“Were you?” he said, in rapt fascination. “What was it like?” He was eleven years younger than I; he had been much the same age as Emily Marchant when the Decimation was unleashed and had been living deep in the American Midwest, beyond the reach of the tidal waves.

I felt an obscure sense of duty urging me to bring him back down to Earth, to insist that tragedy is tragedy and that there is no nobility in the imminent threat of destruction—but I knew that there was nothing I could say that would have any such effect.

“It was like being shipwrecked, scalded and adrift at sea for days on end, in company with a little girl who’d just lost all twelve of her parents,” I said—remembering as I formed the words that the random pairing of Emily Marchant and myself had been so enormously beneficial to both of us as to reduce any clinical benefit of my acquaintance with Ziru Majumdar to utter triviality.

“It must have been terrible,” he admitted—but I could tell that his was a definition of the word “terrible” that carried subtle nuances I hadn’t encountered before. I could tell too that they weren’t the produce of a purely idiosyncratic eccentricity. I was uncomfortably aware, even then, that Ziru Majumdar’s was the voice of a new ideology: a new rival for the neo-Epicurean synthesis that had resolved the conflicts embodied in my marriage to Sharane.

I missed not being able to slip on the bed’s VE hood and telephone one of my parents. There were plenty of other people I could have called, including my erstwhile companion-in-misfortune Emily, but every single one of them was a true emortal and I wanted to consult the opinions of someone who wasn’t, someone who knew what the threat of death was really like and how valuable life was.

For the first time, while I lay in that hospital bed, I began to miss my dead parents not merely as individuals and intimates but as representatives of a vanishing people. For the first time, I began to wonder whether true emortals had been as well prepared for Utopia as I had previously assumed.

“It wasterrible,” I told him, using the word to mean exactly what I intended it to mean, and nothing more—but language is a collaborative business, as fantastic in its fashion as history.

THIRTY-FOUR

I lived on Cape Adare for a further fifteen years after my brief incarceration with Ziru Majumdar. The experience did not serve to make me any more sociable, and my acquaintance with Majumdar did not ripen into friendship. I had nothing further to do with the steadily expanding Cape Hallett community.

When other dwellings began to be raised on Adare itself I fully intended to keep myself to myself, offering no welcome of any kind to my neighbors, but they had other ideas. They issued invitations, which I found hard to refuse, and I got to know a dozen of them in spite of my own lack of effort. I had not yet got out of the habit of thinking of myself as a member of the “young generation” of the New Human Race and was surprised to find that the newcomers were all younger than I, almost all of them being products of the baby boom facilitated by the Decimation.

My new neighbors were not insulted by my reluctance to involve myself in what they clearly saw as a collaborative adventure. They understood that I must have come to the cape in search of solitude and when I told them that I was finalizing the third part of my History—which I still envisaged as a seven-part work—they were happy to maintain a polite distance in order to spare me unnecessary distractions.

What little I saw of the social life of the self-styled “Cape Adare exiles” was not unappealing. Their fondness for real-space interaction presumably followed on from the fact that they had had more than the usual number of contemporaries in childhood, with a consequential abundance of flesh-to-flesh interaction. Their tiny society was, however, hemmed in by numerous barriers of formality and etiquette, which I found aesthetically appealing. In different circumstances I might have entered into the game, but the moment was not right.

Although the invitations I received to visit my new neighbors in their homes did represent a honest attempt to include me in their company, their primary motive was to show off the bizarre architecture of their dwellings. The rapid development of the Antarctic continent had encouraged the development of a new suite of specialized shamirs designed to work with ice.

In the earliest days of gantzing technology the most extravagantly exploited raw materials had been the most humble available—mud, sand, even sea salt—and Leon Gantz had seen his inventions as a means of providing cheap shelter for the poorest people in the world. After the Crash, however, the world’s social and economic priorities had changed dramatically, and the relevant biotechnologies had undergone a spectacular adaptive radiation even before PicoCon had married them to their own fast-evolving inorganic nanotech. From then on, the idea of working exclusively in a single superabundant substance had been more or less set aside by Earthbound gantzers.

In space, of course, things were different—but in space, everything was different.

The shamirs entrusted with the rebuilding of the world’s great cities in ostensible response to the Decivilization Movement had been extraordinarily versatile and clever, combining all manner of materials into the prototypes of modern hometrees. While I was a child, brought up by parents who had all been touched, albeit lightly, by the Decivilization credo, no one had imagined that Earthbound homemakers would ever return to the use of single-substance shamirs—but no one had anticipated the Great Coral Sea Disaster, and no one had properly thought through the consequences of moving UN headquarters to Amundsen City.

Interim measures to provide shelter for the people dispossessed by the tidal waves had renewed interest in working with sand and sea salt, and the development of Amundsen’s satellite towns had produced a new challenge to which the latest generation of gantzers had risen with alacrity.

The homes of the Cape Adare exiles were not simple ice sculptures. They did not have the full range of pseudobiological features that one would expect to find in hometrees designed for warmer regions because there was little point in fixing and redeploying solar energy and no problem at all in obtaining and circulating fresh water, but in every other respect they were hi-tech modern homes. Their walls and conduits required living skins at least as complex as a human suitskin—but these and all their other biotech systems were transparent. They were not optically perfect, but that was no disadvantage. Quite the reverse, in fact; the main reason for the new fashionability of ice castles was the tricks they played with light. Snowfields and glaciers are white and opaque, as were the igloos that legend hailed as humankind’s last experiment in ice dwelling, but the ice castles of Cape Adare were marvellously translucent.

From the outside the ice castles looked like piles of kaleidoscopically jeweled prisms; from the inside they were incredibly complex light-shows that changed with every subtle shift of exterior illumination.

Even in winter, when the sky seemed utterly uniform in its leaden grayness, the light within an ice castle was blithely mercurial. In midsummer, when the sun rolled around the horizon without ever quite setting, it was madly and brilliantly restless: the distilled essence of summer rhapsody. To visit one was exhilarating, but no one with my capacity for psychosomatic disorder could ever have lived in one. I was astonished that anyone could, but the young exiles had adapted to their surroundings with casual ease and had become connoisseurs of perpetually flickering light.