The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [36]
I didn’t even see her go down.
It can’t have been more than three or four seconds afterward when I realized that she was no longer visible, but even with the current to help me it took a further fifteen to get to the point at which I’d last seen her. I dived, but the water was very murky, clouded with fine silt.
I ducked under again and again, moving southward all the time, but I calculated later that she was probably fifty or a hundred meters ahead of me and that I hadn’t made enough allowance for the velocity of the current. At the time, I was in the grip of a panicky haste. I was madly active, but I achieved nothing. I just kept ducking under, hoping to catch sight of her in time to drag her head out of the water, but I was always in the wrong place. It was like a nightmare.
In the end, I had to give up, or exhaustion might have made it impossible for me to beat the undertow. I had sanity enough to save myself from sharing Grizel’s fate—and I felt guilty about that for years.
TWENTY
Grizel’s body was eventually washed up at Onitsha, twenty kilometers downriver. There was a sharp bend there, left over from the days when the old Kwarra had been called the Niger, and the current couldn’t carry her around it.
Her limbs had been chewed by something—not a crocodile, of course—and they’d been broken by rocks she’d encountered when she drifted briefly into white water. All that had happened after she was dead, though; she hadn’t been conscious of the mutilation.
The postmortem confirmed that the branch had struck her on the temple, probably knocking her out instantaneously. Her dutiful IT had stopped the bleeding and protected her brain from the possibility of long-term damage, but it hadn’t been able to lift her head above the surface to let her breathe.
Many people can’t immediately take in news of the death of someone they love. The event defies belief and generates reflexive denial. I didn’t react that way, although some of the others did. We all had mortal parents—and we had all lost at least some of them—but Grizel had been a ZT like us, capable of living for centuries, and perhaps millennia. Camilla’s reaction was the most perverse; even after seeing the body she simply couldn’t get her head around the idea that Grizel was dead and wouldn’t hear the words spoken. The three Rainmakers admitted the fact readily enough but shrugged it off with set features and ready clichés.
With me, on the other hand, it was not merely belief that was instantaneous. I immediately gave way under its pressure. When I was told that her body had been found and the last vestige of hope disappeared I literally fell over, because my legs wouldn’t support me. It was another psychosomatic failure about which my internal machinery could do nothing, just like the seasickness that had saved me from the backflip of the Genesis.
I wept uncontrollably. None of the others did—not even Axel, who’d been closer to Grizel than anyone else, including Camilla. They were sympathetic at first, but it wasn’t long before a note of annoyance began to creep into their reassurances. I was disturbing them, putting a strain on their own coping strategies.
“Come on, Morty,” Eve said, voicing the thought the rest of them were too diplomatic to let out. “You know more about death than any of us. If it doesn’t help you to get a grip when you’re confronted with the reality, what good has all that research done you?”
She was right, after a fashion, but also very wrong. Jodocus and Minna had often tried to suggest, albeit delicately, that mine was an essentially unhealthy fascination, and now they felt vindicated. Unlike Camilla and Axel, who kept conspicuously quiet because they were having their own acute problems dealing with upwelling grief, they weighed in with Eve, presumably attempting to get over their own reflexive denial by criticizing my acceptance.
“If you’d actually bothered to read my commentary-in-progress, Evie,” I retorted,