Ever since the dutiful seismologists of the twenty-second century had 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 silvers did not consider it either. If the moleminers’ senses picked up any indication of mysterious mantle events akin to that which caused the Coral Sea Catastrophe, they paid them no heed.

Many people must have made calculations like mine, realizing that we had survived a disaster that might have been an extinction event only a few centuries earlier. There were not so many who made the further calculation that although there had never been an event that destroyed 400 million people within a week, the ordinary processes of mortality had killed that number during every decade of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Old Human Race had not needed the world to be split apart in order to produce and sustain that kind of attrition rate; disease and old age had done it effortlessly, routinely, and contemptuously.That, to a young and impressionable historian, was a prospect even more mind-boggling than the consequence of a literally world-shattering event—but it did not calm my view of the Coral Sea Disaster. Perhaps perversely, it seemed to broaden and exaggerate my existential unease.

The deaths that occurred in the Coral Sea Disaster seemed to me to be understandable—direly unfortunate and vilely ominous, but understandable. Given the magnitude of the cause, the appalling effect was only to be expected, and my subsequent discomfiture accommodated that awareness. The result of my statistical comparisons was not to end that discomfiture, but to generate a new discomfiture in the contemplation of days long past.

My attempt to gain a proper perspective shone new light on the knowledge I had always had, but never brought fully to mind, that in 2001—the year that began the millennium in which I lived—the world had contained more than six billion people, every single one of whomwas condemned to die within a mere hundred years or so: a catastrophe on the same scale as the Coral Sea Disaster every time the last two digits of the date worked their inexorable way round to zero.

And yet the people who lived in those times had accepted that burden as the common toll of nature, philosophically and almost without complaint!

Perhaps I would have done what I eventually set out to do anyway. Perhaps the Coral Sea Catastrophe would have affected me in much the same way even if I had been on the other side of the world, cocooned in the safety of a hometree or an apartment in one of those crystal cities that felt no more than a slight earth tremor and greeted the sun again after three weeks of minor inconvenience. Even if I had written the same history, however, I am not at all sure that I would have written the same fantasy. It was because I was at the very center of things, because my life was literally turned upside down by the disaster, because I was pathetically sick to my stomach, and because eight-year-old Emily Marchant was there to save my life with her common sense and her composure, that the project which would occupy the first few centuries of my life took such a powerful hold over my imagination. I still contend that it did not become an obsession, but I do admit that it became capable of generating a unique passion in my heart and mind.

I did all kinds of other things; I lived as full a life as any of the other survivors of the Decimation. I did my share of Reconstruction work. I was not diminished in any way by the legacy of my experience—but from that moment on, my interest in the history of death could not be dispassionate, let alone disinterested—and it was very soon after being delivered safely back to what was left of Adelaide that I determined to write a definitive history of death.

From the very moment of that history’s conception, I intended not merely to collate and organize the dull facts of mankind’s longest and hardest war, but to discover, analyze, and celebrate the real meaning and significance of every charge in every battle and every bloodied meter of territory gained.

PART TWO Apprenticeship

Man is born free but is everywhere enchained by the fetters of death. In all times past, men have been truly equal in one respect and one only: they have all borne the burden of age and decay. The day must soon dawn when this burden can be set aside; there will be a new freedom, and with this freedom must come a new equality. No man has the right to escape the prison of death while his fellows remain shackled within.

—The New Charter of Human Rights

(published 2219; adopted 2248)

SIXTEEN

I visited Emily Marchant a dozen times in the three years which followed the Decimation, but we always met in virtual environments far steadier and more brightly lit than the hectic and claustrophobic space we had shared when the world had come apart and we did not know why. I fully intended to keep close contact with her at least until she was grown, but such resolutions always weaken. She was changing as rapidly as any child, and by the time she was twelve she was no longer the same little girl that had saved my life. Our calls grew less frequent and eventually fell into the category of things perennially intended but never actually done—but we didn’t forget one another. We always intended to renew our relationship when a suitable opportunity arose.

Emily told me that she was as happy with her new foster parents as it was possible to be but that she would never forget the twelve who wanted to take her on a journey of discovery through the petty Creations of the greatest genetic artists of the late twenty-fourth and early twenty-fifth centuries. Those destinations had perished in the Flood too; the world was again devoid of dragons and marsupials, temporarily at least, and there would never be another orgy of perfumes as finely balanced as Oscar Wilde’s flamboyant tribute to the mythical Jean Des Esseintes.

My own co-parents never gathered in the same place again. Three came together in the flesh at Papa Domenico’s funeral in 2547, and three at Papa Laurent’s in 2549, but Mama Meta and Mama Siorane were not the only ones who lent their virtual presence to each occasion, even though they were the only ones off-planet. After Papa Laurent’s death a full half-century passed before another of them died—that was Papa Nahum, in 2601—and by that time the directions of their lives had diversified to the point at which none of them felt the need to attend even by technological means. It would have been impossible, in any case, for Mama Siorane or Papa Ezra to take any meaningful part in Papa Nahum’s farewell, given the time-lapse involved in communication with the outer system; Mama Siorane was on Titan by then, and Papa Ezra had taken his work on the adaptation of Zaman transformations to faber anatomy to the microworlds.