The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [147]
I wished that I could cut in with a few helpful suggestions, but I couldn’t. Her message had been hours in transit and my reply would double the interval.
“The only thing we’ve all managed to agree on so far,” she continued, “is that we have to make some kind of arrangement before the turn of the millennium—and we’re insisting that no matter what you arithmetical pedants might say, that means the end of 2999 rather than 3000. It looks as if it won’t be a day sooner, but we’ll have to sort out a venue by then. If I can come to Earth afterward, Morty, I will—just for a visit, you understand—but I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high. It may well be that the only chances we’ll get to meet face-to-face once this miserable century’s done will depend on your willingness not merely to come out of the Well but to come all the way to the frontier. The new-generation spaceships will make that a lot easier, of course, but you’ll still have to get your head around the idea.”
I was trying, in my slow and one-paced fashion, to get my head around that and many other ideas, but I had never even had Sharane’s fervor for novelty, let alone Emily’s, and it wasn’t easy.
It didn’t become any easier to come to an understanding of the new existential predicament of the various humankinds when I heard—not from Emily, in the first instance—that the aptly named starship worldlet Pandora had effected the first meeting between humans and the products of an alien ecosphere. Pandora’s faber inhabitants did not have to discover another “Earthlike” world in order to do this. Some freak of chance had allowed them to make a deep-space rendezvous with another, much smaller starship.
This was big news, but it had been so long awaited that its arrival seemed slightly anticlimactic. The letdown was reinforced by the fact that the aliens were not quite as alien as futuristic fantasies had always implied. That the alien vessel was so similar to the ancient Ark Hope in terms of its design was perhaps expectable, but no one had expected its crew to look so much like the human ambassadors granted the privilege of greeting them.
Like Pandora, the alien starship had a crew entirely composed of individuals who had been extensively bioengineered and even more extensively cyborgized for life in zero gee. Because Pandora’s population consisted entirely of fabers, many of whom had undergone extensive functional cyborgization, the “humans” and the “aliens” who contrived this allegedly epoch-making contact resembled one another rather more than they resembled unmodified members of their parent species. The fundamental biochemistries controlling the “ecosphere-imposed templates” of the two species were slightly different, but the main consequence of this difference was that the two sets of fabers enthusiastically traded their respective molecules of life, so that their own genetic engineers could henceforth make and use chromosomes of both kinds. The aliens also used stripped-down versions of their own DNA analogue in exactly the same ways that humans employed what had once been called para-DNA in shamirs and other gantzing systems.
“What kind of freedom is it,” I asked Eve Chin, with whom I was staying at the time, “that makes all the travelers of space into mirror images of one another? What kind of infinite possibility will there be in the further exploration of the galaxy if it turns out that every starfaring civilization within it has automatically taken the road of convergent evolution?”
“You’re exaggerating,” Eve told me. “The news reports are playing up the similarity between the Pandorans and the aliens, but it seems to me that it isn’t really as close as all that. Freedom won’t breed universal mediocrity in space any more than it has on Earth.”
I wasn’t so sure. Planetary atmospheres are infinitely variable, whereas hard vacuum is the same everywhere, and the physical attributes of planetary surfaces are subject to all kinds of whims that are rigorously excluded from artificial habitats.
“When I lived on the moon the fabers were talking