The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [19]
She didn’t move. She was paralyzed by apprehension.
“I don’t think any more water can get in,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice, “but there’s only so much air. If we stay here too long, we’ll suffocate.”
She was trying to convince herself. She was eight years old and hoped to live to be eight hundred, and she was absolutely right. The air wouldn’t last forever. Hours maybe, but not forever.
“The survival pod will keep us alive for a week,” she added. She had obviously paid close attention to Captain Cardigan’s welcoming speech. She was probably the only passenger who’d actually bothered to plug the safety chips they’d handed out to all of us into her trusty handbook, like the good girl she was.
“We can both fit into the pod,” I assured her, “but we have to get it out of the boat before we inflate it. It’s too big for you to carry.”
“You can’t swim,” she reminded me.
“It’s not hard,” I reminded her. “All I have to do is hold my breath and kick myself away from the boat. But you have to go first. I’ll get you aboard the life raft, Emily. Trust me.”
“I do,” she said.
I stared at her. There was no cause for wonder in the fact that she could be so calm and so controlled and yet not be able to hurl herself into that black airless void—but I had to get her out before I got out myself. I couldn’t show her the way because I couldn’t leave her alone.
“Listen to the water on the outside,” she whispered. “Feel the rocking. It must have been a hurricane that overturned the boat… but we have to go, don’t we, Mister Mortimer? We have to get out.”
“Yes,” I said. “The pod’s bright orange and it has a distress beacon. We should be picked up within twenty-four hours, but there’ll be supplies for a week.” I had every confidence that our suitskins and our internal technology could sustain us for a month, if necessary. Even having to drink a little seawater if our recycling gel clotted would only qualify as a minor inconvenience—but drowning was another matter. Drowning is one of the elementary terrors of emortality, along with a smashed skull, a fall from a great height and a close encounter with a bomb.
“It’s okay, Mister Mortimer,” Emily said, putting her reassuring hand in mine for one more precious moment, so that we could both take strength from the touch. “We can do it. It’ll be all right.”
And so saying, she leaped into the pool of darkness.
ELEVEN
I knew that I couldn’t afford to be paralyzed by apprehension, for Emily’s sake. I also knew—and am convinced of it to this very day—that if Emily hadn’t been there to create the absolute necessity, I would not have been able to lower myself through that hole. I would have waited, cravenly, until there was no more air left to breathe. While I waited, I might have been injured by the buffeting of the rigid-hulled boat, or the boat might have taken on water enough to go down, but I would have waited, alone and horribly afraid.
I couldn’t swim.
In the early twenty-sixth century, it was taken for granted that all members of the New Human Race were perfectly sane. Madness, like war and vandalism, was supposed to be something that our forefathers had put away, with other childish things, when they came to understand how close the old Old Human Race had come to destroying themselves and taking the entire ecosphere with them. It was, I suppose, true. Ali Zaman’s firstborns were, indeed, perfectly sane from the age of eight until eighty, and we lived in contentedly uninteresting times until 23 March 2542. We always knew what counted as the reasonable thing to do, and it was always available to us—but even we New Humans couldn’t and didn’t always do it. As sane as we undoubtedly were, we were still capable of failing to act in our own best interests. Sometimes, we needed an extra reason even to do what we knew