In the absence of an effective medical science—all the more so once that absence had been recognized and admitted—the war against death was essentially a war of propaganda. I insisted that the myths made by intelligent Greeks had to be judged in that light—not by their truthfulness, even in some allegorical or metaphorical sense, but by their usefulness in generating morale.

I admitted, of course, that the great insight of Hippocrates was fated to be refused and confused for a further two thousand years, while all kinds of witch doctors continued to employ all manner of poisons and tortures in the name of medicine, but I believe that I substantiated my claim that there had been a precious moment when the Hellenic Greeks actually knew what they were about and that this had informed their opposition to death more fruitfully than any previous culture or any of the immediately succeeding ones.

Elaborating and extrapolating the process of death in the way that the Egyptians and Greeks had done, I argued, had enabled a more secure moral order to be imported into social life. Those cultures had achieved a better sense of continuity with past and future generations than any before them, allotting every individual a part within a great enterprise that had extended and would extend, generation to generation, from the beginning to the end of time. I was careful, however, to give due credit to those less-celebrated tribesmen who worshiped their ancestors and thought them always close at hand, ready to deliver judgments upon the living. Such people, I felt, had fully mastered an elementary truth of human existence: that the dead are not entirely gone. Their afterlife continues to intrude upon the memories and dreams of the living, whether or not they were actually summoned. The argument became much more elaborate once I had properly accommodated the Far Eastern, Australasian, and Native American data within it, but its essence remained the same.

My commentary approved wholeheartedly of the idea that the dead should have a voice and must be entitled to speak—and that the living have a moral duty to listen. Because the vast majority of the tribal cultures of the ancient world were as direly short of history as they were of medicine, I argued, they were entirely justified in allowing their ancestors to live on in the minds of living people, where the culture those ancestors had forged similarly resided.

In saying this, of course, I was consciously trying to build imaginative bridges between the long-dead subjects of my analysis and its readers, the vast majority of whom still had their own dead freshly in mind.

I think I did strike a chord in some readers and that I triggered some useful word-of-mouth publicity. At any rate, the second part of my history attracted twice as many browsers in its first year within the Labyrinth, and the number of visitations registered thereafter climbed nearly three times as quickly. This additional attention was undoubtedly due to its timeliness and to the fact that it really did have a useful wisdom to offer the survivors of the Decimation.

TWENTY-NINE

The Decimation was undoubtedly thepivotal event in the early history of the New Human Race. That was only partly due to the nature of the catastrophe, which was uniquely well equipped to bring an appalling abundance of death into a world of emortals. Its timing was equally important, because its significance would have been markedly different had it happened a century earlier or later.

In 2542 the world was still congratulating itself on the latest and last of its many victories over the specter of mortality. Human culture was saturated with the elation of a job completed after much unanticipated confusion and complication and all the true emortals—even the lucky few born more than half a century before me—were still young. Even those who had attained their nineties still thoughtof themselves as young; those like myself, only just emerged from adolescence, knew that we had a long period of apprenticeship to serve before we would be properly fitted to take up the reins of progress from the last generation of the Old Human Race. We knew that the nanotech-rejuvenated false emortals would still be running the world in 2600 but that we would come into our inheritance by slow degrees in the twenty-seventh century. Even those of us who were being groomed for the ultimate responsibility of ownership were not impatient to assume their new duties, and those of us whose portion of the stewardship of Earth would be far leaner were perfectly content to mark time, postponing all our most important decisions until the appropriate time.

I have explained how my own experience in the Coral Sea Disaster helped to focus my own ambition and determination. My sense of urgency did not make me hurry my work—I knew from the beginning that it would be the labor of centuries—but it gave me a strong sense of direction and commitment. People more distant from the epicenter of the event might not have been affected as abruptly or as profoundly, but they were affected. The changes in my personal microcosm reflected more ponderous changes in the social macrocosm of Earthbound humanity.

The research that I did for the third instalment of The History of Death—which began, of course, long before the second was finalized—necessitated a great deal of work on the early history of the major world religions, which my theoretical framework compelled me to view as social and psychological technologies providing arms and armor against death. I could hardly have spent so much time thinking about the birth of the great religions without also thinking about their obliteration, even though that had happened in an era belonging to a much later section of my History.Nor could I think about their obliteration without thinking about their replacement.

In 2542 the most common opinion about the fate of religion was that it had begun to fade away when science exposed the folly of its pretensions to explain the origin and nature of the universe and humankind and that its decline had been inexorable since the eighteenth century. It seemed to me, however, that the early assaults of science and utilitarian moral philosophy had only stripped away the outer layers of religion without ever penetrating to its real heart. It made more sense to see religion as a casualty of the ecocatastrophic Crash that followed the rapid technological development and population growth of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

When the human species came through that trial by fire, thanks to Conrad Helier’s provisions for the first so-called New Human Race, its members were determined to jettison the ideologies that seemed to have played a part in formulating the Crisis that led to the Crash, and religion was first on the hit list. It seemed to me that religion had been scapegoated—perhaps not unjustly, given the vilely overextensive use that the followers of the major religions had themselves made of scapegoating strategies. The tiny minorities that had hung on to religious faith despite the post-Crash backlash had, in my view, obtained due reward for their defiance of convention in that they had kept arms and armor against the awareness of death. Their contemptuous neighbors presumably thought such arms and armor unnecessary while the nanotechnologies developed by PicoCon and Omicron A still held out the possibility and the hope that serial rejuvenation would provide an escalator effect leading everyone to true emortality—but I thought that they were wrong.

As I labored through the latter half of the twenty-sixth century, it began to seem odd to me that religion had not bounced back from its post-Crash anathematization. I began to wonder why the small sects that survived had not provided the seeds of a revival as soon as it became obvious that nanotech repair could not beat the Miller Effect. Perhaps they would have done if the Zaman transformation had not made its debut so soon after the reluctant acceptance by the world’s centenarians that they could not and would not live forever. Perhaps it would have done in any case, had there not been another overarching ideology holding the empty intellectual ground.