The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [48]
She was certainly unconventional, but she was magnificently unconventional, and I loved her for it. The fact that she funded much of the research I put into the second part of my History, and funded it lavishly, did not figure in my calculations at all. I would have married her if she had been as poor as I was—although she, admittedly, would not have married me had those been our circumstances.
I found in Sharane a precious wildness that was unfailingly amusing in spite of the fact that it wasn’t truly spontaneous. Her attempts to put herself imaginatively in touch with the past—literally to stand in the shoes of long-gone members of the Old Human Race—had a very casual attitude to matters of accuracy and authenticity, but they were bold and exhilarating. For a while, at least, I was glad occasionally to be a part of them, and when I was content to remain on the sidelines I enjoyed the spectacle just as much.
From her point of view, I suppose I was useful in two ways. On the one hand, I was a font of information and inspiration, offering her a constant flow of new perspectives. Thanks to me, she was able to revisit old exploits with a new eye, so that she could remake them in interesting ways. On the other hand, I provided a kind of existential anchorage whose solidity and mundanity prevented her from losing herself in the flights of her imagination. Neither of those roles was infinitely extendable, but they were valuable while they lasted, and she loved me for the style as well as the efficiency of the manner in which I fulfilled them.
It would have been convenient if we had both come to the end of our infatuation at exactly the same time, but even the best pair-bonds rarely split as neatly and as gently as that. As things turned out, I was the one who suffered the disappointment of losing a love that I still felt very keenly, after a mere twenty years of acquaintance and eighteen of formal marriage.
Sharane and I talked for a while, as even young married people do, about the possibility of recruiting half a dozen more partners so that we might apply to raise a child. It would not have been impossible, or even particularly unusual, given that the Decimation had made licenses much more freely available. We settled, however, for filing our deposits in the local gamete bank with a polite recommendation that some future group of co-parents more than a thousand years hence might consider them appropriate for combination. It was the romantic option—and when we split up, neither of us hated the other enough to rescind the recommendation.
What eventually drove us apart was, I suppose, the same thing that had brought us together. The opposite tendencies of our characters fused for a while into a healthy whole, which seemed greater than the sum of its parts—but the robust tautness of the combination eventually decayed into stress and strain.
“You’re too serious,” Sharane complained, as the breaking point approached, echoing Mama Eulalie’s anxieties about my suitability for alliance with such a mercurial creature. “You work too hard, and you’re too hung up on details. Historical research should be a joyful voyage of discovery, not an obsession.”
“I’m not against joy,” I replied, a trifle defensively and more than a trifle resentfully, “but I’m a serious historian. Unlike you, I have to discriminate between discovery and invention.”
“All history is fantasy,” she quoted at me. “Truth is what you can get away with.”
“The fact that all history is fantasy doesn’t mean you can just make it up” I insisted. “It means that even at its most accurate