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This other ideology was, of course, the work ethic. As a historian, I knew of abundant evidence to show that individuals who were suddenly impoverished after having enjoyed a good standard of living invariably reacted in one of two ways. Either they gave way to total despair or they set themselves to work with relentless assiduity, never relaxing unless and until they regained their former economic status and sometimes not even then. After the Crash, that psychology became applicable on a worldwide scale; once the despairing had taken themselves out of account by the simple expedient of dying, the world had been left in the care of those whose obsessive desire was to restore all the richness, complexity, and productivity of the ecosphere.
The post-Crash world was, of course, constantly resupplying itself with potential hedonists as each new generation of children grew to rebellious adolescence, but all the twenty-second century documents at which I glanced gave me evidence of the dramatic imbalance of power which continually nipped that rebellion in the bud, effortlessly converting the temporary rebels into dutiful workaholics.
That imbalance of power was only partly due to the strength of the work ethic itself; it was greatly enhanced by shifting demographics. Before the Crash, the young had always outnumbered the old, and they had been far more vigorous. Even the primitive technologies of longevity in place before the Crash had increased the democratic authority of the old, but the advent of Internal Technology and nanotech repair gave them the physical vigor to make that authority stick. After the Crash, the old vastly outnumbered the young.
The demographic gap opened up between 2095 and 2120, between the advent of the chiasmalytic disruptors that caused the plague of sterility and the mass production of Helier wombs, ensured that the imbalance was never significantly redressed, even when the new hatcheries were at full stretch. The demographic structure of the population made it absolutely certain that no youthful rebellion could be any more than a storm in a teacup. The prejudices of the old became enormously powerful—and that included their prejudice against religion as well as their unshakable commitment to the work ethic.
So powerful was that commitment, in an era in which many people born in the late twenty-second century were still alive at the begi
It was this powerful work ethic that filled the breach left by religion, in providing arms and armor against the awareness of death. Like determined secularists in the pre-Crash eras, the people of the post-Crash era balanced the inevitability of their own mortality against their achievements in life and the storehouse of wealth and wisdom that they would be able to pass on to the next, even longer-lived generation. The inertia of that situation was easily adequate to carry the culture of the false emortals into the twenty-sixth century—and might have carried it into the twenty-seventh without significant amendment had it not been for the interruption of the Decimation: the first event in five hundred years to cause a widespread questioning of fundamental matters of principle and priority.
One response to the Decimation was to extol the virtues of the work ethic even more highly, to construe the catastrophe as proof that ceaseless toil was the only way to secure the stability and Utopian perfection of the ecosphere and the econosphere. But this was not the only response; others were led by the drift in history to feel that the work ethic had betrayed them and that New Humanity ought not to live by toil alone.
There were, I suppose, few better exemplars of this new ideological conflict than myself and Sharane Fereday. It was, however, our marriage rather than our divorce that offered a pointer to future history. As individuals, we failed to reconcile our differences, but intellectual history marches to a different drum, in which thesis and antithesis must in the end by reconciled by synthesis. While Sharane and I parted, the world groped toward a new balance, and that balance was neo-Epicureanism: a philosophy which asserted that it was not only possible to mix business and pleasure but absolutely necessary in a New Human context.
I had already tried to make that compromise within my marriage, but Sharane had been unwilling to meet me halfway—or, indeed, to admit that I had actually come anywhere near halfway in my attempt to reach out to her. Once we had parted, however, I set out to use my solitude bravely in order to become a much better neo-Epicurean.
THIRTY
I took the business of my own remaking very seriously. Taking what inspiration I could from the Greek myths I had analyzed so painstakingly in Death in the Ancient World, I took great care to do nothing to excess, and I tried with all my might to derive an altogether appropriatepleasure from everything I did, work and play alike. I took equally great care to cultivate a proper love for the commonplace, training myself to a finer pitch of perfection than I had ever achieved before in all the techniques of physiological control necessary to physical fitness and quiet metabolism.
I soon convinced myself that I had transcended such primitive and adolescent goals as happiness and had cultivated instead a truly civilized ataraxia:a calm of mind whose value went beyond the limits of ecstasy and exultation. By the time I reached my 150th birthday I was sure that I had mastered the art and science of New Humanity and was fully prepared to meet the infinite future—but that conviction was, unfortunately, a trifle hubristic.
After the publication of Death in the Ancient WorldI lived for twenty more years in Alexandria, although my portion of the credit left unused by Mama Sajda and Mama Siorane allowed me to move from the caps tack to the outer suburbs. I rented a simple villa that had been cleverly gantzed out of the desert sands: sands that still gave an impression of timelessness even though they had been restored to wilderness as recently as the twenty-fifth century, when Egypt’s food economy had been realigned to take full advantage of new techniques in artificial photosynthesis.
In 2669, when I felt that it was time for a change, I decided that I would like to live for a while in a genuine ancient wilderness—one that had never been significantly transformed by the busy hands of humankind. There were, of course, few such places remaining, and the busy hands of humankind were already at work in all of them. I did not want to return to the Himalayas, so I looked again at the other possibility that my foster parents had seriously considered: Antarctica. They had rejected it because of the rapid development of Amundsen City and its immediate environs, but the Continent Without Nations was a true continent, and it still harbored several unspoiled regions. I knew that they would not long remain so—by the end of the century, I figured, it would no longer be possible to find anything that could pass muster as authentic wilderness—but that knowledge only convinced me that I had better indulge my whim while I still could.
I finally settled on Cape Adare on the Ross Sea, a relatively lonely spot where my nearest human neighbors would be conveniently out of sight beyond the glacial horizon.
I moved into a tall edifice modeled on a twentieth-century lighthouse, from whose windowed attic I could look out at the edge of the ice cap and watch the penguins at play. I worked hard on the third part of my History of Death, which had now reached an era that was tolerably well reflected in actual documents and could therefore be pursued through the Labyrinth in reasonable comfort. I took care, though, to balance my labors sensibly. I spent a great deal of time in recreational virtual environments and cultivated a better appreciation than I had ever had before of the rewards of virtual travel, virtual community, and virtual eroticism. I was reasonably contented and soon came to feel that I had put the awkward turbulence of my early life firmly behind me.