The Fountains of Youth

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The Fountains of Youth Page 5

by Brian Stableford


  “No,” I told her. “If we can just get these life jackets on and take this pod with us….”

  “It’s very big,” she said, dubiously—but I knew that if it had been designed to be carried up the stairs it would certainly go down them.

  Despite the rocking of the boat, I contrived to get one of the life jackets over Emily’s shoulders. “Don’t pull it yet,” I said, showing her where the ring pull was but firmly setting her hand away from it. “We have to get clear of the boat first. You have to swim as hard as you can—that way. Understand? Swim as hard as you can, and don’t pull until you’re sure you’re no longer under the boat. Then you’ll pop up to the surface. I’ll bring the life-raft pod.”

  “I’ve been a good girl,” she told me, with just a hint of bleakness in her awful sobriety. “I’ve never told a lie.”

  It couldn’t have been literally true, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was eight years old and she had every right to expect to live till she was eight hundred. She didn’t deserve to die. It wasn’t fair that she should. It wasn’t fair that she should lose her parents either but one misfortune didn’t license the other. I knew full well that fairness didn’t really come into it, and I expect she knew it too, even if my fellow historians and social commentators were wrong about the abolition of the primary artifices of childhood. I knew in my heart, though, that what she said was right, and that insofar as the imperious laws of nature ruled her observation irrelevant, the universe was wrong. It wasn’t fair. She had been a good girl. If she died, it would be a monstrous injustice.

  Perhaps it was merely a kind of psychological defense mechanism that helped me to displace my own mortal anxieties, but the horror running through me was exclusively focused on her. At that moment, her plight—not our plight, but hers—seemed to be the only thing that mattered. It was as if her dignified protest and her placid courage somehow contained the essence of New Human existence, the purest product of progress.

  Perhaps it was only my cowardly mind’s refusal to contemplate anything else, but the only thing I could think of while I tried to figure out what to do was the awfulness of what Emily Marchant was saying. As that awfulness possessed me it was magnified a thousandfold, and it seemed to me that in her lone and tiny voice there was a much greater voice speaking for multitudes: for all the human children that had ever died before achieving maturity; all the good children who had died without ever having the chance to deserve to die.

  “I can’t hold your hand, Emily,” I told her, as my own life jacket settled itself snugly about my torso. “It would make it too difficult for us to get away.”

  “You’re the one who can’t swim,” she reminded me.

  “I’ll be all right,” I assured her. “If you see the life-raft pack before you see me, the trigger’s here. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. We were both looking down into the hole in what had once been the ceiling of the corridor.

  “Don’t try to hold on to the ladder,” I advised her. “Just dive, as deep as you can. Then go sideways, until you can’t hold your breath any more. Then pull the ring. It’ll carry you up to the surface. I’ll be right behind you.” I was talking as much for my own benefit as hers. As she said, I was the one whose knowledge of swimming was purely theoretical. I was the one who would have to improvise.

  She didn’t move. She was paralyzed by apprehension.

  “I don’t think any more water can get in,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice, “but there’s only so much air. If we stay here too long, we’ll suffocate.”

  She was trying to convince herself. She was eight years old and hoped to live to be eight hundred, and she was absolutely right. The air wouldn’t last forever. Hours maybe, but not forever.

  “The survival pod will keep us alive for a week,” she added. She had obviously paid close attention to Captain Cardigan’s welcoming speech. She was probably the only passenger who’d actually bothered to plug the safety chips they’d handed out to all of us into her trusty handbook, like the good girl she was.

  “We can both fit into the pod,” I assured her, “but we have to get it out of the boat before we inflate it. It’s too big for you to carry.”

  “You can’t swim,” she reminded me.

  “It’s not hard,” I reminded her. “All I have to do is hold my breath and kick myself away from the boat. But you have to go first. I’ll get you aboard the life raft, Emily. Trust me.”

  “I do,” she said.

  I stared at her. There was no cause for wonder in the fact that she could be so calm and so controlled and yet not be able to hurl herself into that black airless void—but I had to get her out before I got out myself. I couldn’t show her the way because I couldn’t leave her alone.

  “Listen to the water on the outside,” she whispered. “Feel the rocking. It must have been a hurricane that overturned the boat… but we have to go, don’t we, Mister Mortimer? We have to get out.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The pod’s bright orange and it has a distress beacon. We should be picked up within twenty-four hours, but there’ll be supplies for a week.” I had every confidence that our suitskins and our internal technology could sustain us for a month, if necessary. Even having to drink a little seawater if our recycling gel clotted would only qualify as a minor inconvenience—but drowning was another matter. Drowning is one of the elementary terrors of emortality, along with a smashed skull, a fall from a great height and a close encounter with a bomb.

  “It’s okay, Mister Mortimer,” Emily said, putting her reassuring hand in mine for one more precious moment, so that we could both take strength from the touch. “We can do it. It’ll be all right.”

  And so saying, she leaped into the pool of darkness.

  ELEVEN

  I knew that I couldn’t afford to be paralyzed by apprehension, for Emily’s sake. I also knew—and am convinced of it to this very day—that if Emily hadn’t been there to create the absolute necessity, I would not have been able to lower myself through that hole. I would have waited, cravenly, until there was no more air left to breathe. While I waited, I might have been injured by the buffeting of the rigid-hulled boat, or the boat might have taken on water enough to go down, but I would have waited, alone and horribly afraid.

  I couldn’t swim.

  In the early twenty-sixth century, it was taken for granted that all members of the New Human Race were perfectly sane. Madness, like war and vandalism, was supposed to be something that our forefathers had put away, with other childish things, when they came to understand how close the old Old Human Race had come to destroying themselves and taking the entire ecosphere with them. It was, I suppose, true. Ali Zaman’s firstborns were, indeed, perfectly sane from the age of eight until eighty, and we lived in contentedly uninteresting times until 23 March 2542. We always knew what counted as the reasonable thing to do, and it was always available to us—but even we New Humans couldn’t and didn’t always do it. As sane as we undoubtedly were, we were still capable of failing to act in our own best interests. Sometimes, we needed an extra reason even to do what we knew full well we had to do—and I needed the responsibility of taking care of Emily Marchant to make me jump into the hot and seething sea, even though I could not swim, and trade the falsely unsinkable Genesis for an authentically unsinkable life raft.

  But Emily was right. We could do it, together, and we did.

  It was the most terrifying and most horrible experience of my young life, but it had to be done, and as soon as Emily had had time to get clear I filled my lungs with air and hurled myself into the same alien void. I had the handgrip of the life-raft pod tightly held in my right hand, but I hugged it to my chest nevertheless as I kicked with all my might, scissoring my legs.

  Much later, of course, I realized that if I had only followed Captain Cardigan’s instructions and read the safety manual, I would have known where to find breathing apparatus as well as a life raft. That would have done wonders for my confidence, although
it would not have made my feeble imitation of swimming any more realistic. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that it was pure luck and the seething of the sea that carried me far enough away from the boat to ensure that when I yanked the ring to inflate my life jacket I did indeed bob up to the surface.

  The surface of the sea was chaotically agitated, and the stars that should have shone so brightly were invisible behind a pall of cloud. I started screaming Emily’s name as soon as I had refilled my lungs. I had sufficient presence of mind to hang on to the pod’s handgrip while I pulled the trigger that would inflate the life raft. There was nothing explosive about its expansion, but it grew with remarkable rapidity, reducing me to a mere parasite hanging on to the side of what felt like a huge rubbery jellyfish. It was as blackly dark as everything else until the process reached its terminus, at which point the eye lights came on and exposed its garish orange color.

  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.

  TWELVE

  It 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 silen
ce 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.

  THIRTEEN

  The 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?

 

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