The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [93]
I couldn’t take that sort of rhetoric seriously. I knew that she’d been carried away by the zeal of the recent convert and had lost her sense of proportion. I had always found it difficult to take Mama Siorane seriously on the admittedly rare occasions when she had insisted on referring to the Earth as “the Well.”
“Leave Earth to the Thanaticists,” Emily said, on another occasion, long after the heyday of Thanaticism was past. “Out here, death is still a threat to be avoided, and everyone wants to live as long and as gloriously as she can. Earth is already rotting, Morty—but Titan hasn’t yet begun to breathe.”
I told myself that she didn’t have the least idea what she was talking about, as far as Earth and the Earthbound were concerned, and that she was probably as far off the mark in her estimation of the potentiality of the cold satellites of the gas giant worlds. My business, I was utterly convinced, was with Earth and solid history, not Titan and wild optimism. I never stopped replying to her messages with mechanical regularity, but I did stop listening to their exhortations.
It must have seemed to the majority of the Earthbound that Thanaticism had already petered out as the turn of the century approached. The word eventually ceased to appear in the headlines. In fact, its last followers had “gone underground”—which is to say that Thanaticist martyrs no longer attempted to stage their exits before the largest audiences they could obtain but instead saved their performance for small, carefully selected groups. This was not a response to persecution but merely a variation in the strange game that they were playing: indulgence in a different kind of drama.
I knew about this development because there was no let up in the communications with which diehard Thanatics continued to batter my patient AI interceptor. My presence at a martyrdom had become one of the few remaining prizes, avidly sought by aficionados in spite of the fact that my debate with Hellward Lucifer Nyxson had been long forgotten by everyone except the diehards themselves.
Although my patient silver took care of all my communication with the world outside, I could not resist the temptation to look over its shoulder occasionally as it parried the thrusts of the now-esoteric Thanaticists. I took due note, therefore, of a gradual shift in Thanaticist philosophy, which deemphasized brutal martyrdom in favor of long-term flirtations with danger. Such flirtations constantly exposed the cultists to the risk of death while keeping the skillful and the fortunate permanently in the game. Some were content to indulge in life-threatening sporting contests, often of a bizarre nature, but others preferred to cultivate a calculatedly unhealthy interest in disease.
Although a few twenty-eighth century Thanaticist martyrs had used diseases as a means of suicide the majority of “soft Thanatics” had always been content to pose as connoisseurs of exotic experience, in much the same spirit as my old acquaintance Ziru Majumdar. The continuation of their interests long after the initial moral panic had abated stimulated a small-scale but thriving black market in designer carcinogens and bioengineered pathogens.
Although the original agents of smallpox, cholera, bubonic plague, and syphilis were long extinct, the modern world abounded in clever genetic engineers who could synthesize similar viruses with very little effort. As the twenty-eighth century died and the twenty-ninth began, the less scrupulous among them found eager clients