“I am afraid that there has not. It is still considered 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. Good-bye, 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 surrounded by an array of unfamiliar machinery. The room was small, drab, and oddly shaped. Its octagonal walls bulged up to a multifaceted convex ceiling, across which crawled faint patterns like blue clouds. Earth’s gravity had disappeared. His body was close to weightless. He felt that with a tiny effort he would become airborne, floating up to rest on that pale sky-ceiling.
Where was he? And why had he been awakened?
Trismon Sorel had assured him that his Servitor would accompany him everywhere, through space and time, and would be required to approve his resurrection. Drake stared around the room, seeking the wheeled form of the Servitor. But then all questions of his location and condition vanished.
A woman waited in the narrow doorway.
It was Ana.
Ana, happy and blooming with health. She was standing exactly as he’d seen her a thousand times, head to one side and her mouth quirked into a question.
The moment of intense joy was blotted out by a terrible disappointment. This was another synthesis, more cruel than the last.
Drake tried to stand up, but instead he found himself rising straight into the air and turning end over end.
“Easy now.” Ana was somehow at his side, steadying him. “I’m sorry, I ought to have waited until you had become accustomed to a low-gee environment.”
“You are a synthesis — not real.”
“That is not true.”
“The dark-haired woman — the simulation of the woman — she said there had not been progress—”
“It spoke the truth.” Ana had floated them back down, to sit side by side on the bed. “At least on that subject. There has been no progress in the problem that interests you.”
“But you — you are here, you are alive.” Again, the fear was there. Could a simulation be made to lie? “Aren’t you?”
“I am indeed. But it is not the way you think it is.” The gentle tone in Ana’s voice was infinitely familiar. “Isn’t it obvious to you 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. “Look at me. Can’t
you see the difference? 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 wakeful-ness 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 been curious to meet you. Each time I woke, I checked your condition in the cryowomb. Each time, before I went again to hibernation, I asked to be awakened should you waken.”
“But I ought not to be awake now,” Drake protested. “I was supposed to remain in cryosleep until the restoration of Ana’s personality became possible. I gave those explicit instructions to my Servitor when I entered the cryotank.”
Entered the cryotank — twenty-nine thousand years ago. Long enough for steel to rust and stone to crumble. Long enough for even the concept of a Servitor to have been lost. Long enough for hopes and thoughts and wishes to have been forgotten. It was folly to expect anything to endure over thirty millennia.
Except that some things had endured. Drake’s own emotions had survived unchanged. He realized that he was delighted to be awake. To be sitting two feet away from Ana, watching the old expressions of thought and concern run across her face — that was infinite bliss.
“I am sorry.” The new Ana bowed her head. “Your-Servitor is not at fault. Your awakening is my doing. I came to Pluto, and as a human, I overrode the instructions given by you 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 that 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 you do not actually know me at all; and I do not know you. 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. As I grew older I learned everything that I could about you and your life. What you did — and tried to do — seemed to me the noblest and bravest thing in the whole universe. I cannot say how much I longed to see you, to speak to you, to thank you for giving me life. But despite that longing, through all past years I respected what you wanted. And I knew that you did not want me.”
“I have never wanted anyone but you.” “No. You want Ana — your Ana. I am Ana, yes, but I am a different person. I have my own memories, my own joys and sorrows, my own fears. 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 you and know you. So I gave the command for resurrection.” She gazed at Drake with those clear, gray eyes that he had known forever. “I did not think of what would come after that. I did not ask myself what pain I might cause you. I realize now that what I did was a selfish and an unforgivable act.”
“You are wrong. It is forgiven already.” “It may be forgiven by you, but it was nonetheless unforgivable. It was my plan to leave Pluto after speaking with you, and proceed to the edge of the Oort Cloud where the members of the Rigel Calorans expedition will assemble. I can no longer do that, at least at this time. I must respect your feelings. How can I atone for waking you against your will?”
“Stay with me.” Drake did not say it, but his mind added the word forever.
“I certainly owe that to you.” Ana smiled, with that 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 in resurrecting you. There is a level of temporal shock after any hibernation, even if it is no more than a few hundred years. I have felt it many times; a reaction to changes in the world, in areas where no change was imagined and anticipated. In your case it has been nearly thirty millennia, and you were not prepared for it as we are. So I will take it as my task to lessen the blow of twenty-nine
thousand vanished years.” She reached out her hand, and her touch made him shiver. “Come along, Drake Merlin. Your patient Servitor is waiting outside. It is most irritated that a mere irrational human would override your explicit instructions. Come along with me, and listen to my abject apologies.”
Chapter 12
“These were never your true love’s eyes,
Why do you feign that you love them?”
Ana’s warning of temporal shock at first seemed greatly overstated. The evidence of human presence on Pluto was mostly the cryowombs. Drake could see little change in the wombs or the planet since his mad run from them, twent
y-nine thousand years earlier.
“True enough.” Ana had all her old calm and common sense. “On the other hand, this is Pluto. You can’t do much without raising the temperature and disturbing the cryowombs, which no one wants to do. Almost everybody has ancestors stored here, even if they don’t quite know who they are.”
“How many have been resurrected?”
She grimaced. “I knew you would ask me that. The cryowombs still hold close to fifty thousand people. Fewer than five hundred of those have been revivified. None but you has been resurrected in the past twenty-five thousand years. You and Melissa Bierly are the only people to have entered the cryowombs twice, and been resurrected twice.”
“Melissa. What happened to Melissa?” Drake saw again those sapphire eyes, blazing with madness.
“She was resurrected.”
“Was she insane?”
“Once, she was. But she is cured.”
“She’s alive?”
“Very much alive. Still superhuman smart and healthy and intelligent, only now she’s happy and no longer suicidal.”
“You met Melissa?”
“Certainly.” Ana smiled at Drake, with an expression that he read as totally loving. “You have your obsessions, Drake, you must permit me mine. I sought Melissa out originally, just because she knew you. We have talked about you, many times. She forms part of the expedition to Rigel Calorans. More than that—”
Drake interrupted: “But I thought that resurrection had become trivial, for anyone who was properly frozen. Why have so few been revived?”
“Resurrection is trivial. The problem isn’t technological; it’s emotional and ethical. If I revive a cryocorpse, what are my responsibilities toward that person? What are my emotional commitments? Although everyone recognizes that their ancestors are here, those are remote ancestors. Think of your own time. Would you, if you could, have resurrected Hammurabi, or Augustus Caesar — even if you were a distant descendant? They would have been lost in your world of telephones and automobiles and computers. Yet they were exceptional people, not like most of the cryocorpses. Do you know the prime criterion that decided who was preserved in the cryowombs?”
Drake nodded glumly. “I can guess, from what the people at Second Chance told me. Money.”
“Exactly. It took money to be frozen, and much more to maintain the condition over the centuries. You are an anomaly, Drake. I read all I could find about you, and I know that money didn’t interest you. You acquired plenty, but only so you could be frozen. What you did was very smart. You learned things that people of the future would want to know. What you had in your head was true wealth. But wealth as you knew it no longer exists…
“You have a powerful imagination, Drake. Imagine this. Imagine resurrecting somebody who proves to be a money-hungry fanatic — someone who was once very rich, expects to be rich now, and hopes to receive special
treatment simply because of that. Such people almost surely know nothing of interest to us. How could they be anything but miserable today?”
“You’re saying it’s becoming less and less likely that someone will be resurrected. So why are the cryowombs maintained?”
“What else can we do with them?” Ana shook her head in frustration. “The people in the wombs are legally dead, but because they can be resurrected we cannot think of them as dead. So what do we do? We do nothing, and pass the problem to our descendants.”
She was sitting in the pilot’s seat of a two-person ship, and now she stabbed at the control panel. “Don’t give us too much credit, Drake,” she said, as they lifted from Pluto’s craggy surface. “People haven’t changed at all. When it comes to making tough decisions, we’re no better now than we were in your time.”
People haven’t changed. Perhaps not, but other things certainly had. The evidence that Ana was both right and wrong began to appear as the ship cruised closer to the Sun. It was her idea to introduce Drake to the new solar system in a practical way, by visiting or passing close to every planet and major moon, then heading out for the remoter and less familiar region of the Oort Cloud. It had been Drake’s idea to use the small two-person ship, and leave their Servitors behind on Pluto until they returned.
Ana had also preferred a leisurely tour, one that would give them time to talk and Drake time to adjust. On their two-day journey to Neptune he decided that he was going to need all of it. Ana had stated that people had not changed. But what were people?
He had called for information about Neptune, and now he was staring at the three-dimensional image in the ship’s display. It showed a large silvery superspider, fourteen multijointed legs emerging from a smooth central ovoid. The object was described as an “inhabitant of Neptune.”
“What does it mean, ‘inhabitant’?” He turned for the fiftieth time to Ana for assistance. “That suggests I’m looking at something intelligent, something that lives on Neptune. I thought that was impossible.”
After the first few hours, he had stopped puzzling over the mysteries of language. Another sea change in communications technology had occurred since Par Leon’s and Trismon Morel’s time. The old languages, filled with their magical resonances of old times and beauties, still existed; but a new language, pruned of ambiguities and redundancies, had been created.
It was much preferred for factual transfers of information, and he and Ana were using it now. Misunderstanding in the new language, according to Ana, was almost impossible.
Maybe. But Drake, approaching communication with a context that was thirty thousand years out of date, suspected that he was coming perilously close.
“That’s a Neptune dweller all right.” Ana did not share his misgivings or confusion. “Of course, it’s not an organic form — we may have evolved organic forms by now that can survive on Neptune, but I don’t know what they are. That’s an inorganic form, and it operates deep enough in the Neptune atmosphere to be buoyant and mobile.”
“But it says there, male human.”
“Correct. That means it’s a fully human male intelligence, downloaded to a brain of inorganic form. If it were anything different, it would say ‘human-modified,’ or ‘human-augmented.’ ”
“How can you say a downloaded intelligence is human? That thing is nothing like a human.”
“That argument ended a long time ago. Or let’s just say, people gave up on it. Can you define a human? I know I can’t. It says it’s human, that Neptune dweller. That’s good enough for me.”
“But what happened to the original human being?”
“I don’t know. I expect he’s around somewhere close by — on the big moon, Triton, more than likely. Neptune has been developed in a very natural way. There are colonies of humans and machines on Triton, and even a few on Nereid, though that doesn’t have much to offer. The planet hardly needs human intelligence at all. There are plenty of Von Neumanns.” She laughed at the look on Drake’s face. “No, I don’t mean the downloaded person. He died before cryocorpses. Von Neumanns are just self-reproducing machines.”
“How many of them are on Neptune?”
“Millions? Billions? I have no idea. I doubt if anyone does, since they’re self-reproducing. They’re mining volatiles and collecting the rare heavier elements, and they manage very well on their own. The human Neptunians are not there for supervision. They have other reasons: to satisfy their curiosity, to experiment with extreme forms, or to maintain some privacy.”
Neptune has been developed in a very natural way. Drake, peering down through endless kilometers of hydrogen and helium atmosphere smudged with icy methane clouds, could see no evidence of development; but according to Ana and the ship’s information service, Neptune beneath those cloud layers swarmed with the spin-offs of human activity, with machines capable of independent activity like humans, and with humans that seemed more like machines.
He would call it anything but natural development.
He changed his mind when the ship flew on to their next port of call. Compared wit
h Uranus, Neptune’s development was natural.
Something monstrous was happening to Uranus.
The major moons, except for little Miranda nearest to the planet, had gone. 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 farther out, and do the fusion pumping 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. And perhaps it was.
“What happened to all the other moons?” He could see fifteen listed in the ship’s data set, from tiny Cordelia, barely more than an orbiting mountain that shepherded the Uranus Epsilon ring, out to Titania and Oberon, good-sized worlds half as big as Earth’s Moon. Miranda was now the only survivor.
“Oh, they’re all right. They’ll be moved back eventually.” Again, the astonishing thing about Ana’s reply was her offhand manner. “Miranda couldn’t be moved, because it was needed. But the others must have been in the way for this phase of the work.’’
Drake stared out of the ports and wondered. Uranus had not been a promising candidate for life to begin with. It would become an impossible one when hydrogen fusion turned the whole world to incandescence.
The thought nagged at him: Why do such a thing, within the original home system of mankind? On those rare occasions in the old days when he thought about the far future, he had imagined Earth, together with all the other planets of the solar system, preserved as some kind of grand museum. Humanity might spread out across the Galaxy, but the home worlds would always be there. Preserved in pristine condition, they would remind people of their origins.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 12
