Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  The great thing was, it didn’t matter. This was not the end of all hope, the end of everything. The hollow shell beside him was not the only Ana, just as he was not the only Drake. Somewhere he and Ana still existed in electronic storage. Somewhere, at some time, they might be reunited. No. They would be reunited.

  Drake ignored his pain and weakness. He laughed aloud.

  It was a mistake. The decaying fabric of his lungs ripped under the stress like wet paper. His throat filled with blood, and he died.

  PART TWO

  Iliad

  Chapter 16

  “By a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney.”

  There are worse things in the world than pain.

  Pain can be channeled and concentrated, marshaled and molded, directed to draw some element of the world into bright particular focus. Harsher pain can force a tighter focus.

  But panic, heart-stilling, gut-twisting panic, has no redeeming value. It dissipates instead of distilling. When blind panic roars and surges, all concentration is lost.

  Drake awoke to that knowledge. Terror and horror howled at him from every direction. He had no idea of the cause. Worse, he did not know how to find out. He was blind to everything, deaf to all but the screaming of frightened minds. He tried to order the chaos around him and structure the questions that he wanted answered:

  Where am I? When am I? How long was I dormant? How far in the future have I traveled this time? What progress has there been in restoring Ana ?

  It was hopeless. He could form the questions, but a hundred billion replies came raging in at once. They said everything and nothing, individual vectors combining to give a null resultant.

  He tried different questions: Why are you so afraid? What is the source of fear?

  A hundred billion answers came in unison. The force of the signal was too much to handle. Drake made a supreme effort. He ignored the torrent of inputs from those countless billions of accessible minds, and looked inward to create his own working environment.

  A sunny room, windowed and comfortable. The familiar prospect beyond it of a windswept Bay of Naples.

  And in the seat opposite, ready to answer his questions -

  Drake recoiled. Instinctively he had thought of Ana, and she sat waiting. It was the worst possible choice. In Ana’s presence, even with an Ana that he had himself created, he would not seek answers. Like the lotus-eaters, he would dream away the time.

  Who?

  People flickered into the armchair. Par Leon, Ariel, Melissa Bierly, Trismon Sorel, Milton, Cass Leemu…

  None would hold. They appeared, and were as quickly gone.

  Who?

  Tom Lambert. Yes, yes, yes. Don’t go!

  The outline of the doctor had been faint and wavering. Now his figure stayed and steadied. He shook his head reprovingly. “Dumb, very dumb. I don’t mean you, Drake. Us. Not your fault, but ours — the composite’s. We should have known better.”

  “Better than what?” Drake saw that it was Tom at thirty, leaner than the paunchy and balding version of their last meeting.

  “Than to expose you all at once to our situation.” The man in the other chair was so real, so tangible, that it was impossible to think of him as some ghostly and evanescent swirl of electrons. “Heaven knows, we’ve talked enough about temporal shock. We have plenty of experience with it. You’d think we would have learned to believe in it.”

  “I’m not feeling temporal shock.”

  “You will. Do you insist on this form of interaction, by the way? It will severely limit the rate of information transfer.”

  “I can handle this. I couldn’t take it the other way.”

  “Then I suppose we’ll have to live with it. That is temporal shock, even if you don’t want to use the term. You’ll get used to the new reality after a while. I’d suggest we take this slowly, maybe have little practice sessions until you learn how to structure and sort inputs.”

  “I’m ready to sort some inputs now, Tom, without any practice at all. Tell me three things. Can Ana be brought back to me? When am I? And where am I? And don’t tell me that I’ll have trouble understanding or accepting whatever the truth is. I’ve heard that line of talk every time I’ve been resurrected, and every time I managed.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Tom leaned back, pipe and lighted match in hand. He was still in his tobacco-addiction days, shortly before acute sinus problems and the anomaly of a physician practicing the opposite of what he preached had forced him to give up smoking. “You know, Drake, some of the questions that you asked are pretty damned hard to

  answer.”

  “I thought they seemed very basic.”

  “Well, you asked about time again. I know what you mean: How many years has it been since your upload into the data banks? But you must understand that with people buzzing all over the Galaxy, or operating in electronic form, or sitting in strong gravitational fields, everyone’s clock runs at a different rate. We use a completely different technique for describing time now. If I told you how it worked, it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. I’ll give you an answer, I promise. I’ll find a way of showing you. But for the moment, why don’t we just agree that however you measure it, it’s been a very long time compared with your previous dormancies.”

  A very long time — compared with fourteen million years? Drake suspected he would not like Tom’s answer, when it was stated in his old-fashioned terms.

  “What about Ana?”

  “Sorry. No real change since last time. We have confirmed the closed nature of the universe, so there is a possibility of ultimate resurrection close to the Omega Point, in the far, far future. Today, we can’t do a thing for her.”

  “So why am I awake, instead of dormant in electronic storage? Have you forgotten what I requested?”

  “Not at all. We have honored your wishes for a long time… perhaps too long. But we have our worries, too. Our own needs have finally reached a point of urgency that cannot be denied. More to the point, if we do not solve our problem, your own needs and requests will become academic. We have to save ourselves if we are to save you.”

  Tom Lambert was adding to Drake’s perplexity. He could imagine that the composite might have problems; but the composite must also possess overwhelming capabilities and resources. Drake could not see how his own resurrection and involvement would change anything. If he had been a living fossil long ago, he was far more of one now.

  “I don’t understand what your problem has to do with me, Tom. And I don’t see what I have to do with it. But I think you’d better tell me about it.”

  “I intend to. And believe me, it is a problem, the very devil of a problem, nothing to do with you or Ana. We have gone beyond desperation. I’ll be honest, you are our last hope, and a long shot it is. A damned long shot. We need a new thought. Or maybe an old thought.” Tom’s mouth trembled, and the fingers holding his pipe writhed. On the fringes of Drake’s mind he heard again the cry and yammer of countless terrified souls. He suppressed them ruthlessly, building a gate in his own consciousness that admitted only the calmest components.

  “Thanks. That’s a lot better.” Tom took the pipe from his mouth and laid it down on the broad window-sill. He rummaged in his pocket for his tobacco pouch. Drake noted, with no surprise, that it was a black leather one given to him by Ana.

  “Might be a good thing if I show you directly,” Tom continued, as he filled and tamped his pipe. “Let you see for yourself, eh? You know the old advice that Professor Bonvissuto drilled into your head: Don’t tell, show.”

  “Do it any way you like. I’ll let you know soon enough if I can’t take it.”

  “Fine. I’m going to begin with the solar system. It is relevant, even though you may think at first that it isn’t. Hold on to your hat, Drake. And hey, presto.” Tom clapped his hands. The inside lights turned off. The scene beyond the picture window changed. The Bay of Naples had gone. Suddenly it was dark outside, with no hint of sea or s
ky. The room hovered on the edge of a bleak and endless void, lit only by glittering stars.

  As Drake stared, the scene began to move smoothly to the right, as though the whole room was turning in space. A huge globe came into view. It was bloated and orange red, its glowing surface mottled with darker spots.

  “The Sun,” Tom Lambert said simply.

  Drake stared at the dull and gigantic orb. “You mean, the Sun as it is today?”

  “That’s right. Real time presentation. Of course, we’re not as close as it looks. That’s as seen through an imaging system. But you’re looking at Sol, the genuine article, with realistic colors and surface features.”

  Sol transformed — by nature, or human activities?

  “Did you make it that way?”

  “Not at all.” Tom was lighting his pipe again, and his presence was revealed only by a dull red glow that waxed and waned. “We could have done it, but we didn’t. Natural stellar evolution made the change.”

  Sol had been transformed by time, from the warm star that Drake had known into a brooding stranger. He had learned enough over the millennia to understand some of the implications. Tom Lambert had answered one of Drake’s questions without saying a word. The change of the Sun from the G-2 dwarf star of their own day to a red giant required five billion years or more of stellar evolution. Sol had now depleted most of its store of hydrogen, and was relying for energy on the fusion of helium and heavier elements.

  “What happened to the planets? I don’t see them at all.”

  “Not enough natural reflected light. But I can highlight them for you.” The field of view changed as Tom spoke, backing off from the Sun. Brighter flashes of light appeared on each side of the glowing ball of orange. “That’s Jupiter.” One light began to blink more urgently. “And that’s Saturn, and Uranus, and Neptune.”

  “Uranus used to have its own fusion reaction. Jupiter, too.”

  The glowing pipe bowl moved in the darkness, as Tom shook his head. “Long gone. Those couldn’t be more than short-term fixes, given the limited fusion materials.”

  “What about the inner planets? What about Earth? Can you show me them?”

  “No. Sol’s red giant phase is a hundred times its old radius, two thousand times the old luminosity. If Earth had remained in its original orbit it would have been incinerated, just like Venus. Mercury was swallowed up completely. Don’t worry about Earth, though, it still exists. The singularity sphere has been removed, and it is more like the Earth that you knew of old. But it was moved far away, along with Mars. There’s no point in looking for it” — Drake had unconsciously been turning his head to scan the sky — “you’ll never see it from our present location. If you like I can show you the Moon. We left that behind.”

  Far away. How far away? What would a human (if there were still such a thing as a living, flesh-and-blood human) see today, looking upward from the surface of that distant Earth?

  “ ‘I had a dream which was not all a dream.’ ” Drake muttered the words as they welled up in his mind. ” ‘The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.’ ”

  “Sorry?” Tom’s voice was puzzled. “I don’t quite grasp what you’re getting at.”

  “Not my thoughts. Those of a writer dead before we were born. Don’t worry about me, Tom, I’m not losing it. Let’s keep going.”

  “Axe you sure? I don’t want to overload you again. Remember, this is only our first session.”

  “I can take it. Go ahead.”

  “If you say so. I wanted to start close to home, give you the local perspective, so to speak, then move us out bit by bit. So here we go again.”

  Sol began to shrink. The room that Drake was sitting in backed away into space and lifted high above the ecliptic. Sol became a tiny disk. The highlighted flicker of the outer planets moved in to merge with it and become a single point.

  The apparent distance to Sol was increasing. In another half minute the inner region of the diffuse globe of the Oort Cloud was visible. Billions of separate and faint points of light were smeared by distance to a glowing haze. “Every one has been highlighted for the display,” Tom said casually. “Have to do it that way, or you wouldn’t see a thing. Not much sunlight so far out. And of course we’ve been showing just the inhabited bodies. What you might call the ‘old’ solar system colonies, before the spread outward really began. Wanted you to see that, but now if you don’t mind, I’m going to pick up the pace a bit. Don’t want to take all day.”

  The outward movement accelerated, accompanied by Tom Lambert’s apparently offhand commentary (Drake realized that the composite speaking through Tom was actually anything but casual; it was his own needs, structuring the form of the input). The whole Oort Cloud was seen briefly, then in turn it shrank rapidly with distance from huge globe to small disk to tiny point of light. Other stars with inhabited planets, or planet-sized free space habitats, appeared as fiery sparks of blue-white and magenta.

  At last the whole galactic spiral arm came into view. It was filled with the flashing lights of occupied worlds. The

  interarm gaps showed no more than a sparse scattering of points, but across those gulfs the Sagittarius and Perseus arms were as densely populated as the local Orion arm. Finally the whole disk of the Galaxy was visible. The colored flecks of light were everywhere, from the dense galactic center to its wispy outer fringes. Humans and their creations spanned the Galaxy.

  The display froze at last.

  “In all our forms,” Tom said, “we endured. More than endured: prospered. That’s the way things stood, just one-tenth of a galactic revolution ago — twenty-five million years, in the old terms of time. Development, by organic, inorganic, and composite forms, had been steady and peaceful through thirty full revolutions of the Sun about the galactic center. Pretty impressive, eh?”

  Very impressive. Drake recalled that one galactic revolution took about two hundred million years. Humans had survived and prospered for more than six billion years.

  “But it’s not like that anymore,” Tom added. “I’m going to show you a recent time evolution — in terms familiar to you, I will display what has been happening in the past few tens of millions of Earth years.”

  Again there was a tremor in his voice, a hint of uncounted minds quivering beyond the gate and walls imposed by Drake. The static view outside the picture window began to change.

  At first it was no more than a hint of asymmetry in the great pattern of spirals, one side of the Galaxy showing a shade less full than the other. After a few moments the differences became more pronounced and more specific. A dark sector was appearing on one side of the disk. On the outermost spiral arm, far across the Galaxy from Sol, the bright points of light were snuffed out one by one. Drake thought at first of an eclipse, as though some unimaginably big and dark sphere was occulting the whole galactic plane. Then he realized that the analogy was no good. The blackness at the edge of the Galaxy was not of constant diameter. It was increasing in size. Some outside influence was moving in to invade the galactic disk, and growing constantly as it did so.

  “And now you see it as it is today,” Tom said quietly. The lights had come on again within the room, dimming the display outside. Drake did not know if that was under his control or Tom’s, as Tom continued, “Except, of course, that it has not ended. The change continues, faster than ever.”

  A crescent wedge had been carved from the Galaxy, cutting out a substantial fraction of the whole disk.

  “Colonies vanish. Without a signal, without a sign.” Tom sounded bewildered. “If we assume that all the composites in the vanished zone have been destroyed, as the silence would suggest, then billions of sentient beings are dying from moment to moment even while we are speaking.”

  It was a tragedy beyond all tragedies. Drake had become used to the tours of a changing solar system, provided on each resurrection
until overstimulation led to numbness; but death was different.

  He had been touched by death just five times in his own life: his parents, Ana’s parents, and the death of Ana herself. Those single incidents loomed enormous, but they sat within a century of larger disasters — of war and famine and disease. Thirty million had been killed in two world wars, twenty million dead of influenza in a single year, twenty million starved to death by the deliberate act of one powerful man.

  Those were huge, unthinkable numbers, but still they were millions, not billions. They were nothing, compared with what he was facing now.

  Tom said softly, “Our galaxy is being invaded by something from outside. We are being destroyed, faster than we can escape.”

  Drake knew that. He also knew he did not want to face it. “Your problem is terrible, but it has nothing to do with me. More than that, there is nothing that I can do about it.”

  “You do not know, unless you try.”

  “Try what? You are being ridiculous.”

  “If we knew what to try, we would long since have tried it. Drake, we did not rouse you from dormancy on a whim, or without prior thought. You are from an earlier age, more familiar with aggression. If anyone can suggest a way to protect us, you can do so.”

  “Why me? There were fifty thousand others in the cryotanks, all from my era. They were resurrected, every one of

  them. I assume that some at least are still conscious entities.”

  “Most are. But they no longer exist as isolated intelligences. All, except you, form part of composites. The result lacks — please do not misunderstand me — your primitive drive and aggression.”

  “You need me because I’m a barbarian!”

  “Exactly.”

  “To try and do what you refuse to do.”

  “No. What we are unable to do. As I said, you are our last hope, and it is a desperate hope indeed. Drake, let me suggest that you have no choice. If you want Ana to return to you, ever, you must help us.”