The Fountains of Youth (6 page)

“That’s impossible,” I told her, stupidly.
“Genesis
is unsinkable. There’s no way it could turn upside down. Captain Cardigan said…”

“But it
is
upside down,” she insisted—unnecessarily, given that I had conceded the point as my assurances trailed off into silence. “The water’s coming in.”

“Yes,” I said, raising myself up to a less ignominious kneeling position and reaching out a hand to brace myself against the wall. “Yes, it is. But why is it hot?”

I put my free hand to my lips and tasted the water on my fingers. It was salty. The water that fed our bathrooms was supposed to be desalinated, and this flood was far too copious in any case.

Emily was right.
Genesis
had turned upside down and was letting in water.

“I don’t know why it’s hot,” she said, “but we have to get out. We have to get to the stairs and swim.”

The light put out by the ceiling strip was no dimmer than usual, but the rippling water overlaying it made it seem faint and uncertain. The girl’s little face, lit from below, seemed terribly serious within the frame of her dark and curly hair. She was looking up at me; even though I was on my knees, she wasn’t as tall as I was.

I was thinking clearly enough to see the implications of having to “get to the stairs.” The stairs had led up to the deck—but now they led
down, into the ocean depths. Above us, there was nothing but the machine deck and the boat’s unbreachable hull.

“I can’t swim,” I said, flatly.

Emily Marchant looked at me as if I were insane.

“I mean it,” I said. “I can’t swim.”

“You have to,” she said. “It’s not hard.”

My reflexive response was to change the subject. “Where’s everyone else gone to?” I asked. The boat lurched more violently as I spoke, and the little girl reached out to me for support. I took my hand away from the wall and clasped both of her hands in mine.

“Mama Janine put me to bed,” Emily said. “Then she went back to the party. Everyone was at the party. There’s only us, Mister Mortimer. We have to get out. No one will come, Mister Mortimer.”

Like me, Emily Marchant had been raised contented and well adjusted, and she was as wise and level-headed as any eight year old in all the world. Her IT and her suitskin were both tuned to compensate for panic, but she was not immune to fear. Fear, like pain, is universally recognized to be necessary and healthy,
in moderation.
She was free to feel fear, if not sheer, stark, paralyzing terror. So was I.
No one will come, Mister Mortimer
, she had said, packing all the tragedy of the moment into those few, almost dispassionate, words. She was afraid, as I was—and we had every reason to be afraid.

Everyone but the two of us had been on deck at the party—all twenty-six of them. Whatever impossibility had flipped
Genesis
onto her back had thrown every last one of them into the sea: the impossibly warm and impossibly violent sea.

I
scrambled to my feet. While I held Emily fast in my right hand I put out my left to steady myself against the upside-down wall. The water was knee-deep and still rising—not very quickly, but inexorably. The upturned boat was rocking from side to side, but it also seemed to be trying to spin around. I could hear the rumble of waves breaking on the outside of the hull. The noise wasn’t loud, but I knew that the hull must be muffling the sound.

“My name’s Emily, Mister Mortimer,” the little girl told me. “I’m frightened.”

I resisted the temptation to say
So am I.
Somewhere in the corridor, I knew, there were lockers containing emergency equipment: not merely life jackets but “survival pods,” whose shells were self-inflating plastic life rafts. There was light enough to find them, if I could only adjust my mind to the fact that everything was upside down. Once we had one, we still had to get it out, and I still couldn’t swim—but how hard could it be, if I could get into a life jacket?

“This way,” I said, as soon as I had figured out which way the emergency locker was. Unsurprisingly, it was in the logical place, next to the stairs, which now descended into angry darkness. I marveled at my being able to speak so soberly and marveled even more that I no longer felt seasick. My body had been shocked back to sanity, if not to normality.

As we moved along the corridor, I couldn’t shake the horror of the thought that Emily Marchant’s
entire family
might have been wiped out at a single stroke and that she might now be that rarest of all rare beings, an
orphan.
It was barely imaginable. What possible catastrophe, I wondered, could have done that? And what other atrocities must that same catastrophe have perpetrated?

“Do you have any idea what happened, Emily?” I asked, as I wrestled with the handle of the locker. It was easy enough to turn it the “wrong” way, but not so easy to drag the door open against the increasing pressure of the water.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Are we going to die?” The word
too
hung unspoken at the end of the sentence. She was only eight, but she understood the implications of the fact that everyone else had been on deck when the boat flipped over, defying every precaution taken by its careful designers.

“No,” I told her. “If we can just get these life jackets on and take this pod with us….”

“It’s very big,” she said, dubiously—but I knew that if it had been designed to be carried up the stairs it would certainly go down them.

Despite the rocking of the boat, I contrived to get one of the life jackets over Emily’s shoulders. “Don’t pull it yet,” I said, showing her where the ring pull was but firmly setting her hand away from it. “We have to get clear of the boat first. You have to swim as hard as you can—
that
way. Understand? Swim as hard as you can, and don’t pull until you’re sure you’re no longer under the boat. Then you’ll pop up to the surface. I’ll bring the life-raft pod.”

“I’ve been a good girl,” she told me, with just a hint of bleakness in her awful sobriety. “I’ve never told a lie.”

It couldn’t have been literally true, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was eight years old and she had every right to expect to live till she was eight hundred. She didn’t
deserve
to die. It wasn’t fair that she should. It wasn’t fair that she should lose her parents either but one misfortune didn’t license the other. I knew full well that fairness didn’t really come into it, and I expect she knew it too, even if my fellow historians and social commentators were wrong about the abolition of the primary artifices of childhood. I knew in my heart, though, that what she said was
right
, and that insofar as the imperious laws of nature ruled her observation irrelevant, the
universe
was wrong. It
wasn’t
fair. She
had
been a good girl. If she died, it would be a monstrous injustice.

Perhaps it was merely a kind of psychological defense mechanism that helped me to displace my own mortal anxieties, but the horror running through me was exclusively focused on her. At that moment, her plight—not
our
plight, but
hers
—seemed to be the only thing that mattered. It was as if her dignified protest and her placid courage somehow contained the essence of New Human existence, the purest product of progress.

Perhaps it was only my cowardly mind’s refusal to contemplate anything else, but the only thing I could think of while I tried to figure out what to do was the awfulness of what Emily Marchant was saying. As that awfulness possessed me it was magnified a thousandfold, and it seemed to me that in her lone and tiny voice there was a much greater voice speaking for multitudes: for all the human children that had ever died before achieving maturity; all the
good
children who had died without ever having the chance to
deserve to die.

“I can’t hold your hand, Emily,” I told her, as my own life jacket settled itself snugly about my torso. “It would make it too difficult for us to get away.”

“You’re the one who can’t swim,” she reminded me.

“I’ll be all right,” I assured her. “If you see the life-raft pack before you see me, the trigger’s
here.
Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. We were both looking down into the hole in what had once been the ceiling of the corridor.

“Don’t try to hold on to the ladder,” I advised her. “Just dive, as deep as you can. Then go sideways, until you can’t hold your breath any more. Then pull the ring. It’ll carry you up to the surface. I’ll be right behind you.” I was talking as much for my own benefit as hers. As she said, I was the one whose knowledge of swimming was purely theoretical. I was the one who would have to improvise.

She didn’t move. She was paralyzed by apprehension.

“I don’t think any more water can get in,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice, “but there’s only so much air. If we stay here too long, we’ll suffocate.”

She was trying to convince herself. She was eight years old and hoped to live to be eight hundred, and she was absolutely right. The air wouldn’t last forever. Hours maybe, but not forever.

“The survival pod will keep us alive for a week,” she added. She had obviously paid close attention to Captain Cardigan’s welcoming speech. She was probably the only passenger who’d actually bothered to plug the safety chips they’d handed out to all of us into her trusty handbook, like the good girl she was.

“We can both fit into the pod,” I assured her, “but we have to get it out of the boat before we inflate it. It’s too big for you to carry.”

“You can’t swim,” she reminded me.

“It’s not hard,” I reminded her. “All I have to do is hold my breath and kick myself away from the boat. But you have to go first. I’ll get you aboard the life raft, Emily. Trust me.”

“I do,” she said.

I stared at her. There was no cause for wonder in the fact that she could be so calm and so controlled and yet not be able to hurl herself into that black airless void—but I had to get her out before I got out myself. I couldn’t show her the way because I couldn’t leave her alone.

“Listen to the water on the outside,” she whispered. “Feel the rocking. It must have been a hurricane that overturned the boat… but we have to go, don’t we, Mister Mortimer? We have to get out.”

“Yes,” I said. “The pod’s bright orange and it has a distress beacon. We should be picked up within twenty-four hours, but there’ll be supplies for a week.” I had every confidence that our suitskins and our internal technology could sustain us for a month, if necessary. Even having to drink a little seawater if our recycling gel clotted would only qualify as a minor inconvenience—but drowning was another matter. Drowning is one of the elementary terrors of emortality, along with a smashed skull, a fall from a great height and a close encounter with a bomb.

“It’s okay, Mister Mortimer,” Emily said, putting her reassuring hand in mine for one more precious moment, so that we could both take strength from the touch. “We can do it. It’ll be all right.”

And so saying, she leaped into the pool of darkness.

I
knew that I couldn’t afford to be paralyzed by apprehension, for Emily’s sake. I also knew—and am convinced of it to this very day—that if Emily hadn’t been there to create the absolute necessity, I would not have been able to lower myself through that hole. I would have waited, cravenly, until there was no more air left to breathe. While I waited, I might have been injured by the buffeting of the rigid-hulled boat, or the boat might have taken on water enough to go down, but I would have waited, alone and horribly afraid.

I couldn’t swim.

In the early twenty-sixth century, it was taken for granted that all members of the New Human Race were perfectly sane. Madness, like war and vandalism, was supposed to be something that our forefathers had put away, with other childish things, when they came to understand how close the old Old Human Race had come to destroying themselves and taking the entire ecosphere with them. It was, I suppose, true. Ali Zaman’s firstborns were, indeed, perfectly sane from the age of eight until eighty, and we lived in contentedly uninteresting times until 23 March 2542. We always knew what counted as the reasonable thing to do, and it was always available to us—but even we New Humans couldn’t and didn’t always do it. As sane as we undoubtedly were, we were still capable of failing to act in our own best interests. Sometimes, we needed an extra reason even to do what we knew full well we
had
to do—and I needed the responsibility of taking care of Emily Marchant to make me jump into the hot and seething sea, even though I could not swim, and trade the falsely unsinkable
Genesis
for an authentically unsinkable life raft.

But Emily was right. We
could
do it, together, and we did.

It was the most terrifying and most horrible experience of my young life, but it had to be done, and as soon as Emily had had time to get clear I filled my lungs with air and hurled myself into the same alien void. I had the handgrip of the life-raft pod tightly held in my right hand, but I
hugged it to my chest nevertheless as I kicked with all my might, scissoring my legs.

Much later, of course, I realized that if I had only followed Captain Cardigan’s instructions and read the safety manual, I would have known where to find breathing apparatus as well as a life raft. That would have done wonders for my confidence, although it would not have made my feeble imitation of swimming any more realistic. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that it was pure luck and the seething of the sea that carried me far enough away from the boat to ensure that when I yanked the ring to inflate my life jacket I did indeed bob up to the surface.

The surface of the sea was chaotically agitated, and the stars that should have shone so brightly were invisible behind a pall of cloud. I started screaming Emily’s name as soon as I had refilled my lungs. I had sufficient presence of mind to hang on to the pod’s handgrip while I pulled the trigger that would inflate the life raft. There was nothing explosive about its expansion, but it grew with remarkable rapidity, reducing me to a mere parasite hanging on to the side of what felt like a huge rubbery jellyfish. It was as blackly dark as everything else until the process reached its terminus, at which point the eye lights came on and exposed its garish orange color.