My commentary flatly refused to give any substantial credit to the fears of those mortal men who felt that the advent of emortality might be a bad thing. I was as dismissive of the Robot Assassins and the original Thanaticists as I was of the Humanists. Despite what my fiercest critics alleged, however, I did make a serious attempt to understand the thinking of such people and to fit it into the larger picture that my History had now brought to the brink of completion.
It was inevitable, in a world that still contained millions of self-described New Stoics, that my evaluation of their forebears would attract vitriolic criticism. When I condemned the people who first formulated the insistence that asceticism was the natural ideological partner of emortality as victims of an “understandable delusion” I knew that I was inviting trouble, but I did it because I thought that I was right, not because I thought that the controversy would boost my access fees.
It did not surprise my critics in the least, of course, that I commended neo-Epicureanism as the optimal psychological adaptation to emortality. Even those who did not know enough biographical details to judge that I had been a lifelong, if slightly unsteady, adherent of “careful hedonism” had inferred from the earlier parts of my study that I was an ardent champion of self-knowledge and avoidance of excess. The cruelest of the early reviewers did venture to suggest that I had been so halfhearted a neo-Epicurean as almost to qualify as a neo-Stoic by default, but I was well used by then to treating criticism of that nature with deserved contempt.
One of the appendixes to The Honeymoon of Emortality collated the statistics of birth and death during the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth centuries, recording the spread of Zaman transformations and the universalization of ectogenesis on Earth and the extension of the Oikumene throughout and beyond the solar system. I recorded acknowledgments to numerous faber scholars based on the moon and Mars for their assistance in gleaning information from the slowly diffusing microworlds and the first wave of their descendant starships. I noted that because the transfer of information between data stores was limited by the speed of light, Earth-based historians might have to wait centuries for significant data about the more distant human colonies, but I promised that I would do my best to update the statistics as and when I could.
These data showed, slightly to my surprise, that the number of individuals of the various humankinds that now existed had already begun to increase more rapidly than ever before by the time of my birth. I could not help but recall, as I noted that conclusion, the lectures I had received from Papa Domenico on the subject of the alleged sterility of the “realist” philosophy and the supposedly inevitable victory of “virtualism.” What, I wondered, would Papa Domenico have thought of Emily Marchant and the highkickers? What would he have thought of a human race whose “virtualist Utopians” were now a small minority? I consigned to a footnote the observation that that although Homo sapiens sapiens had become extinct in the twenty-eighth century there was as yet no consensus on the labeling of its descendant species.
Although it generated a good deal of interest and a very healthy financial return, many lay reviewers were disappointed that the coverage of The Honeymoon of Emortality did not extend to the present day. The surviving Cyborganizers—predictably grateful for the opportunity to heat up a flagging controversy—reacted more noisily than anyone else to this “manifest cowardice” but I had decided that it would be more sensible to reserve such discussions to a tenth and concluding volume of my magnum opus.
The conclusion of my ninth commentary promised that I would consider in all due detail the futurological arguments of the Cyborganizers as well as the hopes and expectations of other contemporary schools of thought. As I had told Emily when she visited the moon, I still had every intention of completing my Herculean labor by the end of the millennium, and I urged my loyal readers to be patient for just a little while longer.
SEVENTY-TWO
I didn’t bother to find another place to live before I left Neyu for good. For several years I led a contentedly rootless existence, traveling far more widely about the mainstreams and backwaters of Garden Earth than I had ever contrived to do before.
In my first 480 years I had seen hundreds of archaeological sites and thousands of museums but relatively little of the casters’ hit parade of “the wonders of the world.” Once, when I enlisted the help of my domestic silver in adding up the time I had spent away from my various homes I found that I had spent more hours inside mountains than sampling the glories of the managed ecosphere. It would have been easy enough to perform a second set of calculations with regard to the time I had spent in virtual environments, but I did not do so. I had no doubt that I had spent far many more hours sampling the delights of imaginary landscapes than real ones even in more recent centuries, let alone in the early years I had spent exploring Papa Domenico’s beloved Universe Without Limits.
Now that further alternatives to Earthbound life appeared to be emerging almost yearly from the mists of possibility, not only in the outer system but also in the colony worlds, it was starkly obvious that every person born on Earth had to make the choice that Lua Tawana had recently made: to stay or to seek one’s fortune in the infinite. I was part of the older generation in the fashionable reckoning of the day, and my neighbors on Neyu always assumed that I had made my choice long before, but I had never entirely shaken off the confusion that had surrounded my descent from Mare Moscoviense. I was still committed to the neo-Epicurean ethic of permanent growth and I refused to consider the matter settled. I felt as young as I ever had, and I certainly didn’t want to be reckoned an element of the Earthbound’s supposed decadence. I decided that I would have to renew my decision to remain Earthbound at least once in every century and that it ought to be an informed decision, based on intimate experience of what Garden Earth had to offer to those who chose to remain.
As the thirtieth century wound down, therefore, I made judicious use of the healthy earnings of the more recent volumes of my History to roam around all six of the old continents. I made a particular point of visiting those parts of the globe that I had missed out on during my first two centuries of life, although ingrained habit ensured that I took care to include all those sites of special historical interest that had somehow slipped through the nets of my previous itineraries.
Everything I saw was transformed by my habit-educated eyes and the sheer relentlessness of my progress into a series of monuments: memorials of those luckless eras before men invented science and civilization and became demigods. I visited a hundred cities and at least as many agricultural and “protected wilderness” areas. I toured a thousand limited ecosystems, both recapitulative and innovative. I also took care to locate and visit many old friends, including as many of my former marriage partners as I could find.
The Lamu Rainmakers had long since ceased to make mere rain, but they had not lost their commitment to ecological management. Axel, Jodocus, and Minna were still on Earth and all enthusiastic Gardeners. Even more remarkably, they were still in regular touch with one another. They provided the best evidence I had ever found, outside my own admittedly unusual relationship with Emily Marchant, that friendship could endure forever even though the friends maintained the pace of their own personal evolution. I found them much changed—and was mildly surprised that they thought the same of me.
“You’re not as self-protective as you used to be, Morty,” Axel observed. “Less defensive. Life on the moon must have loosened you up—I’ve noticed that a lot of returners never quite readapt to all the correlates of gravity. You should have known better than to take on that Cyborganizer, though. He was always going to make you look slow.”
“I never realized back in the twenty-sixth that you were so well connected,” Jodocus marveled. “The number of times you told us about meeting Julius Ngomi inside a mountain and saving Emily Marchant’s life! They’re two of the most important people in the Oikumene now! So tell me—what’s on the agenda of this big meeting t
hey’re planning to settle the future of the human race?”
I didn’t like to admit that I had only the faintest idea, gleaned from reading between the lines of Emily’s VE-monologue communications, so I told Jodocus that the fate of Jupiter was likely to be a significant bone of contention. He nodded sagely, as if I had provided official confirmation of his own suspicions.
“The Type-2 people seem to be getting their act together at last,” he observed. “Maybe they’re right to reckon that we’ve been fully fledged Type-1 for a couple of centuries and that it’s high time we started stocking Earth’s orbit with a string of protoworlds. I suspect that’s what the new generation of smart multifunctional spaceships is really designed for, although all the talk is of atmosphere diving in the gas giants and ice breaking on Titan and Europa. Transmutation makes far more sense than that old second star nonsense—and a Type-2 progression is the rational response to the news that Earthlike planets are fewer, farther between, and far less useful than we dared to hope.”
Jodocus seemed to know more about such matters than I did, or was at least prepared to pretend that he did, but I was content to let him think that I knew far more than I was prepared to make public, and I returned our conversation to the safer ground of twenty-sixth-century Africa.
Minna seemed to have her feet more firmly planted on terra firma than any of the others. After dutifully chiding me for letting things slide so far for so long she was the one who filled me in on recent family history.
“Camilla’s on Europa now,” she told me, “investigating the possibility of making an ecosphere for the core ocean that can accommodate modified humans—the ultimate merpeople. It wouldn’t be a sealed ecosphere. It would be fully connected to the rest of the Oikumene by continuous traffic through the ice shell, using the new smart spaceships. Keir’s still working in harness with silvers, but spaceship AIs are the ones he’s involved with now He’s here, there, and everywhere—the satellites of all the outer planets—but he’s still active in the Rad Libs. He’s too far out right now to communicate regularly. Eve’s still in the Well, though. She was in the Arctic last time I heard from her. She’s like you—always liked things a few degrees colder than the rest of us. Ocean currents are her thing now, but it’s such a political minefield that she never seems to be able to get anything done. Couldn’t stand it myself. Give me fresh water any day—it was a political hot potato in Africa back in the twenty-sixth but nowadays putting lakes and rivers in place is all plain sailing, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
I forgave her the pun.
Having spent some time with my first marriage partners it seemed only appropriate to spend a little with Sharane Fereday. She had been through a dozen more marriages since ours, but she was temporarily unattached. Unlike the Rainmakers, she could see only similarities between my new and old selves, but her comparisons were not as uncomplimentary as they would once have been.
“I often think that people like you are better fitted to emortality than people like me,” she confided. “You need a steady pace to stay long distances, and I’ve always been an existential sprinter. I feel as if I’ve lived my life in fits and starts. It’s had its rewards, of course, but I think I can see the advantages of the steady slog far better now than I could when we were married. I admire you, Morty, I really do. I admire the way you stuck to that history of yours until it was finished. Tenacity is an underrated virtue.”
“It’s not quite finished,” I pointed out. “The donkey work’s done and dusted, but I’m still pondering and polishing the final commentary. To tell you the truth, I feel that some of my critics are right about my procrastinating slightly more than is necessary or reasonable. Sometimes, I wonder if I can actually bear to put the last full stop in place—but I’ve sworn to finish it by the end of the millennium, and I will. It’ll be launched long before the end of December 3000.”
“And what will you do then?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Perhaps I’ll write something else—something very different. I had wondered about becoming some sort of Gardener, but having spent so much time with the Rainmakers in the last couple of years I’ve recovered all my old doubts about my suitability for that kind of work. I’ve been wondering incessantly about off-planet possibilities, of course. My daughter’s become almost as clamorous as Emily Marchant in her insistence that spacefaring is the only way to make proper use of indefinite longevity, but I’m not sure about my suitability for that either. I’ve seen a lot of Garden Earth these last few years, and I feel at home here in a way that I wouldn’t like to lose. I’m glad I’ve lived on the moon, and I’d certainly like to visit the outer system some day, but I’m not sure that I’d ever want to go into space to live—even to one of these new Earths that Type-2 people want to build in Earth orbit.”
“I know what you mean,” Sharane agreed. “If what the casters say about these smart spaceships is true, it will soon become as easy to take tourist trips round the system as it is to tour Earth. When the day comes, I’ll be glad to see the sights. The VE reproductions are great, but they’re not the real thing. I don’t want to become a citizen of the outer darkness, though. I’m Earthbound through and through. All my husbands criticize me for living in the past, but the past is what made us—what we are is the sum of the past, and if we want to extrapolate ourselves in order to live in the future we have to keep our consciousness of the past up to scratch. You understand that, don’t you Morty? You’re only one who ever got close to figuring out that part of me.”
Most of it was mere flattery, of course—the polite conversation of old acquaintances who no longer had anything left to forgive—but it was good to hear that I had a special place in her memory.
SEVENTY-THREE
Emily confirmed what Jodocus Danette had inferred about the crucial importance of the impending conference at which the leading lights of the Oikumene’s many factions would come together face-to-face. Everyone, it seemed, accepted the necessity of some such encounter in the flesh. VE conferencing apparently made it too easy for representatives of the various factions in the dispute to retreat to entrenched positions. Nothing less than a physical gathering could carry sufficient symbolic weight to engender the spirit of give-and-take that would be necessary if the Earthbound and the highkickers were to sort out their rapidly multiplying differences—and even that might not be enough.
Despite the widespread agreement as to its urgent necessity, Emily told me not to expect the conference to happen any time soon. Such elementary matters as finding a venue, setting the agenda, and deciding on the terms of discussion were proving frustratingly difficult, involving a great deal of time-delayed diplomatic wrangling.
“There’s no way we’rt going to agree to come down to Earth,” she told me, defiantly. “That would be symbolically loaded to an unacceptable degree. On the other hand, we can understand why Ngomi doesn’t want to bring his people all the way out here, even as far as Jupiter—and there are symbolic reasons why neither side would be entirely happy about conducting discussions in old Jove’s shadow. If we meet on Mars the Martians will insist that their so-called problems are far more important than they really are, and the asteroids are faberweb territory. Even the moon is an unsuitable compromise because of the faber majority on the far side. It looks as if we might have to settle for empty space, but even the location of the empty space in question is a hot issue—and in the meantime, the unanswered questions are festering away. I wish that you Wellworms hadn’t so completely lost your sense of urgency. The situation’s becoming absurd.”
I wished that I could cut in with a few helpful suggestions, but I couldn’t. Her message had been hours in transit and my reply would double the interval.
“The only thing we’ve all managed to agree on so far,” she continued, “is that we have to make some kind of arrangement before the turn of the millennium—and we’re insisting that no matter what you arithmetical pedants might say, that means the end of 2999 r
ather than 3000. It looks as if it won’t be a day sooner, but we’ll have to sort out a venue by then. If I can come to Earth afterward, Morty, I will—just for a visit, you understand—but I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high. It may well be that the only chances we’ll get to meet face-to-face once this miserable century’s done will depend on your willingness not merely to come out of the Well but to come all the way to the frontier. The new-generation spaceships will make that a lot easier, of course, but you’ll still have to get your head around the idea.”
I was trying, in my slow and one-paced fashion, to get my head around that and many other ideas, but I had never even had Sharane’s fervor for novelty, let alone Emily’s, and it wasn’t easy.
It didn’t become any easier to come to an understanding of the new existential predicament of the various humankinds when I heard—not from Emily, in the first instance—that the aptly named starship worldlet Pandora had effected the first meeting between humans and the products of an alien ecosphere. Pandora’s faber inhabitants did not have to discover another “Earthlike” world in order to do this. Some freak of chance had allowed them to make a deep-space rendezvous with another, much smaller starship.
This was big news, but it had been so long awaited that its arrival seemed slightly anticlimactic. The letdown was reinforced by the fact that the aliens were not quite as alien as futuristic fantasies had always implied. That the alien vessel was so similar to the ancient Ark Hope in terms of its design was perhaps expectable, but no one had expected its crew to look so much like the human ambassadors granted the privilege of greeting them.
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