The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [135]
Days, if not weeks, had passed before I worked out what I might have done to counter his assault. Perhaps I should have conceded the point that the clinicality of my commentary was a means of heightening reader response. Perhaps I should have argued, passionately, that there was no other way to make readers who have long abandoned their fear of death sensitive to the appalling shadow that it once cast over the human world. Perhaps I should have accepted, proudly, that my history could not help appearing to modern readers as an exercise in the pornography of death, because death is itself the ultimate and perhaps the only true pornography. Perhaps I should have… but what point is there in such regretful imaginary reconstructions?
I knew then, as I had always known, that my history would have to stand alone, on its own merits—that it would have to be what it was, and not what any advertising slogan or critical insult attempted to make it.
Samuel Wheatstone was right, of course. My face-to-mask debate with the voice of Cyborganization gave a massive boost to the consultation fees I was collecting for the existing parts of my history. It also created a strong sense of anticipation in respect of the forthcoming eighth installment. He really did make me a lot of money, and I suppose that I ought to have been more grateful for it than I was. In his strange, absurd, and painful way he did help my cause.
SIXTY-EIGHT
The eighth part of my History of Death, entitled The Fountains of Youth, was launched on 1 December 2944. It dealt with the development of elementary technologies of longevity—and, for that matter, with elementary technologies of cyborgization—between the twenty-third and twenty-fifth centuries. It detailed the progress of the new “politics of emortality,” whose main focus was the New Charter of Human Rights, which sought to establish a basic right to longevity for all. It also offered a detailed account of the activities of the Ahasuerus Foundation and the gradual development of the Zaman transformations.
My commentary argued that the Manifesto of the New Chartists was the vital treaty that ushered in the newest phase in man’s continuing war with death. I insisted that the development of technologies of longevity could easily have increased the level of conflict within the human community instead of decreasing it, and that it was the political context provided by the Charter that had tipped the balance in favor of peace and harmony. It had done so by defining the whole human community as a single army, united in all its interests.
I realized that in arguing thus I was laying myself open to a renewal of the charge that I was an apologist for the Hardinists, and I was careful to concede that the Charter had not worked nearly so well in practice as its terms promised, but I had always maintained that the war against death was a war of ideas, and I insisted that the idea of the charter was so important that the inevitable lag phase preceding its effective implementation had been a tolerable hypocrisy. I took great care to emphasize that the charter remained a central document of emortal culture and that the implementation of its primary objectives had not rendered it redundant.
I suppose, in retrospect, that my account of the long battle fought by the Chartists across the stage of world politics was infected by a partisan fervor that had been muted in the three parts immediately preceding it. My description of the obstacles that had been placed in the path of Ali Zaman and others laboring on behalf of the Ahasuerus Foundation was clinical enough, naming no scapegoats, but I could not be so carefully neutral in detailing the resistance offered by certain elements within the community of nations to the proposal that true emortality should be made universally available as soon as it was practical to do so.
Had the principle of universal access not been so firmly established, I suggested, a situation might have developed in which