The Fountains of Youth (13 page)

My surviving parents, as might have been expected, quietly relished the opportunities offered by my parlous situation. They had always been enthusiastic to exercise subtle leverage upon the direction of my life, and fate had delivered me into their hands.

“You should have left Earth fifty years ago,” Mama Meta informed me, stopping barely a centimeter short of saying
I told you so.
“Gravity holds people down and holds people back. It attaches people to the past instead of the future. I’m not saying that history is worthless, but it’s not the sort of career to which anyone should give a hundred percent of their
time and effort. The Labyrinth is here too, Morty. General Good work isn’t just plentiful on the moon, it’s twice as well paid as the same work on Earth—and zero-gee work is triple or quadruple, if you’re prepared to learn the tricks of the trade. You’ll have plenty of time for hobbies—but you have to move fast. In thirty or forty years the fabers will have a virtual monopoly on zero-gee work, and they’ll still have first choice of lunatic work. By 2650 you won’t be able to find
decent
work this side of Mars, but if you strike while the iron’s hot you can make some real money.”

In Mama Meta’s reckoning, “decent” work had to be work for the General Good, which also paid at least three times what the Allocation provided. In her view, that ruled out almost everything available on Earth. Mama Siorane’s pioneering endeavors among the outer satellites were thoroughly decent, as were Papa Ezra’s adventures in genetic engineering, but in Mama Meta’s view, Mama Eulalie and Mama Sajda were “harlots of commerce.” They earned good money, but they were both employed in Production Management—and that, in Mama Meta’s view, was only one short step from the Ent end of EdEnt. “EdEnt is an oxymoron,” Mama Meta had assured me, in the long-gone days before I climbed the mountain. “Education is self-improvement, but Entertainment is self-wastage.” Mercifully, none of her partners had agreed with her on that one—and even Mama Siorane would have stopped short of describing workers in the commercial sector as harlots. That did not mean, alas, that my other fosterers were willing to side with me in the dispute that inevitably developed between myself and Mama Meta.

“I know I’ve always advised you to be yourself,” Mama Eulalie said, on one occasion when I had complained a little too self-pityingly about Mama Meta’s hectoring, “but it wouldn’t do you any harm to spread yourself around a bit. It wouldn’t actually dirty your hands to get involved in commerce. The people who actually keep the big wheels turning might think it necessary to lock themselves away inside mountains, but the people who do the little jobs lead perfectly normal lives. The MegaMall has plenty of single-skill VE-based work available these days—they actually find it hard to attract young people, and we mortals have an inconvenient habit of retiring long before we’re likely to drop dead.”

The last remark was a reference to Papa Nahum, who was a lot closer to dropping dead than he or I realized. Like Mama Eulalie and Mama Sajda, he’d spent his life laboring in relatively menial capacities for what they both, in their quaintly old-fashioned way, insisted on calling the “MegaMall.” His advice, at least, had no undercurrent of censure.

“When I was young,” he said, “I worked very hard. When I reached an age at which the end was in sight, I slacked off. When I was sure I had enough to see me through to the end, I stopped. Work never hurt me but I never learned to like it. I’m Old Human through and through. You’re not. If I’d known that I had to work forever, or as near as damn it, I’d have looked at things a different way. We can’t tell you how to go about that. Better keep in mind, though, that forever is a hell of a long time to be poor, even in today’s world. Taking advantage of unlimited opportunity needs funds as well as endurance.”

“If my history is definitive,” I told him, trying not to sound boastful, “it’ll make money. Not soon, and not a fortune, but it
will
make money. It’ll make my name too. When people mention Mortimer Gray’s
History of Death
, other people will know what they’re talking about.”

“Your choice,” Papa Nahum said, graciously. “Sorry I won’t be around to share the celebration. I want genuine Oscar Wildes at my funeral, mind—none of that cheap rubbish. I don’t care how poor you are.”

When he died, at the dawn of the twenty-seventh century, I brought genuine Oscar Wildes to his funeral even though I couldn’t afford them. Mama Meta ordered Rappaccinis that had been out of fashion for a century, but she didn’t mean any insult. She lived on the moon, where flowers were a good deal rarer than people with legs, and anything with petals counted as a wonder.

O
ddly enough, the most generous moral support I received in the wake of the
Prehistory’s
publication—along with the most generous offers of charitable assistance—came from Emily Marchant, who was now richer than both my families put together.

Emily’s replacement foster parents, operating in the capacity of trustees, had reinvested the twelvefold inheritance she had received from her original fosterers in shamir development. It had been the most obvious thing to do, given that the cities smashed by the tidal waves of 2542 would all need rebuilding, but the obvious sometimes pays unexpected dividends. The shamirs designed for the patient and elegant regenerative work that had been the world’s lip service to Decivilization had not been well adapted to the task of repairing rude devastation. Gantzing biotech had been stuck in a rut for two hundred years while the Zamaners had taken all the funds and all the glory, but coping with the debris of the tidal waves had given its evolution a new impetus.

It was hardly surprising that Emily had gone into the business herself, cleverly reapplying the lessons learned in the design of new and better shamirs to the improvement of the deconstructors and reconstructors that had been set to work in the interior spaces of Io and Ganymede, building subsurface colonies far more sophisticated than those clustered around the lunar poles. In 2615, however, Emily had not yet formed a powerful desire to go out to the outer system herself. Like me, she was still contentedly Earthbound.

“You really ought to take the money, Mortimer,” she said to me, after I had refused for the ninth or tenth time. “It grows so much faster than I can spend it that I keep running into the hypertax bracket, at which point it all gets gobbled up by the Social Fund and redirected to the General Good. I know it’s antisocial to regret that, but I can’t help thinking that I’d prefer to select my own deserving causes.”

“I can’t,” I said. “It would feel wrong.”

“Why? Because you happened to save my life once upon a time? It’s
not payment, Mortimer. It doesn’t alter what you did or make it any less heroic.”

“It could hardly have been any less heroic than it was,” I told her, mournfully. “Anyway, it’s nothing to do with that. It would feel wrong because it would mean that I wasn’t doing it
myself.”

“You take the Allocation, don’t you?”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

I wasn’t entirely sure why, but I felt that it was. The allowance awarded to every member of the race was a guarantee of food, shelter, and basic access to the Labyrinth; I tended to think of it as a modest advance payment for the work I was doing on my
History
, even though that would never be officially recognized as work for the General Good. If I had taken Emily’s money, and spent it on travel to Athens, Jerusalem, and Babylon, I would have been incurring a debt of a different kind. She couldn’t see that—or perhaps she just refused to see it. Either way, it made a difference to me.

“I won’t be this badly off for very long,” I assured her. “It’ll be good for me to struggle for a while. I’ll enjoy it all the more when things get better.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you might have a masochistic streak, Mister Mortimer?” she asked, reverting to the form of my name that she alone employed, inconsistently, in order to emphasize that she didn’t really mean what she was saying.

“Of course it has,” I said. “I’m the historian of death—the man whose self-appointed task it is to remind New Humankind of all the fear and pain that went into its making. I’m probably the last of the truly great masochists.” I had no inkling at that time of the appalling magnitude of the masochism that was yet to visit the world, whose emortal exponents would outshine me as easily as the sun outshines a candle.

“Well,” Emily said, reprovingly, “you know the money’s there whenever you need it. You can always change your mind.”

I probably would have, eventually. As things turned out, though, I found another solution to my straitened circumstances—or had another solution thrust upon me. Putting it that way makes it sound crudely materialistic, but in reality it was anything but that. When I got married
for the second time it wasn’t for convenience, or even for companionship, and it certainly wasn’t for money, although setting up another joint household did solve my financial problems. I married for love, carried away on a tide of passion.

I should, of course, have been immune to such disruptions by the age of eighty-five, but I had contrived to skip that stage of my sentimental education by going straight into a group marriage without bothering with the conventional pair-bond experiments. When I should have been getting the capacity for infatuation out of my system I was busy with other things, like the Great Coral Sea Disaster.

It was, of course, seasickness rather than the fact that I had boarded the
Genesis
as a singleton that had saved my life, but my singleton status had certainly saved me from the sharpest pangs of grief. Had I been part of a couple, I would almost certainly have lost a lover. That had had no
conscious
effect on my continued wariness of pair-bonding experiments, but I have to admit, in retrospect, that it might well have had a subconscious effect. At any rate, I had never suffered the legendary tempests of swift passion in adolescence or earliest adulthood and had been safely insulated from them for nearly forty years while I had been a relatively contented Rainmaker-in-Law.

Perhaps I had been storing up trouble all the while I had lived in Lamu, and swift passion had always been within me, waiting patiently for its fuse to be lit so that it might explode at last. If so, the match applied to that fuse by Sharane Fereday was one that caught almost instantly. I was greatly taken with her from the very first time I caught sight of her, although attraction did not blossom into something more elaborate until we had talked for seven hours—by which time it seemed that we had everything in common and that all our emotional well-springs had flowed together into a common sea.

Had I let my poverty restrict me more tightly we would never have met, for it was on one of my most self-indulgent excursions that Sharane and I were thrust together, and as passengers on the bus from Eden to Nod that we were able to converse for seven hours at a stretch.

The early twenty-sixth century had had no shortage of so-called Edens. The tidal waves of the Decimation had obliterated no less than twelve, ten of them Creationist islands. The Eden that I visited on the
shore of Lake Van was widely reckoned to be one more folly in the same vein, although its makers had claimed that they were merely remaking the “original” Eden of ancient Hebrew myth on the site where a vanished Elder race had played a godly role in raising the ancestors of the heroes to fully human status.

I was interested in the myth in question—which had survived all the religions that had temporarily appropriated it—because it could be interpreted in a way that linked it to my own theories of the origin of humanity. One way of reading it was to infer that the knowledge which had been allegedly imparted there to the first true humans was the knowledge that they must die.

The other tourists gathered at Lake Van at the time of my visit were interested in the garden that had first been planted there some two hundred years earlier and subsequently embellished by some of the most famous Creationist engineers. Even Oscar Wilde, late in his career, had forsaken his beloved flowers in order to collaborate in the design of the Tree of Knowledge—a much more impressive individual than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that an earlier generation of genetic engineers had supplied.

Given that the evidence the archaeologists had found of early human habitation had not yet produced the slightest indication of the préexistence of godlike Elders, Watchers, or oversize Nephilim, I expected to find myself alone in preferring to interest myself in the digs that were still in progress, but I was not. Sharane Fereday was in the museum dome when I arrived, grubbing about in the slit trench with a magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate.

“Hello,” she said, smiling. “Have you come to distract me?”

“I’ve come to work,” I told her, hesitating only for a moment before adding: “The risk is that you’ll distract me, whether you intend to or not.”

She hesitated too, but only for an instant, before saying: “Oh, I intend to. I’m bored already—I’ll just have to hope that even though you’re not, you’ll consent to be distracted, at least for a little while.”

Even if I had not found her physically attractive, Sharane and I would still have fallen into conversation, and I would probably have decided before the day was out to join her on the bus to Nod, on the
shore of Lake Urmia, following the alleged route of the very first human to be consciously aware that he had committed murder.

I did find her unusually attractive, perhaps because rather than in spite of the fact that she did not resemble any of my foster mothers, but that would not have been enough in itself to excite passion. What excited passion was the fervent interest she took in matters that had not previously interested any of my closest acquaintances.

I soon discovered, of course, that the nature of Sharane’s interest in Eden and its significance was markedly different from mine, but that did not seem to matter at all. Given that I had been married for forty years to a company of ecological engineers, the similarities between my notion of history and hers seemed far more important than the differences. Even the differences seemed exciting and productive—if we had been in perfect harmony, our conversations could not have been deeply engaging or so lively.