The Fountains of Youth Read online

  At the time of my birth Papa Laurent had probably built the most considerable public reputation, as an Earth-based xenobiologist, but his quantum of fame was subsequently to be exceeded by Mama Siorane and Papa Ezra, both of whom moved to extraterrestrial frontiers, where celebrity could be more cheaply obtained. Mama Siorane contrived an interesting and newsworthy death on Titan in 2650 and Papa Ezra made a significant contribution to the modification of the Zaman transformation for application to fabers.

  In spite of the relative bleakness of my early surroundings and the arguments my fosterers always seemed to be having, I received the customary superabundance of love, affection, and admiration from my parents. In claiming their own rations of “personal time” with my infant self my devoted mamas and papas subjected me to a veritable deluge of stimulation and amusement. Their determination to familiarize me with the vicissitudes of a harsh natural environment and the delights of a multitude of virtual ones never extended so far as to leave me exposed to the merciless elements without a supremely competent suitskin, or to place me in danger of addiction to synthetic pleasures. I was not allowed to play unattended in the snow until I was twelve, and I was not allowed to indulge in the most seductive virtual experiences until I was several years older than that.

  In sum, with the aid of excellent role models, careful biofeedback training, and thoroughly competent internal technologies, I grew up as reasonable, as charitable, as self-controlled, and as intensely serious of mind as all my city-bound contemporaries.

  THREE

  The majority of the children I met and played with in the homelier kinds of VEs spoke of “real life” in terms of cityscapes: crowds, buildings, and carefully designed parks. The minority who had contact with wilderness mostly thought of it in terms of forests, oceans, and the Antarctic ice cap. Only a couple lived in close proximity with mountain slopes, and even they thought my own situation peculiar, partly because no one was busy sculpting the mountain that loomed over my valley and partly because my only near neighbors were monks.

  When I was very young my VE-linked friends had not the slightest idea what a “monk” was. Nor had I. The members of the accessible community at the north end of the valley communicated among themselves in a language that was either archaic or private, and although I did not entirely trust my parents’ word that the community high on the mountain slope was extinct, I had no solid grounds for thinking otherwise. The cloud so rarely exposed the buildings to view, despite the winds that kept them continually astir, that such brief periods of clarity as did occur only served to intensify the mystery of their nature.

  To tell the truth, the actual monks seemed to me to be the least interesting feature of my environment when I was eight or nine years old. I was much more entranced by the storms and the peculiar transactions of the snow, by the abrupt changes of temperature and texture to which the air was subject whenever I passed out of the safe interior of the hometree, and by the precarious meltwater ecology of the valley floor. My friends, however, were not at all interested in weather reports; they wanted to know about the mysterious mystics and sages who had once occupied the edifice on the mountain and still practiced their arcane rituals in the southern part of the valley. It was not that my friends could not imagine precipitous slopes, or snow, or hectic atmospheric conditions; the problem was that I had no way to persuade them that my actual experience of such phenomena was very different from their virtual experiences.

  “Yes,” Pyotr would say, “of course I know what cold feels like. We have cold in Moscow too. But we don’t have monks.”

  “Of course I can imagine thin air,” Marianna would assure me. “It’s just a matter of barometric pressure. But I can’t imagine religion.”

  They were wrong about being able to imagine what Himalayan cold and Himalayan air felt like, but there was no way to prove it. I thought they were equally mistaken in their assumption that the monks and their beliefs were interesting, given that the few I saw in the distance always seemed so utterly mundane, but I couldn’t prove that either and soon capitulated with inevitability by ceasing to try.

  The continued curiosity of my friends eventually compelled me to find better answers to their questions, but throughout my formative years—from six to sixteen, say—even the “better” answers were wholly invented. I made up different tales at different times, and my accounts became far more elaborate as my sources of inspiration expanded in number and quality, but it was all fantasy. I knew little or nothing about what my allegedly Hindu neighbors believed or did, and nothing at all about what might once have gone on in the allegedly Buddhist community set so high on the looming slope as to be beyond reach.

  None of my co-parents ever visited the complex at the far end of the valley, nor did any of them attempt to learn the language spoken by its inhabitants. None of them would ever have dreamed of trying to climb the mountain that separated them from the place they called Shangri-La, for want of any better name. They had brought their child to remotest Nepal so that he might live in the presence of magnificent strangeness, not that he might penetrate its secrets. By the time I left the valley I understood, vaguely, that they had installed me there because they thought that the valley might teach me to be humble in my humanity, to show me the last vestiges of the untamed earth that had shaped my ancestors, and to give me a proper sense of the value of my emortality. While I was actually there, however, it was simply the place I was in, monks and all. My view of it was conditioned by the knowledge that all the other people of my own age with whom I was encouraged to socialize in VEs had anchorages in reality that seemed more desirable to me because they lay far closer to the heart of human society. I was never lonely as a child, but I knew that I lived in a lonely place, fit only for mad monks, and that I had been put there on purpose.

  “But it’s not a lonely place,” Papa Domenico assured me, on one of the rare occasions when I actually complained. “There are no lonely places any more. Wherever humans go, they take the virtual universe with them. We can hold infinity in the palms of our hands, although we’ve grown so accustomed to the miracle that we no longer seem to be capable of grasping the wonder of it. As long as you’re connected to human society, the Universe Without Limits is yours, the best part of your heritage. Even the monks have that.”

  Papa Laurent told a different story. “One day, Morty,” he said, “the feeling of loneliness will be precious to you. You’ll be glad that it formed such an important part of your sentimental education. The UN may make a big song and dance about keeping Earth’s population stable and using emigration to the moon and the microworlds as a safety valve, but the simple fact is that now that your generation really can live forever the population of the Earthbound will creep up and up and up. The future you’ll have to live in will be so desperately crowded that there won’t be any lonely places left—and you’ll have something to look back on that all your contemporaries will envy. You’ll have an understanding that they’ll never be able to cultivate—although the monks will hang on to it, if they ever manage to recruit any true emortals.”

  They were both talking nonsense, of course, but not for the reasons that occurred to me as a child.

  Perhaps, in the end, my parents’ plan did achieve most of what it was intended to achieve, even though they could never agree as to exactly what that was—but while I was actually living in the parental hometree I could not help but see things differently. I found some delight in the ruggedness of the terrain, but I also felt a good deal of resentment against the continual assertiveness of wind, water, and biting cold—and my curiosity about the perverse people who had chosen to live here, not merely for a while but indefinitely, grew along with that resentment. Even at the age of eight, I knew that I would never take the trouble to learn a new language in order to communicate with the enigmatic people who lived at the other end of the valley, but I knew that there would come a day when I was big enough, strong enough, and brave enough to climb the mountain that separated me from S
hangri-La.

  I did not expect that I would be able to talk to its inhabitants, even if they turned out not to be extinct, but that was not the point of the imagined endeavor. The point was to confirm that Shangri-La was indeed a place, not a phantom of the cloud and a mirage of the sunlight—and to prove that I was the kind of person who could go wherever he wanted to go, despite the vicissitudes of the weather.

  FOUR

  My failed attempts to climb the mountain that loomed so large over my childhood home resulted in a few bruising falls. I listened patiently to the lectures all emortal children must endure regarding the magnitude of every risk they take, but I also learned by slow degrees how to use an ice ax and how to make the most of toeholds. My parents decided soon enough that in view of our having chosen to live among mountains it would be ridiculous to suppress my ambition to climb, so they began investing in smart suitskins with all kinds of extra safety features. By the time I was ten my augmented limbs had the clinging power of a fly’s, and if I rolled myself up into a ball I could bounce for miles.

  I took more risks than the average child of my kind, but the falls I survived didn’t lull me into a false sense of security. My suitskins were exceedingly clever and my internal technology was state of the art, but when I fell I experienced a full measure of terror, and more than enough pain to function as a warning. I was, however, determined to master that slope some day, to find out exactly how the reality of Shangri-La differed from the fantasies I made up for my VE-linked friends.

  I was twelve before I accidentally discovered the source from which my co-parents had borrowed the name Shangri-La. It was, I found, the name of a mythical monastery established above an imaginary valley, whose inhabitants lived to be several hundred years old in an era when that was simply not possible. In the original twentieth-century folktale the monastery had been fitted out with a library so that it might serve as a haven of rest and place of refuge for those few civilized men who were wise enough to realize that their civilization was both precarious and irredeemably sick. Neither the first author of the tale nor its subsequent embellishers had been able to witness the twenty-first-century collapse of their sick civilization, nor had they had imagination enough to envisage its rebuilding by the first people who claimed to be members of a new human race, but I could hardly help thinking that the myth was precious as well as prescient. It colored my own private fantasies as deeply as it colored the fantasies I made up for my friends—which became gradually more plausible as I took advantage of my researches in the Labyrinth.

  “Monks aren’t much interested in emortality,” I explained to Pyotr when I was thirteen. “They all believe that life goes on forever unless you can find a way of getting out—which isn’t easy. They do have internal nanotech, but that’s because they think the extending of a life span from seventy to two or three hundred years is a matter of small concern. They don’t think of themselves as separate entities but as pieces of the world’s soul. The people who used to live on the mountain thought a human lifetime, no matter what difference IT or gene swapping might make, is just a step on the way to eternity, and what they ought to be aiming at is the annihilation of feeling, because feeling is suffering. Monks think life is intrinsically unsatisfying and that nirvana is better, but they put off their own salvation in order to make a gift of some of their accumulated spiritual credit to the rest of us.”

  It’s surprising what can pass for wisdom among thirteen year olds—but it’s not entirely surprising that even its fantasies contain seeds of enlightenment. Much later in life, when I came to consider the great religions as strategies in the great psychological war against death, I had cause to remember my fantasies about the phantom monks of Shangri-La.

  As to the reality…

  It was in the summer of 2535 that I first contrived to climb all the way up the sheer slope that separated my hometree from the stone building. My objective was visible all the way and the rocks were dry; the sun was shining brightly. Given the conditions, it was not a terribly difficult or dangerous climb.

  Had the weather changed suddenly—and the weather in those parts could change with astonishing rapidity from fair to atrocious before the Continental Engineers stuck their oar in—I might have gotten into trouble, but as things were I hardly bruised my suitskin. I was out of breath and my hands were grazed, but I had only to pause on the threshold of the edifice for twenty minutes to regain my composure.

  While I sat there, with my back to the valley, I was able to look through an archway into a courtyard, where there was a statue of Buddha, exactly as I had expected—but there was no sign of anyone walking in the cloister and no sound of any activity within the walls. The place seemed as dead and desolate as I had been assured it was.

  It was not until I raised myself to my feet and wandered through the archway that my presence elicited any response.

  The courtyard was rectangular, and all its inner faces were as smoothly gray as the external face it presented to the valley. There were no visible doors or windows. When I paused in front of the Buddha I had settled for the conclusion that the edifice was now no more than an unmanned shrine—but then a man in a black suitskin stepped out from behind the Buddha. His skin was as dark as his suitskin—darker than that of any living individual I had seen on TV or met in VE. He was obviously not of local descent, and his suitskin was tailored in a very workmanlike fashion. He didn’t look like any kind of monk I had ever seen or imagined.

  “Can I help you, Mister Gray?” he said, in exactly the same kind of media-smoothed English that all my foster parents employed. Save for his unfashionably dark and cosmetically unembellished skin he looked and sounded markedly less exotic than many of my VE friends. It was impossible to tell how old he was, but I guessed that he was a true emortal.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked.

  “We like to know who our neighbors are,” he said, mildly. “We don’t pry, but we’re slightly sensitive to the possibility that others might.”

  “I’m not prying,” I retorted.

  “Yes you are,” he said. “But that’s understandable. We don’t really mind. We stopped worrying about your parents a long time ago. We know that they’re exactly what they seem to be.”

  “You’re not,” I said.

  “I don’t seem to be anything I’m not,” he replied, arching his eyebrows in surprise—but then he figured out that I had meant the comment more generally. “We don’t seem to be anything at all,” he added. “Your parents decided to call this place Shangri-La on their own initiative, and if you decided to elaborate the fantasy…”

  He left the sentence dangling, implying that he knew more about the tales I’d spun than he had any right to.

  Perhaps he would have preferred it if I’d turned around and started climbing back down again, but he must have already accepted that I wouldn’t be content to come all the way up the mountain for nothing.

  “What is this place, then?” I asked. “If it’s not a monastery…”

  “You can come in if you want to,” he said. “But you might find it less interesting than you’d always hoped. I’m Julius Ngomi, by the way.”

  He smiled as he said it. He didn’t really mean what he said about my finding the place less interesting than I’d always hoped—but even after all this time, I still can’t quite make up my mind whether he was right or not.

  FIVE

  There was no obvious sign of a doorway behind the Buddha, but when part of the gray wall drew away at Ngomi’s touch I realized that the featurelessness of the edifice might be an illusion.

  “We generally use the door on the far side of the mountain,” my companion said, waving his hand vaguely in order to suggest that the zigzagging corridor was far more extensive than the eye could see. “There’s a helipad there, although it’s only usable one day in four.”

  By the time we had turned three corners and descended two stairways I had lost my sense of direction, but I had begun to realize how extensively
the mountain had been hollowed out. There didn’t seem to be many people about, but there was no shortage of closed doors, which no one had bothered to hide.

  “What’s inside them?” I asked, vaguely.

  “The litter that dare not speak its name,” he replied, gnomically. “Archaeological specimens. Ancient artifacts. Lots and lots of paper. Things that have no present utility at all but somehow seem to warrant preservation nevertheless. We’ve become very reluctant to throw things away these last few hundred years. The way the history books tell it is that our pre-Crash ancestors—the old Old Human Race—became deeply penitent about their habit of trashing everything they owned in wars and began to set up permanent archives at about the same time they built the first genetic Arks. Then, so the conventional history goes, our more recent forefathers became exceedingly paranoid about the perishability of electronic information during the Virtual Terror. That kicked off a new wave of archive building and archive stuffing.”

  Because he was still talking he paused at the unconcealed door we were about to enter, with his hand hovering a centimeter short of a clearly marked pressure pad. If I’d nodded my head he would presumably have touched it, but I didn’t.

  “Are you saying that the history books have got it wrong?” I asked, instead. It didn’t seem to be an important question as I phrased it, but I never forgot the answer I received, and I never lost sight of its implications.

  “Not exactly,” said Julius Ngomi. “But all history is fantasy, and there are always different ways of coming at a question. The cynical version is that after Leon Gantz and his nephews had developed a ridiculously cheap way to hollow out mountains, their heirs had to figure out a reason for doing it. So they said, Hey, let’s start filing our litter away for the benefit of future archaeologists. I bet we could devise an archiving system so complicated and so all-encompassing that it would keep a whole battalion of maze architects occupied for centuries and make work for thousands of caretakers. It won’t be as much fun as hollowing out asteroids to make gigantic spaceships, but that plan’s on hold for the time being, and this one’s a hell of a lot more convenient. So here we are, in the twenty-sixth century—proud possessors of at least ninety-nine mountains whose bowels are constipated by megatons of carefully sorted and painstakingly indexed shit.”