The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [148]
“But cyborgization adds another major dimension of variability,” Eve pointed out.
“Most of the differences between individual cyborgs are the result of cosmetic modifications,” I said, dubiously. “The strictly functional adaptations produce a fairly narrow range of stereotypes, and the Pandora pictures suggest that the aliens have adapted themselves to the same range of functions.”
Eve wouldn’t shift her position. “Adaptation to zero gee isn’t an existential straitjacket, Morty,” she insisted. “Infinite possibility is still available. One set of coincidences doesn’t prove that the next aliens we encounter will be stamped from the same mold. Anyway, far too much media space-time is being wasted on these coincidences. There’s something else that the news reports aren’t telling us, isn’t there? Don’t you get a distinct sense that certain matters are being set aside, left carefully unmentioned?”
Actually, I hadn’t. Even when Eve raised the possibility, I concluded almost immediately that she had become slightly paranoid by virtue of her long entanglement in the complex diplomatic wrangles that immediately enveloped anyone who proposed the slightest alteration in Earth’s ocean currents.
It turned out that I was wrong and Eve was right, but because I didn’t take her suspicions seriously to begin with, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility that the people who were actually monitoring the Pandorans’ transmission were keeping secrets. It never occurred to me to ask Emily any awkward questions when she sent me an uncharacteristically muted account of her own response to the news.
SEVENTY-FOUR
The tenth and last part of my History of Death, entitled The Marriage of Life and Death, was launched into the Labyrinth on 7 April 2998. It was not, from a purist point of view, an exercise in academic history, although I certainly considered it to be a fitting conclusion to my life’s work. It did deal in considerable detail with the events as well as the attitudes of the thirtieth century, thus bringing the whole enterprise up to date, but the balance of futurological speculation and historical analysis was far too evenhanded to please narrow-minded academicians.
The commentary element of The Marriage of Life and Death discussed neo-Thanaticism and Cyborganization as philosophies as well as social movements, annoying many of my critics and surprising almost all of them. What surprised them was not so much that I had chosen to dabble in rhetoric as that the rhetoric in question treated both movements with considerably more sympathy than I had shown in either of my two public debates with Samuel Wheatstone, alias Hellward Lucifer Nyxson.
My commentary also touched upon several other recent and contemporary debates, including those that were currently attempting to settle vital questions about the physical development of the solar system. The discussion was introduced by an innocuous examination of the proposal that a special microworld should be established as a gigantic mausoleum to receive the bodies of all the solar system’s dead, but it soon diversified into issues that some reviewers thought—mistakenly, I believe—to be irrelevant to a history of death. I tried to be scrupulously evenhanded in my treatment of the ongoing disputes, but I found it impossible to describe the history of such phenomena as the Type-2 Movement without making some attempt to evaluate their goals. I could not compare and contrast spacefarers’ and Earthdwellers’ attitudes to death without linking those attitudes to the various projects in which spacefarers were engaged and the various visions and ambitions guiding those projects.
The title of my commentary was an ironic reflection of one of its main lines of argument. I contended that mankind’s war with death had reached its final balance, but I took care to remind my readers that this was not because death had been entirely banished from