Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [1]
“Why does the sun look bigger when it’s close to the horizon?”
Silas had not heard his guest come up behind him; she was barefoot, and her feet made no sound on the thick carpet. He turned to look at her.
She was wearing nothing but a huge white towel, wrapped twice around her slender frame. The thickness of the towel accentuated her slimness—another product of authentic youth. Nanotech had conquered obesity, but it couldn’t restore the full muscle tone of the subcutaneous tissues; middle age still spread a man’s midriff, if only slightly, and no power on earth could give a man as old as Silas the waist he had possessed a hundred years before.
Catherine Praill was as young as she looked; she had not yet reached her full maturity, although nothing remained for the processes of nature to do, save to etch the features of her body a little more clearly. The softness of her flesh, its subtle lack of focus, seemed to Arnett to be very beautiful, because it was not an effect of artifice. He was old-fashioned, in every sense of the word, and unrepentant of his tastes. He loved youth, and he loved the last vestiges which still remained to humankind of the natural processes of growth and completion. He had devoted the greater part of his life to the overthrow of nature’s tyranny, but he still felt entitled to his affection for its art.
“I don’t know,” he said, a little belatedly. “It’s an optical illusion. I can’t explain it.”
“You don’t know!” There was nothing mocking in her laughter, nothing contrived in her surprise. He was more than a hundred years older than she was; he was supposed to know everything that was known, to understand everything that could be understood. In her innocence, she expected nothing less of him than infinite wisdom and perfect competence. Men of his age were almost rare enough nowadays to be the stuff of legend.
He bowed his head as if in shame, then took a penitent sip from the wineglass as she looked up into his eyes. She was a full twenty centimeters shorter than he. Either height was becoming unfashionable again or she was exercising a kind of caution rare in the young, born of the awareness that it was far easier to add height than to shed it if and when one decided that it was time for a change.
“I gave up trying to hold all the world’s wisdom in my head a long time ago,” he told her. “When all the answers are at arm’s length, you don’t need to keep them any closer.” It was a lie, and she knew it. She had grown up with the omniscient Net, and she knew that its everpresence made ignorance more dangerous, not less—but she didn’t contradict him. She only smiled.
Silas couldn’t decipher her smile. There was more than amusement in it, but he couldn’t read the remainder. He was glad of that small margin of mystery; in almost every other respect, he could read her far better than she read him. To her, he must be a paradox wrapped in an enigma—and that was the reason she was here.
Women of Cathy’s age, still on the threshold of the society of the finished, were only a little less numerous than men of his antiquity, but that did not make the two of them equal in their exoticism. Silas knew well enough what to expect of Cathy—he had always had women of her kind around him, even in the worst of the plague years—but men of his age were new in the world, and they would continue to establish new precedents until the last of his generation finally passed away. No one knew how long that might take; PicoCon’s new rejuve technologies were almost entirely cosmetic, but the next generation would surely reach more deeply into a man’s essential being.
“Perhaps I did know the answer, once,” he told her, not knowing or caring whether it might be true. “Fortunately, a man’s memory gets better and better with age, becoming utterly ruthless in discarding the trivia while taking care to preserve only that which is truly precious.” Pompous old fool!