Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [47]
“I daresay that nothing I can say will affect your pursuit of this line of inquiry,” said Wilde wearily, “but I assure you that it is quite sterile. Walter has not sufficient imagination to have committed this crime, even if he had a motive. I doubt that he did have a motive; Walter and Gabriel King are—or were, in the latter case—cats of a similar stripe. Like Walter, Gabriel King might have been a true artist, but like Walter, he declined the opportunity.” “What do you mean by that?” Lowenthal asked.
“A modern architect, working with thousands of subspecies of gantzing bacteria and shamirs, can raise buildings out of almost any material, shaped to almost any design,” Wilde pointed out, reverting to quasi-professorial mode. “The integration of pseudoliving systems to provide water and other amenities adds a further dimension of creative opportunity. A true artist could make buildings that would stand forever as monuments to contemporary creativity, but Gabriel King’s main interest was always in productivity—in razing whole towns to the ground and reerecting them with the least possible effort. His business, insofar as it is creative at all, has always been the mass production of third-rate homes for second-rate people. Walter has always been the first choice to provide those third-rate homes with third-rate interior and exterior floral decorations.” “I thought the original purpose of bacterial cementation processes was to facilitate the provision of decent homes for the very poor,” said Charlotte.
“Gabriel King was a structural bioengineer, after all, not an architect.” “Even so,” Wilde said, “I find it infinitely sad to see modern methods of construction being applied so mechanically to the mass production of housing for people who are wealthy enough not to need mass-produced housing. The building of a home, or a series of homes, ought to be part of an individual’s cultivation of his own personality, not a matter of following convention—or, even worse, some briefly fashionable fad, like so-called Decivilization. Like education, making a home will one day be one of the things every man is expected to do for himself, and there will be no more Gabriel King houses with Walter Czastka subsystems.” “We can’t all be Creationists,” objected Charlotte.
“Oh, but we can, Charlotte,” Wilde retorted. “We can all make every effort to be whatever we can be—even people like us, who have not Michael’s inbuilt advantages.” “Even the members of the New Human Race still die in the end,” said Charlotte.
“Lowenthal might be able to have ten careers, or twenty, instead of a mere handful, but there are thousands of different occupations—and as you pointed out yourself, our memories are finite. The human mind can only hold so much expertise.” “I’m talking about attitudes rather than capacities,” said Oscar. “The men of the past had one excuse for all their failures—man born of woman had but a short time to live, and it was full of misery—but it was a shabby excuse even then.
Today, the cowardice that still inhibits us is far more shameful. There is no excuse for any man who fails to be a true artist and declines to take full responsibility for both his mind and his environment. Too many of us still aim for mediocrity and are content with its achievement—” He would undoubtedly have continued the lecture, but Charlotte’s beltphone began to buzz again. She put the handset to her ear again.
“Shit hits fan,” said Hal tersely. “The worst-case scenario just kicked in.” By