The Fountains of Youth (39 page)

I knew then, as I had always known, that my history would have to stand alone, on its own merits—that it would have to be
what it was
, and not what any advertising slogan or critical insult attempted to make it.

Samuel Wheatstone was right, of course. My face-to-mask debate with the voice of Cyborganization gave a massive boost to the consultation fees I was collecting for the existing parts of my history. It also created a strong sense of anticipation in respect of the forthcoming eighth installment. He really did make me a lot of money, and I suppose that I ought to have been more grateful for it than I was. In his strange, absurd, and painful way he did help my cause.

T
he eighth part of my
History of Death
, entitled
The Fountains of Youth
, was launched on 1 December 2944. It dealt with the development of elementary technologies of longevity—and, for that matter, with elementary technologies of cyborgization—between the twenty-third and twenty-fifth centuries. It detailed the progress of the new “politics of emortality,” whose main focus was the New Charter of Human Rights, which sought to establish a basic right to longevity for all. It also offered a detailed account of the activities of the Ahasuerus Foundation and the gradual development of the Zaman transformations.

My commentary argued that the Manifesto of the New Chartists was the vital treaty that ushered in the newest phase in man’s continuing war with death. I insisted that the development of technologies of longevity could easily have increased the level of conflict within the human community instead of decreasing it, and that it was the political context provided by the Charter that had tipped the balance in favor of peace and harmony. It had done so by defining the whole human community as a single army, united in all its interests.

I realized that in arguing thus I was laying myself open to a renewal of the charge that I was an apologist for the Hardinists, and I was careful to concede that the Charter had not worked nearly so well in practice as its terms promised, but I had always maintained that the war against death was a war of ideas, and I insisted that the idea of the charter was so important that the inevitable lag phase preceding its effective implementation had been a tolerable hypocrisy. I took great care to emphasize that the charter remained a central document of emortal culture and that the implementation of its primary objectives had not rendered it redundant.

I suppose, in retrospect, that my account of the long battle fought by the Chartists across the stage of world politics was infected by a partisan fervor that had been muted in the three parts immediately preceding it. My description of the obstacles that had been placed in the path
of Ali Zaman and others laboring on behalf of the Ahasuerus Foundation was clinical enough, naming no scapegoats, but I could not be so carefully neutral in detailing the resistance offered by certain elements within the community of nations to the proposal that true emortality should be made universally available as soon as it was practical to do so.

Had the principle of universal access not been so firmly established, I suggested, a situation might have developed in which the spectrum of wealth separated men yet again into two distinct classes of haves and have-nots—a separation that would have led inexorably to violent revolution as those who were too poor to obtain emortality set out to make sure that those who could afford it would not enjoy its fruits. Like any other exercise in counterfactual history, this required speculative thinking of a kind that some of my peers deplored, but I think that my argument was as cogent as it was vigorous. Emortality for the few had never been acceptable on moral grounds and would never have been tolerable in political terms. The Eliminators of the twenty-second century had done far more barking than biting, but their doleful prophecies would indeed have given way to a full-blown crusade had the would-be crusaders not turned to Chartism, and had they not won the day.

I admitted, of course, that I had the benefit of hindsight, and that as a Zaman-transformed individual myself I was bound to have an attitude very different from Ali Zaman’s confused and cautious contemporaries, but I saw no reason to be entirely evenhanded in treating the manner in which his discoveries were received and deployed. From the viewpoint of my history, those who initially opposed Zaman and those who sought to appropriate his work for a minority had to be regarded as traitors in the war against death. I felt no need to seek excuses on their behalf, even though I was keenly aware that I might be feeding ammunition to the Cyborganizers if they cared to continue their attacks upon me.

There was no point in my trying to gloss over the fact that many of those who had sought to inhibit the work of the Ahasuerus Foundation or to prevent the UN’s adoption of the New Charter had done so on the ostensible grounds that they were trying to preserve “human nature” against biotechnological intervention. I knew that many of my readers would respond to this allegation by thinking that if the conservatives of old were so utterly wrong to do that, how could those who opposed the
Cyborganizers on similar grounds be right? I knew, therefore, that my stern judgment that the enemies of Ali Zaman and the Charter had been willfully blind and criminally negligent of the welfare of their own children would be quoted against me—but it would not have been good scholarship to intrude into my argument a rider explaining why the current disputes over cyborganization did not constitute a parallel case. I defended my ground as best I could by couching my argument in political and egalitarian grounds, but I knew that whatever I said would be taken out of context by my critics, and I simply accepted the risk.

As I had anticipated, the Cyborganizers were quick to charge me with inconsistency because I was not nearly so extravagant in my enthusiasm for the various kinds of symbiosis between organic and inorganic systems that were tried out in the period under consideration as I was in my praise of the Herculean labors of the genetic engineers.

When I was called upon to make a public response to such criticisms I was insistent that my lack of enthusiasm for experiments in cyborgization had nothing to do with the idea that such endeavors were “unnatural” and everything to do with the fact that they were only peripherally relevant to the war against death, but it did no good. Wheatstone’s followers—including Tricia Ecosura—waxed lyrical about the injustice of my inclination to dismiss adventures in cyborgization, along with cosmetic biotechnologies, as symptoms of lingering anxiety regarding the presumed “tedium of emortality.” In fact, that anxiety had led the first generations of long-lived people to a lust for variety and “multidimensionality” that was not unlike the popular anxieties on which the Cyborganizers were now trading, but that was a difficult point to get across and it won me no arguments in the public eye.

It is, I suppose, perfectly understandable that champions of man-machine symbiosis, who saw their work as
the
new frontier of science, would have preferred to find a more generous account of the origins of their enterprise, but the simple fact is that I didn’t include it in
The Fountains of Youth
because I didn’t consider it relevant.

The Cyborganization controversy helped to boost access-demand for
The Fountains of Youth
to an extraordinary level and made my financial situation so secure that I had no need to fear the reversion to solitary existence that was bound to follow Lua Tawana’s accession to independence,
but Samuel Wheatstone was correct in prophesying that I would not be grateful.

At the time, I felt too strongly that the academic quality of my commentary had been entirely overlooked and that hardly anyone was now trying to keep track of the development of my history
as a whole.
I hoped, however, that by the time the next part was published the furor over Cyborganization would be dead and gone, allowing my work to be re-placed in its proper perspective.

Such is the way of popular controversies that I got my wish—but the real issues raised by the Cyborganizers survived their fashionability, in much the same way that the real issues raised by the Thanaticists never had gone away—and never would.

I
n September 2945, when Lua Tawana was thirty-three years old, three of her co-parents—Mama Maralyne, Papa Ewald, and Mama Francesca—were killed when the helicopter in which they were traveling crashed into the sea near the island of Vavau during a violent storm.

The household had broken up some ten years earlier, when the divorce was formalized, but its members had not dispersed to any considerable degree. Mica, Tricia, and I had remained near neighbors, and because Lua remained in New Tonga rather than moving to another continent to complete her education, all the others took care to stay in touch. It seemed to me, in fact, that they made more effort to stay in touch than they had when we shared the same hometree, at least in the cases of Bana and Ng. The tragedy affected the survivors as powerfully and as intimately as Grizel’s death had affected the co-partners in my first marriage, but the circumstances were so different that it did not seem to me that history was repeating itself.

It was the first time that my remaining co-spouses, let alone my daughter, had had to face up squarely to the fact that death had not been entirely banished from the world. Like me, they had lost their parents one by one, save for a handful of ZT fosterers, but I was the only one who had ever lost an emortal spouse. This put me in a slightly awkward position because it meant that everyone involved immediately decided that, as the resident expert, I should shoulder not only the responsibility of helping Lua through the ordeal but also the responsibility of helping
them
to cope.

I could hardly object; was I not, after all, the world’s foremost expert on the subject of death?

“You won’t always feel this bad about it,” I assured Lua, while we walked together on the sandy shore looking out over the deceptively placid weed-choked sea. “Time heals virtual wounds as well as real ones.” I had said as much to Mica and Tricia, and they had both accepted it as gospel, but Lua reacted differently.

“I don’t want it to heal,” she told me, sternly. “I want it to be bad. It
ought to be bad. It
is
bad. I don’t want to forget it or to get to a point were it might never have happened.”

“I can understand that,” I said, far more awkwardly than I would have wished. “When I say that it’ll heal I don’t mean that it’ll vanish. I mean that it’ll… become manageable. It won’t be so all-consuming. It won’t ever lose its meaning.”

“But it
will
vanish, won’t it?” she said, with that earnest certainty of which only the newly adult are capable. “Maybe not soon, but it will go. People do forget. In time, they forget
everything.
Our heads can hold only so much. So it
will
lose its meaning. In time, it’ll be as if I never had
any
parents. It won’t matter who they were, or whether they died, or how they died.”

“That’s not true,” I insisted, taking her hand in mine. “Yes, we do forget. The longer we live, the more we let go, because it’s reasonable to prefer our fresher, more immediately relevant memories, but it’s a matter of
choice.
We
can
cling to the things that are important, no matter how long ago they happened. We can make them part of us, and we keep them forever. Even if we forget them, they’re still among the forces that make and shape us. Without them, we’d be different.”

“I suppose so,” she conceded—but I couldn’t tell whether she meant it, or whether she was trying to be kind to a no-longer-functional parent.

“I was nearly killed in the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, you know,” I reminded her. “That was nearly four hundred years ago. Emily Marchant was a little girl, far younger than you are now. She saved my life, and I’ll never forget it. I’d be lying if I said that I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday, because I don’t, but I know that that was the most important event in my life and hers. If it hadn’t happened, I would be a very different person, and so would she—and because of the influence I’ve had on your upbringing, so would you, however slightly. Maybe that doesn’t matter so much in your case or mine, but if Emily Marchant were different, Titan wouldn’t be the world it is today. The history of the whole outer system would have developed differently, and with it—to a small but measurable degree—the history of the human race.”

“Is she really that important?” Lua asked. She’d heard me talk about Emily many times before, of course, but she’d only ever been interested
in Emily the child, Emily the survivor. I’d told her about the ice palaces, and she’d visited them in VE, but I’d never mentioned the highkickers’ grandest plans. I’d never discussed Julius Ngomi’s teasing inquiries about Jupiter in the hometree or taken time out to explain any of the other festering conflicts of interest between the Earthbound and space-faring humanity.

“I believe she’s as important as anyone alive,” I said. “It came as a surprise to me when I first began to see it, but I’m reasonably sure that she’s one of the rare individuals who can actually make a big difference. It’s partly because she’s so rich, but it’s mostly because of the way she got rich and the way she’s fed her wealth into ambitious projects. She’s a mover and shaker, not of rocks and trees but of worlds. Mama Maralyne could have explained the exact nature of her work far better than I can—and Mama Mica still can—but she’s more than just a gantzer of genius. She’s at the very heart of the enterprise that will extend the Oikumene to the stars.”

“And
you
saved her life when she was still a child,” said Lua, teasingly. “Everything she achieves is really down to you.”

“That’s not what I said,” I reminded her, although she was an adult, albeit a very young one, and she knew as well as I did that there’s always a difference between what people say and what they mean to imply. “Emily could swim and I couldn’t. If she hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the hull. I’d never have had the courage to do it on my own, but she didn’t even give me the choice. She told me I had to do it, and she was right.”