The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [144]
In my first 480 years I had seen hundreds of archaeological sites and thousands of museums but relatively little of the casters’ hit parade of “the wonders of the world.” Once, when I enlisted the help of my domestic silver in adding up the time I had spent away from my various homes I found that I had spent more hours inside mountains than sampling the glories of the managed ecosphere. It would have been easy enough to perform a second set of calculations with regard to the time I had spent in virtual environments, but I did not do so. I had no doubt that I had spent far many more hours sampling the delights of imaginary landscapes than real ones even in more recent centuries, let alone in the early years I had spent exploring Papa Domenico’s beloved Universe Without Limits.
Now that further alternatives to Earthbound life appeared to be emerging almost yearly from the mists of possibility, not only in the outer system but also in the colony worlds, it was starkly obvious that every person born on Earth had to make the choice that Lua Tawana had recently made: to stay or to seek one’s fortune in the infinite. I was part of the older generation in the fashionable reckoning of the day, and my neighbors on Neyu always assumed that I had made my choice long before, but I had never entirely shaken off the confusion that had surrounded my descent from Mare Moscoviense. I was still committed to the neo-Epicurean ethic of permanent growth and I refused to consider the matter settled. I felt as young as I ever had, and I certainly didn’t want to be reckoned an element of the Earthbound’s supposed decadence. I decided that I would have to renew my decision to remain Earthbound at least once in every century and that it ought to be an informed decision, based on intimate experience of what Garden Earth had to offer to those who chose to remain.
As the thirtieth century wound down, therefore, I made judicious use of the healthy earnings of the more recent volumes of my History to roam around all six of the old continents. I made a particular point of visiting those parts of the globe that I had missed out on during my first two centuries of life, although ingrained habit ensured that I took care to include all those sites of special historical interest that had somehow slipped through the nets of my previous itineraries.
Everything I saw was transformed by my habit-educated eyes and the sheer relentlessness of my progress into a series of monuments: memorials of those luckless eras before men invented science and civilization and became demigods. I visited a hundred cities and at least as many agricultural and “protected wilderness” areas. I toured a thousand limited ecosystems, both recapitulative and innovative. I also took care to locate and visit many old friends, including as many of my former marriage partners as I could find.
The Lamu Rainmakers had long since ceased to make mere rain, but they had not lost their commitment to ecological management. Axel, Jodocus, and Minna were still on Earth and all enthusiastic Gardeners. Even more remarkably, they were still in regular touch with one another. They provided the best evidence I had ever found, outside my own admittedly unusual relationship with Emily Marchant, that friendship could endure forever even though the friends maintained the pace of their own personal evolution. I found them much changed—and was mildly surprised that they thought the same of me.
“You’re not as self-protective as you used to be, Morty,” Axel observed. “Less defensive. Life on the moon must have loosened you up—I’ve noticed that a lot of returners never quite readapt to all the correlates of gravity. You should have known better than to take on that Cyborganizer, though. He was always going to make you look slow.”
“I never realized back in the twenty-sixth that you were so well connected,” Jodocus marveled. “The number of times you told us about