The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [2]
There was a time when I thought my parents slightly mad, especially when I was still able to eavesdrop on their interminable arguments and recriminations, but I do not think it now, even though no modern newborn spends his childhood as I spent mine. My parents took me to the remotest part of Nepal as soon as I was born because they thought that it would be good for me. Papa Domenico thought that it would be good for me because it would prove to me that there was no place on Earth so bare of resources that its doors did not open directly into his beloved Universe Without Limits, while Mama Siorane thought that it would be good for me because it would put me much more closely in touch with “brute reality,” but it does not matter which of these apparently contradictory theses was closer to the truth. Although I never became what Papa Domenico would have called a “dedicated virtualist” I have been an assiduous explorer of the Universe Without Limits, and I have certainly had my share of bruising contacts with brute reality, so I suppose they were both right in their different ways.
This autobiography will have little or nothing to say about virtualist Utopianism and a great deal about realist Utopianism, but that does not mean that Mama Siorane was any more of a mother to me than Papa Domenico was a father. I had eight parents, and that—in association with the efficiency of VE education—is generally conceded to be perfectly sufficient to make every modern child the son or daughter of the entire human race. That is what I am, as are we all. That is why my personal history is, in a sense, the personal history of everyone who is potentially able to live in the future.
TWO
The ages of my fosterers varied from 102 to 165. They were humble enough not to think of themselves as all-wise but vain enough to think of themselves as competent in the art of parenting as well as brave. They were confident that they were fully qualified to swim against the tide of convention. I suppose that they were able to agree that I should be raised in one of the remotest areas of the world, in spite of their very different notions of why it was a good idea, because they had all lived through the heyday of the Decivilization Movement. Even those among them who had not been sympathetic to its nebulous ideals had strong feelings about the unsuitability of cities as environments for the very young.
Had it not been for the relocation of the UN bureaucracy to Antarctica my parents might well have chosen the Ellsworth Mountains over the Himalayas despite their modest elevation, but the intensive redevelopment of the Continent Without Nations influenced their choice. Their selection of a specific location was heavily influenced by the absurd competition undertaken by the “supporters” of Mount Manaslu, who were then augmenting the peak for the third time in order to claw back the title of “the highest mountain in the world” from the Everestians and Kanchenjungans.
The valley where my co-parents established their hometree was approximately midway between Everest and Kanchenjunga. Its only other inhabitants—or so my fosterers believed when they rented the land and planted the tree—were members of a religious community, some two dozen strong, who lived in a stone-gantzed complex at its southern extremity. There was another stone edifice high on the slope above their own site, but my parents were assured that although it had been the home of another religious community, it was now unoccupied.
Modern readers, who have been taught that all religion had been virtually extinct for three hundred years in 2520, will be more surprised by the proximity to my hometree