When I tried to explain my new state of mind to Emily I found myself hesitating over the wisdom of honesty, but I couldn’t lie to her.
“It’s just nerves, Morty,” she assured me, in one of her exhortatory missives. “You’re ditheringagain. You’ll have to get over it eventually, so why not now? If you go back down the Well, you’ll only have to climb out again. Come to Titan now, while everything here is new, and we’ll go on to Nereid together when the time comes.”
Her pleas did not have the desired effect. If anything, they called forth the same stubbornness that I had cultivated long before as armor against Mama Siorane’s similar exhortations. I reminded myself that Earth was, after all, my home. It was not only myworld, but the home world of allhumankind. No matter what Emily might think, or what my faber friends might say, I began to insist both privately and publicly whenever the issue was raised that the Earth was and would always remain an exceedingly precious thing, which should never be forgotten, and that all spacefarers ought to respect and revere its unique place in human affairs.
When the fabers mocked and Emily grew annoyed I dug in my heels.
“It would be a terrible thing,” I told them all, “were men to spread themselves across the entire galaxy, taking a multitude of forms in order to occupy a multitude of alien worlds, and in the end forget entirely the world from which their ancestors had sprung. Travel far, by all means, but never forget that you have only one true home.”
“Oh, Morty,” was Emily’s belated reply from the wilderness without Saturn’s rings, “will you neverlearn?” But I was older than she, if only by a few years, and I honestly thought that I had now acquired the greater maturity, the better understanding of how to live in the future.
FIFTY-FOUR
The fifth volume of the History of Death, entitled The War of Attrition, was launched on 19 March 2849. Even my sternest critics conceded that it marked a return to the cooler and more comprehensive style of scholarship exhibited by the first two volumes. The chief topic and main connecting thread of the commentary was the history of medical science and hygiene up to the end of the nineteenth century.
The move from contemplation of the history of religion to consideration of the history of science—even a science as misconceived and superstition ridden as pre-twentieth-century medicine—facilitated my adoption of a more analytical pose. Because my main concern was with a very different arena of the war between mankind and mortality, the tenor of my rhetoric was much more acceptable to my peers.
To many of its lay readers, on the other hand, The War of Attritionwas undoubtedly a disappointment. There was nothing in it to comfort the few who still retained a ghoulish interest in the past excesses of Thanaticism. Readers whose primary interest was in the follies of the human imagination must also have found it less fascinating than its predecessors, although it did include material about Victorian tomb decoration and nineteenth-century spiritualism, which carried forward arguments from volume four.
The flow of access fees was very satisfactory for the first six months of the new chapter’s labyrinthine existence, but demand tailed off fairly rapidly when it was realized how different the work was from its predecessors. The vastness and density of its Gordian knot of supportive data made it very difficult for anyone to navigate a course through the entire work, so the few educators and professional historians who condescended to make use of it had to return again and again. I was confident that the flow of income would not dry up entirely, but I knew that I would have to tighten my belt a little if I were to continue to cope with the moon’s ferocious indirect tax regime.
The lack of popular enthusiasm for The War of Attritionwas not, of course, counterbalanced by any conclusive redemption of my academic reputation. Like many earlier scholars who had made contact with a popular audience, I was considered guilty of a kind of intellectual treason, and I knew that I would continue to be frozen out of the scholarly community in spite of my determined attempts at rehabilitation until the academic consensus accepted that I had served my sentence. The stigma attached to my name in academic circles might even have been increased by a few popular reviews that suggested there was much in the new volume to intrigue the inhabitants of a world whose medical science was so adept that almost everyone enjoyed perfect health as well as eternal youth. These reviews suggested that there was a certain piquant delight to be obtained from recalling a world in which everyone was—by modern standards—crippled or deformed, and in which everyone suffered continually from illnesses of a most horrific nature for which no effective treatments were available.
Some commentators felt that my treatment of early medical practitioners was unnecessarily scathing, whereas others thought it unduly generous. It was, of course, both—how could it be otherwise? What could one say of a so-called profession whose practitioners had stubbornly ignored for more than two thousand years the only sensible piece of advice offered by its so-called father, Hippocrates? I did not, of course, make much headway in the difficult business of trying to ascertain which few of the eighty-seven volumes of the Hippocratic Collection actually were by Hippocrates, but I was content to attribute to him the one crucial observation that treatment was best avoided because most active interventions worked to the detriment of the patient. For 2200 years doctors persisted blindly and pigheadedly in applying treatments that increased the danger in which their patients stood.
Even when the scientific method became a common mode of thought doctors remained crassly oblivious to its benefits, preferring to heed the vile counsels of ignoble tradition. How was it, I wondered, that the greatest English minds of the late eighteenth century, assembled together by Erasmus Darwin in the aptly named Lunatic Society, should have penetrated so many secrets of nature and technical practice without ever once applying their trained vision to Darwin’s own profession?—with the result that his beloved son died of blood poisoning caused by a septic finger. How could any historian be less than scathing in chronicling such stupidity?
On the other hand, I was careful to give credit where it was due, complimenting medical practice as the most efficient accessory of religion in the psychological warfare that humankind waged against its ultimate enemy. The treatments that were so woefully ineffective in any material sense, even to the extent of being physically injurious, made a contribution nevertheless to the morale of the race. Seen as quasi-magical rituals, more akin to funerary rites than curative practices, early medicine became a much healthier—or, at any rate, a much more courageous—affair.
I have to admit that there were some passages in the commentary of The War of Attritionthat could be deemed to partake of the “pornography of death and suffering.” Its accounts of the early history of surgery and midwifery were certainly bloodcurdling, and its painstaking analysis of the spread of syphilis through Europe in the sixteenth century could be consumed by readers so inclined as a horror story made all the nastier by its clinical narration.
I was particularly interested in syphilis because of the dramatic social effects of its sudden advent in Europe and its significance in the development of prophylactic medicine. My argument was that syphilis had been primarily responsible for the rise and spread of Puritanism, repressive sexual morality being the only truly effective weapon against its spread. I then deployed well-tried sociological arguments to the effect that Puritanism and its associated habits of thought had been importantly implicated in the rapid development of Capitalism in the Western World. This chain of argument allowed me to put forward the not altogether serious suggestion that syphilis ought to be regarded as the root cause of the economic and political systems that eventually came to dominate the most chaotic, the most extravagantly progressive, and most extravagantly destructive centuries of human history. I left it to my readers to recall that the present owners of the world still referred to their economic manipulations as “Planned Capitalism.” The levity of life in the moon might have removed a little too much gravity from my analysis at that particular point.