I had to admit that “highkickers” was a much more flattering label than “footsloggers.” I knew that she’d have heard all the jokes about can-can and can-do, so I didn’t even try to sharpen my wit on the term. There wasn’t time enough to waste on that kind of nonsense.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Emily hadn’t come to the moon for a vacation and she was very busy, but she had adopted highkicker notions of personal space and the value of face-to-face contact, so I saw a lot more of her than I might have expected. When she did find time to relax I showed her the sights, such as they were. We went out of the dome together, in ultralight suitskins, so that we could look at the stars and feel the authentic lunar surface beneath our feet.
Because Titan had an atmosphere Emily didn’t see the true profusion of the stars very often, but that didn’t prevent her waxing lyrical about the wondrous sights that the cosmos presented to the inhabitants of the outer system. The view from the moon comprised exactly the same stars, and farside light-pollution was minimal, but mere logic couldn’t shake Emily’s conviction that everything looked better out on Civilization’s Edge. I suppose that it must have been easy to reach that opinion while Saturn dominated the sky. In Mare Moscoviense we never saw Earth.
“One day,” I told her, “I’ll have to come see it all for myself. VE tourism isn’t the same. Now that I’ve experienced Earth-based VEs from a lunar-gravity vantage point I’m even more alert than I used to be to their artificiality.” She knew that it was mere talk, of course. I was already in intensive training for the return to full gravity. She’d come along to the gym with me to put in little centrifuge time on her own account, and we’d played the usual lunatic games with massive dumbbells.
“Why wait, Morty?” she asked, softly. “Why one dayinstead of now?”
“I’ve got work to do,” I said. She knew that too. I’d shown her everything, including the new data webs I was patiently building and knitting together. She hadn’t paid much attention, just as I hadn’t paid much attention while she was shopping for new-generation gantzers that were just as gray and slimy as the ones that had become obsolete five minutes before.
“Oh yes,” she said, with deadly unenthusiasm. “Two more volumes of your precious History of Death.”
“Actually,” I confessed, a trifle belatedly, “it’s going to take more than two. Maybe I can cram it into three, but at present I’m thinking four.”
“Which would make it the longest procrastination in history, I suppose,” she said, cruelly. “Let’s see—the first version of the first part was deposited in 2614, and the fifth in 2849. That means that we can expect the ninth and last in 3082—except, of course, that it’ll only be the first version, so you’ll have to tinker round with it for another… what shall we say? A couple of hundred years? Say 3300 to make it a round number. By which time you’ll be seven hundred and eighty years old. It’s just as well that you don’t believe all that doom-laden Thanaticist cant about robotization and the necessity of making a good death before we become mere machines, isn’t it?”
“The research is going very well,” I told her, “and I’m more focused now than I used to be. I’m hoping to have the whole thing wrapped up well before the turn of the millennium.”
“Will anybody care?” she asked. “When did the last false emortal die? Fifty years ago? Don’t bother to tell me the exact date—it doesn’t make any difference. The war against death is over, Morty. It doesn’t matter any more. The point is to find the best way to live withoutdeath.”
“Finding the best way to live without death is part and parcel of the war against it,” I insisted.
“And have your studies brought you a single step closer to finding that best way?” she continued, implacably. “Have you found an answer that can satisfy you, Morty?” She didn’t need to add, Have I?It went without saying that neither of us had found any such thing— as yet.It also went without saying that Khan Mirafzal and his kin were hotter favorites to find an answer adequate to their own kind than any footslogger, no matter how high she could kick.
“I have time,” I said, defensively. “I’m emortal.”
“So are the murdering bastards tucked away in twenty-first-century SusAns,” she said, “just so long as they never come out. I forgot about them, of course, when I tried to remember when the last false emortal died. And there’s dear old Adam Zimmerman too—assuming that he isn’t just a guiding myth invented to stoke up the zeal of the the Ahasuerus Foundation’s Zamaners. How old is henow, if he actually exists? Nine hundred, almost to the day! Our invitations to the birthday party must have gotten lost in the ether. How much time there is to waste, when you think about it!”
“My work isn’t a waste,” I told her, stubbornly. “It’s not irrelevant. If you hadn’t left Earth before the Thanaticists got going, you’d understand that the war against death isn’t over.”
“No,” she said, in a different and darker tone. “It isn’t. I’ve lost three good friends in the last five years, and I’ll lose half a hundred more before the ice palaces are teeming with the latest kind of Utopians. I live every day with the possibility that they might be the ones who’ll lose me, but I’m not prepared to hide out in the bomb shelters indefinitely. I’m not prepared to reduce the horizons of my life to those of a glorified life raft. I want to be part of the Revolution, Morty, not part of the problem that makes the Revolution necessary.”
“That’s not fair,” I complained, meaning the suggestion that I was still psychologically becalmed in the life raft we’d shared when she was a child.
“What’s fairgot to do with it, you great oaf?” she answered, smiling like a faber surrounded by her children. One day, I realized, Emily might be surrounded by highkicking children of her own, busy with the work of populating a brand-new world with skylines more wondrous than any in the system, and perhaps even out of it. On the other hand, she might have moved on, beyond even the satellites of Uranus and Neptune, to some very-nearly-but-not-quite Earthlike world capable of providing a realchallenge to a sculptor of her abilities.
“I have to finish it,” I told her. “It’s what I am. I won’t apologize for that because I don’t think I owe you or the world any kind of apology for what I am orwhat I do.”
“No,” she conceded. “You don’t owe me or the world anything. I just don’t want you to be left behind”
“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, as I’d always told everyone who seemed to need telling. “Maybe I’m one of the ones who’s destined to remain there forever.”
“So what are you doing hanging about on the moon?” she said. “It’s just Antarctica without ice palaces, and noisier neighbors. I’ve seen you in the centrifuge and I know you’re ready. Your legs are positively itching to get to grips with all that gee force.”
“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, legwise,” I admitted. “Maybe I stuck around just to see youfor one last time, before you get so far ahead of me that you’ll be way out of reach.”
“Oaf,” she said, tenderly. “Footslogger. Groundhog. Welldweller. You know that I fell in love with you in that stupid life raft, don’t you? You know that all the nonsense you trotted out to keep my mind off the danger we were in cut right to my heart. You made me, Mortimer Gray.”
I could have said straight out that she’d made me too, but she couldn’t have taken it as a compliment in that form. “That’s the way it works,” I said, instead. “Any two elementary particles that have ever been closely associated continue to modify one another’s movements no matter how far apart they move. I never understood exactly why, but I think it’s something to do with the beauty and charm of their constituent quarks—and if it isn’t, it ought to be.”