“Even you’ll have to admit now that everything’s changed, Morty. Earth isn’t the game board any more. The Hardinist case for its careful preservation as the footsloggers’ ultimate refuge has gone right out the window. The galaxy hasto be full of worlds like Ararat and Maya. Terra-formable ecospheres mustbe a dime a dozen. The only mystery is the Fermi paradox. If we’re here, where the hell are all the others? You’re a historian, Morty—you know how hard we tried to obliterate ourselves, and stillwe made it. The others have to be here too, even if we can’t tune into their beacons, and it’s only a matter of time before we run into them. After that… everything will change again, and nobody can guess exactly how.”

She had much more to say, of course, but that was the red meat. The race was on, and after the race would come the conflict, and after the conflict… the ecocatastrophes and the wars?

I didn’t even recognize the names of some of the factions to which Emily referred so casually. I knew that there were people in the Oort Halo, but I had no idea that they constituted a “crowd” or what their gang mentality might be. I had only the vaguest notion about the composition of the New Arkers and had previously thought of them as merely one more set of eccentrics intent on hollowing out asteroids to make microworlds. I did, however, have some inkling of what Cyborganizers were, by virtue of living with Tricia Ecosura. She often mentioned them, sometimes critically and sometimes sympathetically, but always giving the impression that they were a coming thing, as revolutionary in their own fashion as the newly rampant Continental Engineers.

Under different circumstances, I might have asked Emily to give me a much more detailed account of what she thought the various Maya-bound factions were up to, but it didn’t seem politic. For one thing, I felt that Julius Ngomi was sure to be listening in, and I didn’t want to be his mule. For another, I had to concentrate on the two tasks I now had on hand where there had previously been only one.

I could have taken time out from my history to think about the farthest horizons of the expanding Oikumene, had it not been for the fact that any such time was already spoken for, but I had already agreed to dedicate any and all such time to Lua Tawana, who was growing up quickly. For that reason, I let the matter slide. My reply to Emily’s dispatch acknowledged what she had said but did not engage with it in any intellectually serious fashion. Having not yet parented a child of her own, she probably did not understand, but she made allowances anyhow.

For me, she always did make allowances—and this time, I felt fully entitled to claim them. I was, after all, a man with parental responsibilities.

PART FIVE Responsibility

The triumph of Earthbound humanity is that individual people are still so stubbornly different from one another. Half a millennium of universal emortality has not eroded, let alone erased, the variety of human personality. Instead, our longevity has allowed us to hone and refine our individuality to an exactitude that our remote ancestors would have found astonishing. The Thanaticists were only half right when they claimed that this process of refinement was the work of Sculptor Death, only made possible by the sacrifice of alternative pathways in the brain, just as the Cyborganizers are only half right when they claim that we cannot evolve any further unless we open up new neural pathways for which natural selection has made no provision. The truth is that the natural process of growing older, no matter how long it might be protracted, cannot and does not involve the elimination of the elasticity of human thought and human possibility. The process of further human evolution must, in essence, be an extrapolation of our innate resources, no matter how cleverly and elaborately they are augmented by external technology.

However conducive it might be to Utopian ease and calm, it would not be good for humankind if we were ever to become so similar to one another that it became impossible for people to think one another mad or seriously misguided. Although those extremists who decide to die after a mere seventy or eighty years seem bizarre to sensible moderates, while those who only want to live forever do not, even emortals have to come to terms with the fact that death isinevitable. No matter how hard we may pretend that true emortality has turned wheninto if, the fact remains that we are not immortal. In time, the sun will die; in time, the universe itself will fade into dark oblivion; even the Type-4 speculators who assure us that the extinction of our own inflationary domain will not prevent our remotest descendants from seeking new opportunities in the Unobservable Beyond are only speaking in terms of postponement. At heart, we are all Thanaticists in the sense that everyone who is not rudely seized by predatory death must ultimately make his own compact with the ultimate enemy—and we are all Cyborganizers in the sense that everyone must decide exactly which augmentary technologies he will deploy within the terms of that compact.

—Mortimer Gray

Part Ten of The History of Death

SIXTY-FIVE

Lua Tawana was the linchpin of my world for more than twenty years, and she remained its most significant anchorage long after that. I had not given the matter much consideration before, but as soon as she learned to speak, the logic of the situation became clear. Everyone has a multiplicity of parents, but very few of the Earthbound foster more than one child. Child rearing is the only emotional luxury so strictly rationed on Earth that it is bound to seem like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity even to people who hope to live for millennia. It is hardly surprising that emortal parents become obsessed with the mental development their children—even parents who have decided to maintain the momentum of their careers throughout the years of parenthood.

No matter how clearly focused one becomes during a child-rearing marriage, however, other things do intrude. It was easy enough for me to relegate from immediate concern the developments in and beyond the outer solar system that Emily Marchant was so keen to bring to my attention, but it was not so easy to ignore matters occupying the attention of my marriage partners. I tried hard, and I have no doubt that they tried equally hard, but certain things intruded in spite of all our best efforts, and one of them was Tricia’s increasing involvement in the 2920s with the Cyborganizers. I think I might have held myself aloof even from that had it not been for an unfortunate stroke of coincidence, but I have always been a trifle accident-prone and that was one vulnerability that did not depart as I attained the age of reason and responsibility.

At the most elementary level, the Cyborganizers were merely the newest generation of apologists for cyborgization. They adopted a new title purely in order to make themselves seem more original than they were. In fact, there had always been such apologists around, but the increasing use of cyborgization in adapting people to live and work in space and the hostile environments of other worlds within the solar system had given new ammunition to those who felt that similar opportunities ought to be more widely explored on Earth.

The progress of the “new” movement followed a pattern that had now become familiar to all serious historians if not to the present-obsessed media audience. All the old controversies regarding “brain-feed” equipment surfaced yet again, refreshed by controversy, and all the old tales about wondrous technologies secretly buried by the world’s paternalistic masters began to do the rounds, neatly varnished with a superficial gloss of modernity. TV current-affairs shows initially treated the propaganda flow with amused contempt, but as the stream built toward a tide the casters began to feed off it more extravagantly, and hence to feed it, thus accelerating its ascent to fashionability.