Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Ten

I scrambled to my feet. While I held Emily fast in my right hand I put out my left to steady myself against the upside-down wall. The water was knee-deep and still rising—not very quickly, but inexorably. The upturned boat was rocking from side to side, but it also seemed to be trying to spin around. I could hear the rumble of waves breaking on the outside of the hull. The noise wasn’t loud, but I knew that the hull must be muffling the sound.

“My name’s Emily, Mister Mortimer,” the little girl told me. “I’m frightened.”

I resisted the temptation to say So am I.Somewhere in the corridor, I knew, there were lockers containing emergency equipment: not merely life jackets but “survival pods,” whose shells were self-inflating plastic life rafts. There was light enough to find them, if I could only adjust my mind to the fact that everything was upside down. Once we had one, we still had to get it out, and I still couldn’t swim—but how hard could it be, if I could get into a life jacket?

“This way,” I said, as soon as I had figured out which way the emergency locker was. Unsurprisingly, it was in the logical place, next to the stairs, which now descended into angry darkness. I marveled at my being able to speak so soberly and marveled even more that I no longer felt seasick. My body had been shocked back to sanity, if not to normality.

As we moved along the corridor, I couldn’t shake the horror of the thought that Emily Marchant’s entire familymight have been wiped out at a single stroke and that she might now be that rarest of all rare beings, an orphan.It was barely imaginable. What possible catastrophe, I wondered, could have done that? And what other atrocities must that same catastrophe have perpetrated?

“Do you have any idea what happened, Emily?” I asked, as I wrestled with the handle of the locker. It was easy enough to turn it the “wrong” way, but not so easy to drag the door open against the increasing pressure of the water.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Are we going to die?” The word toohung unspoken at the end of the sentence. She was only eight, but she understood the implications of the fact that everyone else had been on deck when the boat flipped over, defying every precaution taken by its careful designers.

“No,” I told her. “If we can just get these life jackets on and take this pod with us….”

“It’s very big,” she said, dubiously—but I knew that if it had been designed to be carried up the stairs it would certainly go down them.

Despite the rocking of the boat, I contrived to get one of the life jackets over Emily’s shoulders. “Don’t pull it yet,” I said, showing her where the ring pull was but firmly setting her hand away from it. “We have to get clear of the boat first. You have to swim as hard as you can– thatway. Understand? Swim as hard as you can, and don’t pull until you’re sure you’re no longer under the boat. Then you’ll pop up to the surface. I’ll bring the life-raft pod.”

“I’ve been a good girl,” she told me, with just a hint of bleakness in her awful sobriety. “I’ve never told a lie.”

It couldn’t have been literally true, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was eight years old and she had every right to expect to live till she was eight hundred. She didn’t deserveto die. It wasn’t fair that she should. It wasn’t fair that she should lose her parents either but one misfortune didn’t license the other. I knew full well that fairness didn’t really come into it, and I expect she knew it too, even if my fellow historians and social commentators were wrong about the abolition of the primary artifices of childhood. I knew in my heart, though, that what she said was right, and that insofar as the imperious laws of nature ruled her observation irrelevant, the universewas wrong. It wasn’tfair. She hadbeen a good girl. If she died, it would be a monstrous injustice.

Perhaps it was merely a kind of psychological defense mechanism that helped me to displace my own mortal anxieties, but the horror running through me was exclusively focused on her. At that moment, her plight—not ourplight, but hers—seemed to be the only thing that mattered. It was as if her dignified protest and her placid courage somehow contained the essence of New Human existence, the purest product of progress.

Perhaps it was only my cowardly mind’s refusal to contemplate anything else, but the only thing I could think of while I tried to figure out what to do was the awfulness of what Emily Marchant was saying. As that awfulness possessed me it was magnified a thousandfold, and it seemed to me that in her lone and tiny voice there was a much greater voice speaking for multitudes: for all the human children that had ever died before achieving maturity; all the goodchildren who had died without ever having the chance to deserve to die.

“I can’t hold your hand, Emily,” I told her, as my own life jacket settled itself snugly about my torso. “It would make it too difficult for us to get away.”

“You’re the one who can’t swim,” she reminded me.

“I’ll be all right,” I assured her. “If you see the life-raft pack before you see me, the trigger’s here.Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. We were both looking down into the hole in what had once been the ceiling of the corridor.

“Don’t try to hold on to the ladder,” I advised her. “Just dive, as deep as you can. Then go sideways, until you can’t hold your breath any more. Then pull the ring. It’ll carry you up to the surface. I’ll be right behind you.” I was talking as much for my own benefit as hers. As she said, I was the one whose knowledge of swimming was purely theoretical. I was the one who would have to improvise.

She didn’t move. She was paralyzed by apprehension.

“I don’t think any more water can get in,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice, “but there’s only so much air. If we stay here too long, we’ll suffocate.”

She was trying to convince herself. She was eight years old and hoped to live to be eight hundred, and she was absolutely right. The air wouldn’t last forever. Hours maybe, but not forever.

“The survival pod will keep us alive for a week,” she added. She had obviously paid close attention to Captain Cardigan’s welcoming speech. She was probably the only passenger who’d actually bothered to plug the safety chips they’d handed out to all of us into her trusty handbook, like the good girl she was.

“We can both fit into the pod,” I assured her, “but we have to get it out of the boat before we inflate it. It’s too big for you to carry.”

“You can’t swim,” she reminded me.

“It’s not hard,” I reminded her. “All I have to do is hold my breath and kick myself away from the boat. But you have to go first. I’ll get you aboard the life raft, Emily. Trust me.”

“I do,” she said.

I stared at her. There was no cause for wonder in the fact that she could be so calm and so controlled and yet not be able to hurl herself into that black airless void—but I had to get her out before I got out myself. I couldn’t show her the way because I couldn’t leave her alone.

“Listen to the water on the outside,” she whispered. “Feel the rocking. It must have been a hurricane that overturned the boat… but we have to go, don’t we, Mister Mortimer? We have to get out.”

“Yes,” I said. “The pod’s bright orange and it has a distress beacon. We should be picked up within twenty-four hours, but there’ll be supplies for a week.” I had every confidence that our suitskins and our internal technology could sustain us for a month, if necessary. Even having to drink a little seawater if our recycling gel clotted would only qualify as a minor inconvenience—but drowning was another matter. Drowning is one of the elementary terrors of emortality, along with a smashed skull, a fall from a great height and a close encounter with a bomb.

“It’s okay, Mister Mortimer,” Emily said, putting her reassuring hand in mine for one more precious moment, so that we could both take strength from the touch. “We can do it. It’ll be all right.”

And so saying, she leaped into the pool of darkness.

ELEVEN

I knew that I couldn’t afford to be paralyzed by apprehension, for Emily’s sake. I also knew—and am convinced of it to this very day—that if Emily hadn’t been there to create the absolute necessity, I would not have been able to lower myself through that hole. I would have waited, cravenly, until there was no more air left to breathe. While I waited, I might have been injured by the buffeting of the rigid-hulled boat, or the boat might have taken on water enough to go down, but I would have waited, alone and horribly afraid.

I couldn’t swim.

In the early twenty-sixth century, it was taken for granted that all members of the New Human Race were perfectly sane. Madness, like war and vandalism, was supposed to be something that our forefathers had put away, with other childish things, when they came to understand how close the old Old Human Race had come to destroying themselves and taking the entire ecosphere with them. It was, I suppose, true. Ali Zaman’s firstborns were, indeed, perfectly sane from the age of eight until eighty, and we lived in contentedly uninteresting times until 23 March 2542. We always knew what counted as the reasonable thing to do, and it was always available to us—but even we New Humans couldn’t and didn’t always do it. As sane as we undoubtedly were, we were still capable of failing to act in our own best interests. Sometimes, we needed an extra reason even to do what we knew full well we hadto do—and I needed the responsibility of taking care of Emily Marchant to make me jump into the hot and seething sea, even though I could not swim, and trade the falsely unsinkable Genesisfor an authentically unsinkable life raft.

But Emily was right. We coulddo it, together, and we did.

It was the most terrifying and most horrible experience of my young life, but it had to be done, and as soon as Emily had had time to get clear I filled my lungs with air and hurled myself into the same alien void. I had the handgrip of the life-raft pod tightly held in my right hand, but I hugged it to my chest nevertheless as I kicked with all my might, scissoring my legs.

Much later, of course, I realized that if I had only followed Captain Cardigan’s instructions and read the safety manual, I would have known where to find breathing apparatus as well as a life raft. That would have done wonders for my confidence, although it would not have made my feeble imitation of swimming any more realistic. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that it was pure luck and the seething of the sea that carried me far enough away from the boat to ensure that when I yanked the ring to inflate my life jacket I did indeed bob up to the surface.

The surface of the sea was chaotically agitated, and the stars that should have shone so brightly were invisible behind a pall of cloud. I started screaming Emily’s name as soon as I had refilled my lungs. I had sufficient presence of mind to hang on to the pod’s handgrip while I pulled the trigger that would inflate the life raft. There was nothing explosive about its expansion, but it grew with remarkable rapidity, reducing me to a mere parasite hanging on to the side of what felt like a huge rubbery jellyfish. It was as blackly dark as everything else until the process reached its terminus, at which point the eye lights came on and exposed its garish orange color.

I was still yelling, “Emily!”

No sooner was I struck by the horrid thought that getting into the body of the life raft might not be easy than I found out something else I would have known had I read the safety manual. The activated life rait was at least sloth-smart, and it had urgent instincts built into its biosystems. It grabbed me and sucked me in as if it were a synthowhale harvesting a plankton crop. Then it went after Emily, who was close enough to be glaringly obvious to its primitive senses.

While the raft fought the demonic waves I was rolled helplessly back and forth within its softly lit stomachlike interior, and I could tell that it was no easy chase, but the creature was programmed for tenacity. Although it seemed like a long time to me it could not have been more than three minutes before it swallowed Emily and deposited her alongside me. I grabbed hold of her while we continued to rock and roll, so that we wouldn’t be bumping into one another with bruising effect, but it took only another two minutes for me to find the handholds, which allowed me to stabilize my position and to find Emily a coign of vantage of her own.

She spat out some water, but she was fine.

The movement of the boat became somewhat less violent now that its muscles could be wholly devoted to the task of smoothing out the worst excesses of the madcap ride. For a moment I was glad, and then 1 realized what it meant. If there had been any other human being within detection range, the raft would have chased them.

“Did you read the safety manual, Emily?” I asked.

“Yes, Mister Mortimer,” she said, in the wary kind of voice that children use when expecting admonition—but nothing was further from my mind than checking up on her.

“Can you remember whether there were any pods like this on the outside of the boat? Pods that would detach automatically in an emergency?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

I kept on hoping, but I was almost sure that she was right. The Genesiswas supposedly unsinkable, so the only kind of emergency its designers had provided for was the kind where the crew might have to throw a life raft to a swimmer in trouble. There had been no rafts to go to the aid of the people swept overboard when the Genesishad first been rudely upturned by the boiling sea.

TWELVE

It didn’t take long to find the teats that secreted fresh water and other kinds of liquid nourishment. By the time I’d sucked in enough to take the taste of brine away, my suitskin had gotten rid of all the surplus water it had accumulated during the escape from Genesis.The interior surface of the life raft was suitskin-smart too, so there was no water sloshing around. The only significant discomfort was the heat. The life raft was well equipped to warm its inhabitants up if they were hypothermie, but no one had anticipated that it might need equally clever facilities to cool them down if they’d just had a hot bath and were still floating on top of one.

“How long will it be?” Emily asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What happened?” she asked.

I didn’t know that either, but I had already formed two suspicions regarding what seemed at the time to be the most likely not-quite-impossibilities.

“Something must have fallen out of the sky,” I said. “It must have hit the sea very violently, as well as being very hot itself. If it were a comet or an asteroid fragment the satellite ring would have given adequate warning, but if it were actually one of the satellites—maybe even a station…”

“Or a bomb,” she said, neatly filling in the not-quite-impossibility that I’d considered unmentionable. “It could have been a bomb.”

Theoretically, there were no nuclear weapons anywhere in the world—but I’d seen the inside of a mountain that had been hollowed out by gantzers in order to serve as a repository for all the artifacts that the world no longer considered necessary—the litter that dared not speak its name. I’d even poked around in a few of the storerooms. I knew that some of what the New Human Race had put away with other childish things really had been merely put away.

Theoretically, of course, there should have been no one anywhere in the world insane enough to use a nuclear weapon even if one still existed, but even in the long interval of apparent near-universal sanity that separated the Moreau murders from the rebirth of Thanaticism we New Humans were not entirelyconvinced that our theories were reliable in their account of the limits of Old Human irresponsibility.

“I don’t think it was a bomb,” I told the little girl. “If anyone was going to start throwing multimegaton bombs around, they wouldn’t aim one at the Coral Sea. They certainly wouldn’t aim one at Genesis—and whatever happened, we must have been very close to the point of impact.”

We were both wrong, alas, as any passably conscientious student of history will have known ever since I specified the date on which Genesisset sail. Had I been in a clearer frame of mind I would undoubtedly have realized that our hypotheses had only covered two of the three relevant dimensions (up and sideways), but I was still ill. I had stopped noticing it, but my seasickness hadn’t actually been cured.I didn’t suppose that I would be able to complete the reconciliation of my head and my guts while the raft kept on lurching, and I was right.

“They are going to come for us, aren’t they?” Emily said. She was putting on a brave face, but the excessive warmth of the raft’s interior hadn’t brought any significant color to her cheeks.

“Absolutely,” I said. “The raft’s lit up outside like a firework display, and its systems will be transmitting a mayday on the emergency wavelength that will be audible all the way from Australia to geosynchronous orbit. If they can’t redirect a ship to pick us up they’ll send a helicopter as soon as it’s safe to fly—but the weather’s pretty filthy. Anything that can turn the sea into a Jacuzzi is likely to stir the atmosphere up a bit.”

“If it was a bomb,” she said, “there might be nobody…”

“It wasn’t a bomb, Emily,” I told her, firmly. “They didn’t even use big bombs in World War Three or World War Four. It has to be space junk falling back to Earth: an accident in orbit. We happened to be right next to ground zero—a million-to-one chance. They’ll send a copter from Gladstone or Rockhampton when they can.”

“But if someone had heard the mayday,” she pointed out, with deadly accuracy, “they’d have replied, wouldn’t they?”

She was right. The raft had to have a voice facility. A hyperspecialized sloth wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with us, but it would be able to tell us what was happening if anything werehappening. If no one was replying to our mayday one of two things must be true. Either there was no one able to reply, or there were so many maydays filling the airwaves that we were effectively on hold, waiting in a verylong line.

I realized that if it were a very large space station that had come down, the subsequent tidal wave might have taken out Gladstone and Rockhampton as easily as it had taken out Genesis—and flooded every single natural and artificial island west of Vanuatu and south of the Solomons. That was as big a disaster as I could seriously contemplate at the time, but the silence said that even those limits might be elastic.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” Emily said, at last. “All of them.”

She meant all twelve of her parents. The three couples and Captain Cardigan’s crew were gone too, but she couldn’t think about them while her own personal tragedy was so immense.

“We don’t know that,” I said. “There must have been other pods. They all have good suitskins and first-rate IT. People are surprisingly hard to kill.” But I knew as I said it that whatever had tipped Genesisover had been more than surprising, it had been unprecedented, and well-nigh unimaginable. I didn’t have to look out to know that the sea was still seething, and the clouds that had risen from it to blot out the stars were still impenetrable.

THIRTEEN

The sea did not become calm that night. When I was sure that the sun had risen I did take an opportunity to peek out, but the cloud was so thick as to be hardly penetrable, and rain was falling more densely than I had ever seen it before—and there are summer days in the Himalayas, even in these days of supposed climate control, when thirty centimeters of rain can fall in a matter of hours. It was no longer hot inside the raft, although the sea was still ten or fifteen degrees warmer than the falling rain.

I managed to take a little liquid nourishment from the teat, but my IT had not yet managed to get the upper hand in the argument with my subconscious, and I still felt nauseous. It was not until noon that the raft’s voice facility finally kicked in and announced that its mayday had been acknowledged.

“Please wait,” the raft said, in the curiously plaintive fashion typical of the most limited sloths. “Help will come. Please wait.” Clearly, it was talking to another AI no brighter than itself—and if it had taken twelve hours even to cement thatlink, I thought, how much longer would it be before our plight became a matter of urgent concern for a high-grade silver or a human being?

I asked what was happening, of course, and begged to be put into contact with a more intelligent entity, but I couldn’t evoke any response other than a simple repetition. I tried to remember how many islands there were in the Coral Sea and Micronesia and how many people lived along the coastal strips of Queensland and New Guinea, but I had no real idea. The only thing of which I could be sure was that the number of people needing help must be at least as many millions as the number of people able to render it—and that most of them would be aggregated in larger and more easily reachable groups than our minuscule microcosm.

“It’s not fair,” Emily whispered, when it became clear that night was going to fall without anyone coming to our aid, “is it, Mister Mortimer?”

I knew what she meant, but I had a slightly pedantic mind-set even then. “Mortimer’s my first name, Emily, not my second,” I told her, “and the one thing we can be certain of is that whatever’s going on now isfair. All the maydays will be feeding into a ganglion somewhere in the Labyrinth, and a supersilver triage system will make sure that the help goes wherever it’s most urgently needed. Everything will be done in such a way as to ensure the greatest good of the greatest number. They must know that we’re not in any real danger—that the life raft will keep us alive for as long as necessary. They’ll come for us when they can.”

“But they’re not even talkingto us,” she said. “How bad can things be?”

For an eight year old, she was extremely sharp. I figured she deserved an honest answer. “Very, very bad indeed,” I admitted. “Whatever it is, it has to be the worst disaster in human history.”

“Worse than the Crash?” she queried.

“Worse than the Black Death,” I told her, bleakly. “Worse than the last Ice Age, and a hell of a lot quicker. At least as bad as the last big extinction event, if not the one that finally killed off the dinosaurs.” I realized as I said it that even the biggest station in near-Earth orbit couldn’t have caused that big a splash. One of the L-5 cylinders might have—but what could have moved it all the way from lunar orbit without any warning?

“How many people do you think it killed?” she asked, carefully raising her sights above the level of her own family. “Millions?”

“Perhaps millions,” I agreed, sadly.

“Like the Crash,” she said.

She was eight years old, and I didn’t dare ask her exactly what she meant by that. I was prepared to assume that she was only talking about numbers—but I was already a fledgling historian. I knew that the Crash had not been entirely a matter of accident and misadventure. At least some of the viruses that had sterilized the Old Human Race had been deliberately crafted for that purpose, by people who thought of themselves as the midwives and parents of a New Human Race. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Emily might, after all, have been right about that bomb, and whether some member of the realNew Human Race– ourNew Human Race—might have wearied of the slowness with which the world was being handed over to our control.

It was absurd, of course. No sanemember of the New Human Race could possibly have been as impatient as that, let alone as frankly evil-minded as that, but when you’re afloat in a life raft on an impossibly turbulent sea, having never had a chance to recover from seasickness, you can entertain thoughts that you would never entertain at any other time. The fact remained that whatever had caused this disaster wouldhasten the disappearance of the Old Human Race, at least in Australasia and Oceania.

That, in itself, was a sobering thought.

By the time night fell again we had become sufficiently well adapted to the pitching and tossing of the boat to sleep. My slumber was fitful and full of dreams, but Emily slept better and longer, only jerking awake once or twice when her reflexive grip on the handholds weakened and she felt herself moving too far too fast.

While we were awake throughout our second day afloat, we talked about anything and everything except our parents.

I told Emily about the valley in the Himalayas, and the Hindu monks, and the genetically engineered yaks, and the secrets of Shangri-La. She told me about her own home tree in the middle of what had been the outback before the Continental Engineers had constructed the largest of all their irrigation schemes and made it bloom again.

I told her everything I had learned about the hollow mountains full of the world’s dross. She told me everything she knew about the Black Mountains of the Northern Territory, whose hollow interiors were vast factories converting the energetic produce of the SAP forests to every conceivable purpose.

We talked about the latest news from Mars and the Oort Halo and the fact that the so-called kalpa probes would soon be overtaking the first-generation Arks, launched in the early years of the Crash by megacorp men half-convinced that Earthbound man was not going to make it through the crisis. We agreed that when the people those Arks were carrying in SusAn finally emerged from the freezer, they would be pig sick at the thought of having been overtaken as well as having missed out on the last four hundred years of technological progress. We talked about the possibility that human beings would eventually colonize the entire galaxy, terraforming every planet that seemed capable of sustaining an ecosphere, and the possibility that one or other of the kalpa probes would soon encounter other intelligent species already engaged with that task.

We also talked about the Type-2 crusaders who wanted to start transporting mass from the outer system to Earth’s orbit as preliminary steps on the way to making use of the sun’s entire energy output, although I don’t recall either of us taking a particular interest in that topic.

“When I grow up,” Emily said, “I want to go into space.”

“Me too,” I said. “There are wonderful sights to see once you get outside the atmosphere—and virtual reproductions can’t do them justice any more than they could do justice to Wilde’s Creation.” I felt a pang of regret as I said it for the loss of Wilde’s orgiastic Creation.

“I don’t just want to seethings,” Emily assured me. “I want to make things. New worlds.” She didn’t mention Wilde’s island specifically, or any of its neighbors, but I think she had a better sense than I had of their irrelevance to a world in which one could really think in terms of making new worlds.

“I don’t know about going into space permanently,” I said. “No matter how clever our suitskins and IT become, we were shaped by evolution to live at the surface of the earth. It’s the only place we’ll ever really be at home, unless and until the Type-2 brigade can build and terraform Earth 2 on the far side of the sun. I left my old hometree readily enough, but I’m not sure I could leave a world as easily. It’ll be a long time before the Exodus really picks up pace, especially now….” I cut myself off before adding that if the disaster in which we had been caught up really had killed millions, the UN’s propaganda in favor of using extraterrestrial emigration as a population safety-valve was bound to be laid to rest, at least for a while.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Emily said, politely. I can’t remember whether it was the last time she ever spoke those words to me, even with the benefit of a tentative perhaps, but it might well have been. It speaks volumes for the quality of our friendship that it never needed reinforcement by agreement. No difference in the world could have separated us after what we went through together on Genesisand the life raft.