The Fountains of Youth (3 page)

They were both talking nonsense, of course, but not for the reasons that occurred to me as a child.

Perhaps, in the end, my parents’ plan did achieve most of what it was intended to achieve, even though they could never agree as to exactly what that was—but while I was actually living in the parental hometree I could not help but see things differently. I found some delight in the ruggedness of the terrain, but I also felt a good deal of resentment against the continual assertiveness of wind, water, and biting cold—and my curiosity about the perverse people who had chosen to live here, not merely for a while but indefinitely, grew along with that resentment. Even at the age of eight, I knew that I would never take the trouble to learn a new language in order to communicate with the enigmatic people who lived at the other end of the valley, but I knew that there would
come a day when I was big enough, strong enough, and brave enough to climb the mountain that separated me from Shangri-La.

I did not expect that I would be able to talk to its inhabitants, even if they turned out not to be extinct, but that was not the point of the imagined endeavor. The point was to confirm that Shangri-La was indeed a
place
, not a phantom of the cloud and a mirage of the sunlight—and to prove that I was the kind of person who could go wherever he wanted to go, despite the vicissitudes of the weather.

M
y failed attempts to climb the mountain that loomed so large over my childhood home resulted in a few bruising falls. I listened patiently to the lectures all emortal children must endure regarding the magnitude of every risk they take, but I also learned by slow degrees how to use an ice ax and how to make the most of toeholds. My parents decided soon enough that in view of our having chosen to live among mountains it would be ridiculous to suppress my ambition to climb, so they began investing in smart suitskins with all kinds of extra safety features. By the time I was ten my augmented limbs had the clinging power of a fly’s, and if I rolled myself up into a ball I could bounce for miles.

I took more risks than the average child of my kind, but the falls I survived didn’t lull me into a false sense of security. My suitskins were exceedingly clever and my internal technology was state of the art, but when I fell I experienced a full measure of terror, and more than enough pain to function as a warning. I was, however, determined to master that slope some day, to find out exactly how the reality of Shangri-La differed from the fantasies I made up for my VE-linked friends.

I was twelve before I accidentally discovered the source from which my co-parents had borrowed the name Shangri-La. It was, I found, the name of a mythical monastery established above an imaginary valley, whose inhabitants lived to be several hundred years old in an era when that was simply not possible. In the original twentieth-century folktale the monastery had been fitted out with a library so that it might serve as a haven of rest and place of refuge for those few civilized men who were wise enough to realize that their civilization was both precarious and irredeemably sick. Neither the first author of the tale nor its subsequent embellishers had been able to witness the twenty-first-century collapse of their sick civilization, nor had they had imagination enough to envisage its rebuilding by the first people who claimed to be members of a new human race, but I could hardly help thinking that the myth was precious as well as prescient. It colored my own private fantasies as deeply
as it colored the fantasies I made up for my friends—which became gradually more plausible as I took advantage of my researches in the Labyrinth.

“Monks aren’t much interested in emortality,” I explained to Pyotr when I was thirteen. “They all believe that life goes on forever unless you can find a way of getting out—which isn’t easy. They do have internal nanotech, but that’s because they think the extending of a life span from seventy to two or three hundred years is a matter of small concern. They don’t think of themselves as separate entities but as pieces of the world’s soul. The people who used to live on the mountain thought a human lifetime, no matter what difference IT or gene swapping might make, is just a step on the way to eternity, and what they ought to be aiming at is the annihilation of feeling, because feeling is suffering. Monks think life is intrinsically unsatisfying and that nirvana is better, but they put off their own salvation in order to make a gift of some of their accumulated spiritual credit to the rest of us.”

It’s surprising what can pass for wisdom among thirteen year olds—but it’s not entirely surprising that even its fantasies contain seeds of enlightenment. Much later in life, when I came to consider the great religions as strategies in the great psychological war against death, I had cause to remember my fantasies about the phantom monks of Shangri-La.

As to the reality…

It was in the summer of 2535 that I first contrived to climb all the way up the sheer slope that separated my hometree from the stone building. My objective was visible all the way and the rocks were dry; the sun was shining brightly. Given the conditions, it was not a terribly difficult or dangerous climb.

Had the weather changed suddenly—and the weather in those parts
could
change with astonishing rapidity from fair to atrocious before the Continental Engineers stuck their oar in—I might have gotten into trouble, but as things were I hardly bruised my suitskin. I was out of breath and my hands were grazed, but I had only to pause on the threshold of the edifice for twenty minutes to regain my composure.

While I sat there, with my back to the valley, I was able to look through an archway into a courtyard, where there was a statue of Buddha, exactly as I had expected—but there was no sign of anyone walking
in the cloister and no sound of any activity within the walls. The place seemed as dead and desolate as I had been assured it was.

It was not until I raised myself to my feet and wandered through the archway that my presence elicited any response.

The courtyard was rectangular, and all its inner faces were as smoothly gray as the external face it presented to the valley. There were no visible doors or windows. When I paused in front of the Buddha I had settled for the conclusion that the edifice was now no more than an unmanned shrine—but then a man in a black suitskin stepped out from behind the Buddha. His skin was as dark as his suitskin—darker than that of any living individual I had seen on TV or met in VE. He was obviously not of local descent, and his suitskin was tailored in a very workmanlike fashion. He didn’t look like any kind of monk I had ever seen or imagined.

“Can I help you, Mister Gray?” he said, in exactly the same kind of media-smoothed English that all my foster parents employed. Save for his unfashionably dark and cosmetically unembellished skin he looked and sounded markedly less exotic than many of my VE friends. It was impossible to tell how old he was, but I guessed that he was a true emortal.

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

“We like to know who our neighbors are,” he said, mildly. “We don’t pry, but we’re slightly sensitive to the possibility that others might.”

“I’m not prying,” I retorted.

“Yes you are,” he said. “But that’s understandable. We don’t really mind. We stopped worrying about your parents a long time ago. We know that they’re exactly what they seem to be.”

“You’re not,” I said.

“I don’t seem to be anything I’m not,” he replied, arching his eyebrows in surprise—but then he figured out that I had meant the comment more generally.
“We
don’t seem to be anything at all,” he added. “Your parents decided to call this place Shangri-La on their own initiative, and if you decided to elaborate the fantasy…”

He left the sentence dangling, implying that he knew more about the tales I’d spun than he had any right to.

Perhaps he would have preferred it if I’d turned around and started
climbing back down again, but he must have already accepted that I wouldn’t be content to come all the way up the mountain for nothing.

“What is this place, then?” I asked. “If it’s not a monastery…”

“You can come in if you want to,” he said. “But you might find it less interesting than you’d always hoped. I’m Julius Ngomi, by the way.”

He smiled as he said it. He didn’t really mean what he said about my finding the place less interesting than I’d always hoped—but even after all this time, I still can’t quite make up my mind whether he was right or not.

T
here was no obvious sign of a doorway behind the Buddha, but when part of the gray wall drew away at Ngomi’s touch I realized that the featurelessness of the edifice might be an illusion.

“We generally use the door on the far side of the mountain,” my companion said, waving his hand vaguely in order to suggest that the zigzagging corridor was far more extensive than the eye could see. “There’s a helipad there, although it’s only usable one day in four.”

By the time we had turned three corners and descended two stairways I had lost my sense of direction, but I had begun to realize how extensively the mountain had been hollowed out. There didn’t seem to be many people about, but there was no shortage of closed doors, which no one had bothered to hide.

“What’s inside them?” I asked, vaguely.

“The litter that dare not speak its name,” he replied, gnomically. “Archaeological specimens. Ancient artifacts. Lots and lots of paper. Things that have no present utility at all but somehow seem to warrant preservation nevertheless. We’ve become very reluctant to throw things away these last few hundred years. The way the history books tell it is that our pre-Crash ancestors—the
old
Old Human Race—became deeply penitent about their habit of trashing everything they owned in wars and began to set up permanent archives at about the same time they built the first genetic Arks. Then, so the conventional history goes, our more recent forefathers became exceedingly paranoid about the perishability of electronic information during the Virtual Terror. That kicked off a new wave of archive building and archive stuffing.”

Because he was still talking he paused at the unconcealed door we were about to enter, with his hand hovering a centimeter short of a clearly marked pressure pad. If I’d nodded my head he would presumably have touched it, but I didn’t.

“Are you saying that the history books have got it wrong?” I asked, instead. It didn’t seem to be an important question as I phrased it, but I
never forgot the answer I received, and I never lost sight of its implications.

“Not exactly,” said Julius Ngomi. “But all history is fantasy, and there are always different ways of coming at a question. The cynical version is that after Leon Gantz and his nephews had developed a ridiculously cheap way to hollow out mountains, their heirs had to figure out a reason for doing it. So they said,
Hey, let’s start filing our litter away for the benefit of future archaeologists. I bet we could devise an archiving system so complicated and so all-encompassing that it would keep a whole battalion of maze architects occupied for centuries and make work for thousands of caretakers. It won’t be as much fun as hollowing out asteroids to make gigantic spaceships, but that plan’s on hold for the time being, and this one’s a hell of a lot more convenient.
So here we are, in the twenty-sixth century—proud possessors of at least ninety-nine mountains whose bowels are constipated by megatons of carefully sorted and painstakingly indexed shit.”

As he pronounced the final word, Julius Ngomi finally found the impetus to brush the pressure pad with his fingertips, and the door opened. I had just begun to visualize a tide of sewage flooding out into the corridor when I perceived that it was a perfectly normal circular room. Its perimeter wall was rimmed by a series of flatscreens, alternated with perfectly normal VE hoods. Only two of the six hoods were occupied, but there was a third person positioned at the center of the room, apparently engaged in the impossible task of monitoring all six flatscreens simultaneously. This was a gray-haired woman, whose features were so comprehensively time ravaged that I immediately jumped to the conclusion that she was a bicentenarian spinning out the legacy of her third full rejuve as far as it would go.

“Who’s this, Julie?” she asked, mildly, as her pale eyes scanned me from head to toe with what seemed to me to be a practiced sweep. The people under the hoods—one man and one woman, to judge by the contours of their suitskins—didn’t bother to peep out to see what was happening.

“Mortimer Gray,” said Ngomi. “The kid from the valley. Today’s the day he finally grew big enough to complete the climb. About time, considering the number of times he got halfway and chickened out.” The
insult was uncalled for, and not entirely defused by the levity of the black man’s tone.

“Congratulations,” said the woman.

“This is Sara Saul,” Ngomi said. “She’s the boss.”

“The chief archivist, you mean?” I said, trying to show that I was on the ball.

They both laughed. “We’re just lodgers,” Ngomi said. “We don’t actually look after the cesspit. To tell you the truth, the cesspit pretty much looks after itself, now that the store is deemed to be full up. Historians crawl over it and scratch its surface now and again, but nobody else pays it much heed. We just rent a few of the leftover nooks and crannies.”

“But you’re not monks,” I said, uncertainly, “are you?”

Mercifully, they didn’t laugh at that.

“After a fashion, we are,” said Sara Saul. “We’re not given to prayer, like the people at the far end of the valley, and we’re not what used to be called chipmonks—VE obsessives, that is—but you
could
say that we’re in retreat, living ascetically for the sake of our vocation. It
is
a vocation, isn’t it, Julie?”

“Definitely,” said Julius Ngomi.

I knew that they were teasing me, but I had to ask. “What vocation?”

“We’re running the world.” It was Sara Saul who answered.

“I thought that was all done in Antarctica,” I said, lightly. I was determined not to be taken in, although I knew how far out of my intellectual depth I was.