The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  I also found irony rather than tragedy in the process that ensured that the preservation of millions of children from the diseases that had killed them in previous centuries delivered millions of twenty-first-century adults into the untender care of more subtle viruses, which rose to the occasion by increasing their mutation rates. Even if the interventions of biological weaponry were disregarded, I pointed out, natural selection allowed the unconquered diseases to achieve such a sophistication of method and effect that the plague of sterility would surely have been precipitated eventually, even if Conrad Helier and his associates had not decided to give evolution a helping hand.

  The most controversial aspects of the analysis of The Last Judgment were, for once, peripheral to my main argument—but that did not prevent them generating considerable criticism. My discussion of the manner in which the advent of tissue-culture farmfactories had been carefully delayed and loaded with unnecessary commercial burdens by a Hardinist cabal still heavily dependent on their staple monopolies was bound to be resented by those who preferred to represent the early Hardinists as the True Saviors of the human race. I contended that those biotechnologists who were deliberately excluded from the Inner Circle—including Conrad Helier—had been cynically maneuvered into doing dirty work that the world’s new owners desperately wanted done but did not want to be caught actually doing, thus becoming further marginalized. I even suggested that the Hardinists’ levered acquisition of the crucial Gantz patents could easily be seen as a direly unfortunate development in that it had destroyed the last vestiges of authentic competition within the global economy. From that moment on, I claimed, the benignly flexible invisible hand of classical economic theory had been replaced by an iron fist whose grip was sometimes cruel as well as irresistible.

  Perhaps I should have deemphasized these peripheral matters lest they distract too much attention from the main line of my argument, but I simply did not care to. The central thrust of my commentary was, however, that this had been the most critical of all the stages of man’s war with death. The weapons of the imagination had finally been discarded in favor of more effective ones, but in the short term those more effective weapons, by multiplying life so effectively, had also multiplied death. A war that had always been fervent thus became feverishly overheated, to the point at which where it came within a hairsbreadth of destroying all its combatants.

  In earlier times, I had long argued, the growth of human population had been restricted by lack of resources and the war with death had been, in essence, a war of mental adaptation whose only goal was reconciliation. When the “natural” checks on population growth were removed and it became possible to contemplate other goals, however, the sudden acceleration of population growth had temporarily taken all conceivable goals out of reach. The waste products of human society had threatened to poison it, and the fact that human beings were no longer reconciled in any meaningful fashion to the inevitability of death compounded the effects of that poisoning.

  Alongside the weapons by which the long war against death might be won, humankind had also developed the weapons by which it might be lost. Nuclear arsenals and stockpiles of biological weaponry were scattered all over the globe: twin pistols held in death’s skeletal hands, leveled at a human race that had largely forsaken the consolations of religion and the glorifications of patriotism.

  As the twenty-first century gave way to the twenty-second, I proposed, humankind was no longer teetering on the brink of total disaster; it had actually plunged over the edge, its members having left their traditional parachutes behind. The new medical technologies that had held out the tantalizing promise of emortality ever since Morgan Miller’s ill-fated experiments had been publicized had only the narrowest margin of opportunity in which to operate.

  The wounds inflicted by the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first century could so easily have been mortal, and it was not easy for any historian to distinguish between the people who had only been part of the problem and those who had made contributions to its solution. In the end, the soft landing had been achieved as much by luck as judgment, in my estimation. Biotechnology, having passed through the most hectic phase of its evolution, had stayed one vital step ahead of the terrible problems that its lack had generated. In spite of the various forces warping its development, food technology had achieved a merciful and relatively orderly divorce from the bounty of nature, moving out of the fields and into the factories. The liberation of humanity from the vagaries of climate and natural selection had begun, and the first pavements had been set on the route to Garden Earth.

  I argued that whatever teething troubles it had undergone—and was still undergoing—the production of a political apparatus enabling human beings to take collective control of themselves was a remarkable triumph of human sanity. I took great care to emphasize that in the final analysis it was not scientific progress per se that had won the war against death but the ability of human beings to work together, to compromise with one another, and to build viable communities out of disparate and disagreeable raw materials.

  That human beings possessed this ability was, I argued, the legacy of thousands of years of silly superstition, irrational religion, and pigheaded patriotism rather than the product of a few hundred years of science. The human race had turned twenty-first-century crisis into twenty-second-century triumph not because its members had become biotechnologically sophisticated but because they were veterans of a long and fierce war against death. Biotechnology had provided the tools, but death had provided the motivation.

  Apart from slanders heaped upon it by offended would-be Hardinists intent on currying favor with Earth’s masters, The Last Judgment attracted little attention from laypeople. It was generally held to be dealing with matters that everyone understood very well, striving a little too hard for an original slant. This seemed a meager reward for all the work I had put in, especially the delving I had done since my return to Earth into the archival deposits that Julius Ngomi had once described as “the litter that dare not speak its name.” Those critics who admitted that they had been anticipating the successor to the previous volume with some enthusiasm excused their lukewarm response by saying that the new offering had not carried my quest far enough forward.

  Even the least generous of my academic critics could not fault the massiveness of the knot of associated data that I had brought together, or the cleverness with which it had been mazed, but they still felt free to declare that I should have carried the story farther forward in time. Almost without exception, the reviewers pointed out that I had originally intended the work to be seven volumes long, and that it now seemed unlikely that nine would suffice, let alone eight—and they were absolutely unanimous in regretting that inflation.

  The whole world, it seemed, was impatient to be done with the History of Death—but I was still determined to do the job properly, no matter how long it took.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  I had maintained my correspondence with Emily Marchant despite the restrictions placed upon it by the time delay. I sent her a long oration lamenting the unsympathetic reception of The Last Judgment even though I knew that she would align herself with my detractors. It might have been more pleasant to speak of other matters, but ever since Julius Ngomi had appeared in the unlikely role of agent provocateur I had been very careful not to mention the planet Jupiter, and since marrying into the Continental Engineers I didn’t want to get involved in heavy discussions of cutting-edge gantzing technics. I had become rather anxious that my private correspondence might get hijacked, if not by eavesdroppers then by my nearest and supposedly dearest.

  Fortunately, by the time that Emily formulated her reply to my message, she had more important things to discuss than the alleged futility of my mission. Hot on the heels of the Hope’s discovery of Ararat came the discovery by Vishnu, a silver-piloted kalpa probe launched in 2827, of an “Earthlike” world orbiting a G-type star in Scorpio. Like Ararat, this planet’s elaborate ecosphere had produce
d animal species analogous to all the major groups of Earthly animals, including two that seemed to be on the verge of true intelligence.

  The new world, called Maya by the silver’s masters, seemed no more inviting to would-be colonists than Ararat, but it caused a great deal more excitement. Hope was widely considered within the Oikumene to be a direly unsatisfactory platform for colonization, partly by virtue of its antiquity and partly by virtue of the catalog of mistakes and hesitations dutifully recorded by the Ark’s transmissions. Maya, having been found by machines, awaited the careful attention of a colonization mission planned by thirtieth-century sophisticates and executed with the aid of the full panoply of modern technology.

  The only question to be answered was which group of thirtieth-century sophisticates would be entrusted with the task.

  Had I thought more deeply about the matter, I might have anticipated the chaos that would ensue, but I was too busy. It was not until Emily’s message arrived that I realized that a serious conflict of interest had arrived in the system even sooner than Julius Ngomi’s colleagues and collaborators had expected.

  “The race is on,” Emily told me, speaking from one of her favorite VEs, which set her against a vertiginous background of ice mountains. “By the time the Hardinists had got around to sending out invitations to their conference it was way too late. The fabers weren’t about to give away their head start, so your old friend Khan Mirafzal is already diverting his microworld’s course Scorpioward. The Oort Halo crowd reckon that they can still overtake him if they take direct aim, and the New Ark people figure that even if they can’t quite get there firstest they can still land the mostest men and the bes test equipment. Two other faberweb micro worlds are negotiating with Mirafzal for a planned rendezvous, a pooling of effort and a piece of the action, but they haven’t got near a decision as to whether they ought to reengineer children with legs in order to get a foothold on the planet, or whether they ought to content themselves with setting up an orbital network to work hand-in-hand with the Oort gang, the New Arkers, or both.

  “The kalpa programmers are crying foul left, right, and center. Earth’s high-and-mighty will back their claims of ownership right down the line, of course, but they must know that their proclamations won’t mean a thing thirty-nine light years away. The Gaean Libs will probably want the whole process stopped, of course, but that’s just hot air. The real fight will be to determine the methods and objectives of the land grab, and no one thinks that there’s the least chance of settling that in advance. No matter who wins the race, the competition will only intensify once the drops get under way. If the New Arkers were united among themselves they’d have a slim chance of putting a few controls in place, but they’ve always been a loose coalition of interested parties with no meaningful ideological center. In order to get their ship ready in time they’ll have to offer berths to every faction that can help, including the Cyborganizers. The likelihood is that they’ll fragment as soon as they arrive. If you think that Hope’s botches added up to a fiasco, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

  “Even you’ll have to admit now that everything’s changed, Morty. Earth isn’t the game board any more. The Hardinist case for its careful preservation as the footsloggers’ ultimate refuge has gone right out the window. The galaxy has to be full of worlds like Ararat and Maya. Terra-formable ecospheres must be a dime a dozen. The only mystery is the Fermi paradox. If we’re here, where the hell are all the others? You’re a historian, Morty—you know how hard we tried to obliterate ourselves, and still we made it. The others have to be here too, even if we can’t tune into their beacons, and it’s only a matter of time before we run into them. After that… everything will change again, and nobody can guess exactly how.”

  She had much more to say, of course, but that was the red meat. The race was on, and after the race would come the conflict, and after the conflict… the ecocatastrophes and the wars?

  I didn’t even recognize the names of some of the factions to which Emily referred so casually. I knew that there were people in the Oort Halo, but I had no idea that they constituted a “crowd” or what their gang mentality might be. I had only the vaguest notion about the composition of the New Arkers and had previously thought of them as merely one more set of eccentrics intent on hollowing out asteroids to make microworlds. I did, however, have some inkling of what Cyborganizers were, by virtue of living with Tricia Ecosura. She often mentioned them, sometimes critically and sometimes sympathetically, but always giving the impression that they were a coming thing, as revolutionary in their own fashion as the newly rampant Continental Engineers.

  Under different circumstances, I might have asked Emily to give me a much more detailed account of what she thought the various Maya-bound factions were up to, but it didn’t seem politic. For one thing, I felt that Julius Ngomi was sure to be listening in, and I didn’t want to be his mule. For another, I had to concentrate on the two tasks I now had on hand where there had previously been only one.

  I could have taken time out from my history to think about the farthest horizons of the expanding Oikumene, had it not been for the fact that any such time was already spoken for, but I had already agreed to dedicate any and all such time to Lua Tawana, who was growing up quickly. For that reason, I let the matter slide. My reply to Emily’s dispatch acknowledged what she had said but did not engage with it in any intellectually serious fashion. Having not yet parented a child of her own, she probably did not understand, but she made allowances anyhow.

  For me, she always did make allowances—and this time, I felt fully entitled to claim them. I was, after all, a man with parental responsibilities.

  PART FIVE

  Responsibility

  The triumph of Earthbound humanity is that individual people are still so stubbornly different from one another. Half a millennium of universal emortality has not eroded, let alone erased, the variety of human personality. Instead, our longevity has allowed us to hone and refine our individuality to an exactitude that our remote ancestors would have found astonishing. The Thanaticists were only half right when they claimed that this process of refinement was the work of Sculptor Death, only made possible by the sacrifice of alternative pathways in the brain, just as the Cyborganizers are only half right when they claim that we cannot evolve any further unless we open up new neural pathways for which natural selection has made no provision. The truth is that the natural process of growing older, no matter how long it might be protracted, cannot and does not involve the elimination of the elasticity of human thought and human possibility. The process of further human evolution must, in essence, be an extrapolation of our innate resources, no matter how cleverly and elaborately they are augmented by external technology.

  However conducive it might be to Utopian ease and calm, it would not be good for humankind if we were ever to become so similar to one another that it became impossible for people to think one another mad or seriously misguided. Although those extremists who decide to die after a mere seventy or eighty years seem bizarre to sensible moderates, while those who only want to live forever do not, even emortals have to come to terms with the fact that death is inevitable. No matter how hard we may pretend that true emortality has turned when into if, the fact remains that we are not immortal. In time, the sun will die; in time, the universe itself will fade into dark oblivion; even the Type-4 speculators who assure us that the extinction of our own inflationary domain will not prevent our remotest descendants from seeking new opportunities in the Unobservable Beyond are only speaking in terms of postponement. At heart, we are all Thanaticists in the sense that everyone who is not rudely seized by predatory death must ultimately make his own compact with the ultimate enemy—and we are all Cyborganizers in the sense that everyone must decide exactly which augmentary technologies he will deploy within the terms of that compact.

  —Mortimer Gray

  Part Ten of The History of Death

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Lua Tawana was the li
nchpin of my world for more than twenty years, and she remained its most significant anchorage long after that. I had not given the matter much consideration before, but as soon as she learned to speak, the logic of the situation became clear. Everyone has a multiplicity of parents, but very few of the Earthbound foster more than one child. Child rearing is the only emotional luxury so strictly rationed on Earth that it is bound to seem like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity even to people who hope to live for millennia. It is hardly surprising that emortal parents become obsessed with the mental development their children—even parents who have decided to maintain the momentum of their careers throughout the years of parenthood.

  No matter how clearly focused one becomes during a child-rearing marriage, however, other things do intrude. It was easy enough for me to relegate from immediate concern the developments in and beyond the outer solar system that Emily Marchant was so keen to bring to my attention, but it was not so easy to ignore matters occupying the attention of my marriage partners. I tried hard, and I have no doubt that they tried equally hard, but certain things intruded in spite of all our best efforts, and one of them was Tricia’s increasing involvement in the 2920s with the Cyborganizers. I think I might have held myself aloof even from that had it not been for an unfortunate stroke of coincidence, but I have always been a trifle accident-prone and that was one vulnerability that did not depart as I attained the age of reason and responsibility.