The Fountains of Youth

The overwhelming majority of my Earthbound friends and acquaintances would have said, unhesitatingly, that Emily was talking nonsense. They would have judged that her fears were symptoms of “outer-system paranoia”—a phrase whose use had become so earnest that its users tended to forget that it was a mere slogan and not a real disease. The new breed of Continental Engineers thought of themselves as progress personified, and the Tachytelic Perfectionists considered themselves to be the most ardent campaigners for change that Garden Earth had ever entertained, so charges of decadence simply bounced off them. The idea that the galactic center was home to some unspecified menace seemed to contented Earthdwellers to be silly scaremongering.

When I put some of the points made in Emily’s messages to Mica Pershing her reaction was typical, and exactly what I’d expected.

“The outer system people are all crazy,” she said. “Tricia loses her sense of proportion sometimes when she talks about the benefits of cyborgization, but at least she has a sensible notion of what might count as a benefit. The outer-system people have been carried away by mechanization for mechanization’s sake. They think that because it’s possible to design suitskins that will let them operate in hard vacuum for days on end and live on the surface of Titan almost indefinitely that those are worthwhile things to do. They don’t just want to fly spaceships, they want to bespaceships—and they’re starting to cultivate the anxieties of spaceships. Deep space is a horrible and hostile environment, and the universe is full of it. Planets are where life belongs, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that comfortable planets are few and far between—and that the farness in question consists of a vile abyss of emptiness. Of course malfunctions happen, even in the most carefully designed systems. Silvers fail—even the high-grade silvers built into kalpa probes. It’s only to be expected—and the only people who find the prospect unthinkable are people who are on the brink of giving up their own humanity in order to becomethe next generation of kalpas. Earth is where all realprogress takes place, because no matter how far the Oikumene extends Earth will always be its one and only heart, humankind’s one and only home”

Had I been anyone other than Emily Marchant’s trusted confidante I might have agreed with Mica, but it would have seemed disloyal to do so—and I was not at all sure that Emily was wrong.

“Even if all that’s true, the Earthbound shouldn’t lose sight of the farther horizons,” I told Mica, earnestly. “We’re fast approaching the day when Earth’s billions will be a minority within the Oikumene—and once that balance has shifted, the spacefarers’ majority will grow and grow. How long will it be before they’rethe human race and Earth is just a quaint and quiet backwater where the old prehuman folks jealousy preserve their ancient habits?”

“Personally,” Mica told me, “I don’t think it will ever happen. I think the expansion into space has just been a fad, like Cyborganization. I think it’s hitting its natural limits now and that your friend’s panic is the first symptom of a fundamental change in attitude. I think the outward urge will wither and die, and that the outer system people will begin to reclaim their humanity. When we’ve built the new continent, they’ll be able to return to Earth—and as soon as the possibility materializes, they’ll be lining up to do it. The cyborgs will revert to honest flesh, and the fabers will grow legs.”

I could imagine exactly what Emily would have said to that—and so, I presume, could Lua Tawana, who a

“It’s where the future is,” she told us, “and where the real movers and shakers are. If I’m to take an active part in making the future, that’s where I have to be. Here, I could only help to build another continent just like all the rest. There, I can help to build a world like none that has ever been seen or imagined before. And after Titan, who knows?”

SEVENTY-ONE

The ninth volume of the History of Death, entitled The Honeymoon of Emortality, was launched on 28 October 2975. The knot of supportive data was slight by comparison with its predecessors, but the accompanying commentary was extensive—which led many academic reviewers to lament the fact that I had given up “real history” in favor of “popular journalism.” Even those who were sympathetic suggested that I had begun to rush my work, although those who remembered that it had originally been pla

The main focus of the commentary was the development of attitudes to longevity and potential emortality following the establishment of the principle that every human child has a right to be born emortal. The reason that it was more lightly supported than any of its predecessors was simply that it needed less support. I still believe that it was u

The central stream of my argument dutifully weighed the significance of the belated extinction of the “nuclear” family and gave careful consideration to the backlash generated by the ideological rebellion of the Humanists, whose quest to preserve “the authentic Homo sapiens”had once led many to retreat to islands that the Continental Engineers were now integrating into their “new continent.” I was, however, more interested in less inevitable social processes and subtler reactions. I felt—and still feel—that I had more interesting observations to make on the spread of such new philosophies of life as neo-Stoicism, neo-Epicureanism, and Xenophilia.

My main task, as I saw it, was to place these oft-discussed matters in their proper context: the spectrum of inherited attitudes, myths, and fictions by means of which mankind had for thousands of years wistfully contemplated the possibility of extended life.

In fulfilling this task, I contended that traditional attitudes to the idea of emortality—including the common reactionary notion that people would inevitably find emortality intolerably tedious—were essentially an expression of “sour grapes.” While people thought that emortality was impossible, I pointed out, it made perfect sense for them to invent reasons why it would be undesirable anyhow, but when it became a reality, the imaginative battle had to be fought in earnest. The burden of these cultivated anxieties had to be shed, and a new mythology formulated—but that process had been painfully slow. The gradual transformation of the “eternal tedium” hypothesis into the “robotization” hypothesis represented direly slow progress.

My commentary flatly refused to give any substantial credit to the fears of those mortal men who felt that the advent of emortality might be a bad thing. I was as dismissive of the Robot Assassins and the original Thanaticists as I was of the Humanists. Despite what my fiercest critics alleged, however, I did make a serious attempt to understand the thinking of such people and to fit it into the larger picture that my Historyhad now brought to the brink of completion.

It was inevitable, in a world that still contained millions of self-described New Stoics, that my evaluation of their forebears would attract vitriolic criticism. When I condemned the people who first formulated the insistence that asceticism was the natural ideological partner of emortality as victims of an “understandable delusion” I knew that I was inviting trouble, but I did it because I thought that I was right, not because I thought that the controversy would boost my access fees.