I think she kept the secret, but even if she didn’t, she wasn’t responsible for what happened. The simple fact is that Samuel Wheat-stone would have beaten me anyway, because he was a better player of the media game than I was. It was, after all, his vocation. He was a professional fool, and I was a serious historian.
I never really stood a chance.
I did put up a slightly better show against Nyxson/Wheatstone than I had the first time around. I managed to get more of my own argument on to the record, and I did contrive to repeat my chosen slogan often enough to make it a standard item of popular rhetoric, although it was spoiled by the extra spin that he managed to impart to it. In spite of my preparations, I was completely unready for Wheatstone’s main line of attack.
Tricia told me afterward that she was as surprised as I was, and I believed her. Samuel Wheatstone’s attempts to imagine himself in my shoes had obviously been far more successful than my attempts to put myself in his, and he had worked out how to sting me with callous precision.
Before the broadcast began I thought myself sufficiently mature to be unaffected by any probable insult. Perhaps I was—but it had not seemed possible, let alone probable, that Wheatstone would sink so low as to charge me with being a closet Thanaticist.
“Your interminable book is only posing as a history,” he told me, languidly. “It’s actually an extended exercise in the pornography of death. The fact that your commentaries strive so hard to be boring and clinical isn’t a mark of scholarly dignity—it’s a subtle means of heightening response.”
“That’s absurd!” I protested—but it would have take far more than that to put him off.
“You pretend to be standing aside from the so-called war against death, as a painstaking chronicler and fair-minded judge,” he went on, “but you’re actually fully engaged in the final campaign of that war, and the army to which you’ve been conscripted is death’s. You’ve railed in the past against those who sought to restore a proper recognition of death’s reality and utility to human affairs, but you posed as an enemy of death merely to further death’s cause. You attacked Thanaticism, but you were yourself the most extreme and most insidious kind of Thanaticist. You purported to fight the devil by pretending that he did not exist, but what greater service could you do the devil than to persuade his victims that he was a mere mirage?
“In fact, Mortimer, you knew all along that death had not been banished from human affairs. You knew all along that what we choose to call true emortality is merely a postponement of the final reckoning. You knew all along that even so-called true emortals age physically, albeit very slowly, and that even if they didn’t, they would still age mentally by virtue of being trapped in the same physical matrix: becalmed, crystallized, and ultimately sterilized. Cyborganization is robotization by another name, you say. Very well—I accept the assertion. The time is long past for the idea of robotization to be reclaimed from those who use it unthinkingly as a mere insult. Let us call it by its proper name: androidization—for what we are talking about is, after all, a petrifaction of the flesh, a death-in-life, a silverization of the living personality.
“If we are truly to live forever, Mortimer, then we must be forever open to the possibility of change, and in order to do that, we must be prepared not merely to transform our flesh by genetic engineering but augment and enhance it by mechanical supplementation. Mere humans cannot live forever; the best they can ever hope for is to exist forever—but a cyborg is an evolving being, a being for whom future possibilities are infinite. Whoever opposes cyborganization opposes life itself. Whoever condemns cyborganization is not merely a historian but a champion of death, a Thanaticist in the truest and most sinister sense of the word.
“I was a Thanaticist myself, in my youth, but all I ever advocated was the right of human beings to complete the processes of death that shaped their bodies and their personalities, to follow through its patient artwork. When you argued with me then you refused to concede that you or I or anyone should exercise that right, lest we should sacrifice greater and more wonderful opportunities—yet here you are again, refusing to concede that you or I or anyone human should exercise the right to explore those greater and more wonderful opportunities, lest we should sacrifice the privilege of dying as we are. You have immersed yourself so deeply in the history of death, Mortimer, that you have become death’s last and best ally on Earth.”
And so on. Insult after stinging insult—but never to the point of actual injury. It was, after all, only a game. It was all nonsense, but it washed over me like an irresistible tide. I couldn’t fight it within the limitations of the live debate. I went down to ignominious defeat, and I went gracelessly.
I had to admit that Wheatstone did what he had come to do with a certain flair—and he looked magnificent, especially in close-up. He had made further modifications to his skull fixtures, and his mechanical eyes had the most remarkable stare I had ever encountered.
Afterward, he said: “I don’t suppose you’ll thank me for all the money you’ll make this time around either, but I don’t mind. All I need is the knowledge of a kindness done, a generous impulse served. All I ask in return is that when you finally get around to the history of the twenty-eighth and thirty-first centuries, you grant me a couple of modest footnotes.”
I promised him that if he ever did anything worthy of note, I would certainly consider the possibility.
Days, if not weeks, had passed before I worked out what I might have done to counter his assault. Perhaps I should have conceded the point that the clinicality of my commentary was a means of heightening reader response. Perhaps I should have argued, passionately, that there was no other way to make readers who have long abandoned their fear of death sensitive to the appalling shadow that it once cast over the human world. Perhaps I should have accepted, proudly, that my history could not help appearing to modern readers as an exercise in the pornography of death, because death is itself the ultimate and perhaps the only true pornography. Perhaps I should have… but what point is there in such regretful imaginary reconstructions?
I knew then, as I had always known, that my history would have to stand alone, on its own merits—that it would have to be what it was, and not what any advertising slogan or critical insult attempted to make it.
Samuel Wheatstone was right, of course. My face-to-mask debate with the voice of Cyborganization gave a massive boost to the consultation fees I was collecting for the existing parts of my history. It also created a strong sense of anticipation in respect of the forthcoming eighth installment. He really did make me a lot of money, and I suppose that I ought to have been more grateful for it than I was. In his strange, absurd, and painful way he did help my cause.
SIXTY-EIGHT
The eighth part of my History of Death, entitled The Fountains of Youth, was launched on 1 December 2944. It dealt with the development of elementary technologies of longevity—and, for that matter, with elementary technologies of cyborgization—between the twenty-third and twenty-fifth centuries. It detailed the progress of the new “politics of emortality,” whose main focus was the New Charter of Human Rights, which sought to establish a basic right to longevity for all. It also offered a detailed account of the activities of the Ahasuerus Foundation and the gradual development of the Zaman transformations.
My commentary argued that the Manifesto of the New Chartists was the vital treaty that ushered in the newest phase in man’s continuing war with death. I insisted that the development of technologies of longevity could easily have increased the level of conflict within the human community instead of decreasing it, and that it was the political context provided by the Charter that had tipped the balance in favor of peace and harmony. It had done so by defining the whole human community as a single army, united in all its interests.
I realized that in arguing thus I was laying myself open to a renewal of the charge that I was an apologist for the Hardinists, and I was careful to concede that the Charter had not wo
rked nearly so well in practice as its terms promised, but I had always maintained that the war against death was a war of ideas, and I insisted that the idea of the charter was so important that the inevitable lag phase preceding its effective implementation had been a tolerable hypocrisy. I took great care to emphasize that the charter remained a central document of emortal culture and that the implementation of its primary objectives had not rendered it redundant.
I suppose, in retrospect, that my account of the long battle fought by the Chartists across the stage of world politics was infected by a partisan fervor that had been muted in the three parts immediately preceding it. My description of the obstacles that had been placed in the path of Ali Zaman and others laboring on behalf of the Ahasuerus Foundation was clinical enough, naming no scapegoats, but I could not be so carefully neutral in detailing the resistance offered by certain elements within the community of nations to the proposal that true emortality should be made universally available as soon as it was practical to do so.
Had the principle of universal access not been so firmly established, I suggested, a situation might have developed in which the spectrum of wealth separated men yet again into two distinct classes of haves and have-nots—a separation that would have led inexorably to violent revolution as those who were too poor to obtain emortality set out to make sure that those who could afford it would not enjoy its fruits. Like any other exercise in counterfactual history, this required speculative thinking of a kind that some of my peers deplored, but I think that my argument was as cogent as it was vigorous. Emortality for the few had never been acceptable on moral grounds and would never have been tolerable in political terms. The Eliminators of the twenty-second century had done far more barking than biting, but their doleful prophecies would indeed have given way to a full-blown crusade had the would-be crusaders not turned to Chartism, and had they not won the day.
I admitted, of course, that I had the benefit of hindsight, and that as a Zaman-transformed individual myself I was bound to have an attitude very different from Ali Zaman’s confused and cautious contemporaries, but I saw no reason to be entirely evenhanded in treating the manner in which his discoveries were received and deployed. From the viewpoint of my history, those who initially opposed Zaman and those who sought to appropriate his work for a minority had to be regarded as traitors in the war against death. I felt no need to seek excuses on their behalf, even though I was keenly aware that I might be feeding ammunition to the Cyborganizers if they cared to continue their attacks upon me.
There was no point in my trying to gloss over the fact that many of those who had sought to inhibit the work of the Ahasuerus Foundation or to prevent the UN’s adoption of the New Charter had done so on the ostensible grounds that they were trying to preserve “human nature” against biotechnological intervention. I knew that many of my readers would respond to this allegation by thinking that if the conservatives of old were so utterly wrong to do that, how could those who opposed the Cyborganizers on similar grounds be right? I knew, therefore, that my stern judgment that the enemies of Ali Zaman and the Charter had been willfully blind and criminally negligent of the welfare of their own children would be quoted against me—but it would not have been good scholarship to intrude into my argument a rider explaining why the current disputes over cyborganization did not constitute a parallel case. I defended my ground as best I could by couching my argument in political and egalitarian grounds, but I knew that whatever I said would be taken out of context by my critics, and I simply accepted the risk.
As I had anticipated, the Cyborganizers were quick to charge me with inconsistency because I was not nearly so extravagant in my enthusiasm for the various kinds of symbiosis between organic and inorganic systems that were tried out in the period under consideration as I was in my praise of the Herculean labors of the genetic engineers.
When I was called upon to make a public response to such criticisms I was insistent that my lack of enthusiasm for experiments in cyborgization had nothing to do with the idea that such endeavors were “unnatural” and everything to do with the fact that they were only peripherally relevant to the war against death, but it did no good. Wheatstone’s followers—including Tricia Ecosura—waxed lyrical about the injustice of my inclination to dismiss adventures in cyborgization, along with cosmetic biotechnologies, as symptoms of lingering anxiety regarding the presumed “tedium of emortality.” In fact, that anxiety had led the first generations of long-lived people to a lust for variety and “multidimensionality” that was not unlike the popular anxieties on which the Cyborganizers were now trading, but that was a difficult point to get across and it won me no arguments in the public eye.
It is, I suppose, perfectly understandable that champions of man-machine symbiosis, who saw their work as the new frontier of science, would have preferred to find a more generous account of the origins of their enterprise, but the simple fact is that I didn’t include it in The Fountains of Youth because I didn’t consider it relevant.
The Cyborganization controversy helped to boost access-demand for The Fountains of Youth to an extraordinary level and made my financial situation so secure that I had no need to fear the reversion to solitary existence that was bound to follow Lua Tawana’s accession to independence, but Samuel Wheatstone was correct in prophesying that I would not be grateful.
At the time, I felt too strongly that the academic quality of my commentary had been entirely overlooked and that hardly anyone was now trying to keep track of the development of my history as a whole. I hoped, however, that by the time the next part was published the furor over Cyborganization would be dead and gone, allowing my work to be re-placed in its proper perspective.
Such is the way of popular controversies that I got my wish—but the real issues raised by the Cyborganizers survived their fashionability, in much the same way that the real issues raised by the Thanaticists never had gone away—and never would.
SIXTY-NINE
In September 2945, when Lua Tawana was thirty-three years old, three of her co-parents—Mama Maralyne, Papa Ewald, and Mama Francesca—were killed when the helicopter in which they were traveling crashed into the sea near the island of Vavau during a violent storm.
The household had broken up some ten years earlier, when the divorce was formalized, but its members had not dispersed to any considerable degree. Mica, Tricia, and I had remained near neighbors, and because Lua remained in New Tonga rather than moving to another continent to complete her education, all the others took care to stay in touch. It seemed to me, in fact, that they made more effort to stay in touch than they had when we shared the same hometree, at least in the cases of Bana and Ng. The tragedy affected the survivors as powerfully and as intimately as Grizel’s death had affected the co-partners in my first marriage, but the circumstances were so different that it did not seem to me that history was repeating itself.
It was the first time that my remaining co-spouses, let alone my daughter, had had to face up squarely to the fact that death had not been entirely banished from the world. Like me, they had lost their parents one by one, save for a handful of ZT fosterers, but I was the only one who had ever lost an emortal spouse. This put me in a slightly awkward position because it meant that everyone involved immediately decided that, as the resident expert, I should shoulder not only the responsibility of helping Lua through the ordeal but also the responsibility of helping them to cope.
I could hardly object; was I not, after all, the world’s foremost expert on the subject of death?
“You won’t always feel this bad about it,” I assured Lua, while we walked together on the sandy shore looking out over the deceptively placid weed-choked sea. “Time heals virtual wounds as well as real ones.” I had said as much to Mica and Tricia, and they had both accepted it as gospel, but Lua reacted differently.
“I don’t want it to heal,” she told me, sternly. “I want it to be bad. It ought to be bad. It is bad. I don’t want to forget it or to get
to a point were it might never have happened.”
“I can understand that,” I said, far more awkwardly than I would have wished. “When I say that it’ll heal I don’t mean that it’ll vanish. I mean that it’ll… become manageable. It won’t be so all-consuming. It won’t ever lose its meaning.”
“But it will vanish, won’t it?” she said, with that earnest certainty of which only the newly adult are capable. “Maybe not soon, but it will go. People do forget. In time, they forget everything. Our heads can hold only so much. So it will lose its meaning. In time, it’ll be as if I never had any parents. It won’t matter who they were, or whether they died, or how they died.”
“That’s not true,” I insisted, taking her hand in mine. “Yes, we do forget. The longer we live, the more we let go, because it’s reasonable to prefer our fresher, more immediately relevant memories, but it’s a matter of choice. We can cling to the things that are important, no matter how long ago they happened. We can make them part of us, and we keep them forever. Even if we forget them, they’re still among the forces that make and shape us. Without them, we’d be different.”
“I suppose so,” she conceded—but I couldn’t tell whether she meant it, or whether she was trying to be kind to a no-longer-functional parent.
“I was nearly killed in the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, you know,” I reminded her. “That was nearly four hundred years ago. Emily Marchant was a little girl, far younger than you are now. She saved my life, and I’ll never forget it. I’d be lying if I said that I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday, because I don’t, but I know that that was the most important event in my life and hers. If it hadn’t happened, I would be a very different person, and so would she—and because of the influence I’ve had on your upbringing, so would you, however slightly. Maybe that doesn’t matter so much in your case or mine, but if Emily Marchant were different, Titan wouldn’t be the world it is today. The history of the whole outer system would have developed differently, and with it—to a small but measurable degree—the history of the human race.”
The Fountains of Youth Page 30
