Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [23]
Magnus loved wilderness better than anything else in the world. That is to say, he loved green wilderness: wilderness the color of the world that men had all but lost What he hated most in all the world was wasteland: gray wasteland, the color of the glutinous organic dust which had consumed the first-generation cities left derelict by the Crash, and the color of the second-generation cities that had been gantzed out of that dust to supply the alleged needs of the multitudinous produce of Conrad Helier’s New Reproductive System. Today’s third-generation cities were multicolored, and Magnus knew that the fourth-generation complexes which were no longer to be called cities—out of respect for the current fashionability of the absurd philosophy of Decivilization—would take care to mimic the green which had been banished from the ever-extending jet-black SAP fields; to Magnus, however, the underlying color of the human hive and all its honeycombs would always be gray.
Magnus loved to sleep beneath the stars, as if in the open air. Even though the LSP prevented his breathing in the myriad scents of the renewed rain forest while he lay upon his bunk, he felt that he was sharing communion with the benign soul of the world. Thanks to the protective power of the tent, he could lie naked on his bed without the least fear of cold or persecution by predators and parasites.
It was still early when he finished his strictly utilitarian meal, but he was too tired for serious work, and the last thing he wanted was to watch TV. He discarded his beltphone along with his clothes, knowing full well that it would not emit the slightest sound. His answering machine was a low-grade silver, and he had trained it very carefully to be as stubborn as it was clever. It would not break into his communion even to give him news of the end of the world.
He turned the light down to a mere glow. Then he laid himself down on his bed, displaying himself with all due reverence, feeling deliciously humble in the presence of Gaea. In public, he always denied that he was a Gaean Mystic, because two centuries of mockery had contrived to attach a comical significance to the term, but in private he was prepared to admit that Gaea had been the one true love of his life, the core of his spirituality. Her cause was his cause, and would be for as long as he lived.
Sleep did not come to Magnus immediately, but he was unworried by its lack of hurry. He was content to look serenely up at the handful of stars that were visible through the forest canopy.
Darkness had leached all color from the outside world, but it was still green to him. Green was more than mere appearance, after all; it was essence and symbol, belonging at least as much to inner vision as to the deceptive wisdom of the eye.
In the days of his youth, which Magnus could no longer remember with any clarity, there had been such an abundance of gray in the world that he must surely have been filled with anguish by its contemplation. Even then, he had been avid—recklessly avid, on occasion—to work in the cause of life, although he had not had such a clear idea of what the cause of life required of a man. In those days, he had associated freely with the engineers whose cause was to subdue and manipulate life and reduce it to the status of one more MegaMall product; nowadays, he knew better. He had not seen or spoken to Walter Czastka for more than a century.
Now that he was old, Magnus was exceedingly glad that the empire of the gray had been so much reduced. The one good thing to be said for the vast black landscapes of modern agri-industry was that they had liberated space for the limited restoration of the greenery of Ancient Nature. Magnus was now old for the third time,