The Fountains of Youth

“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 hadto 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 Genesisfor an authentically unsinkable life raft.

But Emily was right. We coulddo 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 Genesiswas 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 Genesishad first been rudely upturned by the boiling sea.

TWELVE