The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [79]
It would have been bad enough had the crucified only claimed Christ for their inspiration, but the majority made the specific claim that it was my account of the meaning of the Christ myth that had inspired their adventures. Connoisseurs of other kinds of torture were equally enthusiastic to declare that it was my reinterpretation of the Golden Legend that had given multifarious examples of the various saints to the emortals of the twenty-eighth century and made them newly meaningful.
Invitations to crucifixions, scarifications, and burnings began to pile up in the files of my answering machine. I refused them all, but they kept on coming.
One side effect of the unwanted publicity was that my history began to produce a decent income. Unfortunately, the money that poured into my account seemed to me to be steeped in blood, tainted by torture. I was reluctant to spend it and stopped trying to give it away when many of the intended recipients refused it on exactly the same grounds.
I hoped for a while that the fad would soon pass, preferably before any lives were actually sacrificed, but the cult continued to grow, feeding vampirically on the naive fascination of its emortal audience. Gaea’s latest fever was cooling as the new Ice Age began, its crisis having passed, but the accompanying delirium of human culture had evidently not yet reached and surpassed what Ziru Majumdar called “the cutting edge of experience.”
FORTY-ONE
From the very beginning, I found notoriety inconvenient. At first, I attempted to keep a low profile, programming my answerphone AI to stall all inquiries, whatever their source or nature. But I soon realized that the strategy was assisting others to misquote and misrepresent me, and that my private protests were futile.
I had previously assigned the duty of answering my phone to a low-grade sloth, but I had been dissatisfied with its service for some time. I suspected that it was at least partly to blame for the fact that Emily’s message telling me that she was in Antarctica had gone astray. Now I had the perfect excuse to replace it. I obtained a clever silver, although I begrudged the weeks of hard work that I had to devote to its education.
By the time I had equipped my new servant to put my side of the story, however, there had grown up a considerable clamor demanding that if I objected to the Thanaticists’ view of my work I ought to plead my own case and submit to proper cross-examination. No matter how cleverly my new sim could be equipped to argue on my behalf it remained a sim, and therefore a sham, whose employment was easily made to seem like cowardice.
Had I not been living in a place as remote as La Urbana there would have been far more people beating a path to my actual door, but the fact that those who did make the trip found it arduous made them all the more determined not to be turned away. One or two were Thanaticists embarked on insane pilgrimages; the remainder was evenly divided between legmen for the casters and morally panicked opponents of the new movement who wanted me to stand up against my betrayers and denounce them with all the force I could muster.
I had never felt so desperately alone. The last of my parents had now been dead more than half a century, but I had never felt the lack of them so sharply. Emily had already left L-5 for the outer system and the time delay was beginning to make virtual conversation with her too difficult to serve any real consolatory function. In desperation, I forgave Sharane Fereday for the ignominies