The Fountains of Youth (46 page)

“Don’t be silly, Mortimer,” said Julius Ngomi, sternly. “Ownership of
Earth will always be the foundation stone of power within the human community.
Always.”

Perhaps he knew more than he was letting on. Perhaps Emily did too—and the fabers, and whoever else was involved. Perhaps they
all
knew but didn’t want the others to know how much they knew and what they thought it implied. The return of real conflicts of interests inevitably fostered the return of secrecy to human affairs. Eve was right, and there were far too many things being left unsaid by far too many people—but not for long.

At the end of the third millennium we had finally, if belatedly, arrived at the time when the truly important things could speak for themselves, and they were about to do exactly that.

J
ulius Ngomi was right. By the time I shuttled back down to Earth, leaving the
Ambassador
to continue running rings around the planet, I was world famous. I was also rich, though not by the highest standards of the Hardinist Cabal or the outer-system gantzers. I was, at any rate, richer than I had ever expected to be, and richer than I had ever thought that I might one day need to be.

He was right about my rescue being a nine-day wonder too. He had not been speaking literally, but he was less than forty-eight hours out.

It would be nice to think that Emily’s extravagant congratulatory speech was warranted, but the truth was that even if I hadn’t provided the people aboard
Ambassador
with a common cause and rough-hewn manifesto, their heads would have been smashed together soon enough. I was always fated to be upstaged by the Pandorans, and rightly so. I was just a human interest story, but the Pandorans’ long-unspoken and carefully checked out news was the biggest headline that had ever confronted the human race. It changed everything, and forever.

The day the Pandorans chose to pass on what their alien friends had told them, having had it proved to them conclusively, was the day that humankind’s apprenticeship as a starfaring species was ended and the Age of Responsibility finally began. It was the day emortal humankind moved beyond maturity into uncharted existential territory.

There was a sense in which the news was already seventy years old by the time it arrived in the system, having crawled here at the speed of light, and there was no prospect of a dialogue. By the time
Pandora
had come home, if her crew had decided to do so, the fourth millennium would have been well advanced. In such circumstances, there were bound to be a few people on Earth who declared that it was all a hoax—a lie cooked up for political purposes, either by the Pandorans, or the outer-system people, or the dear old Hardinist Cabal—but they were indeed few. We had to wait a long time for the full story and the final
proof, but the great majority believed what we heard almost as soon as we heard it and knew what it signified.

The news that the aliens gave the crew of
Pandora
and the crew of
Pandora
duly gave to the Oikumene was that life was as widely distributed throughout the galaxy as we had always hoped and suspected but that death was far more widely distributed than we had ever thought or feared. “Earthlike” planets were far rarer than we had dreamed and
much
rarer than was implied by the discovery of Ararat and Maya within fifty light-years of Earth. Intelligence was even rarer—an evolutionary experiment that usually failed—and the achievement of emortality by intelligent species rarer still.

Until they encountered
Pandora
, the inhabitants of the alien Ark—which was indeed an ark and whose parent world had been ruined—had feared that they might now be alone. They had detected our radio signals from some distance but had hardly dared to hope that the transmitters of the signals would still be alive when they came close enough to make contact. They and their ancestors had heard other transmissions, but they had never found the transmitters alive.

According to the alien Ark-dwellers, the vast majority of the life-bearing planets in the galaxy were occupied by a single species of microorganism: a genetic predator that destroyed not merely those competing species which employed its own chemistry of replication, but any and all others. It was the living equivalent of a universal solvent; a true omnivore.

This all-consuming organism had already spread itself across vast reaches of space within the galaxy. It moved from star system to star system by means of spacefaring spores, slowly but inexorably. The initial process of distribution employed by such spores had probably been supernoval scattering, but natural selection had produced slower and surer means of interstellar travel. Wherever spores of any kind encountered a new ecosphere, the omnipotent microorganisms grew and multiplied, ultimately devouring
everything
—not merely those carbonaceous molecules that in Earthly terms were reckoned “organic” but also many kinds of molecules that had been drafted to human use by gantzers and cyborgizers.

In effect, the microorganisms and their spores were natural Cyborganizers
at a nano tech level. They were very tiny, but they were extraordinarily complex and clever. No bigger than Earthly protozoans or the internal nanomachines to which every human being plays host, they were utterly devoid of any vestige of mind or intellect, but they were the most powerful and successful entities in the galaxy, and perhaps the universe. They constituted the ultimate blight, against which nothing complex could compete. Wherever they arrived they obliterated everything but themselves, reducing every victim ecosphere to homogeneity.

Like Earthly microorganisms, the blight was effectively immortal. Its individuals reproduced by binary fission. Many perished, destroyed by adverse circumstance, but those that did not perish went on forever. They were not changeless—they evolved, after their own fashion—but they disdained such aids to change as sexual reproduction and built-in obsolescence. Such devices were capable of producing some remarkable freaks of complexity, but in terms of the big picture—the galactic picture, and presumably the universal picture—such freaks were not merely rare but fragile.

The Ark dwellers dolefully informed the Pandorans that whenever complex life—including everything that we had chosen to call
Earthlike
life—encountered the blight, it was easily and unceremoniously consumed. The existence of species like ours, no matter how diverse they might become with the aid of genetic engineering and cyborgization, was exceedingly precarious. It could flourish only in the remotest parts of the galaxy, far out on its trailing arms. Even in the midst of such protective wilderness, it was doomed to ephemerality.

In the end, the Ark dwellers assured the Pandorans, the blight would reach our homeworld as it had reached theirs. Within a few more million years, the blight would hold dominion over the entire galaxy. Already there was no safe way for spacefarers to go but outward, farther toward the rim of the galaxy and the intergalactic dark.

Within a few thousand years, Maya and Ararat would be swallowed up. Within the space of a single emortal lifetime, Earth would follow them—and what could possibly become of such Arks as went outward, into the void? Where could they find the energy that was essential to sustain such beings as they were, not merely for centuries or millennia but
forever?
And if they could somehow contrive to cross the dark
between the galaxies, what realistic hope did they have of finding the Magellanic Clouds or Andromeda under any dominion but that of the blight?

In competition with news like that, my descent into the watery abyss and its political aftermath could not help but seem trivial. In the face of intelligence like that, it was not merely the political wrangles of the Earthbound and the frontier folk that began to seem meaningless, but the entire history of humankind.

Death had no sooner been retired from its key role in human affairs than it was back, with a vengeance.

I
had observed in
The Marriage of Life and Death
that even emortals must die. What mattered, I had argued, was creating a life that was satisfactory because rather than in spite of temporal limitation. The greatest hope for the future that I had, I’d told the silver navigator of the sunken snowmobile—and, unknowingly, the listening world—was that Emily Marchant and Lua Tawana might live forever, or at least for thousands of years
and that they could continue to make a difference to the shape of the future of humankind.

After the Pandorans dropped their bombshell, the question was whether
anyone
could make a difference to the future of humankind or whether everything that anybody could do, or that anybody’s descendants could do, would merely be posturing in advance of the blight, whimpering while waiting for the curtain of oblivion to descend.

I put the question, in almost exactly those terms, to Emily when she followed me down to Earth after the official conclusion of the
Ambassador
conference. Her answer was entirely predictable.

“We’ll do what we have to do,” she said. “The Earthbound will stand and fight. Some of the outward-bounders will fight too—the rest will run in order to be able to stand and fight another day.”

“According to the alien Ark-dwellers,” I pointed out, “the battle must have been fought a hundred times before, or a thousand. Everybody they know about has lost it.”

“But that’s not many,” she pointed out, “and now that we’ve made contact with the Ark dwellers we’ll have their experience to draw on as well as our own. We don’t have any alternative but to fight as best we can. It doesn’t matter what the odds are. Either we beat the blight or the blight beats us. Either the blight will consume everybody in the universe who has the vestiges of a mind, or someone somewhere will use the resources of mind to defeat and destroy the blight. We have to do the best we can to be that somebody. We have to hang on as long as we can, and we have to conserve our reserves as long as we can, just
in case we get there in the end or help arrives. The one thing we can’t do is lie down and wait to die. Even silvers know that where there’s life there’s hope. Even if there were nothing we could do, we’d keep talking, wouldn’t we, Morty? Even if we didn’t think that there was anybody listening.”

She was right, of course.

The blight, I realized, when I had had a chance to weigh the bad news more carefully, was a
true
marriage of life and death, of whose perfection I had never dared to dream. I realized too that I, of all people, should always have known that something like the blight would exist—that something like it
must
exist—in order that the History of Death might not be complete and might not even be computable by anyone as humble as a human being. I, of all people, should always have known that the war between humankind and death wasn’t one that could be settled for long by any mere treaty of technology, because it was at bottom a
real conflict of interest.

I had imagined the war against death, for a while, as a local struggle for the small prize of the human mind, but I should always have realized that it was a much larger matter than that—that from its very beginning it had been a battle for no less a prize than the universe itself.

The human mind had so far been content with limited objectives, but it had always been evolving, not merely in terms of its own ambitions and dreams, but in terms of the cosmic frame of meaning. Within the frame, its objectives had always been infinite and eternal—and it had always tried, in its limited fashion, to recognize that fact in its aspirations and its accomplishments.

In time, I knew, spores of the new kind of death-life must and would reach Earth’s solar system, whether it took ten thousand years or a million. In the meantime, the systembound must do what they could to erect whatever Type-2 defenses they could contrive. While the opportunity for action remained,
all
humankinds must do their level best to purge the worlds of other stars of its vile empire in order to reclaim them for real life, for intelligence, and for evolution. Those were the facts of the matter; they spoke for themselves.

When Emily left Earth for the last time I was still living in Severnaya Zemlya. When she had gone, I went out on to the great ice sheet in my
newly repaired snowmobile, navigated by the only silver I had ever learned to count as a friend.

“This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization,” I told him, when we paused at the summit of a white mountain. “If you look southward, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?”

“I fear, sir, that I do not know,” the navigator informed me, in an apologetic tone that was definitely contrived for irony’s sake.

I looked upward through the transparent canopy of the air, at the multitude of stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness.

“Please don’t broadcast this to the world,” I said, “but I feel an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I know that although there’s nothing much for me to do for the present moment, the time will come when my particular talent and expertise will be needed again. Some day, it will be my task to compose
another
history, of the next phase in the war that humankind and all its brother species must fight against Death and Oblivion.”

“Yes, sir,” said the dutiful silver. “I hope that it will be as successful as the last.”

“Stop calling me sir,” I said. “We’ve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I can’t think of you as an
it
any longer, so you shouldn’t think of me as a
sir.
You can call me Mortimer—Morty, even.”

“As you wish, Morty,” said the machine, humbly. If he had escaped robotization, it was only by a hairsbreadth. Like Emily, like the alien Ark-dwellers, like Khan Mirafzal, like Garden Earth, and like me the snowmobile’s navigator still had a great deal of evolving to do.