The Fountains of Youth

The gist of the the Cyborganizers’ argument was that the world had become so besotted with the achievements of genetic engineers that people had become blind to all kinds of other possibilities which lay beyond the scope of DNA manipulation. They insisted that it was high time to reawaken such interests and that recent technical advances made in the field of functional cyborgization should be redeployed in the service of aesthetic cyborgazation. There was much talk of “lifestyle cyborganization.” The introduction into the latter term of the extra two letters did nothing to transform its real meaning but contrived nevertheless to generate a host of new implications. The Cyborganizers were, of course, very anxious to stress that there was all the difference in the world between cyborganization and robotization, the former being entirely virtuous while the latter remained the great bugbear of emortal humankind.

I would have been perfectly content to ignore the Cyborganizers had they only been content to ignore me. I am reasonably certain that they would have done exactly that if Tricia Ecosura had not agreed to meet face-to-face with Samuel Wheatstone, one of the movement’s most enthusiastic propagandists, while he was visiting Neyu in 2924. Even that occasion might have passed off harmlessly had I only had the good sense to stay out of the way—as I certainly would have done if I had known that Samuel Wheatstone had not always been content to wear the name his parents had given him. Because I had not, there seemed to be no harm at all in accepting Tricia’s invitation to take a stroll on the beach behind our hometree and say hello to her guest.

She had obviously mentioned me to him—why should she not?—and he was fully prepared to take delight in my confusion. I did not recognize his face, of course, because it had been so radically transformed by cyborgization. His eyes were artificial and his skull was elaborately embellished with other accessories—most of them, I presumed, ornamental rather than functional.

“It’s a great honor to meet you in the flesh at last, Mortimer,” he said to me, beaming broadly. “I’ve never forgotten our discussion, although I’ve not kept up with your work as assiduously as I should have.”

While I was still trying to work out the import of this greeting, Tricia said: “You didn’t tell me that you and Morty knew one another, Samuel.”

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said. “I was using a different name when we last encountered one another. I fear that Mortimer still has no idea who I am—but it was two hundred years ago, and although our contest was transmitted in real time the space we shared was virtual.”

“You’re Hellward Lucifer Nyxson?” I guessed, tentatively.

“I was,” he admitted, blithely. “A youthful folly. It seemed inappropriate to retain the name once the heart had gone out of Thanaticism, so I reverted to my former signature.”

“Of course you did,” I countered, bitterly. “After all, you wouldn’t want the reputation of your present insanity to be tainted by the legacy of past insanities, would you?”

His smile grew broader still. “That’s it!” he said, feigning pleasure. “That’s exactly the expression I remember. I thought you might have forgiven me—after all, I did make you a lot of money—but I’m delighted to find that you haven’t. Principled adversaries are somuch more interesting and rewarding than cynical fellow travelers, don’t you think?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” I asked him, packing as much sarcasm into my tone as I could. “Common decency surely required you to join the martyrs you inspired?”

“Don’t be so stubbornly literal, Mortimer,” he said. “You know full well that I was only trying to stir things up.I’m a showman, not a suicidal maniac. It’s what I do. You should try it some time. It’s fun.” For one eerie moment he sounded exactly like Sharane Fereday—and I reacted almost as if he were.

“Fun!”I echoed, with bitter contempt. “You should be in some antique SusAn chamber along with all the other murderous bastards—human litter that dare not speak its name.”

“You stole that,” he charged, with deadly accuracy. “That’s one of dear old Julius’s catchphrases. That’s the wonderful thing about Earth-bound humanity, don’t you think? There might be billions of us, but we’ll all be around long enough for everybody who’s anybody to meet everybody who’s anybody else. You ought to be careful about repeating other people’s bon mots, though. That way lies robotization. I worry about that, as you’ll doubtless remember—but I worry far more about people like you than people like me.”

“I don’t want you to worry about me,” I said, coldly. “I think I’ll go back inside now. I have better things to do than talk to you.”

“But I doworry about you, Mortimer,” Wheatstone/Nyxson assured me, refusing to consent to the end of the conversation. “I gave you an audience, and you frittered it away. I gave you a cause, and you fumbled the ball. You never have been able to make up your mind about the issues I raised, have you? I put you on the map, but you meekly removed yourself again because you didn’t know exactly where you wanted to be located. It was Mare Moscoviense you ran away to, wasn’t it? You probably came to Neyu because you expected it to be a similarly stagnant backwater—but I’m surprised you didn’t move on as soon as Mica and her friends told you that they intended to make it the central crossroads of a new continent. Do you really think your ideas, motives, and actions are those of a man who’s ready to live forever, Mortimer?”

I had to grit my teeth for a moment lest a reflexive tremble set them chattering. “You gave me nothing,” I told him, when I was sure that I could frame the words properly. “I found my own cause and my own audience long before I heard your stupid pseudonym, and I’m still on the only map that matters. Within a hundred years I’ll have finished my history, and it will be definitive. It will be good.It will command attention because it’s important, not because I once got sucked into a moronic publicity stunt by a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word conscience.You’re notimportant. You’re just a clown, an exhibitionist, a fool.If you’re behind the Cyborganizers, they’re even more intellectually derelict than I thought. I’m astonished that anyone as intelligent as Tricia should even have condescended to talk to you. I won’t.”

I turned my back then, absolutely determined to go—but Hellward Lucifer Nyxson was never a man to concede the last word.

“You’re beautiful, Mortimer,” he called after me. “A pearl beyond price. I’d forgotten just how precious you are—but thanks for reminding me. Tricia’s a very lucky woman, to have you as a co-parent.”

SIXTY-SIX

I ignored it all, of course. I rose above it and put it behind me, for all of seven days. When Tricia accused me of being rude to her guest I refused to rise to the challenge. When Lua asked me why Mama Tricia was angry with me I claimed that I didn’t know.

Unfortunately, seven days was all the time it required for the Cyborganizers to launch an all-out media attack on The History of Death, selecting it out as a “typical example of modern academic research,” guilty of “de-historicizing” cyborgization.

The commentary I had provided to the The Last Judgmentactually contained only three brief references to early experiments in cyborgization, but none of them were complimentary and they swiftly became the Cyborganizers’ favorite example of the “sketchily caricaturish” attitude to cyborgization fostered by the world’s “Secret Masters.” Like all of my kind, the Cyborganizers alleged, I was in the pocket of the Hardinist Cabal. I was producing bad history, warped to the service of their hidden agenda, deliberately falsifying the past so as to to make it seem that organic-inorganic integration and symbiosis were peripheral to the story of human progress rather than its very heart.