The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [43]
“When I was young,” he said, “I worked very hard. When I reached an age at which the end was in sight, I slacked off. When I was sure I had enough to see me through to the end, I stopped. Work never hurt me but I never learned to like it. I’m Old Human through and through. You’re not. If I’d known that I had to work forever, or as near as damn it, I’d have looked at things a different way. We can’t tell you how to go about that. Better keep in mind, though, that forever is a hell of a long time to be poor, even in today’s world. Taking advantage of unlimited opportunity needs funds as well as endurance.”
“If my history is definitive,” I told him, trying not to sound boastful, “it’ll make money. Not soon, and not a fortune, but it will make money. It’ll make my name too. When people mention Mortimer Gray’s History of Death, other people will know what they’re talking about.”
“Your choice,” Papa Nahum said, graciously. “Sorry I won’t be around to share the celebration. I want genuine Oscar Wildes at my funeral, mind—none of that cheap rubbish. I don’t care how poor you are.”
When he died, at the dawn of the twenty-seventh century, I brought genuine Oscar Wildes to his funeral even though I couldn’t afford them. Mama Meta ordered Rappaccinis that had been out of fashion for a century, but she didn’t mean any insult. She lived on the moon, where flowers were a good deal rarer than people with legs, and anything with petals counted as a wonder.
TWENTY-FOUR
Oddly enough, the most generous moral support I received in the wake of the Prehistory’s publication—along with the most generous offers of charitable assistance—came from Emily Marchant, who was now richer than both my families put together.
Emily’s replacement foster parents, operating in the capacity of trustees, had reinvested the twelvefold inheritance she had received from her original fosterers in shamir development. It had been the most obvious thing to do, given that the cities smashed by the tidal waves of 2542 would all need rebuilding, but the obvious sometimes pays unexpected dividends. The shamirs designed for the patient and elegant regenerative work that had been the world’s lip service to Decivilization had not been well adapted to the task of repairing rude devastation. Gantzing biotech had been stuck in a rut for two hundred years while the Zamaners had taken all the funds and all the glory, but coping with the debris of the tidal waves had given its evolution a new impetus.
It was hardly surprising that Emily had gone into the business herself, cleverly reapplying the lessons learned in the design of new and better shamirs to the improvement of the deconstructors and reconstructors that had been set to work in the interior spaces of Io and Ganymede, building subsurface colonies far more sophisticated than those clustered around the lunar poles. In 2615, however, Emily had not yet formed a powerful desire to go out to the outer system herself. Like me, she was still contentedly Earthbound.
“You really ought to take the money, Mortimer,” she said to me, after I had refused for the ninth or tenth time. “It grows so much faster than I can spend it that I keep running into the hypertax bracket, at which point it all gets gobbled up by the Social Fund and redirected to the General Good. I know it’s antisocial to regret that, but I can’t help thinking that I’d prefer to select my own deserving causes.”
“I can’t,” I said. “It would feel wrong.”
“Why? Because you happened to save my life once upon a time? It’s not payment, Mortimer. It doesn’t alter what you did or make it any less heroic.”
“It could hardly have been any less heroic than it was,” I told her, mournfully. “Anyway, it’s nothing to do with that. It would feel wrong because it would mean that I wasn’t doing it myself.”
“You take the Allocation, don’t you?”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
I wasn’t entirely sure why, but I felt that it was. The allowance awarded to every member of the race was a guarantee of food, shelter, and basic access to the Labyrinth;