Free Architects of Emortality by Brian Stableford

people considered him to be an obsessive fool, not merely a lunatic but—and this was surely the final insult—a harmless lunatic.

    “In the empire of the ecosphere, Magnus,” a once-valued colleague had said to him, only a few weeks before, “everything is controlled. It has to be. What you call ‘wilderness’ was born from the gene banks which conserved DNA from the world which existed before the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. It flourishes by our permission, entirely subject to our guidance. Its freedom is merely the result of our refusal fully to exercise our ecological hegemony. You’re fooling yourself if you think that it’s Ancient Nature reborn, in any meaningful sense. Ancient Nature began to die with the first discovery of agriculture and ended its long torment in the years before the Crash. Your so-called wilderness is at best a ghost and at worst a mere echo.” “I know and understand all that,” Magnus now took leave to reply, exercising his inalienable right to l’esprit de I’escaller. “I am not a fool—I merely recognize both the necessity and the propriety of returning these tracts of land to the dominion of natural selection. It is a wholly desirable act of expiation, whose efficacy is clearly displayed by the results of the biodiversity surveys.” “It’s a shallow gesture,” the colleague had told him, in response to a less carefully formulated reply. “It’s a temporary indulgence—a brief guilt trip whose futility will be recognized by the New Human Race as soon as its first generation reaches true adulthood. The time has already arrived when forest green is just as much an artifact as SAP black. You can’t halt progress, Magnus.

    You can’t turn back the clock. Your forest is a sham, and a temporary folly.” “I’m trying to turn the clock, forward,” Magnus had not thought to say at the time. “What I’m doing is progress. The forest is forever, and its flesh is as real as its soul.” And yet, he could not deny that all the forest trees whose company he preferred to that of his fellow men had been planted within his own lifetime. The seeds from which they were grown had come from gene banks: the static arks that had been hastily stocked in the twenty-first century, before the Greenhouse Crisis had sent a second Deluge to devastate the lowlands of civilization. The young trees had required careful protection and assiduous nurture for decades before they could be left to fend for themselves. The re-creation of wilderness had been, in its fashion, as delicate a task as any exercise in Creation of the kind which hundreds of hubristic engineers were now carrying out in the real and artificial islands of the vast Pacific.

    In spite of all this, Magnus knew that he must somehow have faith in the assertion that what surrounded him, as he slept beneath the stars, really was a part of the authentic soul of the world. He had to believe that the gene banks had merely been a phase in an evolutionary story that stretched back from the present to the magical day when life had first ventured forth from the littoral zones of the primordial ocean to embrace the land.

    Like all good Gaeans, Magnus preferred to think of that adventure as an “embrace”; he had always hated to hear it described as a “conquest.” Had he not been assailed by such troublesome doubts, Magnus would not have been delighted to receive an unexpected visitor—but it happened that he was assailed by doubts on that particular night, and that his visitor brought welcome relief.

    When Magnus first heard the noise of the newcomer’s approach, he could not help the reflexive twitch of his hand which impelled it toward the place where his dart gun lay hidden, but he suppressed the impulse readily enough. Within the dome, he was invulnerable to attack by any creature which had only teeth and claws to use as weapons. When he saw that the approaching figure was a human woman,