The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [109]
“A historian,” I told him, reflexively. “It’s what I am because it’s what I want to be.”
“All well and good, for now,” he conceded, “but history isn’t inexhaustible, Mortimer, as you well know. It ends with the present day, the present moment, and no matter how slowly you can recapitulate its achievements, you’ll have to arrive in the present someday. The future, on the other hand, is…”
“Given to your kind,” I said, although I assumed that he was going to say infinite. “I know all that, Mira. I don’t dispute any of it. But what exactly is your kind, given that you rejoice in such freedom to be anything you want to be?”
“Not yet,” he said. “We’ve hardly scratched the surface of constructive cyborgization. That will open up a whole new dimension of freedom.”
“And reopen all the old arguments about robotization,” I added. “The older I get, the more sense those arguments seem to make. Once your little world is lost in the emptiness, effectively cut off from everything else in the universe, how will you avoid the trap of endless repetition? How will you maintain spontaneity, change, difference?”
“Earth is just a bigger spaceship,” Mirafzal reminded me. “The whole solar system is a narrow room—and will one day become exactly that, complete with enclosing walls, if the Type-2 enthusiasts get their way. Even if a rival sect of cosmic engineers eventually wins through, it will only change the decor—and after humankind attains Type-2, the galaxy will become the playground of the Type-3 visionaries. Spontaneity, change, and difference have to come from within, Morty. Cyborgization isn’t robotization; it’s enhancement, not mechanization.”
“And spacefarers will be its pioneers, figuring out how to do it and why while all the lazy footsloggers live on the capital of Earth’s evolutionary momentum,” I conceded, with a sigh. “Maybe you’re right, Mira. Maybe it is just my legs that weigh my spirit down—but if so, then I’m well and truly addicted to gravity. I can’t cast off the past like a worn-out suitskin. I know you think I ought to envy you, but I don’t. You think that I and all my kind are clinging like a terrified infant to Mother Earth while you and your kind are achieving true maturity, but I really do think that it’s important to have somewhere to belong.”
“So do I,” the faber said, quietly. “I just don’t think that Earth is or ought to be that place. It’s not where you start from that’s important, Mortimer, it’s where you’re going.”
“Not for a historian,” I protested, feebly.
“For everybody,” he insisted. “History ends, Mortimer. Life doesn’t—not any more.”
FIFTY-SIX
While I continued to lived on the moon I was half-convinced that Khan Mirafzal was right, although I never followed any of his well-meant advice. The remaining half of my conviction was otherwise inclined. I couldn’t accept that I was trapped in a kind of existential infancy any more than I could see myself as a victim of lotus-eater decadence. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if I’d had one of my close encounters with death while I was on the moon, but I didn’t. The dome in which I lived was only breached once, and the crack was sealed before there was any significant air loss. It was a scare, but it wasn’t a life-endangering threat. The longer I stayed in Mare Moscoviense, the more I came to think of the moon as Antarctica without the crevasses, but with nosier neighbors.
It was always inevitable, I think, that I would eventually give in to my homesickness for Garden Earth and return there, having resolved not to leave it again until my history of death was complete, but there was one more challenge awaiting me after Khan Mirafzal had left the moon for the last time. There was one person in the solar system who had the power to affect me far more deeply in face-to-face confrontation than he and all his kind—and even the footsloggers of Titan sometimes visited the moon.
I received Emily’s message telling