The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [103]
“I’ll be happier here, I think, than I’ve ever been before, once I’m fully accustomed to the strangeness of it all.”
I spoke too soon, of course. I never did become fully accustomed to the strangeness of it all. But I was happy for a while—maybe not happier than I’d ever been before, but happy enough.
PART FOUR
Maturity
In the earliest phases of combat, scientific knowledge was far less efficient as a weapon in the war against death than religious faith. The quest for a scientific definition of death exposed a complex web of conclusions as physicians debated the relative merits of cessation of heartbeat, cessation of respiration, the dying of the cornea, insensibility to electrical stimuli, and the relaxation of sphincter muscles as evidence of irrecoverable demise. Skeptics compiled catalogs of case histories of people buried alive and urban legends recorded macabre cases of childbirth as a result of “necrophilia” practiced by monks or mortuary assistants. Ryan, in 1836, introduced a new distinction between somatic death—the extinction of personality—and molecular death—the death of the body’s cells, noting that the former was rarely instantaneous and the latter never. Prizes were offered in nineteenth-century France for an infallible sign of death, and the failure of all attempts to claim such prizes resulted in the official provision of mortuaries where bodies might lay until the onset of putrefaction settled the matter beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Anthropologists and psychologists made little progress in their early attempts to comprehend and explain attitudes to death and the ritual treatment of corpses. Hertz observed but could not fully rationalize the fact that many death rites involved a two-phased process, the first dealing with “wet” corruptible flesh and the second with “dry” remains such as bones and ashes. He understood that the first phase of interment, cremation, or storage constituted a symbolic removal of the dead person from the realm of “natural”, whereas the secondary rite—the scattering of ashes, the assembly of ossuaries, the equipment of graves with monumental masonry and so on—emphasized the continuity of a human community whose members were all making their painstaking way from cradle to grave, but he had no other analogy to draw upon than that between funeral rites and the “rites of passage” by which boys became men. Freud fared no better, being unable to see belief in the soul’s survival of death as anything but a delusory wishfulfilment fantasy, and funeral rites as anything more than expressions of terror and anxiety, and was led in consequence to hypothesize egoistic “death instincts” which seemingly arose as the natural antithesis of the sexual-reproductive “life instincts.”
—Mortimer Gray
Commentary, Part Five of The History of Death, 2849
FIFTY-THREE
I was not exaggerating when I told Emily that the sight of the sky unmasked by an atmospheric envelope had a profound effect on me. She must have known as well as I did, however, that the inhabitants of the moon did not see such sights very often. The Earthbound sometimes speak of the “domed cities” of the moon as if they were vast hothouses, like Earthly cities enclosed by crystal shells, but they aren’t.
Like the colonists of Io and Europa, the moon’s inhabitants are bur-rowers, and the vast majority of their dwellings are far beneath the surface. No one lives in edifices like the one I rented on Cape Adare, from whose high windows