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.
“There’s running and running” Julius Ngomi informed me, unhelpfully. “The UN takes care of all the superficial bureaucracy, and they do a damn fine job. We work at a slightly deeper level—no pun intended. We help control the ebb and flow of the world’s money. You might think of us as one of the fingers of the Invisible Hand.”
Even at the age of fifteen, I knew what the Invisible Hand was.
“I thought the Invisible Hand was supposed to work on its own,” I said.
“That’s the official story,” Julius Ngomi agreed, “but economics is even more fantastic than history. Back in Adam Smith’s time the invisible hand was supposed to be a mere statistical aggregation of the demand generated by the separate pursuit of individual interest by billions of would-be consumers and the supply generated by attempts to meet that demand profitably, but it was never as simple as that. The difference didn’t matter much when even the wealth of nations was beyond the reach of effective management, because no one had the ability actually to calculate the sum and keep track of all its changing terms—but things have changed.
“The only way the economy could be planned in the days of the old Old Human Race was by the exercise of political brute force to override and channel individual interest. Then the supercomputer happened along, and the workings of spontaneous individual interest became something not merely measurable on a day-to-day basis but futuristically calculable. Demand could already be influenced, of course, in all kinds of clever ways, but the influences were as separate and spontaneous as the interests themselves until it became possible to weigh them and balance them and build them into patterns. So the twenty-first century’s best and bravest put their wise heads together and said, Hey, let’s buy up the world and usher in the Golden Age of Planned Capitalism. If we’re clever enough, I bet we could organize the stock market crash to end all stock market crashes and come out of it with enough corners in genemod primary produce to obtain effective commercial control of two-thirds of the world’s surface—and then we can reel in the other third at our leisure, as long as we never let anyone mention the unholy word Trust. It won’t be as much fun as conquering the universe, but that plan’s on hold for the time being, and this one’ll be a hell of a lot more convenient. So here we are, in the twenty-sixth century, with the effective ownership of the real world in the hands of half a dozen intricately interlinked megacorps, each one dominated by half a dozen major shareholders. Those dominant shareholders have charged their directors and managers with the duty of keeping the economic lifeblood of humankind pumping in an orderly and healthy fashion while its multitudinous heads dream on in the heady clouds of the Universe Without Limits. So that’s what we do.”
“Oh,” I said, while I was trying desperately to think of a question that would sound sufficiently intelligent. All I could think of, in the end, was “Why here? Why not a nice plush officetree in Moscow or Vienna?”
“They’re nice places to work and play,” Ngomi agreed, “but they’re no place to bring up a child. Too many distractions. Even the UN bureaucrats recognize that serious business requires a certain strategic isolation and manifest austerity. You should be grateful that we take our vocation so seriously. It’s your inheritance, as well as mine, we’re keeping in good order. Think of us as fosterers of your entire generation, of the new New Human Race itself. Even those of us who are only false emortals accept the responsibility of making sure that they hand the world over to the true emortals in the best possible condition. That’s a hell of a lot more than the old Old Human Race did for our grandfathers—a hell of a lot more. Sara and I don’t actually live here, of course. We just serve our tours of duty once or twice a year. It’s a stressful job, and we need our rest—and it’s also the kind of job that can get awkwardly addictive, so it’s best to spread the work around. Megalomania is so unbecoming.”
His tone was never less than pleasant, but he wasn’t really sharing a joke with me, or even pretending to. He wasn’t testing me to see how much of what he said I could follow. He was just amusing himself: taking the edge off his monkish exile. If anything had showed on the flatscreens Sara Saul was watching from the corners of her eyes that required her finger of the Invisible Hand to twitch, they’d have bundled me out—but for the moment, the finger was poised above the pressure pad, waiting without any sense of urgency. So two bored adults were taking time out to play with the kid from next door.
Even the people who run the world sometimes pause for play—although rumor has it that dear old Julius hasn’t had much free time of late.
“Can I tell my parents what’s really here?” I asked. It seemed only polite to ask the question, even though I knew full well that they couldn’t stop me.
“Why would you want to do that?” the still-young Julius Ngomi asked me. “I bet this is the first real secret you’ve ever had. Why give it away? Everyone ought to have a piggy-bank full of secrets. You can tell anyone you want—but you’d run the risk that they wouldn’t even be interested and that their disinterest would devalue your informational capital. It really is best to plan these things, Mortimer. Today could be an important step in the making of your secret self, the shaping of your unique identity. None of your co-parents is ever going to climb up here to check your story no matter what you tell them, so why not invent your own Shangri-La? Tru
th is whatever you can get away with.”
“Don’t lead the boy astray, Julie,” said Sara Saul. “Tell your parents what you like, Mortimer. We’re not working in secret—we just don’t advertise our private addresses. Everybody knows we’re somewhere. They’d probably be amused to think of us renting space in a junk mountain—except that it’s not really junk. You have to be careful about taking Julie’s way of telling things too seriously. What’s stored in all these chambers is the real substance of history; the myths spun out in the Labyrinth are just its ghost.”
“A library,” I said, suddenly remembering the original Shangri-La. “A library that would survive even if the Labyrinth got wiped out by the Doomsday Virus.”
“That’s right,” said Sara Saul.
Julius Ngomi laughed. “All civilizations have to live in the ruins of their predecessors,” he said. “Even the ones that never get hit by the Ultimate Weapon. We true emortals are luckier than most, but we’ll still be handing down our garbage as well as our gold.”
“How far down does it go?” I asked, wondering whether the entire Himalayan plateau might be hollowed out to receive the artifacts that the econosphere no longer required—while the rock that was removed to make room for them was, of course, shaped into new artifacts.
“Not far,” said Sara Saul. “We’ve barely scratched Earth’s crust. My kind will have to leave it to true emortals like you and Julie to excavate the mantle and the core and move the planet’s insides to the outside as skyscrapers of steel. The asteroid rebuilders are just practicing—the real architects are yet to come. If you can restrain your impulse to scale dangerous heights, Mortimer, you might see the beginnings of the metamorphosis. If you care to join the Type-2 Crusade, you might well play a part in it.”
“But it would be silly to exercise too much restraint,” Julius Ngomi observed. “It would be foolish to miss out in the present for the sake of seeing a little more of the future unfold. I think you’re one of nature’s climbers, Mortimer. I think you’re the kind of person who’ll always be prepared to dice with death, provided that the dice are suitably loaded.”
I wasn’t sure about that, even then, but I didn’t say so. I was fifteen, and I had scaled a dangerous slope. I hadn’t found what I’d expected to find—but wasn’t that the whole point of scaling dangerous heights? What on Earth would be the point of hollowing out the world if you didn’t put the matter you removed to profitable use?
“Can I come back again?” I asked.
“If you like,” said Sara Saul. “But there’s nothing more to see. Just us, or others like us, laboring patiently.”
“Nothing except garbage,” said Julius Ngomi. “More garbage than you could ever find the time to look at, even if you lived ten thousand years.”
SIX
I did go back to Shangri-La—not often, and not for any particular purpose, but I did go. The climbing did me good. Keeping the secret of the true nature of the edifice from my incurious parents, at least for a little while, also did me good. Secrets make it easier for children to grow apart from their families.
It wasn’t until 2544, when I read the obituaries, that I actually realized who Sara Saul was and what it was that was dying with her. She was a lineal descendant and material heir of Leon Gantz, the inventor of “biological cementation”—and, of course, its converse, “biological deconstruction.” She had been born from a Helier womb just like everybody else, but her co-parents really had been a real family engaged in the business of protecting the most fabulous fortune ever accumulated by a single human family.
Sara Saul, I eventually discovered, was one of a double handful of people who really did own and run the world while she was alive—but she’d still shriveled like a decaying fruit, and the color had drained out of her along with the life. She’d had more temporal power than any Hindu god, but she’d been mortal. All she had been able to do with what she had, in the end, was protect it for a while and then pass it on. To her credit, she really had seen that as a vocation and had tried to do it as best she could.
She was the first person with whom I was personally acquainted to die. I knew that she would not be the last—but I also knew that the number would be finite. I understood, too, those of us who came after her would have to learn to redefine the concept of “vocation,” wherever we figured in the hierarchy of Earth’s stewardship; we could no longer rely on mortality to set its limits for us.
It wasn’t long after my first success in mountain climbing that the time came for me to leave my loving family, although five years seemed a great deal longer then than it does now. At the time, I was impatient to depart, hardly able to wait for the moment when I would be able to leave my Nepalese hometree to enter a community of my peers. Although the fracture lines of their little community stood out sharp and clear I think all my parents were dismayed by my impatience. Papa Laurent wasn’t the only one who strove with all his might to convince me that I ought to treasure the years of my adolescence, to look sideways as well as forward, and to take stock of what I already had as carefully as I counted the freedom that would soon be mine.
“You shouldn’t be in such a hurry,” Mama Eulalie told me. “Looking back, I have to admit that I must seem to have been in a hurry all my life, but I’m Old Human Race and even I could have benefited from slowing down a little. You’re New Human Race, and you can certainly afford to take things easier.”
“Every boy-child longs to be free of his parents,” Papa Nahum told me, “and every boy-child regrets it later. You’ll have a long time to regret it when we’re gone—and we shall be going, Morty, sooner than you think. I’m the youngest, and even I’m halfway to the grave. Get the most out of us while you can.”
I didn’t listen. What child ever does?
There was no fixed period to the business of co-parenthood even in those historically transitional days, but there still seems to be a natural term to the time that any group of people can remain together as an effective team. After twenty years, frayed relationships generally reach breaking point. Not all relationships fray at the same rate, and a few have the strength to resist fracture for far longer, but each of my eight foster parents had to maintain seven different relationships with his or her partners, so the enterprise involved a total of twenty-eight distinct pair-bonds. According to the conventional theory of microsocial dynamics, a collective cannot be sustained once half of its subsidiary pair-bonds have fallen into irredeemable disrepair, and when I remember my co-parents—however fondly—I find it difficult to imagine that one pair-bond in five could ever have been in a healthy state. Even so, they were sorry to part, and not just for my sake.
I understand now that my parents were good and tolerant people. I understand how it was that they quarreled so much and yet never descended to hatred, or even to mute hostility. The nucleus of their common interest in my maturation could not exert sufficient attractive power to keep them in their orbits indefinitely, but they weren’t glad to be sent hurtling apart at so many different tangents. As soon as I had no further need of their all being together the whole system flew apart, but it seemed to them to be a sad moment, and that I was so delighted to be going must have hurt them all. It was left to me to decide exactly when I would depart for a different community, thus setting the date on which my loving co-parents scattered to the ends of the earth and beyond, and I seized the opportunity without having any idea of the value of that which I was casually shattering. They remained my parents, ever willing to serve as home providers, friends, mentors, and supporters, but after I took my leave, they were no longer marriage partners. After I left I never saw more than three of them together, but it wasn’t until most of them were dead that I began to feel the force of that loss.
Once it was determined that I would go to Adelaide, in Australia, to attend university it was soon settled that Papa Dom would go to Antarctica, Papa Laurent to France, Mama Eulalie to the Peruvian Andes, Papa Nahum to Alaska, Mama Meta and Mama Siorane to the moon, Mama Saj
da to Central Africa, and Papa Ezra to New Zealand, but we continued to keep in touch. Papa Dom was, after all, absolutely right: in the Virtual World, everywhere within lunar orbit is close at hand, and even Jupiter and Saturn aren’t so very far away when they’re on the same side of the sun as Earth.
Seven
Although my memories of the period are understandably hazy I feel sure that I had begun to see the fascination of history long before the crucial event that determined my path in life. I’m sure that I took the kernel of that fascination with me from the valley, and I’m fairly sure that I had it even before I climbed the mountain to Shangri-La for the first time. I must have, or the meeting in the mountain could not have had such a powerful effect.
I have, of course, reproduced the details of my first conversation with Julius Ngomi and Sara Saul with the aid of records made at the time, but I do remember, even to this day, the impression left on me by Ngomi’s careful heresies. There was already something within me that responded to the mantra, “All history is fantasy,” and to the idea of a mountain whose bowels were constipated with the archival detritus of past ages.
In the context of my university studies history seemed—in stark contrast to the disciplined coherency of mathematics or the sciences—to be magnificent in its hugeness, amazingly abundant in its data, and charmingly disorganized. I thought of myself as a very orderly and organized person and looked to the study of history to loosen me up a little—but I looked forward even then to the day when I might be able to impose a little of my own orderliness and organization upon the hectic muddle of the past. I was determined from the very beginning that my vocation was to enhance understanding by negotiating between different accounts of how and why and by calming the waters of dissent. If, as Julius Ngomi had suggested, truth was what I could get away with, I wanted to get away with something virtuous as well as grandiose—but I arrived at Adelaide without having the least idea of exactly what that might be.
The Fountains of Youth Page 3