I knew what she meant, but I had a slightly pedantic mind-set even then. “Mortimer’s my first name, Emily, not my second,” I told her, “and the one thing we can be certain of is that whatever’s going on now isfair. All the maydays will be feeding into a ganglion somewhere in the Labyrinth, and a supersilver triage system will make sure that the help goes wherever it’s most urgently needed. Everything will be done in such a way as to ensure the greatest good of the greatest number. They must know that we’re not in any real danger—that the life raft will keep us alive for as long as necessary. They’ll come for us when they can.”
“But they’re not even talkingto us,” she said. “How bad can things be?”
For an eight year old, she was extremely sharp. I figured she deserved an honest answer. “Very, very bad indeed,” I admitted. “Whatever it is, it has to be the worst disaster in human history.”
“Worse than the Crash?” she queried.
“Worse than the Black Death,” I told her, bleakly. “Worse than the last Ice Age, and a hell of a lot quicker. At least as bad as the last big extinction event, if not the one that finally killed off the dinosaurs.” I realized as I said it that even the biggest station in near-Earth orbit couldn’t have caused that big a splash. One of the L-5 cylinders might have—but what could have moved it all the way from lunar orbit without any warning?
“How many people do you think it killed?” she asked, carefully raising her sights above the level of her own family. “Millions?”
“Perhaps millions,” I agreed, sadly.
“Like the Crash,” she said.
She was eight years old, and I didn’t dare ask her exactly what she meant by that. I was prepared to assume that she was only talking about numbers—but I was already a fledgling historian. I knew that the Crash had not been entirely a matter of accident and misadventure. At least some of the viruses that had sterilized the Old Human Race had been deliberately crafted for that purpose, by people who thought of themselves as the midwives and parents of a New Human Race. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Emily might, after all, have been right about that bomb, and whether some member of the realNew Human Race— ourNew Human Race—might have wearied of the slowness with which the world was being handed over to our control.
It was absurd, of course. No sanemember of the New Human Race could possibly have been as impatient as that, let alone as frankly evil-minded as that, but when you’re afloat in a life raft on an impossibly turbulent sea, having never had a chance to recover from seasickness, you can entertain thoughts that you would never entertain at any other time. The fact remained that whatever had caused this disaster wouldhasten the disappearance of the Old Human Race, at least in Australasia and Oceania.
That, in itself, was a sobering thought.
By the time night fell again we had become sufficiently well adapted to the pitching and tossing of the boat to sleep. My slumber was fitful and full of dreams, but Emily slept better and longer, only jerking awake once or twice when her reflexive grip on the handholds weakened and she felt herself moving too far too fast.
While we were awake throughout our second day afloat, we talked about anything and everything except our parents.
I told Emily about the valley in the Himalayas, and the Hindu monks, and the genetically engineered yaks, and the secrets of Shangri-La. She told me about her own home tree in the middle of what had been the outback before the Continental Engineers had constructed the largest of all their irrigation schemes and made it bloom again.
I told her everything I had learned about the hollow mountains full of the world’s dross. She told me everything she knew about the Black Mountains of the Northern Territory, whose hollow interiors were vast factories converting the energetic produce of the SAP forests to every conceivable purpose.
We talked about the latest news from Mars and the Oort Halo and the fact that the so-called kalpa probes would soon be overtaking the first-generation Arks, launched in the early years of the Crash by megacorp men half-convinced that Earthbound man was not going to make it through the crisis. We agreed that when the people those Arks were carrying in SusAn finally emerged from the freezer, they would be pig sick at the thought of having been overtaken as well as having missed out on the last four hundred years of technological progress. We talked about the possibility that human beings would eventually colonize the entire galaxy, terraforming every planet that seemed capable of sustaining an ecosphere, and the possibility that one or other of the kalpa probes would soon encounter other intelligent species already engaged with that task.
We also talked about the Type-2 crusaders who wanted to start transporting mass from the outer system to Earth’s orbit as preliminary steps on the way to making use of the sun’s entire energy output, although I don’t recall either of us taking a particular interest in that topic.
“When I grow up,” Emily said, “I want to go into space.”
“Me too,” I said. “There are wonderful sights to see once you get outside the atmosphere—and virtual reproductions can’t do them justice any more than they could do justice to Wilde’s Creation.” I felt a pang of regret as I said it for the loss of Wilde’s orgiastic Creation.
“I don’t just want to seethings,” Emily assured me. “I want to make things. New worlds.” She didn’t mention Wilde’s island specifically, or any of its neighbors, but I think she had a better sense than I had of their irrelevance to a world in which one could really think in terms of making new worlds.
“I don’t know about going into space permanently,” I said. “No matter how clever our suitskins and IT become, we were shaped by evolution to live at the surface of the earth. It’s the only place we’ll ever really be at home, unless and until the Type-2 brigade can build and terraform Earth 2 on the far side of the sun. I left my old hometree readily enough, but I’m not sure I could leave a world as easily. It’ll be a long time before the Exodus really picks up pace, especially now….” I cut myself off before adding that if the disaster in which we had been caught up really had killed millions, the UN’s propaganda in favor of using extraterrestrial emigration as a population safety-valve was bound to be laid to rest, at least for a while.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Emily said, politely. I can’t remember whether it was the last time she ever spoke those words to me, even with the benefit of a tentative perhaps, but it might well have been. It speaks volumes for the quality of our friendship that it never needed reinforcement by agreement. No difference in the world could have separated us after what we went through together on Genesisand the life raft.
FOURTEEN
Emily and I took all the subjects we discussed aboard the raft very seriously, but we always knew that we were filling in time, trying to make the long wait bearable. When the time came for us to sleep again we were both relieved that the necessity of talking had been temporarily relaxed.
We had been afloat for three storm-tossed days when we finally heard a human voice. There are no words to express the relief that we felt as we realized that the ordeal was over.
“Calling Genesislife raft,” the voice said, sounding almost laconic through the raft’s elementary parrot mike. “This is Steve Willowitch, Air Rescue Mombasa, temporarily reassigned to Canberra. Can you confirm two passengers, alive and uninjured.”
The raft’s sloth had told him that much. I stabbed the icon controlling the voice transmitter with indecent haste and force. “Yes!” I said. “Mortimer Gray and Emily Marchant. Alive and uninjured.”