The Fountains of Youth (14 page)

T
he long conversation that Sharane and I had on the bus to Nod was not the best of the many we shared, but it remains the most precious in my memory because it was the one most sharply edged and focused by gathering emotion. That seems a little absurd now, given that my response to the gathering in question was to become even more intense and pompous than was my habit, but I would be a poor historian were I to deny or conceal it.

“The awareness of death inevitably gives rise to many corollaries,” I told Sharane, having explained my own interest in the Lake Van sites and my own need to make actual physical contact with the faint traces of the remote past. “One of them—perhaps the most important, from the point of view of the New Humans—was the notion that killing required some kind of
justification
, in terms of both meaning and morality. Even if the leap to death consciousness didn’t occur until protohumans had spread out of Africa, at least as far as ancient Mesopotamia and what is now Kurdistan—in which case it must have been made more than once, in several different places—one can hardly blame myth makers for insisting on a single point of origin and a psychologically satisfying first cause. Having conflated a whole community of primal humans into the parental couple of Adam and Eve, it made perfect sense to make one of their sons the first murderer and the other the first murder victim.”

“But the story clearly symbolizes the ancient conflict between nomadic herdsmen and settled agriculturalists,” Sharane objected, assertively but not aggressively. Her eyes seemed to sparkle like gemstones when she was assertive—I was to discover soon enough that they seemed to flash like lightning when she was aggressive.

“Possibly,” I admitted, “but I suspect that the conflict in question had more to do with different ways of revering the dead than any material conflict of interest. Anyway, the awareness that the act of killing requires special justification must precede the attachment of a particular justification. The idea of a fundamental social conflict between the settied
tied and the unsettled must have been powerful because it was the first root cause of war, which was subsequently to be the principal occupation of that time which organized communities did not need to devote to mere survival.”

“That’s a cynical way of looking at it,” she objected, lifting her slender chin and lowering her dark eyebrows in the slightest possible gesture of censure.

“It’s not cynical, it’s realistic,” I riposted. “Anyway, the particular meaning attached to killing by the Eden myth was selected from an already available set that also included legal execution, human sacrifice, and self-defense—as can easily be seen if the linear sequence of Hebrew myths is tracked a little further. All the other meanings and justifications are there, leading inexorably to the establishment of the crucial commandment:
Thou shalt do no murder”

“Isn’t it
Thou shalt not kill?”

“No. That’s a much later and rather sloppy translation. The whole point of the commandment is to forbid
illegitimate
killing.”

“I suppose you’ve even got a better explanation for the serpent,” she said, without undue sarcasm. She meant, of course, a better explanation than the one poor Grizel had carelessly trotted out in her reference to phallocentric fools rather than the Christian reinterpretation, which had imported an evil anti-God into the older myth.

“Another immediate corollary of death awareness,” I pointed out, “is the notion
oí poison.
Snakebite must have been the first example to spring to mind, closely associated with bad food. That the serpent proffers fruit is probably an homage to warning coloration. Sometimes, with all due respect to the complexities of symbolism and metaphor, a serpent is just a snake, and a bad apple is just something that tastes nasty and does you no good.”

“That’s quite brilliant,” she said, with a smile like life itself. “Mortimer Gray, you’re by far the most interesting person I’ve met in ages.”

“The feeling’s mutual, Sharane Fereday,” I assured her. “My friends call me Mort, or Morty.”

She smiled broadly at that too, perhaps having seen the meaning accidentally contained within the short form of my name.

“So shall I,” she informed me.

Sharane’s love for the ancient past was even more intense than mine, but it was very different in kind. She was forty years older than I and had already passed through half a dozen pair-bond marriages. She was a moderately successful writer, but her writings were far less dispassionate than those of a true historian—even a narrative historian who took it for granted that all history is fantasy.

Sharane’s writings tended to the lyrical rather than the factual, even when she was not writing manifest fiction. Her most popular works were scripts for “dramatic reconstructions,” most of which were performed in VE by widely scattered casts of thousands. Some of them were actually acted out in real space with the aid of artful costumes, clever machines, and deft psychotropic biotech. She was the veteran of a hundred battles and a thousand rituals.

On the bus to Nod, Sharane told me that she could never be content merely to
know
about the past; she wanted to re-create it. Even the designing of VE adventures wasn’t enough for her, although she had started out that way. She had always wanted to make her creations more solid, so that they had to be actively improvised rather than passively experienced. She was eagerly and flamboyantly old-fashioned in almost everything that she did. She was dressed in an ordinary suitskin when I first encountered her in Eden, but that was because she was traveling. When I first saw her at home, the passion that I had already conceived and nurtured was further inflamed.

In the privacy of her own home Sharane loved to dress in gaudy pastiches of costumes represented in ancient art. She had a particular fondness for Greek and Egyptian designs, and she programed her wallscreens to produce decor to match her moods. She was widely considered to be a garish eccentric, and I suppose I surrendered far too rapidly to that consensus when we eventually split up, but in the beginning I saw her very differently, as a defiant individualist and a true artist.

When I introduced her to my four surviving parents—whose number had only just been diminished by the loss of Mama Meta, sixteen years after the death of Papa Nahum—their recently reinforced disapproval of my lifestyle was quickly redoubled. They were instantly affrighted by her taste in telephone-VEs, and the more they learned about her the more their worst suspicions were confirmed.

“Morty,” Mama Siorane told me, in one of her rare transmissions from the vicinity of Saturn, “that woman is quite mad. I have long thought that your fascination with the past had slowed down your own intellectual development, but that woman is so retarded as to be infantile.”

When I passed these comments on to my beloved, suitably edited for diplomacy, she merely smiled, saying: “What can you expect from someone who can’t even spell her own name?”

I had expected Mama Eulalie to be the only one who might approve, but even she was distinctly puzzled. “She’s hardly your
type
, Morty,” she said. “Not that I’m accusing you of being boring, of course, but you have always kept company with
serious
people. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“I’m ready,” I assured her.

The only person who wished me well wholeheartedly was Emily Marchant, although the good wishes of my previous spouses were undoubtedly sincere and only fell short of wholeheartedness by that margin which inevitably moderates the enthusiasm of an ex-partner contemplating a replacement relationship.

I
moved into Sharane’s hometree on the island of Crete in September 2619 and we married in March 2621. Even though we had been living together very happily for some months, many of our mutual friends were mildly astonished that we actually formalized the arrangement. The difference in our personalities seemed glaring to others but was quite irrelevant to us.

Solitude, poverty, and intensity of purpose had begun to weigh rather heavily upon me before we met, and my carefully cultivated calm of mind had threatened to become a kind of toiling inertia. Sharane brought a welcome breath of air into an existence that had threatened to become rather stuffy. I always knew, I suppose, that from her point of view I was merely one more amusing distraction in a long sequence, but for her the very essence of life was play. She was not in the least disposed to hide that fact or to be ashamed of it.

“Work is only the means to an end,” she told me. “Play
is
the end. Life is a game, because there isn’t anything else it can be—certainly not a job or a mission or even a vocation. Without rules, life has no structure, but if the rules become laws, life loses its freedom and becomes a sentence; they have to be
rules of play.
People like that mother of yours who can’t spell her name think play is silly, but that’s because they’ve made their own rules too rigid and unforgiving. Play is very serious, especially the kind of play that involves dressing up and pretending. The ancients understood that—that’s why they had exotic costumes and special scripts for use in their most solemn religious ceremonies and sternest legal rituals. The past is an intellectual playground, just like the Labyrinth, and you and I are just happy children delighting in its use and transformation.”

She was certainly unconventional, but she was
magnificently
unconventional, and I loved her for it. The fact that she funded much of the research I put into the second part of my
History
, and funded it lavishly, did not figure in my calculations at all. I would have married her if she
had been as poor as I was—although she, admittedly, would not have married me had those been our circumstances.

I found in Sharane a precious wildness that was unfailingly amusing in spite of the fact that it wasn’t truly spontaneous. Her attempts to put herself imaginatively in touch with the past—
literally
to stand in the shoes of long-gone members of the Old Human Race—had a very casual attitude to matters of accuracy and authenticity, but they were bold and exhilarating. For a while, at least, I was glad occasionally to be a part of them, and when I was content to remain on the sidelines I enjoyed the spectacle just as much.

From her point of view, I suppose I was useful in two ways. On the one hand, I was a font of information and inspiration, offering her a constant flow of new perspectives. Thanks to me, she was able to revisit old exploits with a new eye, so that she could remake them in interesting ways. On the other hand, I provided a kind of existential anchorage whose solidity and mundanity prevented her from losing herself in the flights of her imagination. Neither of those roles was infinitely extendable, but they were valuable while they lasted, and she loved me for the style as well as the efficiency of the manner in which I fulfilled them.

It would have been convenient if we had both come to the end of our infatuation at exactly the same time, but even the best pair-bonds rarely split as neatly and as gently as that. As things turned out, I was the one who suffered the disappointment of losing a love that I still felt very keenly, after a mere twenty years of acquaintance and eighteen of formal marriage.

Sharane and I talked for a while, as even young married people do, about the possibility of recruiting half a dozen more partners so that we might apply to raise a child. It would not have been impossible, or even particularly unusual, given that the Decimation had made licenses much more freely available. We settled, however, for filing our deposits in the local gamete bank with a polite recommendation that some future group of co-parents more than a thousand years hence might consider them appropriate for combination. It was the romantic option—and when we split up, neither of us hated the other enough to rescind the recommendation.

What eventually drove us apart was, I suppose, the same thing that
had brought us together. The opposite tendencies of our characters fused for a while into a healthy whole, which seemed greater than the sum of its parts—but the robust tautness of the combination eventually decayed into stress and strain.

“You’re too serious,” Sharane complained, as the breaking point approached, echoing Mama Eulalie’s anxieties about my suitability for alliance with such a mercurial creature. “You work too hard, and you’re too hung up on details. Historical research should be a joyful voyage of discovery, not an obsession.”

“I’m not against joy,” I replied, a trifle defensively and more than a trifle resentfully, “but I’m a serious historian. Unlike you, I have to discriminate between discovery and invention.”

“All history is fantasy,” she quoted at me. “Truth is what you can get away with.”

“The fact that all history is fantasy doesn’t mean you can just
make it up”
I insisted. “It means that even at its most accurate and authoritative, history has an irreducible element of creativity and imagination. Julius Ngomi might have taken that as a license to propagandize, but I’m a real historian. I have to search for the truth that stands up to skepticism and doesn’t simply fold up into a pack of feeble pretenses.”

“You’re such a
pedant”
she riposted, exasperatedly. “You go on and on about farming being a reluctant and degrading response to ecological disaster, but you’re a farmer through and through. Most people think backbreaking labor is a thoroughly good thing—motor of progress and all that—but you know perfectly well that people were a lot better off when they hunted and gathered for six or seven hours a week and spent the rest of their time sitting under the acacia tree telling one another tall stories. You know it, but you don’t
do
it. That’s not merely stupid, Morty, it’s
perverse”

I tried to resist, but her eyes were flashing.

“To see hard work for what it really is and then to devote your life to it anyway is protracted suicide,” she went on. “Unless the New Human Race can rediscover the delights of play and throw away its whips and spurs we’ll never be able to adapt to emortality. I’ll say one thing for your late Mama Meta: at least she knew that the work ethic belonged in outer space. Okay, so we had to rebuild after the tidal waves—but we’ve
done that now, thanks to your little friend’s shamirs. Now, it’s time to get back to the Garden, to begin the Golden Age again.
Homo faber
is essentially a spacefaring species; those of us who are keeping our legs should accept that we’re
Homo ludens.”