The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [41]
The original version of the The Prehistory of Death attracted little immediate attention outside the ranks of dedicated academicians. The traffic through its aleph was by no means heavy during the first few years of its presence in the Labyrinth—but I was not unduly disappointed by that. It was, after all, merely an introduction. I had several more layers to build before my admittedly speculative “whole picture” of the origins of humanity was transformed into what I hoped would be an utterly compelling “whole picture” of the entire human project.
TWENTY-THREE
For ten years after the disintegration of my first marriage I lived alone. I did not think it would be difficult, and in 2995 I had rather looked forward to life in a cozy private realm undisrupted by continual arguments, where I could make final preparations for the launch of The Prehistory of Death in peace. I had not realized that the disruption of long-standing routine would be as deeply unsettling as it was. Nor had I realized that solitude requires long practice before it becomes comfortable. Nor had I been fully conscious of the extent to which I had been economically dependent on the Lamu collective.
None of my seven partners had made large amounts of money from their employment. Labors devoted to the General Good are not conspicuously well rewarded—but there is all the difference in the world between a household supported by seven steady incomes and a household devoid of any. Such extra-allowance income as I had generated during the marriage had been trivial and sporadic, and all of it had been secondhand, in the sense that it was work subcontracted to me by my marriage partners. That vanished along with their direct support.
I did manage to pick up a little paid work in the ten years leading up to the launch of the Prehistory, most of it derived from work on the teaching programs used by my alma mater. A percentage of the unused credit accumulated by Papa Domenico and Papa Laurent had been transferred to my account shortly before the marriage, but the greater part of it had been reabsorbed into the Social Fund, and almost nothing remained by 2595. For the next ten years I was, in effect, totally dependent on the Allocation I received merely by virtue of being alive.
I could have obtained better-paid work easily enough—the LDA still had plenty to go around, given that the Coral Sea Disaster had set its best laid plans back by more than a century—but I did not want to take time away from my true vocation, at least until the Prehistory was launched. Once the first part of my project had been launched into the Labyrinth, I thought, its use would generate an income—which would facilitate work on the second part, whose publication would generate more income, and so on. I was hopeful that the process would build up sufficient economic momentum to be self-sustaining, if only I could get the snowball rolling.
It sounded easy enough when I formulated the plan, and it should have been easier than it was. I obtained an elementary apartment in a capstack in Alexandria, and if I had only managed to play the monkish scholar all the way down the line, focusing my attention entirely on the introductory section of my work, I would have had ample credit to draw everything I needed out of the Labyrinth and to eat as lavishly as I desired. Unfortunately, I had grown used to interleaving my Lab-work with more relaxed and more expensive real-space researches laying the groundwork for the second section, and I found it very difficult to break that habit—especially now that I was more conveniently based for excursions to Greece, Kurdistan, Israel, and New Mesopotamia.
Things became difficult even before the release of The Prehistory of