The Fountains of Youth (37 page)

For me, she always did make allowances—and this time, I felt fully entitled to claim them. I was, after all, a man with parental responsibilities.

L
ua Tawana was the linchpin of my world for more than twenty years, and she remained its most significant anchorage long after that. I had not given the matter much consideration before, but as soon as she learned to speak, the logic of the situation became clear. Everyone has a multiplicity of parents, but very few of the Earthbound foster more than one child. Child rearing is the only emotional luxury so strictly rationed on Earth that it is bound to seem like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity even to people who hope to live for millennia. It is hardly surprising that emortal parents become obsessed with the mental development their children—even parents who have decided to maintain the momentum of their careers throughout the years of parenthood.

No matter how clearly focused one becomes during a child-rearing marriage, however, other things do intrude. It was easy enough for me to relegate from immediate concern the developments in and beyond the outer solar system that Emily Marchant was so keen to bring to my attention, but it was not so easy to ignore matters occupying the attention of my marriage partners. I tried hard, and I have no doubt that they tried equally hard, but certain things intruded in spite of all our best efforts, and one of them was Tricia’s increasing involvement in the 2920s with the Cyborganizers. I think I might have held myself aloof even from that had it not been for an unfortunate stroke of coincidence, but I have always been a trifle accident-prone and that was one vulnerability that did not depart as I attained the age of reason and responsibility.

At the most elementary level, the Cyborganizers were merely the newest generation of apologists for cyborgization. They adopted a new title purely in order to make themselves seem more original than they were. In fact, there had always been such apologists around, but the increasing use of cyborgization in adapting people to live and work in space and the hostile environments of other worlds within the solar system had given new ammunition to those who felt that similar opportunities ought to be more widely explored on Earth.

The progress of the “new” movement followed a pattern that had now become familiar to all serious historians if not to the present-obsessed media audience. All the old controversies regarding “brain-feed” equipment surfaced yet again, refreshed by controversy, and all the old tales about wondrous technologies secretly buried by the world’s paternalistic masters began to do the rounds, neatly varnished with a superficial gloss of modernity. TV current-affairs shows initially treated the propaganda flow with amused contempt, but as the stream built toward a tide the casters began to feed off it more extravagantly, and hence to feed it, thus accelerating its ascent to fashionability.

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
so
much 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
do
worry 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
not
important. 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.”

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 Judgment
actually 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.

It was the most blatant nonsense imaginable, but it emerged into the media marketplace at a time when anything connected to the cause of Cyborgization was newsworthy, and it became news.

If I had any defense to offer, Samuel Wheatstone ringingly declared to the world, he would be only too pleased to debate the matter in public.

I could not refuse the challenge, not because it would have seemed cowardly but because it would have been seen by the public at large as a tacit confession that I was a bad historian.

I didn’t want to rush into anything without preparing my ground, but time was of the essence. I had to find out what the Cyborganizers were all about in a tearing hurry, and to do that I had to wheedle my way back into Tricia’s good books. I shamelessly exploited the fact that the twelve-year-old Lua was genuinely distressed by our estrangement, and I
managed to avoid getting sidetracked into mere technical discussion by including Lua in our educational discussions.