The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [23]
“But they’re not even talking to us,” she said. “How bad can things be?”
For an eight year old, she was extremely sharp. I figured she deserved an honest answer. “Very, very bad indeed,” I admitted. “Whatever it is, it has to be the worst disaster in human history.”
“Worse than the Crash?” she queried.
“Worse than the Black Death,” I told her, bleakly. “Worse than the last Ice Age, and a hell of a lot quicker. At least as bad as the last big extinction event, if not the one that finally killed off the dinosaurs.” I realized as I said it that even the biggest station in near-Earth orbit couldn’t have caused that big a splash. One of the L-5 cylinders might have—but what could have moved it all the way from lunar orbit without any warning?
“How many people do you think it killed?” she asked, carefully raising her sights above the level of her own family. “Millions?”
“Perhaps millions,” I agreed, sadly.
“Like the Crash,” she said.
She was eight years old, and I didn’t dare ask her exactly what she meant by that. I was prepared to assume that she was only talking about numbers—but I was already a fledgling historian. I knew that the Crash had not been entirely a matter of accident and misadventure. At least some of the viruses that had sterilized the Old Human Race had been deliberately crafted for that purpose, by people who thought of themselves as the midwives and parents of a New Human Race. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Emily might, after all, have been right about that bomb, and whether some member of the real New Human Race—our New Human Race—might have wearied of the slowness with which the world was being handed over to our control.
It was absurd, of course. No sane member of the New Human Race could possibly have been as impatient as that, let alone as frankly evil-minded as that, but when you’re afloat in a life raft on an impossibly turbulent sea, having never had a chance to recover from seasickness, you can entertain thoughts that you would never entertain at any other time. The fact remained that whatever had caused this disaster would hasten the disappearance of the Old Human Race, at least in Australasia and Oceania.
That, in itself, was a sobering thought.
By the time night fell again we had become sufficiently well adapted to the pitching and tossing of the boat to sleep. My slumber was fitful and full of dreams, but Emily slept better and longer, only jerking awake once or twice when her reflexive grip on the handholds weakened and she felt herself moving too far too fast.
While we were awake throughout our second day afloat, we talked about anything and everything except our parents.
I told Emily about the valley in the Himalayas, and the Hindu monks, and the genetically engineered yaks, and the secrets of Shangri-La. She told me about her own home tree in the middle of what had been the outback before the Continental Engineers had constructed the largest of all their irrigation schemes and made it bloom again.
I told her everything I had learned about the hollow mountains full of the world’s dross. She told me everything she knew about the Black Mountains of the Northern Territory, whose hollow interiors were vast factories converting the energetic produce of the SAP forests to every conceivable purpose.
We talked about the latest news from Mars and the Oort Halo and the fact that the so-called kalpa probes would soon be overtaking the first-generation Arks, launched in the early years of the Crash by megacorp men half-convinced that Earthbound man was not going to make it through the crisis. We agreed that when the people those Arks were carrying in SusAn finally emerged from the freezer, they would be pig sick at the thought of having been overtaken as well as having missed