“Don’t take any notice,” Mama Eulalie advised, again. “That bitch was always preaching when she was on Earth, and now she’s in heaven she’s impossible. Some leaders never look behind them, but the wise ones always do.”

In a way, I said good-bye to all of them on the day I said my final good-bye to Papa Laurent. It wasn’t just that we never gathered together again, even in a VE; we had all moved on into new phases of our existence. We were not the people we had been when we shared a hometree; our collective identity had been shattered. We had been broken down into atoms and dissipated in the flow of history. As with Emily Marchant, my calls to them grew farther and farther apart, as did their calls to me. We never actually losttouch, but our touch became tenuous. New acquaintances gradually displaced them to the margins of my life.

SEVENTEEN

By 2550 I was working fairly assiduously on the introductory tract of what I then planned as a seven-knot work. It was the hardest part of the job, partly because I had to learn to navigate the Labyrinth properly and partly because I was determined not to limit myself to the Labyrinth’s resources.

Even in those days many historians worked exclusively with electronic data, but I had been brought up in the shadow of a mountain archive. I think that I had a better sense of the value of what was buried therein than my city-bred peers, and I certainly had a better sense of what had been lost from such repositories during the Decimation. The Himalyan stores had not been affected, but those in Australia, Japan, and Indonesia had suffered considerable losses in collapses caused by earthquakes. Everyone who ever worked in the stores tended to refer to what they were doing as “mining,” but in the wake of the quakes the artifacts in more than one in five of the subterranean repositories really did require laborious and skillful excavation.

The physical and electronic relics of mortal men have always seemed to me to be equally vulnerable to the erosions of time and the corrosions of misfortune. That the world has suffered no major geological upheavals since the Coral Sea split and no major outbreak of software sabotage has made me slightly more complacent, but in the twenty-sixth century experience combined with youth to subject my research to the spurs of a sharp sense of urgency. Despite the oft-expressed anxieties of my surviving foster parents, however, I did not neglect the other aspects of my life. In the course of my travels I met a great many people face-to-face, and I was careful to cultivate a good range of VE friendships, some of which had survived since childhood.

While The Prehistory of Deathwas still far from ready for release into the Labyrinth I contracted my first marriage. Unlike most first marriages it was not a pair-bond, although I had made the usual tentative experiments in one-to-one intimacy. It was a non-parental-group contract tract with an aggregate consisting of three other men and four women, signed and sealed in 2555. Sociologists nowadays insist on referring to such arrangements as “pseudoparental practice groups,” implying that the only possible reason for their formation is training for future parenthood, but my partners and I never thought of it in that way. It was a straightforward exploration of the practicalities of living in close association with others.

The Decimation had fractured so many close-knit groups of every kind that it had sent a wave of panic through the survivors, and for at least half a century thereafter everyone’s mind seemed to be focused on the problems of forming, maintaining, and surviving the breakage of intimate relationships. Ours was one of many such experiments. Although we were not precise contemporaries we were all far too young to be contemplating parenthood even during a temporary baby boom. Mine was the median age of the group, and my oldest partner was only ten years my senior.

I was introduced into the group by Keir McAllister and Eve Chin shortly after its core had begun to entertain the marriage plan. They were in executive control of a fleet of silvers monitoring and modifying the ecological impact of the hastily rebuilt cities east of Nairobi. I first encountered them during investigations of newly exposed sites from which paleontological evidence of humankind’s origins might be excavated, whose presence added yet another complicating factor to their work. Because I was as neutral as anyone available, I became a middleman in the negotiations between the local paleontologists and the ecological redevelopers and found both Keir and Eve refreshingly easy to deal with by comparison with older people. They obviously felt the same and always introduced me to their close friends and co-workers as a kindred spirit.

None of my spouses was a historian. Although they welcomed me as someone who would broaden the range of the group’s interests, they all thought my vocation slightly quaint. They were all involved in post-Decimation reconstruction, although none was a gantzer; they usually spoke of their business as “re-greening” even when they were dealing with city folk. Axel Surt, Jodocus Danette, and Minna Peake were all hydrological engineers specializing in evaporation and precipitation. While Axel, Jodocus, and Minna worked to ensure that future rain would fall where the Continental Engineers thought best and Keir and Eve negotiated its redistribution once it had fallen—among many other equally touchy matters—Camilla Thorburn and Grizel Bielak labored as biologists to deliver a healthy and abundant fauna to the re-greened land from the gene banks contained in the Earthbound Arks. Axel, Jodocus, and Minna liked to describe themselves, lightheartedly, as the Lamu Rainmakers; the rest of us inevitably became known within the family and to its satellite acquaintances as the Rainmakers-in-Law.

Climate control had, of course, been more carefully reinstituted once the great storm caused by the Coral Sea Disaster had abated, and the utter ruination of vast tracts of coastal land had given a new lease on life to the UN’s Land Development Agency. The Agency had resolved to remedy many alleged mistakes made by Ancient Nature, which had been carried forward into the post-Crash era by mere historical momentum. All of my marriage partners except Grizel—who worked for the Ark Consortium—were salaried employees of the LDA. Collectively, therefore, we were relatively well-off, although I contributed far less than my companions to the household purse. What little credit I earned to add to my Allocation was earned by assisting my partners in various humble ways, although I hoped that my own work would eventually begin to generate net-access fees.

We established a hometree in the town that the Rainmakers already used as a base: Lamu, on the coast of Kenya. Mama Sajda was living less than three hundred miles away, and she was the only one of my parents who took the trouble to travel to the ceremony. All of them expressed their delight, though, and I had no cause to suspect any of them of insincerity. They all thought that marriage would be better for me than my long honeymoon with the history of death, and I daresay that they were right.

“Don’t take it too seriously, though,” Mama Sajda warmed me. “I’ve been married five times, and although I hate to generalize from such a small sample I think it’s safe to say that even though two isn’t usually company enough, eight is definitely a crowd. Don’t expect an easy ride, and don’t stick at it too long when the wheels fall off.”

“Everything will be fine,” I assured her. “We don’t have excessive expectations. We’ve all had the opportunity to observe family life, and we know how stormy the emotional weather can get. I don’t say we’re unsinkable, but I’m sure that we’ve got enough life rafts handy, just in case.”