The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [62]
Gaean extremism was discovering new extremes with every decade that passed, buoyed by the idea that the human race was now so securely established throughout the solar system that we ought to return the entire Earth to “fallow ground” by refusing to issue any further child licenses. According to the latest Gaean Lib avant garde, the recent interglacial periods were simply Gaea’s fevers, the birth of civilization had been a morbid symptom of the planet’s sickness and human culture was a mere delirium that could and should be replaced by a much healthier noosphere based in the elusive protosentience of dolphins, cephalopods, and mysterious species yet to come.
“Oh, the Libs and the Mystics aren’t so far wrong,” I said, mischievously. “Agriculture was, at best, an imperfect answer to the predicament of expanding population. What might human beings have become by now, I wonder, if we’d devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to spiritual evolution instead of embracing the crude violence of the plough and the milking machine?”
The most frightening thing of all was that it didn’t seem to cross his mind that I might be joking. He obviously paid more attention to the lunatic fringe TV channels than I did—he heard that kind of stuff all the time, argued with leaden seriousness.
“Well, yes,” he said. “That’s a fair point.”
“It’s just colorful rhetoric,” I told him, with a sigh. “Even the people who indulge in it all the time don’t mean it literally. It’s just a form of play.”
“Think so?” Ziru Majumdar seemed to find this proposition just as novel and just as appealing as the one it was attempting to explain. “Well, perhaps. Having been delirious myself for a while when I was down that hole I’m tempted to take the notion of culture-as-delirium a little more seriously. I can’t be sure whether I was asleep or awake, but I was certainly lost. I don’t know about you, but I always find even the very best VEs a bit flat. I sometimes use illicit psychotropics to give delusion a helping hand, but they don’t really help—they just make me confused and a trifle nauseous.”
Now that he was sounding like Jodocus I felt that I was on safer ground.
“That’s a natural side-effect of the protective efforts of our internal technology,” I told him.
“I know,” he replied. “Nanomachines always do their job a little too well because of the built-in safety margins. It’s a real problem, existentially speaking. It’s only when our IT reaches the limits of its capacity that it lets really interesting things begin to happen. We need to think again about the standard programs so that we can give ourselves and our children a little more rope. We first-generation New Humans have grown up in cotton wool, thanks to the anxieties of a dying breed. We shouldn’t carry forward their mistakes.”
The tone of the conversation had been light until then, but that disturbed me. “Are you a parent, Ziru?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level—and succeeding quite well, thanks to the anesthetics.
“Not yet,” he said. “Soon, I hope. Cape Hallett’s a good place to rear a child. Challenging environment, progressive community.”
“Yes,” I said, weakly. “I suppose it might be.”
I couldn’t help but wonder how many of my own parents would have agreed with him—and how far they might have been persuaded to go along with his weirder arguments.
THIRTY-THREE
The room in which Ziru Majumdar and I were confined was by no means short of facilities. Three of its walls were equipped with window screens, so that if we cared to turn our heads away from one another we could select entirely different vistas on which to look out. If, on the other hand, we were feeling in a collaborative mood, we could both look straight ahead at some mutually agreed spectacle. The VE hoods with which our bedheads were equipped were basic models, but they were not at all uncomfortable. The only thing that was difficult to understand, in view of all this generous provision, was why Doctor Sung had seen fit to put the two of us together