The Fountains of Youth (32 page)

This news was, of course, fifty-eight years old, but it was no less sensational for that. AI-directed kalpa probes had located more than a dozen life-bearing planets, but we only had hard evidence of multicellular life on two of them, neither of which could be described as “Earthlike” no matter how much generosity was granted to the label.
Hope’s
first broadcast spoke of a world whose atmosphere was breathable with the aid of face masks, with abundant plant life and animals sufficiently similar to those of Earth to allow talk of “insects,” “reptiles,” “birds,” and “mammals.”

Hope
had been sent out to find exactly such a world, ripe for colonization. The generations of its mortal crew had clung hard to that determination while news had followed them that Earth’s ecosphere had not been conclusively blighted. New data regarding the scarcity of planets that could be classified as “terraformable” must have poured into the ship’s data banks while it crawled through the void, but even that had not persuaded the ship’s masters to turn around. Now, they considered their decision to have been vindicated, and their initial howl of triumph was headline news even on Earth.

By the time Emily’s ship actually arrived on the moon, however, the news flow from the world that
Hope’s
captain had named Ararat was by no means so enthusiastic. The primitive nanotech systems deposited on the surface had made good progress in gantzing dwellings out of the alien soil, but attempts to adapt local reproductive systems to the manufacture of human foodstuffs had run into trouble, and the first people brought out of SusAn in order to work on the surface—not all of whom survived the revival process—were experiencing unexpected problems of psychological adaptation.

Although the SusAn systems installed on
Hope
had been rendered obsolete several centuries before there were some similar systems still in operation, in which the worst of the first generation of criminals sentenced to SusAn imprisonment were still confined, so the news that long-term freezing down seemed to have unwelcome psychotropic effects was not entirely irrelevant to the Earthbound.

Emily was less enthusiastic about the discovery than I had expected, but she made much of the elementary fact that other “Earthlike” planets did exist.

“The real crux of the matter isn’t
Hope’s
chances of establishing a human population on the surface of Ararat,” she argued, “but the evidence they’ve found of an extinct species of intelligent humanoid indigenes. That’s as close as we can come to proof of the fact that we aren’t alone in the galaxy without actually shaking hands with our mirror
images. One humaniform race might be a fluke, but where there’s two there must be many more, even if one of the two is already defunct.”

“They’re not
entirely
sure that the sentients are extinct,” I told her. “Even if they’re still around, though, it doesn’t really
prove
anything. We’ve been scanning the sky for radio messages for a very long time now, so any other human races that have reached our level of technical sophistication must be very discreet. We mustn’t forget that
Hope
is a strange historical anomaly, launched in a blind panic. Our entire philosophy of cosmic exploration has changed since it went out. Other humaniform races might be busy doing exactly what we’re now busy doing: remaking their spacefarers physically and psychologically.”

“We
, Morty?” she echoed, twitching an eyebrow. She was lightly cyborgized, and had almost certainly undergone some subtle somatic engineering, but her appearance was much as I remembered it—and mine must have been exactly as she remembered it. Neither of us was the type to go in for cosmetic modification for fashion’s sake.

“I mean the fabers,” I admitted. “The forebears of the future human races: the six-handed, the eight-handed, and all the others that are still a twinkle in the imaginative eye.”

“I’m an old-fashioned ganzter,” she reminded me. “My job is adapting inorganic environments to suit the purposes of the humaniform, not the other way around.”

“Purposes?” I queried. “I thought you were an artist.”

“And all art is useless? I never had you pegged as a neo-Wildean, Morty. I’m the kind of artist who believes in the perfect combination of function and beauty.”

I was mildly surprised to hear that, given that coverage of Titan’s new skylines on the lunar news was usually careful to stress that however imposing they might seem the ice palaces were uninhabitable. When I put this point to Emily, she said: “Uninhabitable
as yet.
They’re not just pieces of sculpture, Morty—they’re greenhouses. We haven’t yet managed to distribute the heat as efficiently as we might, but it’s only a matter of time and hard work. Titan will never bathe in the kind of solar deluge that powers Earth’s biomass, although some of us are giving serious consideration to ways and means of increasing its meager portion. But it’s still an energy beneficiary, and it’s sitting next door to the second-biggest
lode of raw materials in the system. It won’t be easy to manage the economics of exchange, but the day will come soon enough when life on the surface of Titan will be a great deal easier and more comfortable than life in the lunar air traps. If luck is with us we’ll both live to see it. Even if Titan’s core weren’t reasonably warm it could still be done, but the geothermal kick-start will make it a lot easier. Believe me, Morty—all those glittering castles are potential real estate, and within a hundred years, or one-fifty at the most, they’ll be the realest estates on the market.”

“At which point,” I said, “you’ll doubtless become richer by a further three or four orders of magnitude.”

“It’s not about getting rich,” she said. “There isn’t going to be any Hardinist Cabal on Titan. We figure that the highkickers are mature enough not to fall prey to the tragedy of the commons. Forget the Gaean Libs, Morty—we’re the next and last Revolution.”

I had to admit that “highkickers” was a much more flattering label than “footsloggers.” I knew that she’d have heard all the jokes about can-can and can-do, so I didn’t even try to sharpen my wit on the term. There wasn’t time enough to waste on that kind of nonsense.

E
mily hadn’t come to the moon for a vacation and she was very busy, but she had adopted highkicker notions of personal space and the value of face-to-face contact, so I saw a lot more of her than I might have expected. When she did find time to relax I showed her the sights, such as they were. We went out of the dome together, in ultralight suitskins, so that we could look at the stars and feel the authentic lunar surface beneath our feet.

Because Titan had an atmosphere Emily didn’t see the true profusion of the stars very often, but that didn’t prevent her waxing lyrical about the wondrous sights that the cosmos presented to the inhabitants of the outer system. The view from the moon comprised exactly the same stars, and farside light-pollution was minimal, but mere logic couldn’t shake Emily’s conviction that everything looked better out on Civilization’s Edge. I suppose that it must have been easy to reach that opinion while Saturn dominated the sky. In Mare Moscoviense we never saw Earth.

“One day,” I told her, “I’ll have to come see it all for myself. VE tourism isn’t the same. Now that I’ve experienced Earth-based VEs from a lunar-gravity vantage point I’m even more alert than I used to be to their artificiality.” She knew that it was mere talk, of course. I was already in intensive training for the return to full gravity. She’d come along to the gym with me to put in little centrifuge time on her own account, and we’d played the usual lunatic games with massive dumbbells.

“Why wait, Morty?” she asked, softly. “Why
one day
instead of now?”

“I’ve got work to do,” I said. She knew that too. I’d shown her everything, including the new data webs I was patiently building and knitting together. She hadn’t paid much attention, just as I hadn’t paid much attention while she was shopping for new-generation gantzers that were just as gray and slimy as the ones that had become obsolete five minutes before.

“Oh yes,” she said, with deadly unenthusiasm. “Two more volumes of your precious
History of Death.”

“Actually,” I confessed, a trifle belatedly, “it’s going to take more than two. Maybe I can cram it into three, but at present I’m thinking four.”

“Which would make it the longest procrastination in history, I suppose,” she said, cruelly. “Let’s see—the first version of the first part was deposited in 2614, and the fifth in 2849. That means that we can expect the ninth and last in 3082—except, of course, that it’ll only be the first version, so you’ll have to tinker round with it for another… what shall we say? A couple of hundred years? Say 3300 to make it a round number. By which time you’ll be seven hundred and eighty years old. It’s just as well that you don’t believe all that doom-laden Thanaticist cant about robotization and the necessity of making a good death before we become mere machines, isn’t it?”

“The research is going very well,” I told her, “and I’m more focused now than I used to be. I’m hoping to have the whole thing wrapped up well before the turn of the millennium.”

“Will anybody care?” she asked. “When did the last false emortal die? Fifty years ago? Don’t bother to tell me the exact date—it doesn’t make any difference. The war against death is over, Morty. It doesn’t matter any more. The point is to find the best way to live
without
death.”

“Finding the best way to live without death is part and parcel of the war against it,” I insisted.

“And have your studies brought you a single step closer to finding that best way?” she continued, implacably. “Have you found an answer that can satisfy you, Morty?” She didn’t need to add,
Have I?
It went without saying that neither of us had found any such thing—
as yet.
It also went without saying that Khan Mirafzal and his kin were hotter favorites to find an answer adequate to their own kind than any footslogger, no matter how high she could kick.

“I have time,” I said, defensively. “I’m emortal.”

“So are the murdering bastards tucked away in twenty-first-century SusAns,” she said, “just so long as they never come out. I forgot about them, of course, when I tried to remember when the last false emortal died. And there’s dear old Adam Zimmerman too—assuming that he isn’t
just a guiding myth invented to stoke up the zeal of the the Ahasuerus Foundation’s Zamaners. How old is
he
now, if he actually exists? Nine hundred, almost to the day! Our invitations to the birthday party must have gotten lost in the ether. How much time there is to waste, when you think about it!”

“My work isn’t a waste,” I told her, stubbornly. “It’s not irrelevant. If you hadn’t left Earth before the Thanaticists got going, you’d understand that the war against death isn’t over.”

“No,” she said, in a different and darker tone. “It isn’t. I’ve lost three good friends in the last five years, and I’ll lose half a hundred more before the ice palaces are teeming with the latest kind of Utopians. I live every day with the possibility that they might be the ones who’ll lose me, but I’m not prepared to hide out in the bomb shelters indefinitely. I’m not prepared to reduce the horizons of my life to those of a glorified life raft. I want to be part of the Revolution, Morty, not part of the problem that makes the Revolution necessary.”

“That’s not fair,” I complained, meaning the suggestion that I was still psychologically becalmed in the life raft we’d shared when she was a child.

“What’s
fair
got to do with it, you great oaf?” she answered, smiling like a faber surrounded by her children. One day, I realized, Emily might be surrounded by highkicking children of her own, busy with the work of populating a brand-new world with skylines more wondrous than any in the system, and perhaps even out of it. On the other hand, she might have moved on, beyond even the satellites of Uranus and Neptune, to some very-nearly-but-not-quite Earthlike world capable of providing a
real
challenge to a sculptor of her abilities.

“I have to finish it,” I told her. “It’s what I am. I won’t apologize for that because I don’t think I owe you or the world any kind of apology for what I am
or
what I do.”

“No,” she conceded. “You don’t owe me or the world anything. I just don’t want you to be
left behind”

“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, as I’d always told everyone who seemed to need telling. “Maybe I’m one of the ones who’s destined to remain there forever.”

“So what are you doing hanging about on the moon?” she said. “It’s
just Antarctica without ice palaces, and noisier neighbors. I’ve seen you in the centrifuge and I know you’re ready. Your legs are positively itching to get to grips with all that gee force.”

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, legwise,” I admitted. “Maybe I stuck around just to see
you
for one last time, before you get so far ahead of me that you’ll be way out of reach.”

“Oaf,” she said, tenderly. “Footslogger. Groundhog. Welldweller. You know that I fell in love with you in that stupid life raft, don’t you? You know that all the nonsense you trotted out to keep my mind off the danger we were in cut right to my heart. You made me, Mortimer Gray.”

I could have said straight out that she’d made me too, but she couldn’t have taken it as a compliment in that form. “That’s the way it works,” I said, instead. “Any two elementary particles that have ever been closely associated continue to modify one another’s movements no matter how far apart they move. I never understood exactly why, but I think it’s something to do with the beauty and charm of their constituent quarks—and if it isn’t, it ought to be.”

I
t turned out that my legs weren’t quite as ready for the return to the Big Well as they seemed. The centrifuge can prepare returning lunatics for the shock of bottoming out, but it can’t prepare them for the sheer relentlessness of gravity. While you have levity at your beck and call it’s easy to think that you won’t miss it, but when it’s four hundred thousand kilometers out of reach it suddenly seems like a precious resource gone to waste.