The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [82]
“The Thanaticists say that’s exactly what they’re doing,” the interviewers would put in, helpfully, thus setting up the next phase of the argument.
“Unfortunately,” I would say, “the so-called Thanaticists have misunderstood what it means to be a hero in the contemporary context. Culturally, we have to go further forward, not backward. The engineering of emortality has made us victors in the war against death, and we need to retain a proper sense of triumph. We ought to celebrate our victory over death as joyously as possible, lest we lose our appreciation of its fruits.”
My interviewers always appreciated that kind of link. “That’s your judgment of the Thanaticists, then?” they would follow up, eagerly. “You think that they don’t have a proper appreciation of the fruits of our victory over mortality?”
I did think that, and I was prepared to say so at any length my interlocutors considered appropriate. It soon became unnecessary for me to describe my History in detail, because the interviewers began to take it for granted that everyone knew who I was and what I’d done. I found it rather flattering that my place on the public agenda was secure and became even more relaxed when I was called upon to wax lyrical on the subject of the latest Thanaticist publicity stunt. Having established me as a public figure and put me at my ease, however, the casters became eager to throw me into the lion’s den, where I could fight the misappropriators of my intellectual property man to man.
I thought I could handle it. So did Minna and Eve. Even Axel and Jodocus offered moral support, although Camilla did warn me to be careful and Keir lost interest when I told him for the sixth or seventh time that I didn’t intend to say anything at all about Gaea.
FORTY-THREE
The most familiar public face of the Thanaticist cult, in 2732, was a woman named Emmanuelle Standress. She often insisted that she was merely a representative of the reclusive Hellward Lucifer Nyxson, but it was widely believed that there was no such person and that the Thanaticist Manifesto had been cooked up by a committee. She readily agreed to a live debate with me. Having studied her previous TV appearances I decided that she was unlikely to get the better of me. She was much younger than I—in her mid-fifties—and I could not help but think of her as a mere child ripe for instruction.
I can understand now that I was rather naive. EdEnt’s stage managers must have laid much more elaborate plans than I suspected at the time. From their point of view, my new “career” as a public figure was something to be plotted with care, and they must have decided in advance what complications they were going to introduce into the plot in order to provide it with an adequate climax. I didn’t know that my confrontation with Standress was merely a taster and that another was being carefully held in reserve. Emmanuelle Standress presumably understood the way the game was played far better than I did—she must, of course, have known that she was merely the challenger employed to build up audience anticipation for the real championship bout.
As I’d expected, Standress took much the same argumentative line as my old marriage-partner Keir, suggesting that I’d been too narrowly focused on my own work to grasp its wider implications.
“You’re an academic historian, after all,” she said, delicately veiling the tacit sneer. “A cloistered pedant, preoccupied with matters of detail, unable to see the wood for the trees. By your own admission, you’re only three-sevenths of the way to your conclusion, and it’s understandable that you don’t want to get ahead of yourself—but we don’t need to wait. We can already see the whole pattern and the central message. Without suffering and death,