The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  The most obvious result of the Engineers’ hard labor was that Neyu was not surrounded by the blue sea at all but by floral carpets that extended to the horizon and far beyond. These uneven carpets included many “islands” of their own: stable regions that could sustain farms of an entirely new kind.

  The initial disappointment caused by the dearth of Tachytelic Perfectionists in my immediate vicinity was soon offset by the discovery of what my nearest neighbors were actually doing. I was delighted to have the opportunity of observing their new and bolder adventures at close range.

  SIXTY-ONE

  The sight of the Pacific sun setting in its flowery bed beneath a glorious blue sky seemed fabulously luxurious after the silver-ceilinged domes of the moon, and I gladly gave myself over to its governance. I continued to work as hard as I had done in Mare Moscoviense, but I took advantage of the hospitability of my environment to cut back drastically on my VE time.

  The experience I had gained in face-to-face interactions stood me in good stead in Neyu as I began to build a richer network of actual acquaintances than I had ever had on Earth, even during the period of my first marriage.

  At first, I was regarded as an eccentric newcomer to the island community. Historians were not as rare on Neyu as they had been on the moon, but ex-lunatics were exceedingly uncommon. My own name was by no means as familiar to my new acquaintances as I could have wished, although its unfamiliarity was welcome testimony to the rapidity with which Thanaticism had been put away—but when I happened to mention that I had spent some time with Emily Marchant before returning from the moon that name triggered an immediate response.

  Unlike Julius Ngomi, the Continental Engineers of Neyu were not in the least interested in any plans Emily and her outer-system friends might have for Jupiter, but they were as interested in the new gantzing instruments that were flowing from the outer system as she had been in those which flowed the other way.

  “They’re developing some very useful deepdown systems,” Mica Pershing told me, enthusiastically. “Titan’s core is very different from Earth’s, of course, but insofar as the techniques address the similarities rather than the differences they’re exactly what we need for our own programs. The Coral Sea Disaster set us back two hundred years, you know, because the bureaucrats down in Antarctica became so absurdly hypersensitive about anything mantle-active. It’s not as if we caused the disaster, for heaven’s sake! We’re the people trying to make sure that it never happens again. How can we police the mantle-crust boundary properly if they won’t let us send out adequate patrols? The Titan brigade has stolen a long march on us, and the Invisible Hand is taking its usual protectionist stance on licenses in the name of the Balance of Trade or some such sacred cow, but rumor has it that Marchant herself is more than keen to deal. Did she give you that impression when you saw her last?”

  I was very interested to hear all this, although I had to confess that I hadn’t taken as much trouble as I might to measure Emily’s exact state of mind on abstruse matters of potential commerce. Mica’s connoisseur interest in Emily’s techniques allowed me to see Julius Ngomi’s anxieties in a new light.

  In Mare Moscoviense the balance of trade between Earth and the rest of the Oikumene had not been a frequent topic of conversation, although one might have expected the fabers to take a keen interest in it, but it was something on which the Invisible Hand would want to keep a very tight grip. Perhaps, I thought, his talk of Jupiter had only been a mask to conceal the real nature of his interest in Emily’s agenda.

  Even more revealing, in its way, was the way Mica echoed Ngomi’s use of the phrase “rumor has it.” I had grown up in a world whose communication systems were so efficient and whose multitudinous electronic spies had been so assiduous, that “rumor” had lost all authority. What was known was almost invariably know to a high degree of certainty—but the rapid development of the outer system had changed all that. There were now significant regions of the Oikumene where the notion of privacy was making a comeback—and wherever privacy flourishes, so does idle gossip.

  When I told Mica that the primary purpose of Emily’s recent visit to the moon had been to shop around for Earth-sourced gantzing techniques she became even more excited.

  “I knew it!” she said. “Melt ice caps and you get oceans. She’s thinking ahead, just as we are, and she’s seeing overlapping concerns, synergistic possibilities. She must be as keen to deal as we are—or would be if only the diehard Hardinists and the Amundsen City mafia would get off our backs. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to put the UN bureaucracy on ice should have been strangled at birth, and Planned Capitalism is just a fancy name for stopping social evolution in its tracks. Tachytelic Perfectionism might be a contradiction in terms, but at least those crazies understand that there’s some virtue in rapidity of change. We’ve got a hell of a long way to go before we can congratulate ourselves that the Garden’s in good shape, and the powers that be aren’t helping us at all.”

  It was rather heartening to hear such sentiments from a 380-year-old earthbound emortal. I’d heard so much faber propaganda on the moon that I’d almost begun to take it for granted that the Earthbound really were terminally decadent, but life on Neyu was the perfect antidote to that suspicion. Some few of my new neighbors did seem in danger of robotization, but that had been true even in Mare Moscoviense—and in Neyu, as on the moon, they were a tiny minority.

  In New Tonga, as in the lunar domes, there was a quasi-revolutionary spirit in the air: a lust for change that far transcended the seemingly modest ambitions of the world’s owners and rulers.

  I had never expected to be drawn to someone like Mica Pershing, and she had obviously not anticipated that I was the kind of person who might be fruitfully invited into the discussions of her own circle, but we were both surprised. We had more in common than the differences in our vocations suggested, and a spontaneous spark of camaraderie kindled what soon became a warm friendship.

  Within months of my arrival I had become well-acquainted with Mica’s closest professional associates. They found me an amusing distraction from their work-related discussions, and I began to feel definite echoes of my old association with the Lamu Rainmakers. The last thing I had been contemplating as I planned my return to Earth had been a third marriage, but when Mica and two of her most intimate allies in the new continental cause began to talk about possibilities of that kind I quickly became interested. What better way could there be to support my insistence that humans really did benefit from roots and that the Earthbound really were progressive in their outlook?

  The marriage that Mica and her friends wanted to form was, of course, different in one very significant respect from the one the Lamu Rainmakers had organized. That had been an exploratory union of young people, whereas this was a purposive association of mature individuals. Mica had decided that she was old enough and wise enough to be a foster mother, and I was ready and willing to reason that if that were true, then I was old enough to be a foster father.

  When Mica and her prospective co-parents began to discuss the spectrum of qualities they would to need to support an application for parenthood, it was easy enough to persuade them that my record as an ex-lunatic historian would add vitally necessary variety. Given that there was no one else on Neyu who could contribute such a striking set of exceptions to the local rule, I went right to the top of their list of candidates.

  The further negotiations remained delicate and complicated because all of the people who would ultimately be welcomed into the company had to be acceptable to all the others, but once the determination was there the process pressed ahead with all possible speed. As the thirtieth century dawned the matter was settled. I was to be married again, and would very soon be a co-parent, following in the footsteps of Papa Domenico, Papa Laurent, Mama Eulalie, Papa Nahum, Mama Meta, Mama Siorane, Mama Sajda, and Papa Ezra. I thought—as I suppose almost everyone must think—that no matter how difficult it would be to do better job than
they had done, I would make certain that I did it.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Long afterward, Mica confessed that my inclusion in the marriage had not been unopposed when she first raised it with Maralyne, Ewald, and Francesca, and that when their preliminary debate reached its critical point the item that swung it was the moral credit that I was presumed to have accumulated by virtue of once having saved Emily Marchands life.

  I was moved by a sense of injury to respond, somewhat dishonestly, that I had had to think long and hard before accepting the invitation, and that the item that had eventually swung my own internal debate was simple economic anxiety. It was a plausible story. Having readapted myself to Earthly life I wanted to press on as hard as was possible with the remaining volumes of my History, and the flow of income from the earlier sections had dwindled to a point at which meeting my living expenses and financing my continuing researches would not have been easy had I not married when I did. Now, I wonder whether I was entirely honest with myself when the idea of the marriage first came up.

  However good or bad the reasons might have been on either side, though, the marriage was a success, at least in terms of its primary objective.

  Four of the eight members of my new aggregate household were committed Continental Engineers. Like Mica, Maralyne Dexter was a traditional gantzer, while Ewald Knabl and Francesca Phénix were of the newer school of Organic Engineers. All four were involved in various island-building projects. The remaining three had, like me, been chosen for the sake of apparent variety, although Banastre Trevelyan was an economist-turned-politician strongly allied to the new continental cause and Tak Wing Ng was a geomorphologist whose interests were in the same area. The only one whose concerns were as blatantly peripheral as mine was Tricia Ecosura, a medical technician specializing in functional cyborgization. It quickly became apparent, however, that although our specializations might be disparate, Tricia and I shared with the other members of the group a particularly intense zeal for our work.

  Throughout the twenty-eighth and early twenty-ninth centuries most groups of applicant co-parents had taken the view that parenthood ought to be a full-time job for at least some of the co-parents, and it was by no means uncommon for entire parental groups to spend twenty years living on saved-up capital. By 2900, however, the tide of fashion had swung decisively against that theory on the grounds that it introduced children to a distinctly freakish lifestyle. The only extreme that was tolerated as the thirtieth century began was the other, by which children were introduced to a work-centerd existence in which direct parenting became a matter of strictly regimented individual turn taking. This was the kind of unit my new family set out to be.

  Although I was married to my seven companions for more than thirty years, from 2902 to 2935, I never became as intimate with any of them as I had been with the co-parents of my first marriage. Except for Mica and Tricia I cannot say that I ever got close to any of them. It was clear from the outset that five of my new companions were only interested in the parental aspects of the union, and they were determined to be businesslike about the whole thing. When Bana suggested that flesh-sex should not merely be excluded from any mention in the the marriage agreement but formally proscribed he might have obtained a majority decision had it not been for the fact that Mica and I threw our support behind Tricia when she argued that the child would derive far more benefit from a less monastic environment.

  Even though the vote went our way, there was a residual consensus that if we three were so keen on providing examples of supposedly healthy physical relationships, then we were the ones responsible for their construction and maintenance. Although Mica played her exemplary part with commendable enthusiasm Tricia was the only one of my co-parents with whom I shared any real emotional intimacy, and it is a pity that our affection for one another was severely prejudiced in later years by philosophical differences.

  Fortunately, the careful mutual distancing of the majority of her co-parents did not affect the bonds we formed with the child committed to our care. She was born in January 2912, less than a year after the publication of the seventh part of my History of Death, although not so soon that the two processes of gestation became tangled in my mind.

  We gave her the name Lua Tawana.

  Biologically speaking, Lua was drawn from ancient Polynesian stock—as narrowly local as could be contrived, given the limitations of the Crash-stocked gene banks. She bore no conspicuous physical resemblance to any of her co-parents, although she promised to be even more beautiful than Francesca, who was the only one of us to have taken a serious interest in the aesthetics of cosmetic enhancement. The uniqueness of her appearance only served to increase the sense we all had that Lua was one of a kind, as well as being a crucial part of a future yet to be created and shaped by humankind, which would be better than the present.

  I wish I could say that I took to parenthood like a duck to water, but any vestigial instincts that I might have inherited had withered in four hundred and some years of adult life. I had a lot to learn, and even though I was more able to put my work temporarily aside than most of my companions I felt that I was painfully inept. From an objective point of view it must have seemed that the others were no better, but no one can be objective in such circumstances and I was awkwardly terrified by the thought that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity might be spoiled by my inability to cultivate the requisite skills with the requisite alacrity.

  Fortunately, Lua did not seem to mind in the least that her care occasionally fell short of perfection. She was a very cheerful baby, not given to excessive crying, and she quickly learned to greet us all with winning smiles. While I was with her, I forgot to worry about the rights and wrongs of my return to Earth and all the conflicts of interest that were developing between the Earthbound and the inhabitants of the outer system.

  I never abandoned my work for more than a day at a time, but I had told Emily the truth when I said that the bulk of the hard labor had been done and that I would be able to accelerate smoothly as I brought the final few parts to completion. I had enough momentum to make the work seem easy, and Lua provided more than enough distraction occasionally to lift my spirits as high as they would go. There was too much anxiety and panicky haste in my day-to-day responsibilities to allow me to say that I was happier on Neyu than I was on the moon, but the peaks of joy that I occasionally obtained by courtesy of Lua’s smiles were new to me, and they added a special zest to the few short years of her infancy. I will not boast that I ever became an exceptionally good parent, but I did learn the basics and I did discover how to obtain my own fulfilment from the task.

  For a while, at least, I was perfectly content to live in the present and leave the future on the shelf for later collection.

  SIXTY-THREE

  The seventh part of the History of Death, entitled The Last Judgment, was launched on 21 June 2911, only twenty-three years after its immediate predecessor. This reflected the close relationship between the subject matter of the sixth and seventh parts and the fact that they covered a relatively narrow span of time. The Last Judgment dealt with the multiple crises that had developed in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, which had collaborated with the last phases of the Great War to face the human race with the prospect of extinction.

  The Fields of Battle had already described the various nuclear exchanges that led up to Brazil’s nuclear attack on Argentina in 2079 and the artificially induced epidemics that had climaxed in the sterility plague of 2095-2120. The new commentary discussed the various contemporary factors—the greenhouse crisis, soil erosion, environmental pollution, and terminal deforestation—which would certainly have inflicted irreparable damage on the ecosphere had the final round of nuclear exchanges and the depredations of the chiasmalytic transformers not administered such a brutally sharp shock to the upward surge of the world’s demographic statistics.

  My commentary included an elaborate consideration of the broader patterns of death in this period, poin
ting out the limitations of the popular misconception that the reversal of population growth was entirely due to the literal and metaphorical fallout of wars. I considered in detail the fate of the “lost billions” of peasant and subsistence farmers who had been disinherited and displaced by the emergent ecological and economic order. Like every other historian of the era, I could only marvel at the fact that in less than two centuries more human beings had died than in the previous two millennia, but I was more outspoken than all the rest in declaring that so much death had, in the end, proved to be a thoroughly good thing.

  I could not help making much of the ironic observation that the near conquest of death achieved by twenty-first-century medicine had offered an unprecedented libation to the specter of death, in the form of an unparalleled abundance of mortal life. I was careful to call attention to the tragic dimensions of the Malthusian crisis thus generated—but historians are always prone to make more of irony than of tragedy because history lacks the moral order characteristic of works of fiction. It was inevitable that my argument would emphasize the fact that the new medicines and the new pestilences of the twenty-first century had to be seen as different faces of the same coin, spinning out the logic of the situation by which the twentieth century’s new technologies of food production had been progenitors of worldwide famine rather than worldwide satiation.

  Perhaps it was unfair of me to pay so much attention to the irony of such situations as the one by which the harvests of the twentieth century Green Revolution facilitated enormous population growth in what was then known as the Third World at a time when China was the only nation whose government was prepared to address Malthusian problems seriously. There was, however, nothing but irony to be found in the fact that when the First World’s enthusiastic promotion of patentable genemod staples introduced global population management by the back door, its endeavors prepared the ground for the stock-market coups that established Hardinism as the last economic orthodoxy. I did admit, of course, that the awful political chaos that followed the Zimmerman coup had been a terrible price to pay for the foundations of the new world order.