The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [31]
The physical and electronic relics of mortal men have always seemed to me to be equally vulnerable to the erosions of time and the corrosions of misfortune. That the world has suffered no major geological upheavals since the Coral Sea split and no major outbreak of software sabotage has made me slightly more complacent, but in the twenty-sixth century experience combined with youth to subject my research to the spurs of a sharp sense of urgency. Despite the oft-expressed anxieties of my surviving foster parents, however, I did not neglect the other aspects of my life. In the course of my travels I met a great many people face-to-face, and I was careful to cultivate a good range of VE friendships, some of which had survived since childhood.
While The Prehistory of Death was still far from ready for release into the Labyrinth I contracted my first marriage. Unlike most first marriages it was not a pair-bond, although I had made the usual tentative experiments in one-to-one intimacy. It was a non-parental-group contract tract with an aggregate consisting of three other men and four women, signed and sealed in 2555. Sociologists nowadays insist on referring to such arrangements as “pseudoparental practice groups,” implying that the only possible reason for their formation is training for future parenthood, but my partners and I never thought of it in that way. It was a straightforward exploration of the practicalities of living in close association with others.
The Decimation had fractured so many close-knit groups of every kind that it had sent a wave of panic through the survivors, and for at least half a century thereafter everyone’s mind seemed to be focused on the problems of forming, maintaining, and surviving the breakage of intimate relationships. Ours was one of many such experiments. Although we were not precise contemporaries we were all far too young to be contemplating parenthood even during a temporary baby boom. Mine was the median age of the group, and my oldest partner was only ten years my senior.
I was introduced into the group by Keir McAllister and Eve Chin shortly after its core had begun to entertain the marriage plan. They were in executive control of a fleet of silvers monitoring and modifying the ecological impact of the hastily rebuilt cities east of Nairobi. I first encountered them during investigations of newly exposed sites from which paleontological evidence of humankind’s origins might be excavated, whose presence added yet another complicating factor to their work. Because I was as neutral as anyone available, I became a middleman in the negotiations between the local paleontologists and the ecological redevelopers and found both Keir and Eve refreshingly easy to deal with by comparison with older people. They obviously felt the same and always introduced me to their close friends and co-workers as a kindred spirit.
None of my spouses was a historian. Although they welcomed me as someone who would broaden the range of the group’s interests, they all thought my vocation slightly quaint. They were all involved in post-Decimation reconstruction, although none was a gantzer; they usually spoke of their business as “re-greening” even when they were dealing with city folk. Axel Surt, Jodocus Danette, and Minna Peake were all hydrological engineers specializing in evaporation and precipitation. While Axel, Jodocus, and Minna worked to ensure that future rain would fall where the Continental Engineers thought best and Keir and Eve negotiated its redistribution once it had fallen—among many other equally touchy matters—Camilla Thorburn and Grizel Bielak labored as biologists to deliver a healthy and abundant fauna to the re-greened land from the gene banks contained in the Earthbound Arks. Axel, Jodocus, and Minna