Free The Fountains of Youth by Brian Stableford

three hundred million but we hope maybe less than five. Queensland took theworst but, the waves trashed New Zealand, the Philippines, and what was left of Japan and the western seaboard of the Americas after the first sequence of quakes had finished. And the islands, of course. Eight thousand of them.”
    Eight thousand of them
was the statistic that reverberated in my head, because I hadn’t quite grasped the fact that 10 percent of the population of Earth was already feared dead, with more to come. I should, of course, have remembered immediately that Papa Ezra was in New Zealand, but I didn’t.
    “You were lucky,” the pilot told us. “Must be tens of thousands of life rafts still floating, but millions didn’t even have a chance to get to a pod.”
    I looked at Emily Marchant. Her tiny face had always seemed wan in the subdued interior lighting of the raft, and mine must have seemed just as bad, so the mute signal we exchanged through our mutual gaze had no further margin of horror in it, nor any additional sorrow for the hundreds of millions whose deaths we hadn’t dared anticipate.
    “Thanks, Steve,” I said. “Get here when you can—we’re okay.”
    This time, my finger was far gentler as it closed the transmitter. There was no point in leaving the channel open; it couldn’t be easy flying a copter through all the filth that was still clogging and stirring the lower atmosphere.
    It occurred to me almost immediately that an event of the kind that Willowitch had described would have done far worse damage had it happened five hundred years earlier, but I said nothing to Emily. She didn’t seem to mind the silence, so I let my own thoughts run on unchecked.
    I knew that if such a crust fissure had opened up while the world was the sole province of the
old
Old Human Race—the pre-Crash mortals—it would almost certainly have killed fifty or sixty percent instead of ten and might have done so much damage to the ecosphere that even the survivors would have been precipitated into a downward spiral to extinction.
Homo sapiens sapiens
had evolved about a million years ago, on the plains of Africa, so five hundred years was only 0.05 of the life span of the species. Had we not renewed ourselves so comprehensively within that geological eyeblink, we would never have had the chance. Thanks to IT and suitskins, Solid and Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis, and our near-total technical control of the ecosphere, Earthboundhumanity could and would bounce back, with what might have to be reckoned as minor casualties. We had reached the life-raft pod in time. We were
all
lucky—except for those of us who had perished.
    Not that the casualties could possibly seem “minor” to Emily Marchant, I remembered, as I applied a gentle brake to the train of thought. She had lost all twelve of her parents at a single stroke. I was later to discover that I had not lost a single one—Papa Ezra had been high in the mountains—and would gladly have made her a gift of all eight had they been mine to give, but that could not have healed the breach in her circumstances. There would be no shortage of willing fosterers eager to adopt her, even in a world that had lost 300 million people, but it would not be the same. Her personal history had been rudely snapped in two, and she would be marked by her loss forever—but that moment could not bear sole responsibility for what became of her, and more than it was solely responsible for what became of me. I was already a historian; she had already declared that she wanted to join the Exodus and leave the homeworld behind.
    “I’m sorry,” I said to Emily. “I’m
so
sorry.”
    She looked at me very gravely, having made her own computation of the scale of the disaster and her own tiny role within it. “If you hadn’t been seasick,” she said, contemplatively, “I wouldn’t have been able to get the pod out.”
    “If you hadn’t been there, neither would I,” I told her.
    She didn’t