The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [32]
Climate control had, of course, been more carefully reinstituted once the great storm caused by the Coral Sea Disaster had abated, and the utter ruination of vast tracts of coastal land had given a new lease on life to the UN’s Land Development Agency. The Agency had resolved to remedy many alleged mistakes made by Ancient Nature, which had been carried forward into the post-Crash era by mere historical momentum. All of my marriage partners except Grizel—who worked for the Ark Consortium—were salaried employees of the LDA. Collectively, therefore, we were relatively well-off, although I contributed far less than my companions to the household purse. What little credit I earned to add to my Allocation was earned by assisting my partners in various humble ways, although I hoped that my own work would eventually begin to generate net-access fees.
We established a hometree in the town that the Rainmakers already used as a base: Lamu, on the coast of Kenya. Mama Sajda was living less than three hundred miles away, and she was the only one of my parents who took the trouble to travel to the ceremony. All of them expressed their delight, though, and I had no cause to suspect any of them of insincerity. They all thought that marriage would be better for me than my long honeymoon with the history of death, and I daresay that they were right.
“Don’t take it too seriously, though,” Mama Sajda warmed me. “I’ve been married five times, and although I hate to generalize from such a small sample I think it’s safe to say that even though two isn’t usually company enough, eight is definitely a crowd. Don’t expect an easy ride, and don’t stick at it too long when the wheels fall off.”
“Everything will be fine,” I assured her. “We don’t have excessive expectations. We’ve all had the opportunity to observe family life, and we know how stormy the emotional weather can get. I don’t say we’re unsinkable, but I’m sure that we’ve got enough life rafts handy, just in case.”
“You don’t know the half of if it,” she assured me, “but you’ll learn.”
I did learn. We all did. That was the whole point of the exercise.
EIGHTEEN
Although we had formed our marriage for general purposes of companionship rather than preparing for parenthood, we didn’t go in for overmuch fleshsex in the early years. We were still finding our various ways through the maze of erotic virtuality and had not yet come to terms, even provisionally, with our own eroto-aesthetic priorities. We did eventually take the time to explore most of the subsidiary combinations contained within the marriage, but we were careful—perhaps too careful—to keep the experiments casual lest petty jealousies should threaten the integrity of the whole. Tacitly, at least, we all accepted the conventional wisdom that the young ought to discover spice in variety and delight in many flavors. Whatever suspicions we retained of our various foster parents and the cultural norms that we inherited, we were content to heed the advice that a broad range of experience is the only secure foundation for a gradual refinement of taste.
The marriage was not conspicuously unhappy for any of us, and such quarrels as we had were muted. This may seem to be damning the whole enterprise with faint praise, but we had not expected it to be life defining. We were not in search of perfection but merely of a better understanding of the many modes and causes of social synergy and interpersonal friction. We went in for a good deal of sportive competition and those kinds of tourism that are best indulged in a group. We visited the other continents from time to time, but most of our adventures merely took us back and forth across Africa.
We all became equally familiar with the trials and tribulations of camping out in the rain forest and the difficulty of keeping sunburn at bay in tropical cities gantzed out of yellow and roseate stone.