The Fountains of Youth

The only consolation I could take from my brief encounter with Hellward Nyxson was that the whole thing had been mere show business. I told myself that Axel was right: that Thanaticism really was a thing of the moment, a TV-powered fad that would attract far more attention than it deserved for a little while and then fade away. I reminded myself that I, by contrast, was a patient historian, not yet halfway through a work that would take another century to complete.

One day, as even Nyxson had pointed out, I would have the job of fitting the brief history of Thanaticism into my entire history of death—and when I came to do so, I would have the final word. In the meantime, all I could do was to lick my wounds.

“You can’t possibly blame yourself,” Axel assured me. “It wouldn’t have mattered what you’d said in that stupid debate.” Jodocus, Eve, and Mi

Even Keir was soothing, after his own fashion. “Madness has its own momentum,” he said. “You couldn’t have stopped it even if you had outflanked him. The EdEnt people could have stamped on it, but they’re just the PR arm of Fossilized Hardinism. Demand management requires that there always has to be something new on the surface, although the system itself must remain absolutely rigid. Nothing will change until we can redeem Gaea from the curse of private ownership.”

“Are you sure the Rad Libs aren’t just one more faddish media phenomenon?” I asked him, churlishly. “They get their fair share of EdEnt spacetime.”

“I’m sure,” he said, confidently. “We’re the revolution that’s waiting to happen. We can afford to play the long game.”

I almost wished that Keir was right, and that I too was a Gaean at heart, prepared to play the long game and casually able to write off every individual human death as one small step in the direction of Mama’s liberation.

Hellward Nyxson was not allowed to rest on his laurels following his victory over me. His next opponent, Chan Chu Lin, took a very different tack, accusing him of having a hidden agenda. He was, Chu suggested; merely the front man for a generation of young people who knew that they would never inherit the earth unless their elders could be persuaded to surrender it voluntarily. Nyxson crushed that accusation with ease, arguing that the generation to which he belonged was far too intelligent to be guilty of mere impatience.

“Those of my peers who want to inherit the earth,” he said, “know perfectly well that its present owners regard their stewardship as a duty rather than a privilege and will be only too willing to surrender their authority when they find more interesting employment. The vast majority, mercifully, have no such desire.”

His subsequent opponents were not so easily quashed, but Nyxson had made his point and grabbed his moment of opportunity. Thanaticism was hot news, and hence hot philosophy. All death was, of course, news in a world populated almost entirely by emortals, but the Thanaticist “martyrs” who took their cue from Standress and Nyxson took great care to make their deaths verynewsworthy by making a great song and dance about what they were doing. The whole purpose of the first true Thanatic suicides was to make a public spectacle of self-destruction.

To begin with, the newscasters and their avid audiences were only too ready to collaborate with Thanaticist ambitions. The twenty-sixth-century fashion that had derided the TV audience as “vidveg” had passed away with the Wildean Creationists who had pioneered it, but we new humans had been a trifle premature in deciding that our own viewing habits were more sophisticated and more socially responsible. The avidity of the media coverage poured gasoline on the flames.

Unlike the suicides falsely claimed by Nyxson’s followers as martyrs, most of whom had been over a hundred, those inspired by his idiot crusade were mostly very young. The movement scored its first spectacular succès de scandale when a sixty-five-year-old woman named Valentina Czarevna took her crucifixion to the limit in 2733. The cult’s most fervent adherents had already begun to cry out that everyone who had lived more than threescore years and ten had already violated the fundamental Thanaticist ethic, but most of those who committed suicide in the name of Thanaticism were somewhat younger. People of my age were far less vulnerable to the tides of fashion.

As the number of Thanaticist martyrs multiplied, so did the variety of the means they selected, although they always preferred violent deaths. They usually issued invitations and waited for large crowds to gather before putting their plans into action. Jumping from tall buildings and burning to death were the most popular methods in the begi

The total number of individuals involved in the Thanaticist “movement” was very small. In a world population of more than three billion, a handful of deaths per week was a drop in the ocean, and the maximum attained by self-appointed Thanatics was less than fifty in a month. “Quiet” suicides continued to outnumber the ostentatious Thanatics by a factor of five or six throughout the period when the pornography of death attained its climatic phase.

Even so, it seemed terrible thing at the time, and I could not help but take a keen personal interest in every development. I confess that in spite of my fierce determination to maintain a scrupulous objectivity befitting a historian, my opinions drifted slightly with the tide of fashion.

FORTY-SIX

I never took part in another live debate after having been so comprehensively upstaged by Hellward Nyxson, but I did continue to give occasional interviews to casters, and even to pose as an expert—in which capacity I soon found a settled line of my own to peddle with practiced efficiency, like every other habitual media whore.

The questions I was asked once the backlash against Thanaticism began went relentlessly back and forth over the same reactionary ground. Is the new fascination with death a kind of social sickness? How disturbed should we be by the discovery that the sanity on which New Humans pride themselves has proved to be so fragile? Ironically, honesty forced me to moderate my own opposition lest I should find myself condemning my own work along with Nyxson’s crusade.

“The contemporary fascination with death is by no means inexplicable, nor is it necessarily unhealthy,” I argued, earnestly and frequently. “In the days when death was inescapable, people were deeply frustrated by the imperious imposition of fate. They resented it with all the force and bitterness they could muster, but it could not be truly fascinatingwhile it remained a simple and universal fact of life. Now that death is no longer a necessity, it has perforce become a luxury. Because it is no longer inevitable, we no longer feel an oppressive need to hate and fear it, and this allows us to take an essentially aestheticview of death. The transformation of the imagery of death into a species of pornography is perfectly understandable, no matter how regrettable it may be.

“Pla