The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [85]
“The account is incomplete,” I pointed out. “When it is whole, I doubt that anyone will be able to misconstrue it as a hymn of praise for the mortal condition.”
As parries go, that one was fatally weak.
“Perhaps, in that case, you should not have begun to publish before the work was complete,” Nyxson observed, “and I look forward to seeing future chapters—including, of course, your account of Thanaticism, which will doubtless be as scrupulous as your account of early Christianity. But all histories are incomplete, and all truths too. No matter how long we might live, we are all hemmed in by time and by the insufficiency of our wisdom. You might be content to regard all questions as settled, and to pretend that all mystery has been banished from the human world, but others are not. There will always be people in the world who are not content to live within prescribed limits or to limit their experiences to the narrow range that others consider good for them. There will always be people in the world who will want to think the supposedly unthinkable and do the supposedly impossible. Most will fail, but those who succeed are the true custodians of progress.”
“That sounds very pretty,” I countered, with an overt sneer that probably lost me far more sympathy than it won, “but what we’re actually talking about is people maiming and killing themselves. That’s not progress—it’s madness.”
“Perhaps it is,” said Nyxson, casually, “but there’s method in the madness, and a message too. If Thanatic martyrdom were merely a matter of unhappy individuals testing the limits of existence to eventual destruction you might be right to accuse me of hypocrisy, but I intend to remain alive because the martyrs to come will require someone to speak for them. My part in their adventure will be to explain what they’re doing and to spell out the message constituted by their deaths for the benefit of those who lack the wit to read it.”
The next trap in line was yawning in front of me but I didn’t see it. It might not have made much difference if I had—I probably wouldn’t have been able to avoid it.
“According to you,” I said, “once the first Thanaticist deaths have occurred, it will be for each and every one of us to make up our own minds what their implications are.”
“But of course,” he said, with carefully exaggerated graciousness. “As an enthusiastic commentator yourself, however, you surely have no objection to my making a well-informed guess.”
“Please do,” I said, trying to sound sarcastic. In retrospect, I should have known that I was losing the fight in the only place that mattered—the minds and hearts of EdEnt’s audience—but at the time I was possessed by such a powerful sense of my own Tightness that it was difficult for me to imagine that anyone could fail to see the force of my arguments.
“Now that the last false emortals are coming to the end of their lives,” Hellward Lucifer Nyxson said, in a tone that was all sweet reason, “we are in danger of thinking of death merely as a matter of history: as something put away, save for the occasional regrettable accident. It is not, and the purpose of Thanaticism is to provide a sharp reminder of the fact. Only a historian could take the view that the New Human Race’s achievement of emortality was a triumph won against tremendous odds. Any biologist could tell you that from the point of view of the ecosphere it was the discovery of death that was the triumph.
“For the first two billion years of Gaea’s lifetime, all life was emortal. The simplest of her children—bacteria, algae, protozoa—still partake of that