The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [44]
“I won’t be this badly off for very long,” I assured her. “It’ll be good for me to struggle for a while. I’ll enjoy it all the more when things get better.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you might have a masochistic streak, Mister Mortimer?” she asked, reverting to the form of my name that she alone employed, inconsistently, in order to emphasize that she didn’t really mean what she was saying.
“Of course it has,” I said. “I’m the historian of death—the man whose self-appointed task it is to remind New Humankind of all the fear and pain that went into its making. I’m probably the last of the truly great masochists.” I had no inkling at that time of the appalling magnitude of the masochism that was yet to visit the world, whose emortal exponents would outshine me as easily as the sun outshines a candle.
“Well,” Emily said, reprovingly, “you know the money’s there whenever you need it. You can always change your mind.”
I probably would have, eventually. As things turned out, though, I found another solution to my straitened circumstances—or had another solution thrust upon me. Putting it that way makes it sound crudely materialistic, but in reality it was anything but that. When I got married for the second time it wasn’t for convenience, or even for companionship, and it certainly wasn’t for money, although setting up another joint household did solve my financial problems. I married for love, carried away on a tide of passion.
I should, of course, have been immune to such disruptions by the age of eighty-five, but I had contrived to skip that stage of my sentimental education by going straight into a group marriage without bothering with the conventional pair-bond experiments. When I should have been getting the capacity for infatuation out of my system I was busy with other things, like the Great Coral Sea Disaster.
It was, of course, seasickness rather than the fact that I had boarded the Genesis as a singleton that had saved my life, but my singleton status had certainly saved me from the sharpest pangs of grief. Had I been part of a couple, I would almost certainly have lost a lover. That had had no conscious effect on my continued wariness of pair-bonding experiments, but I have to admit, in retrospect, that it might well have had a subconscious effect. At any rate, I had never suffered the legendary tempests of swift passion in adolescence or earliest adulthood and had been safely insulated from them for nearly forty years while I had been a relatively contented Rainmaker-in-Law.
Perhaps I had been storing up trouble all the while I had lived in Lamu, and swift passion had always been within me, waiting patiently for its fuse to be lit so that it might explode at last. If so, the match applied to that fuse by Sharane Fereday was one that caught almost instantly. I was greatly taken with her from the very first time I caught sight of her, although attraction did not blossom into something more elaborate until we had talked for seven hours—by which time it seemed that we had everything in common and that all our emotional well-springs had flowed together into a common sea.
Had I let my poverty restrict me more tightly we would never have met, for it was on one of my most self-indulgent excursions that Sharane and I were thrust together, and as passengers on the bus from Eden to Nod that we were able to converse for seven hours at a stretch.
The early twenty-sixth century had had no shortage of so-called Edens. The tidal waves of the Decimation had obliterated no less than twelve, ten of them Creationist islands. The Eden that I visited on the shore of Lake Van was widely reckoned to be one more