The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [64]
“Yes it is,” I agreed, shifting my now-mobile but furiously itching leg and wishing that nanomachines weren’t so slow to compensate for trifling but annoying sensations. “Once in a while is certainly enough for me. In fact, I for one will be quite content if it never happens again. I don’t think I need any more of the kind of enlightenment which comes from experiences like that. I was at ground zero in the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, you know—my ship was flipped over by the uprush of hot water when the mantle broke through the crust below us.”
“Were you?” he said, in rapt fascination. “What was it like?” He was eleven years younger than I; he had been much the same age as Emily Marchant when the Decimation was unleashed and had been living deep in the American Midwest, beyond the reach of the tidal waves.
I felt an obscure sense of duty urging me to bring him back down to Earth, to insist that tragedy is tragedy and that there is no nobility in the imminent threat of destruction—but I knew that there was nothing I could say that would have any such effect.
“It was like being shipwrecked, scalded and adrift at sea for days on end, in company with a little girl who’d just lost all twelve of her parents,” I said—remembering as I formed the words that the random pairing of Emily Marchant and myself had been so enormously beneficial to both of us as to reduce any clinical benefit of my acquaintance with Ziru Majumdar to utter triviality.
“It must have been terrible,” he admitted—but I could tell that his was a definition of the word “terrible” that carried subtle nuances I hadn’t encountered before. I could tell too that they weren’t the produce of a purely idiosyncratic eccentricity. I was uncomfortably aware, even then, that Ziru Majumdar’s was the voice of a new ideology: a new rival for the neo-Epicurean synthesis that had resolved the conflicts embodied in my marriage to Sharane.
I missed not being able to slip on the bed’s VE hood and telephone one of my parents. There were plenty of other people I could have called, including my erstwhile companion-in-misfortune Emily, but every single one of them was a true emortal and I wanted to consult the opinions of someone who wasn’t, someone who knew what the threat of death was really like and how valuable life was.
For the first time, while I lay in that hospital bed, I began to miss my dead parents not merely as individuals and intimates but as representatives of a vanishing people. For the first time, I began to wonder whether true emortals had been as well prepared for Utopia as I had previously assumed.
“It was terrible,” I told him, using the word to mean exactly what I intended it to mean, and nothing more—but language is a collaborative business, as fantastic in its fashion as history.
THIRTY-FOUR
I lived on Cape Adare for a further fifteen years after my brief incarceration with Ziru Majumdar. The experience did not serve to make me any more sociable, and my acquaintance with Majumdar did not ripen into friendship. I had nothing further to do with the steadily expanding Cape Hallett community.
When other dwellings began to be raised on Adare itself I fully intended to keep myself to myself, offering no welcome of any kind to my neighbors, but they had other ideas. They issued invitations, which I found hard to refuse, and I got to know a dozen of them in spite of my own lack of effort. I had not yet got out of the habit of thinking of myself as a member of the “young generation” of the New Human Race and was surprised to find that the newcomers were all younger than I, almost all of them being products of the baby boom facilitated by the Decimation.
My new neighbors were not insulted by my reluctance to involve myself in what they clearly saw as a collaborative adventure. They understood that I must have come to the cape in search of solitude and when I told them that I was finalizing the third part of my History—which I still envisaged as a seven-part work—they were happy to maintain a polite distance