Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [2]
Long ago, while Gabriel had been a student at Wollongong, someone—probably Magnus Teidemann—had told him that sharks’ teeth were not like the teeth of humans. Sharks’ teeth were continually renewed, new ones growing in the rear and migrating forward to replace the old as they were worn down by use. New York’s skyscrapers had followed that pattern for more than five hundred years; whenever one had been removed, another had sprung up to take its place, usually brighter, sharper, and more durable. Despite piecemeal change, the whole ensemble had remained essentially the same. No one had ever taken on the entire island before, let alone the entire city. This was the first time that the whole set of shark’s teeth had been swept away, along with the implicit shark. From now on, New York would be the mouth of a very different social organism. Gabriel was proud to have been the man appointed to that task. In fact, he was very proud—intellectually speaking, of course.
Gabriel felt perfectly entitled to think of himself as the man appointed to the task, although a pedant would have insisted that he was merely one of many, and perhaps not the most important. History would give primary credit to the planners who had pronounced a sentence of death on the old city and the architects who had designed the new. If the engineers who actually carried out the work were to be remembered at all, they would be seen as mere applicants of a suite of technologies that still bore the name of their ancient founder, Leon Gantz, and a nickname borrowed from the legend of Solomon.
Gabriel knew well enough that when the day finally came for the news tapes to record his obituary and commemorate his life, he would be described as a gantzer and a master of shamirs, as if all he had ever done was to use another man’s tools—but he also knew that the description would be misleading and unfair. Leon Gantz had only laid the foundations of biological cementation and deconstruction; it was not until the late twenty-second century that the anonymous nanotechnologists of PicoCon had succeeded in forming the first vital partnership between the organic and the inorganic, and not until the mid-twenty-fourth century that the MegaMall had delivered the full spectrum of modern nanomanipulators into the eager hands of ambitious young men like himself.
Leon Gantz, the PicoCon teamworkers, and the MegaMall’s backroom buccaneers had all been scientists, but Gabriel King was a practical man, a materialist through and through. In his own estimation, Gabriel was a maker, and an artist in the truest sense of the word—a truer sense, at any rate, than the sense in which the word was used by certain people he could name.
“Posturing apes in fancy dress,” Gabriel murmured, again speaking loudly enough to impress the words upon the microscopic ears with which all the apartment’s rooms save one were liberally supplied. Being a practical man, Gabriel did not approve of the “posturing” by means of which certain so-called artists attempted to attract the public eye. Nor did he approve of “apes” who dedicated their lives to making ever more flamboyant versions of entities that were useless in the first place. Nor did he approve of “fancy dress”; his own suitskins were always gray or dark blue, always neatly tailored in such a way as to proclaim that they and he were good utilitarians, with no energy to spare for nonsensical display.
Gabriel knew that there were some who thought that the work in which he was now engaged was an assault on nonsensical display. The would-be prophets of De-civilization had formed a particular hatred for New York and the supposed symbolism of its skyline. It was, in their eyes, the ultimate city, and hence the ultimate symbol of the supposedly decadent past that the De-civilizers desired to obliterate—regardless of the needs and desires of the New Human Race.
Gabriel was prepared