The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [14]
All Papa Domenico added to that was a rude observation about Mama Siorane being as full of shit as the mountain—by that time, alas, my secret had crept out. If Papa Dom could have foreseen that Mama Siorane would die on Titan, gloriously doing instead of merely dreaming, he might have modified his opinion—but he might not. They both deserve full credit for practicing what they preached—Papa Dom went to Antarctica to work for the UN and cultivate the delicious sensations of self-sufficiency, and he died in his VE hood exactly as he would have wished.
The ostensible purpose of a university is to constitute a community of scholars in the interests of further education, but its real purpose is to constitute a community of actual bodies in the interests of further real-space interaction. It would, I think, be too great a wrench were young people to go straight from the flesh-intensive microcosm of a parental home to the adult world, where almost all relationships are conducted almost exclusively in virtual space.
I had, of course, been interacting with other children of my own age in virtual space throughout my time in my parents’ hometree, but I had not met a single one in the flesh until I went to Adelaide. I felt that this put me at something of a disadvantage because almost all my contemporaries had been able to arrange occasional real-space encounters, and those who were city-bred were already used to actual crowds. On the other hand, that I had been reared in a remote mountain valley gave me a hint of exoticism that few of the other new arrivals possessed. I didn’t make friends easily, but no one did. I was exhilarated by those I did make, but I felt even as I made them that they would be temporary. The accident of contemporaneity hardly seemed to be a sound foundation for lasting intimacy. Perhaps I made too much, secretly as well as overtly, of my having climbed precipitous mountain slopes and seen things that normally remained hidden. Perhaps my fascination with history was magnified so rapidly partly in order to provide me with an excuse for solitary study and private preoccupation. In any case, I was less sociable than the average, but was not at all distressed by it.
It was during my second year of study, in 2542, that the defining event of my life occurred: the event that took my magnified fascination and gave it a precise shape that was never significantly modified thereafter. Before I boarded the sailing-ship Genesis in March of that year, I was a dilettante historian pecking here and there at the whole broad sweep of social evolution; when I finally came safely to shore, I was a man with a mission, a man with a destiny.
EIGHT
Genesis was a cruise ship providing tours of the Creationist Islands of the Coral Sea. Many of the islands were natural, but the majority were artificial. Two centuries before, the first new islands raised from the seabed had been regarded as daring experiments paving the way for the more extravagant adventures of the Continental Engineers, but the business had soon been routinized. Custom-designed islands had been easy enough to sell or rent out during the twenty-fifth century, to provide bases for large-scale commercial endeavors in Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis and sea farming or to host the artistic ventures in ecosystem construction that gave the islands their familiar name. The latter market had weakened somewhat in the wake of the Moreau scandal, when the UN insisted on instituting much tighter controls and much more careful monitoring of the Creationists’ endeavors, but the longest-established islands remained significant arenas of ecological research as well as popular tourist attractions.
Children reared in less unconventional environments than the