The Fountains of Youth (9 page)

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.

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
young
man.” 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
morbid
a 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
do
in 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
lost
touch, but our touch became tenuous. New acquaintances gradually displaced them to the margins of my life.

B
y 2550 I was working fairly assiduously on the introductory tract of what I then planned as a seven-knot work. It was the hardest part of the job, partly because I had to learn to navigate the Labyrinth properly and partly because I was determined not to limit myself to the Labyrinth’s resources.

Even in those days many historians worked exclusively with electronic data, but I had been brought up in the shadow of a mountain archive. I think that I had a better sense of the value of what was buried therein than my city-bred peers, and I certainly had a better sense of what had been lost from such repositories during the Decimation. The Himalyan stores had not been affected, but those in Australia, Japan, and Indonesia had suffered considerable losses in collapses caused by earthquakes. Everyone who ever worked in the stores tended to refer to what they were doing as “mining,” but in the wake of the quakes the artifacts in more than one in five of the subterranean repositories really did require laborious and skillful excavation.

The physical and electronic relics of mortal men have always seemed to me to be equally vulnerable to the erosions of time and the corrosions of misfortune. That the world has suffered no major geological upheavals since the Coral Sea split and no major outbreak of software sabotage has made me slightly more complacent, but in the twenty-sixth century experience combined with youth to subject my research to the spurs of a sharp sense of urgency. Despite the oft-expressed anxieties of my surviving foster parents, however, I did not neglect the other aspects of my life. In the course of my travels I met a great many people face-to-face, and I was careful to cultivate a good range of VE friendships, some of which had survived since childhood.

While
The Prehistory of Death
was still far from ready for release into the Labyrinth I contracted my first marriage. Unlike most first marriages it was not a pair-bond, although I had made the usual tentative experiments in one-to-one intimacy. It was a non-parental-group contract
tract with an aggregate consisting of three other men and four women, signed and sealed in 2555. Sociologists nowadays insist on referring to such arrangements as “pseudoparental practice groups,” implying that the only possible reason for their formation is training for future parenthood, but my partners and I never thought of it in that way. It was a straightforward exploration of the practicalities of living in close association with others.