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PART SIX

Beyond Maturity

Our plesance heir is all vane glory,

This fais world is bot transitory,

The flesh is brukle, the Fend is sle,

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The stait of man dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blyth, now sary,

Now dansand merry, now like to dee,

Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in erd heir standis sickir,

As with the wynd wavis the wickir,

So waveris this warld’s vanité

Timor mortis conturbat me.

—William Dunbar

Lament for the Makaris, c.1510

SEVENTY-EIGHT

They say that some people are born lucky. I suppose I must be one of them. The upside of being accident-prone is that when you really need a preposterous freak of chance, one just might come along.

I went peacefully to sleep in the snowmobile, eased into unconsciousness by lack of oxygen and a surfeit of carbon dioxide. At that point, I suppose, I can only have had a matter of a few hours to live, even with the best IT money could buy.

I woke up in a bed, lightly strapped down for my own protection.

I thought I was dreaming, of course. For one thing, I was quite weightless. For another, Emily Marchant was hovering by the bed. She wasn’t a child, and she was carrying enough ET to place her on the outer margins of humankind, but it was definitely her.

“This is good,” I told her. “Rumor has it that time sense in a dream is pretty elastic, if only one has the knack of making things stretch. With luck, I might extend this for subjective hours even if I’m only seconds away from annihilation.”

“Oh, Morty,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time, “don’t you ever change? You just couldn’t wait, could you? I said I’d come to see you when I was done, but you just couldn’t wait.”

I couldn’t imagine what she meant.

“I always change,” I told her, “and I’m a very patient person, as it happens. I don’t suppose, by any chance, that this is a submarine—a submarine that was big enough to swallow the snowmobile whole and snatch me from the very jaws of death?”

“Of course it isn’t a submarine, you idiot,” she said. “It’s a spaceship. A multifunctional spaceship, built for deep dives into the atmosphere of Jupiter and the ice-shelled seas of Europa and Titan. There wasn’t a submarine within two thousand kilometers capable of effecting a rescue, but when Severnaya Zemlya forwarded your mayday to us we were practically overhead. You have no idea what you’ve done for us. We sat up there going around and around, literally and symbolically, getting absolutely nowhere. More than half of our people were as resentful as hell of the fact that we were in Earth orbit, and more than half of the Welldwellers were just as resentful that we were shut up in a Titanian superspaceship. Then the author of The History of Death—a work for whose initial inspiration and fundamental skepticism Julius Ngomi has always been willing to take the credit—threw himself into a marine abyss crucially different from and crucially similar to the one from which he once rescued Emily Marchant. The only possibility of rescuing him from that abyss was exactly this sort of vessel in exactly that location.

“With that single masterstroke of genius you transformed the symbolism, the mood, and the dynamism of the whole situation! You not only gave us the chance to be partners in an enterprise, you left us no possible alternative but to combine forces. You made us take the crucial first step on the way to being partners in all our enterprises, combining all our forces. Hell, you forced us to all be heroes together!”

“What?” I said, querulously. “I don’t understand.”

“You will, Morty, you will. We were stuck—until you forced us to suspend all our arguments, to divert all our attention and effort to the business of saving the author of The History of Death. Now we’re not stuck any more. Now, we have to make progress. You can’t imagine the capital that the casters are making out of that final plaintive speech of yours, Morty—and that silver’s probably