The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [67]
“Why would I do that?” I asked, mystified.
“Well,” she said, “last time we were in close touch I tried to force money on you, and you refused to accept it—and then you ran off and got married. Ever since then, there’s been a conventional tokenism about our conversations. I thought you hadn’t forgiven me. I don’t suppose you’ve grown much less poor in the interim, but you presumably know that I’ve gotten much richer. Forty or fifty times, I think—but it stacks up so fast that I can’t keep count. Your parents used to be very sniffy about commerce, as I remember.”
“Only some of them,” I said. “It just happened to include the two who had most to say. But no, I certainly haven’t been avoiding you, or even trying to keep you at arm’s length. And as it happens, I’m not as poor as I was after my first divorce and probably won’t ever be again. My dividend from the credit Papa Ezra and Mama Siorane piled up while they were working off-planet was quite substantial. It’s mostly spent now, of course, but my History has begun to produce an income of sorts….” I trailed off again, realizing all of a sudden that what I thought of as an income must look like very small change to someone who had been rich last time I spoke to her and was now “forty or fifty times” richer.
“I owe it all to you,” she murmured, reading my mind. She murmured because she knew what my response would be.
“You don’t owe nearly as much to me as I owe to you,” I reminded her, before pressing on with indecent haste. “I take it that Lillie Marleen’s going the same way as Cape Adare now—ice castles lining the main street and running a ragged ring around the old town?”
“You mean that you haven’t even seen it?” I had contrived to take her aback.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never been to Cape Hallett, let alone Lillie Marleen, although the neighbors I do see keep telling me that I should. I’ve been very busy. Is it really as wonderful as they say?”
“Morty,” she said, with a sigh, “Lillie Marleen is currently number two on the official list of the world’s Seven Wonders. It makes Cape Adare’s ice palaces look like a set of drinking glasses set upside down to drain beside a sink. Don’t you ever watch the news?”
“Only the headlines,” I told her. “I’m a historian. At my present rate of progress, I expect to catch up with the twenty-seventh century in three or four hundred years’ time.”
“Oh, Morty,” she said, with a much heavier sigh. “You were my first substitute parent, if only for three days. You’re supposed to provide me with a role model, to be a source of inspiration. Here am I, playing a major part in the remaking of the Continent Without Nations, providing the wherewithal for the greatest art form of the fin-de-siecle, and you’re still stuck in the second century, apart from scanning the headlines. Don’t you ever get out, even in a VE hood?”
“I’ve seen most of the Cape Adare ice castles from the inside,” I told her, “and it’s only ten years or thereabouts since I spent a whole week in Amundsen.”
“Doing something for the UN?”
“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I was in hospital the whole time. I told you—I was injured. My leg was crushed while I was helping to rescue a man who’d fallen into a crevasse. It took days to grow new tissues, and the best part of a year to educate the leg so that it felt as if it was really mine.”
I expected her to sigh again, but she laughed instead. “You have to let me take you out,” she said. “Not once or twice, but fifty or a hundred times. I expect you’ll hate it, but you have to do it anyway. I can’t have you thinking that those glorified goblets over the way are the pinnacle of ice-palace achievement. I can show you light games you can never have imagined—and you’ll look at them even if I have to drag you. They’re the first fruit of my hands-on endeavors. I was really annoyed when you were so dismissive of that particular resolution, and I need to make you suffer by showing you what I’ve achieved.”
“I