Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  But what had made him believe that, when Earth itself had already provided such a different lesson? Humans had been changing Earth in a thousand ways for five thousand years: draining lakes, damming rivers, making deserts bloom, razing mountains, clearing forests. Why would they stop, simply because they had left Earth?

  Drake wondered if it was all his own wishful thinking: a human urge to turn back the clock to a happy time of simplicity and certitude. He stole a glance at Ana, who was looking out of the port and humming to herself in that beloved rich contralto. A surge of happiness engulfed him. Humans could change, the solar system could change, the universe itself could change. It did not matter, as long as Ana was with him.

  After Uranus, the happenings about Saturn seemed minor. Its biggest moon, Titan, was being developed. It was not, however, being terraformed by machines or downloaded humans. Instead, bioengineered human forms were colonizing the unmodified moon.

  “It’s another experiment, of course,” Ana said. “Just to see how far the human biological limits can be pushed. There’s no doubt that we could do here exactly what we’re doing on Neptune, but where’s the fun and challenge in that? As it is, what we have on Titan is quite an undertaking. It’s not the low temperature. That’s a hundred and eighty below water freezing point, but it can be handled easily — just a matter of insulation, when you get right down to it. The hard piece is the chemistry, ours and Titan’s. Nitrogen, methane, ethane, and organic smog: how would you like the problem of adapting a human to breathe and drink those? Do you want to take a closer look?” And, after one look at Drake’s

  face, “Right, then, I guess that’s all for Titan and Saturn. Jupiter it is.”

  The activities they had seen back on Uranus made more sense to Drake after they had left Saturn and its horde of moons, approached Jupiter, and descended at last for a feathery landing on one of the Jovian satellites.

  He remembered Europa from Par Leon’s time 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.

  “This is why we need the Uranus fusion project,” Ana said cheerfully. “Europa is warmed at the moment by individual fusion plants within the deep ocean, and that leads to patchy melting. It will be a lot better here when Jupiter produces a decent amount of heat.”

  “You mean you’ll do the same thing for Jupiter as you’re doing for Uranus?”

  “Not the same. But similar. Uranus is really more like a test case.”

  “But if you’re going to do it eventually, why wait?”

  “Oh, the age-old problem. We still have—”

  She said a word that Drake had never heard before. A soft voice from the ship’s communications system at once added, in English: “no exact equivalent; conservatives/Luddites is closest match.” It was the first time Drake had realized that the ship’s computer monitored every conversation, and had a program to provide near-equivalents for references it judged unfamiliar to Drake.

  Ana didn’t seem to realize how incongruous it was, that a project to transform Uranus beyond recognition could be judged as the “conservative” and old-fashioned approach. She went on, “But the Jupiter transformation will be approved eventually. Give it a few thousand years, and it will all be finished and working. The ice will go. And we’ll have another whole world for development.”

  She had been setting out a meal for the two of them, and she obviously did not share Drake’s increasing uneasiness. But she must have sensed it, because suddenly she stopped what she was doing and came across to his side.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m fine.” It was preposterous to be anything other than fine. He was with Ana again, after an endless separation. But maybe it was because he was with her that he was allowed to admit to fears and doubts. In any case, try as he would he could not stop shivering.

  “You don’t look good.” She placed her hand on his forehead. “And you don’t feel good. Damp and clammy. Let’s take a look at you.”

  She walked over to the ship’s controls, touched a panel, and studied a display.

  “Hmm. It’s nothing physical.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I can’t. The ship can. It monitors the health of both of us continuously. It says you’re all right. But it only deals with physical problems. So the rest is up to us.”

  Ana went across to the table where she had been working, returned to Drake’s side, and handed him a drink. “Here. This should help for starters. I told you there would be temporal shock, and I was right. It just took a while to show up. You sip on that, while I order something as close as this crazy chef 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. 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 had not even allowed himself to think about, Ana had done just the same thing when he was upset. She took over. She was strong when he was weak, obligingly weak when he felt strong.

  Drake did just as he was told. They ate a full, leisurely meal, with Ana doing almost all the talking. The chef provided a reasonable shot at the foods and even the wines of Old Earth. Finally, Drake could begin to relax and probe the cause of his problem. It was not rational, but he realized that it was the sounds of Europa. He could not rid his mind of them. Others might hear nothing but moving ice floes on a changing moon. He heard tormented groans, and the agonized death cries of ice demons.

  “You have too much imagination,” Ana said firmly, when he told her about it. “One day you will have your reward. All this will turn itself into music.” She switched off the lights, lay down next to him, and cradled his head against her breast. He hid himself away in the perfumed night of her long 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.”

  Chapter 13

  “And I was desolate and sick of an old passion.”

  Physical euphoria carried everything before it, all the way into the inner solar system. Lovemaking, as always with Ana, provided 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 her soft body, 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.

  “A disaster?” Drake looked around at the place where the ship had landed. They were on the winter edge of a diminished Antarctic ice cap. In his time, nothing had grown on this rocky shore. The only animal life in June and July had been the emperor penguins, huddled over their eggs to protect them from the fifty-below-zero polar blizzard.

  Now a gentle rain was falling, and the air was filled with calling seabirds, skuas and petrels and albatrosses and terns. Rank grass and flowering plants flourished along the salty margin of the beach. Plovers and curlews
were nesting there in enormous numbers.

  “It doesn’t look like a disaster,” Drake added. He and Ana were strolling along the shore, bareheaded.

  She paused and skipped a flat stone over the brackish waters of the estuary. “Believe me, it was.”

  “What caused it?”

  “The usual: stupidity. We still have our share of that. The old assumption was that Earth’s whole biosphere had strong homeostasis. Disturb it, no matter how, and forces would come into play to restore it to its original condition. So while everyone was looking the other way, not worrying about this planet and wondering what to do with Venus and Europa and Ganymede and Titan, Earth started an environmental runaway.”

  “Runaway how?”

  “Temperature, mostly. The atmospheric composition was starting to change, too, but the biggest problem was greenhouse warming. It was caught before it could go too far. Turning it around was another matter. For a while, people were imagining a new homeostatic end point, with temperatures hot enough to boil water.”

  Drake stared out over the peaceful estuary. “Hubris,” he said, in English.

  “What?”

  “Too much arrogance; the belief that you can do anything.”

  Ana stared at him. “Anything, no,” she said at last. “A lot, yes. Recovery has been slow but steady. Mean equatorial temperatures are below forty degrees Celsius. The land animals are heading out of the temperate zone jungles, and they’re traveling sunward. Don’t worry, we’ve learned our lesson. This won’t happen again — ever.”

  “I’ve learned not to trust ever.” Drake looked north. “We used to live in a place called Spring Valley. If I tell you how to reach it, could we go there?”

  “Were you living up in the mountains, or close to sea level?”

  “Down right at the shore.” Drake did not notice the change Ana had made, from “we” to “you.”

  “Then we could go there, but it would be a waste of time. I don’t just mean the heat — suits would take care of that. But sea levels are up. Your old home will be under five to ten meters of water. Come back again in ten thousand years. The sea level should have dropped enough for you to pay a visit on dry land. But if you’d like to visit mountains, I have my favorites.”

  “You’ve been to Earth before?” It seemed like a ludicrous question — his Ana had been born and raised on Earth.

  But she just nodded. “Five times. It’s a backwater, but it’s on every tourist list. The original home, the birthplace, the shrine of humanity. But if most people were honest, they’d admit that it’s rather dull. It’s not where the action is. Are there other things that you want to see?”

  “My old mentor, Par Leon, lived deep beneath the African plateau. That was high above sea level. I know the location. If we could just fly over there …”

  “Of course.”

  Ana agreed readily, although she must have suspected what they would find. Africa, at ten degrees north of the equator, was a seared world of dust and dead rock. The snows of Birhan were a memory, the peak a stark blackness jutting into a sky of fuming yellow. Drake looked at it and nodded to Ana. He had seen enough.

  They took off for space and wandered to the innermost system. Venus terraforming, according to Ana, was right on schedule. The surface pressure was down from a stupefying ninety Earth atmospheres to less than twenty. Bespoke bacteria converted the sulfuric acid clouds to sulfur, water, and oxygen. The sulfur was delivered to the deep planetary interior. It would not emerge for hundreds of millions of years. Cyanobacteria, seeded into the upper atmosphere, went about their steady business, absorbing carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, fixing nitrogen, and delivering a rain of organic detritus to start a planetary topsoil.

  “Water is still the main problem,” Ana said. “There’s simply not as much as we would like. Venus will always be dry, unless we do an extensive Oort Cloud transfer, or combine the planet with one of the big Jovian water moons, like Callisto.”

  “Is that feasible?” The cure for temporal shock seemed to be working; Drake was starting to feel that anything was possible. But flying a satellite of Jupiter to coalesce with an inner planet? That still sounded ludicrous.

  “It’s not feasible yet,” Ana said. “The impact would destroy Venus. But we’re learning how to do a soft merge. For the moment, I don’t recommend we make a Venus landing. It’s too hot down there — hotter than Earth ever got, even at the height of the runaway. It would have to be suits all the time. Are you ready to go somewhere else?”

  Drake nodded.

  “Right.” Ana paused at the control panel. “Lots of options. Unless you’re really keen, I suggest that we skip Mercury completely. It has the research domes, but nothing really worth seeing.”

  The ship flew on, skimming the broad face of the Sun. Close up, that mottled surface was as raging and demonic as anything that Drake had encountered on his visit to Canopus. They passed through hydrogen prominences that roared and flamed with prodigal energy. Drake remained unperturbed. The ship’s refrigeration held the interior temperature at a comfortable level; in any case, Ana was at his side.

  The Sun fell rapidly behind, and the outward journey began. Drake did not care where he went. It was at Ana’s insistence that they head for Mars.

  “Just for fun,” she said.

  It did not sound like fun. Drake recalled the fury of the Mars bombardment, the cloud-streaked sky of dirty gray and the torn and quaking surface.

  But…

  Twenty-nine and a half millennia was a long time. Drake’s memories were distant history. Their landing was in midmorning, on a calm world of thin, clear air and dark blue sky.

  “A lot more atmosphere than there used to be,” Ana said, as Drake gazed out at a green cover of plants, a thin carpet from which jutted hair-thin stems with fat blue lollipops at their ends. “But there’s not nearly enough oxygen to breathe. Not for us, at least.”

  “Why did they stop halfway?” Drake was becoming blasй when it came to planetary transformation. “I’d have thought Mars would be easy.”

  “It would. You’ll see why in a minute.” Ana watched as Drake disappeared within his bulky symbiote. She tried to restrain herself, then began to giggle helplessly.

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m going to be the same — but just look at you.”

  Drake did. In a mirror he saw a mournful marsupial, an overweight kangaroo with a wobbling paunch and a long camel’s nose. The outsized ears stuck up to provide a constantly surprised expression. He stuck out his tongue. The face in the mirror extended a black appendage at least a foot long. He blinked. The dark liquid eyes blinked back at him, protected by an inner transparent membrane and outer lids with eyelashes long and thick enough to be the envy of any glamour queen.

  Ana was allowing her own symbiote to envelop her. “Now we can go out,” she said, as her new body seemed to inflate before Drake’s eyes. “Follow me.”

  To hell, if you ask me to. But he had already done that. Drake heard the hiss as the ship’s cabin pressure dropped. The hatch opened. He did nothing, but his great paunch began to move in and out with its own rhythm. He saw that Ana’s belly was doing the same.

  “If you decided to live here,” she said, in a voice half an octave higher than usual, “you wouldn’t have to make a decision whether to live on the surface, where there’s not much oxygen, or in the deep caverns, where there is. You’d just let your symbsuit sort that out, and provide whatever you need. Mars surface dwellers never disengage from their symbsuits. They eat, drink, sleep, and die with them — even when they go to the caverns.”

  Drake could understand why, when they left the ship and began to wander the broken plain outside. It didn’t feel anything like wearing a suit. The symbiote was his own body. It merely happened to be a new body that could endure extreme cold and make do on less than a quarter of a human’s oxygen needs.

  “Eat, drink, sleep, and die,” he said. “Make love, too?”

  “Can you imagine humans living
for years in an environment where they couldn’t make love? See that group?” Ana was pointing to the horizon. “Go and ask them.”

  Half a dozen people/symbiotes had appeared. They were moving in true kangaroo fashion, bounding along with fifteen-meter leaps in the low Mars gravity.

  Drake watched them wave and point, inviting Ana and him over to an open structure beside a jumble of rocks.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go and chat.”

  He was curious to hear about life on the surface of Mars, but he didn’t want to talk to them about lovemaking activities involving a symbsuit. He was quite capable of conducting his own experiments on that subject.

  The change took place on the second day on Mars. Ana became suddenly withdrawn and remote. Drake didn’t know what it was — something he had said or done? — and she did not want to talk.

  That had never happened in the old days. It was not that they had never argued. But they had a standard rule. As Ana put it, “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”

  When one’s feelings were hurt, the other always knew. They would sit and talk, argue as much as necessary, and get every nagging pain or upset out into the open. Once the sore point was exposed, the other could stroke it better.

  But Ana refused to do it. She only said, “It’s nothing.” When clearly it wasn’t.

  The return flight to Pluto, cruising out to where Drake’s Servitor was patiently (or perhaps impatiently) awaiting his return, was quiet and unsatisfying. According to Ana, the trip had been a complete success. If there had been major temporal shock, it now lay in the past.

  But if it was a success, why was she so distant?

  He found out on the final morning of the flight, minutes before they were due to land at the station on Charon. Ana had been a lot more cheerful during the previous twenty-four hours. He assumed that the trouble, whatever it had been, was over. Because his guard was down, the shock was so much harder to take.