I have no need to rely on my memories in recapitulating these episodes, because they remain on the record—but by the same token, there is no need for me to quote extensively from them. The interviews rapidly settled into a pattern. In the early days, when I was a relatively new face, my interrogators invariably started out by asking me to supply elementary details of my project and its progress, and their opening questions were usually stolen from uncharitable reviews.

“Some people seem to feel that you’ve been carried away, Mister Gray,” more than one combative interviewer sneeringly began, “and that what started out as a sober history was already becoming an obsessive rant, ripe for appropriation by the Thanaticists. Did you decide to get personal in order to boost your sales?”

My careful cultivation of neo-Epicureanism and my years in Antarctica had provided a useful legacy of calm formality. I handled such accusations with punctilious politeness.

“The war against death has always been personal,” I would reply. “It’s still a personal matter, even for true emortals. Without a sense of personal relevance, it would be impossible for a historian and his readers to put themselves imaginatively in the shoes of the people of the ancient past, thus obtaining empathetic insight into their plight. If I seem to be making heroes of the men of the past when I describe their various crusades, it’s because they wereheroes—and I would far rather my contemporaries found inspiration in my work because they were eager to be heroes in the same cause.”

“The Thanaticists say that’s exactly what they’re doing,” the interviewers would put in, helpfully, thus setting up the next phase of the argument.

“Unfortunately,” I would say, “the so-called Thanaticists have misunderstood what it means to be a hero in the contemporary context. Culturally, we have to go further forward, not backward. The engineering of emortality has made us victors in the war against death, and we need to retain a proper sense of triumph. We ought to celebrate our victory over death as joyously as possible, lest we lose our appreciation of its fruits.”

My interviewers always appreciated that kind of link. “That’s your judgment of the Thanaticists, then?” they would follow up, eagerly. “You think that they don’t have a proper appreciation of the fruits of our victory over mortality?”

I did think that, and I was prepared to say so at any length my interlocutors considered appropriate. It soon became unnecessary for me to describe my Historyin detail, because the interviewers began to take it for granted that everyone knew who I was and what I’d done. I found it rather flattering that my place on the public agenda was secure and became even more relaxed when I was called upon to wax lyrical on the subject of the latest Thanaticist publicity stunt. Having established me as a public figure and put me at my ease, however, the casters became eager to throw me into the lion’s den, where I could fight the misappropriators of my intellectual property man to man.

I thought I could handle it. So did Minna and Eve. Even Axel and Jodocus offered moral support, although Camilla did warn me to be careful and Keir lost interest when I told him for the sixth or seventh time that I didn’t intend to say anything at all about Gaea.

FORTY-THREE

The most familiar public face of the Thanaticist cult, in 2732, was a woman named Emmanuelle Standress. She often insisted that she was merely a representative of the reclusive Hellward Lucifer Nyxson, but it was widely believed that there was no such person and that the Thanaticist Manifesto had been cooked up by a committee. She readily agreed to a live debate with me. Having studied her previous TV appearances I decided that she was unlikely to get the better of me. She was much younger than I—in her mid-fifties—and I could not help but think of her as a mere child ripe for instruction.

I can understand now that I was rather naive. EdEnt’s stage managers must have laid much more elaborate plans than I suspected at the time. From their point of view, my new “career” as a public figure was something to be plotted with care, and they must have decided in advance what complications they were going to introduce into the plot in order to provide it with an adequate climax. I didn’t know that my confrontation with Standress was merely a taster and that another was being carefully held in reserve. Emmanuelle Standress presumably understood the way the game was played far better than I did—she must, of course, have known that she was merely the challenger employed to build up audience anticipation for the realchampionship bout.

As I’d expected, Standress took much the same argumentative line as my old marriage-partner Keir, suggesting that I’d been too narrowly focused on my own work to grasp its wider implications.

“You’re an academic historian, after all,” she said, delicately veiling the tacit sneer. “A cloistered pedant, preoccupied with matters of detail, unable to see the wood for the trees. By your own admission, you’re only three-sevenths of the way to your conclusion, and it’s understandable that you don’t want to get ahead of yourself—but we don’t need to wait. We can already see the whole pattern and the central message. Without suffering and death, life is incomplete. If New Humans are to experience the entire spectrum of available experience, we must refuse nothing, including suffering in all its myriad forms—and, ultimately, death itself.”

“If we’re to refuse nothing,” I retorted, “then we ought not to accept death until we have run the entire gamut of intermediate experiences—and we have no reason, as yet, to think of that range as anything less than infinite. If we can survive the cruel accidents of misfortune, we certainly shouldn’t consent to die by our own hands, or even endanger ourselves unnecessarily, until the very end of time—or as close to it as we can get.”

“Many of us will undoubtedly do their level best to do exactly that,” she came back. “So many, in fact, that will they run the risk of dedicating all their resources to the task and losing sight of everything else. The instincts of self-preservation can easily become neurotically anxious and robotically stereotyped. It’s partly for the benefit of the mechanically minded that others choose to exercise their freedom to be different: their freedom to sample extreme experiences without submitting their appetites to be jaded by eternity.”

“‘Submitting their appetites to be jaded by eternity’!” I echoed, with all the contempt I could muster, for the manner of the phrase as well as its content. “Do you imagine that the martyrs of old were afraid of boredom?Are you so contemptibly stupid that you think they died in order that their hardier companions should not lose sight of that which surrounded them and never let them alone: the most brutal fact of their existence? No! The martyrs of old died in the attempt to make the inevitable meaningful. They tried with all their might to deploy faith as a means of transforming the ignominy of death into something fine and noble. They did it because they had no alternative;it was a measure of their desperation. They were heroic because, although they could not avoid death, they would not accept it for what it was. The imagination was their only weapon, and the pretense that death was not the end was their best strategy. There is all the difference in the world between their situation and ours. We have not entirely escaped death, which stalks us in a hundred sly guises, but we have a weapon infinitely more powerful than any possessed by the Old Human Race: we have emortality, and all the strategies that its use opens up. Ourheroism is not that which makes the best of a bitter necessity, but the far better kind, which makes the most of a golden opportunity. Our heroes are those who live longest and best, whose imagination makes the most of life.”