The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [105]
As the years began to drift by, I reverted yet again to the quiet life of a recluse. I never applied for any kind of somatic modification or cyborgization that would have made life in one-sixth gee feel more comfortable. After taking the first big step that brought me to the moon, and the smaller one that enabled me to take such a liking to the fabers, I hesitated over any other. In spite of all my representations to Emily, my heart and mind remained fundamentally Earthbound.
Sometimes, even I thought of my failure to seek further physiological adaptation as a kind of cowardice—a neurotic reluctance to cut the symbolic umbilical cord connecting me to Earth. Sometimes, even I accepted that reluctance as compelling evidence of my infection by the decadence that the fabers attributed to Earthbound humanity. In such moments of self-doubt I was wont to imagine myself as an insect born at the bottom of a deep cave, who had—thanks to the toil of many preceding generations of insects—been brought to the rim from which I could look out at the great world but dared not take the one small extra step that would carry me out and away. When I went in search of excuses, though, I readily extended the analogy to recall unlucky insects drawn to candle flames, whose combination of instinct and daring proved fatal.
By the time I had been on the moon for twenty happy years I found my thoughts turning back to the Earth more and more frequently and my memories of its many environments becoming gradually fonder. The careful manner in which Earth was relegated to the periphery of the human community by the lunar news gave me a valuable new perspective on Earthbound life, but the longer I lived with that perspective the more convinced I became that I was now properly equipped for life on Earth in a way that I had never been before. I began to think of my sojourn on the moon as a holiday from my real life. It was not, of course, a vacation from my work, which continued apace, but it came to seem like a pause in the pattern of my life as a whole: an interval in which I could collect myself and make ready for a resumption of the ordinary course of my affairs.
When I tried to explain my new state of mind to Emily I found myself hesitating over the wisdom of honesty, but I couldn’t lie to her.
“It’s just nerves, Morty,” she assured me, in one of her exhortatory missives. “You’re dithering again. You’ll have to get over it eventually, so why not now? If you go back down the Well, you’ll only have to climb out again. Come to Titan now, while everything here is new, and we’ll go on to Nereid together when the time comes.”
Her pleas did not have the desired effect. If anything, they called forth the same stubbornness that I had cultivated long before as armor against Mama Siorane’s similar exhortations. I reminded myself that Earth was, after all, my home. It was not only my world, but the home world of all humankind. No matter what Emily might think, or what my faber friends might say, I began to insist both privately and publicly whenever the issue was raised that the Earth was and would always remain an exceedingly precious thing, which should never be forgotten, and that all spacefarers ought to respect and revere its unique place in human affairs.
When the fabers mocked and Emily grew annoyed I dug in my heels.
“It would be a terrible thing,” I told them all, “were men to spread themselves across the entire galaxy, taking a multitude of forms in order to occupy a multitude of alien worlds, and in the end forget entirely the world from which their ancestors had sprung. Travel far, by all means, but never forget that you have only one true home.”
“Oh, Morty,” was Emily’s belated reply from the wilderness without Saturn’s rings, “will you never learn?” But I was older than she, if only by a few years, and I honestly thought that I had now acquired the greater