Had I not been living in a place as remote as La Urbana there would have been far more people beating a path to my actual door, but the fact that those who did make the trip found it arduous made them all the more determined not to be turned away. One or two were Thanaticists embarked on insane pilgrimages; the remainder was evenly divided between legmen for the casters and morally panicked opponents of the new movement who wanted me to stand up against my betrayers and denounce them with all the force I could muster.

I had never felt so desperately alone. The last of my parents had now been dead more than half a century, but I had never felt the lack of them so sharply. Emily had already left L-5 for the outer system and the time delay was beginning to make virtual conversation with her too difficult to serve any real consolatory function. In desperation, I forgave Sharane Fereday for the ignominies she had heaped upon me prior to our parting, and called her. I should have known better.

Although Sharane had not become a wholehearted Thanaticist, she was by no means sympathetic to my plight. Her advice, though liberally given, was of little use. She explained at great length why it would do me no harm at all to expand the range of my own allegedly meager experiences. It should not have surprised me in the least that she had become a convert to the ardently curious philosophy of Ziru Majumdar, but it felt like a kind of treason nevertheless.

Fortunately, the veterans of my previous divorce proved to be more generous and more helpful, although they were too hardheaded to be capable of taking the matter very seriously. There was, alas, little or no consistency in their advice.

“They’re just harmless lunatics, Morty,” Axel told me. “It’ll all be a nine days’ wonder. All you have to do is ignore them, and they’ll eventually go away.” Jodocus took the same dismissive line, but the others were a little more forthcoming.

“You have to stand up to them,” Minna advised. “You have to make your own position clear. Don’t consent to be bullied, or they’ll walk all over you. I know you can get the better of them, if you’ll just make the effort.” Eve wasn’t quite so bullish about it, but she agreed that I ought to issue a detailed and formal account of my true position.

Any hope I might have had that Camilla would provide a casting vote soon vanished when I called her. “Personally,” she opined, breezily, “I don’t care how many of them mutilate themselves. I just wish they’d stop messing about with half-measures and go all the way. Think of it as surgery, removing one more cancer from Gaea’s body. I only wish the Rad Libs were suicidally inclined. Did you know that Keir’s still with them—actually on their so-called steering committee? I thought hewas as mad as a New Human could be until this Thanaticist folly came along. Thanaticism is going to work to the Rad Libs’ advantage, don’t you think? How can anyone call the Libs and Mystics crazy while this kind of thing is going on? I know it’s not your fault, but I wish you’d been a little more careful, Morty—heaven only knows whether you can repair the damage.”

Despite their name, the Rad Libs with whom Keir was now allied were not quite the most radical of the Gaean liberationists. They were advocates of a drastic reduction of the numbers of Earthbound humanity rather than the total abandonment of Earth. There had always been “reductionists” in the Gaean ranks, but the new Ice Age had swelled their numbers and increased the fervor of their demands. As Camilla said, the activities of the recreational crucifixionists were making their policies seem somewhat less ridiculous.

I had hesitated over calling Keir, who had left the Rainmakers long before the divorce, but I was intrigued by Camilla’s news. Curiously enough, he was more enthusiastic than any of the others. “Morty!” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you for months. I read your commentary—all three parts. I even delved into the data stream.”

“I’m flattered,” I said.

“No need. It’s good—but you really ought to put in some more about the mythical Gaea. The realmythical Gaea, that is, not the sanitized one. There’s too much twentieth-century sentimentality loaded into the notion of Mother Earth, even now. I mean, Gaea gave birth to Uranus before mating with him—and their first crop of children were all monsters! Uranus couldn’t stand the sight of them, so what did she do? Gave Chronos a sickle and told him to go cut Daddy’s balls off, that’s what! The blood that flooded from the wound brought forth yet another generation of children. All right up your street, I would have thought.”

“Uranus didn’t die,” I pointed out, utterly mystified by the direction the conversation was taking.

“Maybe not, but he did retire from the Earthly scene forever. Castration became the price of new and better life, Morty—the twenty-second century in a nutshell. Then the sky-god vanished into the sky. That’s us, Morty. We have to go—not today or tomorrow, mind, but we will have to go eventually. Reductionism is the first step, and the sooner we get used to the idea the sooner we can plan a sensible timetable. We’ve been properly born, thanks to Ali Zaman, and we have to start making preparations for giving way, not just for more of our own kind but for Gaea’s next generation: products of a whole new evolutionary sequence.”

I couldn’t tell whether Keir’s advocacy of a more extreme reductionism meant that the position of the entire Rad Lib movement was becoming more extreme or whether he was on the brink of defection to the cause of an even smaller minority. “The new human race will never abandon Earth entirely,” I told him.

“Maybe not entirely,” he admitted, giving the impression that he was reluctant to admit even that, “but that doesn’t stop us making room for new kinds. We’ve grown up, and it’s time for all but a few sane stewards to fly the nest. Isn’t that what your Historyis aiming toward? I know I’m reading between the lines, but that’s surely the direction it’s going. If we stick around, we’re still keeping company with death, right? These new Thanaticists are just the first symptom of continued infantilism, no? A horrible example to us all.”

“I’m not a Gaean, Keir,” I told him, mildly appalled by the cavalier way in which he had contrived to read his own ideas into my text. “Not even in a moderate sense. I’m a neo-Epicurean.”

“That’s what you think, Morty,” he said, with a chuckle. “Maybe you’re too close to your own work, but I can see the way it’s going. We’re all Gaeans now, and when the history of death is finished, the history of life has to begin. You’ll get to the point when you get to the end, even if you haven’t quite got there yet.”

By the time I signed off I was numb with confusion—but I suppose it was Keir’s conviction rather than Eive’s and Minna’s well-meant advice that made up my mind for me. It was bad enough to be misunderstood and misappropriated by the Thanatics, without the Gaean Libs and Mystics deciding that I would serve their cause just as well. I decided that I would come out of hiding and that I would come out fighting—for the plain and simple truth.

FORTY-TWO

I carefully sifted through the many invitations I had received to appear on the talk shows that provided the staple diet of contemporary live broadcasting. I accepted half a dozen—and as more poured in, I continued to accept as many as I could conveniently accommodate within the pattern of my life. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Almost all of my VE time for more than a century had been spent in self-selected environments, and even though I had recently begun paying more attention to the news behind the headlines I had only the most rudimentary grasp of the conventions and protocols of live broadcasting.