My surviving parents, as might have been expected, quietly relished the opportunities offered by my parlous situation. They had always been enthusiastic to exercise subtle leverage upon the direction of my life, and fate had delivered me into their hands.

“You should have left Earth fifty years ago,” Mama Meta informed me, stopping barely a centimeter short of saying I told you so.“Gravity holds people down and holds people back. It attaches people to the past instead of the future. I’m not saying that history is worthless, but it’s not the sort of career to which anyone should give a hundred percent of their time and effort. The Labyrinth is here too, Morty. General Good work isn’t just plentiful on the moon, it’s twice as well paid as the same work on Earth—and zero-gee work is triple or quadruple, if you’re prepared to learn the tricks of the trade. You’ll have plenty of time for hobbies—but you have to move fast. In thirty or forty years the fabers will have a virtual monopoly on zero-gee work, and they’ll still have first choice of lunatic work. By 2650 you won’t be able to find decentwork this side of Mars, but if you strike while the iron’s hot you can make some real money.”

In Mama Meta’s reckoning, “decent” work had to be work for the General Good, which also paid at least three times what the Allocation provided. In her view, that ruled out almost everything available on Earth. Mama Siorane’s pioneering endeavors among the outer satellites were thoroughly decent, as were Papa Ezra’s adventures in genetic engineering, but in Mama Meta’s view, Mama Eulalie and Mama Sajda were “harlots of commerce.” They earned good money, but they were both employed in Production Management—and that, in Mama Meta’s view, was only one short step from the Ent end of EdEnt. “EdEnt is an oxymoron,” Mama Meta had assured me, in the long-gone days before I climbed the mountain. “Education is self-improvement, but Entertainment is self-wastage.” Mercifully, none of her partners had agreed with her on that one—and even Mama Siorane would have stopped short of describing workers in the commercial sector as harlots. That did not mean, alas, that my other fosterers were willing to side with me in the dispute that inevitably developed between myself and Mama Meta.

“I know I’ve always advised you to be yourself,” Mama Eulalie said, on one occasion when I had complained a little too self-pityingly about Mama Meta’s hectoring, “but it wouldn’t do you any harm to spread yourself around a bit. It wouldn’t actually dirty your hands to get involved in commerce. The people who actually keep the big wheels turning might think it necessary to lock themselves away inside mountains, but the people who do the little jobs lead perfectly normal lives. The MegaMall has plenty of single-skill VE-based work available these days—they actually find it hard to attract young people, and we mortals have an inconvenient habit of retiring long before we’re likely to drop dead.”

The last remark was a reference to Papa Nahum, who was a lot closer to dropping dead than he or I realized. Like Mama Eulalie and Mama Sajda, he’d spent his life laboring in relatively menial capacities for what they both, in their quaintly old-fashioned way, insisted on calling the “MegaMall.” His advice, at least, had no undercurrent of censure.

“When I was young,” he said, “I worked very hard. When I reached an age at which the end was in sight, I slacked off. When I was sure I had enough to see me through to the end, I stopped. Work never hurt me but I never learned to like it. I’m Old Human through and through. You’re not. If I’d known that I had to work forever, or as near as damn it, I’d have looked at things a different way. We can’t tell you how to go about that. Better keep in mind, though, that forever is a hell of a long time to be poor, even in today’s world. Taking advantage of unlimited opportunity needs funds as well as endurance.”

“If my history is definitive,” I told him, trying not to sound boastful, “it’ll make money. Not soon, and not a fortune, but it willmake money. It’ll make my name too. When people mention Mortimer Gray’s History of Death, other people will know what they’re talking about.”

“Your choice,” Papa Nahum said, graciously. “Sorry I won’t be around to share the celebration. I want genuine Oscar Wildes at my funeral, mind—none of that cheap rubbish. I don’t care how poor you are.”

When he died, at the dawn of the twenty-seventh century, I brought genuine Oscar Wildes to his funeral even though I couldn’t afford them. Mama Meta ordered Rappaccinis that had been out of fashion for a century, but she didn’t mean any insult. She lived on the moon, where flowers were a good deal rarer than people with legs, and anything with petals counted as a wonder.

TWENTY-FOUR

Oddly enough, the most generous moral support I received in the wake of the Prehistory’spublication—along with the most generous offers of charitable assistance—came from Emily Marchant, who was now richer than both my families put together.

Emily’s replacement foster parents, operating in the capacity of trustees, had reinvested the twelvefold inheritance she had received from her original fosterers in shamir development. It had been the most obvious thing to do, given that the cities smashed by the tidal waves of 2542 would all need rebuilding, but the obvious sometimes pays unexpected dividends. The shamirs designed for the patient and elegant regenerative work that had been the world’s lip service to Decivilization had not been well adapted to the task of repairing rude devastation. Gantzing biotech had been stuck in a rut for two hundred years while the Zamaners had taken all the funds and all the glory, but coping with the debris of the tidal waves had given its evolution a new impetus.

It was hardly surprising that Emily had gone into the business herself, cleverly reapplying the lessons learned in the design of new and better shamirs to the improvement of the deconstructors and reconstructors that had been set to work in the interior spaces of Io and Ganymede, building subsurface colonies far more sophisticated than those clustered around the lunar poles. In 2615, however, Emily had not yet formed a powerful desire to go out to the outer system herself. Like me, she was still contentedly Earthbound.

“You really ought to take the money, Mortimer,” she said to me, after I had refused for the ninth or tenth time. “It grows so much faster than I can spend it that I keep running into the hypertax bracket, at which point it all gets gobbled up by the Social Fund and redirected to the General Good. I know it’s antisocial to regret that, but I can’t help thinking that I’d prefer to select my own deserving causes.”

“I can’t,” I said. “It would feel wrong.”

“Why? Because you happened to save my life once upon a time? It’s not payment, Mortimer. It doesn’t alter what you did or make it any less heroic.”

“It could hardly have been any less heroic than it was,” I told her, mournfully. “Anyway, it’s nothing to do with that. It would feel wrong because it would mean that I wasn’t doing it myself.”

“You take the Allocation, don’t you?”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

I wasn’t entirely sure why, but I felt that it was. The allowance awarded to every member of the race was a guarantee of food, shelter, and basic access to the Labyrinth; I tended to think of it as a modest advance payment for the work I was doing on my History, even though that would never be officially recognized as work for the General Good. If I had taken Emily’s money, and spent it on travel to Athens, Jerusalem, and Babylon, I would have been incurring a debt of a different kind. She couldn’t see that—or perhaps she just refused to see it. Either way, it made a difference to me.