The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [123]
I wish I could say that I took to parenthood like a duck to water, but any vestigial instincts that I might have inherited had withered in four hundred and some years of adult life. I had a lot to learn, and even though I was more able to put my work temporarily aside than most of my companions I felt that I was painfully inept. From an objective point of view it must have seemed that the others were no better, but no one can be objective in such circumstances and I was awkwardly terrified by the thought that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity might be spoiled by my inability to cultivate the requisite skills with the requisite alacrity.
Fortunately, Lua did not seem to mind in the least that her care occasionally fell short of perfection. She was a very cheerful baby, not given to excessive crying, and she quickly learned to greet us all with winning smiles. While I was with her, I forgot to worry about the rights and wrongs of my return to Earth and all the conflicts of interest that were developing between the Earthbound and the inhabitants of the outer system.
I never abandoned my work for more than a day at a time, but I had told Emily the truth when I said that the bulk of the hard labor had been done and that I would be able to accelerate smoothly as I brought the final few parts to completion. I had enough momentum to make the work seem easy, and Lua provided more than enough distraction occasionally to lift my spirits as high as they would go. There was too much anxiety and panicky haste in my day-to-day responsibilities to allow me to say that I was happier on Neyu than I was on the moon, but the peaks of joy that I occasionally obtained by courtesy of Lua’s smiles were new to me, and they added a special zest to the few short years of her infancy. I will not boast that I ever became an exceptionally good parent, but I did learn the basics and I did discover how to obtain my own fulfilment from the task.
For a while, at least, I was perfectly content to live in the present and leave the future on the shelf for later collection.
SIXTY-THREE
The seventh part of the History of Death, entitled The Last Judgment, was launched on 21 June 2911, only twenty-three years after its immediate predecessor. This reflected the close relationship between the subject matter of the sixth and seventh parts and the fact that they covered a relatively narrow span of time. The Last Judgment dealt with the multiple crises that had developed in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, which had collaborated with the last phases of the Great War to face the human race with the prospect of extinction.
The Fields of Battle had already described the various nuclear exchanges that led up to Brazil’s nuclear attack on Argentina in 2079 and the artificially induced epidemics that had climaxed in the sterility plague of 2095-2120. The new commentary discussed the various contemporary factors—the greenhouse crisis, soil erosion, environmental pollution, and terminal deforestation—which would certainly have inflicted irreparable damage on the ecosphere had the final round of nuclear exchanges and the depredations of the chiasmalytic transformers not administered such a brutally sharp shock to the upward surge of the world’s demographic statistics.
My commentary included an elaborate consideration of the broader patterns of death in this period, pointing out the limitations of the popular misconception that the reversal of population growth was entirely due to the literal and metaphorical fallout of wars. I considered in detail the fate of the “lost billions” of peasant and subsistence farmers who had been disinherited and displaced by the emergent ecological and economic order. Like every other historian of the era, I could only marvel at the fact that in less than two centuries more human beings had died than in the previous two millennia, but I was more outspoken