The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [143]
It was inevitable, in a world that still contained millions of self-described New Stoics, that my evaluation of their forebears would attract vitriolic criticism. When I condemned the people who first formulated the insistence that asceticism was the natural ideological partner of emortality as victims of an “understandable delusion” I knew that I was inviting trouble, but I did it because I thought that I was right, not because I thought that the controversy would boost my access fees.
It did not surprise my critics in the least, of course, that I commended neo-Epicureanism as the optimal psychological adaptation to emortality. Even those who did not know enough biographical details to judge that I had been a lifelong, if slightly unsteady, adherent of “careful hedonism” had inferred from the earlier parts of my study that I was an ardent champion of self-knowledge and avoidance of excess. The cruelest of the early reviewers did venture to suggest that I had been so halfhearted a neo-Epicurean as almost to qualify as a neo-Stoic by default, but I was well used by then to treating criticism of that nature with deserved contempt.
One of the appendixes to The Honeymoon of Emortality collated the statistics of birth and death during the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth centuries, recording the spread of Zaman transformations and the universalization of ectogenesis on Earth and the extension of the Oikumene throughout and beyond the solar system. I recorded acknowledgments to numerous faber scholars based on the moon and Mars for their assistance in gleaning information from the slowly diffusing microworlds and the first wave of their descendant starships. I noted that because the transfer of information between data stores was limited by the speed of light, Earth-based historians might have to wait centuries for significant data about the more distant human colonies, but I promised that I would do my best to update the statistics as and when I could.
These data showed, slightly to my surprise, that the number of individuals of the various humankinds that now existed had already begun to increase more rapidly than ever before by the time of my birth. I could not help but recall, as I noted that conclusion, the lectures I had received from Papa Domenico on the subject of the alleged sterility of the “realist” philosophy and the supposedly inevitable victory of “virtualism.” What, I wondered, would Papa Domenico have thought of Emily Marchant and the highkickers? What would he have thought of a human race whose “virtualist Utopians” were now a small minority? I consigned to a footnote the observation that that although Homo sapiens sapiens had become extinct in the twenty-eighth century there was as yet no consensus on the labeling of its descendant species.
Although it generated a good deal of interest and a very healthy financial return, many lay reviewers were disappointed that the coverage of The Honeymoon of Emortality did not extend to the present day. The surviving Cyborganizers—predictably grateful for the opportunity to heat up a flagging controversy—reacted more noisily than anyone else to this “manifest cowardice” but I had decided that it would be more sensible to reserve such discussions to a tenth and concluding volume of my magnum opus.
The conclusion of my ninth commentary promised that I would consider in all due detail the futurological arguments of the Cyborganizers as well as the hopes and expectations of other contemporary schools of thought. As I had told Emily when she visited the moon, I still had every intention of completing my Herculean labor by the end of the millennium, and I urged my loyal readers to be patient for just a little while longer.
SEVENTY-TWO
I didn’t bother to find another place to live before I left Neyu for good. For several years I led a