The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [112]
“I’ve got work to do,” I said. She knew that too. I’d shown her everything, including the new data webs I was patiently building and knitting together. She hadn’t paid much attention, just as I hadn’t paid much attention while she was shopping for new-generation gantzers that were just as gray and slimy as the ones that had become obsolete five minutes before.
“Oh yes,” she said, with deadly unenthusiasm. “Two more volumes of your precious History of Death.”
“Actually,” I confessed, a trifle belatedly, “it’s going to take more than two. Maybe I can cram it into three, but at present I’m thinking four.”
“Which would make it the longest procrastination in history, I suppose,” she said, cruelly. “Let’s see—the first version of the first part was deposited in 2614, and the fifth in 2849. That means that we can expect the ninth and last in 3082—except, of course, that it’ll only be the first version, so you’ll have to tinker round with it for another… what shall we say? A couple of hundred years? Say 3300 to make it a round number. By which time you’ll be seven hundred and eighty years old. It’s just as well that you don’t believe all that doom-laden Thanaticist cant about robotization and the necessity of making a good death before we become mere machines, isn’t it?”
“The research is going very well,” I told her, “and I’m more focused now than I used to be. I’m hoping to have the whole thing wrapped up well before the turn of the millennium.”
“Will anybody care?” she asked. “When did the last false emortal die? Fifty years ago? Don’t bother to tell me the exact date—it doesn’t make any difference. The war against death is over, Morty. It doesn’t matter any more. The point is to find the best way to live without death.”
“Finding the best way to live without death is part and parcel of the war against it,” I insisted.
“And have your studies brought you a single step closer to finding that best way?” she continued, implacably. “Have you found an answer that can satisfy you, Morty?” She didn’t need to add, Have I? It went without saying that neither of us had found any such thing—as yet. It also went without saying that Khan Mirafzal and his kin were hotter favorites to find an answer adequate to their own kind than any footslogger, no matter how high she could kick.
“I have time,” I said, defensively. “I’m emortal.”
“So are the murdering bastards tucked away in twenty-first-century SusAns,” she said, “just so long as they never come out. I forgot about them, of course, when I tried to remember when the last false emortal died. And there’s dear old Adam Zimmerman too—assuming that he isn’t just a guiding myth invented to stoke up the zeal of the the Ahasuerus Foundation’s Zamaners. How old is he now, if he actually exists? Nine hundred, almost to the day! Our invitations to the birthday party must have gotten lost in the ether. How much time there is to waste, when you think about it!”
“My work isn’t a waste,” I told her, stubbornly. “It’s not irrelevant. If you hadn’t left Earth before the Thanaticists got going, you’d understand that the war against death isn’t over.”
“No,” she said, in a different and darker tone. “It isn’t. I’ve lost three good friends in the last five years, and I’ll lose half a hundred more before the ice palaces are teeming with the latest kind of Utopians. I live every day with the possibility that they might be the ones who’ll lose me, but I’m not prepared to hide out in the bomb shelters indefinitely. I’m not prepared to reduce the horizons of my life to those of a glorified life raft. I want to be part of the Revolution, Morty, not part of the problem that makes the Revolution necessary.”
“That’s not fair,” I complained, meaning the suggestion that I was still psychologically becalmed in the life raft we’d shared when she was a child.
“What’s fair got to do with it, you great oaf?” she answered, smiling like a faber surrounded by her children. One day, I realized, Emily might be surrounded by highkicking children of her own, busy with the work of populating a brand-new world with