The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  I asked what was happening, of course, and begged to be put into contact with a more intelligent entity, but I couldn’t evoke any response other than a simple repetition. I tried to remember how many islands there were in the Coral Sea and Micronesia and how many people lived along the coastal strips of Queensland and New Guinea, but I had no real idea. The only thing of which I could be sure was that the number of people needing help must be at least as many millions as the number of people able to render it—and that most of them would be aggregated in larger and more easily reachable groups than our minuscule microcosm.

  “It’s not fair,” Emily whispered, when it became clear that night was going to fall without anyone coming to our aid, “is it, Mister Mortimer?”

  I knew what she meant, but I had a slightly pedantic mind-set even then. “Mortimer’s my first name, Emily, not my second,” I told her, “and the one thing we can be certain of is that whatever’s going on now is fair. All the maydays will be feeding into a ganglion somewhere in the Labyrinth, and a supersilver triage system will make sure that the help goes wherever it’s most urgently needed. Everything will be done in such a way as to ensure the greatest good of the greatest number. They must know that we’re not in any real danger—that the life raft will keep us alive for as long as necessary. They’ll come for us when they can.”

  “But they’re not even talking to us,” she said. “How bad can things be?”

  For an eight year old, she was extremely sharp. I figured she deserved an honest answer. “Very, very bad indeed,” I admitted. “Whatever it is, it has to be the worst disaster in human history.”

  “Worse than the Crash?” she queried.

  “Worse than the Black Death,” I told her, bleakly. “Worse than the last Ice Age, and a hell of a lot quicker. At least as bad as the last big extinction event, if not the one that finally killed off the dinosaurs.” I realized as I said it that even the biggest station in near-Earth orbit couldn’t have caused that big a splash. One of the L-5 cylinders might have—but what could have moved it all the way from lunar orbit without any warning?

  “How many people do you think it killed?” she asked, carefully raising her sights above the level of her own family. “Millions?”

  “Perhaps millions,” I agreed, sadly.

  “Like the Crash,” she said.

  She was eight years old, and I didn’t dare ask her exactly what she meant by that. I was prepared to assume that she was only talking about numbers—but I was already a fledgling historian. I knew that the Crash had not been entirely a matter of accident and misadventure. At least some of the viruses that had sterilized the Old Human Race had been deliberately crafted for that purpose, by people who thought of themselves as the midwives and parents of a New Human Race. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Emily might, after all, have been right about that bomb, and whether some member of the real New Human Race—our New Human Race—might have wearied of the slowness with which the world was being handed over to our control.

  It was absurd, of course. No sane member of the New Human Race could possibly have been as impatient as that, let alone as frankly evil-minded as that, but when you’re afloat in a life raft on an impossibly turbulent sea, having never had a chance to recover from seasickness, you can entertain thoughts that you would never entertain at any other time. The fact remained that whatever had caused this disaster would hasten the disappearance of the Old Human Race, at least in Australasia and Oceania.

  That, in itself, was a sobering thought.

  By the time night fell again we had become sufficiently well adapted to the pitching and tossing of the boat to sleep. My slumber was fitful and full of dreams, but Emily slept better and longer, only jerking awake once or twice when her reflexive grip on the handholds weakened and she felt herself moving too far too fast.

  While we were awake throughout our second day afloat, we talked about anything and everything except our parents.

  I told Emily about the valley in the Himalayas, and the Hindu monks, and the genetically engineered yaks, and the secrets of Shangri-La. She told me about her own home tree in the middle of what had been the outback before the Continental Engineers had constructed the largest of all their irrigation schemes and made it bloom again.

  I told her everything I had learned about the hollow mountains full of the world’s dross. She told me everything she knew about the Black Mountains of the Northern Territory, whose hollow interiors were vast factories converting the energetic produce of the SAP forests to every conceivable purpose.

  We talked about the latest news from Mars and the Oort Halo and the fact that the so-called kalpa probes would soon be overtaking the first-generation Arks, launched in the early years of the Crash by megacorp men half-convinced that Earthbound man was not going to make it through the crisis. We agreed that when the people those Arks were carrying in SusAn finally emerged from the freezer, they would be pig sick at the thought of having been overtaken as well as having missed out on the last four hundred years of technological progress. We talked about the possibility that human beings would eventually colonize the entire galaxy, terraforming every planet that seemed capable of sustaining an ecosphere, and the possibility that one or other of the kalpa probes would soon encounter other intelligent species already engaged with that task.

  We also talked about the Type-2 crusaders who wanted to start transporting mass from the outer system to Earth’s orbit as preliminary steps on the way to making use of the sun’s entire energy output, although I don’t recall either of us taking a particular interest in that topic.

  “When I grow up,” Emily said, “I want to go into space.”

  “Me too,” I said. “There are wonderful sights to see once you get outside the atmosphere—and virtual reproductions can’t do them justice any more than they could do justice to Wilde’s Creation.” I felt a pang of regret as I said it for the loss of Wilde’s orgiastic Creation.

  “I don’t just want to see things,” Emily assured me. “I want to make things. New worlds.” She didn’t mention Wilde’s island specifically, or any of its neighbors, but I think she had a better sense than I had of their irrelevance to a world in which one could really think in terms of making new worlds.

  “I don’t know about going into space permanently,” I said. “No matter how clever our suitskins and IT become, we were shaped by evolution to live at the surface of the earth. It’s the only place we’ll ever really be at home, unless and until the Type-2 brigade can build and terraform Earth 2 on the far side of the sun. I left my old hometree readily enough, but I’m not sure I could leave a world as easily. It’ll be a long time before the Exodus really picks up pace, especially now….” I cut myself off before adding that if the disaster in which we had been caught up really had killed millions, the UN’s propaganda in favor of using extraterrestrial emigration as a population safety-valve was bound to be laid to rest, at least for a while.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Emily said, politely. I can’t remember whether it was the last time she ever spoke those words to me, even with the benefit of a tentative perhaps, but it might well have been. It speaks volumes for the quality of our friendship that it never needed reinforcement by agreement. No difference in the world could have separated us after what we went through together on Genesis and the life raft.

  FOURTEEN

  Emily and I took all the subjects we discussed aboard the raft very seriously, but we always knew that we were filling in time, trying to make the long wait bearable. When the time came for us to sleep again we were both relieved that the necessity of talking had been temporarily relaxed.

  We had been afloat for three storm-tossed days when we finally heard a human voice. There are no words to express the relief that we felt as we realized that the ordeal was over.

  “Calling Genesis life raft,” the voice said, sounding almost laconic through the raft’s elementary parrot mike. “This is Steve Willowitch, Air Rescue Mombasa, temporarily reassign
ed to Canberra. Can you confirm two passengers, alive and uninjured.”

  The raft’s sloth had told him that much. I stabbed the icon controlling the voice transmitter with indecent haste and force. “Yes!” I said. “Mortimer Gray and Emily Marchant. Alive and uninjured.”

  “Good. I’ll be with you in twenty minutes, Mister Gray.”

  “What the hell happened?” I demanded, fearing that he might cut the connection and leave us in suspense for twenty more minutes. “The onboard sloth is too stupid even to pick up broadcasts.” I was only then absorbing the import of what he’d said. Air Rescue Mombasa? I thought. Reassigned to Canberra?

  “Sorry for the delay, Mister Gray, Miss Marchant,” said Steve Willowitch. “Very bad business—major crust fracture. Seabed came open like a zipper south of Guadalcanal, extended for more than a hundred klicks. Seismologists got no warning from tectonic movements—the primary event must have been way down in the mantle, although the plates started shaking fit to burst thereafter. Hell of a blast—like a hundred Krakatoas, mostly a couple of hundred fathoms deep.”

  “How many people died?” Emily asked, tentatively.

  “Don’t know yet,” said the air rescue man. “More than three hundred million but we hope maybe less than five. Queensland took the worst but, the waves trashed New Zealand, the Philippines, and what was left of Japan and the western seaboard of the Americas after the first sequence of quakes had finished. And the islands, of course. Eight thousand of them.”

  Eight thousand of them was the statistic that reverberated in my head, because I hadn’t quite grasped the fact that 10 percent of the population of Earth was already feared dead, with more to come. I should, of course, have remembered immediately that Papa Ezra was in New Zealand, but I didn’t.

  “You were lucky,” the pilot told us. “Must be tens of thousands of life rafts still floating, but millions didn’t even have a chance to get to a pod.”

  I looked at Emily Marchant. Her tiny face had always seemed wan in the subdued interior lighting of the raft, and mine must have seemed just as bad, so the mute signal we exchanged through our mutual gaze had no further margin of horror in it, nor any additional sorrow for the hundreds of millions whose deaths we hadn’t dared anticipate.

  “Thanks, Steve,” I said. “Get here when you can—we’re okay.”

  This time, my finger was far gentler as it closed the transmitter. There was no point in leaving the channel open; it couldn’t be easy flying a copter through all the filth that was still clogging and stirring the lower atmosphere.

  It occurred to me almost immediately that an event of the kind that Willowitch had described would have done far worse damage had it happened five hundred years earlier, but I said nothing to Emily. She didn’t seem to mind the silence, so I let my own thoughts run on unchecked.

  I knew that if such a crust fissure had opened up while the world was the sole province of the old Old Human Race—the pre-Crash mortals—it would almost certainly have killed fifty or sixty percent instead of ten and might have done so much damage to the ecosphere that even the survivors would have been precipitated into a downward spiral to extinction. Homo sapiens sapiens had evolved about a million years ago, on the plains of Africa, so five hundred years was only 0.05 of the life span of the species. Had we not renewed ourselves so comprehensively within that geological eyeblink, we would never have had the chance. Thanks to IT and suitskins, Solid and Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis, and our near-total technical control of the ecosphere, Earthbound humanity could and would bounce back, with what might have to be reckoned as minor casualties. We had reached the life-raft pod in time. We were all lucky—except for those of us who had perished.

  Not that the casualties could possibly seem “minor” to Emily Marchant, I remembered, as I applied a gentle brake to the train of thought. She had lost all twelve of her parents at a single stroke. I was later to discover that I had not lost a single one—Papa Ezra had been high in the mountains—and would gladly have made her a gift of all eight had they been mine to give, but that could not have healed the breach in her circumstances. There would be no shortage of willing fosterers eager to adopt her, even in a world that had lost 300 million people, but it would not be the same. Her personal history had been rudely snapped in two, and she would be marked by her loss forever—but that moment could not bear sole responsibility for what became of her, and more than it was solely responsible for what became of me. I was already a historian; she had already declared that she wanted to join the Exodus and leave the homeworld behind.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Emily. “I’m so sorry.”

  She looked at me very gravely, having made her own computation of the scale of the disaster and her own tiny role within it. “If you hadn’t been seasick,” she said, contemplatively, “I wouldn’t have been able to get the pod out.”

  “If you hadn’t been there, neither would I,” I told her.

  She didn’t believe it, but she knew that I wasn’t lying—that I honestly meant what I said.

  Emily was still hanging on to the inner surface of the wave-tossed raft, but she released her right hand so that she could reach out to me. Solemnly, I took it in mine, and we shook hands for all the world like two businessmen who’d just been introduced.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You too,” she said. Then—and only then—she broke down and began to weep, helplessly and endlessly.

  She was still weeping when the helicopter arrived, but she stopped when she realized how difficult it was going to be to winch us aboard. We had to concentrate and cooperate fully with Steve Willowitch’s heroic endeavors.

  “It’ll be okay, Mortimer,” she assured me, as the hawser came down from the hovering aircraft, which seemed so very tiny against the vast dark backcloth of the continuing storm. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Sure,” I said, as I lifted her up toward the blindly groping cable. “How difficult can it possibly be, for hardened survivors like us?”

  FIFTEEN

  Emily was by no means the only child in the world to lose an entire set of parents, and I still shudder to think of the number of parents who lost their only children. There was, as I had anticipated, no shortage of people willing to forge themselves into teams of adopters for the sake of the orphaned children, and all of those deprived of parenthood retained the right to return to the banks. The broken links in the chain of inheritance were mended. Tears were shed in abundance and then were set aside.

  The cities devastated by tsunamis were rebuilt, and the agricultural lands around them reclaimed. Even at the time it seemed to happen with bewildering rapidity, fueled by an astonishing determination to reassert the dominion of humankind. There had been talk of Garden Earth for centuries, but our capacity to shape and manage the ecosphere had never been subjected to any severe test. After the Coral Sea Disaster, our gantzers and macrobiotechnologists had both the opportunity and the responsibility to demonstrate that they could deal with real Decivilization—and they met the challenge with awesome efficiency. The Continental Engineers were revitalized, if not actually reborn, in those years, and so were the continents themselves.

  There is, I suppose, a certain wretched irony in the fact that all our paranoia regarding the precariousness of life on Earth had been directed outward for hundreds of years. We had thousands of artificial eyes scanning every part of the sky for incoming debris, but none looking down. Pride in our accomplishments had caused us to look upward and outward, and it wasn’t merely the promoters of the Exodus who had fallen into the habit of thinking of future history in terms of the kind of calculated expansion into the galaxy and appropriation of other worlds that Emily and I had discussed so earnestly while we were adrift. The breadth of our accomplishments and the height of our ambitions had made us forget how little we knew of the violent core of our own world.

  Ever since the dutiful seismologists of the twenty-second century had sown the deep probes that measured tectonic stresses and monitor
ed volcanoes, giving polite and timely warning of impending earthquakes and eruptions, we had fallen into the habit of thinking of the planet itself, not merely the ecosphere, as something tame. We had taken the effective constancy of the world’s interior for granted, to the extent that the silvers guiding our best moleminers had been left to themselves, bearing sole responsibility for the work of descending to the underworld of liquid rocks in search of all manner of motherlodes. We simply had not realized that there were forces at work down there that were easily capable of cracking the fragile biosphere like a bird’s egg, to release a fire-breathing dragon capable of devouring everything alive. The limits of AI are such that because we did not think of it, our silvers did not consider it either. If the moleminers’ senses picked up any indication of mysterious mantle events akin to that which caused the Coral Sea Catastrophe, they paid them no heed.

  Many people must have made calculations like mine, realizing that we had survived a disaster that might have been an extinction event only a few centuries earlier. There were not so many who made the further calculation that although there had never been an event that destroyed 400 million people within a week, the ordinary processes of mortality had killed that number during every decade of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Old Human Race had not needed the world to be split apart in order to produce and sustain that kind of attrition rate; disease and old age had done it effortlessly, routinely, and contemptuously. That, to a young and impressionable historian, was a prospect even more mind-boggling than the consequence of a literally world-shattering event—but it did not calm my view of the Coral Sea Disaster. Perhaps perversely, it seemed to broaden and exaggerate my existential unease.

  The deaths that occurred in the Coral Sea Disaster seemed to me to be understandable—direly unfortunate and vilely ominous, but understandable. Given the magnitude of the cause, the appalling effect was only to be expected, and my subsequent discomfiture accommodated that awareness. The result of my statistical comparisons was not to end that discomfiture, but to generate a new discomfiture in the contemplation of days long past.