The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [56]
I finally settled on Cape Adare on the Ross Sea, a relatively lonely spot where my nearest human neighbors would be conveniently out of sight beyond the glacial horizon.
I moved into a tall edifice modeled on a twentieth-century lighthouse, from whose windowed attic I could look out at the edge of the ice cap and watch the penguins at play. I worked hard on the third part of my History of Death, which had now reached an era that was tolerably well reflected in actual documents and could therefore be pursued through the Labyrinth in reasonable comfort. I took care, though, to balance my labors sensibly. I spent a great deal of time in recreational virtual environments and cultivated a better appreciation than I had ever had before of the rewards of virtual travel, virtual community, and virtual eroticism. I was reasonably contented and soon came to feel that I had put the awkward turbulence of my early life firmly behind me.
I had hardly anyone to talk to, all my parents having died and all but a couple of the virtual relationships I had restored in the wake of my first divorce having lapsed again during my second marriage, but I did not care. I had lived long enough with my parents to imagine their responses to my new situation, and my imagined responses were far more conclusive than any real ones could have been.
“This is exactly what I feared,” Mama Siorane would have said. “Forever is a long time to be a hermit.”
“It’s because forever is a long time,” I retorted, “that there’s time enough to be a hermit without any fear of waste.”
“I’ve always told you to be yourself,” Mama Eulalie would have said, “but are you really certain that this is the self you want to be?”
“It’s the self I have to be, for now,” I retorted, “if I’m to design better selves for the future.”
“I always knew that you’d end up as a virtualist Utopian,” Papa Domenico would have said. “I was the oldest of your fathers, the one with the real authority.”
“I’m not a virtualist Utopian, Papa Dom,” I replied. “I’m making myself fit for any and all Utopias.”
“You can’t make yourself without making other things,” Emily Marchant said, without requiring imaginative reproduction. “Navel gazing does no good. You have to get involved with something more meaningful, Morty. That’s what I’m doing. I’ve spent too much time in labs designing new kinds of shamirs. Now I have to find out what’s to be done with them. From now on, it’s hands-on all the way for me.”
It was far less easy to outflank her than my dead parents. “I’ve always been a hands-on historian,” I told her. “My work is going very well.”
“Oh Morty,” she said, refusing to give way as gracefully as my parents, “you don’t even know what hands-on means. You never built anything solid in your life.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, retreating to a formula that could always be relied on to stalemate an unwinnable argument. She didn’t—but she wouldn’t ever concede that her failure to understand me was her fault and not mine.
Perhaps it was only as a result of my upbringing in the Himalayas, but I really did feel at home in Antarctica. It made Alexandria, Crete, Lamu, and Adelaide seem so hectic and strange that I could not quite comprehend how I had tolerated any of them for as long as I had.
I often went walking on the cape, but I avoided the dangerously variable shelves of ice that extended across the shallow sea, keeping to the ice sheets that were safely mounted on solid ground. I had been warned that such excursions could be just as hazardous as littoral ventures, but I was never reckless. As the years went by without my ever getting into difficulties I was able to set aside all anxiety. While outside the house I always wore special suitskins whose fast metabolism compensated