The Fountains of Youth (7 page)

I was still yelling, “Emily!”

No sooner was I struck by the horrid thought that getting into the body of the life raft might not be easy than I found out something else I would have known had I read the safety manual. The activated life rait was at least sloth-smart, and it had urgent instincts built into its biosystems. It grabbed me and sucked me in as if it were a synthowhale harvesting a plankton crop. Then it went after Emily, who was close enough to be glaringly obvious to its primitive senses.

While the raft fought the demonic waves I was rolled helplessly back and forth within its softly lit stomachlike interior, and I could tell that it was no easy chase, but the creature was programmed for tenacity. Although it seemed like a long time to me it could not have been more than three minutes before it swallowed Emily and deposited her alongside me. I grabbed hold of her while we continued to rock and roll, so that we wouldn’t be bumping into one another with bruising effect, but it took only another two minutes for me to find the handholds, which
allowed me to stabilize my position and to find Emily a coign of vantage of her own.

She spat out some water, but she was fine.

The movement of the boat became somewhat less violent now that its muscles could be wholly devoted to the task of smoothing out the worst excesses of the madcap ride. For a moment I was glad, and then 1 realized what it meant. If there had been any other human being within detection range, the raft would have chased them.

“Did you read the safety manual, Emily?” I asked.

“Yes, Mister Mortimer,” she said, in the wary kind of voice that children use when expecting admonition—but nothing was further from my mind than checking up on her.

“Can you remember whether there were any pods like this on the outside of the boat? Pods that would detach automatically in an emergency?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

I kept on hoping, but I was almost sure that she was right. The
Genesis
was supposedly unsinkable, so the only kind of emergency its designers had provided for was the kind where the crew might have to throw a life raft to a swimmer in trouble. There had been no rafts to go to the aid of the people swept overboard when the
Genesis
had first been rudely upturned by the boiling sea.

I
t didn’t take long to find the teats that secreted fresh water and other kinds of liquid nourishment. By the time I’d sucked in enough to take the taste of brine away, my suitskin had gotten rid of all the surplus water it had accumulated during the escape from
Genesis.
The interior surface of the life raft was suitskin-smart too, so there was no water sloshing around. The only significant discomfort was the heat. The life raft was well equipped to warm its inhabitants up if they were hypothermie, but no one had anticipated that it might need equally clever facilities to cool them down if they’d just had a hot bath and were still floating on top of one.

“How long will it be?” Emily asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What happened?” she asked.

I didn’t know that either, but I had already formed two suspicions regarding what seemed at the time to be the most likely not-quite-impossibilities.

“Something must have fallen out of the sky,” I said. “It must have hit the sea very violently, as well as being very hot itself. If it were a comet or an asteroid fragment the satellite ring would have given adequate warning, but if it were actually one of the satellites—maybe even a station…”

“Or a bomb,” she said, neatly filling in the not-quite-impossibility that I’d considered unmentionable. “It could have been a bomb.”

Theoretically, there were no nuclear weapons anywhere in the world—but I’d seen the inside of a mountain that had been hollowed out by gantzers in order to serve as a repository for all the artifacts that the world no longer considered
necessary
—the litter that dared not speak its name. I’d even poked around in a few of the storerooms. I knew that some of what the New Human Race had put away with other childish things really had been merely
put away.

Theoretically, of course, there should have been no one anywhere in
the world insane enough to use a nuclear weapon even if one still existed, but even in the long interval of apparent near-universal sanity that separated the Moreau murders from the rebirth of Thanaticism we New Humans were not
entirely
convinced that our theories were reliable in their account of the limits of Old Human irresponsibility.

“I don’t think it was a bomb,” I told the little girl. “If anyone was going to start throwing multimegaton bombs around, they wouldn’t aim one at the Coral Sea. They certainly wouldn’t aim one at
Genesis
—and whatever happened, we must have been very close to the point of impact.”

We were both wrong, alas, as any passably conscientious student of history will have known ever since I specified the date on which
Genesis
set sail. Had I been in a clearer frame of mind I would undoubtedly have realized that our hypotheses had only covered two of the three relevant dimensions (up and sideways), but I was still ill. I had stopped noticing it, but my seasickness hadn’t actually been
cured.
I didn’t suppose that I would be able to complete the reconciliation of my head and my guts while the raft kept on lurching, and I was right.

“They are going to come for us, aren’t they?” Emily said. She was putting on a brave face, but the excessive warmth of the raft’s interior hadn’t brought any significant color to her cheeks.

“Absolutely,” I said. “The raft’s lit up outside like a firework display, and its systems will be transmitting a mayday on the emergency wavelength that will be audible all the way from Australia to geosynchronous orbit. If they can’t redirect a ship to pick us up they’ll send a helicopter as soon as it’s safe to fly—but the weather’s pretty filthy. Anything that can turn the sea into a Jacuzzi is likely to stir the atmosphere up a bit.”

“If it was a bomb,” she said, “there might be nobody…”

“It wasn’t a bomb, Emily,” I told her, firmly. “They didn’t even use big bombs in World War Three or World War Four. It has to be space junk falling back to Earth: an accident in orbit. We happened to be right next to ground zero—a million-to-one chance. They’ll send a copter from Gladstone or Rockhampton when they can.”

“But if someone had heard the mayday,” she pointed out, with deadly accuracy, “they’d have replied, wouldn’t they?”

She was right. The raft had to have a voice facility. A hyperspecialized
sloth wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with us, but it would be able to tell us what was happening if anything
were
happening. If no one was replying to our mayday one of two things must be true. Either there was no one able to reply, or there were so many maydays filling the airwaves that we were effectively on hold, waiting in a
very
long line.

I realized that if it were a very large space station that had come down, the subsequent tidal wave might have taken out Gladstone and Rockhampton as easily as it had taken out
Genesis
—and flooded every single natural and artificial island west of Vanuatu and south of the Solomons. That was as big a disaster as I could seriously contemplate at the time, but the silence said that even those limits might be elastic.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” Emily said, at last. “All of them.”

She meant all twelve of her parents. The three couples and Captain Cardigan’s crew were gone too, but she couldn’t think about them while her own personal tragedy was so immense.

“We don’t know that,” I said. “There must have been other pods. They all have good suitskins and first-rate IT. People are surprisingly hard to kill.” But I knew as I said it that whatever had tipped
Genesis
over had been more than
surprising
, it had been unprecedented, and well-nigh unimaginable. I didn’t have to look out to know that the sea was still seething, and the clouds that had risen from it to blot out the stars were still impenetrable.

T
he sea did not become calm that night. When I was sure that the sun had risen I did take an opportunity to peek out, but the cloud was so thick as to be hardly penetrable, and rain was falling more densely than I had ever seen it before—and there are summer days in the Himalayas, even in these days of supposed climate control, when thirty centimeters of rain can fall in a matter of hours. It was no longer hot inside the raft, although the sea was still ten or fifteen degrees warmer than the falling rain.

I managed to take a little liquid nourishment from the teat, but my IT had not yet managed to get the upper hand in the argument with my subconscious, and I still felt nauseous. It was not until noon that the raft’s voice facility finally kicked in and announced that its mayday had been acknowledged.

“Please wait,” the raft said, in the curiously plaintive fashion typical of the most limited sloths. “Help will come. Please wait.” Clearly, it was talking to another AI no brighter than itself—and if it had taken twelve hours even to cement
that
link, I thought, how much longer would it be before our plight became a matter of urgent concern for a high-grade silver or a human being?

I asked what was happening, of course, and begged to be put into contact with a more intelligent entity, but I couldn’t evoke any response other than a simple repetition. I tried to remember how many islands there were in the Coral Sea and Micronesia and how many people lived along the coastal strips of Queensland and New Guinea, but I had no real idea. The only thing of which I could be sure was that the number of people needing help must be at least as many millions as the number of people able to render it—and that most of them would be aggregated in larger and more easily reachable groups than our minuscule microcosm.

“It’s not fair,” Emily whispered, when it became clear that night was going to fall without anyone coming to our aid, “is it, Mister Mortimer?”

I knew what she meant, but I had a slightly pedantic mind-set even
then. “Mortimer’s my first name, Emily, not my second,” I told her, “and the one thing we can be certain of is that whatever’s going on now
is
fair. All the maydays will be feeding into a ganglion somewhere in the Labyrinth, and a supersilver triage system will make sure that the help goes wherever it’s most urgently needed. Everything will be done in such a way as to ensure the greatest good of the greatest number. They must know that we’re not in any real danger—that the life raft will keep us alive for as long as necessary. They’ll come for us when they can.”

“But they’re not even
talking
to us,” she said. “How bad can things be?”

For an eight year old, she was extremely sharp. I figured she deserved an honest answer. “Very, very bad indeed,” I admitted. “Whatever it is, it has to be the worst disaster in human history.”

“Worse than the Crash?” she queried.

“Worse than the Black Death,” I told her, bleakly. “Worse than the last Ice Age, and a hell of a lot quicker. At least as bad as the last big extinction event, if not the one that finally killed off the dinosaurs.” I realized as I said it that even the biggest station in near-Earth orbit couldn’t have caused that big a splash. One of the L-5 cylinders might have—but what could have moved it all the way from lunar orbit
without any warning?

“How many people do you think it killed?” she asked, carefully raising her sights above the level of her own family. “Millions?”

“Perhaps millions,” I agreed, sadly.

“Like the Crash,” she said.

She was eight years old, and I didn’t dare ask her exactly what she meant by that. I was prepared to assume that she was only talking about numbers—but I was already a fledgling historian. I knew that the Crash had not been entirely a matter of accident and misadventure. At least some of the viruses that had sterilized the Old Human Race had been deliberately crafted for that purpose, by people who thought of themselves as the midwives and parents of a New Human Race. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Emily might, after all, have been right about that bomb, and whether some member of the
real
New Human Race—
our
New Human Race—might have wearied of the slowness with which the world was being handed over to our control.

It was absurd, of course. No
sane
member of the New Human Race could possibly have been as impatient as that, let alone as frankly evil-minded as that, but when you’re afloat in a life raft on an impossibly turbulent sea, having never had a chance to recover from seasickness, you can entertain thoughts that you would never entertain at any other time. The fact remained that whatever had caused this disaster
would
hasten the disappearance of the Old Human Race, at least in Australasia and Oceania.

That, in itself, was a sobering thought.

By the time night fell again we had become sufficiently well adapted to the pitching and tossing of the boat to sleep. My slumber was fitful and full of dreams, but Emily slept better and longer, only jerking awake once or twice when her reflexive grip on the handholds weakened and she felt herself moving too far too fast.

While we were awake throughout our second day afloat, we talked about anything and everything except our parents.

I told Emily about the valley in the Himalayas, and the Hindu monks, and the genetically engineered yaks, and the secrets of Shangri-La. She told me about her own home tree in the middle of what had been the outback before the Continental Engineers had constructed the largest of all their irrigation schemes and made it bloom again.

I told her everything I had learned about the hollow mountains full of the world’s dross. She told me everything she knew about the Black Mountains of the Northern Territory, whose hollow interiors were vast factories converting the energetic produce of the SAP forests to every conceivable purpose.

We talked about the latest news from Mars and the Oort Halo and the fact that the so-called kalpa probes would soon be overtaking the first-generation Arks, launched in the early years of the Crash by megacorp men half-convinced that Earthbound man was not going to make it through the crisis. We agreed that when the people those Arks were carrying in SusAn finally emerged from the freezer, they would be pig sick at the thought of having been overtaken as well as having missed out on the last four hundred years of technological progress. We talked about the possibility that human beings would eventually colonize the entire galaxy, terraforming every planet that seemed capable of sustaining an
ecosphere, and the possibility that one or other of the kalpa probes would soon encounter other intelligent species already engaged with that task.