Alongside the weapons by which the long war against death might be won, humankind had also developed the weapons by which it might be lost. Nuclear arsenals and stockpiles of biological weaponry were scattered all over the globe: twin pistols held in death’s skeletal hands, leveled at a human race that had largely forsaken the consolations of religion and the glorifications of patriotism.

As the twenty-first century gave way to the twenty-second, I proposed, humankind was no longer teetering on the brink of total disaster; it had actually plunged over the edge, its members having left their traditional parachutes behind. The new medical technologies that had held out the tantalizing promise of emortality ever since Morgan Miller’s ill-fated experiments had been publicized had only the narrowest margin of opportunity in which to operate.

The wounds inflicted by the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first century could so easily have been mortal, and it was not easy for any historian to distinguish between the people who had only been part of the problem and those who had made contributions to its solution. In the end, the soft landing had been achieved as much by luck as judgment, in my estimation. Biotechnology, having passed through the most hectic phase of its evolution, had stayed one vital step ahead of the terrible problems that its lack had generated. In spite of the various forces warping its development, food technology had achieved a merciful and relatively orderly divorce from the bounty of nature, moving out of the fields and into the factories. The liberation of humanity from the vagaries of climate and natural selection had begun, and the first pavements had been set on the route to Garden Earth.

I argued that whatever teething troubles it had undergone—and was still undergoing—the production of a political apparatus enabling human beings to take collective control of themselves was a remarkable triumph of human sanity. I took great care to emphasize that in the final analysis it was not scientific progress per se that had won the war against death but the ability of human beings to work together, to compromise with one another, and to build viable communities out of disparate and disagreeable raw materials.

That human beings possessed this ability was, I argued, the legacy of thousands of years of silly superstition, irrational religion, and pigheaded patriotism rather than the product of a few hundred years of science. The human race had turned twenty-first-century crisis into twenty-second-century triumph not because its members had become biotechnologically sophisticated but because they were veterans of a long and fierce war against death. Biotechnology had provided the tools, but death had provided the motivation.

Apart from slanders heaped upon it by offended would-be Hardinists intent on currying favor with Earth’s masters, The Last Judgmentattracted little attention from laypeople. It was generally held to be dealing with matters that everyone understood very well, striving a little too hard for an original slant. This seemed a meager reward for all the work I had put in, especially the delving I had done since my return to Earth into the archival deposits that Julius Ngomi had once described as “the litter that dare not speak its name.” Those critics who admitted that they had been anticipating the successor to the previous volume with some enthusiasm excused their lukewarm response by saying that the new offering had not carried my quest far enough forward.

Even the least generous of my academic critics could not fault the massiveness of the knot of associated data that I had brought together, or the cleverness with which it had been mazed, but they still felt free to declare that I should have carried the story farther forward in time. Almost without exception, the reviewers pointed out that I had originally intended the work to be seven volumes long, and that it now seemed unlikely that nine would suffice, let alone eight—and they were absolutely unanimous in regretting that inflation.

The whole world, it seemed, was impatient to be done with the History of Death—but I was still determined to do the job properly, no matter how long it took.

SIXTY-FOUR

I had maintained my correspondence with Emily Marchant despite the restrictions placed upon it by the time delay. I sent her a long oration lamenting the unsympathetic reception of The Last Judgmenteven though I knew that she would align herself with my detractors. It might have been more pleasant to speak of other matters, but ever since Julius Ngomi had appeared in the unlikely role of agent provocateur I had been very careful not to mention the planet Jupiter, and since marrying into the Continental Engineers I didn’t want to get involved in heavy discussions of cutting-edge gantzing technics. I had become rather anxious that my private correspondence might get hijacked, if not by eavesdroppers then by my nearest and supposedly dearest.

Fortunately, by the time that Emily formulated her reply to my message, she had more important things to discuss than the alleged futility of my mission. Hot on the heels of the Hope’sdiscovery of Ararat came the discovery by Vishnu, a silver-piloted kalpa probe launched in 2827, of an “Earthlike” world orbiting a G-type star in Scorpio. Like Ararat, this planet’s elaborate ecosphere had produced animal species analogous to all the major groups of Earthly animals, including two that seemed to be on the verge of true intelligence.

The new world, called Maya by the silver’s masters, seemed no more inviting to would-be colonists than Ararat, but it caused a great deal more excitement. Hopewas widely considered within the Oikumene to be a direly unsatisfactory platform for colonization, partly by virtue of its antiquity and partly by virtue of the catalog of mistakes and hesitations dutifully recorded by the Ark’s transmissions. Maya, having been found by machines, awaited the careful attention of a colonization mission planned by thirtieth-century sophisticates and executed with the aid of the full panoply of modern technology.

The only question to be answered was whichgroup of thirtieth-century sophisticates would be entrusted with the task.

Had I thought more deeply about the matter, I might have anticipated the chaos that would ensue, but I was too busy. It was not until Emily’s message arrived that I realized that a serious conflict of interest had arrived in the system even sooner than Julius Ngomi’s colleagues and collaborators had expected.

“The race is on,” Emily told me, speaking from one of her favorite VEs, which set her against a vertiginous background of ice mountains. “By the time the Hardinists had got around to sending out invitations to their conference it was way too late. The fabers weren’t about to give away their head start, so your old friend Khan Mirafzal is already diverting his microworld’s course Scorpioward. The Oort Halo crowd reckon that they can still overtake him if they take direct aim, and the New Ark people figure that even if they can’t quite get there firstest they can still land the mostest men and the bes test equipment. Two other faberweb micro worlds are negotiating with Mirafzal for a planned rendezvous, a pooling of effort and a piece of the action, but they haven’t got near a decision as to whether they ought to reengineer children with legs in order to get a foothold on the planet, or whether they ought to content themselves with setting up an orbital network to work hand-in-hand with the Oort gang, the New Arkers, or both.

“The kalpa programmers are crying foul left, right, and center. Earth’s high-and-mighty will back their claims of ownership right down the line, of course, but they must know that their proclamations won’t mean a thing thirty-nine light years away. The Gaean Libs will probably want the whole process stopped, of course, but that’s just hot air. The real fight will be to determine the methods and objectives of the land grab, and no one thinks that there’s the least chance of settling that in advance. No matter who wins the race, the competition will only intensify once the drops get under way. If the New Arkers were united among themselves they’d have a slim chance of putting a few controls in place, but they’ve always been a loose coalition of interested parties with no meaningful ideological center. In order to get their ship ready in time they’ll have to offer berths to every faction that can help, including the Cyborganizers. The likelihood is that they’ll fragment as soon as they arrive. If you think that Hope’sbotches added up to a fiasco, you ain’t seen nothing yet.