The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [11]
“Can I tell my parents what’s really here?” I asked. It seemed only polite to ask the question, even though I knew full well that they couldn’t stop me.
“Why would you want to do that?” the still-young Julius Ngomi asked me. “I bet this is the first real secret you’ve ever had. Why give it away? Everyone ought to have a piggy-bank full of secrets. You can tell anyone you want—but you’d run the risk that they wouldn’t even be interested and that their disinterest would devalue your informational capital. It really is best to plan these things, Mortimer. Today could be an important step in the making of your secret self, the shaping of your unique identity. None of your co-parents is ever going to climb up here to check your story no matter what you tell them, so why not invent your own Shangri-La? Truth is whatever you can get away with.”
“Don’t lead the boy astray, Julie,” said Sara Saul. “Tell your parents what you like, Mortimer. We’re not working in secret—we just don’t advertise our private addresses. Everybody knows we’re somewhere. They’d probably be amused to think of us renting space in a junk mountain—except that it’s not really junk. You have to be careful about taking Julie’s way of telling things too seriously. What’s stored in all these chambers is the real substance of history; the myths spun out in the Labyrinth are just its ghost.”
“A library,” I said, suddenly remembering the original Shangri-La. “A library that would survive even if the Labyrinth got wiped out by the Doomsday Virus.”
“That’s right,” said Sara Saul.
Julius Ngomi laughed. “All civilizations have to live in the ruins of their predecessors,” he said. “Even the ones that never get hit by the Ultimate Weapon. We true emortals are luckier than most, but we’ll still be handing down our garbage as well as our gold.”
“How far down does it go?” I asked, wondering whether the entire Himalayan plateau might be hollowed out to receive the artifacts that the econosphere no longer required—while the rock that was removed to make room for them was, of course, shaped into new artifacts.
“Not far,” said Sara Saul. “We’ve barely scratched Earth’s crust. My kind will have to leave it to true emortals like you and Julie to excavate the mantle and the core and move the planet’s insides to the outside as skyscrapers of steel. The asteroid rebuilders are just practicing—the real architects are yet to come. If you can restrain your impulse to scale dangerous heights, Mortimer, you might see the beginnings of the metamorphosis. If you care to join the Type-2 Crusade, you might well play a part in it.”
“But it would be silly to exercise too much restraint,” Julius Ngomi observed. “It would be foolish to miss out in the present for the sake of seeing a little more of the future unfold. I think you’re one of nature’s climbers, Mortimer. I think you’re the kind of person who’ll always be prepared to dice with death, provided that the dice are suitably loaded.”
I wasn’t sure about that, even then, but I didn’t say so. I was fifteen, and I had scaled a dangerous slope. I hadn’t found what I’d expected to find—but wasn’t that the whole point of scaling dangerous heights? What on Earth would be the point of hollowing out the world if you didn’t put the matter you removed to profitable use?
“Can I come back again?” I asked.
“If you like,” said Sara Saul. “But there’s nothing more to see. Just us, or others like us, laboring patiently.”
“Nothing except garbage,” said Julius Ngomi. “More garbage than you could ever find the time to look at, even if you lived ten thousand years.”
SIX
I did go back to Shangri-La—not often, and not for any particular purpose, but I did go. The climbing did me good. Keeping the secret of the true nature of the edifice from my incurious parents, at least for a little while, also did me good. Secrets make it easier for children to grow apart from their families.
It wasn’t until 2544, when I read the obituaries, that I actually realized who Sara Saul was and what it was that