“But you’re rich,” I said, redoubling my foolishness. “You have more credit than you’ll need for a millennium and more. You don’t need to leave Earth to seek your fortune.”

“Not thatkind of opportunity, Morty,” she said, without a hint of mockery or censure. “The opportunities of the future. Once you’ve caught up with the twenty-seventh century, you know, you’ll have to catch up with the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth, and in the end, you’re bound to run into the present. Then, even youwill have to look forward—and that will mean looking upward.I know you can do it, Morty, and I know you will, when you’re ready. You learned to swim, eventually, and you haven’t had a headache for days. You’ve adapted to thiskind of enlightenment. It’s only a matter of time before you can see the way the world is going—the way the Oikumene is going.”

“Enlightenment” was what the architects of ice palaces called their new art. I’d always thought it a mere affectation, more than a trifle disrespectful to the heroes of the eighteenth-century revolutions in thought and theory—but I realized when Emily used the word that it was layered far more deeply with deliberate ambiguities than I’d previously understood.

“There’ll always be Earthbound humans,” I told her, mechanically having not quite recovered my composure. “The Gaean extremists will never turn it into a nature reserve. We’ll have to keep making room for new generations by exporting a percentage of the population, but there’ll always be a role for the old. For educators. For historians”

“But you’re notold, Morty,” Emily reminded me. “Youth shouldn’t be a mere preparation for being old. Neither should adulthood. You can’t decide now what you’ll be in three hundred or three thousand years’ time—and if you can, you shouldn’t. One day, Morty, your history of death will be finished—and it will be no good sitting down to start a history of life, because that’s just the other side of the same coin. You’ll have to start on the future, just like the rest of us. It wouldn’t do you any harm to get a little practice, would it?”

“It’s not like that,” I told her, although I wasn’t sure that I could even convince myself of it. “I may be a historian, but I live my everyday life in the present, just like everybody else. There’s nothing wrong with being contentedly Earthbound.”

“You’ve been living in a fake lighthouse for more than twenty years,” she pointed out, “without even realizing that an entire city of light was growing up just over the horizon. Don’t you think that says something about the kind of person you’re in danger of becoming?”

Her rhetoric had come a long way since she was eight years old, and I hadn’t been able to resist its force even then.

“I’m not a recluse,” I told her, realizing as I said it that it was exactly what I was. “I’m just trying to be myself,” I added, realizing as I said it that I still had not the slightest idea what that was supposed to mean.

“But you can see the light, can’t you?” she said, pointing up into the magical spire. “You can see that there are new possibilities before us now. You can see that wherever we live our everyday lives, we’re looking out on to an infinite stage. The universe is waiting for us, Morty, and we can’t keep it waiting forever just because we’re busy playing in our tiny little garden.”

“Sharane used to say that play is all there is,” I told her, reflexively. “She used to say that when all the threats and dangers had been eliminated, play was all that was left to lend purpose to existence.”

“Sharane was a fool,” said Emily, without an atom of doubt in her voice. “She couldn’t even spell her name correctly.”

Emily knew, of course, that Mama Siorane had contrived a death on Titan that everyone she knew out there had considered glorious. It seemed that she was determined to do likewise.

“I’m thinking of moving,” I told her, improvising furiously. “Somewhere new. Somewhere hot. South America, maybe.”

“To work on the fourth part of the History of Death”she said. She wasn’t one of my parents, so she didn’t try to make it sound like an insult or a condemnation, but I couldn’t help hearing it that way.

“It’s important,” I said. “It’s relevant. And it can’t be put off for a thousand years. The past is perishable, Em. If we don’t work to keep it alive, it dies. The artifacts crumble. The documents evaporate. Even ice palaces melt. All thisis temporary. Somebody has to keep track of it all. Somebody has to provide the continuity. I have to stay in touch. I could work on the moon, but that’s as far as you can go in the Universe Without Limits without losing touch with Earth. One day, historians will have to work with a much broader canvas, extending all the way to the Oort Halo, and probably beyond, but if that job’s to be done properly, the groundwork will have to be laid. I’m sorry you’re going. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

“We’ll keep in touch,” she promised. “No more overlooking messages, no more wondering if one of us is avoiding the other.”

“It won’t be the same,” I said. “You can’t have a conversation with someone in the outer system—the time delay won’t allow it. All I ever got from Mama Siorane was a series of lectures.”

“Letters, Morty, not lectures,” she said. “You’re a historian remember? You know what it was like back in the good old days, when people in London needed the Penny Postto keep in touch with people in Canterbury because it was a five-day journey on foot.”

Always the pedant, I had to point out that by the time they had the Penny Post, mail coaches had cut that kind of journey to a matter of hours—but she was right, in principle. From Mama Siorane I’d had lectures; from Emily I would get letters—and I would always be able to see her face, and even touch her VE sim.

“I’ll still be sorry,” I said, stubbornly. “My parents are all dead. You’re all that I have left from that phase of my existence.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “You just can’t be bothered to look for the rest of it while you’re stuck in the distant past. It’s time to move on, Morty—and I don’t mean South America. It’s time to reacquaint yourself with the world you live in.”

She was right, of course. I promised that I would, but I probably wouldn’t have kept the promise very well if the world had given me a choice. I would have changed in my own good time, at my own plodding pace, if I hadn’t been moved to more urgent action by forces beyond my control. As it happened, however, I was soon snatched up by a catastrophe that seemed at first, at least to my unready understanding, to be as furious and as far-reaching in its fashion as the Great Coral Sea Disaster.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The third part of The History of Death, entitled The Empires of Faith, was decanted into the Labyrinth in August 2693. In a defensive introduction I announced that I had been forced to modify my initial ambition to write a truly comprehensive history and acknowledged that my previous hyper-Gordian knot had not been worthy of the name of aleph because it had been so overly ethnocentric. I explained that I hoped to correct this fault by degrees but admitted that I was unlikely ever to attain a genuinely universal breadth. I promised, however, to do my utmost to be eclectic and to provide my future commentaries with as much supportive justification as was practicable.

This apology was not as sincere as it was designed to seem. It might have been more honest to admit that I did not wish to be a mere archivist of death and feared getting bogged down in the sheer mass of the data that pertained to my current and future researches. I could not regard all episodes in humankind’s war against death as being of equal interest, and I wanted to be free to ignore those which I thought peripheral and repetitive. I was more far interested in interpretation than mere summary.