The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [17]
“But it is upside down,” she insisted—unnecessarily, given that I had conceded the point as my assurances trailed off into silence. “The water’s coming in.”
“Yes,” I said, raising myself up to a less ignominious kneeling position and reaching out a hand to brace myself against the wall. “Yes, it is. But why is it hot?”
I put my free hand to my lips and tasted the water on my fingers. It was salty. The water that fed our bathrooms was supposed to be desalinated, and this flood was far too copious in any case.
Emily was right. Genesis had turned upside down and was letting in water.
“I don’t know why it’s hot,” she said, “but we have to get out. We have to get to the stairs and swim.”
The light put out by the ceiling strip was no dimmer than usual, but the rippling water overlaying it made it seem faint and uncertain. The girl’s little face, lit from below, seemed terribly serious within the frame of her dark and curly hair. She was looking up at me; even though I was on my knees, she wasn’t as tall as I was.
I was thinking clearly enough to see the implications of having to “get to the stairs.” The stairs had led up to the deck—but now they led down, into the ocean depths. Above us, there was nothing but the machine deck and the boat’s unbreachable hull.
“I can’t swim,” I said, flatly.
Emily Marchant looked at me as if I were insane.
“I mean it,” I said. “I can’t swim.”
“You have to,” she said. “It’s not hard.”
My reflexive response was to change the subject. “Where’s everyone else gone to?” I asked. The boat lurched more violently as I spoke, and the little girl reached out to me for support. I took my hand away from the wall and clasped both of her hands in mine.
“Mama Janine put me to bed,” Emily said. “Then she went back to the party. Everyone was at the party. There’s only us, Mister Mortimer. We have to get out. No one will come, Mister Mortimer.”
Like me, Emily Marchant had been raised contented and well adjusted, and she was as wise and level-headed as any eight year old in all the world. Her IT and her suitskin were both tuned to compensate for panic, but she was not immune to fear. Fear, like pain, is universally recognized to be necessary and healthy, in moderation. She was free to feel fear, if not sheer, stark, paralyzing terror. So was I. No one will come, Mister Mortimer, she had said, packing all the tragedy of the moment into those few, almost dispassionate, words. She was afraid, as I was—and we had every reason to be afraid.
Everyone but the two of us had been on deck at the party—all twenty-six of them. Whatever impossibility had flipped Genesis onto her back had thrown every last one of them into the sea: the impossibly warm and impossibly violent sea.
Ten
I scrambled to my feet. While I held Emily fast in my right hand I put out my left to steady myself against the upside-down wall. The water was knee-deep and still rising—not very quickly, but inexorably. The upturned boat was rocking from side to side, but it also seemed to be trying to spin around. I could hear the rumble of waves breaking on the outside of the hull. The noise wasn’t loud, but I knew that the hull must be muffling the sound.
“My name’s Emily, Mister Mortimer,” the little girl told me. “I’m frightened.”
I resisted the temptation to say So am I. Somewhere in the corridor, I knew, there were lockers containing emergency equipment: not merely life jackets but “survival pods,” whose shells were self-inflating plastic life rafts. There was light enough to find them, if I could only adjust my mind to the fact that everything was upside down. Once we had one, we still had to get it out, and I still couldn’t swim—but how hard could it be, if I could get into a life jacket?
“This way,” I said, as soon as I had figured out which way the emergency locker was. Unsurprisingly, it was in the logical place, next to the stairs, which now descended into angry darkness. I marveled at my being able to speak so soberly and marveled even more that I no longer felt seasick. My