The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [42]
In addition to the other temptations to which I had fallen prey, I had felt compelled to reconstruct and repair the network of virtual relationships that I had allowed to slip away while I was living in close physical proximity with my partners. Some of the people with whom I restored regular contact would have been willing and able to offer me charity, but I was extremely reluctant to take it. It would have seemed that I had only repaired my relationships with them in order to obtain a financial advantage. In any case, I had my pride—and all charity carries a price.
My surviving parents, as might have been expected, quietly relished the opportunities offered by my parlous situation. They had always been enthusiastic to exercise subtle leverage upon the direction of my life, and fate had delivered me into their hands.
“You should have left Earth fifty years ago,” Mama Meta informed me, stopping barely a centimeter short of saying I told you so. “Gravity holds people down and holds people back. It attaches people to the past instead of the future. I’m not saying that history is worthless, but it’s not the sort of career to which anyone should give a hundred percent of their time and effort. The Labyrinth is here too, Morty. General Good work isn’t just plentiful on the moon, it’s twice as well paid as the same work on Earth—and zero-gee work is triple or quadruple, if you’re prepared to learn the tricks of the trade. You’ll have plenty of time for hobbies—but you have to move fast. In thirty or forty years the fabers will have a virtual monopoly on zero-gee work, and they’ll still have first choice of lunatic work. By 2650 you won’t be able to find decent work this side of Mars, but if you strike while the iron’s hot you can make some real money.”
In Mama Meta’s reckoning, “decent” work had to be work for the General Good, which also paid at least three times what the Allocation provided. In her view, that ruled out almost everything available on Earth. Mama Siorane’s pioneering endeavors among the outer satellites were thoroughly decent, as were Papa Ezra’s adventures in genetic engineering, but in Mama Meta’s view, Mama Eulalie and Mama Sajda were “harlots of commerce.” They earned good money, but they were both employed in Production Management—and that, in Mama Meta’s view, was only one short step from the Ent end of EdEnt. “EdEnt is an oxymoron,” Mama Meta had assured me, in the long-gone days before I climbed the mountain. “Education is self-improvement, but Entertainment is self-wastage.” Mercifully, none of her partners had agreed with her on that one—and even Mama Siorane would have stopped short of describing workers in the commercial sector as harlots. That did not mean, alas, that my other fosterers were willing to side with me in the dispute that inevitably developed between myself and Mama Meta.
“I know I’ve always advised you to be yourself,” Mama Eulalie said, on one occasion when I had complained a little too self-pityingly about Mama Meta’s hectoring, “but it wouldn’t do you any harm to spread yourself around a bit. It wouldn’t actually dirty your hands to get involved in commerce. The people who actually keep the big wheels turning might think it necessary to lock themselves away inside mountains, but the people who do the little jobs lead perfectly normal lives. The MegaMall has plenty of single-skill VE-based work available these days—they actually find it hard to attract young people, and we mortals have an inconvenient habit of retiring long before we’re likely to drop dead.”
The last remark was a reference to Papa Nahum, who was a lot closer to dropping dead than he or I realized. Like Mama Eulalie and Mama Sajda, he’d spent his life laboring in relatively menial capacities for what they both, in their quaintly old-fashioned way, insisted on calling the “MegaMall.” His advice, at least,