The history of medicine and the conquest of disease were, of course, topics of elementary education in the twenty-ninth century. There was supposedly not a citizen of any nation to whom the names of Semmelweis, Jenner, and Pasteur were unknown—but disease had been so long banished from the world, and it was so completely outside the experience of ordinary men and women, that what people “knew” about it was never really brought to consciousness and never came alive to the imagination. Although recreational diseases were still relatively commonplace in the Big Well in the 2840s, popular usage of words such as smallpox, plague, and cancerwas almost exclusively metaphorical.

I would have liked The War of Attritionto remind the world of certain issues that, though not exactly forgotten, had not been brought to mindwhile the diehard explorers of extreme experience had been injecting themselves with all manner of tailored germs, but I cannot pretend that it did. It is at least arguable that it touched off a few unobtrusive ripples whose movement across the collective consciousness of world culture was of some moment, but I dare not press the point. The simple fact is that the name of Mortimer Gray was no longer notorious in 2849, and his continuing work had not yet become firmly established within the zeitgeist.

FIFTY-FIVE

During my latter years in Mare Moscoviense I was often visited by Khan Mirafzal, the faber with whom I had crossed swords on terrestrial TV. The culture of the fabers was so much more geared to face-to-face interaction than that of lunar footsloggers, let alone the thoroughly privatized societies of Earth, that it was a rare faber who would not “drop in” if he happened to be passing the residence of a friend he had not seen for a month or more. When he returned to the moon briefly from the microworld in the asteroid belt that was now his home, Mirafzal automatically came along in person to find out how I was getting along.

His own news was, inevitably, rather more interesting than mine.

Mirafzal explained to me that the microworld on which he lived was being fitted with an antimatter drive that would take it out of the system and into the infinite. Its prospective voyagers were going to great pains to make sure that it was properly equipped for its departure and Mirafzal was one of those charged with the duty of keeping close track of technical progress in the inner system to make sure that no opportunity went unseized.

“We’ll keep in touch by radio, of course,” he said, “but we need to be sure that we’re in a position to take advantage of any new developments that come up while we’re deep in interstellar space.”

Mirafzal was a kind and even-tempered man who would not have dreamed of adopting salesmanlike tactics to convince me of the error of my Earthbound ways, but he was also a man with a sublime vision who could not restrain his enthusiasm for his own chosen destiny. He swept aside my mildly skeptical observations about the prospect of being enclosed in such a tiny space for hundreds of years with the same faces and voices. It was with him that I had the conversations that I couldn’t yet have with Emily, and to him that I exposed my doubts about the direction in which I ought to be going. He was a good listener, and he took me seriously. He was the only faber I knew who did not laugh when I used footslogger metaphors in all seriousness, and he even condescended to use them himself.

“I have no roots on Earth, Mortimer, in any metaphorical sense whatsoever,” he assured me, when I wondered whether even he might become homesick in the great void beyond the Oort Cloud. “In my being, the chains of adaptation have been decisively broken. Every man of my kind is born anew, designed and synthesized. We are the self-made men, who belong everywhere and nowhere. The wilderness of empty space that you find so appalling is our realm and our heritage. I am homesick now, but when the voyage begins, I will be doing what I am designed to do.”

“But you’ve lived alongside unmodified humans throughout your formative years,” I pointed out. “You’ve always lived amid the scattered masses of the solar family. To you, as to me, the utter desolation of the void will surely be strange and alien.”

“Nothing is strange to us,” he assured me. “Nothing is foreign and nothing is alien.”

“My point exactly,” I replied, wryly.

He smiled politely at the joke, but would not retreat from his position.

“Blastular engineering has incorporated freedom into our blood and our bones,” he said, “and I intend to take full advantage of that freedom. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of my nature.”

“While my own blastular engineering served only to complete the adaptation to life on Earth that natural selection had left incomplete,” I mused, applying his logic to my own situation. “Given that I can never be free from the ties that bind me to Earth, perhaps I have no alternative but to return.”

“That’s not so,” he countered. “Natural selection would never have devised emortality, for natural selection can only generate change by death and replacement. When genetic engineers found the means of setting aside the curse of aging they put an end to naturalselection forever. The first and greatest freedom is time, my friend, and you have all the time in the world. You can become whatever you want to be. If you wish, you may even become a faber of sorts—although I gather that you have no such ambition. What doyou want to be, Mortimer?”

“A historian,” I told him, reflexively. “It’s what I am because it’s what I want to be.”

“All well and good, for now,” he conceded, “but history isn’t inexhaustible, Mortimer, as you well know. It ends with the present day, the present moment, and no matter how slowly you can recapitulate its achievements, you’ll have to arrive in the present someday. The future, on the other hand, is…”

“Given to your kind,” I said, although I assumed that he was going to say infinite.“I know all that, Mira. I don’t dispute any of it. But what exactly isyour kind, given that you rejoice in such freedom to be anything you want to be?”

“Not yet,” he said. “We’ve hardly scratched the surface of constructive cyborgization. That will open up a whole new dimension of freedom.”

“And reopen all the old arguments about robotization,” I added. “The older I get, the more sense those arguments seem to make. Once your little world is lost in the emptiness, effectively cut off from everything else in the universe, how will you avoid the trap of endless repetition? How will you maintain spontaneity, change, difference?”

“Earth is just a bigger spaceship,” Mirafzal reminded me. “The whole solar system is a narrow room—and will one day become exactly that, complete with enclosing walls, if the Type-2 enthusiasts get their way. Even if a rival sect of cosmic engineers eventually wins through, it will only change the decor—and after humankind attains Type-2, the galaxy will become the playground of the Type-3 visionaries. Spontaneity, change, and difference have to come from within, Morty. Cyborgization isn’t robotization; it’s enhancement, not mechanization.”

“And spacefarers will be its pioneers, figuring out how to do it and why while all the lazy footsloggers live on the capital of Earth’s evolutionary momentum,” I conceded, with a sigh. “Maybe you’re right, Mira. Maybe it is just my legs that weigh my spirit down—but if so, then I’m well and truly addicted to gravity. I can’t cast off the past like a worn-out suitskin. I know you think I ought to envy you, but I don’t. You think that I and all my kind are clinging like a terrified infant to Mother Earth while you and your kind are achieving true maturity, but I really do think that it’s important to have somewhere to belong.”