The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [49]
“You’re such a pedant” she riposted, exasperatedly. “You go on and on about farming being a reluctant and degrading response to ecological disaster, but you’re a farmer through and through. Most people think backbreaking labor is a thoroughly good thing—motor of progress and all that—but you know perfectly well that people were a lot better off when they hunted and gathered for six or seven hours a week and spent the rest of their time sitting under the acacia tree telling one another tall stories. You know it, but you don’t do it. That’s not merely stupid, Morty, it’s perverse”
I tried to resist, but her eyes were flashing.
“To see hard work for what it really is and then to devote your life to it anyway is protracted suicide,” she went on. “Unless the New Human Race can rediscover the delights of play and throw away its whips and spurs we’ll never be able to adapt to emortality. I’ll say one thing for your late Mama Meta: at least she knew that the work ethic belonged in outer space. Okay, so we had to rebuild after the tidal waves—but we’ve done that now, thanks to your little friend’s shamirs. Now, it’s time to get back to the Garden, to begin the Golden Age again. Homo faber is essentially a spacefaring species; those of us who are keeping our legs should accept that we’re Homo ludens.”
“I’m not sure about that,” I countered, reassuming my usual palliative tone. “I was never happy about those war-addicted fools hijacking the label Homo sapiens. We’re the ones who have the opportunity to be true sapients, and I think we ought to take it. Play is great, but it can’t be the be-all and end-all of emortal existence. Those legs that the fabers are discarding are the price we pay for the luxury of keeping our feet on the ground.”
“You think I need you to keep my feet on the ground,” Sharane came back, “but I don’t. I need somebody who doesn’t think that keeping our feet on the ground is a luxury.”
“Touché,” I conceded. “But…”
I knew that the break between us had been completed and rendered irreparable when she wouldn’t even hear my rebuttal. “I’ve been weighed down long enough,” she said, callously. “I need to soar for a while, to spread my wings. You’re holding me back, Morty.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
My first divorce had come about because a cruel accident had ripped apart the delicate fabric of my life, but my second—or so it seemed to me—was itself a horrid rent that shredded my very being. It seemed so vilely unnecessary, so achingly unreasonable, so treasonously uncaused. It hurt.
I hope that I tried with all my might not to blame Sharane, but how could I avoid it? And how could she not resent my overt and covert accusations, my veiled and naked resentments? Once the break became irrevocable, the relationship was rapidly poisoned.
“Your problem, Mortimer,” Sharane said to me, when her brief lachrymose phase had given way to incandescent anger, “is that you’re a deeply morbid man. There’s a special fear in you: an altogether exceptional horror that feeds upon your spirit day and night and makes you grotesquely vulnerable to occurrences that normal people can take in their stride, and which ill befit a self-styled Epicurean. If you want my advice, you should abandon that history you’re writing and devote yourself to something much brighter and more vigorous.” She knew, of course, that the last thing I wanted at that particular moment was her advice.
“Death is my life,” I informed her, speaking metaphorically, and not entirely without irony. “It always will be, until and including the end.”
I remember saying that. The rest is vague, and I’ve had to consult objective records in order to put the quotes in place, but I really do remember saying exactly those words.
I won’t say that Sharane and I had been uniquely happy while