The Fountains of Youth (20 page)

“Only some of them,” I said. “It just happened to include the two who had most to say. But no, I certainly haven’t been avoiding you, or even trying to keep you at arm’s length. And as it happens, I’m not as poor as I was after my first divorce and probably won’t ever be again. My dividend from the credit Papa Ezra and Mama Siorane piled up while they were working off-planet was quite substantial. It’s mostly spent now, of course, but my
History
has begun to produce an income of sorts….” I trailed off again, realizing all of a sudden that what I thought of as an income must look like very small change to someone who had been rich last time I spoke to her and was now “forty or fifty times” richer.

“I owe it all to you,” she murmured, reading my mind. She murmured because she knew what my response would be.

“You don’t owe nearly as much to me as I owe to you,” I reminded her, before pressing on with indecent haste. “I take it that Lillie Marleen’s going the same way as Cape Adare now—ice castles lining the main street and running a ragged ring around the old town?”

“You mean that you haven’t even
seen
it?” I had contrived to take her aback.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never been to Cape Hallett, let alone Lillie Marleen, although the neighbors I do see keep telling me that I should. I’ve been very busy. Is it really as wonderful as they say?”

“Morty,” she said, with a sigh, “Lillie Marleen is currently number two on the official list of the world’s Seven Wonders. It makes Cape Adare’s ice palaces look like a set of drinking glasses set upside down to drain beside a sink. Don’t you ever watch the news?”

“Only the headlines,” I told her. “I’m a historian. At my present rate of progress, I expect to catch up with the twenty-seventh century in three or four hundred years’ time.”

“Oh, Morty,” she said, with a much heavier sigh. “You were my first substitute parent, if only for three days. You’re supposed to provide me with a role model, to be a source of inspiration. Here am I, playing a major part in the remaking of the Continent Without Nations, providing the wherewithal for the greatest art form of the fin-de-siecle, and you’re still stuck in the second century, apart from scanning the headlines. Don’t you
ever
get out, even in a VE hood?”

“I’ve seen most of the Cape Adare ice castles from the inside,” I told her, “and it’s only ten years or thereabouts since I spent a whole week in Amundsen.”

“Doing something for the UN?”

“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I was in hospital the whole time. I told you—I was injured. My leg was crushed while I was helping to rescue a man who’d fallen into a crevasse. It took days to grow new tissues, and the best part of a year to educate the leg so that it felt as if it was really
mine.”

I expected her to sigh again, but she laughed instead. “You have to let me take you out,” she said. “Not once or twice, but fifty or a hundred times. I expect you’ll hate it, but you have to do it anyway. I can’t have you thinking that those glorified goblets over the way are the pinnacle of
ice-palace achievement. I can show you light games you can never have imagined—and you’ll look at them even if I have to drag you. They’re the first fruit of my hands-on endeavors. I was
really annoyed
when you were so dismissive of that particular resolution, and I need to make you suffer by showing you what I’ve achieved.”

“I still have a problem with psychosomatic conditions,” I reminded her. “I always have to wear masks to protect me from snow blindness and summer rhapsody. I have trouble in ice palaces.”

“It’s
September
, Morty,” she said, with mock exasperation. “Equinox time. If I wanted to blow your mind completely I’d leave it till December and the solstice. This will be a
gentle
introduction, just to get you in the mood. It’s my pride and joy, Morty. You can’t say no.”

I remembered what Mia Czielinski had said about having a duty to explore the world’s possibilities. As a historian, I knew it wasn’t possible, because possibilities are lost with every day that passes, and even in the Age of Everyman an individual really is an individual, incapable of being in two places at the same time. As Emily Marchant’s friend and mentor, though, I knew that I really had fallen down on the job and that it was high time I learned to swim again, metaphorically speaking. I didn’t realize then how long it would be before I saw her in the flesh again, but I certainly realized how long it had been since I had last seen her, and I was appalled at my negligence in leaving it so long.

“I wasn’t dismissive,” I said, defensively. “I just had my own path to follow. I thought
you
were being dismissive. It’s nearly ready, you know. Just a few more months.”

“By then,” she said, “I’ll probably be gone—but that won’t matter, will it? The Labyrinth is everywhere: the Universe Without Limits. Wherever I am, I’ll always be able to keep in touch with your work. Mine isn’t like that. To know what I amount to, you have to see and feel and touch the solid reality. I know you’re not ready to follow me on the next leg of the journey, but I’m damned if I’ll let you miss out on this one. You have to see what I’ve made, and you have to see it
with me”

“I will,” I said, wilting before the onslaught. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I
suppose the next few weeks qualified as a holiday, even though I went home almost every night. It was the first holiday I’d taken since my second divorce and might even have qualified as the first since my aborted trip on
Genesis
, given that all the trips I’d taken with the Lamu Rainmakers and Sharane had been calculated to mingle a certain amount of study with the tourism. I can honestly say, however, that I had not the slightest intention of including the ice palaces of Lillie Marleen, Dumont D’Urville, and Porpoise Bay in my history of death.

That was perhaps as well, as I would have struggled in vain to recapture the subjective essence of the experience. To say that it was intoxicating would hardly have done it justice; each edifice was an entire gallery of psychotropic effects. At first, being inside the ice palaces made me dizzy and queasy, but Emily was relentless. She refused to believe that I couldn’t adapt, and by degrees I did. Pm sure that I never learned to see them as she did, but I did begin to grasp the awesome wonder and sublimity of their structure.

I had always accepted the conventional wisdom which said that Isaac Newton was mistaken in identifying seven colors in the rainbow, having been prejudiced toward that number for mystical reasons, and that there were really only five: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Emily’s ice palaces taught me that I and the world had been quite wrong and that the human eye was capable of more education in this regard than nature had ever seen fit to provide. There are, in fact, at least a dozen colors in the visual spectrum, and perhaps as many as twenty—although we have not, to this day, attained a consensus in naming them.

When visiting Mia Czielinski and my other neighbors on Adare I had thought of “adaptation” to the ice palaces as a mere matter of soothing reflexive discomfort and disturbance, but what Emily’s architecture demanded was something far more complex and far reaching. I was woefully inadequate to the task—and I knew that I would never be prepared
to put in the kind of work that would have been necessary to raise my perceptiveness even as far as mediocrity.

“Can’t you get the same effects with glass?” I asked Emily, wondering why the earliest gantzers had not discovered a similar art form when they had first begun to work with biotech-fused sand.

“Similar,” she admitted, “but they’re much harder to manage. Not worth the effort, in my opinion, although artists in the tropic zones have already joined the competition. Most of the light-management work in an ice palace is done by the skin that mediates between the warm spaces and the cold walls. Quite apart from the fact that glass working doesn’t require membranes of that sort, they’re brand-new technology, unique to the new generation of shamirs.”

“But glass houses have been around for a long time,” I observed. “Surely
somebody
glimpsed these kinds of possibilities.”

“Back in the twenty-second century the main priority was making sure that glass houses were safe, in the sense that they wouldn’t break if you threw stones at them,” she told me. “They were so crude, optically speaking, that it’s no wonder that nobody managed to lay foundation stones for this kind of artwork. In those days, gantzing was just a matter of sticking things together and making sure they stayed stuck. You got a lot of glitter, but there was no practical way to increase the scale and delicacy of the prismatic effects. Ice-palace-like effects couldn’t be foreshadowed in glass even in the twenty-fourth century, when the first true shamirs came in.”

“Well,” I said, looking up into the heady heights of a kaleidoscopically twisted spire, “you’ve certainly made up for lost time. This is the work of a genius.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, with sincere modesty. “Once you’ve mastered a few simple tricks the effects are easy to contrive. I got a head start because I devised the techniques—now that I’ve shown the way, real architects are beginning to take over the reins.”

“But you’re still learning,” I pointed out. “You could stay ahead of the game if you put your mind to it. Maybe it’s time for you to move on to work in glass.”

“Absolutely not. Ice is my medium. But there’s ice and
ice.
This is
just a beginning. As soon as the twenty-eighth gets under way I’ll be off to where the real action is.”

“The Arctic?” I said, foolishly.

“Hardly,” she said. “There’s no scope here for real hands-on work.”

It finally dawned on me that by “here” she meant Earth, and that what she’d meant when she’d first mentioned the next step on her journey—the one that she knew I wouldn’t be able to take—she’d meant a journey into space.

“This is just the beginning,” she added, while I was still working it out. “When the twenty-eighth century gets under way, I want to be where the real action is.”

“The moon?” I said, foolishly.

“Titan, Dione, and Enceladus,” she replied. “Then on to Nereid and Triton. So far, the colonists of the outer planet satellites have only been digging in, excavating nice warm wombs way down where the heat is. For five hundred years we’ve been imagining the conquest of space as if we were moles. Glass is poor stuff by comparison with ice, but water ice might not be the optimum. All
this
is just icing on a cake, Morty. It’s not even continental engineering. The next generation of shamirs will lay the groundwork for planetary engineering. Not boring old terraformation—
real
planetary engineering. Give me four hundred years, Morty, then come visit me in the ice palaces of Neptune’s moons, and I’ll show you a work of art.”

All I could say in response to that, in my feeblest manner, was, “You’re going to the far edge of the Oikumene? That’s as far from home as you can go.”

“For the moment. It won’t seem so far once the kalpas report in—but for now, it’s where the opportunities are.”

“But you’re rich,” I said, redoubling my foolishness. “You have more credit than you’ll need for a millennium and more. You don’t need to leave Earth to seek your fortune.”

“Not
that
kind of opportunity, Morty,” she said, without a hint of mockery or censure. “The opportunities of the future. Once you’ve caught up with the twenty-seventh century, you know, you’ll have to catch up with the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth, and in the end,
you’re bound to run into the present. Then, even
you
will have to look forward—and that will mean looking
upward.
I know you can do it, Morty, and I know you will, when you’re ready. You learned to swim, eventually, and you haven’t had a headache for days. You’ve adapted to
this
kind of enlightenment. It’s only a matter of time before you can see the way the world is going—the way the Oikumene is going.”

“Enlightenment” was what the architects of ice palaces called their new art. I’d always thought it a mere affectation, more than a trifle disrespectful to the heroes of the eighteenth-century revolutions in thought and theory—but I realized when Emily used the word that it was layered far more deeply with deliberate ambiguities than I’d previously understood.

“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, mechanically having not quite recovered my composure. “The Gaean extremists will never turn it into a nature reserve. We’ll have to keep making room for new generations by exporting a percentage of the population, but there’ll always be a role for the old. For educators. For
historians”

“But you’re
not
old, Morty,” Emily reminded me. “Youth shouldn’t be a mere preparation for being old. Neither should adulthood. You can’t decide now what you’ll be in three hundred or three thousand years’ time—and if you can, you shouldn’t. One day, Morty, your history of death will be finished—and it will be no good sitting down to start a history of life, because that’s just the other side of the same coin. You’ll have to start on the future, just like the rest of us. It wouldn’t do you any harm to get a little practice, would it?”

“It’s not like that,” I told her, although I wasn’t sure that I could even convince myself of it. “I may be a historian, but I live my everyday life in the present, just like everybody else. There’s nothing wrong with being contentedly Earthbound.”

“You’ve been living in a fake lighthouse for more than twenty years,” she pointed out, “without even realizing that an entire city of light was growing up just over the horizon. Don’t you think that says something about the kind of person you’re in danger of becoming?”

Her rhetoric had come a long way since she was eight years old, and I hadn’t been able to resist its force even then.

“I’m not a recluse,” I told her, realizing as I said it that it was exactly what I was. “I’m just trying to be myself,” I added, realizing as I said it
that I still had not the slightest idea what that was supposed to mean.