Free The Fountains of Youth by Brian Stableford Page A

believe it, but she knew that I wasn’t lying—that I honestly meant what I said.
    Emily was still hanging on to the inner surface of the wave-tossed raft, but she released her right hand so that she could reach out to me. Solemnly, I took it in mine, and we shook hands for all the world like two businessmen who’d just been introduced.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “You too,” she said. Then—and only then—she broke down and began to weep, helplessly and endlessly.
    She was still weeping when the helicopter arrived, but she stopped when she realized how difficult it was going to be to winch us aboard. We had to concentrate and cooperate fully with Steve Willowitch’s heroic endeavors.
    “It’ll be okay, Mortimer,” she assured me, as the hawser came down from the hovering aircraft, which seemed so very tiny against the vast dark backcloth of the continuing storm. “It’ll be fine.”
    “Sure,” I said, as I lifted her up toward the blindly groping cable. “How difficult can it possibly be, for hardened survivors like us?”

FIFTEEN
    E mily was by no means the only child in the world to lose an entire set of parents, and I still shudder to think of the number of parents who lost their only children. There was, as I had anticipated, no shortage of people willing to forge themselves into teams of adopters for the sake of the orphaned children, and all of those deprived of parenthood retained the right to return to the banks. The broken links in the chain of inheritance were mended. Tears were shed in abundance and then were set aside.
    The cities devastated by tsunamis were rebuilt, and the agricultural lands around them reclaimed. Even at the time it seemed to happen with bewildering rapidity, fueled by an astonishing determination to reassert the dominion of humankind. There had been talk of Garden Earth for centuries, but our capacity to shape and manage the ecosphere had never been subjected to any severe test. After the Coral Sea Disaster, our gantzers and macrobiotechnologists had both the opportunity and the responsibility to demonstrate that they could deal with
real
Decivilization—and they met the challenge with awesome efficiency. The Continental Engineers were revitalized, if not actually reborn, in those years, and so were the continents themselves.
    There is, I suppose, a certain wretched irony in the fact that all our paranoia regarding the precariousness of life on Earth had been directed outward for hundreds of years. We had thousands of artificial eyes scanning every part of the sky for incoming debris, but none looking down. Pride in our accomplishments had caused us to look upward and outward, and it wasn’t merely the promoters of the Exodus who had fallen into the habit of thinking of future history in terms of the kind of calculated expansion into the galaxy and appropriation of other worlds that Emily and I had discussed so earnestly while we were adrift. The breadth of our accomplishments and the height of our ambitions had made us forget how little we knew of the violent core of our own world.
    Ever since the dutiful seismologists of the twenty-second centuryhad sown the deep probes that measured tectonic stresses and monitored volcanoes, giving polite and timely warning of impending earthquakes and eruptions, we had fallen into the habit of thinking of the planet itself, not merely the ecosphere, as something
tame.
We had taken the effective constancy of the world’s interior for granted, to the extent that the silvers guiding our best moleminers had been left to themselves, bearing sole responsibility for the work of descending to the underworld of liquid rocks in search of all manner of motherlodes. We simply had not realized that there were forces at work down there that were easily capable of cracking the fragile biosphere like a bird’s egg, to release a fire-breathing dragon capable of devouring everything alive. The limits of AI are such that because we did not think of it, our