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Papa Domenico’s funeral in Amundsen City provided my first opportunity to visit the Continent Without Nations and to view the beating heart of the Utopian Bureaucracy. The architects who had built the new United Nations Complex had taken great pride in their ability to make the city blend in with the “natural” landscape, sheathing every building in glittering ice, and their efforts seemed spectacular to eyes that had not yet beheld a real ice palace. They had, at any rate, succeeded in providing the complex with the perfect image of icy objectivity. The funeral was easily accommodated to the same pattern; it was a solemn and businesslike affair, far less lavish than any I had seen on TV.
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“This new project of yours isn’t a good idea, Morty,” Papa Laurent told me. “I don’t say it’s not worth doing, but it’s not the sort of thing that should occupy a youngman.” He was not yet two hundred, but his second rejuve had not taken as well as it should, and he knew that he had not long to live—which inevitably led him to think of himself as very old.
“On the contrary,” I told him. “It’s work that only a young man can do. It will take decades, perhaps centuries, if it’s to be done properly—and I do mean to do it properly.The Labyrinth is so vast that the task of building hypertextual bridges to encompass a subject as broad as mine is more than Herculean. Nothing like it has been attempted before because it wasn’t the kind of project that a mortal scholar could seriously contemplate. If I don’t start now, the task might even prove beyond someone like me. The Decimation cost us a vast amount of historical information as well as four hundred million human lives and thousands of living species—which is, admittedly, trivial by comparison but serves as a timely reminder that the past becomes less accessible with every day that passes.”
“But the essential data will all be there,” Papa Laurent objected, “even if the bridges remain unbuilt—and we’re already on the threshold of an age when that kind of data navigation can be entirely delegated to silvers. Surely they’ll be the historians of the future.”
“Silvers are very poor commentators,” I reminded him, “and they only build bridges to co
“Don’t let it get on top of you,” my aged parent persisted. “You can’t put off the business of living.”
“I won’t,” I promised—and tried with all my might to keep the promise.
“A history of death is too morbida preoccupation for a young man,” he insisted, revealing the extent to which his own mind had lost its ability to move on. “You’ve always been a little too serious. I always knew that the balance of the team was wrong. We needed lighter hearts than Nahum’s or Siorane’s or even mine.”
“The members of every team of fosterers look back on their work and think they got the balance wrong,” I assured him. “I think you got the balance just right. Trust me, Papa Laurent.”
Mama Sajda also told me that she’d always known that the team was out of kilter, although it wasn’t lighter hearts that she’d thought lacking. “Too many people with their eyes on the stars or Dom’s ridiculous Universe Without Horizons,” she told me. “I thought it was enough to set the hometree down in a quintessentially real place, but we still couldn’t keep our feet on the ground. We should have chosen Africa—the veldt, or the fringes of the rain forest. We were too detached.”
Mama Meta and Mama Siorane, speaking across the void, were now united in the opinion that I ought to have been raised on the moon or in one of the L-5 habitats, but Papa Nahum—who was also speaking via VE space—was more contented, and so was Mama Eulalie. “Don’t listen to them, Mortimer,” Mama Eulalie advised me. “Go your own way. Any parents who bring up a child capable of going his own way have done their job.”
The similarly detached Papa Ezra, mercifully, was content to talk more about his own work than mine and take the decisions of the past for granted. “We’re all going the same way as Dom, Morty,” he reminded me. “One by one, we’ll desert you. Try to remember Dom kindly—the practice will do you good. You’re the only one who’ll have to say goodbye to all eight of us.”
Papa Laurent’s funeral was completely different from Papa Domenico’s. Paris did not have the distinction of being one of the most ancient cities in the world, and it had not escaped the Decimation unscathed, but its inhabitants had contrived nevertheless to retain a sense of cultural superiority and calculated decadence left over from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most Parisians would have put their own city and the UN’s ice-clad metropolis at opposite ends of a spectrum of existential sensitivity, and anyone who judged them by appearances would probably have agreed. Our farewell to Papa Laurent was, in consequence, much gaudier, much warmer, and somewhat more tearful than our farewell to Papa Domenico, although I did not feel his loss any less sharply.
“I’m the oldest now,” Mama Eulalie said to me, “but I’m damned if I intend to be the next to go. I’ll give the others a race.” So she did, surviving Papa Nahum by thirty-three years and Mama Meta by seventeen—although both of them might have argued as they lay upon their deathbeds that she had accomplished less by virtue of her unwillingness to take risks that many people regarded as routine.
This time, it was Mama Siorane who took me most sternly to task over my vocation. “It’s stupid to immerse yourself in the mire of the past, Mortimer,” she informed me, sternly. “Laurent wasn’t right about many things, but he was right about that. We should have abolished history along with the Old Human Race. I may be just a false emortal stitched together by nanotech, halfway to robothood, but I’m working for the future. The future is where you’re going to have to live your life, Mortimer, and it’s the future you should be focused on. Leave Earth to the old, and come out here to the real world. The planet’s served its purpose in giving birth to us, and it’s a foolish and cowardly young man who clings fast to his cradle. One day you’ll leave, and it would be better sooner than later. One day, all of your generation will have to leave, if only to make room for the next. The Decimation might have taken the pressure off, but it’ll return soon enough. It’s not good for you to be obsessed with the dead.”
“If I ever leave Earth for good,” I told her, “I want to come away with a proper sense of progress. I don’t think we should expand into the galaxy mindlessly just because up seems to be the only way to go and we’re too restless as a race to stand still. I’m as committed as you are to the ethic of permanent growth, but I think we need a better sense of what we intend to doin the more distant reaches of galactic space, and we can only get that by cultivating a better sense of who we are.We can’t do that if we don’t fully understand what our ancestors were.”
“Utter rubbish,” she opined. “Our ancestors were worms and fish, and you can’t embrace human aspirations by understanding the blindness of worms and the stupidity of fish. You have to look forward, Mortimer, or you’re half-dead even in your emortality.”