The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [67]
“I think they tell us the truth,” Sara said, slightly shocked by the idea that they might not. “Ms. Mapledean says there’s no way to be sure of the origin of any particular virus, because they were mutating so quickly and no one ever admitted to anything, but that it was definitely a war of sorts.”
“Of sorts,” the Dragon Man echoed. “That’s right. Sorts that people had never been able to fight before. At least you had to meet your enemy face to face when people used to fight with clubs and swords—you even had to know who he was. In a plague war, everyone who hasn’t had the right injections becomes an enemy by default...and nobody had all the right injections, no matter who he was or how deep his bunker might be. Anyway, no one had actually accepted the fact, as yet, that the world would have to be comprehensively reinvented and totally redesigned. No one had yet grasped the fact that no human female would be able to bear a child of her own for...I don’t know how long. I suppose we could put the clock back, now, if we ever wanted to. We have the technology now—but we didn’t have it during the Aftermath.
“I don’t remember there being a day, or a year, when we all recognized that things had changed forever. It crept up on us. Artificial wombs were designed, perfected, used...but there wasn’t a point in time when everybody accepted that they weren’t just a stopgap, or an emergency measure. We kept on anticipating a future that never came, until the realization dawned that we’d been living in a new world for decades, and that it was now the world, a way of life we were stuck with. It was evolution, not revolution, too gradual to be clearly perceived.
“The natural miracle children became rarer and rarer, and the technological miracle children gradually became commonplace. I suppose they teach you in school that it all worked out for the best, that it was necessary as well as lucky—and so it was—but it didn’t seem like that when we were living through it. We lived it as tragedy, and those of us who are left still remember it that way.”
“But it was necessary,” Sara murmured, when the old man looked for a response.
“Yes, it was,” he agreed. “In a world where everyone might live to be three hundred, or three thousand, it’s necessary as well as polite that we should all postpone the exercise of our right to have children—our right of replacement—until we’re dead. It’s the only way we can live on the Earth without bringing about another ecocatastrophe even worse than the Crash. It’s the way it has to be.”
“And it was lucky,” Sara added, echoing what Ms. Mapledean had said about the matter. “The ecocatastrophe would have been even worse if it hadn’t been for the plague of sterility.”
“Maybe,” conceded the Dragon Man. “Some said, even then, that we’d have been a lot luckier if the plague had hit a hundred years earlier, in the 1980s instead of the 2080s. If it had, we might have prevented a lot more extinctions. On the other hand, it would have been a lot harder to develop the technologies we needed to save the situation before we became extinct. There was no ideal time for any of it to happen. I guess we were lucky to come through it at all.”
“Not just lucky,” Sara said, seeking further confirmation of the story she’d been told so many times. “Clever and brave.”
“Clever and brave,” the Dragon Man repeated. “Which, loosely translated, means that when people finally