The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [45]
I was interested in the myth in question—which had survived all the religions that had temporarily appropriated it—because it could be interpreted in a way that linked it to my own theories of the origin of humanity. One way of reading it was to infer that the knowledge which had been allegedly imparted there to the first true humans was the knowledge that they must die.
The other tourists gathered at Lake Van at the time of my visit were interested in the garden that had first been planted there some two hundred years earlier and subsequently embellished by some of the most famous Creationist engineers. Even Oscar Wilde, late in his career, had forsaken his beloved flowers in order to collaborate in the design of the Tree of Knowledge—a much more impressive individual than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that an earlier generation of genetic engineers had supplied.
Given that the evidence the archaeologists had found of early human habitation had not yet produced the slightest indication of the préexistence of godlike Elders, Watchers, or oversize Nephilim, I expected to find myself alone in preferring to interest myself in the digs that were still in progress, but I was not. Sharane Fereday was in the museum dome when I arrived, grubbing about in the slit trench with a magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate.
“Hello,” she said, smiling. “Have you come to distract me?”
“I’ve come to work,” I told her, hesitating only for a moment before adding: “The risk is that you’ll distract me, whether you intend to or not.”
She hesitated too, but only for an instant, before saying: “Oh, I intend to. I’m bored already—I’ll just have to hope that even though you’re not, you’ll consent to be distracted, at least for a little while.”
Even if I had not found her physically attractive, Sharane and I would still have fallen into conversation, and I would probably have decided before the day was out to join her on the bus to Nod, on the shore of Lake Urmia, following the alleged route of the very first human to be consciously aware that he had committed murder.
I did find her unusually attractive, perhaps because rather than in spite of the fact that she did not resemble any of my foster mothers, but that would not have been enough in itself to excite passion. What excited passion was the fervent interest she took in matters that had not previously interested any of my closest acquaintances.
I soon discovered, of course, that the nature of Sharane’s interest in Eden and its significance was markedly different from mine, but that did not seem to matter at all. Given that I had been married for forty years to a company of ecological engineers, the similarities between my notion of history and hers seemed far more important than the differences. Even the differences seemed exciting and productive—if we had been in perfect harmony, our conversations could not have been deeply engaging or so lively.
TWENTY-FIVE
The long conversation that Sharane and I had on the bus to Nod was not the best of the many we shared, but it remains the most precious in my memory because it was the one most sharply edged and focused by gathering emotion. That seems a little absurd now, given that my response to the gathering in question was to become even more intense and pompous than was my habit, but I would be a poor historian were I to deny or conceal it.
“The awareness of death inevitably gives rise to many corollaries,” I told Sharane, having explained my own interest in the Lake Van sites and my own need to make actual physical contact with the faint traces of the remote past. “One of them—perhaps the most important, from the point of view of the New Humans—was the notion that killing required some kind of justification, in terms of both meaning and morality. Even if the leap