The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [146]
“And what will you do then?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Perhaps I’ll write something else—something very different. I had wondered about becoming some sort of Gardener, but having spent so much time with the Rainmakers in the last couple of years I’ve recovered all my old doubts about my suitability for that kind of work. I’ve been wondering incessantly about off-planet possibilities, of course. My daughter’s become almost as clamorous as Emily Marchant in her insistence that spacefaring is the only way to make proper use of indefinite longevity, but I’m not sure about my suitability for that either. I’ve seen a lot of Garden Earth these last few years, and I feel at home here in a way that I wouldn’t like to lose. I’m glad I’ve lived on the moon, and I’d certainly like to visit the outer system some day, but I’m not sure that I’d ever want to go into space to live—even to one of these new Earths that Type-2 people want to build in Earth orbit.”
“I know what you mean,” Sharane agreed. “If what the casters say about these smart spaceships is true, it will soon become as easy to take tourist trips round the system as it is to tour Earth. When the day comes, I’ll be glad to see the sights. The VE reproductions are great, but they’re not the real thing. I don’t want to become a citizen of the outer darkness, though. I’m Earthbound through and through. All my husbands criticize me for living in the past, but the past is what made us—what we are is the sum of the past, and if we want to extrapolate ourselves in order to live in the future we have to keep our consciousness of the past up to scratch. You understand that, don’t you Morty? You’re only one who ever got close to figuring out that part of me.”
Most of it was mere flattery, of course—the polite conversation of old acquaintances who no longer had anything left to forgive—but it was good to hear that I had a special place in her memory.
SEVENTY-THREE
Emily confirmed what Jodocus Danette had inferred about the crucial importance of the impending conference at which the leading lights of the Oikumene’s many factions would come together face-to-face. Everyone, it seemed, accepted the necessity of some such encounter in the flesh. VE conferencing apparently made it too easy for representatives of the various factions in the dispute to retreat to entrenched positions. Nothing less than a physical gathering could carry sufficient symbolic weight to engender the spirit of give-and-take that would be necessary if the Earthbound and the highkickers were to sort out their rapidly multiplying differences—and even that might not be enough.
Despite the widespread agreement as to its urgent necessity, Emily told me not to expect the conference to happen any time soon. Such elementary matters as finding a venue, setting the agenda, and deciding on the terms of discussion were proving frustratingly difficult, involving a great deal of time-delayed diplomatic wrangling.
“There’s no way we’rt going to agree to come down to Earth,” she told me, defiantly. “That would be symbolically loaded to an unacceptable degree. On the other hand, we can understand why Ngomi doesn’t want to bring his people all the way out here, even as far as Jupiter—and there are symbolic reasons why neither side would be entirely happy about conducting discussions in old Jove’s shadow. If we meet on Mars the Martians will insist that their so-called problems are far more important than they really are, and the asteroids are faberweb territory. Even the moon is an unsuitable compromise because of the faber majority on the far side. It looks as if we might have to settle for empty space, but even the location of the empty space in question is a hot issue—and in the meantime, the unanswered questions are festering away. I wish that you Wellworms hadn’t so completely lost your sense of urgency. The situation