“Get rid of your legs and learn to swing,” the faber would say. “You’ll understand then that human beings have no need of roots. Only reach with four hands instead of two, and you’ll find the stars within your grasp. Leave the past to rot at the bottom of the deep dark well, and give the heavens their due.”
I quickly learned to fall back on the same defensive moves that most of my unmodified neighbors employed in such combative exchanges. “You can’t break all your links with solid ground,” we told the fabers, over and over again. “Somebody has to deal with the larger lumps of matter that are strewn about the universe, and you can’t go to meet real mass if you don’t have legs. It’s planets that produce biospheres and only biospheres can produce such luxuries as breathable air and recyclable carbon.”
“Nonsense,” the fabers replied. “Wherever there are oxides there’s oxygen, and wherever there’s methane there’s carbon. Nanotech can do anything that natural-born life can do. A biosphere is just a layer of slime on the outside of a ball, and the slime gets in your eyes. You have to wipe them clean to see properly.”
“If you’ve seen farther than other men,” the footsloggers would tell their upstart cousins, “it’s not because you can swing by your arms from the ceiling—it’s because you can stand on the shoulders of giants with legs.”
Such exchanges were always cheerful. It was almost impossible to get into a realargument with a faber because their talk was as intoxicated as their movements. They did relax, occasionally, but even on the rare occasions when all four of their arms were at rest their minds remained effervescent. Some unmodified humans accused them of chattering, but any attempt on the part of the churlish and the morose to make “ape-man” or “monkey” into a term of abuse was forestalled by the fabers’ flat refusal to accept them as such.
“Footsloggers were just one more link in the great chain of primate being,” they would say, amiably. “We’re the cream of the ape-man crop, the main monkeys. You’re just another dead end, like gorillas, big-headed Australopithecines, and lumpen Neanderthals. The partnership between hand, eye, and brain is what gave humans their humanity, and we have the very best of that.”
If an unmodified human countered with the suggestion that they too might be superseded in their turn, they only chuckled with delight. “We surely will,” they would say. “We’re already working on it. Just as soon as we can redesign the brain to make it viable, four arms won’t be enough. Just wait until the realspider monkeys get their eight-handed act together.”
It went without saying, of course, that the vast majority of fabers were Gaean Liberationists—but such ideas came so naturally to them that they did not seem nearly as extreme in faber rhetoric as they did when they were spoken in the voice of someone like Keir McAllister. “The well belongs to the unwell,” the fabers were fond of saying. Even on the moon, which was a gravity well of sorts, the statement was a cliché. There were many others of the same ilk:
The well will climb out of the Well, when they find the will.
The sick stick, the hale bail.
Hey diddle diddle, footsloggers fiddle, monkeys jump over the moon.
Some of these saws were annoying—especially “History is bunk, fit for sleeping minds,” which was frequently quoted at me when I told fabers what kind of work I did—but I soon learned not to take them as insults.
In spite of the freedom with which such opinions were laughingly offered, there were few unmodified men on the moon who did not like fabers. I suppose that those who could not stand them quickly retreated into the depths of the Big Well or passed on to those habitats that spun at great speed.
Once I had grown used to lunar banter I began to take it in good part and even to thrive upon it. It made a refreshing change from the kinds of conversation that I had grown used to during the previous hundred years, and I was glad that no vestige of my Earthly notoriety tainted the atmosphere of Moscovience. Even Khan Mirafzal, when I met him in person, made only fleeting reference to our first meeting in VE. He greeted me as a friend with whom he had briefly lost contact, not as an adversary who had dared to try to understand the craziness of Thanaticism.
As I adapted physically and psychologically to the conditions on the far side of the moon, my mood was progressively lightened, and I began to perceive the quirky wisdom of those who proposed that the satellite was not governed by gravity at all, but by levity. I retained enough of my intellectual seriousness to do my work, to which I remained thoroughly dedicated, but I began to smile more frequently and to spend far less time in VE. I put the nightmarish legacy of Thanaticism behind me and even came to see my sojourns on Cape Adare and Cape Wolstenholme as periods of unfortunate disequilibrium. I brought a new zest to my Herculean labors, and it seemed to me that they had never gone so smoothly.
It was in that spirit that I finally got around to restoring communication with Emily Marchant, my conscience and my inspiration.
“You were right about the galaxy,” I told her, in the next long monologue I launched into the remoter regions of the system. “It does look far more inviting when there’s no atmosphere to blur its face. You were right about the other galaxies too. I never expected to be able to see so many with the naked eye, and whenever I calculate the distance that I’m able to see my head spins. I do miss blue sky, and naked vegetation, but I’m not homesick yet. Visiting Earth-imitative VEs is just as false as visiting lunar VEs used to be, and the fact that I’ve so many memories of the actuality serves to emphasize the unreality of the virtual experience, but it adds an extra dimension to my objectivity. Time on the moon will make me a better historian in more ways than one. I haven’t quite got the hang of identifying myself imaginatively with fabers—and the attempt has certainly exposed the limit of that old cliché about putting oneself in the other man’s shoes—but I’m getting there.
“The moon’s not an ideal place to work, of course. It’s in the Labyrinth, but it has no physical archives—none, at any rate, that are relevant to my current period. It does have compensating advantages of its own, though. I never thought that it was possible to have so much flesh-to-flesh contact with other people outside of a marriage, and the tangibility of social contacts hereabouts makes up for the artificiality and inorganic dominance of the living space. I thought I’d achieved true maturity while I was living and working on Adare, but Moscoviense has shown me the limitations of the person I was then. This is a place where people really can grow up and leave their roots behind. Even though I’m not properly built for it, I can use the ceiling holds the fabers use and keep my feet off the ground for hours on end. I couldn’t do it in a real faberweb, of course, but there’s just enough gravity on the moon to let me feel free without having to brave the big zero.
“I’ll be happier here, I think, than I’ve ever been before, once I’m fully accustomed to the strangeness of it all.”
I spoke too soon, of course. I never did become fullyaccustomed to the strangeness of it all. But I was happy for a while—maybe not happier than I’d ever been before, but happy enough.
PART FOUR Maturity
In the earliest phases of combat, scientific knowledge was far less efficient as a weapon in the war against death than religious faith. The quest for a scientific definition of death exposed a complex web of conclusions as physicians debated the relative merits of cessation of heartbeat, cessation of respiration, the dying of the cornea, insensibility to electrical stimuli, and the relaxation of sphincter muscles as evidence of irrecoverable demise. Skeptics compiled catalogs of case histories of people buried alive and urban legends recorded macabre cases of childbirth as a result of “necrophilia” practiced by monks or mortuary assistants. Ryan, in 1836, introduced a new distinction between somatic death—the extinction of personality—and molecular death—the death of the body’s cells, noting that the former was rarely instantaneous and the latter never. Prizes were offered in nineteenth-century France for an infallible sign of death, and the failure of all attempts to claim such prizes resulted in the official provision of mortuaries where bodies might lay until the onset of putrefaction settled the matter beyond the shadow of a doubt.