The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [68]
“It’s September, Morty,” she said, with mock exasperation. “Equinox time. If I wanted to blow your mind completely I’d leave it till December and the solstice. This will be a gentle introduction, just to get you in the mood. It’s my pride and joy, Morty. You can’t say no.”
I remembered what Mia Czielinski had said about having a duty to explore the world’s possibilities. As a historian, I knew it wasn’t possible, because possibilities are lost with every day that passes, and even in the Age of Everyman an individual really is an individual, incapable of being in two places at the same time. As Emily Marchant’s friend and mentor, though, I knew that I really had fallen down on the job and that it was high time I learned to swim again, metaphorically speaking. I didn’t realize then how long it would be before I saw her in the flesh again, but I certainly realized how long it had been since I had last seen her, and I was appalled at my negligence in leaving it so long.
“I wasn’t dismissive,” I said, defensively. “I just had my own path to follow. I thought you were being dismissive. It’s nearly ready, you know. Just a few more months.”
“By then,” she said, “I’ll probably be gone—but that won’t matter, will it? The Labyrinth is everywhere: the Universe Without Limits. Wherever I am, I’ll always be able to keep in touch with your work. Mine isn’t like that. To know what I amount to, you have to see and feel and touch the solid reality. I know you’re not ready to follow me on the next leg of the journey, but I’m damned if I’ll let you miss out on this one. You have to see what I’ve made, and you have to see it with me”
“I will,” I said, wilting before the onslaught. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
THIRTY-SIX
I suppose the next few weeks qualified as a holiday, even though I went home almost every night. It was the first holiday I’d taken since my second divorce and might even have qualified as the first since my aborted trip on Genesis, given that all the trips I’d taken with the Lamu Rainmakers and Sharane had been calculated to mingle a certain amount of study with the tourism. I can honestly say, however, that I had not the slightest intention of including the ice palaces of Lillie Marleen, Dumont D’Urville, and Porpoise Bay in my history of death.
That was perhaps as well, as I would have struggled in vain to recapture the subjective essence of the experience. To say that it was intoxicating would hardly have done it justice; each edifice was an entire gallery of psychotropic effects. At first, being inside the ice palaces made me dizzy and queasy, but Emily was relentless. She refused to believe that I couldn’t adapt, and by degrees I did. Pm sure that I never learned to see them as she did, but I did begin to grasp the awesome wonder and sublimity of their structure.
I had always accepted the conventional wisdom which said that Isaac Newton was mistaken in identifying seven colors in the rainbow, having been prejudiced toward that number for mystical reasons, and that there were really only five: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Emily’s ice palaces taught me that I and the world had been quite wrong and that the human eye was capable of more education in this regard than nature had ever seen fit to provide. There are, in fact, at least a dozen colors in the visual spectrum, and perhaps as many as twenty—although we have not, to this day, attained a consensus in naming them.
When visiting Mia Czielinski and my other neighbors on Adare I had thought of “adaptation” to the ice palaces as a mere matter of soothing reflexive discomfort and disturbance, but what Emily’s architecture demanded was something far more complex and far reaching. I was woefully inadequate to the task—and I knew that I would never be prepared to put in the kind of work that would have been necessary to raise my perceptiveness even as far as mediocrity.