The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [70]
“Enlightenment” was what the architects of ice palaces called their new art. I’d always thought it a mere affectation, more than a trifle disrespectful to the heroes of the eighteenth-century revolutions in thought and theory—but I realized when Emily used the word that it was layered far more deeply with deliberate ambiguities than I’d previously understood.
“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, mechanically having not quite recovered my composure. “The Gaean extremists will never turn it into a nature reserve. We’ll have to keep making room for new generations by exporting a percentage of the population, but there’ll always be a role for the old. For educators. For historians”
“But you’re not old, Morty,” Emily reminded me. “Youth shouldn’t be a mere preparation for being old. Neither should adulthood. You can’t decide now what you’ll be in three hundred or three thousand years’ time—and if you can, you shouldn’t. One day, Morty, your history of death will be finished—and it will be no good sitting down to start a history of life, because that’s just the other side of the same coin. You’ll have to start on the future, just like the rest of us. It wouldn’t do you any harm to get a little practice, would it?”
“It’s not like that,” I told her, although I wasn’t sure that I could even convince myself of it. “I may be a historian, but I live my everyday life in the present, just like everybody else. There’s nothing wrong with being contentedly Earthbound.”
“You’ve been living in a fake lighthouse for more than twenty years,” she pointed out, “without even realizing that an entire city of light was growing up just over the horizon. Don’t you think that says something about the kind of person you’re in danger of becoming?”
Her rhetoric had come a long way since she was eight years old, and I hadn’t been able to resist its force even then.
“I’m not a recluse,” I told her, realizing as I said it that it was exactly what I was. “I’m just trying to be myself,” I added, realizing as I said it that I still had not the slightest idea what that was supposed to mean.
“But you can see the light, can’t you?” she said, pointing up into the magical spire. “You can see that there are new possibilities before us now. You can see that wherever we live our everyday lives, we’re looking out on to an infinite stage. The universe is waiting for us, Morty, and we can’t keep it waiting forever just because we’re busy playing in our tiny little garden.”
“Sharane used to say that play is all there is,” I told her, reflexively. “She used to say that when all the threats and dangers had been eliminated, play was all that was left to lend purpose to existence.”
“Sharane was a fool,” said Emily, without an atom of doubt in her voice. “She couldn’t even spell her name correctly.”
Emily knew, of course, that Mama Siorane had contrived a death on Titan that everyone she knew out there had considered glorious. It seemed that she was determined to do likewise.
“I’m thinking of moving,” I told her, improvising furiously. “Somewhere new. Somewhere hot. South America, maybe.”
“To work on the fourth part of the History of Death” she said. She wasn’t one of my parents, so she didn’t try to make it sound like an insult or a condemnation, but I couldn’t help hearing it that way.
“It’s important,” I said. “It’s relevant. And it can’t be put off for a thousand years. The past is perishable, Em. If we don’t work to keep it alive, it dies. The artifacts crumble. The documents evaporate. Even ice palaces melt. All this is temporary. Somebody has to keep track of it all.