I used the compensation money I had extracted from my former landlord to buy a modest hometree way upstream in La Urbana, a town that had once been the hub of a massive ecological reconstruction operation but had since become the effective terminus of the river-based tourist trade. It was a busy place by comparison with Cape Adare, but its business was conducted at a much slower pace. Its inhabitants seemed idle almost to the point of somnolence, even when they were working flat out.

I liked living beside the great river. Grizel’s death in the Kwarra was far enough behind me by then for the psychological scar to have healed, and I found it rather charming that the Venezuelans, unlike the Nigerians, had reintroduced alligators to the Orinoco shallows.

Although I was busy with overdue revisions of the first versions of parts one and two of my history, and with intensive research for part four, Emily’s criticisms made me pay far more attention than had lately become my habit to the news behindthe headlines, and it was thus that I became belatedly aware of the insidious spread of the attitudes that I had first met in the person of Ziru Majumdar and the dark fashions that were soon to climax in the rebirth of Thanaticism.

As soon as I fully understood what I had been missing I swore that I would never be so neglectful again. As thehistorian of mortality, it was plainly my duty to keep track of that tiny fraction of death’s history that was still in the making. In the beginning, however, I did not realize the significance of what was happening.

The TV pundits who became more and more anxious about “the pornography of death” initially took a censorious line, taking it for granted in their customary fashion that all sensible folk agreed with them. It did not seem to them—or to me—that there was anything new or particularly disturbing about the growing fascination with images of pain and death.

Death was, of course, still present in the world, but the end of inevitabledeath was in sight. The last false emortals had not yet passed away, but their days were numbered in the thousands, if not in the hundreds. The requiem for the Old Human Race was in progress; had there been any church bells remaining in the world, they would have been tolling for our ancestor species. In such circumstances, a revival of interest in death seemed only natural, and the frank morbidity of that interest did not seem particularly perverse or dangerous. The remaining triple rejuvenates were all celebrities, simply by virtue of having taken the technology of repair to its limits. The death of every one of them was intrinsically newsworthy—far more newsworthy, in fact, than the occasional accidental deaths of relatively young emortals.

As a historian, I was able to take a certain connoisseur pleasure in what seemed to me to be a perfectly understandable irony: that an audience of true emortals whose IT gave them complete control over the ravages of pain should have become fascinated with the idea of death. I thought it entirely appropriate that the chief corollary of that interest should be a renaissance of interest in the role that death had played in the prenanotech world, when it had almost invariably been accompanied by physical pain and psychological anguish.

Having met Ziru Majumdar, I already knew that some emortals had begun experimenting with the experience of pain. As a historian, I knew well enough that even in the earliest days of Internal Technology there had been some people who used the resilience it gave them to indulge a taste for violent and dangerous activities, and that there had been a thriving pornography of violence in the twenty-second century, born of the optimism that misled the earliest false emortals to think that they might have set foot on an escalator that would take them all the way to true emortality. Unfortunately, I was slow to combine the two items of knowledge into an anticipation of the way in which the new fascination with the pornography of death would give rise to a new masochism.

The groundwork for the so-called Thanaticist Manifesto was laid not merely by people like Ziru Majumdar but by people like Mia Czielinski. No blame attaches to Emily Marchant, of course, but her artistic adventures had made it clear to millions of people that what they had previously accepted as the bounds of aesthetic experience were far narrower than anyone had expected. Once the quest for new aesthetic experiences became worldwide, the opportunity was opened for Majumdar’s explorations in discomfort and distress to move into the cultural mainstream. Now that true emortality was almost universal, and nanotechnology was even cleverer in compensating for pain and injury than it had been in the twenty-second century, the kind of people who delighted in the reeducation of their eyes by ice palaces moved on easily enough to the supposed reeducation of their flesh, testing the limits of their psychological and physical endurance in every imaginable way.

I would probably have realized this sooner had I stayed in Antarctica, but from the viewpoint of La Urbana in the first decade of the twenty-eighth century the whole affair looked like a storm in a teacup—the teacup in question being the weird parallel universe of VE land. It was there that the new pornography of violence was produced and marketed and there that the TV pundits took leave to lament the fact and issue terrible prophecies about its likely effects. I could never take the garrulous imbeciles seriously, and the force of that habit made me laugh derisively when they first began to proclaim, in terrified tones, that the new masochism was bound to cause a new Thanaticism to rear its ugly head.

Alas, even casters have to be right sometimes.

FORTY

It was the followers of a movement that had flourished at the very end of the twenty-fifth century and the beginning of the twenty-sixth who had actually coined the term Thanaticism.It had been an early folly of the last generation of false emortals, whose last representatives were now in the process of quitting the Earth. Some of those unlucky enough to have been born after the advent of Zaman transformations, resentful of the disastrous choice made by their foster parents not to take advantage of the new technology, had perversely elected to reject the benefits of rejuvenation too, making a fetish out of living only a “natural” life span.

At the time, the Thanaticists had often been bracketed in common parlance—mistakenly, I think—with the earlier cult of Robot Assassins, who had themselves been mistakenly thought of as a revival of the twenty-second-century movement of self-styled Eliminators.

The Robot Assassins had taken the view that the progressive cyborgization of double and triple rejuvenates equipped with ever-more-sophisticated IT was transforming them into “robots” no longer capable of empathizing with “true” human beings: implicitly sociopathic individuals. The result of this progressive dehumanization of the old, the Robot Assassins contended, was that Earth was falling into the hands of unhuman individuals whose lack of fellow-feeling would eventually manifest itself as malevolence toward their feeling kin. In order to prevent the “robotic revolution” the Robot Assassins had embarked upon a campaign of murder, while swearing an oath that they would commit suicide before suffering “robotization” themselves. It was this last aspect of their credo that had caused contemporary commentators to put the first Thanaticists in the same bracket, even though the Thanaticists did not advocate assassination as a political means.

In the twenty-sixth century no one had thought it possible that genetically endowed emortals could ever embrace Thanaticism, and the cult was conventionally regarded as a petty and essentially futile rebellion against fate, whose adherents would swiftly eliminate themselves from the fabric of history. There were, however, a few Thanaticists who encouraged the view that they were closely akin to the Robot Assassins by arguing that in spite of their exclusive reliance on biological mechanisms of longevity, true emortals would suffer robotization nevertheless and that the inheritors of Earth would eventually become indistinguishable from programmed artificial intelligences.