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“I suppose it’s an acquired taste,” I said to Mia Czielinski, the proud owner of the most spectacular of the Cape Adare ice palaces. “I’m just not sure that I’ve got enough time and enough mental fortitude to acquire it.”
“We all have the time,” she replied, censoriously. “As for mental fortitude—how can you possibly consent to miss out on anyvaluable experience? If we have eternity to play with, do we not have a duty to explore its possibilities?”
I could see that she had a point. She was not merely an emortal but an emortal raised by emortal parents, who had done their work under the influence of theories very different from those to which my own parents had paid heed.
“I’m only one man,” I said to Mia Czielinski. “We’re all individuals, and it’s the differences in our experience that shape and make us.”
“Not any more,” she said. “This is the Age of Everyman, when every single one of us may entertain the ambition to experience all human possibilities.”
I remember thinking, although I was too polite and too cautious to say it aloud, that one of us had a very poor understanding of transfinite mathematics.
THIRTY-FIVE
I realized eventually that the real reason for the tightness and formality of the burgeoning Cape Adare community was the need—which the newcomers to the Cape really did experience as a need—to be in and out of one another’s homes all the time during the summer months, savoring the intricate intimacies of each and every edifice. I realized too why my neighbors had not been in the least distressed by my failure to reciprocate their invitations. They would have been conspicuously disappointed if I had. I did, however, receive one actual visitor during my final years on the cape, who turned up on the doorstep una
She was frankly astonished by my own astonishment at her sudden appearance.
“I’ve been in Antarctica for months,” she said, “mostly just over the hill in Lillie Marleen. I’ve been frightfully busy, but I’ve been waiting for you to invite me over. I did leave you a message when I arrived.”
“I must have overlooked it or not taken it in—I had no idea you were here,” I said, knowing that it was a woefully inadequate response. It had never occurred to me, as I marveled at what my neighbors had done with a new generation of shamirs, that I had been acquainted for nearly a century with one of the most prominent figures in contemporary shamir design and theperson most likely to be making a fortune from ice-palace architecture.
I hadn’t seen Emily in the flesh since Steve Willowitch had ferried us to Australia in his copter. People are supposed to keep the VE images in their answerphone AIs constantly updated, but they never do. People are also supposed to use camera transmission when they phone instead of merely invoking their VE images, but they never do that either—so you never get a true appreciation of actual appearance from VE interaction, even VE interaction that hasn’t been allowed to slide into long silence. Emily had changed a great deal more than I had, but each of us was looking at a stranger.
“I should have called you anyway, message or no message,” I said, still floundering in embarrassment, “and I always meant to, but I never quite… I’ve been so fearfully busy, you see. I launched the third part of the Historylast month.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, in a slightly injured voice. “I shouldn’t have taken it for granted that it was safe to drop in.”
I was quick to make amends—or at least to try. “It’s alwayssafe,” I assured her. “For you, I’m always available.”
“I thought you might be avoiding me,” she said, arching her eyebrow a little. I’d seen exactly the same arch a dozen times while we were engaged in deep and meaningful conversation in our bouncing life raft, although she’d been a mere child. The difference between our ages would have seemed utterly unimportant to anyone else, but I could still see the child inside the adult, and she could still see the nonswimmer within the historian.
“Why would I do that?” I asked, mystified.
“Well,” she said, “last time we were in close touch I tried to force money on you, and you refused to accept it—and then you ran off and got married. Ever since then, there’s been a conventional tokenism about our conversations. I thought you hadn’t forgiven me. I don’t suppose you’ve grown much less poor in the interim, but you presumably know that I’ve gotten much richer. Forty or fifty times, I think—but it stacks up so fast that I can’t keep count. Your parents used to be very sniffy about commerce, as I remember.”
“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 Historyhas 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 ru
“You mean that you haven’t even seenit?” 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 sca
“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 pi