The Fountains of Youth (24 page)

“That’s what you think, Morty,” he said, with a chuckle. “Maybe you’re too close to your own work, but I can see the way it’s going. We’re all Gaeans now, and when the history of death is finished, the history of life has to begin. You’ll get to the point when you get to the end, even if you haven’t quite got there yet.”

By the time I signed off I was numb with confusion—but I suppose it was Keir’s conviction rather than Eive’s and Minna’s well-meant advice that made up my mind for me. It was bad enough to be misunderstood and misappropriated by the Thanatics, without the Gaean Libs and Mystics deciding that I would serve their cause just as well. I decided that I would come out of hiding and that I would come out fighting—for the plain and simple truth.

I
carefully sifted through the many invitations I had received to appear on the talk shows that provided the staple diet of contemporary live broadcasting. I accepted half a dozen—and as more poured in, I continued to accept as many as I could conveniently accommodate within the pattern of my life. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Almost all of my VE time for more than a century had been spent in self-selected environments, and even though I had recently begun paying more attention to the news behind the headlines I had only the most rudimentary grasp of the conventions and protocols of live broadcasting.

I have no need to rely on my memories in recapitulating these episodes, because they remain on the record—but by the same token, there is no need for me to quote extensively from them. The interviews rapidly settled into a pattern. In the early days, when I was a relatively new face, my interrogators invariably started out by asking me to supply elementary details of my project and its progress, and their opening questions were usually stolen from uncharitable reviews.

“Some people seem to feel that you’ve been carried away, Mister Gray,” more than one combative interviewer sneeringly began, “and that what started out as a sober history was already becoming an obsessive rant, ripe for appropriation by the Thanaticists. Did you decide to get personal in order to boost your sales?”

My careful cultivation of neo-Epicureanism and my years in Antarctica had provided a useful legacy of calm formality. I handled such accusations with punctilious politeness.

“The war against death has always been personal,” I would reply. “It’s still a personal matter, even for true emortals. Without a sense of personal relevance, it would be impossible for a historian and his readers to put themselves imaginatively in the shoes of the people of the ancient past, thus obtaining empathetic insight into their plight. If I seem to be making heroes of the men of the past when I describe their various crusades, it’s because they
were
heroes—and I would far rather my contemporaries
found inspiration in my work because they were eager to be heroes in the same cause.”

“The Thanaticists say that’s exactly what they’re doing,” the interviewers would put in, helpfully, thus setting up the next phase of the argument.

“Unfortunately,” I would say, “the so-called Thanaticists have misunderstood what it means to be a hero in the contemporary context. Culturally, we have to go further forward, not backward. The engineering of emortality has made us victors in the war against death, and we need to retain a proper sense of triumph. We ought to celebrate our victory over death as joyously as possible, lest we lose our appreciation of its fruits.”

My interviewers always appreciated that kind of link. “That’s your judgment of the Thanaticists, then?” they would follow up, eagerly. “You think that they don’t have a proper appreciation of the fruits of our victory over mortality?”

I did think that, and I was prepared to say so at any length my interlocutors considered appropriate. It soon became unnecessary for me to describe my
History
in detail, because the interviewers began to take it for granted that everyone knew who I was and what I’d done. I found it rather flattering that my place on the public agenda was secure and became even more relaxed when I was called upon to wax lyrical on the subject of the latest Thanaticist publicity stunt. Having established me as a public figure and put me at my ease, however, the casters became eager to throw me into the lion’s den, where I could fight the misappropriators of my intellectual property man to man.

I thought I could handle it. So did Minna and Eve. Even Axel and Jodocus offered moral support, although Camilla did warn me to be careful and Keir lost interest when I told him for the sixth or seventh time that I didn’t intend to say anything at all about Gaea.

T
he most familiar public face of the Thanaticist cult, in 2732, was a woman named Emmanuelle Standress. She often insisted that she was merely a representative of the reclusive Hellward Lucifer Nyxson, but it was widely believed that there was no such person and that the Thanaticist Manifesto had been cooked up by a committee. She readily agreed to a live debate with me. Having studied her previous TV appearances I decided that she was unlikely to get the better of me. She was much younger than I—in her mid-fifties—and I could not help but think of her as a mere child ripe for instruction.

I can understand now that I was rather naive. EdEnt’s stage managers must have laid much more elaborate plans than I suspected at the time. From their point of view, my new “career” as a public figure was something to be plotted with care, and they must have decided in advance what complications they were going to introduce into the plot in order to provide it with an adequate climax. I didn’t know that my confrontation with Standress was merely a taster and that another was being carefully held in reserve. Emmanuelle Standress presumably understood the way the game was played far better than I did—she must, of course, have known that she was merely the challenger employed to build up audience anticipation for the
real
championship bout.

As I’d expected, Standress took much the same argumentative line as my old marriage-partner Keir, suggesting that I’d been too narrowly focused on my own work to grasp its wider implications.

“You’re an academic historian, after all,” she said, delicately veiling the tacit sneer. “A cloistered pedant, preoccupied with matters of detail, unable to see the wood for the trees. By your own admission, you’re only three-sevenths of the way to your conclusion, and it’s understandable that you don’t want to get ahead of yourself—but we don’t need to wait. We can already see the whole pattern and the central message. Without suffering and death, life is incomplete. If New Humans are to experience the entire spectrum of available experience, we must refuse
nothing, including suffering in all its myriad forms—and, ultimately, death itself.”

“If we’re to refuse nothing,” I retorted, “then we ought not to accept death until we have run the entire gamut of intermediate experiences—and we have no reason, as yet, to think of that range as anything less than infinite. If we can survive the cruel accidents of misfortune, we certainly shouldn’t consent to die by our own hands, or even endanger ourselves unnecessarily, until the very end of time—or as close to it as we can get.”

“Many of us will undoubtedly do their level best to do exactly that,” she came back. “So many, in fact, that will they run the risk of dedicating all their resources to the task and losing sight of everything else. The instincts of self-preservation can easily become neurotically anxious and robotically stereotyped. It’s partly for the benefit of the mechanically minded that others choose to exercise their freedom to be different: their freedom to sample extreme experiences without submitting their appetites to be jaded by eternity.”

“‘Submitting their appetites to be jaded by eternity’!” I echoed, with all the contempt I could muster, for the manner of the phrase as well as its content. “Do you imagine that the martyrs of old were afraid of
boredom?
Are you so contemptibly stupid that you think they died in order that their hardier companions should not lose sight of that which surrounded them and never let them alone: the most brutal fact of their existence? No! The martyrs of old died in the attempt to make the inevitable meaningful. They tried with all their might to deploy faith as a means of transforming the ignominy of death into something fine and noble. They did it because
they had no alternative;
it was a measure of their desperation. They were heroic because, although they could not avoid death, they would not accept it for what it was. The imagination was their only weapon, and the pretense that death was not the end was their best strategy. There is all the difference in the world between their situation and ours. We have not entirely escaped death, which stalks us in a hundred sly guises, but we have a weapon infinitely more powerful than any possessed by the Old Human Race: we have
emortality
, and all the strategies that its use opens up.
Our
heroism is not that which makes the best of a bitter necessity, but the far better kind,
which makes the most of a golden opportunity. Our heroes are those who live longest and best, whose imagination makes the most of life.”

“Your commentaries are more honest than the man behind them,” my opponent alleged, by way of retaliation. “They speak clearly of the self-dissatisfaction that you cannot now admit. They tell the truth that you cannot yet admit to yourself: that your life, like the life of so many of your fellow emortals, is already derelict and desolate, already decayed into routine and repetition, and that it stands in desperate need of redemption. Imagine a world composed of Mortimer Grays! Imagine a world that had no Hellward Nyxsons to disturb and disturb it, to display the faces of fear and terror, to play the part of dreams and darkness. What are people like you, without people like us, but the living dead? Why are you so ungrateful for the gift that we offer, when every word that you have written proclaims your own fascination for every intricate detail of lost mortality and all its torments?”

“An unwanted gift is not a gift at all,” I told her, reverting to defensive mode. “An unnecessary gift that causes offense is an insult. We have the past to inform us of the awful reality of death, in far more detail than your efforts could ever contrive. Your hollow mockery of that past, which transforms its tragedy into play, is an insult to every mortal who ever lived and ever emortal who ever will. I study death in order to discover how best to live, and if I have not yet succeeded it is because my studies are incomplete, not because they require an abrupt perversion into nightmare.”

I think I did tolerably well in that first debate, considering that I never realized that it was merely a preliminary bout. EdEnt must have thought so too, because they didn’t wait long before setting me up for a tilt at the top man: the man many considered to be the New Human Race’s first significant devil’s advocate.

Yes, the casters declared, there
was
a Hellward Lucifer Nyxson. Moreover, he was now prepared to emerge from obscurity to defend the principles of his crusade against the belated objections of the man who had done so much to inspire the movement: that unlikely Judas of Thanaticism, Mortimer Gray.

S
omewhat to my surprise, the pseudonymous Hellward Nyxson was rather less strident than Emmanuelle Standress had been. His name was by far the most flamboyant thing about him; his sim’s face was tailored to a conservative model of handsomeness, and the VE from which he spoke was blandly staid, without the slightest hint of the pornography of death in its decor. His mild tone was presumably intended to upset whatever strategy I had prepared, as was the unexpected angle of his attack.

“I like your work very much,” he said, softly, “not merely because it is so wonderfully comprehensive, but because I admire your defiant justification of what some would consider a flawed method. Like you, I am adamant that we cannot understand history unless we can use our imagination as cleverly as is humanly possible, to put ourselves in the shoes of the people of the past. If we are to understand them, we must try with all our might to see the world as they saw it, and I think you have come as close as any man alive to an understanding of the mortal condition, save for one tiny flaw.”

He left it to me to say, “What flaw?” Having been wrong-footed by his tone and manner, I was foolish enough to walk straight into the trap, handing the tempo of the contest to him.

“You reveal the limitations of your own imagination when you refuse to give mortals full credit for their faith. You insist in regarding faith as a kind of self-delusion: a confidence trick calculated to exercise a psychological placebo effect. Because you cannot believe in heaven, or in reincarnation, or in personal redemption through suffering, you refuse to accept that the beliefs of the men of the past could be anything but self-deception—and you insult them further by proclaiming that they were heroes for having successfully lied to themselves. What do you think
their
response to your analysis would be?”

By this time, I had realized my earlier mistake. I was ready for the second trap and casually ignored his question.

“Are you arguing that there
is
a heaven,” I asked him, scornfully, “or are you merely speaking in favor of reincarnation? Perhaps you really do believe in the redemptive value of suffering?”

“I am content to admit that I do not know what, if anything, lies beyond death,” Nyxson relied, suavely, “but I respect the right of every human being not to be told what he or she should or should not believe or what possibilities he or she should or should not explore. Why do you think that you have the authority to deny your fellows that right?”

“It’s not for either of us to tell people whether or not they should submit themselves to torture, or even to commit suicide,” I admitted, “but you seem to be mistaken as to which of us is dishonestly overreaching his duty. You’re the one who exhorts others to take their own lives, while remaining stubbornly alive yourself. My main concern is to stop you pretending that my work lends any support to your monstrous crusade.”