Текст книги "The Fountains of Youth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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FOURTEEN

Emily and I took all the subjects we discussed aboard the raft very seriously, but we always knew that we were filling in time, trying to make the long wait bearable. When the time came for us to sleep again we were both relieved that the necessity of talking had been temporarily relaxed.

We had been afloat for three storm-tossed days when we finally heard a human voice. There are no words to express the relief that we felt as we realized that the ordeal was over.

“Calling Genesislife raft,” the voice said, sounding almost laconic through the raft’s elementary parrot mike. “This is Steve Willowitch, Air Rescue Mombasa, temporarily reassigned to Canberra. Can you confirm two passengers, alive and uninjured.”

The raft’s sloth had told him that much. I stabbed the icon controlling the voice transmitter with indecent haste and force. “Yes!” I said. “Mortimer Gray and Emily Marchant. Alive and uninjured.”

“Good. I’ll be with you in twenty minutes, Mister Gray.”

“What the hell happened?”I demanded, fearing that he might cut the connection and leave us in suspense for twenty more minutes. “The onboard sloth is too stupid even to pick up broadcasts.” I was only then absorbing the import of what he’d said. Air Rescue Mombasa?I thought. Reassigned to Canberra?

“Sorry for the delay, Mister Gray, Miss Marchant,” said Steve Willowitch. “Very bad business—major crust fracture. Seabed came open like a zipper south of Guadalcanal, extended for more than a hundred klicks. Seismologists got no warning from tectonic movements—the primary event must have been way down in the mantle, although the plates started shaking fit to burst thereafter. Hell of a blast—like a hundred Krakatoas, mostly a couple of hundred fathoms deep.”

“How many people died?” Emily asked, tentatively.

“Don’t know yet,” said the air rescue man. “More than three hundred million but we hope maybe less than five. Queensland took the worst but, the waves trashed New Zealand, the Philippines, and what was left of Japan and the western seaboard of the Americas after the first sequence of quakes had finished. And the islands, of course. Eight thousand of them.”

Eight thousand of themwas the statistic that reverberated in my head, because I hadn’t quite grasped the fact that 10 percent of the population of Earth was already feared dead, with more to come. I should, of course, have remembered immediately that Papa Ezra was in New Zealand, but I didn’t.

“You were lucky,” the pilot told us. “Must be tens of thousands of life rafts still floating, but millions didn’t even have a chance to get to a pod.”

I looked at Emily Marchant. Her tiny face had always seemed wan in the subdued interior lighting of the raft, and mine must have seemed just as bad, so the mute signal we exchanged through our mutual gaze had no further margin of horror in it, nor any additional sorrow for the hundreds of millions whose deaths we hadn’t dared anticipate.

“Thanks, Steve,” I said. “Get here when you can—we’re okay.”

This time, my finger was far gentler as it closed the transmitter. There was no point in leaving the channel open; it couldn’t be easy flying a copter through all the filth that was still clogging and stirring the lower atmosphere.

It occurred to me almost immediately that an event of the kind that Willowitch had described would have done far worse damage had it happened five hundred years earlier, but I said nothing to Emily. She didn’t seem to mind the silence, so I let my own thoughts run on unchecked.

I knew that if such a crust fissure had opened up while the world was the sole province of the oldOld Human Race—the pre-Crash mortals—it would almost certainly have killed fifty or sixty percent instead of ten and might have done so much damage to the ecosphere that even the survivors would have been precipitated into a downward spiral to extinction. Homo sapiens sapienshad evolved about a million years ago, on the plains of Africa, so five hundred years was only 0.05 of the life span of the species. Had we not renewed ourselves so comprehensively within that geological eyeblink, we would never have had the chance. Thanks to IT and suitskins, Solid and Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis, and our near-total technical control of the ecosphere, Earthbound humanity could and would bounce back, with what might have to be reckoned as minor casualties. We had reached the life-raft pod in time. We were alllucky—except for those of us who had perished.

Not that the casualties could possibly seem “minor” to Emily Marchant, I remembered, as I applied a gentle brake to the train of thought. She had lost all twelve of her parents at a single stroke. I was later to discover that I had not lost a single one—Papa Ezra had been high in the mountains—and would gladly have made her a gift of all eight had they been mine to give, but that could not have healed the breach in her circumstances. There would be no shortage of willing fosterers eager to adopt her, even in a world that had lost 300 million people, but it would not be the same. Her personal history had been rudely snapped in two, and she would be marked by her loss forever—but that moment could not bear sole responsibility for what became of her, and more than it was solely responsible for what became of me. I was already a historian; she had already declared that she wanted to join the Exodus and leave the homeworld behind.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Emily. “I’m sosorry.”

She looked at me very gravely, having made her own computation of the scale of the disaster and her own tiny role within it. “If you hadn’t been seasick,” she said, contemplatively, “I wouldn’t have been able to get the pod out.”

“If you hadn’t been there, neither would I,” I told her.

She didn’t believe it, but she knew that I wasn’t lying—that I honestly meant what I said.

Emily was still hanging on to the inner surface of the wave-tossed raft, but she released her right hand so that she could reach out to me. Solemnly, I took it in mine, and we shook hands for all the world like two businessmen who’d just been introduced.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You too,” she said. Then—and only then—she broke down and began to weep, helplessly and endlessly.

She was still weeping when the helicopter arrived, but she stopped when she realized how difficult it was going to be to winch us aboard. We had to concentrate and cooperate fully with Steve Willowitch’s heroic endeavors.

“It’ll be okay, Mortimer,” she assured me, as the hawser came down from the hovering aircraft, which seemed so very tiny against the vast dark backcloth of the continuing storm. “It’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” I said, as I lifted her up toward the blindly groping cable. “How difficult can it possibly be, for hardened survivors like us?”

FIFTEEN

Emily was by no means the only child in the world to lose an entire set of parents, and I still shudder to think of the number of parents who lost their only children. There was, as I had anticipated, no shortage of people willing to forge themselves into teams of adopters for the sake of the orphaned children, and all of those deprived of parenthood retained the right to return to the banks. The broken links in the chain of inheritance were mended. Tears were shed in abundance and then were set aside.

The cities devastated by tsunamis were rebuilt, and the agricultural lands around them reclaimed. Even at the time it seemed to happen with bewildering rapidity, fueled by an astonishing determination to reassert the dominion of humankind. There had been talk of Garden Earth for centuries, but our capacity to shape and manage the ecosphere had never been subjected to any severe test. After the Coral Sea Disaster, our gantzers and macrobiotechnologists had both the opportunity and the responsibility to demonstrate that they could deal with realDecivilization—and they met the challenge with awesome efficiency. The Continental Engineers were revitalized, if not actually reborn, in those years, and so were the continents themselves.

There is, I suppose, a certain wretched irony in the fact that all our paranoia regarding the precariousness of life on Earth had been directed outward for hundreds of years. We had thousands of artificial eyes scanning every part of the sky for incoming debris, but none looking down. Pride in our accomplishments had caused us to look upward and outward, and it wasn’t merely the promoters of the Exodus who had fallen into the habit of thinking of future history in terms of the kind of calculated expansion into the galaxy and appropriation of other worlds that Emily and I had discussed so earnestly while we were adrift. The breadth of our accomplishments and the height of our ambitions had made us forget how little we knew of the violent core of our own world.

Ever since the dutiful seismologists of the twenty-second century had sown the deep probes that measured tectonic stresses and monitored volcanoes, giving polite and timely warning of impending earthquakes and eruptions, we had fallen into the habit of thinking of the planet itself, not merely the ecosphere, as something tame.We had taken the effective constancy of the world’s interior for granted, to the extent that the silvers guiding our best moleminers had been left to themselves, bearing sole responsibility for the work of descending to the underworld of liquid rocks in search of all manner of motherlodes. We simply had not realized that there were forces at work down there that were easily capable of cracking the fragile biosphere like a bird’s egg, to release a fire-breathing dragon capable of devouring everything alive. The limits of AI are such that because we did not think of it, our silvers did not consider it either. If the moleminers’ senses picked up any indication of mysterious mantle events akin to that which caused the Coral Sea Catastrophe, they paid them no heed.

Many people must have made calculations like mine, realizing that we had survived a disaster that might have been an extinction event only a few centuries earlier. There were not so many who made the further calculation that although there had never been an event that destroyed 400 million people within a week, the ordinary processes of mortality had killed that number during every decade of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Old Human Race had not needed the world to be split apart in order to produce and sustain that kind of attrition rate; disease and old age had done it effortlessly, routinely, and contemptuously.That, to a young and impressionable historian, was a prospect even more mind-boggling than the consequence of a literally world-shattering event—but it did not calm my view of the Coral Sea Disaster. Perhaps perversely, it seemed to broaden and exaggerate my existential unease.

The deaths that occurred in the Coral Sea Disaster seemed to me to be understandable—direly unfortunate and vilely ominous, but understandable. Given the magnitude of the cause, the appalling effect was only to be expected, and my subsequent discomfiture accommodated that awareness. The result of my statistical comparisons was not to end that discomfiture, but to generate a new discomfiture in the contemplation of days long past.

My attempt to gain a proper perspective shone new light on the knowledge I had always had, but never brought fully to mind, that in 2001—the year that began the millennium in which I lived—the world had contained more than six billion people, every single one of whomwas condemned to die within a mere hundred years or so: a catastrophe on the same scale as the Coral Sea Disaster every time the last two digits of the date worked their inexorable way round to zero.

And yet the people who lived in those times had accepted that burden as the common toll of nature, philosophically and almost without complaint!

Perhaps I would have done what I eventually set out to do anyway. Perhaps the Coral Sea Catastrophe would have affected me in much the same way even if I had been on the other side of the world, cocooned in the safety of a hometree or an apartment in one of those crystal cities that felt no more than a slight earth tremor and greeted the sun again after three weeks of minor inconvenience. Even if I had written the same history, however, I am not at all sure that I would have written the same fantasy. It was because I was at the very center of things, because my life was literally turned upside down by the disaster, because I was pathetically sick to my stomach, and because eight-year-old Emily Marchant was there to save my life with her common sense and her composure, that the project which would occupy the first few centuries of my life took such a powerful hold over my imagination. I still contend that it did not become an obsession, but I do admit that it became capable of generating a unique passion in my heart and mind.

I did all kinds of other things; I lived as full a life as any of the other survivors of the Decimation. I did my share of Reconstruction work. I was not diminished in any way by the legacy of my experience—but from that moment on, my interest in the history of death could not be dispassionate, let alone disinterested—and it was very soon after being delivered safely back to what was left of Adelaide that I determined to write a definitive history of death.

From the very moment of that history’s conception, I intended not merely to collate and organize the dull facts of mankind’s longest and hardest war, but to discover, analyze, and celebrate the real meaning and significance of every charge in every battle and every bloodied meter of territory gained.

PART TWO Apprenticeship

Man is born free but is everywhere enchained by the fetters of death. In all times past, men have been truly equal in one respect and one only: they have all borne the burden of age and decay. The day must soon dawn when this burden can be set aside; there will be a new freedom, and with this freedom must come a new equality. No man has the right to escape the prison of death while his fellows remain shackled within.

–The New Charter of Human Rights

(published 2219; adopted 2248)

SIXTEEN

I visited Emily Marchant a dozen times in the three years which followed the Decimation, but we always met in virtual environments far steadier and more brightly lit than the hectic and claustrophobic space we had shared when the world had come apart and we did not know why. I fully intended to keep close contact with her at least until she was grown, but such resolutions always weaken. She was changing as rapidly as any child, and by the time she was twelve she was no longer the same little girl that had saved my life. Our calls grew less frequent and eventually fell into the category of things perennially intended but never actually done—but we didn’t forget one another. We always intended to renew our relationship when a suitable opportunity arose.

Emily told me that she was as happy with her new foster parents as it was possible to be but that she would never forget the twelve who wanted to take her on a journey of discovery through the petty Creations of the greatest genetic artists of the late twenty-fourth and early twenty-fifth centuries. Those destinations had perished in the Flood too; the world was again devoid of dragons and marsupials, temporarily at least, and there would never be another orgy of perfumes as finely balanced as Oscar Wilde’s flamboyant tribute to the mythical Jean Des Esseintes.

My own co-parents never gathered in the same place again. Three came together in the flesh at Papa Domenico’s funeral in 2547, and three at Papa Laurent’s in 2549, but Mama Meta and Mama Siorane were not the only ones who lent their virtual presence to each occasion, even though they were the only ones off-planet. After Papa Laurent’s death a full half-century passed before another of them died—that was Papa Nahum, in 2601—and by that time the directions of their lives had diversified to the point at which none of them felt the need to attend even by technological means. It would have been impossible, in any case, for Mama Siorane or Papa Ezra to take any meaningful part in Papa Nahum’s farewell, given the time-lapse involved in communication with the outer system; Mama Siorane was on Titan by then, and Papa Ezra had taken his work on the adaptation of Zaman transformations to faber anatomy to the microworlds.

Papa Domenico’s funeral in Amundsen City provided my first opportunity to visit the Continent Without Nations and to view the beating heart of the Utopian Bureaucracy. The architects who had built the new United Nations Complex had taken great pride in their ability to make the city blend in with the “natural” landscape, sheathing every building in glittering ice, and their efforts seemed spectacular to eyes that had not yet beheld a real ice palace. They had, at any rate, succeeded in providing the complex with the perfect image of icy objectivity. The funeral was easily accommodated to the same pattern; it was a solemn and businesslike affair, far less lavish than any I had seen on TV.

Not unnaturally, given that it was only five years after the Decimation, the conversation of the mourners was dominated by the trading of disaster stories. My fosterers demanded that I repeat my own tale for the benefit of dozens of their more distant acquaintances, and as I did so, over and over again, the account absorbed something of the spirit of the place and became colder and more impersonal even in my own reckoning.

“This new project of yours isn’t a good idea, Morty,” Papa Laurent told me. “I don’t say it’s not worth doing, but it’s not the sort of thing that should occupy a youngman.” He was not yet two hundred, but his second rejuve had not taken as well as it should, and he knew that he had not long to live—which inevitably led him to think of himself as very old.

“On the contrary,” I told him. “It’s work that only a young man can do. It will take decades, perhaps centuries, if it’s to be done properly—and I do mean to do it properly.The Labyrinth is so vast that the task of building hypertextual bridges to encompass a subject as broad as mine is more than Herculean. Nothing like it has been attempted before because it wasn’t the kind of project that a mortal scholar could seriously contemplate. If I don’t start now, the task might even prove beyond someone like me. The Decimation cost us a vast amount of historical information as well as four hundred million human lives and thousands of living species—which is, admittedly, trivial by comparison but serves as a timely reminder that the past becomes less accessible with every day that passes.”

“But the essential data will all be there,” Papa Laurent objected, “even if the bridges remain unbuilt—and we’re already on the threshold of an age when that kind of data navigation can be entirely delegated to silvers. Surely they’ll be the historians of the future.”

“Silvers are very poor commentators,” I reminded him, “and they only build bridges to connect preexisting highways. I want to make new connections, to build a huge picture of a kind that we’ve almost stopped producing. We’ve become too easily content to let the trees hide the wood, and I want to see the entire forest—but no one will accept my grand overview if I can’t demonstrate that I’ve done all the detailed work. A historian has to pay his dues. My history will take at least two hundred years to complete. I hope to issue it in installments, but the preliminary work will take a long time.”

“Don’t let it get on top of you,” my aged parent persisted. “You can’t put off the business of living.”

“I won’t,” I promised—and tried with all my might to keep the promise.

“A history of death is too morbida preoccupation for a young man,” he insisted, revealing the extent to which his own mind had lost its ability to move on. “You’ve always been a little too serious. I always knew that the balance of the team was wrong. We needed lighter hearts than Nahum’s or Siorane’s or even mine.”

“The members of every team of fosterers look back on their work and think they got the balance wrong,” I assured him. “I think you got the balance just right. Trust me, Papa Laurent.”

Mama Sajda also told me that she’d always known that the team was out of kilter, although it wasn’t lighter hearts that she’d thought lacking. “Too many people with their eyes on the stars or Dom’s ridiculous Universe Without Horizons,” she told me. “I thought it was enough to set the hometree down in a quintessentially real place, but we still couldn’t keep our feet on the ground. We should have chosen Africa—the veldt, or the fringes of the rain forest. We were too detached.”

Mama Meta and Mama Siorane, speaking across the void, were now united in the opinion that I ought to have been raised on the moon or in one of the L-5 habitats, but Papa Nahum—who was also speaking via VE space—was more contented, and so was Mama Eulalie. “Don’t listen to them, Mortimer,” Mama Eulalie advised me. “Go your own way. Any parents who bring up a child capable of going his own way have done their job.”

The similarly detached Papa Ezra, mercifully, was content to talk more about his own work than mine and take the decisions of the past for granted. “We’re all going the same way as Dom, Morty,” he reminded me. “One by one, we’ll desert you. Try to remember Dom kindly—the practice will do you good. You’re the only one who’ll have to say goodbye to all eight of us.”

Papa Laurent’s funeral was completely different from Papa Domenico’s. Paris did not have the distinction of being one of the most ancient cities in the world, and it had not escaped the Decimation unscathed, but its inhabitants had contrived nevertheless to retain a sense of cultural superiority and calculated decadence left over from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most Parisians would have put their own city and the UN’s ice-clad metropolis at opposite ends of a spectrum of existential sensitivity, and anyone who judged them by appearances would probably have agreed. Our farewell to Papa Laurent was, in consequence, much gaudier, much warmer, and somewhat more tearful than our farewell to Papa Domenico, although I did not feel his loss any less sharply.

“I’m the oldest now,” Mama Eulalie said to me, “but I’m damned if I intend to be the next to go. I’ll give the others a race.” So she did, surviving Papa Nahum by thirty-three years and Mama Meta by seventeen—although both of them might have argued as they lay upon their deathbeds that she had accomplished less by virtue of her unwillingness to take risks that many people regarded as routine.

This time, it was Mama Siorane who took me most sternly to task over my vocation. “It’s stupid to immerse yourself in the mire of the past, Mortimer,” she informed me, sternly. “Laurent wasn’t right about many things, but he was right about that. We should have abolished history along with the Old Human Race. I may be just a false emortal stitched together by nanotech, halfway to robothood, but I’m working for the future. The future is where you’re going to have to live your life, Mortimer, and it’s the future you should be focused on. Leave Earth to the old, and come out here to the real world. The planet’s served its purpose in giving birth to us, and it’s a foolish and cowardly young man who clings fast to his cradle. One day you’ll leave, and it would be better sooner than later. One day, all of your generation will have to leave, if only to make room for the next. The Decimation might have taken the pressure off, but it’ll return soon enough. It’s not good for you to be obsessed with the dead.”

“If I ever leave Earth for good,” I told her, “I want to come away with a proper sense of progress. I don’t think we should expand into the galaxy mindlessly just because up seems to be the only way to go and we’re too restless as a race to stand still. I’m as committed as you are to the ethic of permanent growth, but I think we need a better sense of what we intend to doin the more distant reaches of galactic space, and we can only get that by cultivating a better sense of who we are.We can’t do that if we don’t fully understand what our ancestors were.”

“Utter rubbish,” she opined. “Our ancestors were worms and fish, and you can’t embrace human aspirations by understanding the blindness of worms and the stupidity of fish. You have to look forward, Mortimer, or you’re half-dead even in your emortality.”

“Don’t take any notice,” Mama Eulalie advised, again. “That bitch was always preaching when she was on Earth, and now she’s in heaven she’s impossible. Some leaders never look behind them, but the wise ones always do.”

In a way, I said good-bye to all of them on the day I said my final good-bye to Papa Laurent. It wasn’t just that we never gathered together again, even in a VE; we had all moved on into new phases of our existence. We were not the people we had been when we shared a hometree; our collective identity had been shattered. We had been broken down into atoms and dissipated in the flow of history. As with Emily Marchant, my calls to them grew farther and farther apart, as did their calls to me. We never actually losttouch, but our touch became tenuous. New acquaintances gradually displaced them to the margins of my life.