Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [106]
“I know what the Miller effect is,” the monk assured him. “I’m thoroughly familiar with all the brave attempts that have been made to produce a biotech fountain of youth—even those made way back at the dawn of modern history, when Adam Zimmerman was barely cold in his cryonic vault. I know that there’s a fundamental difference between slowing aging down and stopping it, and I know that there’s an element of paradox in every project which aims to reverse the aging process. I’m not claiming that anyone now alive can become truly emortal no matter how fast the IT escalator moves. I might have to settle for two hundred years, Damon Hart for two-fifty or three hundred. Even embryos engineered in the next generation of Helier wombs for maximum resistance to aging might not be able to live much beyond a thousand years—only time will tell. But that’s not the point.
“The point, Silas, is that even if you and I won’t be able to play parent to that new breed, Damon’s generation will. Conrad Helier and I must be reckoned mortal gods—but the children for whom we hold the world in trust will be an order of magnitude less mortal than we. The world we shape must be shaped for them, not for old men like you. Those who have had the role of planner thrust upon them must plan for a thousand years, not for ten or a hundred.
“Conrad Helier understands that well enough, even if you don’t—but he still thinks that he can play a lone hand, sticking to his own game while others play theirs. We can’t allow that. We aren’t like the corpsmen of old, Silas—we don’t want to tell you and him what to do and we don’t want ownership of everything you and he produce, but we do want you both to join the club. We want you both to play with the team. What you did in the Crash was excusable, and we’re very grateful to you for delivering the stability of the New Reproductive System, but what Conrad Helier is doing now has to be planned and supervised by all of us. We have to fit it into our schemes.”
“Exactly what is it that you think Conrad’s followers are doing?” Silas asked curiously.
“If you don’t know,” the monk replied tartly, “they must have been so deeply hurt by your decision to retire that they decided to cut you out entirely. Even if that’s so, though, I’d be willing to bet that all you have to do is say you’re sorry and ask to be let back in. You really should. I can understand that you felt the need to take a holiday, but people like us don’t retire. We know that the only way to make life worth living is to play our part in the march of progress. We may not have true emortality, but we have to try to be worthy of it nevertheless.”
“Cut the Eliminator crap,” Silas said tersely. “You’re not one of them.”
“No, I’m not,” the monk admitted, “for which you should be duly thankful. I do like the Eliminators, though. I don’t altogether approve of them—there’s too much madness in their method, and murder can no longer be reckoned a forgivable crime—but I like the way that they’re prepared to raise an issue that too many people are studiously avoiding: who is worthy of immortality? They’re going about it backwards, of course—we’ll never arrive at a population entirely composed of the worthy by a process of quasi-Darwinian selection—but we all need to think about the myriad ways in which we might strive to be worthy of the gifts