The Fountains of Youth (2 page)

Had it not been for the relocation of the UN bureaucracy to Antarctica my parents might well have chosen the Ellsworth Mountains over the Himalayas despite their modest elevation, but the intensive redevelopment of the Continent Without Nations influenced their choice. Their selection of a specific location was heavily influenced by the absurd competition undertaken by the “supporters” of Mount Manaslu, who were then augmenting the peak for the third time in order to claw back the title of “the highest mountain in the world” from the Everestians and Kanchenjungans.

The valley where my co-parents established their hometree was approximately midway between Everest and Kanchenjunga. Its only other inhabitants—or so my fosterers believed when they rented the land and planted the tree—were members of a religious community, some two dozen strong, who lived in a stone-gantzed complex at its southern extremity. There was another stone edifice high on the slope above their own site, but my parents were assured that although it had been the home of another religious community, it was now unoccupied.

Modern readers, who have been taught that all religion had been virtually extinct for three hundred years in 2520, will be more surprised by the proximity to my hometree of a living community of monks than a
seemingly dead one, but retreatist sects carrying forward versions of Buddhism and Hinduism had shown far greater resilience than the followers of other traditions, and such communities had their own reasons for preferring locations remote from civilization. My foster parents found no particular cause for astonishment in that they were to become neighbors of one active monastery and one derelict one. Nor did this detract, in their eyes, from the supposed remoteness of the site.

The valley where I was brought up bears little resemblance now to the state it was in when I lived there. It fell victim to one of the less contentious projects of the Continental Engineers. Its climate is almost Mediterranean now, thanks to the dome and all its subsidiary facilities, and it is only an hour from Kathmandu by tube train. The Hindu community at the southern end of the valley is long gone—its stone-gantzed harshness replaced by luxuriant hometrees—but the stone edifice my parents nicknamed Shangri-La is still standing. When the cloud lifts it presents much the same appearance to the valley dwellers as it presented to me in earliest childhood. Because it remains outside the protective shell it must seem to young children, as it once seemed to me, to be shrouded in mystery.

Because I only lived with my foster parents for twenty years—a mere 4 percent of my life to date—and because much of that time was spent in a state of infantile obliviousness, I find it difficult to write about them as a coherent collective. I got to know them much better as disparate individuals once the collective had broken up, and that probably has as much to do with my impression that they were always quarreling as my earliest memories. I now suspect that they were happier together than I was ever able to believe while they were alive, and I am sure that they were better parents than I ever gave them credit for while I still had to listen to their homilies and complaints.

As a dutiful historian—even one who has stooped so low as to resurrect the dubious genre of spiritual autobiography—I suppose that I ought to make a proper record of my origins. My foster parents were Domenico Corato, bom 2345; Laurent Holderness, bom 2349; Eulalie Neqael, born 2377; Nahum Turkhan, bom 2379; Meta Khaled, bom 2384; Siorane Wolf, born 2392; Sajda Ajdal, bom 2402; and Ezra Derhan, born 2418. The ovum that they withdrew from a North American
bank to initiate my development had been deposited there in 2170, having been taken from the womb of one Diana Caisson, born 2168. The sperm used to fertilize it after the Zamaners had done their preliminary work had been deposited in 2365 by Evander Gray (2347-2517).

I have been unable to discover any more about Diana Caisson’s history. The sectors of the Labyrinth hosting the relevant data were devastated by the viral shrapnel of an early twenty-third-century logic bomb, and I have never been able to discover any hard-copy reference. Evander Gray was a longtime gantzing engineer who had spent the greater part of his working life on the moon, although he had done three tours of duty in the asteroid belt; he had died in an orbital settlement.

In Mama Siorane’s and Mama Meta’s eyes, Evander Gray must have qualified as a pioneer, although Papa Domenico would doubtless have pointed out to them that there had been “space pioneers” as long ago as the twentieth century. At any rate, the three years separating notification of Evander Gray’s death from the exercise of his right of replacement testifies to the fact that although no one was in a tearing hurry to perpetuate his heritage, he was considered a reasonably good catch. He was reckoned good enough, at any rate, for my parents not to hesitate long over the selection of my surname. If Papa Dom disapproved, he did not think it worth exercising his power of veto.

I do not know why I was given the first name Mortimer, although I did ask several of my foster parents.

“We liked it,” was all the answer Papa Domenico offered.

“It sounded serious,” was Mama Eulalie’s contribution. “We wanted a serious child.”

“It seemed to flow well in association with the surname,” Mama Meta said. “People who have to wear their names for centuries will need names that flow well. Mine never did. I always envied Laurent his.”

“The name originally belonged to a crusader associated with the Dead Sea,” Mama Sajda informed me, in the overscrupulous manner that I was often said by her co-parents to have inherited. “It’s a corruption of the Latin
de mortuo mari
—but that had absolutely nothing to do with our decision. So far as I remember, it got the vote because it was the only leading candidate to which no one had any strong objection.”

That sounded only too likely at the time; it still does.

Unlike my donor father, none of my foster parents had restricted themselves to a single vocation. Five of them had already served terms as civil servants when they married, and two more were to do so afterward. Four had already worked as research scientists, and one more was subsequently to be added to that number. Three had been structural engineers, and three more were to dabble in that art. Three had done stints as retail managers, two as Labyrinth navigators, and two as VE techs—although the last two figures were doubled by endeavors subsequent to parenthood.

Five of my co-parents had constructed hypertextual mándalas of one kind or another before they had charge of me, although none had worked in the field of history. I cannot single any one of them out as a key influence on the development of my own career. If I am as pedantic as some people say, I suppose I might be reckoned to be more Mama Sajda’s son than anyone else’s, but she was essentially an
organizer
whose genius lay in the delicate social art of managing VE conferences. I don’t recall feeling closer to her than to any of my other mothers.

At the time of my birth Papa Laurent had probably built the most considerable public reputation, as an Earth-based xenobiologist, but his quantum of fame was subsequently to be exceeded by Mama Siorane and Papa Ezra, both of whom moved to extraterrestrial frontiers, where celebrity could be more cheaply obtained. Mama Siorane contrived an interesting and newsworthy death on Titan in 2650 and Papa Ezra made a significant contribution to the modification of the Zaman transformation for application to fabers.

In spite of the relative bleakness of my early surroundings and the arguments my fosterers always seemed to be having, I received the customary superabundance of love, affection, and admiration from my parents. In claiming their own rations of “personal time” with my infant self my devoted mamas and papas subjected me to a veritable deluge of stimulation and amusement. Their determination to familiarize me with the vicissitudes of a harsh natural environment and the delights of a multitude of virtual ones never extended so far as to leave me exposed to the merciless elements without a supremely competent suitskin, or to place me in danger of addiction to synthetic pleasures. I was not allowed to play unattended in the snow until I was twelve, and I was not allowed to
indulge in the most seductive virtual experiences until I was several years older than that.

In sum, with the aid of excellent role models, careful biofeedback training, and thoroughly competent internal technologies, I grew up as reasonable, as charitable, as self-controlled, and as intensely serious of mind as all my city-bound contemporaries.

T
he majority of the children I met and played with in the homelier kinds of VEs spoke of “real life” in terms of cityscapes: crowds, buildings, and carefully designed parks. The minority who had contact with wilderness mostly thought of it in terms of forests, oceans, and the Antarctic ice cap. Only a couple lived in close proximity with mountain slopes, and even they thought my own situation peculiar, partly because no one was busy sculpting the mountain that loomed over my valley and partly because my only near neighbors were monks.

When I was very young my VE-linked friends had not the slightest idea what a “monk” was. Nor had I. The members of the accessible community at the north end of the valley communicated among themselves in a language that was either archaic or private, and although I did not entirely trust my parents’ word that the community high on the mountain slope was extinct, I had no solid grounds for thinking otherwise. The cloud so rarely exposed the buildings to view, despite the winds that kept them continually astir, that such brief periods of clarity as did occur only served to intensify the mystery of their nature.

To tell the truth, the actual monks seemed to me to be the least interesting feature of my environment when I was eight or nine years old. I was much more entranced by the storms and the peculiar transactions of the snow, by the abrupt changes of temperature and texture to which the air was subject whenever I passed out of the safe interior of the hometree, and by the precarious meltwater ecology of the valley floor. My friends, however, were not at all interested in weather reports; they wanted to know about the mysterious mystics and sages who had once occupied the edifice on the mountain and still practiced their arcane rituals in the southern part of the valley. It was not that my friends could not imagine precipitous slopes, or snow, or hectic atmospheric conditions; the problem was that I had no way to persuade them that my actual experience of such phenomena was very different from their virtual experiences.

“Yes,” Pyotr would say,
“of course
I know what cold feels like. We have cold in Moscow too. But we don’t have monks.”

“
Of course
I can imagine thin air,” Marianna would assure me. “It’s just a matter of barometric pressure. But I can’t imagine religion.”

They were wrong about being able to imagine what Himalayan cold and Himalayan air felt like, but there was no way to prove it. I thought they were equally mistaken in their assumption that the monks and their beliefs were interesting, given that the few I saw in the distance always seemed so utterly mundane, but I couldn’t prove that either and soon capitulated with inevitability by ceasing to try.

The continued curiosity of my friends eventually compelled me to find better answers to their questions, but throughout my formative years—from six to sixteen, say—even the “better” answers were wholly invented. I made up different tales at different times, and my accounts became far more elaborate as my sources of inspiration expanded in number and quality, but it was all fantasy. I knew little or nothing about what my allegedly Hindu neighbors believed or did, and nothing at all about what might once have gone on in the allegedly Buddhist community set so high on the looming slope as to be beyond reach.

None of my co-parents ever visited the complex at the far end of the valley, nor did any of them attempt to learn the language spoken by its inhabitants. None of them would ever have dreamed of trying to climb the mountain that separated them from the place they called Shangri-La, for want of any better name. They had brought their child to remotest Nepal so that he might live in the presence of magnificent strangeness, not that he might penetrate its secrets. By the time I left the valley I understood, vaguely, that they had installed me there because they thought that the valley might teach me to be humble in my humanity, to show me the last vestiges of the untamed earth that had shaped my ancestors, and to give me a proper sense of the value of my emortality. While I was actually there, however, it was simply the place I was in, monks and all. My view of it was conditioned by the knowledge that all the other people of my own age with whom I was encouraged to socialize in VEs had anchorages in reality that seemed more desirable to me because they lay far closer to the heart
of human society. I was never lonely as a child, but I knew that I lived in a lonely place, fit only for mad monks, and that I had been put there on purpose.

“But it’s not a lonely place,” Papa Domenico assured me, on one of the rare occasions when I actually complained. “There are no lonely places any more. Wherever humans go, they take the virtual universe with them. We can hold infinity in the palms of our hands, although we’ve grown so accustomed to the miracle that we no longer seem to be capable of grasping the wonder of it. As long as you’re connected to human society, the Universe Without Limits is yours, the best part of your heritage. Even the monks have that.”

Papa Laurent told a different story. “One day, Morty,” he said, “the feeling of loneliness will be precious to you. You’ll be glad that it formed such an important part of your sentimental education. The UN may make a big song and dance about keeping Earth’s population stable and using emigration to the moon and the microworlds as a safety valve, but the simple fact is that now that your generation really can live forever the population of the Earthbound will creep up and up and up. The future you’ll have to live in will be so desperately crowded that there won’t be any lonely places left—and you’ll have something to look back on that all your contemporaries will envy. You’ll have an understanding that they’ll never be able to cultivate—although the monks will hang on to it, if they ever manage to recruit any true emortals.”