty-fifty chance of hitting either an ecologist or a historian. In Mare Moscoviense, the only ecologists were humble engineers who helped maintain the life-support systems, and the population of historians could be counted on the fingers of an unmodified man. This was in a city of a quarter of a million people. Whether they were resident or passing through, the people of the moon were far more preoccupied with the inorganic than the organic, and far more interested in the future than the past.