The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [8]
“How do you know my name?” I asked.
“We like to know who our neighbors are,” he said, mildly. “We don’t pry, but we’re slightly sensitive to the possibility that others might.”
“I’m not prying,” I retorted.
“Yes you are,” he said. “But that’s understandable. We don’t really mind. We stopped worrying about your parents a long time ago. We know that they’re exactly what they seem to be.”
“You’re not,” I said.
“I don’t seem to be anything I’m not,” he replied, arching his eyebrows in surprise—but then he figured out that I had meant the comment more generally. “We don’t seem to be anything at all,” he added. “Your parents decided to call this place Shangri-La on their own initiative, and if you decided to elaborate the fantasy…”
He left the sentence dangling, implying that he knew more about the tales I’d spun than he had any right to.
Perhaps he would have preferred it if I’d turned around and started climbing back down again, but he must have already accepted that I wouldn’t be content to come all the way up the mountain for nothing.
“What is this place, then?” I asked. “If it’s not a monastery…”
“You can come in if you want to,” he said. “But you might find it less interesting than you’d always hoped. I’m Julius Ngomi, by the way.”
He smiled as he said it. He didn’t really mean what he said about my finding the place less interesting than I’d always hoped—but even after all this time, I still can’t quite make up my mind whether he was right or not.
FIVE
There was no obvious sign of a doorway behind the Buddha, but when part of the gray wall drew away at Ngomi’s touch I realized that the featurelessness of the edifice might be an illusion.
“We generally use the door on the far side of the mountain,” my companion said, waving his hand vaguely in order to suggest that the zigzagging corridor was far more extensive than the eye could see. “There’s a helipad there, although it’s only usable one day in four.”
By the time we had turned three corners and descended two stairways I had lost my sense of direction, but I had begun to realize how extensively the mountain had been hollowed out. There didn’t seem to be many people about, but there was no shortage of closed doors, which no one had bothered to hide.
“What’s inside them?” I asked, vaguely.
“The litter that dare not speak its name,” he replied, gnomically. “Archaeological specimens. Ancient artifacts. Lots and lots of paper. Things that have no present utility at all but somehow seem to warrant preservation nevertheless. We’ve become very reluctant to throw things away these last few hundred years. The way the history books tell it is that our pre-Crash ancestors—the old Old Human Race—became deeply penitent about their habit of trashing everything they owned in wars and began to set up permanent archives at about the same time they built the first genetic Arks. Then, so the conventional history goes, our more recent forefathers became exceedingly paranoid about the perishability of electronic information during the Virtual Terror. That kicked off a new wave of archive building and archive stuffing.”
Because he was still talking he paused at the unconcealed door we were about to enter, with his hand hovering a centimeter short of a clearly marked pressure pad. If I’d nodded my head he would presumably have touched it, but I didn’t.
“Are you saying that the history books have got it wrong?” I asked, instead. It didn’t seem to be an important question as I phrased it, but I never forgot the answer I received, and I never lost sight of its implications.
“Not exactly,” said Julius Ngomi. “But all history is fantasy, and there are always different ways of coming at a question. The cynical version is that after Leon Gantz and his nephews had developed a ridiculously cheap