The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [0]
Inherit the Earth
Architects of Emortality
The Fountains of Youth
The Fountains
of Youth
B R I A N S T A B L E F O R D
A Tom Doherty Associates Book • New York
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in
this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE FOUNTAINS OF YOUTH
Copyright © 2000 by Brian Stableford
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or
portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty
Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 978-0-312-87206-9
ISBN: 0-312-87206-2
First Edition: May 2000
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jane, and everyone engaged in the serious
business of learning to live in the future
Acknowledgements
A much shorter and substantially different version of this novel was published in the April 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. I am very grateful to Gardner Dozois for publishing that novella and reprinting it in his annual collection of the Year’s Best Science Fiction. In the course of researching Mortimer Gray’s History of Death I consulted numerous academic studies of attitudes to death, of which the most useful proved to be Man’s Concern with Death by Arnold Toynbee, A. Keith Mant, Ninian Smart, John Hinton, Simon Yudkin, Eric Rhode, Rosalind Hey-wood, and H. H. Price (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968); The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Aries (London: Allen Lane, 1981); and Death, Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funeral Rites by Douglas J. Davies (London: Cassell, 1997). I should also like to thank David Lang-ford for his invaluable contributions to the collaborative future history we first set out in The Third Millennium (1985), much of which is reconfigured herein; Jane Stableford for proofreading services and helpful commentary; and David Hartwell for helping to keep the flickering flame alight.
Preface
Anyone who has chosen to read this autobiography must be hoping to gain some insight into the same question that led me to write it: Why did Mortimer Gray write The History of Death?
The easy answer is, of course, that somebody had to do it, and once I had published my first volume I had staked a claim that others were bound to respect, no matter how impatient they became with my slowness or the thrust of my arguments. It would, however, be disingenuous to pretend that anyone else’s history of death would have been exactly the same as mine. The question would still remain: Why did Mortimer Gray write the particular history that bears his name? What experiences shaped him and cast their shadow upon his history?
It would, I suppose, be possible to begin the search for an explanation with the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, which provided my first near-death experience as well as my first meeting with Emily Marchant, but it would not be right. I was Mortimer Gray long before I set sail on the ill-fated Genesis, and there is a sense in which the historian of death was already in the making before the Decimation. At the risk of telling my readers rather more than they need or desire to know, therefore, I feel that I must start at the very beginning of my own story, with an account of my unusual childhood. There, I hope, it will be possible to locate the seed of the individual that I became and the work that eventually made me famous.
PART ONE
Childhood
Mortal humans had no alternative but to live in the present. They woke up every morning knowing that disaster might strike them down before evening in any of a hundred different ways, and they knew that even if they were to survive, still they were ephemera bound to Earth for a mere moment of its history. Our parents and grandparents hoped that they would be different and that they would have the opportunity of living in the future, but their hopes were dashed;