The Fountains of Youth (34 page)

I swept all such distinctions casually aside. I suppose that my refusing to see any of the world wars as an unmitigated disaster was not so very unorthodox, but my refusal to see them as horrific examples of the
barbarity of ancient man certainly was. I argued that the trumpery nationalism that had replaced the great religions as the main creator and definer of a sense of human community was a poor and petty thing, but I did not condemn it as an evil. I admitted that the massive conflicts engendered in its name were tragic, but I insisted that they were a necessary stage in historical development. All the empires of faith, including the tawdry empires of patriotism and nationalism, were utterly incompetent to complete their self-defined tasks, but they were necessary in spite of that. They were always bound to fail, and their disintegration was always bound to be bloody, because they were brave but hopeless attempts to make a virtue of dire necessity, but they served their temporary purpose.

As one more transfiguration of the meaning of death, temporarily redeeming the ultimate evil by enshrouding it in nobility while also laying bare the appalling hollowness of exactly those pretensions, the global wars had bridged the historical gap between the senility of religion and the maturity of science. Not until the scientifically guided global wars had done their work and run their course, I argued, could the groundwork for a
genuine
human community—in which all mankind could properly and meaningfully join—be properly laid. The foundations of the ultimate world order had to be laid in the common experience of all nations, as part of a hard-won and well-understood universal heritage.

I repeated yet again that no matter who the citizens of particular nations had appointed as their enemies, the only
real
enemy of all humankind was death itself. Only by facing up to death in a new way, by gradually transforming the role of death as part of the means to human ends, could a true human community be made. Even the petty wars of the bloodiest period in human history, whatever their immediate purpose in settling economic squabbles and pandering to the megalomaniac psychoses of national leaders, had played an essential part in the shifting pattern of history. They had, I insisted, provided a vast, all-encompassing, and quite invaluable carnival of destruction—a carnival that could have no other ultimate outcome but to make human beings weary of the lust to kill, lest they bring about their extinction.

Some reviewers condemned
Fields of Battle
on the grounds of its evident irrelevance to a world that had banished war, but I was heartened
by the general tenor of its reception. A few critics descended to sarcasm in welcoming the fact that my thesis had returned to the safe track of true history, dealing exclusively with things safely dead and buried, but there was clear evidence that the earlier parts of my work had now grown sufficiently familiar for the whole enterprise to be treated with respect.

My brief notoriety had not been entirely forgotten, and certainly not forgiven, in academic circles but it seemed to me that the good effects of that publicity were at last beginning to outweigh the bad. The
History
was now being taken seriously even by many who were unsympathetic to its stance, and my theories were now firmly established on the world’s intellectual agenda. Several reviewers actually confessed that they were now looking forward to the next installment of the story.

W
hen I was ready to leave the rehab center I shopped around for an inexpensive place to live. I wanted a complete contrast to my life on the moon, so I immediately rejected Antarctica and the Ice Age-afflicted parts of the Northern Hemisphere. I didn’t want to return to Africa or South America, so that narrowed my choices considerably. When I found myself recoiling in a quasi-reflexive manner from the thought of living in Oceania I became slightly anxious. I told myself that emortals could not afford to accumulate hang-ups and that it was high time I put the legacy of the Coral Sea Catastrophe firmly behind me.

I eventually decided to rent an apt-capsule in Neyu, one of the virginal islands of New Tonga.

Once the devastation of the original Creationist Islands had been repaired—although the vast majority of the ecological microcosms had been replaced rather than restored—the Continental Engineers had raised new islands by the score from the relatively shallow sea. New Tonga was a blue-sea region rather than a vast tract of LAP-gel, but it was neither a wilderness reserve nor a glorified fish farm.

Insofar as there was an avant garde among Earthbound genetic artists, the virgin isles of New Tonga were the stomping ground of its members. I was mildly interested in that avant garde because one of its factions—the Tachytelic Perfectionists—had borrowed rhetoric from the Thanaticists in openly proclaiming themselves to be “artists in death,” working with ephemeral artificial organisms designed to live very briefly within a context of ferocious competition and natural selection.

The capstack in which my apt was located was an architectural fantasia of which even Emily might have approved, although it was anything but icy. It was bright and gaudy, complex without being confused. The many textures of its outer tegument recalled the rinds of fruit and the chitinous shells of marine mollusks, and its multitudinous tiny windows were somewhat reminiscent of the facets of an insect’s compound eye.

I could not, of course, select my immediate neighbors. I was dismayed at first to find that not only were there no Tachytelic Perfectionists living in the building, but that the faction in question was regarded as something of a joke by the geneticists who did live there. The great majority of the biotechnologists who lived in the caps tack did not consider themselves to be “artists” at all, and those who did were classical Aesthetes cast in the antique mould of the second Oscar Wilde.

My closest neighbors, whose most voluble spokesman was a woman of my own age named Mica Pershing, were mostly steadfastly utilitarian island builders. They were firmly committed to a newly emergent alliance between old-fashioned gantzers and organic engineers. Mica explained to me after welcoming me into their midst that she and her associates were perfectly happy to accept the label of Continental Engineers, but she took care to emphasize the contention that they were a new breed, not to be confused with their forerunners.

“We’re the
true
Continental Engineers,” she told me. “Being more than three hundred years old, I sometimes get accused of belonging to the old guard by the up-and-coming centenarian youngsters, but I’m as forward-looking as any of them. I expect you get that sort of thing yourself—or is the profession of history the precious exception wherein experience receives its proper due?”

I assured her that it was not, although it certainly ought to have been.

During the previous three hundred years I had been briefly acquainted with many people who would have styled themselves Continental Engineers, but most of those I had recently encountered had been ambitious to move to the next logical stage of that career path, becoming Planetary Engineers. I had not realized, although it would have been obvious had I cared to study the logic of the situation, that the emigration of those so minded was bound to leave behind a hard core of fundamentalists, who would see the art and craft of Continental Engineering as a quintessentially Earthbound discipline. My neighbors on Neyu had no ambition to join the terraformers on Mars or the palace builders on Titan; even their obsession with the remaking of Garden Earth was highly specialized.

The first self-appointed Continental Engineers to make a real impact
on the popular imagination, way back in the twenty-first century, had done so by mounting a campaign to persuade the United Nations to license the building of a dam across the Straits of Gibraltar. Because more water evaporates from the Mediterranean than flows into it from rivers, that plan would have considerably increased the land surface of southern Europe and Northern Africa. It had, of course, never come to fruition, but its dogged pursuit had won the Engineers a whole series of consolation prizes. Their island-building activities had been boosted considerably by the Decimation.

More recently, the climatic disruptions caused by the advancing Ice Age had given Continental Engineering a further boost, allowing its propagandists to promote the idea of raising new lands in the tropics as a refuge for emigrants from the newly frozen north. The “old-fashioned gantzers” among them had been so busy for the previous two centuries that they had become increasingly assertive, protesting loudly against anyone who dared to suppose that their attitudes were as obsolescent as their tools. Mica was a fairly typical specimen.

When I moved to Neyu the actual endeavors of the resident gantzers were still heavily dependent on traditional techniques that Emily Marchant would have regarded as laughably primitive. The basics of island building had not changed in half a millennium: crude bacterial cyborgs that did little more than agglomerate huge towers of cemented sand provided the foundations, and “lightning corals” did the finishing work. Such techniques were perfectly adequate to the task of creating great archipelagos of new islands. The Continental Engineers’s progressives were, however, already thinking at least two steps ahead.

Even the “moderates” based in New Tonga and its sister states saw the ever-increasing network of bridges connecting the new islands as a blueprint for the highways of a new Pacific continent twice the size of Australia. Their extremists were already talking about New Pangaea and New Gondwanaland: rival versions of a grand plan to take technical control over the whole set of Earth’s tectonic plates and institute a new era of macrogeographical design.

The biologists who were now collaborating with the Continental Engineers had already begun planting vast networks of “enhanced seaweeds” in the most suitable enclaves of the blue-sea region. The algae in
question were enhanced in the sense that they combined the best features of kelps and wracks with surface features modeled on freshwater-dwelling flowering plants, especially water lilies.

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.

T
he 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.