Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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THIRTY-FIVE

I realized eventually that the real reason for the tightness and formality of the burgeoning Cape Adare community was the need—which the newcomers to the Cape really did experience as a need—to be in and out of one another’s homes all the time during the summer months, savoring the intricate intimacies of each and every edifice. I realized too why my neighbors had not been in the least distressed by my failure to reciprocate their invitations. They would have been conspicuously disappointed if I had. I did, however, receive one actual visitor during my final years on the cape, who turned up on the doorstep unannounced.

She was frankly astonished by my own astonishment at her sudden appearance.

“I’ve been in Antarctica for months,” she said, “mostly just over the hill in Lillie Marleen. I’ve been frightfully busy, but I’ve been waiting for you to invite me over. I did leave you a message when I arrived.”

“I must have overlooked it or not taken it in—I had no idea you were here,” I said, knowing that it was a woefully inadequate response. It had never occurred to me, as I marveled at what my neighbors had done with a new generation of shamirs, that I had been acquainted for nearly a century with one of the most prominent figures in contemporary shamir design and theperson most likely to be making a fortune from ice-palace architecture.

I hadn’t seen Emily in the flesh since Steve Willowitch had ferried us to Australia in his copter. People are supposed to keep the VE images in their answerphone AIs constantly updated, but they never do. People are also supposed to use camera transmission when they phone instead of merely invoking their VE images, but they never do that either—so you never get a true appreciation of actual appearance from VE interaction, even VE interaction that hasn’t been allowed to slide into long silence. Emily had changed a great deal more than I had, but each of us was looking at a stranger.

“I should have called you anyway, message or no message,” I said, still floundering in embarrassment, “and I always meant to, but I never quite… I’ve been so fearfully busy, you see. I launched the third part of the Historylast month.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, in a slightly injured voice. “I shouldn’t have taken it for granted that it was safe to drop in.”

I was quick to make amends—or at least to try. “It’s alwayssafe,” I assured her. “For you, I’m always available.”

“I thought you might be avoiding me,” she said, arching her eyebrow a little. I’d seen exactly the same arch a dozen times while we were engaged in deep and meaningful conversation in our bouncing life raft, although she’d been a mere child. The difference between our ages would have seemed utterly unimportant to anyone else, but I could still see the child inside the adult, and she could still see the nonswimmer within the historian.

“Why would I do that?” I asked, mystified.

“Well,” she said, “last time we were in close touch I tried to force money on you, and you refused to accept it—and then you ran off and got married. Ever since then, there’s been a conventional tokenism about our conversations. I thought you hadn’t forgiven me. I don’t suppose you’ve grown much less poor in the interim, but you presumably know that I’ve gotten much richer. Forty or fifty times, I think—but it stacks up so fast that I can’t keep count. Your parents used to be very sniffy about commerce, as I remember.”

“Only some of them,” I said. “It just happened to include the two who had most to say. But no, I certainly haven’t been avoiding you, or even trying to keep you at arm’s length. And as it happens, I’m not as poor as I was after my first divorce and probably won’t ever be again. My dividend from the credit Papa Ezra and Mama Siorane piled up while they were working off-planet was quite substantial. It’s mostly spent now, of course, but my Historyhas begun to produce an income of sorts….” I trailed off again, realizing all of a sudden that what I thought of as an income must look like very small change to someone who had been rich last time I spoke to her and was now “forty or fifty times” richer.

“I owe it all to you,” she murmured, reading my mind. She murmured because she knew what my response would be.

“You don’t owe nearly as much to me as I owe to you,” I reminded her, before pressing on with indecent haste. “I take it that Lillie Marleen’s going the same way as Cape Adare now—ice castles lining the main street and running a ragged ring around the old town?”

“You mean that you haven’t even seenit?” I had contrived to take her aback.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never been to Cape Hallett, let alone Lillie Marleen, although the neighbors I do see keep telling me that I should. I’ve been very busy. Is it really as wonderful as they say?”

“Morty,” she said, with a sigh, “Lillie Marleen is currently number two on the official list of the world’s Seven Wonders. It makes Cape Adare’s ice palaces look like a set of drinking glasses set upside down to drain beside a sink. Don’t you ever watch the news?”

“Only the headlines,” I told her. “I’m a historian. At my present rate of progress, I expect to catch up with the twenty-seventh century in three or four hundred years’ time.”

“Oh, Morty,” she said, with a much heavier sigh. “You were my first substitute parent, if only for three days. You’re supposed to provide me with a role model, to be a source of inspiration. Here am I, playing a major part in the remaking of the Continent Without Nations, providing the wherewithal for the greatest art form of the fin-de-siecle, and you’re still stuck in the second century, apart from scanning the headlines. Don’t you everget out, even in a VE hood?”

“I’ve seen most of the Cape Adare ice castles from the inside,” I told her, “and it’s only ten years or thereabouts since I spent a whole week in Amundsen.”

“Doing something for the UN?”

“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I was in hospital the whole time. I told you—I was injured. My leg was crushed while I was helping to rescue a man who’d fallen into a crevasse. It took days to grow new tissues, and the best part of a year to educate the leg so that it felt as if it was really mine.”

I expected her to sigh again, but she laughed instead. “You have to let me take you out,” she said. “Not once or twice, but fifty or a hundred times. I expect you’ll hate it, but you have to do it anyway. I can’t have you thinking that those glorified goblets over the way are the pinnacle of ice-palace achievement. I can show you light games you can never have imagined—and you’ll look at them even if I have to drag you. They’re the first fruit of my hands-on endeavors. I was really annoyedwhen you were so dismissive of that particular resolution, and I need to make you suffer by showing you what I’ve achieved.”

“I still have a problem with psychosomatic conditions,” I reminded her. “I always have to wear masks to protect me from snow blindness and summer rhapsody. I have trouble in ice palaces.”

“It’s September, Morty,” she said, with mock exasperation. “Equinox time. If I wanted to blow your mind completely I’d leave it till December and the solstice. This will be a gentleintroduction, just to get you in the mood. It’s my pride and joy, Morty. You can’t say no.”

I remembered what Mia Czielinski had said about having a duty to explore the world’s possibilities. As a historian, I knew it wasn’t possible, because possibilities are lost with every day that passes, and even in the Age of Everyman an individual really is an individual, incapable of being in two places at the same time. As Emily Marchant’s friend and mentor, though, I knew that I really had fallen down on the job and that it was high time I learned to swim again, metaphorically speaking. I didn’t realize then how long it would be before I saw her in the flesh again, but I certainly realized how long it had been since I had last seen her, and I was appalled at my negligence in leaving it so long.

“I wasn’t dismissive,” I said, defensively. “I just had my own path to follow. I thought youwere being dismissive. It’s nearly ready, you know. Just a few more months.”

“By then,” she said, “I’ll probably be gone—but that won’t matter, will it? The Labyrinth is everywhere: the Universe Without Limits. Wherever I am, I’ll always be able to keep in touch with your work. Mine isn’t like that. To know what I amount to, you have to see and feel and touch the solid reality. I know you’re not ready to follow me on the next leg of the journey, but I’m damned if I’ll let you miss out on this one. You have to see what I’ve made, and you have to see it with me”

“I will,” I said, wilting before the onslaught. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

THIRTY-SIX

I suppose the next few weeks qualified as a holiday, even though I went home almost every night. It was the first holiday I’d taken since my second divorce and might even have qualified as the first since my aborted trip on Genesis, given that all the trips I’d taken with the Lamu Rainmakers and Sharane had been calculated to mingle a certain amount of study with the tourism. I can honestly say, however, that I had not the slightest intention of including the ice palaces of Lillie Marleen, Dumont D’Urville, and Porpoise Bay in my history of death.

That was perhaps as well, as I would have struggled in vain to recapture the subjective essence of the experience. To say that it was intoxicating would hardly have done it justice; each edifice was an entire gallery of psychotropic effects. At first, being inside the ice palaces made me dizzy and queasy, but Emily was relentless. She refused to believe that I couldn’t adapt, and by degrees I did. Pm sure that I never learned to see them as she did, but I did begin to grasp the awesome wonder and sublimity of their structure.

I had always accepted the conventional wisdom which said that Isaac Newton was mistaken in identifying seven colors in the rainbow, having been prejudiced toward that number for mystical reasons, and that there were really only five: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Emily’s ice palaces taught me that I and the world had been quite wrong and that the human eye was capable of more education in this regard than nature had ever seen fit to provide. There are, in fact, at least a dozen colors in the visual spectrum, and perhaps as many as twenty—although we have not, to this day, attained a consensus in naming them.

When visiting Mia Czielinski and my other neighbors on Adare I had thought of “adaptation” to the ice palaces as a mere matter of soothing reflexive discomfort and disturbance, but what Emily’s architecture demanded was something far more complex and far reaching. I was woefully inadequate to the task—and I knew that I would never be prepared to put in the kind of work that would have been necessary to raise my perceptiveness even as far as mediocrity.

“Can’t you get the same effects with glass?” I asked Emily, wondering why the earliest gantzers had not discovered a similar art form when they had first begun to work with biotech-fused sand.

“Similar,” she admitted, “but they’re much harder to manage. Not worth the effort, in my opinion, although artists in the tropic zones have already joined the competition. Most of the light-management work in an ice palace is done by the skin that mediates between the warm spaces and the cold walls. Quite apart from the fact that glass working doesn’t require membranes of that sort, they’re brand-new technology, unique to the new generation of shamirs.”

“But glass houses have been around for a long time,” I observed. “Surely somebodyglimpsed these kinds of possibilities.”

“Back in the twenty-second century the main priority was making sure that glass houses were safe, in the sense that they wouldn’t break if you threw stones at them,” she told me. “They were so crude, optically speaking, that it’s no wonder that nobody managed to lay foundation stones for this kind of artwork. In those days, gantzing was just a matter of sticking things together and making sure they stayed stuck. You got a lot of glitter, but there was no practical way to increase the scale and delicacy of the prismatic effects. Ice-palace-like effects couldn’t be foreshadowed in glass even in the twenty-fourth century, when the first true shamirs came in.”

“Well,” I said, looking up into the heady heights of a kaleidoscopically twisted spire, “you’ve certainly made up for lost time. This is the work of a genius.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, with sincere modesty. “Once you’ve mastered a few simple tricks the effects are easy to contrive. I got a head start because I devised the techniques—now that I’ve shown the way, real architects are beginning to take over the reins.”

“But you’re still learning,” I pointed out. “You could stay ahead of the game if you put your mind to it. Maybe it’s time for you to move on to work in glass.”

“Absolutely not. Ice is my medium. But there’s ice and ice.This is just a beginning. As soon as the twenty-eighth gets under way I’ll be off to where the real action is.”

“The Arctic?” I said, foolishly.

“Hardly,” she said. “There’s no scope here for real hands-on work.”

It finally dawned on me that by “here” she meant Earth, and that what she’d meant when she’d first mentioned the next step on her journey—the one that she knew I wouldn’t be able to take—she’d meant a journey into space.

“This is just the beginning,” she added, while I was still working it out. “When the twenty-eighth century gets under way, I want to be where the real action is.”

“The moon?” I said, foolishly.

“Titan, Dione, and Enceladus,” she replied. “Then on to Nereid and Triton. So far, the colonists of the outer planet satellites have only been digging in, excavating nice warm wombs way down where the heat is. For five hundred years we’ve been imagining the conquest of space as if we were moles. Glass is poor stuff by comparison with ice, but water ice might not be the optimum. All thisis just icing on a cake, Morty. It’s not even continental engineering. The next generation of shamirs will lay the groundwork for planetary engineering. Not boring old terraformation– realplanetary engineering. Give me four hundred years, Morty, then come visit me in the ice palaces of Neptune’s moons, and I’ll show you a work of art.”

All I could say in response to that, in my feeblest manner, was, “You’re going to the far edge of the Oikumene? That’s as far from home as you can go.”

“For the moment. It won’t seem so far once the kalpas report in—but for now, it’s where the opportunities are.”

“But you’re rich,” I said, redoubling my foolishness. “You have more credit than you’ll need for a millennium and more. You don’t need to leave Earth to seek your fortune.”

“Not thatkind of opportunity, Morty,” she said, without a hint of mockery or censure. “The opportunities of the future. Once you’ve caught up with the twenty-seventh century, you know, you’ll have to catch up with the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth, and in the end, you’re bound to run into the present. Then, even youwill have to look forward—and that will mean looking upward.I know you can do it, Morty, and I know you will, when you’re ready. You learned to swim, eventually, and you haven’t had a headache for days. You’ve adapted to thiskind of enlightenment. It’s only a matter of time before you can see the way the world is going—the way the Oikumene is going.”

“Enlightenment” was what the architects of ice palaces called their new art. I’d always thought it a mere affectation, more than a trifle disrespectful to the heroes of the eighteenth-century revolutions in thought and theory—but I realized when Emily used the word that it was layered far more deeply with deliberate ambiguities than I’d previously understood.

“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, mechanically having not quite recovered my composure. “The Gaean extremists will never turn it into a nature reserve. We’ll have to keep making room for new generations by exporting a percentage of the population, but there’ll always be a role for the old. For educators. For historians”

“But you’re notold, Morty,” Emily reminded me. “Youth shouldn’t be a mere preparation for being old. Neither should adulthood. You can’t decide now what you’ll be in three hundred or three thousand years’ time—and if you can, you shouldn’t. One day, Morty, your history of death will be finished—and it will be no good sitting down to start a history of life, because that’s just the other side of the same coin. You’ll have to start on the future, just like the rest of us. It wouldn’t do you any harm to get a little practice, would it?”

“It’s not like that,” I told her, although I wasn’t sure that I could even convince myself of it. “I may be a historian, but I live my everyday life in the present, just like everybody else. There’s nothing wrong with being contentedly Earthbound.”

“You’ve been living in a fake lighthouse for more than twenty years,” she pointed out, “without even realizing that an entire city of light was growing up just over the horizon. Don’t you think that says something about the kind of person you’re in danger of becoming?”

Her rhetoric had come a long way since she was eight years old, and I hadn’t been able to resist its force even then.

“I’m not a recluse,” I told her, realizing as I said it that it was exactly what I was. “I’m just trying to be myself,” I added, realizing as I said it that I still had not the slightest idea what that was supposed to mean.

“But you can see the light, can’t you?” she said, pointing up into the magical spire. “You can see that there are new possibilities before us now. You can see that wherever we live our everyday lives, we’re looking out on to an infinite stage. The universe is waiting for us, Morty, and we can’t keep it waiting forever just because we’re busy playing in our tiny little garden.”

“Sharane used to say that play is all there is,” I told her, reflexively. “She used to say that when all the threats and dangers had been eliminated, play was all that was left to lend purpose to existence.”

“Sharane was a fool,” said Emily, without an atom of doubt in her voice. “She couldn’t even spell her name correctly.”

Emily knew, of course, that Mama Siorane had contrived a death on Titan that everyone she knew out there had considered glorious. It seemed that she was determined to do likewise.

“I’m thinking of moving,” I told her, improvising furiously. “Somewhere new. Somewhere hot. South America, maybe.”

“To work on the fourth part of the History of Death”she said. She wasn’t one of my parents, so she didn’t try to make it sound like an insult or a condemnation, but I couldn’t help hearing it that way.

“It’s important,” I said. “It’s relevant. And it can’t be put off for a thousand years. The past is perishable, Em. If we don’t work to keep it alive, it dies. The artifacts crumble. The documents evaporate. Even ice palaces melt. All thisis temporary. Somebody has to keep track of it all. Somebody has to provide the continuity. I have to stay in touch. I could work on the moon, but that’s as far as you can go in the Universe Without Limits without losing touch with Earth. One day, historians will have to work with a much broader canvas, extending all the way to the Oort Halo, and probably beyond, but if that job’s to be done properly, the groundwork will have to be laid. I’m sorry you’re going. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

“We’ll keep in touch,” she promised. “No more overlooking messages, no more wondering if one of us is avoiding the other.”

“It won’t be the same,” I said. “You can’t have a conversation with someone in the outer system—the time delay won’t allow it. All I ever got from Mama Siorane was a series of lectures.”

“Letters, Morty, not lectures,” she said. “You’re a historian remember? You know what it was like back in the good old days, when people in London needed the Penny Postto keep in touch with people in Canterbury because it was a five-day journey on foot.”

Always the pedant, I had to point out that by the time they had the Penny Post, mail coaches had cut that kind of journey to a matter of hours—but she was right, in principle. From Mama Siorane I’d had lectures; from Emily I would get letters—and I would always be able to see her face, and even touch her VE sim.

“I’ll still be sorry,” I said, stubbornly. “My parents are all dead. You’re all that I have left from that phase of my existence.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “You just can’t be bothered to look for the rest of it while you’re stuck in the distant past. It’s time to move on, Morty—and I don’t mean South America. It’s time to reacquaint yourself with the world you live in.”

She was right, of course. I promised that I would, but I probably wouldn’t have kept the promise very well if the world had given me a choice. I would have changed in my own good time, at my own plodding pace, if I hadn’t been moved to more urgent action by forces beyond my control. As it happened, however, I was soon snatched up by a catastrophe that seemed at first, at least to my unready understanding, to be as furious and as far-reaching in its fashion as the Great Coral Sea Disaster.