The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  Climate control had, of course, been more carefully reinstituted once the great storm caused by the Coral Sea Disaster had abated, and the utter ruination of vast tracts of coastal land had given a new lease on life to the UN’s Land Development Agency. The Agency had resolved to remedy many alleged mistakes made by Ancient Nature, which had been carried forward into the post-Crash era by mere historical momentum. All of my marriage partners except Grizel—who worked for the Ark Consortium—were salaried employees of the LDA. Collectively, therefore, we were relatively well-off, although I contributed far less than my companions to the household purse. What little credit I earned to add to my Allocation was earned by assisting my partners in various humble ways, although I hoped that my own work would eventually begin to generate net-access fees.

  We established a hometree in the town that the Rainmakers already used as a base: Lamu, on the coast of Kenya. Mama Sajda was living less than three hundred miles away, and she was the only one of my parents who took the trouble to travel to the ceremony. All of them expressed their delight, though, and I had no cause to suspect any of them of insincerity. They all thought that marriage would be better for me than my long honeymoon with the history of death, and I daresay that they were right.

  “Don’t take it too seriously, though,” Mama Sajda warmed me. “I’ve been married five times, and although I hate to generalize from such a small sample I think it’s safe to say that even though two isn’t usually company enough, eight is definitely a crowd. Don’t expect an easy ride, and don’t stick at it too long when the wheels fall off.”

  “Everything will be fine,” I assured her. “We don’t have excessive expectations. We’ve all had the opportunity to observe family life, and we know how stormy the emotional weather can get. I don’t say we’re unsinkable, but I’m sure that we’ve got enough life rafts handy, just in case.”

  “You don’t know the half of if it,” she assured me, “but you’ll learn.”

  I did learn. We all did. That was the whole point of the exercise.

  EIGHTEEN

  Although we had formed our marriage for general purposes of companionship rather than preparing for parenthood, we didn’t go in for overmuch fleshsex in the early years. We were still finding our various ways through the maze of erotic virtuality and had not yet come to terms, even provisionally, with our own eroto-aesthetic priorities. We did eventually take the time to explore most of the subsidiary combinations contained within the marriage, but we were careful—perhaps too careful—to keep the experiments casual lest petty jealousies should threaten the integrity of the whole. Tacitly, at least, we all accepted the conventional wisdom that the young ought to discover spice in variety and delight in many flavors. Whatever suspicions we retained of our various foster parents and the cultural norms that we inherited, we were content to heed the advice that a broad range of experience is the only secure foundation for a gradual refinement of taste.

  The marriage was not conspicuously unhappy for any of us, and such quarrels as we had were muted. This may seem to be damning the whole enterprise with faint praise, but we had not expected it to be life defining. We were not in search of perfection but merely of a better understanding of the many modes and causes of social synergy and interpersonal friction. We went in for a good deal of sportive competition and those kinds of tourism that are best indulged in a group. We visited the other continents from time to time, but most of our adventures merely took us back and forth across Africa.

  We all became equally familiar with the trials and tribulations of camping out in the rain forest and the difficulty of keeping sunburn at bay in tropical cities gantzed out of yellow and roseate stone. Axel and Minna always wore suitskins that enclosed every part of their bodies, but the rest of us tended to follow convention by leaving our heads and hands naked. Camilla’s skin and bald head were heavily ornamented with ceramic inlays, but they did not protect her from the extremes of temperature, brightness, and humidity that frequently stretched the resources of our IT. I was tempted more than once to darken my skin to the same hue as Julius Ngomi’s, but I always settled for a less assertive shade of brown.

  “This is nothing,” Axel would say, from the safety of his biotech cocoon, whenever anyone complained about the violence of the sun. “Imagine what it must have been like in the days when the Sahara stretched from one side of Africa to the other and smart dress hadn’t been invented.” He was only slightly less annoying at such times than Grizel and Camilla were when they began to lament the almost total loss of what they insisted on misnaming “the first generation rain forest” and its accompanying biota. No matter how many bothersome flies and biting bugs their patient efforts restored to the forests and grasslands they always protested that the originals must have been far more interesting by virtue of the rich cargoes of infectious diseases they had carried and transmitted.

  “Biodiversity is one thing,” Jodocus said to Grizel, on one occasion, “but defending the rights of killer parasites is something else. Only a lawyer would sink to that.”

  I believe that her reply—supported by Keir as well as Camilla—included derisory references to “the bowdlerization of the biosphere,” “estate agent ecology,” and “niche fascism.” Such phrases were not meant entirely for comic effect.

  To begin with, I had a considerable affection for all the other members of my new family, but as time went by the usual accretion of petty irritations built up. Several proposals were made between 2565 and 2575 to make additions to the group’s personnel, but none received the necessary majority. It was, of course, much easier to arrange exits than negotiate new admissions, and the only modification that actually came about was Keir’s departure in 2578, as a result of an irreconcilable breakdown of his relationship with Eve.

  Eve disapproved of Keir’s political activities on behalf of a faction of the Gaean Liberationists, who were bitterly disappointed by the UN’s decision to return the population of the Earthbound to its pre-Decimation level in a matter of decades. Eve was a committed Garden Earther herself, but she never wavered in her conviction that the Garden had to be run for the benefit of humankind, whereas Keir became increasingly strident in his advocacy of population reduction with a view to restoring the empire of natural selection to continentwide wilderness reservations. Their ideological differences made it so difficult for Keir and Eve to work together, let alone live together, that one or the other of them had to leave the group.

  Keir intended to keep in touch with the rest of us, and we with him, but the resolution faded; although I had known him for some years before the marriage was made, it proved impossible simply to revert to the terms of our earlier relationship. After 2580 more than a hundred years passed before I heard from him again.

  Had things continued the way they were, I suppose I would have been the second deserter. Research for the second volume of my history—which I had begun while I was still constructing the first—drew me more and more frequently to Egypt and to Greece in the 2580s and early 2590s. The Rainmakers pointed out that I had no real need actually to travel in order to do the relevant research, but I disagreed.

  I explained as best I could that the parts of my project dealing with the remotest eras of antiquity had to be based on the evidence of artifacts rather than texts, and that one could not obtain a proper sense of the significance of artifacts from secondhand accounts and virtual experiences, but my partners were unimpressed. It was not that I did not trust the webs of information distributed through the Labyrinth, but I did not trust their sufficiency—and I was as passionate about sufficiency in those days as I was about urgency.

  Africa had been a uniquely valuable base for my study of the prehistory of death, but as soon as I moved on to history per se the pressure to find a base in Europe began to build. I would probably have obtained a formal divorce before the turn of the century, even though I knew that it would give my surviving parents more cause to disapprove of my chosen project, but I was spared the slight i
gnominy of an individual departure from a continuing group by a comprehensive breakup.

  Unfortunately, that tiny advantage was far outweighed by the shock and grief of the event that caused the general dissolution: Grizel’s death in 2594, at the age of seventy.

  Grizel died as most of the people lost in the Decimation had died, by drowning, but the circumstances were very different. From my point of view, though, there was one important point of similarity and one of distinction. I was with her, just as I had been with Emily Marchant on 23 March 2542, but I could not save her.

  NINETEEN

  Axel, Jodocus, and Minna were required by their work to range across the entire equatorial belt and often took trips to Nigeria. In spite of their constant complaints about the trips I took, the Rainmakers could not be content with secondhand information collected and collated by silvers regarding patterns of rainfall. They did not doubt its reliability, but they doubted its sufficiency.

  “You see, Mortimer,” Axel explained to me, totally ignoring that I had offered very similar explanations of my own endeavors, “there’s no substitute for taking a plane and flying over the territory so that you can see the whole thing as a piece. Statistical data is invaluable, of course, but a broad sweep of the eye can pick up on things that a whole legion of silvers could never pick out of the data drizzle.”

  It was entirely usual for some or all of the remaining marriage partners to accompany the Rainmakers on these trips. Anyone who felt in need of a change of scene was likely to regard it as a good opportunity. On the trip that led to tragedy, Grizel and I went with Axel and Minna to study the floodplain of the newly rerouted Kwarra. While Axel and Minna did so with all due scientific dispassion, from the air, Grizel and I “investigated” the flow of the river in a more lighthearted spirit, at ground level.

  I had not only learned to swim after so nearly losing my life in the Coral Sea but had become rather fanatical about it. It was not that I enjoyed it, particularly—although I certainly found it great fun if my mood and the circumstances were right—but that I had come to think of it as one of the most essential accomplishments of a New Human. Given that drowning was one of the few ways in which a New Human could perish with relative ease, it seemed to me to be necessary for every member of that race to make sure that he or she could fight such a fate with all his—or her—might.

  Grizel knew my opinion, and did not mock me for it, but she could not take the matter quite so seriously. She enjoyed swimming in a pool, but she saw no need to make strenuous efforts to learn to counter all the vagaries and treacheries of fast-flowing water. To her, I suppose, the seemingly slow-moving Kwarra must have appeared to be merely a big pool, which held no particular hazards.

  To tell the truth, when we went down to the water on the fateful day, even I had not the least inkling of any danger. The day was clear and windless and the surface of the river seemed utterly docile, despite that its level was higher than normal. Axel and Minna had flown off to survey the eastern tributaries, which descended from the Adamouwa Plateau, in the hope of gaining some insight into the reasons for the slightly excessive flow.

  As Grizel and I hid from the heat and the bright sun in the shaded shallows, our conversation was all to do with the lack of natural hazards in the immediate vicinity. Grizel, who always described herself as an “ecological purist,” thought the policies of the LDA, and Camilla’s department in particular, rather pusillanimous. She didn’t really want to see the return of such awkward water-borne parasites as bilharzia and the guinea worm, but she was entirely serious about wanting to restock the New Kwarra with crocodiles.

  “Crocodiles were around far longer than the other once-extinct species we’ve brought back,” she argued. “If any large-size species had security of tenure, it was them. They’d really proved their evolutionary worth, until we came along and upset the whole applecart. Anyway, they’re essentially lazy. They wouldn’t bother chasing people. Like most so-called predators they prefer carrion.”

  I didn’t bother trying to challenge her admittedly eccentric view of ecological aesthetics; I’d learned from long acquaintance that it was much safer to stick to practical matters. “They could still bite,” I pointed out, “and I doubt if they’d be particular if anyone strayed too close to their favorite lurking places. They were somewhat given to lurking, weren’t they?”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re a historian and should know better. If you care to consult the figures, you’ll see that far more old humans were crushed by hippos than were ever chewed by crocodiles—but we love our hippos, don’t we? The hippopotamus was one of the first species we brought back out of the banks when we started rebuilding African river ecologies.”

  I pointed out that we hadn’t brought the hippos back because they were harmless—after all, we’d also brought back lions, leopards, and cheetahs in the first wave of ecological readjustments—but because such danger as they posed was clearly manifest and easily avoidable. She wasn’t impressed.

  “It’s just puerile mammalian chauvinism,” she said. “Childish fur fetishism. Putting crocodiles at the bottom of the list is just antireptilian prejudice.”

  I didn’t bother to argue that the New Human fondness for birds gave the lie to the charge of mammalian chauvinism, because she’d simply have added feather fetishism to her list of psychological absurdities. Instead, I pointed out that we had been only too willing to resurrect cobras and black mambas. She was, alas, as happy as ever to shift her ground. “Once we were safely immune to their bites,” she scoffed. “Snakes are so much sexier than crocodiles—according to phallocentric fools.”

  She didn’t say in so many words that the category of phallocentric fools was one to which I belonged, but the implication was there. It wasn’t that which drew us apart, though; we were just drifting. As ever, she was happy to shift her ground as a matter of routine, even in the water. I let her go. I didn’t want to continue the verbal contest, and I let her go.

  On this occasion, she shifted and drifted too far. Although the surface seemed perfectly placid, the midriver current was quite powerful; once in its grip, even the strongest swimmer wouldn’t have found it easy to get out again.

  When Grizel found that the current was bearing her away she could have called for help, but she didn’t. She assumed that the worst that could happen to her was that she’d be carried a few hundred meters downstream before she could get back to the shallows. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred she would have been right, but not this time. As well as being more powerful than it seemed, the midriver current was carrying more than its fair share of debris—including waterlogged branches and whole tree trunks that might have traveled all the way from Adamouwa.

  When I became aware that Grizel was no longer near me she was still clearly in view. When I shouted after her, she just waved, as if to reassure me that all was well and that she’d rejoin me soon enough. I set out after her regardless. I didn’t have any kind of premonition—I just didn’t have enough confidence in the power of her arms and legs. I thought she might need my help to get back to the bank.

  I never saw the piece of wood that hit her. I don’t suppose she did either; it must have slid upon her as quietly and as insidiously as a crocodile. Logs in water are weightless, but they pack an enormous amount of momentum, and if a swimmer is trying with all her might to go sideways….

  I didn’t even see her go down.

  It can’t have been more than three or four seconds afterward when I realized that she was no longer visible, but even with the current to help me it took a further fifteen to get to the point at which I’d last seen her. I dived, but the water was very murky, clouded with fine silt.

  I ducked under again and again, moving southward all the time, but I calculated later that she was probably fifty or a hundred meters ahead of me and that I hadn’t made enough allowance for the velocity of the current. At the time, I was in the grip of a panicky haste. I was madly active, but I achieved nothing. I just kept du
cking under, hoping to catch sight of her in time to drag her head out of the water, but I was always in the wrong place. It was like a nightmare.

  In the end, I had to give up, or exhaustion might have made it impossible for me to beat the undertow. I had sanity enough to save myself from sharing Grizel’s fate—and I felt guilty about that for years.

  TWENTY

  Grizel’s body was eventually washed up at Onitsha, twenty kilometers downriver. There was a sharp bend there, left over from the days when the old Kwarra had been called the Niger, and the current couldn’t carry her around it.

  Her limbs had been chewed by something—not a crocodile, of course—and they’d been broken by rocks she’d encountered when she drifted briefly into white water. All that had happened after she was dead, though; she hadn’t been conscious of the mutilation.

  The postmortem confirmed that the branch had struck her on the temple, probably knocking her out instantaneously. Her dutiful IT had stopped the bleeding and protected her brain from the possibility of long-term damage, but it hadn’t been able to lift her head above the surface to let her breathe.

  Many people can’t immediately take in news of the death of someone they love. The event defies belief and generates reflexive denial. I didn’t react that way, although some of the others did. We all had mortal parents—and we had all lost at least some of them—but Grizel had been a ZT like us, capable of living for centuries, and perhaps millennia. Camilla’s reaction was the most perverse; even after seeing the body she simply couldn’t get her head around the idea that Grizel was dead and wouldn’t hear the words spoken. The three Rainmakers admitted the fact readily enough but shrugged it off with set features and ready clichés.