“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.”
I paused, feeling a slight shock of renewed revelation even though it was something I’d always known and always accepted.
“She lost her entire family” I went on. “She’s fine now, but I’m absolutely certain that she hasn’t forgotten any one of them—and she had twelve parents, not the standard eight. She can still feel the force of their loss. That’s what I’m really trying to tell you, Lua. In four hundred years’ time, you’ll still remember what happened, and you’ll still feel it, but you’ll be all right. It’ll be part of you—an important part of you—but it won’t have reduced you in any injurious way. You’ll be a mover and shaker too, maybe of worlds.”
“Right now,” she said, looking up at me so that her dark and soulful eyes seemed unbearably huge and sad, “I’m not particularly interested in being all right, let alone moving and shaking. Right now, I just want to cry.”
“That’s fine,” I told her. “It’s okay to cry. Being over thirty doesn’t mean that you have to give up crying. I didn’t. I still haven’t.”
I led by example. It was probably the most intimate moment we ever shared, but there were many less intimate that left similarly indelible and far more precious marks on my memory and my heart.
Lua Tawana continued to grow up, and her remaining parents continued to drift apart, but I was a parent forever afterward, and a changed man because of it.
SEVENTY
I remained on Neyu for forty years after Lua Tawana left the archipelago. None of my surviving co-parents was in any greater hurry to leave the island. Banastre was the first to depart for another continent, followed by Tricia, but they both returned at irregular intervals, often making special trips to coincide with Lua’s visits. I continued to see Mica socially and even got together with Ng at widely spaced but fairly regular intervals. Although we had never been a close family the fact that the five survivors had shared a significant loss continued to bind us together.
Of exactly what it was that bound us I was unsure. It wasn’t grief in any ordinary sense of the word, and it may have been something for which New Humans had not yet invented a word. Immediately after the tragedy my co-parents had seemed to outside observers to be exaggeratedly calm and philosophical, almost as if the loss of three spouses was simply a minor glitch in the infinitely unfolding pattern of their lives, but I knew that even if they did not know how best to express it, the effect of the deaths upon them had been profound. They had all grown accustomed to their own emortality, almost to the extent that they had ceased to think about death at all, and the simultaneous loss of three co-spouses had introduced a strange and almost unaccountable rift into the pattern of their affairs. They were not the same afterward, any more than I had been the same after losing Grizel to the Kwarra.
I was less affected than any of them, not merely because I had gone through it before but because I was a man who had lived for centuries in the most intimate contact with the idea of death. The shock of our mutual loss was not nearly as strange to me as it was to them, nor did it seem unaccountable. I often found myself attempting to persuade my ex-spouses that the tragedy had had its positive, life-enhancing side, repeating with approval what Lua had said about wanting to conserve the bad feeling and pontificating about the role played by death in defining experiences as important and worthwhile.
Mica understood, I think—but Tricia never did. We had been close once, but Samuel Wheatstone’s foolery drove us apart irrevocably, and she ended up thinking of me as a traitor to her personal cause as well as an opponent of her philosophical cause.
When that cause went the same way as all fashionable movements Samuel Wheatstone went with it. He dropped out of public view, although the memory of his remarkable mask was not easily put away—perhaps not as easily as the mask itself. I doubt that he ever replaced his artificial eyes with tissue-cultured replicas of those with which he had been born, but I doubt that he kept the more exotic embellishments with which he had decorated his skull. Most of those had been purely for show. Such cyborg modifications as did become briefly popular among the Earthbound were mostly of the same kind—essentially cosmetic even when they did have ostensible functions. Tricia’s were entirely cosmetic, but they always seemed to me to be rather tasteless. Francesca might have made a much better model for the wilder excesses of ET fanaticism, had she lived.
Given that natural selection had adapted the human body very carefully to the requirements of life at the Earth’s surface, it is hardly surprising that its conventional form met most people’s needs and desires. Although suitskins designed for Earthly use had become much cleverer over time, they remained relatively meek and unobtrusive passengers on the human body. The inhabitants of the outer system, on the other hand, had very different needs and desires, and their suitskins had become so inventive that it was easy to argue that all the human beings who did not live on the Earth’s surface were heavily cyborgized simply by virtue of the clothing they wore.
Off-world examples had prompted the Cyborganization fad but from the point of view of most off-worlders the wayward tides of Earthly fashion were the whims of the irredeemably decadent. The highkickers were serious about the possibilities of cyborgization, and there were many among them who felt that if cyborgization was the price they would have to pay to establish authentic Utopias in the ice-palace cities that awaited them on Titan and the Uranian moons, then it was a price well worth paying. There were not quite so many who felt that the work of galactic exploration ought to be the province of cyborgized humans rather than silver-piloted probes, but there were enough of them to force the progress of human-machine hybridization into ever-more-adventurous channels.
Every message I received from Emily Marchant in the thirtieth century seemed to come from a different person. Before 2900 even the high-kickers had been careful to retain their own faces, but Samuel Wheatstone’s extravagant reconstruction of his own appearance had accurately reflected the demise of that particular taboo. Emily was never one to support ornamental cyborgization, but she lost her former inhibitions about letting her artificial augmentations show. Her first set of artificial eyes was carefully designed to resemble the ones they replaced, but her second wasn’t, and the parts of her suitskin overlaying the flesh of her face gradually abandoned their attempts to reproduce th
e appearance that had once lain “beneath” them.
I asked Emily many questions about her metamorphosis, but she rarely thought them worth answering, and the long time delay between exchanges made it easy for her to ignore them. Her transmissions were always full of her own news, her own hopes, and her own fears—among which the fear of robotization and the fear of losing her identity did not seem to figure at all.
I found all this rather disturbing, but Emily seemed to find my own priorities equally strange and became increasingly insistent that the entire population of the Earthbound had become dangerously insensitive to the situations developing outside the system.
“It’s as if the hard-core Hardinists have washed their hands of the whole affair,” she complained in one message, delivered from the heart of one of her finest virtual ice-palaces. “Having despaired of exercising any control over the terraformation of Maya they seem to have decided that Earth is their only concern. I know they don’t censor the news, but they do exert an enormous influence on its agenda, and Earth’s casters seem to have followed their lead in dismissing almost all of the information-flow from outside the system as irrelevant and uninteresting. It’s not irrelevant, Morty. It’s infinitely more important than 99 percent of what happens on the Earth’s surface.
“No one on Earth seems to be in the least troubled by the attrition rate of the kalpa probes. People down there seem to think that because so many of the old Arks went missing it’s not surprising that so many of the kalpas have lost contact, but the cases aren’t similar at all. Something’s happening out there, Morty, and it has consequences for all of us. The Fermi paradox has been around so long that it’s lost its power to amaze or frighten the Earthbound, but we can still feel its urgency. Given Earth, Ararat, and Maya, the galaxy ought to be full of mature civilizations broadcasting away like crazy, but it’s not—and the search for possible Type-2 civilizations has drawn a complete blank. The discovery of Ararat and Maya tells us that we can’t be alone, but it’s no longer a question of where the hell are they. The question we ought to be asking—all of us, Morty, not just the highkickers—is what the hell are they?
“Whoever’s out there is much less like us than we’ve been prepared to assume, and the one thing we can be sure of is that contact is just around the corner, even if it hasn’t been made already. We’re beginning to believe that most of the missing Arks and nearly all the missing kalpas have made contact with something, but we can’t begin to guess what it is—and the Earthbound don’t even seem to care. We’re worried that while we’re renewing ourselves constantly the population of Earth is growing contentedly old, relaxing into a lotus-eater existence. Nobody out here uses robotization as a term of abuse any more, but we think that something like what we used to mean by that term has already happened to the Earthbound. They’ve become insular, self-satisfied, and lazy. They’ve lost their progressive impetus to the extent that they can’t even seem to realize that something is badly wrong in the inner reaches of the galaxy, and that it matters”
The overwhelming majority of my Earthbound friends and acquaintances would have said, unhesitatingly, that Emily was talking nonsense. They would have judged that her fears were symptoms of “outer-system paranoia”—a phrase whose use had become so earnest that its users tended to forget that it was a mere slogan and not a real disease. The new breed of Continental Engineers thought of themselves as progress personified, and the Tachytelic Perfectionists considered themselves to be the most ardent campaigners for change that Garden Earth had ever entertained, so charges of decadence simply bounced off them. The idea that the galactic center was home to some unspecified menace seemed to contented Earthdwellers to be silly scaremongering.
When I put some of the points made in Emily’s messages to Mica Pershing her reaction was typical, and exactly what I’d expected.
“The outer system people are all crazy,” she said. “Tricia loses her sense of proportion sometimes when she talks about the benefits of cyborgization, but at least she has a sensible notion of what might count as a benefit. The outer-system people have been carried away by mechanization for mechanization’s sake. They think that because it’s possible to design suitskins that will let them operate in hard vacuum for days on end and live on the surface of Titan almost indefinitely that those are worthwhile things to do. They don’t just want to fly spaceships, they want to be spaceships—and they’re starting to cultivate the anxieties of spaceships. Deep space is a horrible and hostile environment, and the universe is full of it. Planets are where life belongs, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that comfortable planets are few and far between—and that the farness in question consists of a vile abyss of emptiness. Of course malfunctions happen, even in the most carefully designed systems. Silvers fail—even the high-grade silvers built into kalpa probes. It’s only to be expected—and the only people who find the prospect unthinkable are people who are on the brink of giving up their own humanity in order to become the next generation of kalpas. Earth is where all real progress takes place, because no matter how far the Oikumene extends Earth will always be its one and only heart, humankind’s one and only home”
Had I been anyone other than Emily Marchant’s trusted confidante I might have agreed with Mica, but it would have seemed disloyal to do so—and I was not at all sure that Emily was wrong.
“Even if all that’s true, the Earthbound shouldn’t lose sight of the farther horizons,” I told Mica, earnestly. “We’re fast approaching the day when Earth’s billions will be a minority within the Oikumene—and once that balance has shifted, the spacefarers’ majority will grow and grow. How long will it be before they’re the human race and Earth is just a quaint and quiet backwater where the old prehuman folks jealousy preserve their ancient habits?”
“Personally,” Mica told me, “I don’t think it will ever happen. I think the expansion into space has just been a fad, like Cyborganization. I think it’s hitting its natural limits now and that your friend’s panic is the first symptom of a fundamental change in attitude. I think the outward urge will wither and die, and that the outer system people will begin to reclaim their humanity. When we’ve built the new continent, they’ll be able to return to Earth—and as soon as the possibility materializes, they’ll be lining up to do it. The cyborgs will revert to honest flesh, and the fabers will grow legs.”
I could imagine exactly what Emily would have said to that—and so, I presume, could Lua Tawana, who announced when she visited Neyu to celebrate her fortieth birthday that she had decided to leave Earth. She had secured a job on the moon, but her ultimate aim was to go to Titan and make that her home for a century or two.
“It’s where the future is,” she told us, “and where the real movers and shakers are. If I’m to take an active part in making the future, that’s where I have to be. Here, I could only help to build another continent just like all the rest. There, I can help to build a world like none that has ever been seen or imagined before. And after Titan, who knows?”
SEVENTY-ONE
The ninth volume of the History of Death, entitled The Honeymoon of Emortality, was launched on 28 October 2975. The knot of supportive data was slight by comparison with its predecessors, but the accompanying commentary was extensive—which led many academic reviewers to lament the fact that I had given up “real history” in favor of “popular journalism.” Even those who were sympathetic suggested that I had begun to rush my work, although those who remembered that it had originally been planned as a seven-volume work were not slow to assert that the contrary was the case and that I was procrastinating because I had become afraid of the letdown effect of finishing it.
The main focus of the commentary was the development of attitudes to longevity and potential emortality following the establishment of the principle that every human child has a right to be born emortal. The reason that it was more lightly supported than any of its predecessors was simply that it needed less support. I still believe that it was unnecess
ary to make a fetish of gathering every last public statement ever made on the subject into a single knot, let alone that I should have made far more effort to trawl private archives for relevant comments.
The central stream of my argument dutifully weighed the significance of the belated extinction of the “nuclear” family and gave careful consideration to the backlash generated by the ideological rebellion of the Humanists, whose quest to preserve “the authentic Homo sapiens” had once led many to retreat to islands that the Continental Engineers were now integrating into their “new continent.” I was, however, more interested in less inevitable social processes and subtler reactions. I felt—and still feel—that I had more interesting observations to make on the spread of such new philosophies of life as neo-Stoicism, neo-Epicureanism, and Xenophilia.
My main task, as I saw it, was to place these oft-discussed matters in their proper context: the spectrum of inherited attitudes, myths, and fictions by means of which mankind had for thousands of years wistfully contemplated the possibility of extended life.
In fulfilling this task, I contended that traditional attitudes to the idea of emortality—including the common reactionary notion that people would inevitably find emortality intolerably tedious—were essentially an expression of “sour grapes.” While people thought that emortality was impossible, I pointed out, it made perfect sense for them to invent reasons why it would be undesirable anyhow, but when it became a reality, the imaginative battle had to be fought in earnest. The burden of these cultivated anxieties had to be shed, and a new mythology formulated—but that process had been painfully slow. The gradual transformation of the “eternal tedium” hypothesis into the “robotization” hypothesis represented direly slow progress.
The Fountains of Youth Page 31