The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [145]
I didn’t like to admit that I had only the faintest idea, gleaned from reading between the lines of Emily’s VE-monologue communications, so I told Jodocus that the fate of Jupiter was likely to be a significant bone of contention. He nodded sagely, as if I had provided official confirmation of his own suspicions.
“The Type-2 people seem to be getting their act together at last,” he observed. “Maybe they’re right to reckon that we’ve been fully fledged Type-1 for a couple of centuries and that it’s high time we started stocking Earth’s orbit with a string of protoworlds. I suspect that’s what the new generation of smart multifunctional spaceships is really designed for, although all the talk is of atmosphere diving in the gas giants and ice breaking on Titan and Europa. Transmutation makes far more sense than that old second star nonsense—and a Type-2 progression is the rational response to the news that Earthlike planets are fewer, farther between, and far less useful than we dared to hope.”
Jodocus seemed to know more about such matters than I did, or was at least prepared to pretend that he did, but I was content to let him think that I knew far more than I was prepared to make public, and I returned our conversation to the safer ground of twenty-sixth-century Africa.
Minna seemed to have her feet more firmly planted on terra firma than any of the others. After dutifully chiding me for letting things slide so far for so long she was the one who filled me in on recent family history.
“Camilla’s on Europa now,” she told me, “investigating the possibility of making an ecosphere for the core ocean that can accommodate modified humans—the ultimate merpeople. It wouldn’t be a sealed ecosphere. It would be fully connected to the rest of the Oikumene by continuous traffic through the ice shell, using the new smart spaceships. Keir’s still working in harness with silvers, but spaceship AIs are the ones he’s involved with now He’s here, there, and everywhere—the satellites of all the outer planets—but he’s still active in the Rad Libs. He’s too far out right now to communicate regularly. Eve’s still in the Well, though. She was in the Arctic last time I heard from her. She’s like you—always liked things a few degrees colder than the rest of us. Ocean currents are her thing now, but it’s such a political minefield that she never seems to be able to get anything done. Couldn’t stand it myself. Give me fresh water any day—it was a political hot potato in Africa back in the twenty-sixth but nowadays putting lakes and rivers in place is all plain sailing, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
I forgave her the pun.
Having spent some time with my first marriage partners it seemed only appropriate to spend a little with Sharane Fereday. She had been through a dozen more marriages since ours, but she was temporarily unattached. Unlike the Rainmakers, she could see only similarities between my new and old selves, but her comparisons were not as uncomplimentary as they would once have been.
“I often think that people like you are better fitted to emortality than people like me,” she confided. “You need a steady pace to stay long distances, and I’ve always been an existential sprinter. I feel as if I’ve lived my life in fits and starts. It’s had its rewards, of course, but I think I can see the advantages of the steady slog far better now than I could when we were married. I admire you, Morty, I really do. I admire the way you stuck to that history of yours until it was finished. Tenacity is an underrated virtue.”
“It’s not quite finished,” I pointed out. “The donkey work’s done and dusted, but I’m still pondering and polishing the final commentary. To tell you the truth, I feel that some of my critics are right about my procrastinating slightly more than is necessary or reasonable. Sometimes, I wonder