Far futures, p.39
Far Futures, page 39
Drake turned off the recorder. “I said, eight to ten years. It has been nine.”
“You recorded us, back then at the very beginning? I can’t believe you would do that.”
“I had to, Tom. Even then, I was convinced that you would change your mind. And I knew that I wouldn’t. You have to live up to your agreement. You promised.”
“I promised to help you, to stop you from doing something crazy to yourself.” Tom’s face was flushed with intolerable frustration. “For God’s sake, Drake, I’m a doctor. You can’t ask me to help you to kill yourself.”
“I’m not asking that.”
“You might as well be. No one has ever been revived. Maybe no one ever will be. If they do learn how, Anastasia will be a candidate. She is in the best Second Chance womb, she had the best preparation money could buy. But you, you’re different. You’re not even sick! Ana was dying before she was frozen. You’re healthy, you’re productive, you’re at the height of your career. And you are asking me to throw all that away, to help you take the long chance that someday, God knows when, you just might be revived. Don’t you see, Drake, I can’t help you.”
“You gave me your promise.”
“Stop saying that! I also made an oath as a physician: to do no harm. But you want me to take you from perfect health to a high odds of final death.”
“I have to do it, Tom. If you won’t help I’ll find someone who will. Probably someone less competent and reliable than you.”
“Why do you have to do it? Give me one good reason.”
“You know why, if you think about it.” Drake spoke slowly, coaxingly. “For Ana’s sake. Unless I go on ahead, they may never choose to wake her. She could be one of the last on their list. You and I know her for what she really is, a unique and marvelous woman. But what will the records show? A singer, still not as famous as she would have been, who died young of a devastating disease. I’ve had time to prepare, I’m sure that they will wake me. And it’s an advantage that I’m in good health now, because there will be no reason to delay my revival on medical grounds. As soon as I am sure that they have a cure for what killed Ana, I can wake her. We’ll start over, the two of us.”
Tom Lambert’s cheeks had gone from fiery red to pale. “We have to talk about this some more, Drake. The whole idea is crazy. Did you really mean what you said, that if I won’t help you will go to someone else?”
“Look at me, Tom. Tell me if you think that I mean it.”
Lambert looked. He did not speak again; but his hands slowly came up to cover his eyes.
It took four days of solid argument, another five to make final preparations. Drake Merlin and Tom Lambert drove together to Second Chance.
Drake took a long last look out of the window at the windblown trees and the cloudy sky, then climbed slowly into the thermal tank.
Tom injected the Asfanil.
It took only a few seconds before the long fall began, dropping steadily down the longest descent that a human can ever make.
Down, down, down. All the way to two degrees absolute, colder than the coldest hell ever conceived by Dante.
Drake could never be sure. Had he truly dreamed those superconducting dreams, lying there twelve degrees colder than a block of solid hydrogen? Or had he only dreamed that he dreamed them, as he came slowly back through the long thaw?
It made little difference. There was still an eternity of twisted images, a procession of pale and terrifying lights moving against a pitch-dark background. They arrived well ahead of any form of consciousness, and they went on forever.
It was daunting, to undergo such torment, and then learn that he had been one of the lucky ones. The freezing process in his case had apparently gone very smoothly. Some awoke armless and legless. All that he lost during the thaw were a few square centimeters of skin.
The pain of waking was something else. The final stages, from three degrees Celsius to normal body temperature, had to be taken slowly. They occupied a full thirty-six hours. For most of that time Drake was pierced with the agony of waking tissues and returning circulation, unable to move or even to cry out. In the last stages, before full consciousness returned, hearing came back before sight. He could hear speech around him, but not in any tongue that he could recognize.
How far had he traveled? Even before the pain faded, that question filled his mind.
The answer did not come at once. While he was still half-conscious he felt the sting of an injector spray. He at once blanked out again. After another infinite hiatus he came up all the way, opening his eyes to a quiet sunlit room not too different from the Second Chance facility where he had begun the descent.
A man and a woman were watching him, talking softly together. As soon as they saw that he was awake the man pressed a point on a segmented wall panel. The two went on with their work, lining up two complex and incomprehensible pieces of equipment.
The person who came in presently through the white sliding door was dark-haired and oddly androgynous, with a face that seemed both clean-shaven and also smooth and womanly. The newcomer stepped to the side of the bed and stood looking down at Drake with a pleased and almost proprietary air.
“How are you feeling?”
Drake knew then that it was a man. He spoke in English, oddly pronounced. That was reassuring. Drake had suffered two worries as he slipped under. What if he was revived in just a few years’ time, when nothing at all could be done to cure Ana? Or what if he surfaced after fifty thousand years, a living fossil, quite unable to communicate his needs to the men and women of the future?
“I feel all right. But weak.” Drake thought of trying to sit up, then knew at once that he could not do it. “I am as weak as a baby.”
“Naturally. Are you Drake Merlin?”
“I am.”
The man nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent. My name is Par Leon. Can you understand me easily?”
“Perfectly easily.” Drake’s second worry returned. “Why do you ask that question? When am I?”
“I ask it because the old languages are not easy, even with augments and much study. For your second question, in your measure we are now in the year 2587 of the prophet Christ.”
Almost six centuries. It was longer than Drake had expected. But better long than short. He had entertained awful visions of being forced to do the whole thing over and over, diving down to the bottom of the Pit and then clawing his agonized way back up to thawed life.
“I have waited here through the whole warming and first treatment,” Par Leon continued. “Soon I will leave you here for rest, for more treatment, and for first education. But I desired to speak with you at once when you became conscious. It is not rational, but I feared that there might be a mistake in identity—that it might not be Drake Merlin, the Drake Merlin of my curiosity, who was awakened.” Par Leon glanced at the equipment standing at the bedside and shook his head. “You are a strong man, Drake Merlin. Uniquely strong. The record shows that you did not once cry out or complain during all the thawing.” There had been other things on Drake’s mind. Could Ana be cured? He glanced across at the other two workers, who were still chatting together in an alien tongue. “Language must have changed completely. I can understand you easily, but I cannot understand them at all.”
“You mean, understand the doctors?” Par Leon replied with a surprised expression on his lean face. “Of course not. Neither can I. Naturally, they are speaking Medicine.”
Drake raised his eyebrows. The look must have survived with its meaning intact across six centuries, because Par Leon at once went on, “I myself speak Music and History—and, of course, Universal. And I learned Old Anglic enough to be able to study your times and to speak with you. But I know no Medicine.”
“Medicine is a language?” Drake felt that his mind must be slowed by the long sleep and thawing treatment.
“Of course. Like Music, or Chemistry, or Astronautics. But surely this was already true in your own time. Did you not have languages specific to each—what is your word?—discipline?”
“I suppose that we did, but we didn’t know it.” Par Leon’s question explained a great deal. No wonder that Drake had found psychologists, professional educators, social scientists, and computer scientists—to name but a few—quite incomprehensible. The special jargon and odd acronyms signaled the arrival of new proto-languages, emerging forms as alien as Sanskrit or classical Greek. “How do you speak to the doctors?”
“For ordinary things we employ Universal, which all understand. I do not attempt to speak actual Medicine. If I am in that subject-matter area, we keep a computer in the circuit to provide exact concept equivalents between language pairs.”
It occurred to Drake that multidisciplinary programs must be hell. But then, they always had been. He was beginning to feel oddly and irrationally euphoric, a combination of drugs and the idea that he might succeed after all in the longest shot of his life.
He made a determined effort to sit up. His head lifted maybe five centimeters from the pillow, then fell back despite everything he could do to hold it up.
“Slowly. Rome—was not built—in a day.” Par Leon glowed, clearly delighted at coming up with such a prize example of genuine Old Anglic. “It will be moons before you are fully strong. Two more things I will tell you, then I will allow your treatment to continue.
“First, it was I who arranged for you to be brought here and revived. I am a musicologist, interested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in particular your own time.”
Drake’s bet, six hundred years old now, had paid off. He wondered what modem music sounded like. Would he be able to compose it?
“Under our laws,” Par Leon went on, “you owe me for the cost of your revival and treatment. This amounts to six years of work from you. You are most fortunate that you were healthy and correctly frozen and maintained, or the time of service would have been much longer. However, I also believe that you will find your indenture with me both pleasant and interesting. I am proposing that you and I, together, write the definitive history of your own musical period.”
So the question of earning a living was postponed for at least a few years. Par Leon would surely have to feed Drake Merlin while he was paying off his debt.
“Second, I have good news for you.” Par Leon was gazing at Drake expectantly. “When we examined you, our doctors found certain problems—defects, you would say?—with your body and its glandular balance. They hope that they have cured the simpler body malfunctions, and you should now live between one hundred and seventy and two hundred years.
“However, the glandular imbalance represented a more subtle problem. It was likely to manifest itself as some form of madness, some uncontrollable compulsion. The doctors observed this as soon as you were thawed enough to respond to psycho-probes. They made small chemical changes and have, we hope, corrected the difficulty.” Par Leon was watching Drake closely. “Please tell me now of your feelings toward the woman, Anastasia.”
Drake felt his heart racing. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, and it was as hard to breathe as if heavy weights sat on his chest. He closed his eyes for a long moment, and thought about Ana until he became calm again.
It was obvious what the other man wanted to hear; and Ana was worth a million lies. Drake looked up at Par Leon and shook his head feebly. “I feel very little for her. No more than a faint sense that something was once there. It is like the scar of an old wound.”
“Excellent!” The smile had kept its meaning. “That is most satisfying. The disease that killed the woman was eliminated from the human stock long ago, by careful mating choice—eugenics, as your language puts it. We could certainly reanimate her, but according to our doctors it is still not clear that we would be able to cure her. However, we can see no reason to awaken her at all. Like most in the cryowombs, she is of little or no value to us. Most important of all, an involvement with her might interfere with your work for me.”
“So her body is still stored?”
“Of course. We keep all the cryocorpses. Although most are of no present value, who knows what our future needs might be? The cryowombs are like a library of the past, to open whenever it will serve a purpose. Two hundred years from now someone may find a use for her, and her disease perhaps easily cured. Then she, too, may live and work again.”
“Is Anastasia stored near here?”
“Of course not!” For the first time, Par Leon appeared to be shocked. “What a waste of space and energy that would imply. The cryowombs are of course maintained on Pluto, where space is cheap, cooling needs are small, and escape velocity is low.”
That sentence, more than any other that Par Leon had spoken, wrenched Drake forward in time. What technology was implied, that could casually ship a few million bodies to the edge of the solar system rather than keep them in cold storage on Earth? If, that is, Pluto was the edge of the solar system. Six centuries. More than the time from Monteverdi to Shostakovich, from Copernicus to Einstein, from the Columbus discovery of America to the first landing on the Moon. He had come a long, long way.
Par Leon was still gazing at him, now a little suspiciously. “Again you ask about the woman, Anastasia. Why? Are you sure that you are in fact fully cured? If not, another course of treatment is easy to arrange.”
Drake cursed his own stupidity and did his best to smile reassuringly. “I feel sure that will not be needed. Already her memory fades. As soon as I am strong enough, I am eager to begin my work with you.”
“Wonderful.” The smile was back, but Par Leon was wagging his finger in warning. “We will certainly work together, but only after you are fully recovered and have had some essential training. First, you must learn to speak Universal and Music and you must have enough background knowledge to live comfortably in this time. It will also be my responsibility to see that you are able to find suitable activity when your work with me is done, and for that you will need skills that today you lack.
“Rest now, Drake Merlin. I will return tomorrow, or the next day. By that time you will already find yourself stronger. And you will be far more knowledgeable.”
As Par Leon left, the medical technicians carried forward a transparent helmet with silvered lines inscribed on its upper part. They lowered it carefully onto Drake’s head.
He lost consciousness at once, too quickly to be aware of its cool touch.
When he awoke he already had a smattering of Universal and a good but superficial knowledge of solar-system civilization in the twenty-sixth century. Par Leon’s confidence that he would pick up new knowledge quickly did not depend on anything so unreliable as old-fashioned learning.
Facts, vocabulary, and rules could be instilled almost instantly using the feedback helmets. Use of language, particularly spoken language, came more slowly because it required physical coordination and practice.
However, a civilization was far more than facts, rules, and languages. In some areas Par Leon proved to be an extreme optimist. In fact, after a couple of weeks Drake decided that certain aspects of the times would be forever beyond him, no matter how long he lived there.
Science was one of them. Modem science, particularly the basic assumptions that underlay modem science, totally eluded his grasp. It was no surprise that he would find science difficult. That had always been the case. In his own time his teachers had accused him of having talent but no interest, dreaming his days away with words and music.
Even so, the general ideas of science ought to be accessible. They were supposed to be no more than common sense, elevated to become a discipline. But he found himself struggling hopelessly—and he was struggling, working harder to understand than he had ever done as a young man.
A scientist recruited by Par Leon did her best to help, explaining the difficulty within the less precise vocabulary available in Universal. Drake had already given up any notion of learning Science for himself.
“It is the typical problem of a major paradigm shift.” Cass Leemu was a young and attractive brunette, whose own field of specialty Drake had been unable to comprehend even after hours of conversation. It seemed to be no more than pictures, but somehow it yielded quantitative results. “Drake Merlin, is the name of Isaac Newton familiar to you?”
“Of course. Gravity, and the laws of motion.”
“Right. Familiar, and easy to comprehend. We agree on that. But did you know that most of his contemporaries found his work quite beyond them? He introduced notions of absolute space and time, which they found implausible. And his work was best understood employing the calculus, which seemed to the scientists of the seventeenth century to be shrouded in the paradoxes of infinitely small quantities. It took two generations to absorb the new worldview, and work with it comfortably. The same thing happened two centuries later, when Maxwell elevated the concept of a field to central importance. And again in the twentieth century, when uncertainty and undecidability assumed a dominant position almost simultaneously in the prevailing worldview.”
“And you are telling me that it has happened again?”
“It has happened.” Cass Leemu smiled ruefully. “Not once, Drake, but three times. Three major viewpoint shifts. Our understanding of Nature differs more from the perspectives of your time than yours differed from the Romans’.”
“So I am going to be like Newton’s colleagues, unable to comprehend a new foundation.”
“I am afraid so. Unless you can master the concept of—” She paused, then smiled again at Drake, this time apologetically. “I am sorry. The word for the idea that now underlies science lacks any adequate paraphrase in Universal. Even the general data banks are silent. But if you really wish to study science, beginning with the absolute basics, I may be able to help you.”
“I can’t. Not yet.” Drake was reluctant to give Cass Leemu an outright no—he might need a sympathetic ear later. “You see, I owe the next six years to Par Leon. He revived me.”
“Of course. Six years only? He is being generous.”
