Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [22]
Magnus had always worked in the cause of life—the greatest cause there was—and he knew that a man condemned to die, as all men of his misfortunate generation were, ought to make a gift of his body to Mother Earth. He did not want a gaudy funeral in which his coffin would be dragged around the streets of some sterile city, followed by cartloads of Rappaccini flowers purchased from the MegaMall.
He would rather die in the sisterly company of sylphs and dryads, surrounded by the flowers of the forest, donating his flesh to the seething cauldron of benign witchery.
The “tent” in which Magnus was temporarily resident was not, of course, an actual tent. It was a bubble dome made out of Life-Simulating Plastic, of a kind originally designed for use on Mars. It was second cousin to those which currently dotted the airless plains of the moon and those which were anchored to the bedrock beneath the snows and glutinous muds of Titan. It was a high-tech product of the MegaMall, and its presence here confirmed that no matter what Magnus’s dreams and wishes might be, he was a stranger in an alien environment.
Man was an alien invader here, as he was everywhere else in the solar system.
Man was a product of the savanna, a creator of fields and deserts. The forest was its own world, but the entire ecosphere was part of the human empire now.
The forest could not survive without the protection and support of such benevolent invaders as himself, and the LSP dome was the price of his own comfortable survival within it.
The purpose of Magnus’s dome, as of its extraterrestrial cousins, was to secure a miniature alien environment and to keep a natural ecosphere at bay. The only difference was that the primary purpose of his dome was to protect the environment without, rather than the environment within. The biospheric fragment in which the dome was set had to be guarded from contamination because it was, in spite of its relative geographical isolation, too near a neighbor that was the most dangerous and malign of all alien environments: the fin de siecle cities of the twenty-fifth century. The humming hives of the MegaMall’s customers and sales force were far beyond the horizon, but while they shared the same spherical surface and the same atmosphere they had to be reckoned close neighbors. From the forest’s viewpoint, the MegaMall’s minions were the neighbors from hell.
Ultimately, of course, it was the MegaMall that paid Magnus his living wage, just as it paid the wage of every other man and woman living on and beyond Earth, but Magnus always thought of his particular portion of the great capitalist pie as conscience money, or as a tribute to the oldest goddess of them all: the ultimate mother, Gaea the Great.
Tired as he was, Magnus had neither the inclination nor the energy to make an elaborate investigation of his new captives. The most interesting specimens, in any case, would be too small to see without the aid of a magnifying glass, and his eyes, long overdue for replacement, were too weak to take the strain. He took his time decanting the contents of his specimen jars into more economical storage units, and then put the empty jars into the sterilizer, ready to be taken out into the field again tomorrow. They would be alternated with their duplicates for the sixty-third time, with thirty-seven still to go.
When his duty had been adequately done, Magnus used the microwave oven—which had been dutifully storing solar power all day long—to heat up a plastic-wrapped meal. The sole meuniere tasted excellent, as was to be expected of one of the finest products of modern food science, but Magnus hardly noticed. In the wilderness, eating was a utilitarian business, a mere matter of fueling the body.
The tropical night arrived with characteristic swiftness, but Magnus did not reach for the wall panel whose virtual control keys were displayed in patterns of red light. He could