The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [71]
“We’ll keep in touch,” she promised. “No more overlooking messages, no more wondering if one of us is avoiding the other.”
“It won’t be the same,” I said. “You can’t have a conversation with someone in the outer system—the time delay won’t allow it. All I ever got from Mama Siorane was a series of lectures.”
“Letters, Morty, not lectures,” she said. “You’re a historian remember? You know what it was like back in the good old days, when people in London needed the Penny Post to keep in touch with people in Canterbury because it was a five-day journey on foot.”
Always the pedant, I had to point out that by the time they had the Penny Post, mail coaches had cut that kind of journey to a matter of hours—but she was right, in principle. From Mama Siorane I’d had lectures; from Emily I would get letters—and I would always be able to see her face, and even touch her VE sim.
“I’ll still be sorry,” I said, stubbornly. “My parents are all dead. You’re all that I have left from that phase of my existence.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You just can’t be bothered to look for the rest of it while you’re stuck in the distant past. It’s time to move on, Morty—and I don’t mean South America. It’s time to reacquaint yourself with the world you live in.”
She was right, of course. I promised that I would, but I probably wouldn’t have kept the promise very well if the world had given me a choice. I would have changed in my own good time, at my own plodding pace, if I hadn’t been moved to more urgent action by forces beyond my control. As it happened, however, I was soon snatched up by a catastrophe that seemed at first, at least to my unready understanding, to be as furious and as far-reaching in its fashion as the Great Coral Sea Disaster.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The third part of The History of Death, entitled The Empires of Faith, was decanted into the Labyrinth in August 2693. In a defensive introduction I announced that I had been forced to modify my initial ambition to write a truly comprehensive history and acknowledged that my previous hyper-Gordian knot had not been worthy of the name of aleph because it had been so overly ethnocentric. I explained that I hoped to correct this fault by degrees but admitted that I was unlikely ever to attain a genuinely universal breadth. I promised, however, to do my utmost to be eclectic and to provide my future commentaries with as much supportive justification as was practicable.
This apology was not as sincere as it was designed to seem. It might have been more honest to admit that I did not wish to be a mere archivist of death and feared getting bogged down in the sheer mass of the data that pertained to my current and future researches. I could not regard all episodes in humankind’s war against death as being of equal interest, and I wanted to be free to ignore those which I thought peripheral and repetitive. I was more far interested in interpretation than mere summary.
I justified that in my text by arguing that insofar as the war against death had been a moral crusade, I felt fully entitled to draw morals from it.
This preface, understandably, dismayed those critics who had already urged me to be more dispassionate. Some academic reviewers were content to condemn the new volume without even bothering to inspect the rest of the commentary, although that sector of the book was no longer than the equivalent sector of the second part and seemed to me to benefit from a rather more fluent style. It is, of course, possible that the reviewers were put off by the abundance of the data collated in support, which was indeed fearsome.
Other critics complained of