The Fountains of Youth

SIXTY-NINE

In September 2945, when Lua Tawana was thirty-three years old, three of her co-parents—Mama Maralyne, Papa Ewald, and Mama Francesca—were killed when the helicopter in which they were traveling crashed into the sea near the island of Vavau during a violent storm.

The household had broken up some ten years earlier, when the divorce was formalized, but its members had not dispersed to any considerable degree. Mica, Tricia, and I had remained near neighbors, and because Lua remained in New Tonga rather than moving to another continent to complete her education, all the others took care to stay in touch. It seemed to me, in fact, that they made more effort to stay in touch than they had when we shared the same hometree, at least in the cases of Bana and Ng. The tragedy affected the survivors as powerfully and as intimately as Grizel’s death had affected the co-partners in my first marriage, but the circumstances were so different that it did not seem to me that history was repeating itself.

It was the first time that my remaining co-spouses, let alone my daughter, had had to face up squarely to the fact that death had not been entirely banished from the world. Like me, they had lost their parents one by one, save for a handful of ZT fosterers, but I was the only one who had ever lost an emortal spouse. This put me in a slightly awkward position because it meant that everyone involved immediately decided that, as the resident expert, I should shoulder not only the responsibility of helping Lua through the ordeal but also the responsibility of helping themto cope.

I could hardly object; was I not, after all, the world’s foremost expert on the subject of death?

“You won’t always feel this bad about it,” I assured Lua, while we walked together on the sandy shore looking out over the deceptively placid weed-choked sea. “Time heals virtual wounds as well as real ones.” I had said as much to Mica and Tricia, and they had both accepted it as gospel, but Lua reacted differently.

“I don’t want it to heal,” she told me, sternly. “I want it to be bad. It ought to be bad. It isbad. I don’t want to forget it or to get to a point were it might never have happened.”

“I can understand that,” I said, far more awkwardly than I would have wished. “When I say that it’ll heal I don’t mean that it’ll vanish. I mean that it’ll… become manageable. It won’t be so all-consuming. It won’t ever lose its meaning.”

“But it willvanish, won’t it?” she said, with that earnest certainty of which only the newly adult are capable. “Maybe not soon, but it will go. People do forget. In time, they forget everything.Our heads can hold only so much. So it willlose its meaning. In time, it’ll be as if I never had anyparents. It won’t matter who they were, or whether they died, or how they died.”

“That’s not true,” I insisted, taking her hand in mine. “Yes, we do forget. The longer we live, the more we let go, because it’s reasonable to prefer our fresher, more immediately relevant memories, but it’s a matter of choice.We cancling to the things that are important, no matter how long ago they happened. We can make them part of us, and we keep them forever. Even if we forget them, they’re still among the forces that make and shape us. Without them, we’d be different.”

“I suppose so,” she conceded—but I couldn’t tell whether she meant it, or whether she was trying to be kind to a no-longer-functional parent.

“I was nearly killed in the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, you know,” I reminded her. “That was nearly four hundred years ago. Emily Marchant was a little girl, far younger than you are now. She saved my life, and I’ll never forget it. I’d be lying if I said that I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday, because I don’t, but I know that that was the most important event in my life and hers. If it hadn’t happened, I would be a very different person, and so would she—and because of the influence I’ve had on your upbringing, so would you, however slightly. Maybe that doesn’t matter so much in your case or mine, but if Emily Marchant were different, Titan wouldn’t be the world it is today. The history of the whole outer system would have developed differently, and with it—to a small but measurable degree—the history of the human race.”

“Is she really that important?” Lua asked. She’d heard me talk about Emily many times before, of course, but she’d only ever been interested in Emily the child, Emily the survivor. I’d told her about the ice palaces, and she’d visited them in VE, but I’d never mentioned the highkickers’ grandest plans. I’d never discussed Julius Ngomi’s teasing inquiries about Jupiter in the hometree or taken time out to explain any of the other festering conflicts of interest between the Earthbound and space-faring humanity.

“I believe she’s as important as anyone alive,” I said. “It came as a surprise to me when I first began to see it, but I’m reasonably sure that she’s one of the rare individuals who can actually make a big difference. It’s partly because she’s so rich, but it’s mostly because of the way she got rich and the way she’s fed her wealth into ambitious projects. She’s a mover and shaker, not of rocks and trees but of worlds. Mama Maralyne could have explained the exact nature of her work far better than I can—and Mama Mica still can—but she’s more than just a gantzer of genius. She’s at the very heart of the enterprise that will extend the Oikumene to the stars.”

“And yousaved her life when she was still a child,” said Lua, teasingly. “Everything she achieves is really down to you.”

“That’s not what I said,” I reminded her, although she was an adult, albeit a very young one, and she knew as well as I did that there’s always a difference between what people say and what they mean to imply. “Emily could swim and I couldn’t. If she hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the hull. I’d never have had the courage to do it on my own, but she didn’t even give me the choice. She told me I had to do it, and she was right.”

I paused, feeling a slight shock of renewed revelation even though it was something I’d always known and always accepted.

“She lost her entire family”I went on. “She’s fine now, but I’m absolutely certain that she hasn’t forgotten any one of them—and she had twelve parents, not the standard eight. She can still feel the force of their loss. That’s what I’m really trying to tell you, Lua. In four hundred years’ time, you’ll still remember what happened, and you’ll still feel it, but you’ll be all right. It’ll be part of you—an important part of you—but it won’t have reducedyou in any injurious way. You’ll be a mover and shaker too, maybe of worlds.”

“Right now,” she said, looking up at me so that her dark and soulful eyes seemed unbearably huge and sad, “I’m not particularly interested in being all right, let alone moving and shaking. Right now, I just want to cry.”

“That’s fine,” I told her. “It’s okay to cry. Being over thirty doesn’t mean that you have to give up crying. I didn’t. I still haven’t.”

I led by example. It was probably the most intimate moment we ever shared, but there were many less intimate that left similarly indelible and far more precious marks on my memory and my heart.

Lua Tawana continued to grow up, and her remaining parents continued to drift apart, but I was a parent forever afterward, and a changed man because of it.

SEVENTY

I remained on Neyu for forty years after Lua Tawana left the archipelago. None of my surviving co-parents was in any greater hurry to leave the island. Banastre was the first to depart for another continent, followed by Tricia, but they both returned at irregular intervals, often making special trips to coincide with Lua’s visits. I continued to see Mica socially and even got together with Ng at widely spaced but fairly regular intervals. Although we had never been a close family the fact that the five survivors had shared a significant loss continued to bind us together.