Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [5]
“A long time ago,” Gabriel said, making the most of the phrase, “I wrote a thesis for my doctorate on the twenty-first-century Greenhouse Crisis. The rising sea levels forced New York’s citizens to fight a fantastic battle to preserve it from the flood, raising the entire island and remodeling the buildings so that the old streets became flood tunnels. In those days, New York was a symbol of United America’s defiance of the forces of nature: an embodiment of the determination of the Hundred States to survive the crisis and remake the world. Sometimes I can’t help thinking that it’s slightly disrespectful to the efforts of those twenty-first-century heroes to renounce the city’s heritage—and whatever motivates my paymasters, that’s not the spirit in which I’m working.
I’m trying to do as they did, to save the city and everything it has symbolized.” Silently he cursed himself for excessive pomposity, but the young woman seemed to mop it up.
“Yes,” she said. “I see. I understand what you’re saying—what you’re doing.” Gabriel felt a sudden moment of dizziness, which had nothing to do with the elevation of the thirty-ninth floor of the undeconstructed Trebizond Tower.
He realized that he could not now remember what complex chain of accidents and decisions had made him a master of demolition. He must have begun adult life as a historian, if he had indeed written the thesis he had glibly recalled, and must have continued it as a businessman enthusiastic for any opportunity.
Deconstruction was the pattern.into which his life had eventually fallen, but he no longer knew exactly how or why. It must have been the trail of profit and loss, not any special interest, which had led him into the specific line of business whose master he now was, but he had developed a passion for it nevertheless. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and he still knew next to nothing about the molecular biology of the bacterial agents which were his ultimate minions, but he loved the discretion and the artistry of their work.
Felling by artificial decay was neat as well as economical.
“Wouldn’t it be more satisfying, Gabriel,” one of his aides had recently asked him, “if you made as much money building things as you do tearing them down?” Would it? he wondered as he stared at his visitor’s beautifully guileless eyes.
He honestly didn’t know.
He rallied himself, blinking away the momentary hint of vertigo and breaking away from his companion’s gaze. On the far side of Central Park the rotting teeth were slowly and politely folding themselves away into their internal cavities. He had to remind himself that he was not at all like them; he was no ugly transient, fading into decrepitude for the last time. The presence of the lovely woman was adequate proof of that fact. She was authentically young, perhaps even a Natural, and yet she was here, ready to embrace him, to savor the thrill of being with a man who had done so much: a complete man.
“What do you love best in all the world?” the young woman asked Gabriel King as she took his hand and drew him away from the table where she had placed the vase.
It was a strange question, but she asked it as if it were serious—and she was, after all, authentically young. She had come to him in the flesh, seeking enlightenment Gabriel had not the slightest idea what he loved best in all the world.
Everything he had done—everything, at least, that he remembered having done—he had done for money, but he had never been an overdevout worshipper at the shrine of Mammon. He had made money because that was what people of his particular tribe had always done. His foster father and his foster grandfather before him had made money, in the crisis and its aftermath, and six or seven generations of woman-born Kings before them had made money even during the Dark Ages of the unextended life span. Kings had always been the most loyal and best-rewarded