The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [137]
The Cyborganization controversy helped to boost access-demand for The Fountains of Youth to an extraordinary level and made my financial situation so secure that I had no need to fear the reversion to solitary existence that was bound to follow Lua Tawana’s accession to independence, but Samuel Wheatstone was correct in prophesying that I would not be grateful.
At the time, I felt too strongly that the academic quality of my commentary had been entirely overlooked and that hardly anyone was now trying to keep track of the development of my history as a whole. I hoped, however, that by the time the next part was published the furor over Cyborganization would be dead and gone, allowing my work to be re-placed in its proper perspective.
Such is the way of popular controversies that I got my wish—but the real issues raised by the Cyborganizers survived their fashionability, in much the same way that the real issues raised by the Thanaticists never had gone away—and never would.
SIXTY-NINE
In September 2945, when Lua Tawana was thirty-three years old, three of her co-parents—Mama Maralyne, Papa Ewald, and Mama Francesca—were killed when the helicopter in which they were traveling crashed into the sea near the island of Vavau during a violent storm.
The household had broken up some ten years earlier, when the divorce was formalized, but its members had not dispersed to any considerable degree. Mica, Tricia, and I had remained near neighbors, and because Lua remained in New Tonga rather than moving to another continent to complete her education, all the others took care to stay in touch. It seemed to me, in fact, that they made more effort to stay in touch than they had when we shared the same hometree, at least in the cases of Bana and Ng. The tragedy affected the survivors as powerfully and as intimately as Grizel’s death had affected the co-partners in my first marriage, but the circumstances were so different that it did not seem to me that history was repeating itself.
It was the first time that my remaining co-spouses, let alone my daughter, had had to face up squarely to the fact that death had not been entirely banished from the world. Like me, they had lost their parents one by one, save for a handful of ZT fosterers, but I was the only one who had ever lost an emortal spouse. This put me in a slightly awkward position because it meant that everyone involved immediately decided that, as the resident expert, I should shoulder not only the responsibility of helping Lua through the ordeal but also the responsibility of helping them to cope.
I could hardly object; was I not, after all, the world’s foremost expert on the subject of death?
“You won’t always feel this bad about it,” I assured Lua, while we walked together on the sandy shore looking out over the deceptively placid weed-choked sea. “Time heals virtual wounds as well as real ones.” I had said as much to Mica and Tricia, and they had both accepted it as gospel, but Lua reacted differently.
“I don’t want it to heal,” she told me, sternly. “I want it to be bad. It ought to be bad. It is bad. I don’t want to forget it or to get to a point were it might never have happened.”
“I can understand that,” I said, far more awkwardly than I would have wished. “When I say that it’ll heal I don’t mean that it’ll vanish. I mean that it’ll… become manageable. It won’t be so all-consuming. It won’t ever lose its meaning.”
“But it will vanish, won’t it?” she said, with that earnest certainty of which only the newly adult are capable. “Maybe not soon, but it will go. People do forget. In time, they forget everything. Our heads can hold only so much. So it will lose its meaning. In time, it’ll be as if I never had any parents. It won’t matter who they were, or whether they died, or how they died.”
“That’s not true,” I insisted, taking her hand in mine. “Yes, we do forget. The longer we live, the more we let go, because it’s