The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [152]
Yet again, I attempted to give serious consideration to the possibility of packing up and leaving Earth—perhaps with Emily, if and when she condescended to drop in after her conference. I found, though, that I still remembered far too well how the sense of wild excitement I’d found when I first lived on the moon had faded into a dull ache of homesickness. The spaces between the stars, I knew, belonged to the fabers, and the planets circling other stars would belong to people adapted before birth to live in their environments. I felt that I was still tied by my genes to the surface of the Earth, and I didn’t yet want to undergo the kind of cyborgizational metamorphosis that would be necessary to fit me for the exploration of other worlds. I still believed in belonging, and I felt very strongly that Mortimer Gray belonged to Earth, however decadent its society might have become in the jaundiced eyes of outsiders.
Despite my newfound sympathy for the more contemplative kinds of Thanaticism I had told the caster the simple truth—I didn’t harbor the slightest inclination toward suicide. No matter how much respect I had cultivated for the old Grim Reaper, death was still, for me, the ultimate enemy. I did, however, find a certain spiritual solace in the white emptiness of the polar cap. I felt comfortable and contented there, and I got into the habit of taking long walks across the almost featureless surface, renting a six-limbed silver-animated snowmobile of which I eventually grew quite fond.
As a historian, of course, I was familiar with the old saying that warns us that he who keeps walking long enough is bound to trip up in the end, but I took no notice of it. Like Ziru Majumdar several hundred years before and on the far side of the world, I convinced myself soon enough that I knew every nook and cranny of the landscape, whose uniform whiteness made it seem far flatter and less hazardous than it actually was.
If I ever thought about the possibility of falling into an unexpected crevasse, as poor Majumdar had done, I thought of it in exactly those terms—as the slight possibility of suffering a minor inconvenience, which could not have any worse result than a few broken bones and a few days in hospital.
My imagination was, alas, inadequate. On 25 July 2999 I suffered the gravest misfortune of my 480-year life—graver even than the one that had overtaken me in Great Coral Sea Disaster.
Strictly speaking, of course, it was not I who stumbled but the vehicle I was in. Although such a thing was generally considered to be quite impossible, it fell into a cleft so deep that it had no bottom at all, and it ended up sinking into the ocean depths beneath the ice cap, taking me with it.
SEVENTY-SIX
I was oddly unafraid while the snowmobile was actually sliding down the precipitate slope. I was securely strapped into my seat, and although I was bounced around rather roughly I sustained only a few easily remediable bruises.
When I realized that the bumping had stopped I was relieved for a second or two, thinking that the ordeal was over—but then I realized what the Stygian darkness beyond the machine’s windows actually signified. Had there been air and ice, the cabin’s lights would have reflected back in wondrous fashion, but the water soaked up the radiance like a sponge.
I realized that I had not come to a stop all but was instead still sinking, gracefully and comfortably, into the loneliest place on the entire planet.
The snowmobile fell for several minutes before another abrupt lurch informed me that we had hit bottom. Even then, I half expected the machine simply to pick itself up, regain its balance on all six of its limbs, and start walking. Alas, it couldn’t and didn’t.
“I must offer my most profound apologies,” the machine’s silver navigator said, as the awfulness of my plight slowly sank into my consciousness. “I fear that three of my limbs were disabled as we fell into the pit. My internal