The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [150]
In the months that followed its release the concluding part of my History was very widely read, but not very widely admired. Many readers judged it to be unacceptably anticlimactic. A new wave of Cyborganizers had become entranced all over again by the possibility of a technologically guaranteed “multiple life,” by which “facets” of a mind might be extended into several different bodies, some of which would live on far beyond the death of the original flesh. They were grateful for the concessions I had made but understandably disappointed that I refused to grant that such a development could or would constitute a final victory over death. The simple truth was that I could not see any real difference between old arguments about “copies” and new ones about “facets.” I felt that such a development, even if feasible, would make no real difference to the existential predicament because every “facet” of a parent mind would have to be reckoned a separate and distinct individual, each of which must face the world alone.
Many Continental Engineers, Gaean Liberationists, and Outward Bounders—unmodified men as well as fabers—also claimed that the essay was narrow-minded. Various critics suggested that I ought to have had far more to say about the life of the Earth itself, or the emergence of the new “DNA ecoentity” that had already extended its tentacles as far as neighboring stars. Many argued that I should have concluded with some sort of dramatic escalation of scale that would put the new life of emortal humankind into its “proper cosmic perspective.”
The readers who found the most to like in The Marriage of Life and Death on a first—perhaps rather superficial—reading were fugitive neo-Thanaticists, who were quick to express their hope that having completed my thesis, I would now recognize the aesthetic propriety of joining their ranks. More than one of them suggested, not altogether flippantly, that the only proper conclusion to which my history could be brought was my own voluntary self-extinction. Khan Mirafzal, when asked by a caster to relay his opinion back from his Maya-bound microworld, opined that it was quite unnecessary for me to take any such action, given that I and all my Welldwelling kind were already immured in a tomb from which we would never be able to escape. I assume that he, like the neo-Thanaticists, was concealing a certain seriousness within the obvious joke. When I was asked by the same caster whether my work was really finished, I agreed with him that the tenth and last part would require far more updating than the previous nine and that I would have to keep adding to it for as long as I lived. I insisted, however, that I had no plans to contrive an exit merely for the sake of putting an end to that process.
SEVENTY-FIVE
Although I was no longer staying with Eve when the final part of my History was launched I was still in the Arctic. My memories of my long sojourn on Cape Adare had by now been deeply steeped in fond nostalgia—a nostalgia further exaggerated by the one brief visit I had recently paid to the Antarctic continent, which had changed out of all recognition. The Arctic ice cap was now the last place in the world where one could see seemingly limitless expanses of “natural ice.”
Although the latest Ice Age was officially over, most of its effects having been carefully overturned by the patient corrosive efforts of the Continental Engineers, the north polar ice-cap was still vast, and a wide ring of desolation surrounded the ice palaces at the geographical pole. Eve called this ring “the last true wilderness of Earth,” and although I could have quibbled with the meanings she attached to the terms last and true I could see what she meant.
There were far fewer ice palaces on the northern ice-cap than I had expected to find, although there had been extensive engineering of the ice-clad islands as well as the region of the pole itself. The bulk of the population of the so-called Upper Circle was