The Fountains of Youth (11 page)

“Crocodiles were around far longer than the other once-extinct species we’ve brought back,” she argued. “If any large-size species had security of tenure, it was them. They’d really proved their evolutionary worth, until we came along and upset the whole applecart. Anyway, they’re essentially lazy. They wouldn’t bother chasing
people.
Like most so-called predators they prefer carrion.”

I didn’t bother trying to challenge her admittedly eccentric view of ecological aesthetics; I’d learned from long acquaintance that it was much safer to stick to practical matters. “They could still bite,” I pointed out, “and I doubt if they’d be particular if anyone strayed too close to their favorite lurking places. They were somewhat given to lurking, weren’t they?”

“Nonsense,” she said. “You’re a historian and should know better. If you care to consult the figures, you’ll see that far more old humans were crushed by hippos than were ever chewed by crocodiles—but we
love
our hippos, don’t we? The hippopotamus was one of the first species we brought back out of the banks when we started rebuilding African river ecologies.”

I pointed out that we hadn’t brought the hippos back because they were harmless—after all, we’d also brought back lions, leopards, and cheetahs in the first wave of ecological readjustments—but because such danger as they posed was clearly manifest and easily avoidable. She wasn’t impressed.

“It’s just puerile mammalian chauvinism,” she said. “Childish fur fetishism. Putting crocodiles at the bottom of the list is just antireptilian prejudice.”

I didn’t bother to argue that the New Human fondness for birds gave the lie to the charge of mammalian chauvinism, because she’d simply have added feather fetishism to her list of psychological absurdities. Instead, I pointed out that we had been only too willing to resurrect cobras and black mambas. She was, alas, as happy as ever to shift her ground. “Once we were safely immune to their bites,” she scoffed. “Snakes are so much
sexier
than crocodiles—according to phallocentric fools.”

She didn’t say in so many words that the category of phallocentric fools was one to which I belonged, but the implication was there. It wasn’t that which drew us apart, though; we were just drifting. As ever, she was happy to shift her ground as a matter of routine, even in the water. I let her go. I didn’t want to continue the verbal contest, and I let her go.

On this occasion, she shifted and drifted too far. Although the surface seemed perfectly placid, the midriver current was quite powerful; once in its grip, even the strongest swimmer wouldn’t have found it easy to get out again.

When Grizel found that the current was bearing her away she could have called for help, but she didn’t. She assumed that the worst that could happen to her was that she’d be carried a few hundred meters downstream before she could get back to the shallows. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred she would have been right, but not this time. As well as being more powerful than it seemed, the midriver current was carrying more than its fair share of debris—including waterlogged branches and whole tree trunks that might have traveled all the way from Adamouwa.

When I became aware that Grizel was no longer near me she was
still clearly in view. When I shouted after her, she just waved, as if to reassure me that all was well and that she’d rejoin me soon enough. I set out after her regardless. I didn’t have any kind of premonition—I just didn’t have enough confidence in the power of her arms and legs. I thought she might need my help to get back to the bank.

I never saw the piece of wood that hit her. I don’t suppose she did either; it must have slid upon her as quietly and as insidiously as a crocodile. Logs in water are weightless, but they pack an enormous amount of momentum, and if a swimmer is trying with all her might to go sideways….

I didn’t even see her go down.

It can’t have been more than three or four seconds afterward when I realized that she was no longer visible, but even with the current to help me it took a further fifteen to get to the point at which I’d last seen her. I dived, but the water was very murky, clouded with fine silt.

I ducked under again and again, moving southward all the time, but I calculated later that she was probably fifty or a hundred meters ahead of me and that I hadn’t made enough allowance for the velocity of the current. At the time, I was in the grip of a panicky haste. I was madly active, but I achieved nothing. I just kept ducking under, hoping to catch sight of her in time to drag her head out of the water, but I was always in the wrong place. It was like a nightmare.

In the end, I had to give up, or exhaustion might have made it impossible for me to beat the undertow. I had sanity enough to save myself from sharing Grizel’s fate—and I felt guilty about that for years.

G
rizel’s body was eventually washed up at Onitsha, twenty kilometers downriver. There was a sharp bend there, left over from the days when the old Kwarra had been called the Niger, and the current couldn’t carry her around it.

Her limbs had been chewed by something—not a crocodile, of course—and they’d been broken by rocks she’d encountered when she drifted briefly into white water. All that had happened after she was dead, though; she hadn’t been conscious of the mutilation.

The postmortem confirmed that the branch had struck her on the temple, probably knocking her out instantaneously. Her dutiful IT had stopped the bleeding and protected her brain from the possibility of long-term damage, but it hadn’t been able to lift her head above the surface to let her breathe.

Many people can’t immediately take in news of the death of someone they love. The event defies belief and generates reflexive denial. I didn’t react that way, although some of the others did. We all had mortal parents—and we had all lost at least some of them—but Grizel had been a ZT like us, capable of living for centuries, and perhaps millennia. Camilla’s reaction was the most perverse; even after seeing the body she simply couldn’t get her head around the idea that Grizel was dead and wouldn’t hear the words spoken. The three Rainmakers admitted the fact readily enough but shrugged it off with set features and ready clichés.

With me, on the other hand, it was not merely belief that was instantaneous. I immediately gave way under its pressure. When I was told that her body had been found and the last vestige of hope disappeared I literally fell over, because my legs wouldn’t support me. It was another psychosomatic failure about which my internal machinery could do nothing, just like the seasickness that had saved me from the backflip of the
Genesis.

I wept uncontrollably. None of the others did—not even Axel, who’d
been closer to Grizel than anyone else, including Camilla. They were sympathetic at first, but it wasn’t long before a note of annoyance began to creep into their reassurances. I was disturbing them, putting a strain on their own coping strategies.

“Come on, Morty,” Eve said, voicing the thought the rest of them were too diplomatic to let out. “You know more about death than any of us. If it doesn’t help you to get a grip when you’re confronted with the reality, what good has all that research done you?”

She was right, after a fashion, but also very wrong. Jodocus and Minna had often tried to suggest, albeit delicately, that mine was an essentially unhealthy fascination, and now they felt vindicated. Unlike Camilla and Axel, who kept conspicuously quiet because they were having their own acute problems dealing with upwelling grief, they weighed in with Eve, presumably attempting to get over their own reflexive denial by criticizing my acceptance.

“If you’d actually bothered to read my commentary-in-progress, Evie,” I retorted, “you’d know that it has nothing complimentary to say about the philosophical acceptance of death. It sees a sharp awareness of mortality and the capacity to feel the horror of death so keenly as key forces driving early human evolution. If
Homo erectus
hadn’t felt and fought the knowledge of his own mortality with such desperation and courage,
sapiens
might never have emerged.”

“But you don’t have to act it out so flamboyantly,” Jodocus came back, ineptly using cruelty to conceal and assuage his own misery. “We’ve evolved beyond
sapiens
now, let alone
erectus.
We’ve gotten past the tyranny of primitive emotion. We’ve matured.” Jodocus was the oldest of us, and he had lately begun to seem much older than ten years my senior, although he was still some way short of his first century. Had he been a falsie he’d have been booking a date for his first rejuve, and the rhythms of social tradition seemed to be producing some kind of weird existential echo in his being.

“It’s what I feel,” I told him, retreating into uncompromising assertion. “I can’t help it. Grizel’s dead, and I couldn’t save her. She might have told a few lies in her time, but she didn’t deserve to die. I’m entitled to cry.”

“We
all
loved her,” Eve reminded me. “We’ll all miss her. Nobody
deserves to die, but sometimes it happens, even to people like us. You’re not
proving
anything, Morty.”

What she meant was that I wasn’t proving anything except my own instability, but she spoke more accurately than she thought. I wasn’t proving anything at all. I was just reacting—atavistically, perhaps, but with crude honesty and authentically childlike innocence. But I
had
laid the theoretical groundwork for that reaction in the still-unpublished
Prehistory of Death.
I
had
argued that my reaction was the kind of reaction that had propelled the Old Human Race out of apehood and into wisdom, and I was damned if I was going to be told by a bunch of amateurs who were still in denial that I ought to put on a braver face.

“We have to pull together now,” Camilla put in, “for Grizel’s sake.”

If only it had been that easy. In fact, we all flew apart with remarkable rapidity. Our little knot in the fabric of neohuman society dissolved into the warp and weft, almost as if it had never been—or so it seemed at the time. Much later, I came to realize that it had made a much deeper and more indelible mark on me than I knew; I suspect that it was the same for the others in spite of all their stiff-jawed self-control.

It’s not obvious why a death in the family almost always leads to divorce in childless marriages, but that’s the way it works. Camilla wasn’t being foolish—such a loss
does
force the survivors to pull together—but the process of pulling together usually serves only to emphasize the fragility and incompleteness of the unit.

We all went our separate ways before the century ended, even the three Rainmakers. From then on, they worked on the management of separate storms.

T
he first edition of the introductory section of my
History of Death
, entitled
The Prehistory of Death
, was launched into the Labyrinth in 21 January 2614.

As with any modern work of scholarship, the greater part of
The Prehistory of Death
was designed as an
aleph:
a tiny point whose radiants shone in every direction and spread into the vast multidimensional edifice of the web to connect up billions of data into a new and hopefully interesting pattern. Many contemporary works did no more than that, and there was a zealous school of thought which insisted that a true historian ought not to attempt any more than that. A
scientific
historian, these zealots claimed, ought not to dabble in commentary at all; his task was merely to organize the data in such a way that they could best speak for themselves. In this view, any historian who supplied a commentary was superimposing on the data a narrative of his own, which was at best superfluous and at worst distortive.

My response to that argument was identical to Julius Ngomi’s:
all
history is fantasy.

I do not mean by this that history is devoid of brute facts or that historians ought not to aim for accuracy in the accumulation and cross-correlation of those facts. The facts of history are, however, documents and artifacts of human manufacture; they cannot be understood in any terms other than the motives of their makers. There is a tiny minority of documents whose purpose is to provide an impersonal, accurate, and objective record of events, but there is a wealth of complication even in the notion of a record whose purpose is accuracy, and anyone who doubts that the compilers of supposedly objective accounts might sometimes have deceptive motives need only ask themselves whether it really is possible for economic historians to obtain a full and true picture of the financial transactions of the past by examining account books prepared to meet the requirements of tax assessment.

In order for a historian to understand the motives that lie behind the
documents and artifacts that the people of the past have handed down to us it is always necessary to perform an act of imaginative identification. The historian must place himself, as it were, in the shoes of the maker: to participate as best he can in the
act of making.

Without this leap of the imagination, no understanding is possible, but every honest historian will admit that any such leap is a leap in the dark, and that the conclusions at which he arrives—no matter how confident he may feel of their certainty—are the products of his own fantasy. A good historian is a scrupulous fantasist, but he is a fantasist nevertheless.

The zealots among my peers argue that if this is the case, then history is impossible and that everything sheltering under that name is false. They point out that the historians of the present do not belong to the same species as the people of the past and that our existential situation is radically different from theirs. I have heard this said many times in connection with my
History of Death.
Its least sympathetic critics have always argued that insofar as my work attempted to go beyond the collation of statistics it was bound to fail, for the simple reason that I, a true emortal, could not possibly perform the mental gymnastics that would be required to allow me to see the world as a mortal would have done.