The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [12]
Sara Saul, I eventually discovered, was one of a double handful of people who really did own and run the world while she was alive—but she’d still shriveled like a decaying fruit, and the color had drained out of her along with the life. She’d had more temporal power than any Hindu god, but she’d been mortal. All she had been able to do with what she had, in the end, was protect it for a while and then pass it on. To her credit, she really had seen that as a vocation and had tried to do it as best she could.
She was the first person with whom I was personally acquainted to die. I knew that she would not be the last—but I also knew that the number would be finite. I understood, too, those of us who came after her would have to learn to redefine the concept of “vocation,” wherever we figured in the hierarchy of Earth’s stewardship; we could no longer rely on mortality to set its limits for us.
It wasn’t long after my first success in mountain climbing that the time came for me to leave my loving family, although five years seemed a great deal longer then than it does now. At the time, I was impatient to depart, hardly able to wait for the moment when I would be able to leave my Nepalese hometree to enter a community of my peers. Although the fracture lines of their little community stood out sharp and clear I think all my parents were dismayed by my impatience. Papa Laurent wasn’t the only one who strove with all his might to convince me that I ought to treasure the years of my adolescence, to look sideways as well as forward, and to take stock of what I already had as carefully as I counted the freedom that would soon be mine.
“You shouldn’t be in such a hurry,” Mama Eulalie told me. “Looking back, I have to admit that I must seem to have been in a hurry all my life, but I’m Old Human Race and even I could have benefited from slowing down a little. You’re New Human Race, and you can certainly afford to take things easier.”
“Every boy-child longs to be free of his parents,” Papa Nahum told me, “and every boy-child regrets it later. You’ll have a long time to regret it when we’re gone—and we shall be going, Morty, sooner than you think. I’m the youngest, and even I’m halfway to the grave. Get the most out of us while you can.”
I didn’t listen. What child ever does?
There was no fixed period to the business of co-parenthood even in those historically transitional days, but there still seems to be a natural term to the time that any group of people can remain together as an effective team. After twenty years, frayed relationships generally reach breaking point. Not all relationships fray at the same rate, and a few have the strength to resist fracture for far longer, but each of my eight foster parents had to maintain seven different relationships with his or her partners, so the enterprise involved a total of twenty-eight distinct pair-bonds. According to the conventional theory of microsocial dynamics, a collective cannot be sustained once half of its subsidiary pair-bonds have fallen into irredeemable disrepair, and when I remember my co-parents—however fondly—I find it difficult to imagine that one pair-bond in five could ever have been in a healthy state. Even so, they were sorry to part, and not just for my sake.
I understand now that my parents were good and tolerant people. I understand how it was that they quarreled so much and yet never descended to hatred, or even to mute hostility. The nucleus of their common interest in my maturation could not exert sufficient attractive power to keep them in their orbits indefinitely, but they weren’t glad to be sent hurtling apart at so many different tangents. As soon as I had