The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [47]
On the bus to Nod, Sharane told me that she could never be content merely to know about the past; she wanted to re-create it. Even the designing of VE adventures wasn’t enough for her, although she had started out that way. She had always wanted to make her creations more solid, so that they had to be actively improvised rather than passively experienced. She was eagerly and flamboyantly old-fashioned in almost everything that she did. She was dressed in an ordinary suitskin when I first encountered her in Eden, but that was because she was traveling. When I first saw her at home, the passion that I had already conceived and nurtured was further inflamed.
In the privacy of her own home Sharane loved to dress in gaudy pastiches of costumes represented in ancient art. She had a particular fondness for Greek and Egyptian designs, and she programed her wallscreens to produce decor to match her moods. She was widely considered to be a garish eccentric, and I suppose I surrendered far too rapidly to that consensus when we eventually split up, but in the beginning I saw her very differently, as a defiant individualist and a true artist.
When I introduced her to my four surviving parents—whose number had only just been diminished by the loss of Mama Meta, sixteen years after the death of Papa Nahum—their recently reinforced disapproval of my lifestyle was quickly redoubled. They were instantly affrighted by her taste in telephone-VEs, and the more they learned about her the more their worst suspicions were confirmed.
“Morty,” Mama Siorane told me, in one of her rare transmissions from the vicinity of Saturn, “that woman is quite mad. I have long thought that your fascination with the past had slowed down your own intellectual development, but that woman is so retarded as to be infantile.”
When I passed these comments on to my beloved, suitably edited for diplomacy, she merely smiled, saying: “What can you expect from someone who can’t even spell her own name?”
I had expected Mama Eulalie to be the only one who might approve, but even she was distinctly puzzled. “She’s hardly your type, Morty,” she said. “Not that I’m accusing you of being boring, of course, but you have always kept company with serious people. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“I’m ready,” I assured her.
The only person who wished me well wholeheartedly was Emily Marchant, although the good wishes of my previous spouses were undoubtedly sincere and only fell short of wholeheartedness by that margin which inevitably moderates the enthusiasm of an ex-partner contemplating a replacement relationship.
TWENTY-SIX
I moved into Sharane’s hometree on the island of Crete in September 2619 and we married in March 2621. Even though we had been living together very happily for some months, many of our mutual friends were mildly astonished that we actually formalized the arrangement. The difference in our personalities seemed glaring to others but was quite irrelevant to us.
Solitude, poverty, and intensity of purpose had begun to weigh rather heavily upon me before we met, and my carefully cultivated calm of mind had threatened to become a kind of toiling inertia. Sharane brought a welcome breath of air into an existence that had threatened to become rather stuffy. I always knew, I suppose, that from her point of view I was merely one more amusing distraction in a long sequence, but for her the very essence of life was play. She was not in the least disposed to hide that fact or to be ashamed of it.
“Work is only the means to an end,” she told me. “Play is the end. Life is a game, because there isn’t anything else it can be—certainly not a job or a mission or even a vocation. Without rules, life has no structure, but if the rules become laws, life loses its freedom and becomes a sentence; they have to be rules of play. People like that mother of yours who can’t spell her name