Far futures, p.43
Far Futures, page 43
Drake felt a brief desire to visit their old home, heat or no heat, until he learned that it now lay beneath fifteen feet of water. In another ten thousand years, according to Ana, the sea level should have dropped enough for him to pay a visit on dry land. She showed no interest in that particular area, or indeed in any location on Earth. He learned that she had been to Earth three times before and found it rather dull.
They took off for space again and wandered on through the inner system. The ship skimmed low across the broad face of the Sun, to show a surface as raging and demonic as anything that Drake had encountered on his visit to Canopus. With Ana at his side, this time he remained unperturbed.
When she declared that they ought to spiral out again toward Pluto, he agreed. If there had been major temporal shock it now lay in the past. He was feeling wonderful, relaxed and content in mind and body as they cruised out to where his Servitor was patiently (or perhaps impatiently) awaiting his return.
Because his guard was down so completely, the shock when it came was so much harder to take.
“What do you mean, make the most of the last few days here?’ Drake had been watching the ship’s automatic docking on Charon until Ana’s words jerked him to attention. “I thought we could stay in the outer system as long as we like.”
“We can. You can.” She moved to stand in front of him. “But I can’t. I made promises, remember. The people heading for Rigel Calorans are waiting for me, but they won’t wait forever. I have to head out and join them.”
“But what about us?” And when Ana shook her head, he went on, “Look, if you already made promises to them, I completely understand.
I wouldn’t want you to go back on your word. But I have nothing to hold me close to Sol—nothing but you. I’ll come with you, join your group.”
“No, Drake, you won’t. And you do not understand.” She took his hand gently in hers. “I like you a lot, and I will never forget that I owe my life to you. But you can’t go with me. Let me put it more brutally: I don’t want you to go with me. I do not love you as you love your Ana.”
“I don’t believe it. Everything we’ve said to each other, everything we’ve done . . .”
“Everything that you have said. We make fine, fond lovers, physically we fit together beautifully, I don’t deny it.”
“So what’s the problem? Ana, we can talk this through, we always have.”
“That’s the problem, right there. I’m not Ana—not your Ana. I’m me. You and I have never talked through any problems together. Think about it, and you will realize that what I say is true.” She released his hand and stepped away. “Drake, this is all my fault. I should never have revivified you. I see you looking at me, and I know you are seeing someone else.”
“I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”
“No. You are blind. You want what you see, what you think I am. There’s so much background that you and your Ana shared. I don’t have that, but you don’t even realize it’s missing. Let me give you just one example. You assumed I would know why you call your Servitor Milton, so you’ve never bothered to explain to me. But I don’t know.”
“They also serve who only stand and wait.’ An ancient poet, John Milton, wrote that. It was just a sort of joke when I said it, because the Servitor—”
“Drake, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I want to leave, right now.”
“You can’t leave. What will I do without you?”
“You will become what you were before I appeared to mess up your life: strong, determined, brave.” She came toward him, hesitated, and then at last kissed him quickly on the lips. “Go forward again, Drake. Don’t give up. I agree with you, somewhere, sometime, there will be a way for you to find Anastasia. The real Ana. Your Ana.”
She stepped away and was out of the door before he could do more than reach out a hand in her direction. He took a couple of steps to follow, then slumped into a chair. He was still sitting there, staring blindly at the rugged surface of Charon, when the door opened again.
The little Servitor, Milton, eased quietly into the room. It rolled forward to stand at Drake’s side. As though sensing the human’s mood, it did not say a word. It knew what would happen next.
There was the same sunlit room as before, the same outlook onto a sandy beach and windswept ocean. But this time ominous rain clouds stood in the middle distance; and in place of the raven-haired gypsy woman, a bald-headed man was sitting in the easy chair opposite.
Drake turned his head back and forth. His neck was feeling slightly stiff. “I’d rather you didn’t bother with all this, you know. I much prefer the real thing.”
“I think not.” The man’s English was perfect, accent-free. “There have been changes.”
“I expect changes. I need changes. My era could do nothing to help Ana. Let’s dispense with the simulations.”
“That is I’m afraid impossible.”
“My body—”
“Is fine. You have not been uploaded to the data banks and your cryocorpse, together with Ana’s original body, is still safe in a cryowomb. The womb is no longer held on Pluto, for reasons that will become obvious later. However, your body is unchanged and can easily be revivified. That may not be necessary, since as you see we no longer find it necessary to reanimate you in order to converse. We are maintaining a direct superconducting link with your brain.”
“Who are you?”
“That also is not an easy question.” The man smiled, an easy and friendly grin that seemed impossible to simulate. “Call me Alman, if you enjoy a mild joke. Let me just say that I am a composite, and to make you feel easier, I will bring another element of that composite directly to this meeting.”
The man did not move, but at his side a familiar sphere topped by a metal whisk-broom blinked into existence.
“With apologies.” The Servitor nodded its eyeless head toward Drake. “Your instructions to me upon freezing were quite explicit. However, upon multiple reflection we finally judged it necessary to interface with you. I recognize that an argument could be made that you have not in fact been reanimated, and therefore your instructions have not been disobeyed. However, I reject that as a form of special pleading on my own behalf.”
“You are Milton? You don’t sound at all as you used to.”
“I am Milton, and in composition more than Milton. But I am still your Servitor.”
“How long?” Drake sat up straight, aware that his real body deep in cryosleep could not move a micrometer. “How long since I went back to the cryowomb?”
There was a perceptible hesitation before Milton answered. “By your standards, it has been a long time. There have been . . . discontinuities . . . in solar-system development.”
“You mean a total collapse of human civilization? I worried about that, before I first went into cryosleep.”
“There was no collapse in the sense that you imply, with loss of technology. However, on three occasions human development has proceeded in other directions—what we now perceive to have been false directions. During two of those periods, the whole idea of technology lacked meaning.”
“How long since I went to the cryowomb? Are you going to tell me, or aren’t you? Forget the ‘temporal shock’ nonsense and tell me. That is a direct command.”
“Even without reinforcement from the composite, I am empowered to reject any command contrary to your well-being. However, I will answer. Your body has been within the cryowomb for a period which, in your most familiar units of Earth orbital revolutions, is fourteen million years.” The Servitor paused. When Drake did not move, it continued: “Fourteen million years. Which is to say, a period equal to—”
“I know what fourteen million years is.” Drake laughed, a harsh humorless bark of disbelief. “I guess I was wrong. I’m not immune to temporal shock at all. I’m in temporal shock, right now. Give me a minute or two, Milton, then I’ll be fine.”
“As long as you need.” The Servitor rolled backward a few feet, and the bald-headed man in the armchair continued, “We assume that you refer to subjective minutes. One advantage of a superconducting interface is speed. This meeting is taking place with subjective time lapse equal to less than one thousandth real-time—”
“I need to know,” Drake interrupted. “I need to know what’s happened to the solar system—why you woke me—if there has been progress with Ana’s problem.” He had a thrilling thought. “Is it possible to interface with her brain, the way you did with mine?”
“Unfortunately, it is not. We made contact, long ago. But too many of her brain cells have been destroyed.”
“Let me try for myself.” Drake found he was trembling with eagerness. “Put me in touch with her, let me make my own evaluation.”
“We judge that would be most unwise.” Alman’s face was compassionate. “For your sake. Just as it is unwise to expose you to humankind as it exists today. We have no wish to add to your level of uneasiness. If it is any comfort, your strength and mental resilience are extraordinary. We feared that you might retreat to insanity immediately after being contacted. You did not. But contact with the sad, muddied remnant of mind that sits now within Anastasia’s body would try your sanity past bearing.”
“But has there been other progress? If her brain cannot be repaired—”
“We will come to the question of scientific progress in due course. For the moment, we judge it best for you to begin with the most familiar. Your Servitor will show you around the solar system. Then it will be time for us to talk again.”
Drake was not interested in a stupid tour of the solar system. He wanted to know what changes might affect Ana’s possible return. He leaned forward, ready to dispute their proposed approach.
And found that he would be given no chance to do so. With one final wave of his hand, Alman vanished.
Although Drake’s frozen body remained in the cryowomb, the illusion that he had been reanimated was perfect. He felt that he and Milton were traveling together in a real ship, its motion and progress constrained by the limits of physics and geometry. He experienced real hunger and fatigue. After sixteen hours of subjective wakefulness, he would begin to yawn and feel the need for sleep.
It was the solar system that seemed to lack reality.
They began close to the Sun, where the familiar, steady beacon offered constancy and comfort. A few million years were nothing within the lifetime of a G-class star. It had looked down on Drake’s birth, and he expected it would look down unchanged on his death.
But unlike his birth, that death could not take place on Earth. Drake had stared from the ship’s ports in awe as they swept out past the hot cinder of Mercury and on to the garden world of Venus, with its blue-white atmosphere, placid seas and sculpted contents. The transformation of that planet was surprising and wonderful. But most of his interest was already focused ahead. Earth. What would the home world have become, after such long habitation and development?
As they drew closer he looked and looked again. The Earth-Moon doublet was growing in the ship’s displays, familiar yet oddly wrong. The proportions were right, Earth’s disk bulking more than ten times as big as its satellite’s; but the colors were strange. The smaller world was an angry red tinged with yellow smears. The larger gleamed white, a dull and almost uniform white, oddly suggestive.
He stared hard at that pale orb, and felt a perspective shift suddenly within his mind.
“That’s the Moon! Which means that the little one has to be Earth. Is this all just a simulation?”
He hardly expected an answer. Although Milton was at his side, the Servitor had spoken little since the journey began.
This time, however, the response was immediate. “It is no simulation. Although our journey is in derived reality, what you are seeing exactly matches the physical world.”
“What happened to the Earth?”
“It is easier to say why than what. As we told you, three times while you were in cryosleep a strange direction was taken by humanity. In two of those, technology was ignored. In the third, it took a leap which even now we do not understand. The center of that new technology was Earth. One day, without warning, Earth collapsed to a fraction of its old size. Its surface closed. Its mass remained unchanged.”
“It collapsed while it was still inhabited? What happened to the people?”
“We do not know, but we believe that in some form they survived. Even after six hundred thousand Earth years, no one has ever managed to penetrate the sphere that you see. It remains impermeable to all forms of matter and radiation. Our best theory is that the sphere is constantly maintained by a single entity within it, a combination of organic and inorganic intelligence.
“Of perhaps greater consequence to the rest of the solar system, at the time of its collapse and closure the Earth was the repository of all major data banks. Their loss had a profound effect on human development—even on human sanity. Everyone was suddenly deprived of a vital group memory and cohesive force. The process of reconstruction began, but it was slow, uncertain, and imperfect. In that era, every person in the cryowombs was revivified to assist in the re-re-creation of old historical records. You alone, because I was armed with your specific instructions, were exempt.”
Drake leaned back, his thoughts bitter and far from the Earth that now filled the screens So all the long shots had paid off after all; even the “useless” ones whom no one had previously thought it worthwhile to revive. Instead of fleeing from Pluto he should simply have placed himself with Ana in the Pluto cryowomb. They would have been awakened together, to live the rest of their lives together.
“Do you wish to go closer, for sentimental reasons?” Milton was at his side, the Servitors wiry broom of sensors turned toward him. “It is deemed quite safe to do so. There has never been interference with an approaching ship, not even ones that land upon the outer surface of Earth.”
“That isn’t Earth, no matter what you call it.” Drake turned his back on the displays. “Take me away. There’s nothing for me here.”
Nothing for him, perhaps, anywhere in the whole solar system. That defeatist thought grew stronger as they flew on outward from the Sun. It was not a problem of mere physical change—the rings of Saturn gone into the terraforming of Titan, Uranus like a miniature second sun illuminating the outer planets, ‘Pluto basking in new heat to the point where nitrogen was a liquid on its surface and the cryowomb containing Drake and Ana had been moved to a more convenient and cooler location.
More important than all those were the changes that could not be seen. When Drake first heard the words “fourteen million years” he had at once realized some of the implications. The recent news that everyone else in the cryowombs had been revivified strengthened his understanding that he was now what he had once feared he might become: a living fossil, a creature from the remote past. Even the cryowombs themselves were an anachronism, replaced as a method of hibernation by the far easier and more reliable uploading and downloading of minds to and from electronic storage. Drake owed his own and Ana’s continued existence in cryform only to Milton’s literal and conscientious mind.
And it was a mind. He could no longer think of the Servitor as a simple mechanical aide. Considered alone, Milton possessed powers that rivaled those of any single human from Drake’s time; considered as part of a composite, the Servitor far surpassed that.
The familiar constellations had left the sky, replaced by new and anonymous patterns. Fourteen million years was long enough for the slow movement of the “fixed” stars to have changed totally the face of the heavens. On the long flight out to the edge of the Oort Cloud (a dizzying coalescence, now, of a hundred million worldlets and interlocking intelligences) Drake struggled to accept his new reality. He had been told by the composite, of which Milton formed one unit, that the science of today was not merely unknown to him, it was unknowable. Although science was not the reason that he had been contacted within the cryowomb, there had indeed been progress in the problem of restoring the original Ana. Unfortunately, that progress was in terms strange to Drake. It had been explained five times by Milton. Still, Drake wondered if his misconceptions exceeded his understanding.
He tried once more, as their simulated journey through the new solar system neared its end and Alman appeared unexpectedly on board the ship.
Drake cornered the bald-headed man in the galley, aware even as he did so how ridiculous his own action must seem. Since everything was in derived reality, Alman could choose to vanish as easily and suddenly as he had arrived.
“Milton says that new developments have made it possible in principle to restore Ana in her original form—not merely her body, but her whole personality.”
“No.” Alman sighed, a wholly plausible human sigh. “That is not what we said. We said that because of changes in our overall understanding of the universe, it will be possible in principle to restore Ana in the future. It is a statement of theoretical interest. It is not possible today.”
“Then, when will it be possible? And what has changed, to make it possible?”
“It is not easy to explain in a way that you will understand. Or to know where to begin, so as to maximize the probability of your comprehension. Perhaps we should start with a question: Do you know the difference between an open universe and a closed universe?”
“No idea.”
“I feared as much. And yet the distinction is easy to define. You know that the more distant galaxies are receding from us?”
“Sure. Even in my time most people knew that.”
“Then the definitions become very simple. In an open universe, the galaxies will go on receding from each other forever. In a closed universe, they will one day reverse their outward motion and begin to approach each other. In a closed universe, the end point for that approach is a final collapse to a point of infinite density, pressure, and temperature. Is that clear?”
