The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [102]
It went without saying, of course, that the vast majority of fabers were Gaean Liberationists—but such ideas came so naturally to them that they did not seem nearly as extreme in faber rhetoric as they did when they were spoken in the voice of someone like Keir McAllister. “The well belongs to the unwell,” the fabers were fond of saying. Even on the moon, which was a gravity well of sorts, the statement was a cliché. There were many others of the same ilk:
The well will climb out of the Well, when they find the will.
The sick stick, the hale bail.
Hey diddle diddle, footsloggers fiddle, monkeys jump over the moon.
Some of these saws were annoying—especially “History is bunk, fit for sleeping minds,” which was frequently quoted at me when I told fabers what kind of work I did—but I soon learned not to take them as insults.
In spite of the freedom with which such opinions were laughingly offered, there were few unmodified men on the moon who did not like fabers. I suppose that those who could not stand them quickly retreated into the depths of the Big Well or passed on to those habitats that spun at great speed.
Once I had grown used to lunar banter I began to take it in good part and even to thrive upon it. It made a refreshing change from the kinds of conversation that I had grown used to during the previous hundred years, and I was glad that no vestige of my Earthly notoriety tainted the atmosphere of Moscovience. Even Khan Mirafzal, when I met him in person, made only fleeting reference to our first meeting in VE. He greeted me as a friend with whom he had briefly lost contact, not as an adversary who had dared to try to understand the craziness of Thanaticism.
As I adapted physically and psychologically to the conditions on the far side of the moon, my mood was progressively lightened, and I began to perceive the quirky wisdom of those who proposed that the satellite was not governed by gravity at all, but by levity. I retained enough of my intellectual seriousness to do my work, to which I remained thoroughly dedicated, but I began to smile more frequently and to spend far less time in VE. I put the nightmarish legacy of Thanaticism behind me and even came to see my sojourns on Cape Adare and Cape Wolstenholme as periods of unfortunate disequilibrium. I brought a new zest to my Herculean labors, and it seemed to me that they had never gone so smoothly.
It was in that spirit that I finally got around to restoring communication with Emily Marchant, my conscience and my inspiration.
“You were right about the galaxy,” I told her, in the next long monologue I launched into the remoter regions of the system. “It does look far more inviting when there’s no atmosphere to blur its face. You were right about the other galaxies too. I never expected to be able to see so many with the naked eye, and whenever I calculate the distance that I’m able to see my head spins. I do miss blue sky, and naked vegetation, but I’m not homesick yet. Visiting Earth-imitative VEs is just as false as visiting lunar VEs used to be, and the fact that I’ve so many memories of the actuality serves to emphasize the unreality of the virtual experience, but it adds an extra dimension to my objectivity. Time on the moon will make me a better historian in more ways than one. I haven’t quite got the hang of identifying myself imaginatively with fabers—and the attempt has certainly exposed the limit of that old cliché about putting oneself in the other man’s shoes—but I’m getting there.
“The moon’s not an ideal place to work, of course. It’s in the Labyrinth, but it has no physical archives—none, at any rate, that are relevant to my current period. It does have compensating advantages of its own, though. I never thought that it was possible to have so much flesh-to-flesh contact with other people outside of a marriage, and the tangibility of social contacts