The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [18]
As we moved along the corridor, I couldn’t shake the horror of the thought that Emily Marchant’s entire family might have been wiped out at a single stroke and that she might now be that rarest of all rare beings, an orphan. It was barely imaginable. What possible catastrophe, I wondered, could have done that? And what other atrocities must that same catastrophe have perpetrated?
“Do you have any idea what happened, Emily?” I asked, as I wrestled with the handle of the locker. It was easy enough to turn it the “wrong” way, but not so easy to drag the door open against the increasing pressure of the water.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Are we going to die?” The word too hung unspoken at the end of the sentence. She was only eight, but she understood the implications of the fact that everyone else had been on deck when the boat flipped over, defying every precaution taken by its careful designers.
“No,” I told her. “If we can just get these life jackets on and take this pod with us….”
“It’s very big,” she said, dubiously—but I knew that if it had been designed to be carried up the stairs it would certainly go down them.
Despite the rocking of the boat, I contrived to get one of the life jackets over Emily’s shoulders. “Don’t pull it yet,” I said, showing her where the ring pull was but firmly setting her hand away from it. “We have to get clear of the boat first. You have to swim as hard as you can—that way. Understand? Swim as hard as you can, and don’t pull until you’re sure you’re no longer under the boat. Then you’ll pop up to the surface. I’ll bring the life-raft pod.”
“I’ve been a good girl,” she told me, with just a hint of bleakness in her awful sobriety. “I’ve never told a lie.”
It couldn’t have been literally true, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was eight years old and she had every right to expect to live till she was eight hundred. She didn’t deserve to die. It wasn’t fair that she should. It wasn’t fair that she should lose her parents either but one misfortune didn’t license the other. I knew full well that fairness didn’t really come into it, and I expect she knew it too, even if my fellow historians and social commentators were wrong about the abolition of the primary artifices of childhood. I knew in my heart, though, that what she said was right, and that insofar as the imperious laws of nature ruled her observation irrelevant, the universe was wrong. It wasn’t fair. She had been a good girl. If she died, it would be a monstrous injustice.
Perhaps it was merely a kind of psychological defense mechanism that helped me to displace my own mortal anxieties, but the horror running through me was exclusively focused on her. At that moment, her plight—not our plight, but hers—seemed to be the only thing that mattered. It was as if her dignified protest and her placid courage somehow contained the essence of New Human existence, the purest product of progress.
Perhaps it was only my cowardly mind’s refusal to contemplate anything else, but the only thing I could think of while I tried to figure out what to do was the awfulness of what Emily Marchant was saying. As that awfulness possessed me it was magnified a thousandfold, and it seemed to me that in her lone and tiny voice there was a much greater voice speaking for multitudes: for all the human children that had ever died before achieving maturity; all the good children who had died without ever having the chance to deserve to die.
“I can’t hold your hand, Emily,” I told her, as my own life jacket settled itself snugly about my torso. “It would make it too difficult for us to get away.”
“You’re the one who can’t swim,” she reminded me.
“I’ll be all right,” I assured her. “If you see the life-raft pack before you see me, the trigger’s here. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. We were both looking down into the hole in what had once been the ceiling of the corridor.
“Don’t try to hold on to the ladder,” I advised her. “Just dive, as deep as you can. Then go sideways, until you can’t hold your breath