The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [80]
Although Sharane had not become a wholehearted Thanaticist, she was by no means sympathetic to my plight. Her advice, though liberally given, was of little use. She explained at great length why it would do me no harm at all to expand the range of my own allegedly meager experiences. It should not have surprised me in the least that she had become a convert to the ardently curious philosophy of Ziru Majumdar, but it felt like a kind of treason nevertheless.
Fortunately, the veterans of my previous divorce proved to be more generous and more helpful, although they were too hardheaded to be capable of taking the matter very seriously. There was, alas, little or no consistency in their advice.
“They’re just harmless lunatics, Morty,” Axel told me. “It’ll all be a nine days’ wonder. All you have to do is ignore them, and they’ll eventually go away.” Jodocus took the same dismissive line, but the others were a little more forthcoming.
“You have to stand up to them,” Minna advised. “You have to make your own position clear. Don’t consent to be bullied, or they’ll walk all over you. I know you can get the better of them, if you’ll just make the effort.” Eve wasn’t quite so bullish about it, but she agreed that I ought to issue a detailed and formal account of my true position.
Any hope I might have had that Camilla would provide a casting vote soon vanished when I called her. “Personally,” she opined, breezily, “I don’t care how many of them mutilate themselves. I just wish they’d stop messing about with half-measures and go all the way. Think of it as surgery, removing one more cancer from Gaea’s body. I only wish the Rad Libs were suicidally inclined. Did you know that Keir’s still with them—actually on their so-called steering committee? I thought he was as mad as a New Human could be until this Thanaticist folly came along. Thanaticism is going to work to the Rad Libs’ advantage, don’t you think? How can anyone call the Libs and Mystics crazy while this kind of thing is going on? I know it’s not your fault, but I wish you’d been a little more careful, Morty—heaven only knows whether you can repair the damage.”
Despite their name, the Rad Libs with whom Keir was now allied were not quite the most radical of the Gaean liberationists. They were advocates of a drastic reduction of the numbers of Earthbound humanity rather than the total abandonment of Earth. There had always been “reductionists” in the Gaean ranks, but the new Ice Age had swelled their numbers and increased the fervor of their demands. As Camilla said, the activities of the recreational crucifixionists were making their policies seem somewhat less ridiculous.
I had hesitated over calling Keir, who had left the Rainmakers long before the divorce, but I was intrigued by Camilla’s news. Curiously enough, he was more enthusiastic than any of the others. “Morty!” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you for months. I read your commentary—all three parts. I even delved into the data stream.”
“I’m flattered,” I said.
“No need. It’s good—but you really ought to put in some more about the mythical Gaea. The real mythical Gaea, that is, not the sanitized one. There’s too much twentieth-century sentimentality loaded into the notion of Mother Earth, even now. I mean, Gaea gave birth to Uranus before mating with him—and their first crop of children were all monsters! Uranus couldn’t stand the sight of them, so what did she do? Gave Chronos a sickle and told him to go cut Daddy’s balls off, that’s what! The blood that flooded from the wound brought forth yet another generation of children. All right up your street, I would have thought.”
“Uranus didn’t die,” I pointed out, utterly mystified by the direction the conversation was taking.
“Maybe not, but he did retire from the Earthly scene forever. Castration became the price of new and better life, Morty—the twenty-second century in a nutshell. Then the sky-god vanished into the sky. That’s us, Morty. We have to go—not today or