As one more transfiguration of the meaning of death, temporarily redeeming the ultimate evil by enshrouding it in nobility while also laying bare the appalling hollowness of exactly those pretensions, the global wars had bridged the historical gap between the senility of religion and the maturity of science. Not until the scientifically guided global wars had done their work and run their course, I argued, could the groundwork for a genuinehuman community—in which all mankind could properly and meaningfully join—be properly laid. The foundations of the ultimate world order had to be laid in the common experience of all nations, as part of a hard-won and well-understood universal heritage.
I repeated yet again that no matter who the citizens of particular nations had appointed as their enemies, the only realenemy of all humankind was death itself. Only by facing up to death in a new way, by gradually transforming the role of death as part of the means to human ends, could a true human community be made. Even the petty wars of the bloodiest period in human history, whatever their immediate purpose in settling economic squabbles and pandering to the megalomaniac psychoses of national leaders, had played an essential part in the shifting pattern of history. They had, I insisted, provided a vast, all-encompassing, and quite invaluable carnival of destruction—a carnival that could have no other ultimate outcome but to make human beings weary of the lust to kill, lest they bring about their extinction.
Some reviewers condemned Fields of Battleon the grounds of its evident irrelevance to a world that had banished war, but I was heartened by the general tenor of its reception. A few critics descended to sarcasm in welcoming the fact that my thesis had returned to the safe track of true history, dealing exclusively with things safely dead and buried, but there was clear evidence that the earlier parts of my work had now grown sufficiently familiar for the whole enterprise to be treated with respect.
My brief notoriety had not been entirely forgotten, and certainly not forgiven, in academic circles but it seemed to me that the good effects of that publicity were at last beginning to outweigh the bad. The Historywas now being taken seriously even by many who were unsympathetic to its stance, and my theories were now firmly established on the world’s intellectual agenda. Several reviewers actually confessed that they were now looking forward to the next installment of the story.
SIXTY
When I was ready to leave the rehab center I shopped around for an inexpensive place to live. I wanted a complete contrast to my life on the moon, so I immediately rejected Antarctica and the Ice Age-afflicted parts of the Northern Hemisphere. I didn’t want to return to Africa or South America, so that narrowed my choices considerably. When I found myself recoiling in a quasi-reflexive manner from the thought of living in Oceania I became slightly anxious. I told myself that emortals could not afford to accumulate hang-ups and that it was high time I put the legacy of the Coral Sea Catastrophe firmly behind me.
I eventually decided to rent an apt-capsule in Neyu, one of the virginal islands of New Tonga.
Once the devastation of the original Creationist Islands had been repaired—although the vast majority of the ecological microcosms had been replaced rather than restored—the Continental Engineers had raised new islands by the score from the relatively shallow sea. New Tonga was a blue-sea region rather than a vast tract of LAP-gel, but it was neither a wilderness reserve nor a glorified fish farm.
Insofar as there was an avant garde among Earthbound genetic artists, the virgin isles of New Tonga were the stomping ground of its members. I was mildly interested in that avant garde because one of its factions—the Tachytelic Perfectionists—had borrowed rhetoric from the Thanaticists in openly proclaiming themselves to be “artists in death,” working with ephemeral artificial organisms designed to live very briefly within a context of ferocious competition and natural selection.
The capstack in which my apt was located was an architectural fantasia of which even Emily might have approved, although it was anything but icy. It was bright and gaudy, complex without being confused. The many textures of its outer tegument recalled the rinds of fruit and the chitinous shells of marine mollusks, and its multitudinous tiny windows were somewhat reminiscent of the facets of an insect’s compound eye.
I could not, of course, select my immediate neighbors. I was dismayed at first to find that not only were there no Tachytelic Perfectionists living in the building, but that the faction in question was regarded as something of a joke by the geneticists who did live there. The great majority of the biotechnologists who lived in the caps tack did not consider themselves to be “artists” at all, and those who did were classical Aesthetes cast in the antique mould of the second Oscar Wilde.
My closest neighbors, whose most voluble spokesman was a woman of my own age named Mica Pershing, were mostly steadfastly utilitarian island builders. They were firmly committed to a newly emergent alliance between old-fashioned gantzers and organic engineers. Mica explained to me after welcoming me into their midst that she and her associates were perfectly happy to accept the label of Continental Engineers, but she took care to emphasize the contention that they were a new breed, not to be confused with their forerunners.
“We’re the trueContinental Engineers,” she told me. “Being more than three hundred years old, I sometimes get accused of belonging to the old guard by the up-and-coming centenarian youngsters, but I’m as forward-looking as any of them. I expect you get that sort of thing yourself—or is the profession of history the precious exception wherein experience receives its proper due?”
I assured her that it was not, although it certainly ought to have been.
During the previous three hundred years I had been briefly acquainted with many people who would have styled themselves Continental Engineers, but most of those I had recently encountered had been ambitious to move to the next logical stage of that career path, becoming Planetary Engineers. I had not realized, although it would have been obvious had I cared to study the logic of the situation, that the emigration of those so minded was bound to leave behind a hard core of fundamentalists, who would see the art and craft of Continental Engineering as a quintessentially Earthbound discipline. My neighbors on Neyu had no ambition to join the terraformers on Mars or the palace builders on Titan; even their obsession with the remaking of Garden Earth was highly specialized.
The first self-appointed Continental Engineers to make a real impact on the popular imagination, way back in the twenty-first century, had done so by mounting a campaign to persuade the United Nations to license the building of a dam across the Straits of Gibraltar. Because more water evaporates from the Mediterranean than flows into it from rivers, that plan would have considerably increased the land surface of southern Europe and Northern Africa. It had, of course, never come to fruition, but its dogged pursuit had won the Engineers a whole series of consolation prizes. Their island-building activities had been boosted considerably by the Decimation.
More recently, the climatic disruptions caused by the advancing Ice Age had given Continental Engineering a further boost, allowing its propagandists to promote the idea of raising new lands in the tropics as a refuge for emigrants from the newly frozen north. The “old-fashioned gantzers” among them had been so busy for the previous two centuries that they had become increasingly assertive, protesting loudly against anyone who dared to suppose that their attitudes were as obsolescent as their tools. Mica was a fairly typical specimen.