Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [76]
“What happened in the last decade of the twenty-first century and the first decades of the twenty-second wasn’t a tragedy at all—but the fact that it was seen as a tragedy, and a terrible threat to the future of the species, increased its beneficial effects. The Crash was a common enemy, and it created such a sense of common cause, focused on the development of artificial wombs and the securing of adequate supplies of sperms and ova, that for the first time in history the members of the human race were all on the same side.
“We’re still living on the legacy of that break in history, in spite of attempts made by madmen like the Eliminators to set us all at one another’s throats again. We’re still all on the same side, all engaged in the same ongoing quest—and we have Conrad Helier to thank for that. You have no conception of the debt which the world owes to that man.”
“You don’t regret what you did, then?” asked a whispery voice from off-stage.
“No,” said Arnett’s simulacrum dispiritedly. “If you’re looking for some sign of repentance, forget it. What we did was necessary, and right.”
“And yet you’ve kept it secret all these years,” the voice observed. “When you were first accused of having done this, you denied it. When you realized that further denial was useless, you attempted to take sole responsibility—not out of pride, but out of a desire to protect your collaborators. The truth had, in the end, to be extracted from you. Why is that, if you aren’t ashamed of what you did?”
“Because there are people in the world like you,” the ersatz Silas countered unenthusiastically. “Because PicoCon and the other purveyors of cheap longevity have ensured that the world is still overfull of people whose moral horizons are absurdly narrow and horribly bleak. For every person alive in 2095 who would have understood our reasons, there were half a hundred who would have said ‘How dare you do this to me? How dare you take away my freedom of self-determination, even for the good of the world?’ Too many people would have seen sterilization as a theft, as a loss of power.
“Many young people nowadays, born into a world of artificial wombs, find it frankly repulsive that women ever had to give birth like wild animals—but too many members of the older generations still feel that they were robbed, changed without their consent. Karol Kachellek and Eveline Hywood are still doing important work; they never wanted to be sidetracked by the kind of publicity the revelations which you’ve forced out of me would generate—will generate, I suppose.”
“What right did you have to make decisions for all mankind?” the second synthetic voice asked, still maintaining its stage-whisper tone. “What right did you have to play God?”
“What gave us the right,” Arnett’s image replied, the voice as relentlessly dull as it had been throughout, “was our understanding. Conrad had the vision, and the artistry required to develop the means. The responsibility fell to him—you might as well ask what right he had to surrender it to others, given that those others were mostly ill-educated egomaniacs whose principal short-term aim was to slaughter their neighbors. Someone had to be prepared to take control, or the world was doomed. When you know that people won’t accept the gift of their own salvation, you have only two choices: to force it on them, or to leave them to destruction. It was better for the world to be saved—and it was better for the world to believe that it had been saved by a fortunate combination of miracles rather than by means of a conspiracy of scientists. Conrad always wanted to do what was best for the world, and keeping our actions secret was simply a continuation of that policy.”
“What of the unhappiness caused by the frustration of maternal instinct?” asked the interrogative voice, in a tone devoid of any real indignation. “What of the misery generated by the brutal wrench which you administered to human nature? There are many—and not