The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [90]
Some of the invitations I received during the latter phase of the Thanaticist craze were exhortations to participate in legalized murders, and these became more common as the exhaustion of ready models forced later “martyrs” to become more extreme in their bizarrerie. I refused to have anything to do with such acts, and often urged the would-be martyrs to reconsider their actions, but they continued regardless.
By 2740 the Thanaticist martyrs had progressed from conventional suicides to public executions, by rope, sword, ax, or guillotine. At first the executioners were volunteers—one or two were actually arrested and charged with murder, although none could be convicted—but as the Thanaticists became more desperate to reignite the waning glare of public attention they began campaigning for various nations to re-create the official position of Public Executioner, together with bureaucratic structures that would give all citizens the right to call upon the services of such officials. It was taken for granted at first that they stood no chance of success, but this proved to be a mistake.
Even I, who claimed to understand the cult better than its members, was astonished when the government of Colombia—presumably desirous of taking the lead in the nation’s ongoing competition with Venezuela for recognition as the home of the world’s aesthetic avant garde—actually accepted such an obligation, with the result that Thanaticists began to flock to Maracaibo and Cartagena in order to obtain an appropriate send-off. I was relieved when the UN, following the death of Shamiel Sihra in an electric chair in 2743, added a further rider to the ninety-ninth amendment, outlawing suicide by public execution.
By this time I had given up making media appearances that only seemed to cement my reputation as a Thanaticist sympathizer no matter how hard I tried to backpedal and distance myself from the movement. In 2744 I began refusing all invitations to appear on TV as well as all invitations to take part in Thanaticist ceremonies. It seemed to me that it was time to become a recluse once again.
I had a great deal of work to do on the fourth part of my history, and I had had my fill of distractions.
FORTY-SEVEN
The fourth part of The History of Death, entitled Fear and Fascination, was launched into the Labyrinth on 12 February 2767. Although the furor over Thanaticism had died down, my commentary was immediately subject to heavy access demand. The heyday of the movement was long past, but its atrocities were still fresh in the world’s memory, and it is possible that my title misled some would-be readers into thinking that my commentary would be directly concerned with the Thanaticist creed. Requisitions of material from the first three parts of the history had declined sharply in the 2760s in the wake of the Thanaticism-inspired boom, and I might have set a higher access fee had I realized that the new publication would generate such high demand.
Academic historians were universal in their condemnation of the new commentary, and those who complimented me on the thoroughness with which I had bound together the underlying data were annoyingly few in number. I understood that the enthusiasm with which the publication was greeted by laymen was hardly conducive to academic acclaim, but I felt that I had done the ritual spadework with exemplary efficiency. There were, however, a number of popular reviewers who praised my commentary highly even after discovering that it had nothing explicit to say about the “problem” of Thanaticism. My arguments were recklessly plundered by journalists and other broadcasting pundits in search of possible parallels that might be drawn with the modern world, especially those passages that seemed to carry moral lessons for the few remaining Thanaticists and the legions who feared and were fascinated