The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [16]
I thought myself the unluckiest man in the world—although it turned out that I was, in fact, one of the luckiest.
The combined resources of my internal nanotech and my solicitous suitskin could not make me well, but they could and did contrive to put me to sleep. I have a vague memory of disturbing dreams, but I am reasonably certain that I did not actually awake until I was hurled from my bed on to the floor of my cabin. From that moment on, however, my memory is crystal clear, even after all this time. Although this is the only passage in my autobiography for which I have no objective record to serve as a crutch, I am quite certain of its accuracy.
NINE
I thought at first that I had simply fallen—that I had been tossing and turning in consequence of my illness, which had thus contrived to inflict one more ignominy upon me. When I couldn’t recover my former position after spending long minutes fruitlessly groping about amid all kinds of mysterious debris, my first assumption was that I must be confused. When I couldn’t open the door of my cabin even though I had the handle in my hand, I took it for granted that my failure was the result of clumsiness. When I finally got out into the corridor, and found myself crawling in shallow water with the artificial bioluminescent strip beneath instead of above me, I thought I must be mad.
One of the things Captain Cardigan had proudly told us as we were about to embark was that his pride and joy was absolutely guaranteed to be unsinkable. Even if Long John were to crash, he assured us, Genesis was so cleverly designed and constructed that it was physically impossible for her to be holed or overturned. I had taken note of his assurance because, having been raised in a high valley whose only source of water was melting snow, I had never learned to swim. When I finally worked out, therefore, that the boat seemed to be upside down, I could not quite believe the evidence of my eyes and my reason. When I also worked out that the hectic motion I was feeling really was the motion of the upturned boat and not a subjective churning of my guts, I was seized by the absurd notion that my seasickness had somehow infected the hull of the craft. No matter what mental gymnastics I performed, however, I could not find any other explanation for being on my hands and knees, fighting to keep my balance, and that my palms and kneecaps were pressed to a strip light that had definitely been situated on the ceiling of the corridor when I had gone into my cabin. What was more, both my forearms and my thighs were immersed in ten or twelve centimeters of hot water.
There must be a second strip light in the floor, I told myself, uncertainly, which has now come on while the other has gone off. Somebody must have been running a bath, and the bath has overflowed. Perhaps the water has shorted out Long John’s circuits.
Then the little girl spoke to me, saying, “Mister Mortimer? Is that you, Mister Mortimer?”
I thought for an instant that the voice was a delusion and that I was lost in a nightmare. It wasn’t until she touched me and tried to drag me upright with her tiny, frail hands that I was finally able to focus my thoughts and admit to myself that something was horribly, horribly wrong.
“You have to get up, Mister Mortimer,” said Emily Marchant. “The boat’s upside down.”
She was only eight years old, but she spoke quite calmly and reasonably, even though she had to support herself against the wall in order to save herself from falling over as the boat rocked and lurched.
“That’s impossible,” I told her, stupidly. “Genesis is unsinkable. There’s no way