The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [33]
“This is nothing,” Axel would say, from the safety of his biotech cocoon, whenever anyone complained about the violence of the sun. “Imagine what it must have been like in the days when the Sahara stretched from one side of Africa to the other and smart dress hadn’t been invented.” He was only slightly less annoying at such times than Grizel and Camilla were when they began to lament the almost total loss of what they insisted on misnaming “the first generation rain forest” and its accompanying biota. No matter how many bothersome flies and biting bugs their patient efforts restored to the forests and grasslands they always protested that the originals must have been far more interesting by virtue of the rich cargoes of infectious diseases they had carried and transmitted.
“Biodiversity is one thing,” Jodocus said to Grizel, on one occasion, “but defending the rights of killer parasites is something else. Only a lawyer would sink to that.”
I believe that her reply—supported by Keir as well as Camilla—included derisory references to “the bowdlerization of the biosphere,” “estate agent ecology,” and “niche fascism.” Such phrases were not meant entirely for comic effect.
To begin with, I had a considerable affection for all the other members of my new family, but as time went by the usual accretion of petty irritations built up. Several proposals were made between 2565 and 2575 to make additions to the group’s personnel, but none received the necessary majority. It was, of course, much easier to arrange exits than negotiate new admissions, and the only modification that actually came about was Keir’s departure in 2578, as a result of an irreconcilable breakdown of his relationship with Eve.
Eve disapproved of Keir’s political activities on behalf of a faction of the Gaean Liberationists, who were bitterly disappointed by the UN’s decision to return the population of the Earthbound to its pre-Decimation level in a matter of decades. Eve was a committed Garden Earther herself, but she never wavered in her conviction that the Garden had to be run for the benefit of humankind, whereas Keir became increasingly strident in his advocacy of population reduction with a view to restoring the empire of natural selection to continentwide wilderness reservations. Their ideological differences made it so difficult for Keir and Eve to work together, let alone live together, that one or the other of them had to leave the group.
Keir intended to keep in touch with the rest of us, and we with him, but the resolution faded; although I had known him for some years before the marriage was made, it proved impossible simply to revert to the terms of our earlier relationship. After 2580 more than a hundred years passed before I heard from him again.
Had things continued the way they were, I suppose I would have been the second deserter. Research for the second volume of my history—which I had begun while I was still constructing the first—drew me more and more frequently to Egypt and to Greece in the 2580s and early 2590s. The Rainmakers pointed out that I had no real need actually to travel in order to do the relevant research, but I disagreed.
I explained as best I could that the parts of my project dealing with the remotest eras of antiquity had to be based on the evidence of artifacts rather than texts, and that one could not obtain a proper sense of the significance of artifacts from secondhand accounts and virtual experiences, but my partners were unimpressed. It was not that I did not trust the webs of information distributed