The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [9]
As he pronounced the final word, Julius Ngomi finally found the impetus to brush the pressure pad with his fingertips, and the door opened. I had just begun to visualize a tide of sewage flooding out into the corridor when I perceived that it was a perfectly normal circular room. Its perimeter wall was rimmed by a series of flatscreens, alternated with perfectly normal VE hoods. Only two of the six hoods were occupied, but there was a third person positioned at the center of the room, apparently engaged in the impossible task of monitoring all six flatscreens simultaneously. This was a gray-haired woman, whose features were so comprehensively time ravaged that I immediately jumped to the conclusion that she was a bicentenarian spinning out the legacy of her third full rejuve as far as it would go.
“Who’s this, Julie?” she asked, mildly, as her pale eyes scanned me from head to toe with what seemed to me to be a practiced sweep. The people under the hoods—one man and one woman, to judge by the contours of their suitskins—didn’t bother to peep out to see what was happening.
“Mortimer Gray,” said Ngomi. “The kid from the valley. Today’s the day he finally grew big enough to complete the climb. About time, considering the number of times he got halfway and chickened out.” The insult was uncalled for, and not entirely defused by the levity of the black man’s tone.
“Congratulations,” said the woman.
“This is Sara Saul,” Ngomi said. “She’s the boss.”
“The chief archivist, you mean?” I said, trying to show that I was on the ball.
They both laughed. “We’re just lodgers,” Ngomi said. “We don’t actually look after the cesspit. To tell you the truth, the cesspit pretty much looks after itself, now that the store is deemed to be full up. Historians crawl over it and scratch its surface now and again, but nobody else pays it much heed. We just rent a few of the leftover nooks and crannies.”
“But you’re not monks,” I said, uncertainly, “are you?”
Mercifully, they didn’t laugh at that.
“After a fashion, we are,” said Sara Saul. “We’re not given to prayer, like the people at the far end of the valley, and we’re not what used to be called chipmonks—VE obsessives, that is—but you could say that we’re in retreat, living ascetically for the sake of our vocation. It is a vocation, isn’t it, Julie?”
“Definitely,” said Julius Ngomi.
I knew that they were teasing me, but I had to ask. “What vocation?”
“We’re running the world.” It was Sara Saul who answered.
“I thought that was all done in Antarctica,” I said, lightly. I was determined not to be taken in, although I knew how far out of my intellectual depth I was.
“There’s running and running” Julius Ngomi informed me, unhelpfully. “The UN takes care of all the superficial bureaucracy, and they do a damn fine job. We work at a slightly deeper level—no pun intended. We help control the ebb and flow of the world’s money. You might think of us as one of the fingers of the Invisible Hand.”
Even at the age of fifteen, I knew what the Invisible Hand was.
“I thought the Invisible Hand was supposed to work on its own,” I said.
“That’s the official story,” Julius Ngomi agreed, “but economics is even more fantastic than history. Back in Adam Smith’s time the invisible hand was supposed to be a mere statistical aggregation of the demand generated by the separate