Free Architects of Emortality by Brian Stableford Page A

however, a different set of reflexes was immediately invoked, and he tumbled from his bed with indecent haste.

    By the time the woman had come through the protective undergrowth, Magnus had framed his protests, but they were halfhearted, motivated by shame that she should have come upon him naked in a transparent tent rather than by annoyance at the violation of his privacy.

    “You shouldn’t have come,” he said when he had let her in—having partly clothed himself, although he still felt more than a little exposed. “It’s dangerous to walk through the forest by night.” “I was lonely,” she said. “My dome’s only a couple of kilometers from yours, and it seemed foolish to endure the loneliness when company was so close to hand. By day, the nature of our work confines us to our own tracts, but that’s no reason why we can’t get together in our own time. There is a track, after all—it’s not as if I had to hack my way through thorny bushes and sticky creepers with a machete. I would have called to tell you I was coming, but that damned silver of yours wouldn’t let me through. You really should instruct it to allow a few exceptions.” Magnus didn’t have the heart to tell her that if he had been disposed to file a list of people exempted from the silver’s stalling strategy, her name would not have been among them. She was undeniably lovely—her eyes were perfectly delightful, her flowing hair absolutely magnificent—but he hardly knew her. He had never seen her at the base, nor had he even noticed her name in any of the documents that flitted across his busy screens. Had she not taken it into her head to begin making these mercifully infrequent journeys from her LSP tent to his, he would probably never have become aware of her existence, let alone made love to her. But even in the depths of his beloved forest he could take comfort from genuine human warmth, and she did seem genuine, in that naive fashion that only the authentically young could manifest.

    They talked for a while, as they always did. She liked him to talk and never thought him pompous or foolish.

    She was not a Natural, but she was one of the committed ones, one of those who understood—or was, at least, capable of understanding, given the guidance of a man as wise as himself.

    “If you are to understand what you are,” he told her, when they had got to the strong meat of the conversation, “you must understand the true history of your own genes. Like everyone else, you were born from an artificial womb, the child of a sperm and an ovum which might well have been stored in the banks for centuries. I’m sure that the resultant egg was carefully screened, before cell division was even allowed to begin, for immunity to those hereditary diseases for which even the best IT cannot compensate—but that doesn’t mean that you’re a creature of human artifice. No matter how extensively the designers of the New Human Race may tamper with the blueprint which is written in the DNA carried by our kind, the DNA retains a history which extends in an unbroken double helix all the way back to the cradle of life itself. Like the forest, you and I are part of the soul of the world—and so is the legion of Naturals whose privilege it will be to inherit that world.” The woman had always replied to such proud and portentous statements with a welcoming smile, and she did so now. “That’s right,” she said. “I was born from a Helier womb, like my mother before me, but the essence of my being didn’t begin its development in an artificial environment. As it happens, the sperm and egg whose combination formed my own gentemplate hadn’t been stored in the banks for centuries, and in spite of everything that was done to the embryo, and everything else which separates me from the moment of my first genesis, I feel that I’m less a creature of artifice than many. It’s a pity that the Naturals have been allowed to hijack that label. I was