I could not help but wonder, afterward, whether I had already begun to aspire to the robot condition. I couldn’t help asking myself whether, as Hadria Nuccoli would presumably have argued, I was fleeing from true human potential because I was incapable of loving anything but the sepulchral death-in-life that was the emortal condition.
Was it conceivable, I wondered, that she might have been right about the nature of the authenticfountain of youth?
I concluded, on due reflection, that she was wrong in every respect. That may have been why, in the end, I lived and she died. On the other hand, the nanotech injected into her body by the doctors may simply have arrived too late to turn the tide.
I wept for her when they told me she’d died and wished with all my heart that she hadn’t, even though I knew that if there were tears on the far side of life, she would be lamenting my inability to join her.
Although it was entirely unlike my previous close encounters with death, my infection by Hadria Nuccoli was just as disturbing in its own way. I tried to regard it as a minor hiccup in the settled pattern of my life—something to be survived, put away and forgotten—but I couldn’t quite put the pattern back together again.
The last thing I’d expected when I set out to write a History of Deathwas that my explanatory study might actually assist the dread empire of death to regain a little of the ground it had lost in the world of human affairs. Even though the Thanaticists and their successors were willfully misunderstanding and perverting the meaning of my work, I felt that my objectivity had been fatally contaminated when the protective walls of my home had been breached, and that the stain would not be easily eradicated. I knew that I still owed it to the Thanaticists as well as to everyone else to make the true message of my work clear, but while my own mind was less than perfectly clear that task seemed impossible.
I felt that I could not stay on Cape Wolstenholme and that I could never live in such a frail dwelling again.
I had to move again—but where could I go? Where on Earth, and in what kind of home, could I recover the equilibrium I had lost and the objectivity that would always be under threat while there were people like Hadria Nuccoli in the world?
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 from a view composed entirely of stars.
FIFTY-ONE
Emily was, of course, highly delighted when I told her of my decision, and she sent a message back from Io that was overflowing with enthusiastic congratulations. I was slow to reply to it because I felt slightly guilty about concealing my true motives for making the move. She thought I was being bold, whereas I was actually going into hiding, and I dared not even try to explain that to Emily. I excused my tardiness by telling myself—and her, when I finally did get around to replying—that I had to concentrate on the business of adapting myself to a new world and a new society.
As I had expected, I found life on the moon very different from anything I’d experienced in my travels around the Earth’s surface. It wasn’t so much the change in gravity, although that certainly took a lot of getting used to, or the severe regime of daily exercise in the centrifuge that I had to adopt in order to make sure that I might one day return to the world of my birth without extravagant medical provision. Nor was it the fact that the environment was so comprehensively artificial or that it was impossible to venture outside without special equipment; in those respects it was much like Antarctica. The most significant difference was in the people.
Mare Moscoviense had few tourists—tourists mostly stayed Earth-side, making only brief trips farside—but most of its inhabitants were nevertheless just passing through. It was one of the main jumping-off points for emigrants, largely because it was an important industrial center. It was the site of one of the solar system’s largest factories for the manufacture of shuttles and other local-space vehicles, and it was host to hundreds of nanotech studios and shamir manufactories. It was one of the chief trading posts supplying materials to the microworlds in Earth orbit and beyond, so many of its visitors came in from the farther reaches of the solar system.