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The carefully worded but unvoiced thought brought forth an unexpectedly sour surge of resentment. “The Age of the Human Herbivores,” he murmured, speaking loudly enough for the apartment’s recorders to catch the words, although he was not entirely sure that he wanted evidence of a childish explosion of envy to remain on the record. “The Cud-Chewing Era.” The wave of resentment died quickly enough, and the manufactured contempt with it. Intellectually, Gabriel did not begrudge the New Human Race its dreams, and he was not a man to let his emotions get the better of his intellect. The judgment of his intellect was—as it had to be—that the demolition of New York was work of which a man of his sort should be proud. It was, after all, a fitting culmination of his career.
Long ago, while Gabriel had been a student at Wollongong, someone—probably Magnus Teidema
Gabriel felt perfectly entitled to think of himself as the man appointed to the task, although a pedant would have insisted that he was merely one of many, and perhaps not the most important. History would give primary credit to the pla
Gabriel knew well enough that when the day finally came for the news tapes to record his obituary and commemorate his life, he would be described as a gantzer and a master of shamirs, as if all he had ever done was to use another man’s tools—but he also knew that the description would be misleading and unfair. Leon Gantz had only laid the foundations of biological cementation and deconstruction; it was not until the late twenty-second century that the anonymous nanotechnologists of PicoCon had succeeded in forming the first vital partnership between the organic and the inorganic, and not until the mid-twenty-fourth century that the MegaMall had delivered the full spectrum of modern nanomanipulators into the eager hands of ambitious young men like himself.
Leon Gantz, the PicoCon teamworkers, and the MegaMall’s backroom buccaneers had all been scientists, but Gabriel King was a practical man, a materialist through and through. In his own estimation, Gabriel was a maker, and an artist in the truest sense of the word—a truer sense, at any rate, than the sense in which the word was used by certain people he could name.
“Posturing apes in fancy dress,” Gabriel murmured, again speaking loudly enough to impress the words upon the microscopic ears with which all the apartment’s rooms save one were liberally supplied. Being a practical man, Gabriel did not approve of the “posturing” by means of which certain so-called artists attempted to attract the public eye. Nor did he approve of “apes” who dedicated their lives to making ever more flamboyant versions of entities that were useless in the first place. Nor did he approve of “fancy dress”; his own suitskins were always gray or dark blue, always neatly tailored in such a way as to proclaim that they and he were good utilitarians, with no energy to spare for nonsensical display.
Gabriel knew that there were some who thought that the work in which he was now engaged was an assault on nonsensical display. The would-be prophets of De-civilization had formed a particular hatred for New York and the supposed symbolism of its skyline. It was, in their eyes, the ultimate city, and hence the ultimate symbol of the supposedly decadent past that the De-civilizers desired to obliterate—regardless of the needs and desires of the New Human Race.
Gabriel was prepared to admit that if ever there was a city whose ugliness demanded that it be torn down and built anew, that city was Old New York, but he found talk of “eliminating the display of history” and “shedding the empty cultural heritage of the past” difficult to endure. He had more than a little respect for “the display of history,” on the grounds that if mankind’s mistakes were not made manifest as well as remembered, they might be repeated, even by a New Human Race engineered in the artificial womb for true emortality. To make this unrepentantly misshapen metropolis a scapegoat for antediluvian folly and greed seemed to him to be foolish and simpleminded.
To Gabriel, as to all Americans in spirit, Manhattan was the last urban wilderness, the last geographically confined space on Earth where so many people so ardently desired to gather that it had been forced to grow further and further upward, extending its magnificently vicious fangs into gleaming blades of crystal and alloy. Given that the island had to be domesticated and made fit for habitation by the ironically titled Naturals, Gabriel would not have wanted the labor of its deconstruction to be entrusted to anyone else—but it was hardly surprising that the job had imported a sadness into his soul that he could not shake off and did not really want to.
It was only natural—was it not?—that he should be unable to take as much delight in contemplation of the raising of the tame city as he was from contemplation of the devastation of the wild.
“The devastation of the wild,” he repeated, aloud, in order that he could savor the phrase. Some thoughts were too precious to remain unspoken.
Then the door chime sounded, and his sadness vanished like smoke as he turned away from the window. His heart was already begi
Gabriel checked the viewscreen, although he knew perfectly well who it was. As a conscientious utilitarian, he never received personal visitors in the many temporary homes which business forced him to adopt, except for purposes that were strictly personal. He was of the old school, which held that all professional matters should be consigned to virtual environments, where the full panoply of technical support was available—and he was also of the even older school, which held that the pressures of the flesh were best dealt with in the flesh.
He was certain that the woman waiting to be admitted to the apartment was authentically young, not because he had expertise enough to detect a first-rate rejuve, but because the way she talked and the fact that she was here at all smacked of awesome naivete. At a distance, one might have judged that she looked like thousands of other young women, sculpted to a currently fashionable ideal, but at close quarters her uniqueness became obvious. Her eyes were wonderful, her hair utterly glorious. In an age where only the subtlest nuances could discriminate between the very beautiful and the extremely beautiful, she belonged to the furthest reaches of the extreme category.
“Come in,” Gabriel said as he released the locks and slid the door aside.
It seemed that she understood what it meant to belong to a very old school, because she had brought him flowers. “These are for you,” she said as she handed them over, smiling broadly. The blooms were like miniature sunflowers, and their densely clustered petals had the color and texture of nascent gold.