The Fountains of Youth

“No matter what so-called weather controllers may say,” Captain Cardigan assured us, “the winds answer to no man. They can be mean and they can be furious—but Long John can take anything they throw at us and turn it to our advantage.”

I suppose he had every right to be proud and confident, and he certainly didn’t deserve to die, but I find it difficult to think of him as anything but a smug fool.

The majority of my fellow passengers was made up by the family of an eight-year-old girl named Emily Marchant. She was traveling with all twelve of her parents, and I remember churlishly thinking that they must be a far more coherent and generous team than my own had ever been. Six more passenger berths were taken by couples a little older than myself, undertaking early experiments in the awkward social art of pair-bonding.

On many occasions the ship might have had to set sail with its last remaining slot unfilled, because there were not many people likely to undertake such an expedition solo, but I was determined to make up at least some of the experience lost to me while I was raised in the shadow of Shangri-La. I was not intimidated by the thought of being an outsider in such a company. Captain Cardigan and his crew—which included a chef-programmer as well as the customary service staff—added a further eight to our number.

I was looking forward to the Creationist Islands, especially Marsupial Glory, Dragon Island, and the most famous of all those in the southern hemisphere: Oscar Wilde’s Orgy of Perfumes. I had visited the first two as a virtual tourist, but there is something slightly absurd about VE reproductions of scent and taste, and I knew that Wilde’s Creation would have to be experienced in the flesh if it were to mean anything at all.

I expected to spend the days that elapsed before we reached the islands su

Seasickness, by virtue of being partly psychosomatic, is one of the very few diseases with which modern internal technology is sometimes impotent to deal, and I was miserably confined to my cabin while I waited for my body and mind to make the necessary adaptive compact. I was bitterly ashamed of myself, for I alone out of the twenty-eight people on board had fallen prey to the atavistic malaise.

I was ill throughout the night of the twenty-second and the following day. There was to be a lavish deck party on the night of the twenty-third, which was forecast to be calm and bright, and I convinced myself for all of five minutes that I might be well enough to attend. As soon as I had gotten to my feet, however, my stomach rebelled and my legs turned to jelly. I was forced to return to my bed in abject misery. While my traveling companions—to whom I had barely been introduced as we waited to board the vessel—were enjoying themselves hugely beneath the glorious light of the tropic stars, I lay in my bunk, half-delirious with discomfort and lack of sleep.

I thought myself the unluckiest man in the world—although it turned out that I was, in fact, one of the luckiest.

The combined resources of my internal nanotech and my solicitous suitskin could not make me well, but they could and did contrive to put me to sleep. I have a vague memory of disturbing dreams, but I am reasonably certain that I did not actually awake until I was hurled from my bed on to the floor of my cabin. From that moment on, however, my memory is crystal clear, even after all this time. Although this is the only passage in my autobiography for which I have no objective record to serve as a crutch, I am quite certain of its accuracy.

NINE

I thought at first that I had simply fallen—that I had been tossing and turning in consequence of my illness, which had thus contrived to inflict one more ignominy upon me. When I couldn’t recover my former position after spending long minutes fruitlessly groping about amid all kinds of mysterious debris, my first assumption was that I must be confused. When I couldn’t open the door of my cabin even though I had the handle in my hand, I took it for granted that my failure was the result of clumsiness. When I finally got out into the corridor, and found myself crawling in shallow water with the artificial bioluminescent strip beneath instead of above me, I thought I must be mad.

One of the things Captain Cardigan had proudly told us as we were about to embark was that his pride and joy was absolutely guaranteed to be unsinkable. Even if Long John were to crash, he assured us, Genesiswas so cleverly designed and constructed that it was physically impossible for her to be holed or overturned. I had taken note of his assurance because, having been raised in a high valley whose only source of water was melting snow, I had never learned to swim. When I finally worked out, therefore, that the boat seemed to be upside down, I could not quite believe the evidence of my eyes and my reason. When I also worked out that the hectic motion I was feeling really was the motion of the upturned boat and not a subjective churning of my guts, I was seized by the absurd notion that my seasickness had somehow infected the hull of the craft. No matter what mental gymnastics I performed, however, I could not find any other explanation for being on my hands and knees, fighting to keep my balance, and that my palms and kneecaps were pressed to a strip light that had definitely been situated on the ceiling of the corridor when I had gone into my cabin. What was more, both my forearms and my thighs were immersed in ten or twelve centimeters of hot water.

There must be a second strip light in the floor, I told myself, uncertainly, which has now come on while the other has gone off. Somebody must have been ru