Time Enough for Love (2 page)

TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE

The Lives of the Senior Member of the Howard Families (Woodrow Wilson Smith; Ernest Gibbons; Captain Aaron Sheffield; Lazarus Long; “Happy” Daze; His Serenity Seraphin the Younger, Supreme High Priest of the One God in All His Aspects and Arbiter Below and Above; Proscribed Prisoner No. 83M2742; Mr. Justice Lenox; Corporal Ted Bronson; Dr. Lafe Hubert; and others), Oldest Member of the Human Race. This Account is based principally on the Senior’s Own Words as recorded at many times and places and especially at the Howard Rejuvenation Clinic and at the Executive Palace in New Rome on Secundus in Year 2053 After the Great Diaspora (Gregorian Year 4272 of Old Home Terra)—and supplemented by letters and by eyewitness accounts, the whole then arranged, collated, condensed, and (where possible) reconciled with official records and contemporary histories, as directed by the Howard Foundation Trustees and executed by the Howard Archivist Emeritus. The result is of unique historical importance despite the Archivist’s decision to leave in blatant falsehoods, self-serving allegations, and many amoral anecdotes not suitable for young persons.

On the Writing of History

History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion—i.e., none to speak of.

—L.L.

The Great Diaspora of the Human Race which started more than two millennia ago when the Libby-Sheffield Drive was disclosed, and which continues to this day and shows no sign of slowing, made the writing of history as a single narrative—or even many compatible narratives—impossible. By the twenty-first century (Gregorian)
¹
on Old Home Terra our Race was capable of doubling its numbers three times each century—given space and raw materials.

The Star Drive gave both. H. sapiens spread through this sector of our Galaxy at many times the speed of light and multiplied like yeast. If doubling had occurred at the twenty-first-century potential, our numbers would now be of the order of 7 x 10
⁹
x 2
⁶⁸
—a number so large as to defy emotional grasp; it is suited only to computers:

7 x 10
⁹
x 2
⁶⁸
= 2,066,035,336,255,469,780,992,000,000,000.

—or more than two thousand million billion trillion people

—or a mass of protein twenty-five
million
times as great as the entire mass of our race’s native planet Sol III, Old Home.

Preposterous.

Let us say that it would be preposterous had not the Great Diaspora taken place, for our race, having reached the potential to double three times each century, had also reached a crisis under which it could not double even once—that knee of the curve in the yeast-growth law in which a population can maintain a precarious stability of zero growth only by killing off its own members fast enough…lest it drown in its own poisons, commit suicide by total war, or stumble into some other form of the Malthusian Final Solution.

But the Human Race has not (we think) increased to that monstrous figure because the base figure for the Diaspora must not be thought of as seven billion but rather as a few million at the opening of the Era, plus the unnumbered, small-but-still-growing hundreds of millions since, who have migrated from Earth and from its colony planets to still more distant places over the last two millennia.

But we are no longer able to make a reasoned guess at the numbers of the Human Race, nor do we have even an approximate count of the colonized planets. The most we can say is that there must be in excess of two thousand colonized planets, in excess of five hundred billion people. The colonized planets may be twice that number, the Human Race could be four times that numerous. Or more.

So even the demographic aspects of historiography have become impossible; data are out of date when we receive them and always incomplete—yet so numerous and so varied in reliability that several hundred humans/computers on my staff keep busy trying to analyze, collate, interpolate and extrapolate, and to weigh them against other data before incorporating them into the records. We attempt to maintain standards of 95 percent in probability of corrected data, 85 percent in pessimistic reliability; our achievement is closer to 89 per cent and 81 percent—and getting worse.

Pioneers care little about sending records to the home office; they are busy staying alive, making babies, and killing off anything in their way. A colony is usually into its fourth generation before
any
data reach this office.

(Nor can it be otherwise. A colonist too interested in statistics becomes a statistic himself—as a corpse. I intend to migrate; once I have done so, I won’t care whether this office keeps track of me or not. I have stuck to this essentially useless work for almost a century partly through inducements and partly through genetic disposition—I am a direct-and-reinforced descendant of Andrew Jackson Slipstick Libby himself. But I am descended also from the Senior and have—I think—some of his restless nature. I want to follow the wild geese and see what is happening out there—get married again, leave a dozen descendants on a fresh uncrowded planet, then—possibly—move on. Once I have the Senior’s memoirs collated, the Trustees can, in the Senior’s ancient idiom, take this job and shove it.)

What sort of man is our Senior, my ancestor and probably yours, and certainly the oldest living human being, the only man who has taken part in the entire pageant of the crisis of the Human Race and its surmounting of crisis through Diaspora?

For surmount it we have. Our race could now lose fifty planets, close ranks, and move on. Our gallant women could replace the casualties in a single generation. Not that it appears likely that this will happen; thus far we have encountered not one race as mean, as nasty, as deadly as our own. A conservative extrapolation indicates that we will reach in numbers that preposterous figure given earlier in a few more generations—and move on out of this Galaxy into others before we finish settling this one. Indeed, reports from farther out indicate that Human intergalactic colony ships are already headed out into the Endless Deeps. These reports are not verified—but the most virile colonies are always a long way from the most populous centers. One may hope.

At best, history is hard to grasp; at worst, it is a lifeless collection of questionable records. It is most alive through the words of eyewitnesses…and we have but one witness whose life spans the twenty-three centuries of crisis and Diaspora. The next oldest human being whose age this office has been able to verify is only a little over a thousand years old. Probability theory makes it possible that there is somewhere a person half again that age—but it is both mathematically and historically certain that there is no other human alive today who was born in the twentieth century.
²

Some may question whether this “Senior” is the member of the Howard Families born in 1912 and also the “Lazarus Long” who led the Families in their escape from Old Home in 2136, etc.—pointing out that all the ancient methods of identification (fingerprints, retinal patterns, etc.) can now be beaten. True, but those methods were adequate for their time and the Howard Families Foundation had special reason to use them with care; the “Woodrow Wilson Smith” whose birth was registered with the Foundation in 1912 is certainly the “Lazarus Long” of 2136 and 2210. Before those tests ceased to be reliable, they were supplemented by modern unbeatable tests based first on clone transplants and, more lately, on absolute identification of genetic patterns. (It is interesting to note that an impostor showed up about three centuries ago, here on Secundus, and was given a new heart from a cloned pseudobody of the Senior. It killed him.) The Senior whose words are quoted herein has a genetic pattern identical with that of a bit of muscle tissue removed from “Lazarus Long” by Dr. Gordon Hardy in the Starship
New Frontiers
about 2145, and cultured by him for longevity research. Q.E.D.

But what sort of man
is
he? You must judge for yourself. In condensing this memoir to manageable length I have omitted many verified historical incidents (the raw data are available to scholars at the Archives)—but I have left in lies and unlikely stories on the assumption that the lies a man tells tell more truth about him—when analyzed—than does “truth.”

It is clear that this man is, by standards usual in civilized societies, a barbarian and a rogue.

But it is not for children to judge their parents. The qualities that make him what he is are precisely those needed to stay alive in a jungle—or on a raw frontier. Do not forget your debt to him both genetic and historic.

To understand our historic debt to him it is necessary to review some ancient history—part tradition or myth, and part fact as firmly established as the assassination of Julius Caesar. The Howard Families Foundation was established by the will of Ira Howard, who died in 1873. His will instructed the trustees of the foundation to use his money to “prolong human life.” This is fact.

Tradition says that he willed this in anger at his own fate, for he found himself dying
of old age
in his forties—dead at forty-eight, a bachelor without progeny. So none of us carries his genes; his immortality lies only in a name, and in an idea—that death could be thwarted.

At that time death at forty-eight was not unusual. Believe it or not, in those days the average age at death was about thirty-five! But not from senility. Disease, starvation, accident, murder, war, childbirth, and other violences cut down most humans long before senility set in. But a human who passed all these hurdles still could expect death from old age sometime between seventy-five and one hundred. Very few reached one hundred; nevertheless every population group had its tiny minority of “centenarians.” There is a legend about “Old Tom Parr” who is supposed to have died in 1635 aged one hundred and fifty-two years. Whether or not the legend is true, probability analysis of demographic data of that era shows that some individuals must have lived a century and a half. But they were few indeed.

The Foundation started its work as a prescientific breeding experiment, as nothing was then known of genetics: Adults of long-lived stock were encouraged to mate with others like them, money being the inducement.

Unsurprisingly the inducement worked. Equally unsurprisingly this experiment worked, as it was an empirical method used by stockbreeders for centuries before the science of genetics came into being: Breed to reinforce one characteristic, then eliminate the culls.

The Families’ Archives do not show how the earliest culls were eliminated; they simply show that some were eliminated from the Families—root and branch, all descendants—for the unforgivable sin of dying of old age too young.

By the Crisis of 2136 all members of the Howard Families had life expectancies in excess of one hundred and fifty years, and some had exceeded that age. The cause of that crisis seems unbelievable—yet all records both from inside and from outside the Families agree on it. The Howard Families were in extreme danger from all other humans simply because they lived so “long.” Why this was true is a matter for group psychologists, not for a record-keeper. But it
was
true.

They were seized and concentrated in a prison camp, and were about to be tortured to death in an attempt to wrest from them their “secret” of “eternal youth.” Fact—not myth.

Here the Senior comes into the story. Through audacity, a talent for lying convincingly, and what would seem to most people today a childish delight in adventure and intrigue for its own sake, the Senior brought off the greatest jailbreak of all time, stealing a primitive starship and escaping right out of the Solar System with all of the Howard Families (then numbering about 100,000 men, women, and children).

If this seems impossible—so many people and just one ship—remember that the first starships were enormously bigger than the ones we now use. They were self-sustaining artificial planetoids intended to remain in space for many years at speeds below that of light: they
had
to be huge.

The Senior was not the only hero of that Exodus. But in all the varied and sometimes conflicting accounts that have come down to us, he was always the driving force. He was our Moses who led his people out of bondage.

He brought them home again three-quarters of a century later (2210)—but not into bondage. For that date, Year One of the Standard Galactic calendar, marks the opening of the Great Diaspora…caused by extreme population pressure on Old Home Terra, and made possible by two new factors: the Libby-Sheffield Para-Drive as it was known then (not a “drive” in any true sense, but a means of manipulating n-dimensional spaces), and the first (and simplest) of effective longevity techniques: new blood grown in vitro.

The Howard Families caused this to happen simply by escaping. The short-lived humans back on Terra, still convinced that the long-lived families possessed a “secret,” set about trying to find it by wide and systematic research, and, as always, research paid off serendipitously, not with the nonexistent “secret” but with something almost as good: a therapy, and eventually a sheaf of therapies, for postponing old age, and for extending vigor, virility, and fertility.

The Great Diaspora was then both necessary and possible.

The Senior’s great talent (aside from his ability to lie extemporaneously and convincingly) seems always to have been a rare gift for extrapolating the possibilities of any situation—then twisting it to suit his own purposes. (He calls it: “You have to have a feeling for what makes the frog jump.” Psychometrists who have studied him say that he has an extremely high psi talent expressed as “forerunners” and “luck”—but what the Senior has to say about
them
is less polite. As a record-keeper, I refrain from opinion.)

The Senior saw at once that this benison of extended youth, although promised to everyone, would in fact be limited to the powerful and their nepots. The billions of helots could
not
be allowed to live beyond their normal span; there was no room for them—unless they migrated to the stars, in which case there would be room for each human to live as long as he could manage. How the Senior exploited this is not always clear; he seems to have used several names and many fronts. His key corporations wound up in the hands of this Foundation, then were liquidated to move the Foundation and the Howard Families to Secundus—at his behest, he having saved “the best real estate” for his relatives and descendants. Sixty-eight percent of those then living accepted the challenge of new frontiers.