When I set up home on the ice sheet myself I didn’t intend to stay long, but it seemed as good a place as any to reflect on my options now that my history was finished and to see in the new millennium. There was an inevitable sense of letdown once I’d made the final deposit but I had had plenty of time to prepare for that, and I knew that I would be able to keep on adding to the final part and refining the earlier ones more or less indefinitely.
Several of my closest acquaintances sent messages of congratulation to the Arctic that were distinctly ambiguous. They all seemed to think that it was a bad idea for me to “hide myself away in such a desolate place.” Some were even prepared to assert that they understood my state of mind better than I did myself, but I had no intention of giving way to their various entreaties. The loudest of those entreaties were from Mica, Axel, and Minna, all of whom urged me to return to the Pacific and join the pioneers of the Seventh Continent. Several of my old faber friends in Mare Moscoviense, on the other hand, tried to persuade me that it was high time I returned to the far side of the moon, thus putting Earth—literally if not figuratively—behind me.
I put them all off. The only person whose congratulatory message excited me at all was Emily’s, for reasons that had nothing to do with well-meant advice.
“It looks as though I willget another chance to see you on Earth,” she told me. “The big conference is presently scheduled for the middle of next year, and it looks as if Earth orbit will be the compromise point. We’d prefer it to take place farther out, but we’re prepared to give way on that point if Ngomi’s Hardinist hard-liners will allow us to lay on the actual platform. You Wellworms may think you’re up-to-date on smart spaceship technology, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Anyway, I’ll come down as soon as the big argument is over, whatever the outcome might be.”
Emily did not actually omit the customary quota of good advice, but I had already heard enough of that to let it wash over me. “Even the longest book,” she pointed out, with a breathtaking lack of originality, “eventually runs out of words, but the job of building worldsis never finished.” I had heard much the same from a dozen “Wellworms,” although they, of course, thought that the work of constructing a single world would be adequate to fill millennia.
“Even if the time should one day come when we can call thiscontinent complete,” Mica had said—referring, of course, to Pacifica—“there’ll be others. We still have to build that dam between the Pillars of Hercules, and if only we can coordinate our aims with those of Eve’s mob, we might really be able to do something with the oceans.” Even Jodocus had concurred with that, although he had added the rider that when Garden Earth was finally finished, adding a few clones to the home orbit would fill a few more millennia without creating the least necessity for any “true human” to venture farther afield than was necessary to collect the requisite mass.
I couldn’t, as yet, find a new sense of mission in any of the directions suggested by my friends, but I wasn’t downhearted about that and I wasn’t in any hurry. Nor was I unduly depressed by the fact that I couldn’t even contemplate sitting down to start another book. In composing the history of death, I thought, I had already written thebook. The history of death was also the history of life, and I couldn’t imagine that there was anything more to be added to what I’d done save for an endless series of updates and footnotes.
Yet again, I attempted to give serious consideration to the possibility of packing up and leaving Earth—perhaps with Emily, if and when she condescended to drop in after her conference. I found, though, that I still remembered far too well how the sense of wild excitement I’d found when I first lived on the moon had faded into a dull ache of homesickness. The spaces between the stars, I knew, belonged to the fabers, and the planets circling other stars would belong to people adapted before birth to live in their environments. I felt that I was still tied by my genes to the surface of the Earth, and I didn’t yet want to undergo the kind of cyborgizational metamorphosis that would be necessary to fit me for the exploration of other worlds. I still believed in belonging, and I felt very strongly that Mortimer Gray belonged to Earth, however decadent its society might have become in the jaundiced eyes of outsiders.
Despite my newfound sympathy for the more contemplative kinds of Thanaticism I had told the caster the simple truth—I didn’t harbor the slightest inclination toward suicide. No matter how much respect I had cultivated for the old Grim Reaper, death was still, for me, the ultimate enemy. I did, however, find a certain spiritual solace in the white emptiness of the polar cap. I felt comfortable and contented there, and I got into the habit of taking long walks across the almost featureless surface, renting a six-limbed silver-animated snowmobile of which I eventually grew quite fond.
As a historian, of course, I was familiar with the old saying that warns us that he who keeps walking long enough is bound to trip up in the end, but I took no notice of it. Like Ziru Majumdar several hundred years before and on the far side of the world, I convinced myself soon enough that I knew every nook and cranny of the landscape, whose uniform whiteness made it seem far flatter and less hazardous than it actually was.
If I ever thought about the possibility of falling into an unexpected crevasse, as poor Majumdar had done, I thought of it in exactly those terms—as the slight possibility of suffering a minor inconvenience, which could not have any worse result than a few broken bones and a few days in hospital.
My imagination was, alas, inadequate. On 25 July 2999 I suffered the gravest misfortune of my 480-year life—graver even than the one that had overtaken me in Great Coral Sea Disaster.
Strictly speaking, of course, it was not I who stumbled but the vehicle I was in. Although such a thing was generally considered to be quite impossible, it fell into a cleft so deep that it had no bottom at all, and it ended up sinking into the ocean depths beneath the ice cap, taking me with it.
SEVENTY-SIX
I was oddly unafraid while the snowmobile was actually sliding down the precipitate slope. I was securely strapped into my seat, and although I was bounced around rather roughly I sustained only a few easily remediable bruises.
When I realized that the bumping had stopped I was relieved for a second or two, thinking that the ordeal was over—but then I realized what the Stygian darkness beyond the machine’s windows actually signified. Had there been air and ice, the cabin’s lights would have reflected back in wondrous fashion, but the water soaked up the radiance like a sponge.
I realized that I had not come to a stop all but was instead still sinking, gracefully and comfortably, into the loneliest place on the entire planet.
The snowmobile fell for several minutes before another abrupt lurch informed me that we had hit bottom. Even then, I half expected the machine simply to pick itself up, regain its balance on all six of its limbs, and start walking. Alas, it couldn’t and didn’t.
“I must offer my most profound apologies,” the machine’s silver navigator said, as the awfulness of my plight slowly sank into my consciousness. “I fear that three of my limbs were disabled as we fell into the pit. My internal systems have also suffered some damage. I am doing everything within my power to summon help.”
“Well,” I said, gruffly, “at least we’re the right way up. I don’t suppose there’d be any realistic possibility of reaching dry land even if you couldwalk. Do you, by any chance have one of those new-fangled suit-skins on board? I mean the ones that allow swimmers to work in this sort of environment.”