The Fountains of Youth (29 page)

Mare Moscoviense had few tourists—tourists mostly stayed Earth-side, making only brief trips farside—but most of its inhabitants were nevertheless just passing through. It was one of the main jumping-off points for emigrants, largely because it was an important industrial center. It was the site of one of the solar system’s largest factories for the manufacture of shuttles and other local-space vehicles, and it was host to hundreds of nanotech studios and shamir manufactories. It was one of the chief trading posts supplying materials to the microworlds in Earth orbit and beyond, so many of its visitors came in from the farther reaches of the solar system.

When I arrived in Moscoviense the majority of the city’s long-term residents were unmodified, like me, or lightly modified by reversible
cyborgization. A substantial minority of the permanent population and a great many of those visiting were, however, fabers like Khan Mirafzal, genetically engineered for low-gee environments. Most of their adaptations were internal and subtle, but the one that had won them their name was the most conspicuous. Every faber possessed four hands, being equipped with an extra pair of “arms” instead of legs. All but a few of the public places in Moscoviense were designed to accommodate their kind as well as “walkers.” All the corridors were railed and all the ceilings ringed.

The sight of fabers swinging around the place like gibbons, getting everywhere at five or six times the pace of walkers, was one that I found subtly disturbing to begin with. Fabers couldn’t live, save with the utmost difficulty, in the gravity well that was Earth. They almost never descended to the planet’s surface. By the same token, it was difficult for men from Earth to work in zero-gee environments without extensive modification, surgical if not genetic. For this reason, the only “ordinary” men who tarried in highly specialized faber environments weren’t ordinary by any customary standard. The moon, with its one-sixth Earth gravity, was one of the few places in the inner solar system where fabers and unmodified men frequently met and mingled. Even the L-5 colonies were divided by their rates of spin into “footslogger territories” and “faberwebs.”

I had always known about fabers, of course, but like so much other “common knowledge” the information had lain unattended in some unheeded pigeonhole of my memory until direct acquaintance ignited it and gave it life. By the time I had lived in Moscoviense for a month that unused reserve of common knowledge had turned into a profound fascination.

It seemed to me that fabers lived their lives at a very rapid tempo, despite the fact that they were just as emortal as members of their parent species. For one thing, faber parents normally had their children while they were still alive, and very often they had several at intervals of only twenty or thirty years. An aggregate family of fabers often had three or even four children growing up in parallel. In the infinite reaches of space, there was no population control, and no restrictive “right of replacement.” A microworld’s population could grow as fast as the
microworld could acquire extra biomass and organize more living space. Then again, the fabers were always
doing
things. Even though they had four arms, they never seemed to leave one dangling. They seemed to have no difficulty at all in doing two different things at the same time, often using only one limb for attachment. On the moon this generally meant hanging from the ceiling like a bat while one exceedingly busy hand mediated between the separate tasks being carried out by the remaining two.

I quickly realized that it wasn’t just the widely accepted notion that the future of mankind must take the form of a gradual diffusion through the galaxy that made the fabers think of Earth as decadent. From their viewpoint, the habits and manners of the lunar footsloggers seemed annoyingly slow and sedentary. The Earthbound, having long since attained control of the ecosphere of their native world, seemed to the fabers to be living a lotus-eater existence, indolently pottering about in its spacious garden, and unmodified spacefarers seemed to the fabers to have brought that deep-seated indolence with them into environments where it did not belong.

The most extreme fabers, in this and other respects, were the “converts” who had attained that state by means of somatic engineering rather than having been born four-handed. Many footsloggers did not regard the converts as “real” fabers and emphasized this point by referring to the faber-born as “naturals,” borrowing an obsolete term that false emortals had once applied to the earliest Earthbound ZTs. The converts, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the formulators and best practitioners of faber philosophy.

Most fabers weren’t contemptuous of legs as such, but converts were often inclined to draw nice distinctions in their arguments about the relative worth of different variants of humankind. They would give their wholehearted endorsement to the hypothetical spacefaring folk who would one day be given legs by genetic engineers in order that they might descend to the surfaces of new and alien worlds, but they would be casually dismissive of those emigrants from Earth who insisted on hanging on to the legs their ancestors had bequeathed to them in order to enjoy the fruits of the labors of past generations.

Such airy discussions came as a shock to me, because I was suddenly
able to see Mama Siorane as the faber converts must have seen her rather than as she had seen herself—as a
flawed
pioneer who had never quite had the courage of her convictions, who had gone all the way out to Titan but had stopped short of modifying her own unfortunately mortal flesh. I was very conscious of the fact that Emily was following in Mama Siorane’s footsteps, and I could not help but wonder whether she would take up the challenge of the converts and trade her emortal feet for emortal hands.

Papa Ezra, by contrast, was a hero even to converts despite that he had hung on to his legs till he died. The name of Ezra Derhan meant nothing to anyone on Earth, but it was familiar in every household on the moon and in the micro worlds. Papa Ezra had
made
converts and had contributed to the perfection of the Zaman transformations with which every faber infant was now equipped. In Mare Moscoviense in 2825 hardly anyone had heard of Mortimer Gray, historian of death and unsuccessful scourge of the Thanaticists, and only one person in five was impressed if I introduced myself as a friend of Emily Marchant, gantzer extraordinaire and ice-palace designer, but
everyone
reacted when I mentioned that I was the foster son of Ezra Derhan.

I quickly came to understand that although unmodified men were still the majority population of the moon in 2825, they were no longer the dominant population, politically or ideologically. Faber attitudes were already recognized there, tacitly if not explicitly, as the attitudes that humankind would one day export to the farther reaches of the galaxy. Faber attitudes constituted the philosophy of that fraction of the human race that was not merely new but blessed with a new sense of purpose. It was hardly surprising that they considered Earthbound humanity to be decadent or that they took such aberrations as Thanaticism for glaring symptoms of that decay.

W
here I had lived on Earth, it had always seemed to me that one could blindly throw a stone into a crowded room and stand a fifty-fifty chance of hitting either an ecologist or a historian. In Mare Moscoviense, the only ecologists were humble engineers who helped maintain the life-support systems, and the population of historians could be counted on the fingers of an unmodified man. This was in a city of a quarter of a million people. Whether they were resident or passing through, the people of the moon were far more preoccupied with the inorganic than the organic, and far more interested in the future than the past.

When I told them about my vocation, my new neighbors were likely to smile politely and shake their heads.

“It’s the weight of those legs,” the fabers among them were wont to say. “You think they’re holding you up, but in fact they’re holding you down. Give them a chance and you’ll find that you’ve put down roots.”

If any unmodified man dared to inform a faber that “having roots” wasn’t considered an altogether bad thing on Earth, the faber would laugh.

“Get rid of your legs and learn to swing,” the faber would say. “You’ll understand then that human beings have no need of roots. Only reach with four hands instead of two, and you’ll find the stars within your grasp. Leave the past to rot at the bottom of the deep dark well, and give the heavens their due.”

I quickly learned to fall back on the same defensive moves that most of my unmodified neighbors employed in such combative exchanges. “You can’t break all your links with solid ground,” we told the fabers, over and over again. “Somebody has to deal with the larger lumps of matter that are strewn about the universe, and you can’t go to meet real mass if you don’t have legs. It’s planets that produce biospheres and only biospheres can produce such luxuries as breathable air and recyclable carbon.”

“Nonsense,” the fabers replied. “Wherever there are oxides there’s oxygen, and wherever there’s methane there’s carbon. Nanotech can do anything that natural-born life can do. A biosphere is just a layer of slime on the outside of a ball, and the slime gets in your eyes. You have to wipe them clean to see properly.”

“If you’ve seen farther than other men,” the footsloggers would tell their upstart cousins, “it’s not because you can swing by your arms from the ceiling—it’s because you can stand on the shoulders of giants with legs.”

Such exchanges were always cheerful. It was almost impossible to get into a
real
argument with a faber because their talk was as intoxicated as their movements. They did relax, occasionally, but even on the rare occasions when all four of their arms were at rest their minds remained effervescent. Some unmodified humans accused them of chattering, but any attempt on the part of the churlish and the morose to make “ape-man” or “monkey” into a term of abuse was forestalled by the fabers’ flat refusal to accept them as such.

“Footsloggers were just one more link in the great chain of primate being,” they would say, amiably. “We’re the cream of the ape-man crop, the main monkeys. You’re just another dead end, like gorillas, big-headed Australopithecines, and lumpen Neanderthals. The partnership between hand, eye, and brain is what gave humans their humanity, and we have the very best of that.”

If an unmodified human countered with the suggestion that they too might be superseded in their turn, they only chuckled with delight. “We surely will,” they would say. “We’re already working on it. Just as soon as we can redesign the brain to make it viable, four arms won’t be enough. Just wait until the
real
spider monkeys get their eight-handed act together.”

It went without saying, of course, that the vast majority of fabers were Gaean Liberationists—but such ideas came so naturally to them that they did not seem nearly as extreme in faber rhetoric as they did when they were spoken in the voice of someone like Keir McAllister. “The well belongs to the unwell,” the fabers were fond of saying. Even on the moon, which was a gravity well of sorts, the statement was a cliché. There were many others of the same ilk:

Some of these saws were annoying—especially “History is bunk, fit for sleeping minds,” which was frequently quoted at me when I told fabers what kind of work I did—but I soon learned not to take them as insults.

In spite of the freedom with which such opinions were laughingly offered, there were few unmodified men on the moon who did not like fabers. I suppose that those who could not stand them quickly retreated into the depths of the Big Well or passed on to those habitats that spun at great speed.

Once I had grown used to lunar banter I began to take it in good part and even to thrive upon it. It made a refreshing change from the kinds of conversation that I had grown used to during the previous hundred years, and I was glad that no vestige of my Earthly notoriety tainted the atmosphere of Moscovience. Even Khan Mirafzal, when I met him in person, made only fleeting reference to our first meeting in VE. He greeted me as a friend with whom he had briefly lost contact, not as an adversary who had dared to try to understand the craziness of Thanaticism.

As I adapted physically and psychologically to the conditions on the far side of the moon, my mood was progressively lightened, and I began to perceive the quirky wisdom of those who proposed that the satellite was not governed by gravity at all, but by levity. I retained enough of my intellectual seriousness to do my work, to which I remained thoroughly dedicated, but I began to smile more frequently and to spend far less time in VE. I put the nightmarish legacy of Thanaticism behind me and even came to see my sojourns on Cape Adare and Cape Wolstenholme as periods of unfortunate disequilibrium. I brought a new zest to my Herculean labors, and it seemed to me that they had never gone so smoothly.

It was in that spirit that I finally got around to restoring communication with Emily Marchant, my conscience and my inspiration.

“You were right about the galaxy,” I told her, in the next long monologue
I launched into the remoter regions of the system. “It does look far more inviting when there’s no atmosphere to blur its face. You were right about the other galaxies too. I never expected to be able to see so many with the naked eye, and whenever I calculate the distance that I’m able to see my head spins. I do miss blue sky, and naked vegetation, but I’m not homesick yet. Visiting Earth-imitative VEs is just as false as visiting lunar VEs used to be, and the fact that I’ve so many memories of the actuality serves to emphasize the unreality of the virtual experience, but it adds an extra dimension to my objectivity. Time on the moon will make me a better historian in more ways than one. I haven’t quite got the hang of identifying myself imaginatively with fabers—and the attempt has certainly exposed the limit of that old cliché about putting oneself in the other man’s shoes—but I’m getting there.