Charles Sheffield - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“You mean, understand the doctors?” The stranger Leon replied with a surprised expression on his lean face. “Of course you cannot. Neither can I. They are doctors. To each other they are naturally speaking Medicine.”

Drake raised his eyebrows. The look must have survived with its meaning intact across the centuries, because Par Leon went on, “That is right, Medicine. I cannot help you. I myself am fluent in Music and History — and, of course, Universal. And I learned Old Anglic to be able to study your times and to speak with you. But I know little or no Medicine.”

“Medicine is a language ?” Drake felt that his mind had been slowed by the long sleep and thawing treatment.

“Of course. Like Music or Chemistry or Computing. But surely this was already true in your own time. Did you not have languages specific to each — what is the word you use? — discipline?”

“I suppose that we did; but we didn’t realize it.” Par Leon’s question explained a great deal. No wonder that Drake had found psychologists, professional educators, social scientists, and physicists — to name but a few — incomprehensible. Even in his original time, the special jargon and odd acronyms had been signaling the arrival of new protolanguages, 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 not as bad as they had once been. Here at least there was an understanding that the problem existed. And what were computers like, after five more centuries of development? In his day they had been in their infancy. They ought to be able to do anything now, anything at all — like curing Ana. It was almost a surprise to see that there was still a place in the world for humans.

He was beginning to feel oddly and irrationally euphoric, a combination of drugs and the idea that he might succeed more easily than he had dreamed.

He made a more 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 five-hundred-year-old bet had paid off. He wondered what modern music sounded like. Would he be able to listen to it with pleasure? 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 presumably 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 is the word that you would use? — with your body and its glandular balance. They hope that they have cured the simpler body malfunctions, and they have provided standard stabilization of your chromosomal telomeres. You will still age, but slowly. You should live between two and three 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 psychoprobes. 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 your former wife, Anastasia Werlich.”

Drake felt his heart racing. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, and in his weakened condition it was as hard to breathe as if heavy weights had been dropped onto his chest. He closed his eyes for a long moment and thought about Ana. Gradually, he became calm again.

It was obvious what the other 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. I know that she was once very dear to me, but I am not sure how. 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 put 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 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 it that could casually ship millions of 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. How many planets were known now? Even in his day, there was talk of many more bodies out in a region known as the Kuiper Belt. Five centuries. It was 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 Werlich. 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 yon 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.