Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  “We must be patient.” Ariel himself showed neither anger nor impatience. “If your original training had perhaps been in mathematics and physics, rather than in music, this would be simpler. But we will work with what we have.” There was no implied criticism, as Ariel continued, “Certain other things become possible in a closed universe. Such a universe possesses, as I said, a single, final end point: an eschaton. At that eschaton, that ultimate stage of confluence of all things, the universe contracts to a singularity. Everything converges, everything meets. This was known to scientists and philosophers at the time of your own birth, who sometimes referred to it as the Omega Point.

  “And now we come to the most significant point. Just before the eschaton is reached, all that has ever been known, all information past or present, becomes accessible. Every item of information about people who died a thousand years ago — or fourteen million years ago — becomes available. At the eschaton, every personality who ever existed could in principle be re-created, in perfect detail.”

  “Including Ana! I understand, I understand exactly.”

  But Drake was filled with rage, not exhilaration. “If this was known millions of years ago, why the devil was it never once mentioned to me?”

  “Because it seemed totally irrelevant. The potential for such future action exists only if the universe is closed. In your time, the observations of mass-energy density provided too low a value, by a factor of ten to twenty. That indicated an open universe. Later, scientists decided on theoretical grounds that the universe ought to sit exactly on the boundary between an open and a closed universe. They sought experimental evidence for the missing matter, and they slowly found it. There was still uncertainty; however, they thought that the universe would expand forever, but more and more slowly. In such a case the Omega Point would never exist.

  “But that has at last changed. For reasons that we still do not understand, recent measurements reveal a mass-energy density higher than the critical value. That points to a closed universe. The eschaton will exist. One day, many billions of years hence, it must be reached.”

  “And Ana can then return to me. When? When will it happen?”

  “If it is ever possible, it will be in the far, far future. Our estimate is that the eschaton will be reached fifty billion years from now. That is a time so long that it makes the interval from your first moment of cryosleep to the present day seem less than the blink of an eye. The universe itself is only fifteen billion years old. I recommend that you do not let this conversation affect your subsequent actions. But your own wishes are important. I would like to know what you want.”

  “You’re crazy!” Drake glared at Ariel in disbelief. “You know what I want. Why do you think I was frozen in the first place? I want to be with Ana. I’ll wait forever if I have to. I don’t care how long I have to stay in electronic storage.”

  “We feared such a response. We deem it irrational. However, we sense your resolution and the force of your will. There is still one more thing.”

  “There always is. Another problem?”

  “Not at all. A recommendation. You will, I feel sure, want to understand as completely as possible the concept of a closed universe, and its implications for the Omega Point. That would become vastly easier were you to become part of a composite mind. You would have access to all that any knew, science and mathematics and language and philosophy.”

  It sounded tempting. Surely, the more that he knew relevant to Ana’s ultimate resurrection, the better. But Drake had learned to be wary. Might there also be negatives, so well hidden that the composite represented by Ariel and Milton was not aware of them?

  Drake could sense one, a subtlety that was hard to define precisely. There was a softness to this age, a kindness and a

  willingness to bend and compromise. That sounded like real progress for the human species (if that name still applied). But as part of a composite, Drake would surely find his own anachronistic claws and fangs vanishing, dissolved by the pacifism and gentle altruism of the group mind.

  A change for the better? Not necessarily. What was good for today might prove fatal tomorrow. Might there be a new future when polish and diplomacy were useless, where what was needed to restore Ana was raw resolve and crude energy?

  Merging into a group was a risk too big to take.

  “I don’t want to become part of a composite,”

  Drake said at last. Ariel had been waiting patiently. “I am willing to be downloaded into the database. But I don’t want to be awake in electronic storage. Let me sleep until I can do some thing.”

  “That can be done. There are, however, other and more pleasant options. It would be very easy to create for you a derived reality, one in which you and Ana are continuously together. Before the general use of the composites, many people lived their whole lives in such an environment.”

  “How could I be with Ana? She does not exist.”

  “We would provide a simulation. But, I guarantee, a highly plausible one.”

  “No.” Drake did not tell of the zombie image that came into his head: Ana’s dead body, somehow reanimated but possessed of no genuine life, took hold of him in clammy hands and pressed cold lips to his. “No, Ariel. That would be the worst thing I can imagine. Let me lie dormant. Activate me only if there is significant new information about the Omega Point relevant to Ana’s restoration.”

  Ariel bowed his head. “I am sorry that you will not join us, and I am sorry that you refuse derived reality. I believe that we could have soothed your pain.”

  “Forget me and my pain. There are worse things in the world than pain. As soon as you are able, I want to become dormant.”

  Drake paused. He had said all that he needed to say, yet it felt incomplete. Something ought to be added of his own great personal debt: to this epoch, to his faithful Servitor, to Ariel, and to the people who had finally offered him a faint and far-distant hope that he might succeed. It was unlikely that he could ever repay Ariel and Milton and their descendants, but he must make the offer.

  “Waken me in one other circumstance.” Drake could feel his attention fading. Ariel was taking him at his word, and already moving him toward dormancy.

  “Wake me if ever you have problems” — he had to struggle to think, struggle to finish what he wanted to say — “tough problems, ones where I might be able to help. Bring me from dormancy, and I will do my best for you.

  “Don’t hold out too much hope. I haven’t had a single idea in fourteen million years, but who knows? Maybe in another fourteen million I’ll get lucky and come up with one.”

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  Interlude:

  Dying

  Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

  This sensible warm motion to become

  A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit

  To bathe in fiery floods or to reside

  In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;

  To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

  And borne with restless violence round about

  This pendent world.

  There are worse things in the world than pain.

  It was easy to say, hard to believe. Every fiber of every muscle was at full contraction. Tendons stretched, bones creaked and bent.

  Something had gone wrong; terribly, terribly wrong. That knowledge filled Drake’s mind as the agony continued without end. If this was the price of electronic downloading into a new body, he would take a thousand primitive thawings any day.

  One thing, and one thing only, saved his sanity: if he was being resurrected, it must be because there was also some new hope of resurrecting Ana. For that promise, any pain could be endured.

  The knotting of his muscles was finally easing. It was replaced by a great weariness and lassitude. He opened his eyes.

  Too soon. He saw only darkness shot through
with streaks of flickering white. He lay back and waited.

  Now he could both hear and feel. A high-pitched series of clicks sounded, very close. The skin of his chest and belly prickled and tickled, disturbing but not painful.

  Vision was returning. He was lying on his back with his head turned to one side. In front of his eyes he saw a milky, translucent sheet, bowed down into a shallow depression under his weight. It felt cool and sticky on his cheek. He tried to lift his head and managed to do so even in his weakened condition. That success convinced him that he was not on Earth or in a simulated gravity close to that on Earth. He was light.

  Pluto again? One of the asteroids, or a moon of one of the bigger planets? Or somewhere totally new, out in the Oort Cloud or beyond? Or perhaps he was in derived reality, where anything was possible. The real question, as always, was when. How long had he been downloaded and dormant before entering his new body?

  Something had appeared in his field of vision. It was a black, shiny, convex surface, ribbed with spokes that radiated from a central boss like the spokes of an open umbrella. It was small, not much bigger than an outstretched hand. And it was moving, inching its way down past his body.

  He tried to speak, to ask a question in Universal. All that emerged was a gargling grunt. His throat felt filled with phlegm. He tried again, lifting his head and coughing out a single word: When?

  No human was visible to answer him. Looking down the length of his naked body, he saw four more of the black umbrella objects crouched close by. He learned the source of the gentle prickling on his chest and belly. Dozens of tiny turquoise objects, hard-cased and articulated like small insects, were crawling busily over him. His movement and garbled attempt at speech aroused them to a frenzy of activity. They scurried down the sides of his body and vanished underneath the little arched umbrellas. He heard a louder sequence of excited hisses and clicks from the umbrellas themselves. They all lifted and began to walk on the ends of their spokes, away across the white, sticky membrane on which he was lying. The turquoise insects went with them, clinging to their undersides, or perhaps lodged inside the umbrella crawlers.

  Drake realized that the whole surface on which he lay was only a few meters across. It was surrounded and covered by a hemispherical dome. The crawlers advanced to the dome’s edge, pushed against it, and slid easily through.

  Drake was alone. And he had never felt more alone.

  He summoned all his strength and managed to sit up. His pains had not disappeared, but they had become more localized. His hands and feet burned, with the pain of returning circulation. He lifted his right hand close to his face and studied it. It was his own hand, he recognized the familiar pattern of lines on the palm. But the skin was wrinkled, as though he had been immersed in water for a long time. The fingertips were blue-white and dead looking. When he pinched his forefinger between the thumb and fingers of his left hand, there was no sensation. He had feeling only in his palms and wrists — and that feeling was pain.

  He could not stand, but he could crawl. On hands and knees he made his way to the edge of the little hemispherical room. He found that he could push his hand into and through the wall. Presumably he could push the whole of him through just as easily.

  And go where?

  Weakness was sweeping over him again, and he lay down on his stomach on the sticky floor. An awful conviction filled his mind. Nothing that he had seen was in any way familiar. Perhaps the strangest thing about his previous resurrection, fourteen million years beyond the time of his original birth, was not that so much had changed. It was that so much had been the same, that humans had endured, that something remained recognizable. At the time of his first freezing, true humans had been less than three million years old. How many million years would the species continue, in any form? And after humans, what? Perhaps machines were the inheritors — but machines so different from any that he had ever seen that he would not even know what they were. Machines, like the ones that he had seen creeping over his body.

  He felt like staying where he was, closing his eyes, and giving up. But Melissa Bierly’s words, from long ago, would not permit that. “Keep your faith, Drake, and go on … somewhere, sometime, you will find Anastasia.”

  There was a dark side to those words, one that he had never appreciated before. Assume that he had been downloaded because there was now a way to resurrect his Ana. Into what kind of future world would he be bringing her? It would be supremely selfish to pull Ana from her fermata of endless sleep, if the universe that he had to offer was so alien that pleasure and happiness were impossible.

  Well, it was his job to find out. And it would not do to be a pessimist. Since he had been downloaded, no matter how far in the future he had come, the human information network of an earlier time must still exist. Other humans, in flesh or in electronic form, would also exist. They, like he, could be placed in a cloned form of their original body, whose genetic blueprint was stored with the contents of their minds and memories. So his problem would be to contact those humans, in whatever form they endured.

  Drake sat up, cursing his own physical weakness. His heart was pounding. That was probably the air. It smelled strange, and he had to breathe faster than usual. He started again toward the wall of the room, determined this time to force his way through and see what lay on the other side. His head was pushing against the wall when a dozen of the little umbrella crawlers came in from the other side of the membrane. Their hissing and clicking reached a new level of excitement when they saw what he was doing. They bunched up in front of him, pushing at his hands and forearms. At first he resisted, but a dozen reinforcements came through the wall and added their efforts to the others. Each one was carrying a narrow section of transparent flexible sheet. One of them waved a piece urgently at Drake.

  They were trying to tell him something. And since they had resurrected him, they were probably not intending to do him harm. He allowed himself to be shepherded to the middle of the hemisphere, and laid out flat on his back. Hundreds of the blue-green insectile objects emerged from the crawlers. They seized the flexible sheets and began to place them in position around his body. Where the edges met, the sheets formed a tight and invisible seal.

  Drake finally knew what the blue-green workers were doing when a sheet was placed in position over his face. He reached up to tear it free of his mouth and nose, then realized that it left a couple of inches of free space there.

  “A suit!” he gargled. “You making me a suit?”

  He did not expect an answer. Now he understood the reason for the excitement when he tried to push his way through the wall of the room where he had been lying. Whatever was out there, he could not handle it without special protection. The crawlers knew it. Either they were intelligent themselves, or they were under the control of an intelligence. That intelligence would eventually tell him where he was, and how far into the future he had traveled.

  He began to cooperate more actively, lifting his arms and legs so that the sheets could be placed into position. The turquoise workers moved faster, scuttling all around him to make a complete sheath around his body. Each finger, each toe, each ear, was precisely and individually wrapped. He was nervous when the last big piece went into place, sealing

  off the back of his head and his access to the air in the room. The suit could hold only enough air for a few minutes. He told himself to relax. If they didn’t want him alive, why would they have resurrected him?

  He noticed no change at all in his breathing. As an experiment he spoke again, through clotted and phlegm-filled vocal cords. “All right, what’s next?”

  Apparently sound passed through his body sheath with no difficulty. The crawlers hummed and clicked in reply and retreated from him. The blue-green workers returned to them and disappeared through small apertures beneath the ends of the umbrella spokes. All the crawlers headed together for the wall of the room, and paused there.

  Drake followed. This time there was no objection when he pushed a
gainst the sticky membrane. He forced his way through.

  It was obvious now why his earlier effort had been prevented. He was emerging onto the surface of a moon or planet. It was a small one, with a horizon only a kilometer or so away. The hard and unvarying light of the stars above him suggested that if any atmosphere existed, it was far too thin to breathe.

  Another mystery. The membrane wall had allowed him to push through easily, but it did not release its air. Nor did there seem to be a hole where he had passed through. Technology was still advancing.

  Cautiously, he stood up. His feet felt pain at the ankles and were dead below. Balancing was not easy. He stared upward. The pattern of constellations had been unfamiliar on his earlier resurrection, so it was too much to hope that he would recognize them this time. One thing he was sure of: There were far too many stars, thousands after thousands of them. In such a crowded sky, it would be difficult for the mind to create the old imagined shapes of bears, dragons, swans, or crosses.

  Where was he? Drake’s conviction that he had traveled far in time and space became stronger. A sky should appear so crowded only close to the center of the Galaxy, thirty thousand light-years from Earth.

  Or not even there. The stars above were thickly scattered, enough to make vision easy; but not so thick that other objects could not be seen beyond them. High to Drake’s right, like a shadow behind the stars, he could make out a great misty spiral of light. He was looking at it from above and slightly away from its axis of rotation.

  He had wondered where he was. Still he did not know, but now he could make a guess. His first thought had been that he was in the dense middle of his own galaxy, staring out at some other spiral. But there was no spiral galaxy nearly so close — the one he was looking at was bright and sprawled over a quarter of the sky. Unless he was in the unimaginably distant future, the object overhead must be the Galaxy, the one that formed the home of Earth and Sol. He was seeing it from a dense cluster of stars that in intergalactic terms was a close neighbor, one of the Magellanic Clouds — tight groups of billions of stars that were gravitationally tied to the Galaxy and a couple of hundred thousand light-years away from it.