In the past few days she had taken charge of their lives. Although she had been thawed for less than seventy days, she seemed to know more than Drake about everything in their new world. After the first twenty-four hours he had surrendered his independence. She was like a force of nature. He did not attempt to argue with her or resist her. She knew where they were going, how they would get there, what they would do when they arrived.
Only occasionally, when they were waiting for something, did he notice a difference. The forceful, all-competent manner changed. The blue eyes became frenzied and crazy, and dark shadows crossed her face like demons.
It was happening now. They were at the surface, and the giant elevator doors were ready to release them to the outside air. Melissa should have been bubbling over with energy and excitement. Instead she was withdrawn, staring at the floor a few feet in front of them as if she saw all the devils of Hell in the pattern of tiles. It was Drake who was wide-eyed and curious, too absorbed to worry about the change in Melissa. Even the doors themselves aroused his interest. They had not opened, like normal doors, but seemed to dissolve to gray mist and then quietly vanish. Was this what the induced teaching meant, when it referred to “the transforming technology provided by a mastery of molecular bonds”?
He stared through the doors as they silently faded. Half a dozen possibilities filled his mind as to what he might see outside: a world completely paved over, with roads and vehicles everywhere? vast amounts of airborne traffic of strange and unfamiliar design, flying above his head? postnuclear devastation? gigantic buildings, arcologies in which half a million people could live? shimmering heat, as global warming ruled; or sheeted ice and visible breath, the precursors to some new Ice Age held at bay in his own time only by the widespread burning of fossil fuels? Or maybe the ozone layer was lost, and sunlight was now so fierce and strong in ultraviolet radiation that unshielded skin would turn purple black within minutes.
All these, and more, had been confidently predicted.
Drake looked. He saw an endless prairie, dotted in the distance with small clumps of trees. Of humans, and human influence, there was no sign. Melissa came to his side and took his hand. He glanced at her and saw that she was back once more to her usual confident self. She began to lead the way, walking toward that far-off blue-gray skyline.
As they went, Melissa explained. She had returned to her normal manner instantly, as soon as the doors were fully
open and the surface beyond was visible.
“I could certainly see the signs in my time,” she said, “and I’d be surprised if they weren’t already visible in yours. If I was asked to provide a single word for what started the change, I’d give one that I’ve never seen quoted: glass. Before people had glass, there was a time when they didn’t have buildings at all. They lived outside, in the middle of whatever was out there — animals of all sizes, from fleas to elephants. They might not have liked it, but they couldn’t do a thing about it. As time went on people learned to make buildings and could live indoors. But if you wanted to see what you were doing, there had to be holes in the walls to let in light. You could make the holes small, so the elephants and wolves and bears couldn’t get in. But there was no way of making the holes big enough to let light in, yet small enough to keep insects and spiders and wood lice and centipedes out. People still expected to live in the middle of bugs of all kinds. So they squashed them, or encouraged them — spiders will keep your house free of flies — or just put up with them.
“But then cheap, good-quality glass became available. You could make windows that let the light in and kept the bugs out. And that’s when people started to think that spiders and cockroaches and ants were ‘dirty,’ and even ‘unnatural.’ I’ve known women who would scream if they found a decent-sized spider in their bathroom. And as for doing this—”
She reached down to the tall grass at their feet, and stood up again holding a big grasshopper gently in her cupped hands. “I knew people who wouldn’t touch a harmless bug like this, not if you paid them. Don’t you think it’s peculiar, even the word dirty changed its meaning. We’re walking on dirt. Dirt is everywhere. It’s totally natural. The ground is made of dirt. But when you live in a totally artificial environment, shielded from the outside, you never see real earth. ‘Dirty’ things become completely unnatural, and you avoid them. The good news is, when people wanted less and less to go outside, because it was full of beetles and gnats and worms and earwigs and leeches, they were willing to let the surface become more like the way it used to be before humans took over.” She bent down, released the grasshopper, and pointed away to their left. “Not just grasshoppers and bees and flies, either.
Go twenty to thirty kilometers that way, you’ll find gazelles and wildebeest and cheetahs. Maybe lions, too.”
“Are we in the tropics? Or has the climate changed?” One other confident prediction of Drake’s own time had been that in another generation all the hoofed wildlife and the big predators would be gone.
“We’re in what used to be Africa, about ten degrees north of the equator. It’s what you would call Ethiopia. There has been some climate change, too. Think of this as just like Serengeti, even though it isn’t.” Melissa pointed again, this time upward toward the afternoon sun. “One reason it’s not too hot, it’s midwinter and we’re fifteen hundred meters above sea level. Feel it in your lungs?” And, as Drake drew in a deep breath of thin but warm and pollen-laden air, she added, “Come on. You’ve been stuck inside for four years, or maybe it’s five hundred and four. Let’s see what sort of job they did when they tuned up your body.”
She had given up the usual gray dress in favor of bright pink shorts and a red T-shirt. Her legs were shapely but well muscled. She began to run toward the nearest grove of trees, maybe a mile and a half away. After a moment Drake set out in pursuit. They were each carrying a backpack, which when Drake had put it on seemed to weigh next to nothing. Within the first quarter of a mile he changed his mind. He could feel it bouncing up and down on his back, the straps cutting into his shoulders. How could a meal weigh nothing when it was on the inside of you, and so much when you were carrying it on the outside?
He began to pant harder and felt in his calves and thighs the first pain of fatigue and oxygen starvation. The altitude made a tremendous difference, far more than he would have expected, and he had not taken regular exercise since he was thawed. His new body was supposed to make it unnecessary. He forced himself to run for another couple of minutes, then he had to stop. He had forgotten what it was like to be physically exhausted. He dropped heavily to the ground, and lay there panting on the dry, grassy soil.
All the time that he was running, Melissa had steadily increased her lead. She went all the way to the trees, circled them, and headed back at the same speed. She came to where he lay and stood by him with her legs wide apart and her hands on her hips.
Drake rolled on to his back and stared up at her. “What did they do with your body?”
“Not a thing. This is the original me.” She squatted at his side. She wasn’t even panting. “Now do you agree that it was a good idea to get you away from work for a while?”
“If it doesn’t kill me when my heart gives out.”
“It won’t. Any problems like that would have been taken care of. Come on.” She reached down and helped him rise to his feet. “We have to keep going if we want to get to a monitor lodge before darkness.”
That sounded to Drake like an excellent idea. Lions might be twenty kilometers away. But how far were they likely to travel when they were hunting?
Melissa didn’t seem worried, although fast and fit as she was she could not outspeed a hungry lion. On the other hand, it occurred to Drake that she didn’t have to. All she had to do was run faster than him.
Drake’s idea of Earth’s future transportation system, if he had had one at all, was vague, busy, and grandiose — the chaotic vehicle mix of the late twentieth century, extrapolated to become faster, bus
ier, and more tangled.
If the quiet open prairie had not set him right during the afternoon, Melissa did so that night. “The transportation system is all there,” she said, “and according to the reports it’s an excellent one. You can get anywhere in the world in just a few hours. We’ll see it for ourselves when we use it tomorrow. But it’s not heavily used. A few sightseers like us; and that’s about it.”
They had settled into a comfortable lodge, empty except for service machines, and they were eating dinner. It was Drake’s fourth meal with another human being since he had been resurrected. After three years of work together, Par Leon had shyly asked Drake if he would like to have dinner in person every three or four months. Drake took that for what it was, a sincere gesture of approval and friendship.
“So what happened?” he asked Melissa, as their empty plates vanished into the table. “I know that the population is down by a factor of ten from our time, but there still ought to be lots of traffic — people and goods. Why isn’t there?”
She sighed, with the tolerance of a person with a full stomach. Although she was smaller than Drake, she had eaten at least twice as much. But there was no fat on her body. He put it down to her high burn rate and her endless energy.
“You really did tune out for four years, didn’t you?” she said. “It must take a positive effort not to know what’s going on in the world.”
“I was planning to learn a lot about transportation systems, on this planet and off it. But not yet.”
“There’s less to learn than you might imagine. We could have guessed this, too, if we’d bothered to think. Why do people need transportation?”
“To carry goods from where they’re made to where they’re needed. To take people to work, and to let them meet each other.”
“What you’re describing is nowadays called a primitive industrial society. You and I lived at the end of that, though I don’t think we knew it. Automated manufacturing and telework were just about to take off in our time. We are now in a postindustrial, machine-supported society. You don’t need to carry goods when they can be made on the spot from simple raw materials. The manufacturing is all done by machines, smart enough so they don’t need people to watch over them. People still work, but no one goes to work anymore. They don’t need to. You must know that from your own project. You told me you don’t actually see Par Leon more than once a month, and you could get by very well without that.”
“So why is there a transportation system at all?”
“Because a few people want one and use one. Because it doesn’t really cost anything to maintain it — the machines do all that, without a single human being involved. Same as this lodge. When we arrived, our meals were cooked and our beds prepared, and we didn’t even have to request it. It’s an odd thought, but if all the people were to die, the housekeeper here probably wouldn’t notice. It would carry on as usual. I doubt if there’s another person — I mean on the surface — within a hundred miles.”
Drake went to the window and gazed out into the warm African night. It was bright moonlight, and fifty yards away he could see head-high grass swaying as some large invisible animal moved through it.
No other humans within a hundred miles of here. But there was a deeper question. What was he doing here?
He could not give an answer that made sense. Somehow, Melissa Bierly’s requests carried the weight of absolute commands. He did not know how to refuse. If she told him to go outside and face hungry lions, he was sure that he would do it.
And there was another question. What was she doing here? Her desire to see the world made sense only if she was looking for something — or running from something.
He could not imagine what; but later, when they were lying side by side in the lodge’s quiet bedroom, he heard her
sighs. Melissa was moaning softly in her sleep. And every few minutes, until he finally fell asleep himself, he heard the sound of grinding teeth.
Morning restored Melissa’s cheerfulness and drive. She announced that she had changed her mind. She wanted to head upward, to the top of the peak that loomed to the northeast, before they used the transportation system and flew to South America.
“Birhan?” Drake had called up a large-scale map and asked for an optimal route. Now he called up a topographic map. “Are you sure? It’s a brute. According to this it rises above thirteen thousand feet. We won’t be able to breathe.”
“I’ll breathe for both of us.” Melissa was bursting with energy. “I’ll help you, and we won’t go all the way to the top. Just enough to get a view. Come on, let’s go.”
The housekeeper had anticipated their need for packaged food, just as it had provided breakfast and had a car ready. It knew which maps Drake had demanded, and it had decided that Birhan was not within a day’s walk for a human.
The hovercar moved smoothly, about three feet above the surface, and made almost no noise. It handled all kinds of terrain with ease, water as well as land. When they drifted across the rocky near-dry course of a broad river, Drake looked up from the display that was tracing out their path.
“This is the Blue Nile. I wonder what happened to it.”
“Diverted, four hundred years ago.” As usual, Melissa knew everything. “It was once completely dry. It looks as though the old dams are breaking down. No one needs them anymore.”
The ground was rising steadily, and the hovercar was following the upward slope effortlessly. So far as Drake was concerned he would have been happy to ride all the way to the snow-capped peak ahead. Melissa had other ideas.
“This will do.” She stopped the car. “We’re at eight thousand feet. Let’s head for that, and eat when we get there. The car will stay here.”
She was pointing, not at the mountain but at the display. It showed a small flattened area where the hillside leveled off about two thousand feet above them. It could be approached easily from one side, but the contour lines suggested that the other edge ended in a sheer thousand-foot drop.
Melissa jumped lightly down from the car. Drake did the same, less lightly. He flexed his shoulders. Already he was aware that his lungs were working harder.
They started up. Melissa seemed to have an instinct for the easiest route, and rather than competing, Drake stayed two paces behind and followed her lead. He was afraid that it would be worse than the day before, but Melissa held to a slow, steady pace that he could live with. They were both wearing heavier clothing. Melissa had on thick blue pants and a padded jacket that exactly matched the color of her eyes. Drake wondered how the lodge housekeeper had made or found the color — how it even knew the color.
Today, at this altitude, warm clothes were necessary. Drake felt the tingling in his ears. The breeze at his back was chilly, but it seemed to help by pushing him along.
Helped for a while, at least. He was still relieved when they breasted the final rise and emerged onto the little plateau. Melissa did not stop, but went walking over to the far side of it.
“There,” she said. “That’s why we’re here. That’s Africa.”
She was pointing out to the west. Drake came to her side, then at once stepped back, appalled. The view was incredible. He could see what seemed like hundreds of miles across hills and plains. But they were standing at the very edge of a sheer cliff. It was so steep, it could not be natural. Someone, sometime, for some inexplicable reason, had sheered the whole mountain side to a rock face that dropped vertically without ledges or breaks to a boulder-strewn chasm a thousand feet below.
“Be careful, Melissa.” He backed farther and sat down. There was a gusty wind blowing on the plateau, and to be anywhere near the edge was terrifying.
She turned and grinned at him. “You don’t need to worry about me. Watch.”
While he stared in horror she closed her eyes and walked along the very edge, so close that at each blind step only a part of her foot met the rock. When he was convinced that she must fall, she turned and sauntered over to him.
“All right, then. Lunch?”
“Lunch, dinner, anything you like — as long as you stay away from that edge.”
“You worry too much, Drake.” She sat down casually at his side. “Can’t you see I could do this sort of thing all day, and never get hurt?”
He believed her, but to his relief she followed his lead and removed her backpack. He looked across to the other side of the plateau, with its easy descent. With any luck Melissa would feel they had done enough climbing for the day.
They began to eat. Even in midwinter, the sunlight at this latitude was intense. It picked out every detail of Melissa’s face: the contented smile, the glow of perfect skin, and the dazzling blue eyes. Drake decided that he had never in his life seen a woman who looked healthier.
He was staring right at her when the change came. She had just crunched a crisp piece of celery. As she swallowed, the corners of her mouth turned down. Her face flushed darker, responding to a sudden rush of blood. The splendid eyes stared fixedly at nothing, then glared all around.
“It has to be,” she said. “It has to be.”
She stood up. While Drake sat frozen she walked back five steps. He was still trying to scramble to his feet when she ran forward and hurled herself over the sheer edge of the cliff.
“Melissa!” He forgot his own fears and ran to the edge.
She was falling, her arms held wide. She did not change her position, and she did not cry out. Drake stared in horror as her blue-clad figure diminished in size. Already she had dropped hundreds of feet. Her pose was a swan dive, perfectly balanced like a high diver in the first phase of descent. But instead of water, beneath her lay nothing but solid rock and sharp-sided boulders.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 7
