The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [3]
The valley where I was brought up bears little resemblance now to the state it was in when I lived there. It fell victim to one of the less contentious projects of the Continental Engineers. Its climate is almost Mediterranean now, thanks to the dome and all its subsidiary facilities, and it is only an hour from Kathmandu by tube train. The Hindu community at the southern end of the valley is long gone—its stone-gantzed harshness replaced by luxuriant hometrees—but the stone edifice my parents nicknamed Shangri-La is still standing. When the cloud lifts it presents much the same appearance to the valley dwellers as it presented to me in earliest childhood. Because it remains outside the protective shell it must seem to young children, as it once seemed to me, to be shrouded in mystery.
Because I only lived with my foster parents for twenty years—a mere 4 percent of my life to date—and because much of that time was spent in a state of infantile obliviousness, I find it difficult to write about them as a coherent collective. I got to know them much better as disparate individuals once the collective had broken up, and that probably has as much to do with my impression that they were always quarreling as my earliest memories. I now suspect that they were happier together than I was ever able to believe while they were alive, and I am sure that they were better parents than I ever gave them credit for while I still had to listen to their homilies and complaints.
As a dutiful historian—even one who has stooped so low as to resurrect the dubious genre of spiritual autobiography—I suppose that I ought to make a proper record of my origins. My foster parents were Domenico Corato, bom 2345; Laurent Holderness, bom 2349; Eulalie Neqael, born 2377; Nahum Turkhan, bom 2379; Meta Khaled, bom 2384; Siorane Wolf, born 2392; Sajda Ajdal, bom 2402; and Ezra Derhan, born 2418. The ovum that they withdrew from a North American bank to initiate my development had been deposited there in 2170, having been taken from the womb of one Diana Caisson, born 2168. The sperm used to fertilize it after the Zamaners had done their preliminary work had been deposited in 2365 by Evander Gray (2347-2517).
I have been unable to discover any more about Diana Caisson’s history. The sectors of the Labyrinth hosting the relevant data were devastated by the viral shrapnel of an early twenty-third-century logic bomb, and I have never been able to discover any hard-copy reference. Evander Gray was a longtime gantzing engineer who had spent the greater part of his working life on the moon, although he had done three tours of duty in the asteroid belt; he had died in an orbital settlement.
In Mama Siorane’s and Mama Meta’s eyes, Evander Gray must have qualified as a pioneer, although Papa Domenico would doubtless have pointed out to them that there had been “space pioneers” as long ago as the twentieth century. At any rate, the three years separating notification of Evander Gray’s death from the exercise of his right of replacement testifies to the fact that although no one was in a tearing hurry to perpetuate his heritage, he was considered a reasonably good catch. He was reckoned good enough, at any rate, for my parents not to hesitate long over the selection of my surname. If Papa Dom disapproved, he did not think it worth exercising his power of veto.
I do not know why I was given the first name Mortimer, although I did ask several of my foster parents.
“We liked it,” was all the answer Papa Domenico offered.
“It sounded serious,” was Mama Eulalie