The Fountains of Youth (5 page)

I have, of course, reproduced the details of my first conversation with Julius Ngomi and Sara Saul with the aid of records made at the time, but I do
remember
, even to this day, the impression left on me by Ngomi’s careful heresies. There was already something within me that responded to the mantra, “All history is fantasy,” and to the idea of a mountain whose bowels were constipated with the archival detritus of past ages.

In the context of my university studies history seemed—in stark contrast to the disciplined coherency of mathematics or the sciences—to be magnificent in its hugeness, amazingly abundant in its data, and charmingly disorganized. I thought of myself as a very orderly and organized person and looked to the study of history to loosen me up a little—but I looked forward even then to the day when I might be able to impose a little of my own orderliness and organization upon the hectic muddle of the past. I was determined from the very beginning that
my
vocation was to enhance understanding by negotiating between different accounts of how and why and by calming the waters of dissent. If, as Julius Ngomi had suggested, truth was what I could get away with, I wanted to get away with something virtuous as well as grandiose—but I arrived at Adelaide without having the least idea of exactly what that might be.

The last thing Julius Ngomi said to me before I left the valley—the last thing he was to say to me for more than three hundred years, as things turned out—was, “History is okay for amateurs, kid, but it’s no work for real people. Historians have only interpreted the world and its révolutons
—the point is to change it, carefully, constructively, and without any more revolutions.”

I didn’t realize at the time that he was quoting or that the quote was deeply ironic. Nor did I realize that his parting shot and Mama Siorane’s reflected fundamentally dissonant views about the way the future would and ought to be shaped.

“Forget what Papa Dom says about the Universe Without Limits,” she said. “He thinks that the imagination has no boundaries, but it keeps running into the most important boundary of all: the boundary of
action.
History is a good subject to study because it’s all about the waves of hopeful imagination breaking on the rocks of effective action. History will teach you that the future of humankind can’t be a matter of designing ever-more-comfortable VEs. History will teach you that if you don’t actually
do
it, you haven’t achieved anything at all—and when you’ve learned that, you’ll be a doer too, not a mere dreamer.”

All Papa Domenico added to that was a rude observation about Mama Siorane being as full of shit as the mountain—by that time, alas, my secret had crept out. If Papa Dom could have foreseen that Mama Siorane would die on Titan, gloriously doing instead of merely dreaming, he might have modified his opinion—but he might not. They both deserve full credit for practicing what they preached—Papa Dom went to Antarctica to work for the UN and cultivate the delicious sensations of self-sufficiency, and he died in his VE hood exactly as he would have wished.

The ostensible purpose of a university is to constitute a community of scholars in the interests of further education, but its real purpose is to constitute a community of actual bodies in the interests of further real-space interaction. It would, I think, be too great a wrench were young people to go straight from the flesh-intensive microcosm of a parental home to the adult world, where almost all relationships are conducted almost exclusively in virtual space.

I had, of course, been interacting with other children of my own age in virtual space throughout my time in my parents’ hometree, but I had not met a single one in the flesh until I went to Adelaide. I felt that this put me at something of a disadvantage because almost all my contemporaries had
been able to arrange occasional real-space encounters, and those who were city-bred were already used to actual crowds. On the other hand, that I had been reared in a remote mountain valley gave me a hint of exoticism that few of the other new arrivals possessed. I didn’t make friends easily, but no one did. I was exhilarated by those I did make, but I felt even as I made them that they would be temporary. The accident of contemporaneity hardly seemed to be a sound foundation for lasting intimacy. Perhaps I made too much, secretly as well as overtly, of my having climbed precipitous mountain slopes and seen things that normally remained hidden. Perhaps my fascination with history was magnified so rapidly partly in order to provide me with an excuse for solitary study and private preoccupation. In any case, I was less sociable than the average, but was not at all distressed by it.

It was during my second year of study, in 2542, that the defining event of my life occurred: the event that took my magnified fascination and gave it a precise shape that was never significantly modified thereafter. Before I boarded the sailing-ship
Genesis
in March of that year, I was a dilettante historian pecking here and there at the whole broad sweep of social evolution; when I finally came safely to shore, I was a man with a mission, a man with a destiny.

G
enesis
was a cruise ship providing tours of the Creationist Islands of the Coral Sea. Many of the islands were natural, but the majority were artificial. Two centuries before, the first new islands raised from the seabed had been regarded as daring experiments paving the way for the more extravagant adventures of the Continental Engineers, but the business had soon been routinized. Custom-designed islands had been easy enough to sell or rent out during the twenty-fifth century, to provide bases for large-scale commercial endeavors in Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis and sea farming or to host the artistic ventures in ecosystem construction that gave the islands their familiar name. The latter market had weakened somewhat in the wake of the Moreau scandal, when the UN insisted on instituting much tighter controls and much more careful monitoring of the Creationists’ endeavors, but the longest-established islands remained significant arenas of ecological research as well as popular tourist attractions.

Children reared in less unconventional environments than the one chosen by my foster parents were often taken on educational voyages like the one offered by
Genesis.
I had never believed Papa Domenico’s assurances that the habit was an obsolete and functionless vestige left over from more primitive times—like any child denied anything, I had instead formed the determination that as soon as I was my own master, I would make good on my parents’ omission. I had already toured the Blooming Outback and the reforested Nullarbor, the former by bus and the latter by hot-air balloon; the
Genesis
cruise seemed a logical next step.

It was not only the series of destinations visited by
Genesis
that was held to be valuable but the experience of being under sail.
Genesis
was powered by wind alone, and its silver-controlled system of sails was represented by its owners as a marvel in its own right. The control of a sailing ship was said to be one of the most challenging of all the tasks given to artificial intelligence because of the complexity and unpredictability of
the forces that had to be met and transformed into smooth directional travel. So, at least, Captain Christopher Cardigan—who insisted on referring to his own vessel’s AI as “Long John”—assured the party of twenty that boarded the
Genesis
in Brisbane on 22 March 2542.

“No matter what so-called weather controllers may say,” Captain Cardigan assured us, “the winds answer to no man. They can be mean and they can be furious—but Long John can take anything they throw at us and turn it to our advantage.”

I suppose he had every right to be proud and confident, and he certainly didn’t deserve to die, but I find it difficult to think of him as anything but a smug fool.

The majority of my fellow passengers was made up by the family of an eight-year-old girl named Emily Marchant. She was traveling with all twelve of her parents, and I remember churlishly thinking that they must be a far more coherent and generous team than my own had ever been. Six more passenger berths were taken by couples a little older than myself, undertaking early experiments in the awkward social art of pair-bonding.

On many occasions the ship might have had to set sail with its last remaining slot unfilled, because there were not many people likely to undertake such an expedition solo, but I was determined to make up at least some of the experience lost to me while I was raised in the shadow of Shangri-La. I was not intimidated by the thought of being an outsider in such a company. Captain Cardigan and his crew—which included a chef-programmer as well as the customary service staff—added a further eight to our number.

I was looking forward to the Creationist Islands, especially Marsupial Glory, Dragon Island, and the most famous of all those in the southern hemisphere: Oscar Wilde’s Orgy of Perfumes. I had visited the first two as a virtual tourist, but there is something slightly absurd about VE reproductions of scent and taste, and I knew that Wilde’s Creation would have to be experienced in the flesh if it were to mean anything at all.

I expected to spend the days that elapsed before we reached the islands sunning myself on the deck and reveling in the unusual experience of having nothing at all to do. Unfortunately, I was struck down by
seasickness as soon as we left port. I had, of course, been on several virtual sea journeys without ever suffering a single qualm, but the movement of the actual ocean proved to be brutally different from its VE analogues.

Seasickness, by virtue of being partly psychosomatic, is one of the very few diseases with which modern internal technology is sometimes impotent to deal, and I was miserably confined to my cabin while I waited for my body and mind to make the necessary adaptive compact. I was bitterly ashamed of myself, for I alone out of the twenty-eight people on board had fallen prey to the atavistic malaise.

I was ill throughout the night of the twenty-second and the following day. There was to be a lavish deck party on the night of the twenty-third, which was forecast to be calm and bright, and I convinced myself for all of five minutes that I might be well enough to attend. As soon as I had gotten to my feet, however, my stomach rebelled and my legs turned to jelly. I was forced to return to my bed in abject misery. While my traveling companions—to whom I had barely been introduced as we waited to board the vessel—were enjoying themselves hugely beneath the glorious light of the tropic stars, I lay in my bunk, half-delirious with discomfort and lack of sleep.

I thought myself the unluckiest man in the world—although it turned out that I was, in fact, one of the luckiest.

The combined resources of my internal nanotech and my solicitous suitskin could not make me well, but they could and did contrive to put me to sleep. I have a vague memory of disturbing dreams, but I am reasonably certain that I did not actually awake until I was hurled from my bed on to the floor of my cabin. From that moment on, however, my memory is crystal clear, even after all this time. Although this is the only passage in my autobiography for which I have no objective record to serve as a crutch, I am quite certain of its accuracy.

I
thought at first that I had simply fallen—that I had been tossing and turning in consequence of my illness, which had thus contrived to inflict one more ignominy upon me. When I couldn’t recover my former position after spending long minutes fruitlessly groping about amid all kinds of mysterious debris, my first assumption was that I must be confused. When I couldn’t open the door of my cabin even though I had the handle in my hand, I took it for granted that my failure was the result of clumsiness. When I finally got out into the corridor, and found myself crawling in shallow water with the artificial bioluminescent strip beneath instead of above me, I thought I must be mad.

One of the things Captain Cardigan had proudly told us as we were about to embark was that his pride and joy was absolutely guaranteed to be unsinkable. Even if Long John were to crash, he assured us,
Genesis
was so cleverly designed and constructed that it was physically impossible for her to be holed or overturned. I had taken note of his assurance because, having been raised in a high valley whose only source of water was melting snow, I had never learned to swim. When I finally worked out, therefore, that the boat seemed to be upside down, I could not quite believe the evidence of my eyes and my reason. When I also worked out that the hectic motion I was feeling really was the motion of the upturned boat and not a subjective churning of my guts, I was seized by the absurd notion that my seasickness had somehow infected the hull of the craft. No matter what mental gymnastics I performed, however, I could not find any other explanation for being on my hands and knees, fighting to keep my balance, and that my palms and kneecaps were pressed to a strip light that had definitely been situated on the ceiling of the corridor when I had gone into my cabin. What was more, both my forearms and my thighs were immersed in ten or twelve centimeters of hot water.

There must be a second strip light in the floor
, I told myself, uncertainly,
which has now come on while the other has gone off. Somebody
must have been running a bath, and the bath has overflowed. Perhaps the water has shorted out Long John’s circuits.

Then the little girl spoke to me, saying, “Mister Mortimer? Is that you, Mister Mortimer?”

I thought for an instant that the voice was a delusion and that I was lost in a nightmare. It wasn’t until she touched me and tried to drag me upright with her tiny, frail hands that I was finally able to focus my thoughts and admit to myself that something was horribly,
horribly
wrong.

“You have to get up, Mister Mortimer,” said Emily Marchant. “The boat’s upside down.”

She was only eight years old, but she spoke quite calmly and reasonably, even though she had to support herself against the wall in order to save herself from falling over as the boat rocked and lurched.