The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [113]
“I have to finish it,” I told her. “It’s what I am. I won’t apologize for that because I don’t think I owe you or the world any kind of apology for what I am or what I do.”
“No,” she conceded. “You don’t owe me or the world anything. I just don’t want you to be left behind”
“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, as I’d always told everyone who seemed to need telling. “Maybe I’m one of the ones who’s destined to remain there forever.”
“So what are you doing hanging about on the moon?” she said. “It’s just Antarctica without ice palaces, and noisier neighbors. I’ve seen you in the centrifuge and I know you’re ready. Your legs are positively itching to get to grips with all that gee force.”
“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, legwise,” I admitted. “Maybe I stuck around just to see you for one last time, before you get so far ahead of me that you’ll be way out of reach.”
“Oaf,” she said, tenderly. “Footslogger. Groundhog. Welldweller. You know that I fell in love with you in that stupid life raft, don’t you? You know that all the nonsense you trotted out to keep my mind off the danger we were in cut right to my heart. You made me, Mortimer Gray.”
I could have said straight out that she’d made me too, but she couldn’t have taken it as a compliment in that form. “That’s the way it works,” I said, instead. “Any two elementary particles that have ever been closely associated continue to modify one another’s movements no matter how far apart they move. I never understood exactly why, but I think it’s something to do with the beauty and charm of their constituent quarks—and if it isn’t, it ought to be.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
It turned out that my legs weren’t quite as ready for the return to the Big Well as they seemed. The centrifuge can prepare returning lunatics for the shock of bottoming out, but it can’t prepare them for the sheer relentlessness of gravity. While you have levity at your beck and call it’s easy to think that you won’t miss it, but when it’s four hundred thousand kilometers out of reach it suddenly seems like a precious resource gone to waste.
A curious thing happened to me when I got back to Earth and booked into a rehab hostel. While I was enjoying my first long session in the swimming pool—although I wasn’t doing much actual swimming—I was joined by a tall man with unusually dark skin, whose walk as he crossed the polished floor suggested that his legs were not in the least need of readaptation. He swam several languorous lengths before making his way over to the lane in which I was dawdling.
“Hello, Mortimer,” he said. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
As soon as he suggested that I ought to recognize him I did. It wasn’t so much the hue of his skin as the manner of his speech that tipped me off.
“All history is fantasy,” I quoted at him. “I was only a boy when we met, Mister Ngomi. It was more than three hundred years ago.”
He smiled broadly. “Call me Julius,” he said. “They said we’d never manage to keep hold of our early memories, didn’t they? The falsies, that is. Because serial rejuves and too much nano in the brain left their memories pretty much wiped out, they assumed we’d be the same, serially reincarnate within the same body. It’s good to be able to prove them wrong, isn’t it?”
“There’s not much else I remember from those days but bare facts,” I confessed. “You made an impression. It was so unexpected—the inside of the mountain, I mean. The kind of thing of which indelible traces are made. Did you actually come here looking for me?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I did.”
“Why?” I asked, guardedly. I remembered him clearly enough to be sure that his wasn’t the kind of job you did for a hundred years or so and then put behind you. If he’d been a finger of the invisible hand then, he was probably