Tor Books by Brian Stableford
Inherit the Earth
Architects of Emortality
The Fountains of Youth
The Fountains
of Youth
B R I A N S T A B L E F O R D
A Tom Doherty Associates Book • New York
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in
this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE FOUNTAINS OF YOUTH
Copyright © 2000 by Brian Stableford
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or
portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor ®is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty
Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 978-0-312-87206-9
ISBN: 0-312-87206-2
First Edition: May 2000
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jane, and everyone engaged in the serious
business of learning to live in the future
Acknowledgements
A much shorter and substantially different version of this novel was published in the April 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.I am very grateful to Gardner Dozois for publishing that novella and reprinting it in his annual collection of the Year’s Best Science Fiction.In the course of researching Mortimer Gray’s History of DeathI consulted numerous academic studies of attitudes to death, of which the most useful proved to be Man’s Concern with Deathby Arnold Toynbee, A. Keith Mant, Ninian Smart, John Hinton, Simon Yudkin, Eric Rhode, Rosalind Hey-wood, and H. H. Price (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968); The Hour of Our Deathby Philippe Aries (London: Allen Lane, 1981); and Death, Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funeral Ritesby Douglas J. Davies (London: Cassell, 1997). I should also like to thank David Lang-ford for his invaluable contributions to the collaborative future history we first set out in The Third Millennium(1985), much of which is reconfigured herein; Jane Stableford for proofreading services and helpful commentary; and David Hartwell for helping to keep the flickering flame alight.
Preface
Anyone who has chosen to read this autobiography must be hoping to gain some insight into the same question that led me to write it: Why did Mortimer Gray write The History of Death?
The easy answer is, of course, that somebody had to do it, and once I had published my first volume I had staked a claim that others were bound to respect, no matter how impatient they became with my slowness or the thrust of my arguments. It would, however, be disingenuous to pretend that anyone else’s history of death would have been exactly the same as mine. The question would still remain: Why did Mortimer Graywrite the particular history that bears his name? What experiences shaped him and cast their shadow upon his history?
It would, I suppose, be possible to begin the search for an explanation with the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, which provided my first near-death experience as well as my first meeting with Emily Marchant, but it would not be right. I was Mortimer Gray long before I set sail on the ill-fated Genesis, and there is a sense in which the historian of death was already in the making before the Decimation. At the risk of telling my readers rather more than they need or desire to know, therefore, I feel that I must start at the very beginning of my own story, with an account of my unusual childhood. There, I hope, it will be possible to locate the seed of the individual that I became and the work that eventually made me famous.
PART ONE Childhood
Mortal humans had no alternative but to live in the present. They woke up every morning knowing that disaster might strike them down before evening in any of a hundred different ways, and they knew that even if they were to survive, still they were ephemera bound to Earth for a mere moment of its history. Our parents and grandparents hoped that they would be different and that they would have the opportunity of living in the future, but their hopes were dashed; no sooner had they reached the crossroads of their burgeoning careers than they learned the sad truth. Ours is the first generation of humans to have the privilege of knowing that we really can live in the future; ours is, therefore, the first generation to have the responsibility and the duty of discovering how that might and ought to be done.
—Mortimer Gray
Introduction to Part One of The History of Death, 2614
one
I was born in 2520, an unexceptional child of the twenty-sixth century. Like my contemporaries, I was the beneficiary of a version of the Zaman transformation, which differs hardly at all from the one most commonly used today. By comparison with the children of previous centuries, however—excepting a minority of those born in the latter decades of the twenty-fifth century—I and all my kind were new. We were the first true emortals, immune to all disease and further aging.
This does not mean, of course, that I shall never die. There are a thousand ways in which the life of an emortal might be ended by accident or misadventure. In any case, future generations may well regard it as a major discourtesy for any earthbound person to postpone voluntary extinction too long—and those who choose not to remain earthbound multiply the risk of eventual death by accident or misadventure at least a hundredfold.