The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [29]
“But the essential data will all be there,” Papa Laurent objected, “even if the bridges remain unbuilt—and we’re already on the threshold of an age when that kind of data navigation can be entirely delegated to silvers. Surely they’ll be the historians of the future.”
“Silvers are very poor commentators,” I reminded him, “and they only build bridges to connect preexisting highways. I want to make new connections, to build a huge picture of a kind that we’ve almost stopped producing. We’ve become too easily content to let the trees hide the wood, and I want to see the entire forest—but no one will accept my grand overview if I can’t demonstrate that I’ve done all the detailed work. A historian has to pay his dues. My history will take at least two hundred years to complete. I hope to issue it in installments, but the preliminary work will take a long time.”
“Don’t let it get on top of you,” my aged parent persisted. “You can’t put off the business of living.”
“I won’t,” I promised—and tried with all my might to keep the promise.
“A history of death is too morbid a preoccupation for a young man,” he insisted, revealing the extent to which his own mind had lost its ability to move on. “You’ve always been a little too serious. I always knew that the balance of the team was wrong. We needed lighter hearts than Nahum’s or Siorane’s or even mine.”
“The members of every team of fosterers look back on their work and think they got the balance wrong,” I assured him. “I think you got the balance just right. Trust me, Papa Laurent.”
Mama Sajda also told me that she’d always known that the team was out of kilter, although it wasn’t lighter hearts that she’d thought lacking. “Too many people with their eyes on the stars or Dom’s ridiculous Universe Without Horizons,” she told me. “I thought it was enough to set the hometree down in a quintessentially real place, but we still couldn’t keep our feet on the ground. We should have chosen Africa—the veldt, or the fringes of the rain forest. We were too detached.”
Mama Meta and Mama Siorane, speaking across the void, were now united in the opinion that I ought to have been raised on the moon or in one of the L-5 habitats, but Papa Nahum—who was also speaking via VE space—was more contented, and so was Mama Eulalie. “Don’t listen to them, Mortimer,” Mama Eulalie advised me. “Go your own way. Any parents who bring up a child capable of going his own way have done their job.”
The similarly detached Papa Ezra, mercifully, was content to talk more about his own work than mine and take the decisions of the past for granted. “We’re all going the same way as Dom, Morty,” he reminded me. “One by one, we’ll desert you. Try to remember Dom kindly—the practice will do you good. You’re the only one who’ll have to say goodbye to all eight of us.”
Papa Laurent’s funeral was completely different from Papa Domenico’s. Paris did not have the distinction of being one of the most ancient cities in the world, and it had not escaped the Decimation unscathed, but its inhabitants had contrived nevertheless to retain a sense of cultural superiority and calculated decadence left over from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most Parisians would have put their own city and the UN’s ice-clad metropolis at opposite ends of a spectrum of existential sensitivity, and anyone