The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [98]
The answer was simple enough, once I had made up my mind. If there was nowhere on Earth, 1 had to take the step that Mama Siorane had urged me to take more than a hundred years before—the step that Emily Marchant also wanted me to take. I had to find a vantage point from which the trials and travails of Earthbound humanity could be seen from a proper distance, dispassionately.
I remembered while I lay in the hospital, without any companion to keep me company, that one of my last live appearances on TV had taken place in a VE that reproduced an image of a lunar observatory. It had been selected as the appropriate site for a discussion in which a faber named Khan Mirafzal had argued, rather vehemently, that Thanaticism was evidence of the fact that Earthbound man was becoming decadent. I had heard distinct echoes of Mama Siorane and Emily in his fierce insistence that the progressive future of humankind lay outside Earth, in the microworlds and the distant colonies.
Like Emily, Khan Mirafzal had claimed that humans genetically reshaped for life in low gravity or for the colonization of alien worlds were immune to Thanaticist follies because it was perfectly obvious that all the projects and possibilities that beckoned to them required longevity and calm of mind. Everyone who lived in space tended to wax lyrical about the supposed decadence of the Earthbound, much as the extreme Gaean Liberationists did, but as I reflected on my plight in the hospital I recalled that Mirafzal’s arguments had been balanced by an unusually coherent idea of the intellectual virility of the “outward bound.”
“While the surface of the earth still provided challenges, those who dwelt upon it knew that they were not yet complete,” he had said, when we first met, “but now that it offers only limitations, its inhabitants are bound to grow introspective. Not all introspection is unhealthy, but even at the end of the psychological spectrum opposite to Thanaticism there is closure, imprisonment, and stultification. The L-5 habitats may seem to the Earthbound to be the ultimate in physical enclosure, but the people who live within them—especially those like myself, who have forsaken heavy legs in order to have the benefit of four arms—know that the whole universe awaits us. We are citizens of infinity and must therefore be citizens of eternity. We have changed ourselves in order to become champions of change.”
The moderator of our conversation had dutifully pointed out that the surface of Earth was still changing and that there were many among the Earthbound who were determined to see that it never became fixed and sterile.
“The central doctrine of Planned Capitalism is continuous change within a stable frame,” Mirafzal had countered, “I’m not talking about change for the sake of commerce. There’s no fashion on the moon. I’m talking about future evolution: expansion into the galaxy; meetings with other minds; adaptation to all kinds of circumstances; life without boundaries and without the possibility of boundaries. That requires a very different psychology. The Earthbound can have no idea of what it is like to be truly human until they step outside their frame into reality.”
At the time, it had seemed like mere cleverness, talk for talk’s sake, like everything else on TV. Now, I figured that it was high time I tested it out. I would have called Emily had she been close enough to Earth, but she was too far away; Khan Mirafzal seemed to be the best available substitute. He was pleased to hear from me and more than glad to have the opportunity to repeat his arguments in more sympathetic circumstances. He talked, and I listened. I allowed myself to be convinced and decided to leave Earth, at least for a while, to investigate the farther horizons of the human enterprise.
In 2825 I flew to the moon. After some hesitation, I settled in Mare Moscoviense. I thought it best to try out the side that faces away from Earth so that I might benefit