The Fountains of Youth (22 page)

I will freely admit that my text was incomplete and that it focused on the examples most helpful to my argument. I could not agree with the not-very-numerous contemporary practitioners of “natural magick” and shamanism that I had unjustly neglected their traditions, which had never been associated with anything remotely resembling an empire of faith, but I have to admit now that I was probably wrong to represent both Taoism and Confucianism as mere “defensive formulations” institutionalized in opposition to the spread of Buddhism. I regarded the Tao merely as a variant of the Buddhist Way, despite that it had not taught rebirth and karma, but it seems to me now that the aim of wu-wei was interestingly different from nirvana.

At the time, I was deflected from deeper analysis by the fact that later Taoism had replaced the mystic quest for eternity with a very mundane desire for longevity and postmortem security in legends of the search for the elixir of immortality and the heavenly Pure Land—although the importance of the Pure Land in the mythology of Imperial Japan, alongside the Zen-based disciplines of satori and bushido, should have made me far more attentive. In my own defense, I should point out that I did pay slightly more attention to the Confucian ideas of Yin and Yang, but only in the context of a typology of different images of the “divided individual.”

In spite of all these defects, however, I thought
The Empires of Faith
to be an interesting work and a useful contribution to humankind’s attempt to understand our own past.

It may seem strange to the modern reader that I had no inkling of the way in which the third part of my
History
would be read and reinterpreted by readers who had no affiliation to any préexistent religious tradition, but I simply was not thinking in those terms. I was blinkered by my preconceptions, taking it for granted that the vast majority of Earth-bound humans who did not belong to any of the eccentric minorities on whose metaphorical toes I might be trampling could all be reckoned as dispassionate rationalists much like myself.

Given that I have taken so much trouble to record the gist of my conversations with Ziru Majumdar, this may seem foolish—but even though I realized at the time that Majumdar’s philosophy must have some kind of movement behind it I had no idea how widespread that movement was. I had not the faintest idea that it was capable of exerting such a grip on the imagination of millions that it could and would be extrapolated to extremes that I can only call insane. I feel obliged to say, however, that even if I
had
anticipated the uses to which the now-notorious sections of
The Empires of Faith
would be put, I would not have left them out or ameliorated their tone. I was a historian in search of understanding, and those chapters of my commentary were a significant step on my intellectual journey.

No one is infallible, and I accept that there is a possibility that my analysis of Christianity may have been utterly misconceived, but I do not think that it was—and even if it had been, I would still have been justified
in stating my case. I meant what I wrote, and I meant no more by what I wrote than what I intended to mean. It is not my fault that other readers imported a very different meaning into my observations or that they used the trails which I had patiently laid down in the Labyrinth to track down data for their own dark and nasty purposes. I do not regret that part three of my
History of Death
began the work of making me famous, but I do regret that it first made me notorious, and that it did so by linking my name—firmly and, it seems, forever—with Thanaticism.

S
hortly after Emily blasted off on the first leg of her journey to the outer reaches of the Oikumene I was thrown out of my hermitage by the landlord. He’d had a purchase offer he couldn’t refuse from some Bright Young Thing who wanted to demolish it and build yet another ultimate ice castle. I didn’t mind; I’d already told Emily that I intended to move, and since voicing the intention I’d begun to hunger for the color, spontaneity, and sultry abandonment of warmer climes. I decided that there would be time enough to celebrate the advent of the new Ice Age when the glaciers had reached the full extent of their reclaimed empire and that I might as well make what use I could of Gaea’s temporary fever before it cooled.

As soon as the twenty-eighth century got under way I moved to Venezuela, resolved to dwell in the gloriously restored jungles of the Orinoco, amid their teeming wildlife.,

Following the destruction of the southern part of the continent in the second nuclear war, Venezuela and Colombia had attained a cultural hegemony in South America that they had never surrendered. Brazil and Argentina had long since recovered, both economically and ecologically, from their disastrous fit of ill temper, but the upstart rivals that had overtaken them in the meantime were still considered to be the home of the avant garde of all the Americas. There was then no place on Earth that contrasted more sharply with the ice fields of Antarctica than Venezuela, and it was virtually untouched by the new legion of gantzing artists; the notorious and still-extending House of Usher had been raised out of the Orinoco mud with the aid of techniques that now seemed primeval.

I used the compensation money I had extracted from my former landlord to buy a modest hometree way upstream in La Urbana, a town that had once been the hub of a massive ecological reconstruction operation but had since become the effective terminus of the river-based tourist trade. It was a busy place by comparison with Cape Adare, but its business was conducted at a much slower pace. Its inhabitants seemed
idle almost to the point of somnolence, even when they were working flat out.

I liked living beside the great river. Grizel’s death in the Kwarra was far enough behind me by then for the psychological scar to have healed, and I found it rather charming that the Venezuelans, unlike the Nigerians, had reintroduced alligators to the Orinoco shallows.

Although I was busy with overdue revisions of the first versions of parts one and two of my history, and with intensive research for part four, Emily’s criticisms made me pay far more attention than had lately become my habit to the news
behind
the headlines, and it was thus that I became belatedly aware of the insidious spread of the attitudes that I had first met in the person of Ziru Majumdar and the dark fashions that were soon to climax in the rebirth of Thanaticism.

As soon as I fully understood what I had been missing I swore that I would never be so neglectful again. As
the
historian of mortality, it was plainly my duty to keep track of that tiny fraction of death’s history that was still in the making. In the beginning, however, I did not realize the significance of what was happening.

The TV pundits who became more and more anxious about “the pornography of death” initially took a censorious line, taking it for granted in their customary fashion that all sensible folk agreed with them. It did not seem to them—or to me—that there was anything new or particularly disturbing about the growing fascination with images of pain and death.

Death was, of course, still present in the world, but the end of
inevitable
death was in sight. The last false emortals had not yet passed away, but their days were numbered in the thousands, if not in the hundreds. The requiem for the Old Human Race was in progress; had there been any church bells remaining in the world, they would have been tolling for our ancestor species. In such circumstances, a revival of interest in death seemed only natural, and the frank morbidity of that interest did not seem particularly perverse or dangerous. The remaining triple rejuvenates were all celebrities, simply by virtue of having taken the technology of repair to its limits. The death of every one of them was intrinsically newsworthy—far more newsworthy, in fact, than the occasional accidental deaths of relatively young emortals.

As a historian, I was able to take a certain connoisseur pleasure in what seemed to me to be a perfectly understandable irony: that an audience of true emortals whose IT gave them complete control over the ravages of pain should have become fascinated with the idea of death. I thought it entirely appropriate that the chief corollary of that interest should be a renaissance of interest in the role that death had played in the prenanotech world, when it had almost invariably been accompanied by physical pain and psychological anguish.

Having met Ziru Majumdar, I already knew that some emortals had begun experimenting with the experience of pain. As a historian, I knew well enough that even in the earliest days of Internal Technology there had been some people who used the resilience it gave them to indulge a taste for violent and dangerous activities, and that there had been a thriving pornography of violence in the twenty-second century, born of the optimism that misled the earliest false emortals to think that they might have set foot on an escalator that would take them all the way to true emortality. Unfortunately, I was slow to combine the two items of knowledge into an anticipation of the way in which the new fascination with the pornography of death would give rise to a new masochism.

The groundwork for the so-called Thanaticist Manifesto was laid not merely by people like Ziru Majumdar but by people like Mia Czielinski. No blame attaches to Emily Marchant, of course, but her artistic adventures had made it clear to millions of people that what they had previously accepted as the bounds of aesthetic experience were far narrower than anyone had expected. Once the quest for new aesthetic experiences became worldwide, the opportunity was opened for Majumdar’s explorations in discomfort and distress to move into the cultural mainstream. Now that true emortality was almost universal, and nanotechnology was even cleverer in compensating for pain and injury than it had been in the twenty-second century, the kind of people who delighted in the reeducation of their eyes by ice palaces moved on easily enough to the supposed reeducation of their flesh, testing the limits of their psychological and physical endurance in every imaginable way.

I would probably have realized this sooner had I stayed in Antarctica, but from the viewpoint of La Urbana in the first decade of the twenty-eighth century the whole affair looked like a storm in a teacup—
the teacup in question being the weird parallel universe of VE land. It was there that the new pornography of violence was produced and marketed and there that the TV pundits took leave to lament the fact and issue terrible prophecies about its likely effects. I could never take the garrulous imbeciles seriously, and the force of that habit made me laugh derisively when they first began to proclaim, in terrified tones, that the new masochism was bound to cause a new Thanaticism to rear its ugly head.

Alas, even casters have to be right sometimes.

I
t was the followers of a movement that had flourished at the very end of the twenty-fifth century and the beginning of the twenty-sixth who had actually coined the term
Thanaticism.
It had been an early folly of the last generation of false emortals, whose last representatives were now in the process of quitting the Earth. Some of those unlucky enough to have been born after the advent of Zaman transformations, resentful of the disastrous choice made by their foster parents not to take advantage of the new technology, had perversely elected to reject the benefits of rejuvenation too, making a fetish out of living only a “natural” life span.

At the time, the Thanaticists had often been bracketed in common parlance—mistakenly, I think—with the earlier cult of Robot Assassins, who had themselves been mistakenly thought of as a revival of the twenty-second-century movement of self-styled Eliminators.

The Robot Assassins had taken the view that the progressive cyborgization of double and triple rejuvenates equipped with ever-more-sophisticated IT was transforming them into “robots” no longer capable of empathizing with “true” human beings: implicitly sociopathic individuals. The result of this progressive dehumanization of the old, the Robot Assassins contended, was that Earth was falling into the hands of unhuman individuals whose lack of fellow-feeling would eventually manifest itself as malevolence toward their feeling kin. In order to prevent the “robotic revolution” the Robot Assassins had embarked upon a campaign of murder, while swearing an oath that they would commit suicide before suffering “robotization” themselves. It was this last aspect of their credo that had caused contemporary commentators to put the first Thanaticists in the same bracket, even though the Thanaticists did not advocate assassination as a political means.

In the twenty-sixth century no one had thought it possible that genetically endowed emortals could ever embrace Thanaticism, and the cult was conventionally regarded as a petty and essentially futile rebellion
against fate, whose adherents would swiftly eliminate themselves from the fabric of history. There were, however, a few Thanaticists who encouraged the view that they were closely akin to the Robot Assassins by arguing that in spite of their exclusive reliance on biological mechanisms of longevity, true emortals would suffer robotization nevertheless and that the inheritors of Earth would eventually become indistinguishable from programmed artificial intelligences.