“You don’t know the half of if it,” she assured me, “but you’ll learn.”

I did learn. We all did. That was the whole point of the exercise.

EIGHTEEN

Although we had formed our marriage for general purposes of companionship rather than preparing for parenthood, we didn’t go in for overmuch fleshsex in the early years. We were still finding our various ways through the maze of erotic virtuality and had not yet come to terms, even provisionally, with our own eroto-aesthetic priorities. We did eventually take the time to explore most of the subsidiary combinations contained within the marriage, but we were careful—perhaps too careful—to keep the experiments casual lest petty jealousies should threaten the integrity of the whole. Tacitly, at least, we all accepted the conventional wisdom that the young ought to discover spice in variety and delight in many flavors. Whatever suspicions we retained of our various foster parents and the cultural norms that we inherited, we were content to heed the advice that a broad range of experience is the only secure foundation for a gradual refinement of taste.

The marriage was not conspicuously unhappy for any of us, and such quarrels as we had were muted. This may seem to be damning the whole enterprise with faint praise, but we had not expected it to be life defining. We were not in search of perfection but merely of a better understanding of the many modes and causes of social synergy and interpersonal friction. We went in for a good deal of sportive competition and those kinds of tourism that are best indulged in a group. We visited the other continents from time to time, but most of our adventures merely took us back and forth across Africa.

We all became equally familiar with the trials and tribulations of camping out in the rain forest and the difficulty of keeping sunburn at bay in tropical cities gantzed out of yellow and roseate stone. Axel and Minna always wore suitskins that enclosed every part of their bodies, but the rest of us tended to follow convention by leaving our heads and hands naked. Camilla’s skin and bald head were heavily ornamented with ceramic inlays, but they did not protect her from the extremes of temperature, brightness, and humidity that frequently stretched the resources of our IT. I was tempted more than once to darken my skin to the same hue as Julius Ngomi’s, but I always settled for a less assertive shade of brown.

“This is nothing,” Axel would say, from the safety of his biotech cocoon, whenever anyone complained about the violence of the sun. “Imagine what it must have been like in the days when the Sahara stretched from one side of Africa to the other and smart dress hadn’t been invented.” He was only slightly less annoying at such times than Grizel and Camilla were when they began to lament the almost total loss of what they insisted on misnaming “the first generation rain forest” and its accompanying biota. No matter how many bothersome flies and biting bugs their patient efforts restored to the forests and grasslands they always protested that the originals must have been far more interesting by virtue of the rich cargoes of infectious diseases they had carried and transmitted.

“Biodiversity is one thing,” Jodocus said to Grizel, on one occasion, “but defending the rights of killer parasites is something else. Only a lawyer would sink to that.”

I believe that her reply—supported by Keir as well as Camilla—included derisory references to “the bowdlerization of the biosphere,” “estate agent ecology,” and “niche fascism.” Such phrases were not meant entirely for comic effect.

To begin with, I had a considerable affection for all the other members of my new family, but as time went by the usual accretion of petty irritations built up. Several proposals were made between 2565 and 2575 to make additions to the group’s personnel, but none received the necessary majority. It was, of course, much easier to arrange exits than negotiate new admissions, and the only modification that actually came about was Keir’s departure in 2578, as a result of an irreconcilable breakdown of his relationship with Eve.

Eve disapproved of Keir’s political activities on behalf of a faction of the Gaean Liberationists, who were bitterly disappointed by the UN’s decision to return the population of the Earthbound to its pre-Decimation level in a matter of decades. Eve was a committed Garden Earther herself, but she never wavered in her conviction that the Garden had to be run for the benefit of humankind, whereas Keir became increasingly strident in his advocacy of population reduction with a view to restoring the empire of natural selection to continentwide wilderness reservations. Their ideological differences made it so difficult for Keir and Eve to work together, let alone live together, that one or the other of them had to leave the group.

Keir intended to keep in touch with the rest of us, and we with him, but the resolution faded; although I had known him for some years before the marriage was made, it proved impossible simply to revert to the terms of our earlier relationship. After 2580 more than a hundred years passed before I heard from him again.

Had things continued the way they were, I suppose I would have been the second deserter. Research for the second volume of my history—which I had begun while I was still constructing the first—drew me more and more frequently to Egypt and to Greece in the 2580s and early 2590s. The Rainmakers pointed out that I had no real need actually to travel in order to do the relevant research, but I disagreed.

I explained as best I could that the parts of my project dealing with the remotest eras of antiquity had to be based on the evidence of artifacts rather than texts, and that one could not obtain a proper sense of the significance of artifacts from secondhand accounts and virtual experiences, but my partners were unimpressed. It was not that I did not trust the webs of information distributed through the Labyrinth, but I did not trust their sufficiency—and I was as passionate about sufficiency in those days as I was about urgency.

Africa had been a uniquely valuable base for my study of the prehistory of death, but as soon as I moved on to history per se the pressure to find a base in Europe began to build. I would probably have obtained a formal divorce before the turn of the century, even though I knew that it would give my surviving parents more cause to disapprove of my chosen project, but I was spared the slight ignominy of an individual departure from a continuing group by a comprehensive breakup.

Unfortunately, that tiny advantage was far outweighed by the shock and grief of the event that caused the general dissolution: Grizel’s death in 2594, at the age of seventy.

Grizel died as most of the people lost in the Decimation had died, by drowning, but the circumstances were very different. From my point of view, though, there was one important point of similarity and one of distinction. I was with her, just as I had been with Emily Marchant on 23 March 2542, but I could not save her.

NINETEEN

Axel, Jodocus, and Minna were required by their work to range across the entire equatorial belt and often took trips to Nigeria. In spite of their constant complaints about the trips I took, the Rainmakers could not be content with secondhand information collected and collated by silvers regarding patterns of rainfall. They did not doubt its reliability, but they doubted its sufficiency.

“You see, Mortimer,” Axel explained to me, totally ignoring that I had offered very similar explanations of my own endeavors, “there’s no substitute for taking a plane and flying over the territory so that you can see the whole thing as a piece. Statistical data is invaluable, of course, but a broad sweep of the eye can pick up on things that a whole legion of silvers could never pick out of the data drizzle.”