The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [126]
Even the least generous of my academic critics could not fault the massiveness of the knot of associated data that I had brought together, or the cleverness with which it had been mazed, but they still felt free to declare that I should have carried the story farther forward in time. Almost without exception, the reviewers pointed out that I had originally intended the work to be seven volumes long, and that it now seemed unlikely that nine would suffice, let alone eight—and they were absolutely unanimous in regretting that inflation.
The whole world, it seemed, was impatient to be done with the History of Death—but I was still determined to do the job properly, no matter how long it took.
SIXTY-FOUR
I had maintained my correspondence with Emily Marchant despite the restrictions placed upon it by the time delay. I sent her a long oration lamenting the unsympathetic reception of The Last Judgment even though I knew that she would align herself with my detractors. It might have been more pleasant to speak of other matters, but ever since Julius Ngomi had appeared in the unlikely role of agent provocateur I had been very careful not to mention the planet Jupiter, and since marrying into the Continental Engineers I didn’t want to get involved in heavy discussions of cutting-edge gantzing technics. I had become rather anxious that my private correspondence might get hijacked, if not by eavesdroppers then by my nearest and supposedly dearest.
Fortunately, by the time that Emily formulated her reply to my message, she had more important things to discuss than the alleged futility of my mission. Hot on the heels of the Hope’s discovery of Ararat came the discovery by Vishnu, a silver-piloted kalpa probe launched in 2827, of an “Earthlike” world orbiting a G-type star in Scorpio. Like Ararat, this planet’s elaborate ecosphere had produced animal species analogous to all the major groups of Earthly animals, including two that seemed to be on the verge of true intelligence.
The new world, called Maya by the silver’s masters, seemed no more inviting to would-be colonists than Ararat, but it caused a great deal more excitement. Hope was widely considered within the Oikumene to be a direly unsatisfactory platform for colonization, partly by virtue of its antiquity and partly by virtue of the catalog of mistakes and hesitations dutifully recorded by the Ark’s transmissions. Maya, having been found by machines, awaited the careful attention of a colonization mission planned by thirtieth-century sophisticates and executed with the aid of the full panoply of modern technology.
The only question to be answered was which group of thirtieth-century sophisticates would be entrusted with the task.
Had I thought more deeply about the matter, I might have anticipated the chaos that would ensue, but I was too busy. It was not until Emily’s message arrived that I realized that a serious conflict of interest had arrived in the system even sooner than Julius Ngomi’s colleagues and collaborators had expected.
“The race is on,” Emily told me, speaking from one of her favorite VEs, which set her against a vertiginous background of ice mountains. “By the time the Hardinists had got around to sending out invitations to their conference it was way too late. The fabers weren’t about to give away their head start, so your old friend Khan Mirafzal is already diverting his microworld’s course Scorpioward. The Oort Halo crowd reckon that they can still overtake him if they take direct aim, and the New Ark people figure that even if they can’t quite get there firstest they can still land the mostest men and the bes test equipment.