The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [50]
“Twenty years is a long time even for an emortal when you’re more than a hundred years old, Mort,” Marna Sajda told me, when I turned to her for comfort. “It’s time for you to move on.” I would of course have turned to Mama Eulalie had my options not narrowed when she died in 2634.
“That’s what Sharane said,” I told Mama Sajda, in a slightly accusatory tone. “She was being sternly reasonable at the time. I thought that the sternness would crumble if I put it to the test, and I thought that her resolve would crumble with it, but it didn’t.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” she replied, tersely.
Had I been in a less fragile mood, I wouldn’t have been able to say that I was surprised either, but that wasn’t the point, as I tried hard to explain. I was convinced, perhaps foolishly, that Mama Eulalie would have understood.
“I’m truly sorry,” Mama Sajda said, when I was eventually reduced to tears.
“She said that too,” I was quick to point out, not caring that I was piling up evidence to back Sharane’s claim that I had an innately obsessive frame of mind. “She said that she had to do it. She said that she hated hurting me, but she would say that, wouldn’t she?”
Now that forgetfulness has blotted out the greater part of that phase of my life—including, I presume, the worst of it—I don’t really know why I was so devastated by Sharane’s decision or why it should have filled me with such black despair. Had I cultivated a dependence so absolute that it seemed irreplaceable, or was it only my pride that had suffered a sickening blow? Was it the imagined consequences of the rejection or merely the rejection itself that hurt me so badly?
Mama Sajda wanted to help, but only for a week or two. Mama Eulalie had added injury to Sharane’s insult by dying mere years before I had the greatest need of her. She had been 257 years old and had outlasted not only Papa Nahum, who had been born two years after her, but also Mama Meta, who had been seven years younger. Even so, she had not lasted long enough. None of my other co-parents had come to Mama Eulalie’s funeral. Their association with her was too far in the past. Raising me had ceased to be a defining experience for them. I didn’t hold it against them. I figured that none of them was likely to be around for another twenty years, although I’d never have guessed that Mama Siorane would be the last to go, frozen on the crest of a Titanian mountain, looking up at the rings of Saturn. She was the only one who didn’t actually have a funeral, but even I didn’t go to Papa Ezra’s. I was still Earth-bound, reluctant to lose what people like Mama Siorane had begun to refer to as my “gravirginity.”
When I said my last good-bye to Mama Sajda in 2647, too close for spiritual comfort to the place at which I’d failed to save Grizel from drowning in the treacherous Kwarra, I said my last good-bye to that whole phase in my life: to the tattered remnants of childhood, the bitter legacies of first love, and the patiently accepted hardships of apprenticeship. The second part of my History of Death was launched the following year, and I was possessed by a strong sense of beginning a new phase of my existence—but I was wrong about that.
I was maturing by degrees, but I still had not served the full term of my apprenticeship.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The second part of The History of Death was entitled Death in the Ancient World. It plotted a convoluted but not particularly original trail through the Labyrinth, collating