The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [151]
When I set up home on the ice sheet myself I didn’t intend to stay long, but it seemed as good a place as any to reflect on my options now that my history was finished and to see in the new millennium. There was an inevitable sense of letdown once I’d made the final deposit but I had had plenty of time to prepare for that, and I knew that I would be able to keep on adding to the final part and refining the earlier ones more or less indefinitely.
Several of my closest acquaintances sent messages of congratulation to the Arctic that were distinctly ambiguous. They all seemed to think that it was a bad idea for me to “hide myself away in such a desolate place.” Some were even prepared to assert that they understood my state of mind better than I did myself, but I had no intention of giving way to their various entreaties. The loudest of those entreaties were from Mica, Axel, and Minna, all of whom urged me to return to the Pacific and join the pioneers of the Seventh Continent. Several of my old faber friends in Mare Moscoviense, on the other hand, tried to persuade me that it was high time I returned to the far side of the moon, thus putting Earth—literally if not figuratively—behind me.
I put them all off. The only person whose congratulatory message excited me at all was Emily’s, for reasons that had nothing to do with well-meant advice.
“It looks as though I will get another chance to see you on Earth,” she told me. “The big conference is presently scheduled for the middle of next year, and it looks as if Earth orbit will be the compromise point. We’d prefer it to take place farther out, but we’re prepared to give way on that point if Ngomi’s Hardinist hard-liners will allow us to lay on the actual platform. You Wellworms may think you’re up-to-date on smart spaceship technology, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Anyway, I’ll come down as soon as the big argument is over, whatever the outcome might be.”
Emily did not actually omit the customary quota of good advice, but I had already heard enough of that to let it wash over me. “Even the longest book,” she pointed out, with a breathtaking lack of originality, “eventually runs out of words, but the job of building worlds is never finished.” I had heard much the same from a dozen “Wellworms,” although they, of course, thought that the work of constructing a single world would be adequate to fill millennia.
“Even if the time should one day come when we can call this continent complete,” Mica had said—referring, of course, to Pacifica—“there’ll be others. We still have to build that dam between the Pillars of Hercules, and if only we can coordinate our aims with those of Eve’s mob, we might really be able to do something with the oceans.” Even Jodocus had concurred with that, although he had added the rider that when Garden Earth was finally finished, adding a few clones to the home orbit would fill a few more millennia without creating the least necessity for any “true human” to venture farther afield than was necessary to collect the requisite mass.
I couldn’t, as yet, find a new sense of mission in any of the directions suggested by my friends, but I wasn’t downhearted about that and I wasn’t in any hurry. Nor was I unduly depressed by the fact that I couldn’t even contemplate sitting down to start another book. In composing the history of death, I thought, I had already written the book. The history of death was also the history of life, and I couldn