The Fountains of Youth (17 page)

“I always knew that you’d end up as a virtualist Utopian,” Papa Domenico would have said. “I was the oldest of your fathers, the one with the real authority.”

“I’m not a virtualist Utopian, Papa Dom,” I replied. “I’m making myself fit for any and all Utopias.”

“You can’t make yourself without making other things,” Emily Marchant said, without requiring imaginative reproduction. “Navel gazing does no good. You have to get involved with something more meaningful, Morty. That’s what I’m doing. I’ve spent too much time in labs designing new kinds of shamirs. Now I have to find out what’s to be
done
with them. From now on, it’s hands-on all the way for me.”

It was far less easy to outflank her than my dead parents. “I’ve always been a hands-on historian,” I told her. “My work is going very well.”

“Oh Morty,” she said, refusing to give way as gracefully as my parents, “you don’t even know what
hands-on
means. You never built anything
solid
in your life.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, retreating to a formula that could always be relied on to stalemate an unwinnable argument. She didn’t—but she wouldn’t ever concede that her failure to understand me was her fault and not mine.

Perhaps it was only as a result of my upbringing in the Himalayas, but I really did feel
at home
in Antarctica. It made Alexandria, Crete, Lamu, and Adelaide seem so hectic and strange that I could not quite comprehend how I had tolerated any of them for as long as I had.

I often went walking on the cape, but I avoided the dangerously variable shelves of ice that extended across the shallow sea, keeping to the ice sheets that were safely mounted on solid ground. I had been warned that such excursions could be just as hazardous as littoral ventures, but I was never reckless. As the years went by without my ever getting into difficulties I was able to set aside all anxiety. While outside the house I always wore special suitskins whose fast metabolism compensated for the low temperature, and I rarely took off my face mask unless the weather was exceptionally clement. I made sure that my IT had additional reserves for emergency use, and I kept a small company of rescue robots that could be summoned to my assistance if I were
caught in a blizzard or slipped into a crevasse. I only had occasion to call them out five times in the 2670s, and they responded with quick efficiency, bringing me home safe and well.

During my first decade in Antarctica I did not meet a single human being in the flesh. In summer I could see distant ships from my eyrie as they tentatively probed the waters of the gulf, but they rarely came close enough to the shore for me to discern crewmen working on their decks. Most of them would, in any case, have been fully automated craft taking their carefully measured harvest of krill from the rich waters. I was a thousand kilometers south of the latitudes in which liquid artificial photosynthesis systems could be economically deployed, and four hundred from the nearest marine farms. The local ecosystem had to be measured and managed as carefully as any, but it was equipped with species that were very little different from those that had flourished here before the twenty-first-century ocean dereliction, which some ecologists still reckoned to be the root cause and most significant aspect of the Crash.

As time went by, the probing ships became more numerous and more various, but not in any troublesome sense. Inland, it was a different story. The initial relocation of the UN’s central administration to Amundsen City had provided a golden opportunity for streamlining, but as soon as the new setup was in place the perverse logic of bureaucracy had begun to reassert itself, and the organization had begun to expand again, growing and mutating.

The original plan had been to maintain a relatively small and austere presence in Amundsen City while conducting the bulk of UN business in virtual space. There was no practical reason why the world’s government could not have been run like its economy, from widely scattered tiny cells like the one hidden by Shangri-La, but government is not entirely a practical matter. As soon as a certain prestige and status was attached to an “Antarctic position” Amundsen City became a sociopolitical Klondyke, and the subsequent population rush inevitably spread outward like a creeping infection.

Eventually, as I had known it would, it reached Cape Adare.

B
y 2680, my nearest neighbors on Cape Adare were no longer out of sight. Although the nearest towns, Leningradskaya and Lillie Marleen, were still at a safe distance, the burgeoning Cape Hallett colony gradually extended itself along the Barchgrevnik Coast to the very edge of my own promontory. It became increasingly common for me to meet other walkers in the northern reaches of the cape. The people in question were scrupulously polite and not at all intrusive, but the very concept of neighborhood implies a certain moral obligation that cannot be set aside.

The first time I had to send my rescue robots out to someone else’s aid I knew that my eremitic existence was under threat and that my solitude would soon be at an end. The embrace of Earthbound humanity was now total. How could I possibly complain? The southern extremity of Cape Adare had been welcomed into that embrace on the day I had moved there; I was an agent of human infection myself.

I was by this time an old hand, a proven Antarctican: the kind of man who had to respond to a
real
emergency in person. When one of my new neighbors from Hallett, Ziru Majumdar, fell into a crevasse so deep and awkward that all the slothful robots on the Ross shore could not extract him by means of Artificial Intelligence alone, I was one of the people who felt obliged to fly to his aid.

Human intelligence being what it is, it only required five of us—and seventy-five tons of equipment—to pull Mister Majumdar out of the hole, and only two of us ended up more seriously injured than he was before the operation began. Even ice that is bedded on solid rock is prone to shift, especially under the stress of urgent action. Frozen water cannot drown a man, but it can certainly crush him.

After several hours of merciful anesthesis, courtesy of our kindly IT, Ziru Majumdar and I woke up in adjacent beds at the hospital in Amundsen City. I was fully insulated from pain and could not sense my left leg at all, but the extent of the numbness and the depth of the illusory
feeling that my brain had been removed from my head and immersed in a vat of treacle assured me that I would not be up and about for some considerable time.

“I’m truly sorry about your leg, Mister Gray,” Majumdar said. “It was very stupid of me to get lost at all, even in the blizzard—and then to walk over the lip of the crevasse… very, very foolish. I’ve lived here for five years, after all; I thought I knew every last ice ridge like the back of my hand. It’s not as if I’ve ever suffered from summer rhapsody or snow blindness.”

I’d suffered slightly from both the ailments he named. I was still awkwardly vulnerable to any psychosomatic condition that was readily available. My sensitivity had, however, served to make me so careful that I never looked upon the all-pervasive winter snows without a protective mask, and I had programed my household sloth to draw the blinds against the eternal days of late December and early January. An uneasy mind can sometimes be an advantage.

“It wasn’t your fault, Mister Majumdar,” I graciously insisted. “I suppose I must have been a little overconfident myself, or I’d never have slipped and fallen when the fracture became a collapse. One bound is all it would have required to take me clear. At least they were able to pull me out in a matter of minutes; you must have lain at the bottom of that crevasse for the better part of two days.”

“Very nearly,” he admitted. “At first I assumed that I could get out myself—when I found that I could not I took it for granted that the robots would cope. Who would ever have thought I’d need to summon human help in this day and age?”

“It might have been better if you’d lost consciousness sooner,” I pointed out.

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “I never like to trust these matters entirely to the judgment of machine intelligence. I’m not one of these people who’s so afraid of circumstance that they program their IT to black them out at the first sign of physical stress and consign their fate to the dutiful care of their telephone answering machines.”

“Neither am I,” I said, wondering if I were being subtly insulted, “but there are times when consciousness and courage increase our danger.”

“But they also enhance our experience,” Majumdar countered, with what seemed to me to be remarkable eagerness. “While I was waiting for real help to arrive I came round several times. At least, I think I did. The problem with being half-anesthetized is that it makes one very prone to hallucination. If I had been deeply asleep, it would be as if the whole affair never happened. One should remember these things
properly
, don’t you think? How else can we regard our experiences as complete? It was jolly cold, though. I had a thermosuit over my suitskin, but I’d have been much better in a reinforced costume like yours. My clothes were doing their absolute best to keep me warm, but the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t give you much slack when you’re at the bottom of a cleft, lying in the permafrost. I’ve got authentic frostbite in my toes, you know. Imagine that! Authentic frostbite.”

I tried to imagine it, but it wasn’t easy. He could hardly be in pain, so it was difficult to conjure up any notion of what it might feel like to have necrotized toes. It was equally difficult to figure out why he considered the possession of necrotized toes to be a kind of privilege and why he felt the need to tell me about it in such a salesmanlike manner. I wondered what kind of work he did when he wasn’t out memorizing ice ridges.

I could understand his apparent excitement, to some degree. We live such careful and ordered lives that the occasional minicatastrophe has considerable compensations. Mister Majumdar’s accident would give him something to talk about, something with which to make himself seem a little bit more interesting—but that wasn’t what he meant when he rattled on about making his experience more complete. He seemed to think that the frostbite might be interesting
in itself
rather than as a mere datum that he could trot out at VE parties—but with my brain suspended in treacle and no left leg, I was in no condition to involve myself in mysteries.

My doctor, whose name was Ayesha Sung, reckoned that it would take a week for the crushed tissues in my leg to regenerate the bones and sinews.

“You’ll have to be immobilized for at least four days,” she told me, sternly. “The cell masses have to be returned to quasi-blastular innocence before they can lay the foundations for a new knee and ankle. Once the superstructure is in place, the differentiation can be concluded
and the synovial fluid can get the whole thing working. Once my nanomachines have finished, the rest is up to you. It could take as much as three months to train up the muscles again. If you had any special skills built into the old set you’ll have to reeducate the reflexes. You’re not a ballet dancer, I hope?”

She knew full well that I wasn’t a ballet dancer. She could easily have picked a less derisive example—skier, maybe, or climber.

“You were very lucky,” she added. “If you’d fallen headfirst, you’d be dead.”

“Fortunately,” I told her, unable to resist the temptation to be sarcastic, “I was standing on my feet when the ground gave way. I was in a hurry to rescue poor Mister Majumdar, so I hadn’t given the possibility of standing on my head much thought.”

“Very amusing,” she said, coldly. “If I offered a discount on my fee for a helpful attitude, you’d just have lost yours. You should try to be more like Mister Majumdar. All experience enriches us as it transforms us.”

“Thanks a lot, Mister Majumdar,” I said, when she’d gone.

“Call me Ziru,” was his only reply.

“Mortimer,” I offered in return, figuring that he could shorten it when he’d demonstrated a little more camaraderie. Then I repented, remembering that we were going to be together for several days and that it was at least thirty years since I’d last spent such a long time in the actual company of another human being. “You aren’t
really
enjoying having frostbite, are you?” I asked by way of making conversation. “You
have
programed your IT to cut out the pain, I suppose.”

“Of course,” he said. “But cutting out pain isn’t just a practical issue, is it? It’s not just a straightforward matter of leaving the warning flash in place and then obliterating the rest.”

“Isn’t it?” I queried, having always thought that it was. Given that good IT is a far better monitor of internal damage than pain ever was, it had always seemed to me entirely reasonable that technologically sophisticated humans, old and new alike, should reserve pain responses to the triggering of withdrawal reflexes.

“Certainly not,” Majumdar said. “The fact that we don’t
need
pain any longer to inform us that all is not well within our internal being—a job for which it was always ludicrously ill-fitted—it doesn’t follow that
it’s entirely useless and ought to be discarded. It’s a
resource
, which ought to be carefully explored, if only for aesthetic reasons.”

“Aesthetic reasons?” I echoed, in frank astonishment. “Connoisseur masochism, you mean?”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he replied, loftily. “But I’m not talking about anything as crude as trying to find a paradoxical pleasure in pain. What I’m talking about is taking care to learn what pain
as pain
has to teach us about who and what we are—and, more importantly, who and what we were.”

“The empire of fear hath the greatest of all despots set at its head,” I quoted, “whose name is Death, and his consort is named Pain.”

“Who said that?” Majumdar wanted to know—but not enough to wait for the answer. “A mortal, of course. We live in a different world now. Anyway, pain was always the handmaiden of life, whatever mortals thought. Uncontrolled suffering makes life unbearable, but controllable suffering—
obedient
pain—merely gives it an edge. When you take the trouble to get to know obedient pain, you discover that there are many different kinds. There’s a whole spectrum of neglected aesthetic experience in the multitudinous facets of disease and injury.”