Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  “If you say so. And the Silent Zone?”

  “Stays silent, and untouched.” Drake looked one last time toward the outer edge of the Galaxy, knowing that colonies were disappearing from the human community as he watched. He felt Mel Bradley’s disapproval, weighted by the thoughts of hundreds of trillions of other composites across space.

  “I intend to do something else about the Silent Zone,” Drake continued. “You can start the return transmission any time. As soon as I’m back at headquarters I’m going to try a new approach.”

  It was one of the rare occasions when the thought of his own dissolution was preferable to the idea of what he had to do next. Dying once was not so bad. Everybody did it eventually, and it was part of your personal future even if you didn’t know how or when.

  Dying a billion times was less appealing.

  The location of every lost world was well known. Drake had chosen one of the most recently silenced, vanished from the human community since the time of his own involvement.

  He and Tom Lambert were on board a probe ship, downloaded to an inorganic form that shared the ship’s eyes, ears, and communications unit.

  Tom had taken charge of the ship’s drive. “According to the records for other similar places,” he said, “we’re approaching the danger zone. That’s the planet ahead.”

  They stared in silence at the image of a peaceful world. It was a look-alike for another planet about three hundred light-years away: same K-type primary; mass, size, orbital parameters and axial tilt within a few percent; atmosphere modified very slightly, if at all, to an Earth analog. Both worlds had been colonized by a human association of organic and inorganic forms within two million years of each other. Here were sister planets, celestial twins with one difference: this world, Argentil, after billions of years of active presence in the human community, had dropped all contact and refused to respond to any signals.

  Tom finally broke the silence. “Do you want to hold our distance?”

  “Everything we see is being sent back to headquarters?”

  “Everything.”

  “Let’s hold our position for one full Argentil day, and make sure we’ve seen everything that’s down there. Then we’ll go closer.”

  Drake suspected they had already seen all they were going to. Whatever the Shiva had done to this planet, they had not destroyed it or made it uninhabitable for humans. Changes had taken place in Argentil, particularly an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, but those could be the result of natural long-term climatic changes. They could just as well be the work of humans. Either way, the planet was still comfortably habitable.

  They were hovering far off on the sunward side. As the world turned slowly beneath the ship, Drake suddenly imagined himself with Ana, restored to human body form, strolling unsuited and bareheaded among the dark-green forest lands of Argentil.

  The thought came as a shock. Ana had been absent from his mind for a long time. Once he would have sworn that could not happen, that no hour could pass in which he did not think about her.

  “All right, Tom.” Drake had to act. His mind felt oddly unbalanced. Maybe he had watched Argentil for too long. “Let’s go. Take us closer. Take us all the way down to a landing.”

  How could he not be thinking constantly about Ana, when she was the whole reason that he was wandering here on the outer rim of the Galaxy?

  He heard Tom screaming, but his own mind was far away. He was not seeing Argentil as the ship closed in for its final approach pattern. When the fusion fires rose from the surface to vaporize the descending ship, he saw only Ana. She was standing before him, telling him not to worry: they would still enjoy the future together, when all these events were nothing but a remote blip on the distant horizon of time.

  The ship’s communications unit was not controlled by Drake’s wandering consciousness. A brief final message, triggered by the attack, went as an S-wave signal back to headquarters: it said that this ship, like so many others, was being destroyed — by a system sent to Argentil to defend the planet from the Shiva.

  One more attempt. After how many?

  Drake had lost count.

  He studied the screens. It was information of a sort, even though it only confirmed what he already knew.

  Where a giant artificial colony had once floated in free space, the sensors now showed nothing at all. However, the outer layers of the nearest star, only four light-minutes away, revealed subtle changes in its spectrum. There were more metal absorption lines than had been shown in the old records. And a nearby planet, which had once supported a human colony, was silent but apparently untouched.

  It seemed as though the Shiva destroyed free-space colonies, while leaving the planets that they conquered able to support life. Drake pondered that fact as his lead ship turned cautiously toward the planet. Instead of Tom Lambert accompanying him, Drake had been downloaded to both ships. His two electronic versions had decided on a strategy on the way out from headquarters. Ship combinations had been sent out before, without success. After a million failed attempts he no longer hoped for definitive answers. He would settle for some small additional scrap of information.

  When the first ship was within a few light-seconds of the planet, the second one released a tiny pod. It lacked a propulsion system, but it contained miniature sensors, an uploaded copy of Drake, and a low-data-rate transmitter.

  The pod hung silent and motionless in space, while Drake on board it watched the approach of the two main ships to the planet. The first one vanished in a haze of high-energy particles and radiation. The second turned to flee, but a rolling torus of fire arrowed to it from the place where the other ship had been destroyed.

  Drake reached a conclusion: the transmission link was an Achilles’ heel. The second ship should have been at a safe distance, but after the Shiva had killed the first ship they had been able to follow the tiny pulses of communication between the two.

  It was another crumb of information about the Shiva. It told him that he had to be ultracautious in his own transmission. He began to send data out, warily and slowly, varying the strength and direction of the signal. Thousands of receiving stations, all over the Galaxy, would each receive a disconnected nugget of information. When he was finished, headquarters would face the task of time-ordering the sequence of weak signals, allowing for travel times, and collating everything to a single message.

  Drake sent the pulses out a thousand times, varying the order of the signal destinations. By the time that he was finished, twelve thousand years had passed and he had drifted far from the star where the ships had died.

  He had no propulsion system. Even now, he dared not risk a rescue signal.

  They also serve who only stand and wait.

  He waited. For another one hundred and forty thousand interminable years, he waited. The pod contained minimal computing facilities and no other distractions. There was nothing for him to do.

  At last he gave the internal command to turn off all systems within the pod.

  “All systems?” The pod’s intelligence was limited, but sufficient to follow the implications of the command.

  “That is my instruction.”

  “I am sorry, but I am unable to perform that command.”

  “I see. Very well. Give me override.”

  “That is permitted.”

  Final authority for pod operations was turned over to Drake.

  He switched off all systems; was erased; became nothing.

  Chapter 22

  “Her lips were red, her looks were free,

  Her locks were yellow as gold;

  Her skin was white as leprosy,

  The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

  Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”

  It wasn’t working. Drake decided that a smarter man than he would have realized the truth long ago. With all their efforts, they had learned very little.

  The most tangible piece of information had been provided by Mel Br
adley: the rate of spread of the Shiva zone of influence was between one-half and three kilometers a second. In other words, the Shiva domain expanded across one light-year of space in between one hundred thousand and six hundred thousand Earth years. That had its own implications. The firebreak that Mel had made with the help of the caesuras was forty light-years thick. It had taken four million years before a world was lost on the “safe” side of it; twenty-five million years later, every world along the whole great arc of the firebreak was gone.

  The other thing, pointed out by Cass Leemu, was more peculiar: the Shiva apparently spread faster through regions where humans had colonies. Logic said it ought to be the other way round, that the resistance of a colony ought to slow the Shiva. Instead, it speeded them up. A policy of flight, leaving a world before the Shiva were predicted to arrive, had proved the best defense for other colonies.

  And that was it; the sum total of what they had learned, in fifty million years of effort and millions of star systems lost. The good news, if that was the word for it, was that it would take a few billion more years before the entire galaxy became part of the Silent Zone.

  Drake wondered what to suggest next to the composites. That humanity, in all its forms, should flee to another galaxy?

  Universal flight didn’t seem feasible, even if it was psychologically acceptable.

  He turned his total attention to a single question: Was there anything, anything at all, that they had not tried? He could think of just one thing. They had sent specially trained colonies to worlds that in the next centuries or millennia were candidates to fall to the Shiva. It had been done with single organic entities, with inorganics, and with composites, and always with the same results: the colonies reported that everything was all right, that they were doing fine, no problems. Then one day they fell silent.

  But here was the oddity: distant worlds were not affected. The Shiva influence was a local effect. If there was a way to be close enough to observe a world as it was lost, yet somehow far enough away that the observer would not be swallowed up in silence, then humanity might learn something new.

  That prompted another thought: Could it be that they were not going early enough to the endangered worlds? Suppose there were long-term changes, subtle warnings of the coming of the Shiva, that Drake’s observers did not

  catch because they had not lived long enough on the planet.

  What sort of indicators were plausible? He couldn’t say. Ice ages, variation in length of seasons, movement of polar caps, polarity reversal of magnetic fields, earthquakes, modified physiology of individuals at the cell level, homeostatic shift — it could be any or all of them. Despite all his studies, he was not, and would never be, a scientist.

  But he could think of a way to test his idea. Embody someone in a long-lived form. Make thousands of copies of him, organic or inorganic. Send a copy to each world, long before the Shiva were expected there. Ask each one to wait, observe, and prepare. Tell him to be patient. Tell him to report back any anomaly, no matter how small.

  Drake reached one more conclusion. He had been thinking “him,” and it was not hard to see why. How could he ask anyone else to endure an interminable wait, especially one likely to end with final extinction?

  It was not some indefinite “him.” It was Drake.

  It could be Drake and only Drake. He had to be the one. He would prepare, and he would send copies of himself. He would also be at headquarters and monitor every incoming message. And one day, before the whole galaxy was silenced, perhaps the Drake-that-goes and the Drake-that-stays would learn something useful.

  And one other thing must be done. A certain crucial piece of information must be withheld from any copy of Drake who descended to each planet.

  He would consult Cass to find out just how to do that.

  Drake splayed his feet on the marshy surface and stared up for a last sight of the spacecraft. It was difficult, not only because the ship was dwindling in apparent size, but because as it rose higher the rate of motion across the sky decreased. Drake was embodied in a native form known as a mander. Its eyes were like a frog’s eyes, good at seeing rapidly moving objects, less effective on anything that stayed in one position.

  One final glimpse, and then the ship was gone. Human vision might follow it still, but Drake could not. It did not matter. He knew where it was and where it would remain, far beyond the atmosphere in a polar observation orbit.

  He looked around. This planet, Lukoris, was his new home. He had better get used to it, because he was going to be here for a long time. Half a million years did not sound like much — if you said it fast. From three to five hundred thousand years were likely to elapse before the Shiva arrived. Half a million years of waiting, before this world became part of the expanding Silent Zone.

  The first thing was to understand and feel at home in his own body. He had been animated less than ten minutes ago, as the ship was preparing to leave. Drake examined the mander’s physiology with a fair amount of curiosity. He was supposed to live like this, awake or dormant, for a thousand human lifetimes. According to the composites this body would never age or wear out. Even if he were to remain continuously conscious, which was not his plan, the mander would be as healthy and limber in a million years as it was that day.

  How could that be? But perhaps a better question was, why not? Why did organisms age at all?

  The answer had been discovered, long, long ago, and soon followed by the longevity protocols. Death by aging was a far-off anachronism. But none of that explained, in a way that Drake could understand, why a being aged, or how current science could hold off old age indefinitely.

  It was like much of science: important, useful, and totally mysterious.

  Drake returned to the inspection of his body. This was, according to alien specialist Milton, the closest form to human on the whole planet. It was hard to believe.

  Drake examined the mander’s feet. They were large and webbed. The legs above them were long and powerfully muscled, ideal for long balanced leaps. If it swims like a frog, and jumps like a frog, and sees like a frog…

  He stuck out one of his two tongues. It was short and not sticky or club ended. He had already known that, intellectually, but he wanted reassurance.

  In other respects the mander body was not at all froglike. His skin was dry and soft to the touch, covered with material like feathery mole fur. His two mouths were not in his head, where the sense organs were clustered, but one on each side of the torso beneath the breathing apertures. His brain was centered between them, deep in the interior of his chest and protected by rings of bony plates. Nothing could reach it that would not kill him first.

  His embodiment was not, according to Milton, the most intelligent life-form on the planet Lukoris. That position was claimed by a monstrous flying predator known as a sphexbat, a creature that bordered on self-awareness and rode the permanent thermals around Lukoris’s crags and vertical precipices, landing neither to feed nor breed. The sphexbat’s young developed within the body cavity of the parent until one day they were ejected, to fly or to fall to their deaths. Lukoris’s mutation rate was high. The survival odds for infant sphexbats were no better than 30 percent.

  Drake was interested in the animals mainly because they were interested in him — manders formed one of the sphexbat’s preferred forms of food. An immortal body was immortal only against aging. It could still be killed. He, of course, could be reembodied, but death by sphexbat sounded unusually unpleasant. The sphexbats did not swoop down on their prey and carry it off, like the Earth raptors. First they made a low-level run across the surface, blowing a fine cloud of neurotoxic vapor from glands at the base of their wings. Vegetation cover was not enough protection. Any mander inhaling the fog did not die, but it felt the urge to crawl into the open and there became paralyzed. The sphexbat returning at the end of the day for its second run found the prey alive and conscious but unable to move. The victim was scooped up from the surface and consumed at leis
ure. The sphexbats maintained live larders on high rock ledges, and a mander — or Drake — might wait there awake and immobilized for many days.

  Danger from sphexbat attack was a potential problem on the surface, but that’s not where Drake intended to spend most of his time. No one could live alone and conscious for a million years, in his own body or any other, and remain sane. Drake would mostly be at the bottom of the swamp with the other manders, ten meters down, dormant and safe from attack. His species estivated regularly.

  Events on the surface would not be ignored. A network of instruments would record data until Drake’s return to the surface. That information supplemented the observations of the orbiting ship.

  Drake expected to return to the surface for Lukoris’s winter, but not every time. Once every hundred or thousand years he would be above ground for a few months, to check the instruments and to conduct a planetary survey. Changes that occurred too slowly to be noticed in real time might jump out at him if he saw the planet as a series of snapshots, glimpses caught at widely separated intervals.

  First, though, he needed a baseline from which to measure change. He must understand Lukoris in all its parts. He would travel around the world and observe as he had never observed before.

  Drake sighed, and said to himself, Why bother? Why am I doing this?

  But he knew the answer to that. He set to work.

  Prior to Drake’s arrival, Lukoris had been the home of a thriving colony for hundreds of millions of Earth years. When the great amalgam of panic-stricken humans, computers, composites, and all their trappings fled the path of the Shiva, they did not take everything. Drake was the inheritor of a whole planet and of the former colony’s technology.

  That technology was useful in Drake’s own survey of Lukoris. The planetwide data net showed a divided world of extreme horizontals and verticals, of sluggish seas and swamps encircling near-vertical mountain ranges. The mander body could not survive the rarefied air of the highest peaks without equipment, but Drake had to know what was going on there. Who could say where and in what form the Shiva might choose to appear?