“A library,” I said, suddenly remembering the original Shangri-La. “A library that would survive even if the Labyrinth got wiped out by the Doomsday Virus.”

“That’s right,” said Sara Saul.

Julius Ngomi laughed. “All civilizations have to live in the ruins of their predecessors,” he said. “Even the ones that never get hit by the Ultimate Weapon. We true emortals are luckier than most, but we’ll still be handing down our garbage as well as our gold.”

“How far down does it go?” I asked, wondering whether the entire Himalayan plateau might be hollowed out to receive the artifacts that the econosphere no longer required—while the rock that was removed to make room for them was, of course, shaped into new artifacts.

“Not far,” said Sara Saul. “We’ve barely scratched Earth’s crust. My kind will have to leave it to true emortals like you and Julie to excavate the mantle and the core and move the planet’s insides to the outside as skyscrapers of steel. The asteroid rebuilders are just practicing—the real architects are yet to come. If you can restrain your impulse to scale dangerous heights, Mortimer, you might see the beginnings of the metamorphosis. If you care to join the Type-2 Crusade, you might well play a part in it.”

“But it would be silly to exercise too much restraint,” Julius Ngomi observed. “It would be foolish to miss out in the present for the sake of seeing a little more of the future unfold. I think you’re one of nature’s climbers, Mortimer. I think you’re the kind of person who’ll always be prepared to dice with death, provided that the dice are suitably loaded.”

I wasn’t sure about that, even then, but I didn’t say so. I was fifteen, and I had scaled a dangerous slope. I hadn’t found what I’d expected to find—but wasn’t that the whole point of scaling dangerous heights? What on Earth would be the point of hollowing out the world if you didn’t put the matter you removed to profitable use?

“Can I come back again?” I asked.

“If you like,” said Sara Saul. “But there’s nothing more to see. Just us, or others like us, laboring patiently.”

“Nothing except garbage,” said Julius Ngomi. “More garbage than you could ever find the time to look at, even if you lived ten thousand years.”

SIX

I did go back to Shangri-La—not often, and not for any particular purpose, but I did go. The climbing did me good. Keeping the secret of the true nature of the edifice from my incurious parents, at least for a little while, also did me good. Secrets make it easier for children to grow apart from their families.

It wasn’t until 2544, when I read the obituaries, that I actually realized who Sara Saul was and what it was that was dying with her. She was a lineal descendant and material heir of Leon Gantz, the inventor of “biological cementation”—and, of course, its converse, “biological deconstruction.” She had been born from a Helier womb just like everybody else, but her co-parents really had been a real familyengaged in the business of protecting the most fabulous fortune ever accumulated by a single human family.

Sara Saul, I eventually discovered, was one of a double handful of people who really did own and run the world while she was alive—but she’d still shriveled like a decaying fruit, and the color had drained out of her along with the life. She’d had more temporal power than any Hindu god, but she’d been mortal. All she had been able to do with what she had, in the end, was protect it for a while and then pass it on. To her credit, she really had seen that as a vocation and had tried to do it as best she could.

She was the first person with whom I was personally acquainted to die. I knew that she would not be the last—but I also knew that the number would be finite. I understood, too, those of us who came after her would have to learn to redefine the concept of “vocation,” wherever we figured in the hierarchy of Earth’s stewardship; we could no longer rely on mortality to set its limits for us.

It wasn’t long after my first success in mountain climbing that the time came for me to leave my loving family, although five years seemed a great deal longer then than it does now. At the time, I was impatient to depart, hardly able to wait for the moment when I would be able to leave my Nepalese hometree to enter a community of my peers. Although the fracture lines of their little community stood out sharp and clear I think all my parents were dismayed by my impatience. Papa Laurent wasn’t the only one who strove with all his might to convince me that I ought to treasure the years of my adolescence, to look sideways as well as forward, and to take stock of what I already had as carefully as I counted the freedom that would soon be mine.

“You shouldn’t be in such a hurry,” Mama Eulalie told me. “Looking back, I have to admit that I must seem to have been in a hurry all my life, but I’m Old Human Race and even I could have benefited from slowing down a little. You’re New Human Race, and you can certainly afford to take things easier.”

“Every boy-child longs to be free of his parents,” Papa Nahum told me, “and every boy-child regrets it later. You’ll have a long time to regret it when we’re gone—and we shall be going, Morty, sooner than you think. I’m the youngest, and even I’m halfway to the grave. Get the most out of us while you can.”

I didn’t listen. What child ever does?

There was no fixed period to the business of co-parenthood even in those historically transitional days, but there still seems to be a natural term to the time that any group of people can remain together as an effective team. After twenty years, frayed relationships generally reach breaking point. Not all relationships fray at the same rate, and a few have the strength to resist fracture for far longer, but each of my eight foster parents had to maintain seven different relationships with his or her partners, so the enterprise involved a total of twenty-eight distinct pair-bonds. According to the conventional theory of microsocial dynamics, a collective cannot be sustained once half of its subsidiary pair-bonds have fallen into irredeemable disrepair, and when I remember my co-parents—however fondly—I find it difficult to imagine that one pair-bond in five could ever have been in a healthy state. Even so, they were sorry to part, and not justfor my sake.

I understand now that my parents were good and tolerant people. I understand how it was that they quarreled so much and yet never descended to hatred, or even to mute hostility. The nucleus of their common interest in my maturation could not exert sufficient attractive power to keep them in their orbits indefinitely, but they weren’t glad to be sent hurtling apart at so many different tangents. As soon as I had no further need of their all being together the whole system flew apart, but it seemed to them to be a sad moment, and that I was so delighted to be going must have hurt them all. It was left to me to decide exactly when I would depart for a different community, thus setting the date on which my loving co-parents scattered to the ends of the earth and beyond, and I seized the opportunity without having any idea of the value of that which I was casually shattering. They remained my parents, ever willing to serve as home providers, friends, mentors, and supporters, but after I took my leave, they were no longer marriage partners. After I left I never saw more than three of them together, but it wasn’t until most of them were dead that I began to feel the force of that loss.

Once it was determined that I would go to Adelaide, in Australia, to attend university it was soon settled that Papa Dom would go to Antarctica, Papa Laurent to France, Mama Eulalie to the Peruvian Andes, Papa Nahum to Alaska, Mama Meta and Mama Siorane to the moon, Mama Sajda to Central Africa, and Papa Ezra to New Zealand, but we continued to keep in touch. Papa Dom was, after all, absolutely right: in the Virtual World, everywhere within lunar orbit is close at hand, and even Jupiter and Saturn aren’t so very far away when they’re on the same side of the sun as Earth.