The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [162]
In competition with news like that, my descent into the watery abyss and its political aftermath could not help but seem trivial. In the face of intelligence like that, it was not merely the political wrangles of the Earthbound and the frontier folk that began to seem meaningless, but the entire history of humankind.
Death had no sooner been retired from its key role in human affairs than it was back, with a vengeance.
EIGHTY
I had observed in The Marriage of Life and Death that even emortals must die. What mattered, I had argued, was creating a life that was satisfactory because rather than in spite of temporal limitation. The greatest hope for the future that I had, I’d told the silver navigator of the sunken snowmobile—and, unknowingly, the listening world—was that Emily Marchant and Lua Tawana might live forever, or at least for thousands of years and that they could continue to make a difference to the shape of the future of humankind.
After the Pandorans dropped their bombshell, the question was whether anyone could make a difference to the future of humankind or whether everything that anybody could do, or that anybody’s descendants could do, would merely be posturing in advance of the blight, whimpering while waiting for the curtain of oblivion to descend.
I put the question, in almost exactly those terms, to Emily when she followed me down to Earth after the official conclusion of the Ambassador conference. Her answer was entirely predictable.
“We’ll do what we have to do,” she said. “The Earthbound will stand and fight. Some of the outward-bounders will fight too—the rest will run in order to be able to stand and fight another day.”
“According to the alien Ark-dwellers,” I pointed out, “the battle must have been fought a hundred times before, or a thousand. Everybody they know about has lost it.”
“But that’s not many,” she pointed out, “and now that we’ve made contact with the Ark dwellers we’ll have their experience to draw on as well as our own. We don’t have any alternative but to fight as best we can. It doesn’t matter what the odds are. Either we beat the blight or the blight beats us. Either the blight will consume everybody in the universe who has the vestiges of a mind, or someone somewhere will use the resources of mind to defeat and destroy the blight. We have to do the best we can to be that somebody. We have to hang on as long as we can, and we have to conserve our reserves as long as we can, just in case we get there in the end or help arrives. The one thing we can’t do is lie down and wait to die. Even silvers know that where there’s life there’s hope. Even if there were nothing we could do, we’d keep talking, wouldn’t we, Morty? Even if we didn’t think that there was anybody listening.”
She was right, of course.
The blight, I realized, when I had had a chance to weigh the bad news more carefully, was a true marriage of life and death, of whose perfection I had never dared to dream. I realized too that I, of all people, should always have known that something like the blight would exist—that something like it must exist—in order that the History of Death might not be complete and might not even be computable by anyone as humble as a human being. I, of all people, should always have known that the war between humankind and death wasn’t one that could be settled for long by any mere treaty of technology, because it was at bottom a real conflict of interest.
I had imagined the war against death, for a while, as a local struggle for the small prize of the human mind, but I should always have