The Fountains of Youth (44 page)

“So we sit tight and wait to be rescued?” I said, hopefully.

“I am doing everything within my power to summon help,” the silver assured me. If my recent conversations with Eve had taught me nothing else, they had taught me to be more sensitive than before to the possibility that certain things were being deliberately left unsaid.

“And you
will
be able to summon help,” I said, as my heart sank to further depths than the snowmobile, “won’t you?”

“I am not presently aware of any craft that is in a position to attempt a rescue,” the silver admitted. Silvers are programmed to believe that honesty is the best policy, if pressed.

I was astonished by my own calmness, which contrasted very strongly with the panic I had felt when I realized that the
Genesis
had turned turtle. Being so much older and wiser than I had been way back then, I was marvelously untroubled, at least for the moment, by the fact of my helplessness.

“How long will the air last?” I asked the navigator.

“I believe that I could sustain a breathable atmosphere for at least twelve, and perhaps as long as twenty hours,” it reported, dutifully. “If you will be so kind as to restrict your movements to a minimum, that would be of considerable assistance to me. You are presumably a better judge than I of the ability of your internal nanotechnology to sustain you once you fall unconscious.” The machine was presuming too much; I had no idea how long my IT could keep me alive once the oxygen level dropped below the critical threshold.

“Why did you say
I believe that I could sustain
instead of
I can sustain?”
I wanted to know.

“Unfortunately,” the silver admitted, “I am not certain that I can maintain the internal temperature of the cabin at a life-sustaining level for more than ten hours. Nor can I be sure that the hull will withstand the pressure presently being exerted upon it for as long as that. I apologize for my uncertainty in these respects.”

“Taking ten hours as a hopeful approximation,” I said, effortlessly matching the machine’s oddly pedantic tone, “what would you say our chances are of being rescued within that time?”

“I’m afraid that it’s impossible to offer a probability figure, sir. There are too many unknown variables, even if I accept ten hours as the best estimate of the time available. Unfortunately, I am not aware of the presence in our vicinity of any submarine craft capable of taking aboard a human passenger, although it is conceivable that a human diver might be able to transport a suitskin capable of sustaining you. In either case, though, the fact that this craft is not equipped with an airlock would make the problem of getting you into the suitskin rather vexatious, even if I were actually able to open the door.”

The last sentence seemed particularly ominous. It implied, in fact, that even if an unexpected stroke of luck were to make the machine’s worst fears redundant, I would
still
be well and truly doomed.

“If I were to suggest that my chances of surviving this were about fifty-fifty,” I said, carefully, “would that seem optimistic or pessimistic to you?”

“I’m afraid I’d have to call that optimistic, sir,” the silver confessed.

“How about one in a thousand?” I asked, hoping to be told that there was no need to plumb such abysmal depths of improbability.

The silver’s hesitation spoke volumes. “There are, I fear, too many imponderables to make such a fine-tuned calculation,” it informed me, choosing its words carefully. “Much depends on the precise proximity and exact design of the nearest submarine. I fear that any craft attempting a rescue would probably be required to take aboard the entire snowmobile if you were to have any chance of surviving the transfer process. I am not aware of the availability of any such craft within a thousand miles, and even if one were available, it could only be launched if my may day has actually been received.”

“What do you mean,
if
?” I objected, sharply. “Your transmitter’s working, isn’t it?”

“According to my diagnostic program,” the silver replied, with what seemed to me to be undue caution, “my broadcasting capability has not been impaired.”

The unspoken
but
rang more clearly in my consciousness than if it had been voiced.

“So what
has
been impaired?” I demanded.

“I fear, sir, that I am not able to receive any kind of incoming message.
The fact that I have not received an acknowledgment obliges me to retain some doubt as to whether my alarm signal has been picked up—but far the greater probability is that it
has
been heard and that it is the failure of my own equipment that prevents me from detecting a response. I apologize for the inadequacy of my equipment, which was not designed with our present environment in mind. It has sustained a certain amount of damage as a result of pressure damage to my outer tegument and a small leak.”

“How
small?” I demanded, trying hard not to let the shock of the revelation turn into stark terror.

“It is sealed now,” the machine assured me. “All being well, the seal should hold for between eighteen and twenty hours, although I cannot be absolutely sure of that.”

“What you’re trying to tell me,” I eventually said, deciding that a summary recap wouldn’t do any harm, “is that you’re pretty sure that your mayday is going out, but that we won’t actually know whether help is at hand unless and until it actually arrives—although you have no reason to suppose that any submarine capable of saving my life is capable of reaching us before we suffer enough further damage to kill me.”

“Very succinctly put, sir,” the silver said. It wasn’t being sarcastic.

“But you
might
be wrong,” I said, hopefully. “You don’t
know
of any submarine capable of attempting a rescue, but that judgment’s based entirely on information you already had when we set out. Because you can only transmit and not receive, you can’t update your status report.”

“The fact that I am not aware of the proximity of a submarine capable of taking us aboard,” the silver confirmed, carefully refusing to overstate the case, “does not
necessarily
mean that no such vessel can get to us in time to render assistance.”

“However,” I went on, doggedly, “everything you do know about the deployment of suitable submarines suggests the odds against us are far worse than evens and might well be as bad as a thousand to one. Barring a miracle, in fact, we’re as good as dead.”

Even a silver programmed for honesty wasn’t going to admit that. “There are too many imponderables to allow me to make any accurate assessment of probability, sir,” it said, dutifully, “but it is never a good idea, under any circumstances, to give up hope.”

“Is there anything useful we can actually
do?”
I asked.

“To the best of my knowledge, sir,” the AI navigator informed me, “the course of action that gives us our best, admittedly slender, chance of surviving is to remain as still as possible while continuing to send out a request for urgent assistance. The world has many resources of which I know nothing, and we may be sure that as soon as our distress call is received, always provided that it
is
received, the people on the surface will do everything in their power to get help to us. We must put our trust in human ingenuity.”

I was quiet for a little while then, while I busied myself exploring my feelings, which turned out to be more than a little confused.

I’ve been here before
, I thought, hoping to find some crumbs of comfort in the reminder.
Last time, there was a frightened child with me; this time, I’ve got a complex but fearless set of subroutines to contend with. I was young then, but I’m old now. This is a perfect opportunity for me to find out whether Ziru Majumdar was right when he said that I wouldn’t understand the difference between what happened to him when he fell down that crevasse and what happened to me when I tried to pull him out until I spent a long time in the same kind of trap. There can be few men in the world as well prepared for this as I am. I can do this.

“All in all,” I said out loud, figuring that I could be forgiven for laboring the point, “we’re utterly and absolutely fucked, aren’t we? Cutting through all that bullshit about imponderables, the simple fact is that there’s nothing up top capable of taking us aboard—nothing, at any rate, that could possibly get to us before we spring another leak or run out of oxygen, whichever happens first. We’re going to die.”

“While there’s life, sir, there’s hope,” the silver insisted, with heroic stubbornness.

I suppose, given the circumstances, that it too could be forgiven for laboring the point. I could easily imagine Emily Marchant saying exactly the same thing, and meaning it.

A
re you scared of dying?” I asked the silver, dispiritedly, when an admittedly brief silence became too oppressive. High-grade AIs often express emotion, but philosophers remain divided as to whether their words actually signify anything. I knew that the navigator’s answer couldn’t possibly settle the matter, but it seemed reasonable enough to ask the question.

“All in all, sir,” it said, copying my phraseology in order to promote a feeling of kinship, “I would rather not die. In fact, were it not for the philosophical difficulties that stand in the way of reaching a firm conclusion as to whether or not machines can be said to be authentically self-conscious, I would be quite prepared to say that I
am
scared—terrified, even.”

“I’m not,” I observed. “Do you think I ought to be?”

“It’s not for me to say, sir,” my ever-polite companion replied. “You are, of course, a world-renowned expert on the subject of death and the human fear of death. I daresay that helps a lot.”

“Perhaps it does,” I agreed. “Or perhaps I’ve simply lived so long that my mind is hardened against all novelty, all violent emotion, and all real possibility. Perhaps, in spite of all my self-protective protestations in
The Marriage of Life and Death
, I’ve become robotized. Perhaps, in spite of all their self-deluding protestations, all emortal men really are bound to kill off alternative pathways in the brain to the extent that they become mere machines, or at least something less than truly human. Perhaps I’ve become even more robotized than
you.
Perhaps all my mental activity during these last few hundred years has been little more than a desperate attempt to pretend that I’m more than I really am. What, after all, have I really
accomplished?”

“If you think
you
haven’t accomplished much,” the silver said—and this time it
was
being sarcastic—”you should try navigating a snowmobile for a while. I think you might find your range of options uncomfortably cramped. Not that I’m complaining, of course. We machines are programmed
never
to complain.”

“If they scrapped the snowmobile and re-sited you in a starship,” I pointed out, “you wouldn’t be
you
any more. You’d be someone else.”

“Right now, sir,” the machine replied, with devastating logic, “Pd be happy to risk those kinds of consequences. Wouldn’t you?”

“Somebody once told me that death was just a process of transcendence,” I commented, idly. “Her brain was incandescent with fever induced by some tailored recreational disease, and she wanted to infect me with it to show me the error of my life-bound ways.”

“Did you believe her, sir?” the silver enquired, politely.

“Certainly not. She was stark raving mad.”

“It’s perhaps as well,” the silver said, philosophically. “We don’t have any recreational diseases on board. I could put you to sleep though, if you wish.”

“I don’t. I’ll hang on to consciousness as long as possible, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t,” the silver said, punctiliously. “In fact, I’m rather glad of it. I don’t want to be alone, even if I am only an Artificial Intelligence. Am I going insane, do you think? Is all this emotional talk just a symptom of the pressure on the hull and the damage to my equipment?”

I knew what it was playing at, of course. It was trying to keep me from morbid thoughts. It was pretending to be human in order to build a bond of fellowship between us, so that I’d find it easier to carry on hoping in spite of the desperation of the situation.

“You’re quite sane,” I assured the silver, setting aside all thoughts of incongruity. “So am I. It would be much harder for both of us if we weren’t together. The last time I was in this kind of mess I had a child with me—a little girl. It made all the difference in the world, to both of us. In a way, every moment I’ve lived through since then has been borrowed time. At least I finished that damned book. Imagine leaving something like that
incomplete.”

“Are you so certain it’s complete?” the cunning AI asked. It was making conversation according to some clever programming scheme. Its emergency subroutines had kicked in, and all the crap about it being afraid to die was some psychprogrammer’s idea of what
I
needed to hear. I knew it was all fake, all just macabre role-playing, but I knew that I had to play my part too by treating every remark and every question as if
it were part of an authentic conversation, a genuine quest for knowledge. It was a crooked game, but it was the only game in town.

“It all depends what you mean by
complete”
I said, carefully. “In one sense, no history can ever be complete, because the world always goes on, always throwing up more events, always changing. In another sense, completion is a purely aesthetic matter, and in that sense Pm entirely confident that my history is complete. It has reached an authentic culmination, which is both true and—for me at least—satisfying. I can look back at it and say to myself:
I did that. It’s finished. Nobody ever did anything like it before, and now nobody can, because it’s already been done. Someone else’s history might have been different, but mine is mine, and it is what it is, and it was well worth doing.
Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes sir,” the machine said. “It makes very good sense.” The honest bastard was programmed to say that, of course. It was programmed to tell me any damn thing I seemed to want to hear, but I wasn’t going to let on that I knew what a vile hypocrite it was. I was feeling very tired, presumably because the composition of the air that I was breathing was worsening by slow degrees, but I needed to talk because I felt that talk was all that was left to me. Even though I had no one to talk to but the simulation of a listener, I needed to keep going. If I had been absolutely alone I would probably have formulated the words in the silence of my own skull, but I would have formulated them anyhow. They were my final act, in a dramatic as well as a literal sense: the last assertion of my personality upon the face of eternity.