The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [22]
“But if someone had heard the mayday,” she pointed out, with deadly accuracy, “they’d have replied, wouldn’t they?”
She was right. The raft had to have a voice facility. A hyperspecialized sloth wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with us, but it would be able to tell us what was happening if anything were happening. If no one was replying to our mayday one of two things must be true. Either there was no one able to reply, or there were so many maydays filling the airwaves that we were effectively on hold, waiting in a very long line.
I realized that if it were a very large space station that had come down, the subsequent tidal wave might have taken out Gladstone and Rockhampton as easily as it had taken out Genesis—and flooded every single natural and artificial island west of Vanuatu and south of the Solomons. That was as big a disaster as I could seriously contemplate at the time, but the silence said that even those limits might be elastic.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” Emily said, at last. “All of them.”
She meant all twelve of her parents. The three couples and Captain Cardigan’s crew were gone too, but she couldn’t think about them while her own personal tragedy was so immense.
“We don’t know that,” I said. “There must have been other pods. They all have good suitskins and first-rate IT. People are surprisingly hard to kill.” But I knew as I said it that whatever had tipped Genesis over had been more than surprising, it had been unprecedented, and well-nigh unimaginable. I didn’t have to look out to know that the sea was still seething, and the clouds that had risen from it to blot out the stars were still impenetrable.
THIRTEEN
The sea did not become calm that night. When I was sure that the sun had risen I did take an opportunity to peek out, but the cloud was so thick as to be hardly penetrable, and rain was falling more densely than I had ever seen it before—and there are summer days in the Himalayas, even in these days of supposed climate control, when thirty centimeters of rain can fall in a matter of hours. It was no longer hot inside the raft, although the sea was still ten or fifteen degrees warmer than the falling rain.
I managed to take a little liquid nourishment from the teat, but my IT had not yet managed to get the upper hand in the argument with my subconscious, and I still felt nauseous. It was not until noon that the raft’s voice facility finally kicked in and announced that its mayday had been acknowledged.
“Please wait,” the raft said, in the curiously plaintive fashion typical of the most limited sloths. “Help will come. Please wait.” Clearly, it was talking to another AI no brighter than itself—and if it had taken twelve hours even to cement that link, I thought, how much longer would it be before our plight became a matter of urgent concern for a high-grade silver or a human being?
I asked what was happening, of course, and begged to be put into contact with a more intelligent entity, but I couldn’t evoke any response other than a simple repetition. I tried to remember how many islands there were in the Coral Sea and Micronesia and how many people lived along the coastal strips of Queensland and New Guinea, but I had no real idea. The only thing of which I could be sure was that the number of people needing help must be at least as many millions as the number of people able to render it—and that most of them would be aggregated in larger and more easily reachable groups than our minuscule microcosm.
“It’s not fair,” Emily whispered, when it became clear that night was going to fall without anyone coming to our aid, “is it, Mister Mortimer?”
I knew what she meant, but I had a slightly pedantic mind-set even then. “Mortimer’s my first name, Emily, not my second,” I told her, “and the one thing we can be certain of is that whatever’s going on now is fair. All the maydays will be feeding into a ganglion somewhere in the Labyrinth, and a supersilver triage