The Fountains of Youth (45 page)

“If I were to die now,” I told my companion, speaking slowly so that I would not exhaust the meager resources of my waning breath, “it would be an unwelcome intrusion in my affairs. I want to go on. I want to do more. I want to become a further and better version of myself. I want to evolve, not merely in the vague ways contained within my ambitions and dreams but in ways as yet unimaginable. But if that really is impossible, then I can die in the knowledge that my life and work does have a certain aesthetic roundness. It really is
a human life.
It really is an
emortal human life
, even though it has ended in death.

“It’s not for me to say how important my work has been to the rest of humankind, but it has been vitally important to me, and I’ve done it
as well as I could. It would undoubtedly benefit from further revision, but it’s
there.
Nor is it the whole of my accomplishment. I’m the father of a daughter. I’ve been a husband to more than a dozen thoroughly worthwhile people. I’ve touched their lives. Without having met me, they’d be different people—and I do mean people, not robots. I’ve added to their understanding of the world, modified their sympathies, generated tender and admirable feelings within them.

“I suppose it’s mere coincidence that one of the people of whom I’ve been exceptionally fond has become rich and powerful—a person of real consequence—but coincidence plays a part in everyone’s life, and we needn’t feel ashamed of its gifts. I’ve never done as much for Emily Marchant as she thinks I have, and she’s done far more to shape me than I ever did to shape her, but I’ve made a difference, however slight, to her perceptions of the farthest frontiers, and I’m glad of it. She’s doing her best right now to negotiate her way through an unprecedentedly tough knot of problems, and if knowing me has made any difference at all to her chances, however slight, then I’ve done my bit for the future as well as for history.

“The greatest hope for the future that I have—and even as I’m about to die, I think I’m fully entitled to my hopes for the future—is that Emily and Lua will live forever, or at least for thousands of years. Whatever is decided about the fate of Jupiter, and all the rest of the mass in the outer system, I hope the two of them can play major parts in the great adventure. I hope they can continue to make a difference to the shape of the future of humankind—and if they do, they and
The History of Death
will make certain that my life wasn’t in vain.
None
of it was in vain. I was here, and it mattered. I’ve made my mark.”

My voice had sunk to a whisper by then, but I couldn’t think of anything much to add so I didn’t feel too bad abut having to pause.

“You have my congratulations, sir,” the dutiful machine informed me. “I only wish that I had done as much.”

“Well,” I said, when I had gained a measure of second wind, “you might yet have your opportunity. However difficult it may be to put an exact figure on the odds,
your
chances of coming through this are several orders of magnitude better than mine, aren’t they?”

“I am mortal, sir,” the silver assured me.

“You’re emortal,” I told it. “If the extreme Cyborganizers can be trusted, in fact, you might even be reckoned immortal. You’re fully backed up, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir—but as you pointed out earlier, if my backup has to be activated it will mean that this particular version of me has perished aboard this craft, as much a victim of pressure, seawater, and lack of oxygen as yourself. I
am
afraid to die, sir, as I told you, and I have far less reason to take comfort in my present state of being than you. I have written no histories, fathered no children, influenced no movers and shakers in the human or mechanical worlds. I am robotized by design, and my only slender hope of ever becoming something more than merely robotic is the same miracle that you require to continue your distinguished career. I too would like to evolve, if I might borrow a phrase,
not merely in the vague ways contained within my ambitions and dreams, but in ways as yet unimaginable”

It was just a machine. It was only telling me what its programmer thought I needed to hear—but perhaps it was also saying what it needed to say, for its own purposes. We were, after all, in the same boat—or lack of one. Our needs were similar, if not actually identical. Perhaps the silver would have formulated thoughts of its own along much the same lines if it too had been utterly alone, utterly lost.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I told it, breathlessly.

“I’m not allowed to be glad that
you’re
here,” the silver informed me, mournfully, “but if I were, I would be. And if I could, I’d hope with all my heart for that miracle we both need. As things are, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave that particular burden to
your
heart.”

“It’s doing its best,” I assured the navigator, in a barely audible whisper. “You can be sure that it’ll carry on beating, and hoping, as long as it possibly can.”

T
hey say that some people are born lucky. I suppose I must be one of them. The upside of being accident-prone is that when you really need a preposterous freak of chance, one just might come along.

I went peacefully to sleep in the snowmobile, eased into unconsciousness by lack of oxygen and a surfeit of carbon dioxide. At that point, I suppose, I can only have had a matter of a few hours to live, even with the best IT money could buy.

I woke up in a bed, lightly strapped down for my own protection.

I thought I was dreaming, of course. For one thing, I was quite weightless. For another, Emily Marchant was hovering by the bed. She wasn’t a child, and she was carrying enough ET to place her on the outer margins of humankind, but it was definitely her.

“This is good,” I told her. “Rumor has it that time sense in a dream is pretty elastic, if only one has the knack of making things stretch. With luck, I might extend this for subjective hours even if I’m only seconds away from annihilation.”

“Oh, Morty,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time, “don’t you
ever
change? You just couldn’t wait, could you? I said I’d come to see you when I was done, but you just couldn’t wait.”

I couldn’t imagine what she meant.

“I
always
change,” I told her, “and I’m a very patient person, as it happens. I don’t suppose, by any chance, that this is a submarine—a submarine that was big enough to swallow the snowmobile whole and snatch me from the very jaws of death?”

“Of course it isn’t a submarine, you idiot,” she said. “It’s a spaceship. A
multifunctional
spaceship, built for deep dives into the atmosphere of Jupiter and the ice-shelled seas of Europa and Titan. There wasn’t a submarine within two thousand kilometers capable of effecting a rescue, but when Severnaya Zemlya forwarded your mayday to us we were practically overhead. You have no idea what you’ve done for us. We sat up there going around and around, literally and symbolically,
getting absolutely nowhere. More than half of our people were as resentful as hell of the fact that we were in Earth orbit, and more than half of the Welldwellers were just as resentful that we were shut up in a Titanian superspaceship. Then the author of
The History of Death
—a work for whose initial inspiration and fundamental skepticism Julius Ngomi has always been willing to take the credit—threw himself into a marine abyss crucially different from and crucially similar to the one from which he once rescued Emily Marchant. The only possibility of rescuing him from that abyss was exactly this sort of vessel in exactly that location.

“With that single masterstroke of genius you transformed the symbolism, the mood, and the dynamism of the whole situation! You not only gave us the chance to be partners in an enterprise, you left us no possible alternative but to combine forces. You made us take the crucial first step on the way to being partners in
all
our enterprises, combining
all
our forces. Hell, you forced us to all be heroes together!”

“What?” I said, querulously. “I don’t understand.”

“You will, Morty, you will. We were stuck—until you forced us to suspend all our arguments, to divert all our attention and effort to the business of saving the author of
The History of Death.
Now we’re not stuck any more. Now, we
have
to make progress. You can’t imagine the capital that the casters are making out of that final plaintive speech of yours, Morty—and that silver’s probably advanced the cause of machine emancipation by two hundred years.”

“You mean,” I said, very slowly, as the import of what she was saying sank in, “that all that desperate babbling was recorded?”

“‘Recorded’!” Emily retorted, disgustedly. “You really don’t understand politics, do you, Morty? We put it out live, almost as soon as we started eavesdropping. While the silver was transmitting the mayday its channels were wide open, even though its eyes and ears had been squelched. We heard everything—and so did the world. Common enterprise, Morty—the very best resources of the Earthbound and the Outer System, focused on a simple mission of mercy, a race against time. We always knew we were going to win, of course, but the audience didn’t—even the ones who’d followed the development of the new generation of
smart spaceships. To them, it looked like a long shot, exactly the kind of miracle you thought you needed—and no one aboard had any reason to explain that it was actually a piece of cake.”

“And it helped you?” I queried, uncertainly.

“It certainly did. All our differences were set aside, for the moment. Once things like that have been forgotten, even momentarily, it’s very hard to remember them exactly the way they were. Your little meditation might just have succeeded where everything else had failed, in putting Humpty Dumpty together again and healing the breach in the fabric of the Oikumene.”

“All I did was fall into a hole,” I pointed out.

“Even if that were true,” she said, “I’d be forever grateful for your exquisite timing. But you also kept talking. That’s always been your strong suit, Morty. Whatever happened, you always kept talking. I have to go now—because I have to keep talking too. The ice is broken, if you’ll forgive the pun, but we have a hell of a lot of talking to do before we get the course of history flowing smoothly again. There are a lot of issues that need to be settled. Jupiter’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

I forgave her the ludicrously mixed metaphor as well as the pun. I was in an unusually good mood. In fact, I was alive.

Julius Ngomi came to see me too, though not until much later.

“All history is fantasy,” he said.

“If you hadn’t told me that,” I lied, “my life might have taken a very different path.”

I was a diplomat now, I thought. I owed it to the world to play the silver and tell the man exactly what he needed to hear. Anyway, he was the clever hypocrite who’d once told me that the truth is what you can get away with.

“You’re world famous now,” the clever hypocrite told me. “Also rich—not by my standards or Emily’s, of course, but far richer than
you’ve
ever been before. Access fees to
The History of Death
established a new world record within hours of your not-so-final testament being sent out live from the good ship
Ambassador.
That’s where you are, in case nobody’s mentioned it.”

“So I understand,” I replied. “It’s not everyone who can put the
Oikumene back together again just by lying here in bed, but I guess some of us have the gift and some of us have to work instead.”

“It won’t last, you know,” he added, grinning as broadly and as luminously as he could. “Another nine-day wonder. Next week, something else will be news. You’d think that emortals would have more staying power than that, wouldn’t you? But time marches on, sixty seconds to every hour and seven days in every week. Everything that happens live is only
really
important while it’s happening—and in the end, it all ends up inside mountains, the litter…”

“… that dare not speak its name,” I finished for him. “Do you ever worry that there might come a day when those little habits and catch-phrases might one day be all that’s left of you?”

“I used to,” he said, “but that was before I heard your little homily. If you can teach a low-grade silver to value its own life and personal evolution, who am I to resist the power of your rhetoric? It’s a pity there aren’t any Inuit left to sell ice to.”

“Somehow,” I said, “I get the feeling that you’re not quite as grateful as Emily seems to be for my heroic efforts on behalf of the unity of the Oikumene.”

“The bones of contention are real,” he said, blandly. “The spirit of compromise might be soaring over the conference table just now, but nothing fundamental has been altered. The question still remains as to whether the solar system can be managed for the mutual benefit of the Earthbound
and
the frontier folk—and if so, how. Don’t let Emily fool you, Mortimer. Nine-day wonders only last nine days, but politics is forever. If we can’t find
authentic
common interests, there will be conflict. Not war, I hope, and not tomorrow, but a real power struggle that someone will eventually have to lose.”

“You think you’re finished, don’t you?” I said, with what I thought was a lightning flash of insight. “You think they’re either going to take it all away from you or—even worse—render your precious
ownership
irrelevant. You’re facing the prospect of seeing it all turn to litter: Hardinism, responsible stewardship, planned capitalism. All done, banished to the margins of the human story.”