The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [30]
“I’m the oldest now,” Mama Eulalie said to me, “but I’m damned if I intend to be the next to go. I’ll give the others a race.” So she did, surviving Papa Nahum by thirty-three years and Mama Meta by seventeen—although both of them might have argued as they lay upon their deathbeds that she had accomplished less by virtue of her unwillingness to take risks that many people regarded as routine.
This time, it was Mama Siorane who took me most sternly to task over my vocation. “It’s stupid to immerse yourself in the mire of the past, Mortimer,” she informed me, sternly. “Laurent wasn’t right about many things, but he was right about that. We should have abolished history along with the Old Human Race. I may be just a false emortal stitched together by nanotech, halfway to robothood, but I’m working for the future. The future is where you’re going to have to live your life, Mortimer, and it’s the future you should be focused on. Leave Earth to the old, and come out here to the real world. The planet’s served its purpose in giving birth to us, and it’s a foolish and cowardly young man who clings fast to his cradle. One day you’ll leave, and it would be better sooner than later. One day, all of your generation will have to leave, if only to make room for the next. The Decimation might have taken the pressure off, but it’ll return soon enough. It’s not good for you to be obsessed with the dead.”
“If I ever leave Earth for good,” I told her, “I want to come away with a proper sense of progress. I don’t think we should expand into the galaxy mindlessly just because up seems to be the only way to go and we’re too restless as a race to stand still. I’m as committed as you are to the ethic of permanent growth, but I think we need a better sense of what we intend to do in the more distant reaches of galactic space, and we can only get that by cultivating a better sense of who we are. We can’t do that if we don’t fully understand what our ancestors were.”
“Utter rubbish,” she opined. “Our ancestors were worms and fish, and you can’t embrace human aspirations by understanding the blindness of worms and the stupidity of fish. You have to look forward, Mortimer, or you’re half-dead even in your emortality.”
“Don’t take any notice,” Mama Eulalie advised, again. “That bitch was always preaching when she was on Earth, and now she’s in heaven she’s impossible. Some leaders never look behind them, but the wise ones always do.”
In a way, I said good-bye to all of them on the day I said my final good-bye to Papa Laurent. It wasn’t just that we never gathered together again, even in a VE; we had all moved on into new phases of our existence. We were not the people we had been when we shared a hometree; our collective identity had been shattered. We had been broken down into atoms and dissipated in the flow of history. As with Emily Marchant, my calls to them grew farther and farther apart, as did their calls to me. We never actually lost touch, but our touch became tenuous. New acquaintances gradually displaced them to the margins of my life.
SEVENTEEN
By 2550 I was working fairly assiduously on the introductory tract of what I then planned as a seven-knot work. It was the hardest part of the job, partly because I had to learn to navigate the Labyrinth properly and partly because I was determined not to limit myself to the Labyrinth’s resources.
Even in those days many historians worked exclusively with electronic data, but I had been brought up in the shadow of a mountain archive. I think that I had a better sense of the value of what was buried therein than my city-bred peers, and I certainly had a better sense of what had been lost from such repositories during the Decimation. The Himalyan stores had not been affected, but those in Australia, Japan, and Indonesia had suffered considerable