Far futures, p.42
Far Futures, page 42
“To go?” Trismon Sorel was bewildered. “But go where? We can offer you everything that your heart desires.”
“No. You cannot offer me the Anastasia that I know and love. But that is what I want—all I want. Put me back into the cryowombs, with Ana’s original body by my side.”
“But I told you, the real Ana, the Ana that you knew, is not in that body. Too many brain cells have been destroyed. Ana is gone.”
“She is gone. But gone where?”
“That is a meaningless question. It is like asking where the wind goes when it is no longer blowing, or where is the odor of a flower after the flower dies.”
“It seems a meaningless question today. But it may not always be meaningless. You told me that I have an infinite number of choices. My choice is simple, and I say it again: I want to be placed in the Pluto cryowombs. Do I have that right?”
“You do.” Trismon Sorel could not conceal his discomfort and disappointment. “I cannot deny it to you. But I beg you to reconsider. You can return to cryosleep for as long as you choose, but when will you be awakened? In one century? In five?”
“I do not know. I want to leave this instruction with my freezing: awaken me when new evidence comes into the data banks that seems relevant to the re-creation of Anastasia’s original personality. And not until then.”
“I must be honest with you. If you hope to sleep until your Ana can return, I believe that you will sleep forever.”
“I will take that risk. It is smaller than risks that I have taken in the past. Can we begin?”
“If you insist.” Trismon Sorel held up his hand. Drake was already rising from his seat. “But there is one thing more. While we have been speaking, a group-mind meeting has been in progress involving every human within easy signal range. A conclusion has been reached. Your request will be granted, but with one condition: you must have a companion for your travel into the future, just as each of us has a companion.”
“I want no woman in the cryowomb with me, other than my own Ana. And no man, either.”
“We would condemn neither living man nor living woman to such a future. Your companion will not reside in the cryobanks. It will be a Servitor, designed for on-demand operation, exactly like my own Servitor,” Trismon Sorel gestured to the little wheeled sphere with its metal whisk-broom head, waiting quietly at his side. “So long as you do not call upon its services, it will remain dormant. When you need a companion or an assistant, it will be there to obey your commands.”
Sorel stood up. “Come with me now. The preparations are already beginning for the cloning of Ana. While that is proceeding, I will introduce you to the endless virtues of the Senator class. And you can decide on the appearance and name of your own personal model.”
Drake woke quickly and easily, rising at once to full consciousness. That was enough to convince him that something had gone wrong. He had not been taken into cryosleep, but instead was awakening as soon as the Asfanil wore off.
He opened his eyes, expecting to see the cryolab facility and Trismon Sorel’s familiar face. Instead he found himself lounging at ease in a deep armchair. A woman with the strong features, raven hair, and dark complexion of a gypsy sat opposite. She was watching him closely. When his eyes opened she nodded but did not speak.
“What happened?” His mouth was dry, but no more than usual after sedation. “Why didn’t I go into cryosleep?”
“And what makes you think you didn’t?” She arched black eyebrows at him. “Don’t you believe in progress? The old barbarism of waking agony is long in the past. Today the thawing is no less pleasant than waking from a natural sleep.”
She spoke not in Universal but in perfect English, unaccented and without pauses.
He stared around him. His last waking sight had been of the cryolab, deep within the sterile interior of the Moon. Now he was sitting in a room whose long window faced out over a sandy beach and a restless ocean. It was windy outside. He could hear the gusts moaning around the outside of the building, and see tiny sparks of sunlight reflecting from distant whitecaps.
“How long?”
“I was hoping that we might postpone that question for at least a little while.” The woman sighed. “I should have known better. All your records display a remarkable focus of attention. To answer your question, it has been rather a long time—much longer than I suspect you hoped. It is more than twenty-nine thousand years since you last descended into cryosleep.”
Long enough for real progress in the reconstruction of his Ana.
Longer, also, than the whole of humanity’s previous recorded history. Drake stared around him in disbelief. He had again tried to prepare his mind for anything, for any amount of change. And again he was surprised. The last thing that he expected was sameness. But the room he was sitting in would not have been out of place as a twentieth-century living room. The scene outside was a pleasant summer’s day, something to be found at thousands of locations on Earth’s seacoasts.
“It’s not real, is it?” He gestured around him. “All this is an electronic simulation, designed to please me.” A worse thought struck him. “In fact, I’m not real, either. I’ve not been revivified at all. I’ve been downloaded.”
“Not true.” The woman frowned reprovingly. “You were certainly revivified, but although the capability exists to do so you have not been downloaded to inorganic storage. You are very real, and you are occupying your own body. However, you are right at least in part. The scene around you was synthesized from your own memories and is being inserted for your convenience into your optic nerve—nonintrusively, I might add. The old indignities of body invasion disgust today’s society.”
“I don’t want a synthesis. I want to know where I really am, with my real surroundings.”
“Very well. If you insist.”
“I do.”
“Then there is one other thing that you should know before you leave derived reality.” The woman stared at Drake, her dark eyes serious. “You are real flesh and blood. But I am not. I am a part of the synthesis, and I disappear when it does.”
She raised her hand in farewell.
“Wait!” Drake, without moving, found himself standing. “I have to know. Has there been progress in bringing back my Ana?”
“I am afraid that there has not. It is still considered to be an impossible problem.”
“But I was supposed to remain in the cryowomb until there was hope of a new approach. Why am I awake?”
“I hear the question.” The dark head nodded. “However, it is best answered by another. Goodbye, Drake Merlin.”
She was gone. With her went the sunlit room and its pleasant prospect of a windswept ocean. Drake found himself recumbent on an adjustable bed with an array of unfamiliar machinery sitting on both sides of him. The room he was in was small and oddly shaped. Its octagonal walls bulged up to a multifaceted convex ceiling. His body felt close to weightless, as though with a tiny effort he would become airborne and float to rest on that pale-blue upper boundary.
Where was he? And who had wakened him?
Drake stared around the room, expecting to see the familiar wheeled form of a Servitor. And then all questions of his location and condition vanished.
A woman waited in the narrow doorway.
It was Ana.
She was standing exactly as he had seen her a thousand times, head of one side and her mouth quirked into a question. Drake tried to stand p and move toward her, but instead found himself rising straight up d turning end over end.
“Easy now.” Ana was somehow at his side, steadying him. “I’m sorry, ought to have waited until you had become accustomed to a low-gee environment.”
“The dark-haired woman—the simulation of the woman—it said ere had not been progress—”
“It spoke the truth.” Ana had floated them back down, to sit side by side on the bed. “There has been no progress in the problem that interests you.”
“But you—you are here, you are alive.” A horrible thought struck him: simulation. “Aren’t you?”
“I certainly am. But it is not the way you think it is.” The gentle tone in her voice was infinitely familiar. “Isn’t it obvious who I am?”
“You are Ana.”
“Yes. But I am not your Ana.” She took him by the arm, and turned so that they were face-to-face. “I am the Ana to whom you gave life. I am the clone of your wife, the person grown from her cells by Trismon Sorel and his colleagues.”
“But the other woman said it had been twenty-nine thousand years—have you been alive for so long?”
“Not continuously. That is not the custom.” She laughed, and at the sound Drake felt his heart break. “Like most people, I choose short periods of wakefulness between long ones in hibernation—what you would call cryosleep. Almost everyone is curious to know the future, to meet the future.
“And for twenty-nine thousand years, I have also been curious to meet you. Each time I woke, I checked your condition. Each time, before I went again to hibernation, I asked to be awakened should you waken.”
“I ought not to be awake now. I was supposed to remain in cryosleep until the restoration of your personality became possible.” Except that Drake realized he was delighted to be awake. To be sitting just two feet away from Ana, watching the expressions run across her face—that was infinite bliss.
“I am sorry.” She bowed her head. “Forgive me, but that is my fault. I came here to Pluto and countered the instructions given to your Servitor.” She frowned. “It says its name is Milton. An odd name for a Servitor.”
“Not really.” Drake felt a twinge of uneasiness at Ana’s comment, which he pushed aside. “Milton is the name that I gave it.”
“In any case, I directed that you be reanimated.”
“And I’m glad that you did.” Drake reached out to embrace her, but she leaned away.
“No. I should have realized that this might happen. Let me try to explain.” She stood up and drifted safely out of arm’s reach. “You feel that you know me well, and more than well. But I do not know you at all. Although I have gazed at your picture and listened to your voice a thousand times, you are a stranger to me. When I first reached consciousness you were already in the cryowombs. You do not know how much I have longed to see you, to speak to you, to thank you for giving me life. But in the past I always tried to respect what you wanted. I knew that you did not want me.”
“I have never wanted anyone but you.”
“You want Ana—your Ana. I am Ana, too, but a different person. I have my own memories, my own joys and sorrows. You do not share them.” She sighed. “Anyway, a few months ago I agreed to do something that I have been asked to do many times: to go away with friends on a long journey. We will fly out to the human colony on Rigel Calorans. I expect to be away for many thousands of Earth years. When I made that decision to leave the solar system for so long, I wondered: When I return, who knows where Drake Merlin might be? I could not bear the thought that I might never, ever, see and know you. So I gave the command to revivify.” She gazed at Drake with the clear grey eyes that he had known forever. “I realize now that this was an unforgivable act.”
“You are wrong. It is forgiven already.”
“It may be forgiven, but it was unforgivable. It was my plan to leave Pluto soon after speaking with you, and proceed to the edge of the Oort where the expedition will assemble. I can no longer do that.”
“Stay with me.” Drake did not say it, but his mind added the word forever.
“I certainly owe that to you.” Ana smiled, with a familiar rueful downturn of one side of her mouth. “And now like the self-serving wretch that I am, I will try to justify my own action. There is some level of temporal shock after any hibernation, even if it is no more than a few hundred years. In your case it has been nearly thirty millennia and you were not prepared for it as we are. So it will be my task to lessen the blow of twenty-nine thousand vanished years.” She reached out her hand. “Your Servitor is waiting outside. It is most unhappy that a mere irrational human overrode your explicit instructions to it. Come along with me, and listen to my apologies.”
Ana’s warning of temporal shock at first seemed greatly overstated. The evidence of human presence on Pluto was mostly the cryowombs, and Drake could see little change to them since his mad dash through and away from them, twenty-nine thousand six hundred years earlier.
The evidence that she was right began to appear as they spiraled in toward the Sun. At Ana’s suggestion they planned to visit or pass close by each planet. It was Drake’s idea to use a small two-person ship, and leave their Servitors behind on Pluto until they returned.
Neptune had developed in a natural way. There were large colonies of humans and machines on the moons, Triton and Nereid, while the planet itself formed the home of hundreds of thousands of Von Neumanns, mining volatiles and collecting the rare heavier elements needed for their own reproduction.
But something monstrous was happening to Uranus.
The major moons of the planet, except for little Miranda nearest to the planet, had vanished. The ship swung into co-orbit with Miranda and circled Uranus for two full revolutions. The gas-giant world was marked with a pattern of bright spots, ninety-six of them evenly spaced around the flattened sphere of the planet.
“Nothing yet,” Ana said in reply to Drake’s question. “In another two thousand years or so, when the preparation work is all done, those will be the main nodes. The stimulated fusion program will begin. Uranus is too small to maintain its own fusion, so there will have to be continuous priming and pumping. They’ll move Miranda far out, and do it from there.”
She spoke casually, as though the conversion of a major component of the solar system from planet to miniature star was a routine operation.
Drake stared out of the ports and wondered. Uranus was not a promising candidate for life, but it would become far less eligible when hydrogen fusion had turned the whole world to incandescence.
The thought nagged at him: Why do such a thing, within the original home system of mankind? Whenever he thought about the far future he imagined Earth, together with all the original planets of the solar system, preserved as some kind of great museum. Humanity might spread out far across the Galaxy, but the home worlds would always be there. They would remind people of their origins.
The Uranus decision made more sense when they had flown past Saturn and its horde of moons, on toward Jupiter, and descended at last for a feathery landing on one of the Jovian satellites. Drake remembered Europa as an ice world, the fifty-kilometer deeps of its continuous ocean plated over by a kilometer and more of icy plateaus and thick-ribbed pressure ridges. But it was that way no longer. Their little ship landed on a giant iceberg, floating in random currents along a broad river. With the sunlight striking in at a low angle, the long stretch of open water seemed mottled and tawny like the skin of a great snake. It wound its way to the horizon between palisades and battlements of blue crystal. As the berg carrying the ship moved sluggishly along, Drake saw open water leads running off in all directions. He shivered. He could imagine strange creatures, huge and misshapen, writhing along the icy horizon.
Europa in its tide-locked orbit turned steadily about Jupiter. The Sun slowly vanished from the black sky. The sounds of jostling floes became louder, carried to the ship through the water and ice of the dark surface. To Drake’s musician’s ear the bergs cried out to each other, sharp high-pitched whines and portamento moans in frightening counterpoint against a background of deeper grumbles.
“That’s why we need the Uranus fusion project,” Ana said cheerfully. “Europa is warmed at the moment by individual plants within the deep ocean, and that leads to patchy melting. It will be a lot better here when Uranus is finished and working. The ice will all go, and we’ll have another whole world for development.”
She was setting out a meal for the two of them, and she obviously did not share one scrap of Drake’s uneasiness. But she must somehow have sensed it, because suddenly she stopped what she was doing and came across to his side.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” It was preposterous to be anything other than fine when he was with Ana again, after such a long separation. But maybe it was because he was with her that he could admit fears and doubts. In any case, try as he would he could not stop shivering.
“Here.” Ana handed him a drink. “I told you there would be temporal shock, and I was right. It just took a little while to show up. You sip on that, while I order something as close as this crazy autochef can manage to the foods you were raised on. And for tonight I think we’ll manage with a little less Europa. I’m going to dim the lights and close the ship screens, and you can sit there and imagine you’re safely back on good old Earth.”
She could not have known it, but long ago, back in the happy days that Drake would not even allow himself to think about, Ana had done just the same thing for him when he was upset. She was strong when he was weak, obligingly weak when he felt strong.
Drake did as he was told. They ate an easy, leisurely meal, talking about nothing or remaining silent, exactly as the mood struck them. The chef provided a reasonable shot at the foods of Old Earth. Afterward Ana cradled his head against her breast, and he hid himself away in the night of her long brown hair.
It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that they would become lovers that evening. Neither of them realized that Drake, deep inside, thought of it as “lovers again.”
Physical euphoria carried everything before it, all the way into and through the inner solar system. Lovemaking, as it had always been, was an epiphany for Drake. As an antidote to temporal shock it could not have been better. Immersed in the familiar touch and smell and taste of Ana’s soft perfumed skin, he would have seen Earth and Sun destroyed with equanimity.
It was not quite that bad, although four thousand years earlier the Earth had come close to an environmental runaway.
Recovery had been slow. But when the ship landed on the diminished Antarctic ice cap, mean equatorial temperatures were again below 50° Celsius and land animals were venturing sunward from the lush jungles of the once-temperate zones.
