The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [81]
I couldn’t tell whether Keir’s advocacy of a more extreme reductionism meant that the position of the entire Rad Lib movement was becoming more extreme or whether he was on the brink of defection to the cause of an even smaller minority. “The new human race will never abandon Earth entirely,” I told him.
“Maybe not entirely,” he admitted, giving the impression that he was reluctant to admit even that, “but that doesn’t stop us making room for new kinds. We’ve grown up, and it’s time for all but a few sane stewards to fly the nest. Isn’t that what your History is aiming toward? I know I’m reading between the lines, but that’s surely the direction it’s going. If we stick around, we’re still keeping company with death, right? These new Thanaticists are just the first symptom of continued infantilism, no? A horrible example to us all.”
“I’m not a Gaean, Keir,” I told him, mildly appalled by the cavalier way in which he had contrived to read his own ideas into my text. “Not even in a moderate sense. I’m a neo-Epicurean.”
“That’s what you think, Morty,” he said, with a chuckle. “Maybe you’re too close to your own work, but I can see the way it’s going. We’re all Gaeans now, and when the history of death is finished, the history of life has to begin. You’ll get to the point when you get to the end, even if you haven’t quite got there yet.”
By the time I signed off I was numb with confusion—but I suppose it was Keir’s conviction rather than Eive’s and Minna’s well-meant advice that made up my mind for me. It was bad enough to be misunderstood and misappropriated by the Thanatics, without the Gaean Libs and Mystics deciding that I would serve their cause just as well. I decided that I would come out of hiding and that I would come out fighting—for the plain and simple truth.
FORTY-TWO
I carefully sifted through the many invitations I had received to appear on the talk shows that provided the staple diet of contemporary live broadcasting. I accepted half a dozen—and as more poured in, I continued to accept as many as I could conveniently accommodate within the pattern of my life. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Almost all of my VE time for more than a century had been spent in self-selected environments, and even though I had recently begun paying more attention to the news behind the headlines I had only the most rudimentary grasp of the conventions and protocols of live broadcasting.
I have no need to rely on my memories in recapitulating these episodes, because they remain on the record—but by the same token, there is no need for me to quote extensively from them. The interviews rapidly settled into a pattern. In the early days, when I was a relatively new face, my interrogators invariably started out by asking me to supply elementary details of my project and its progress, and their opening questions were usually stolen from uncharitable reviews.
“Some people seem to feel that you’ve been carried away, Mister Gray,” more than one combative interviewer sneeringly began, “and that what started out as a sober history was already becoming an obsessive rant, ripe for appropriation by the Thanaticists. Did you decide to get personal in order to boost your sales?”
My careful cultivation of neo-Epicureanism and my years in Antarctica had provided a useful legacy of calm formality. I handled such accusations with punctilious politeness.
“The war against death has always been personal,” I would reply. “It’s still a personal matter, even for true emortals. Without a sense of personal relevance, it would be impossible for a historian and his readers to put themselves imaginatively in the shoes of the people of the