Charles Sheffield - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

You have everything to lose. 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 chance that someday, God knows when, you might — -just might — be revived. Don’t you see, Drake, I can’t help you. Across a gulf of eight centuries, Tom Lambert’s words reverberated in Drake’s mind.

“I’ve heard that logic before,” Drake said, “and it proved wrong. I will take that risk. It is smaller than risks that I have taken in the past. Can we begin… now?”

“If you insist.” Trismon Sorel held up his hand. Drake was already rising from his seat. “But there is one thing more. While we have been speaking, a group-mind meeting has been in progress involving every human within easy signal range. A conclusion has been reached. Your request will be granted, but with one condition: You do not go alone. You will have a companion for your travel into the future, just as each of us has a companion, to share our fortunes and to stand by our side through good and bad.”

“I desire no woman in the cryowomb with me, other than my own Ana. And no man, either.”

“We would condemn neither living man nor living woman to such an uncertain future. Your companion will not reside in the cryowombs. It will be a Servitor, designed for on-demand operation, exactly like my own Servitor.” Trismon Sorel gestured to the little wheeled sphere with its metal whisk-broom head, waiting quietly at his side. “So long as you do not call upon its services, it will remain dormant and in communion with the data banks. When you need a companion or an assistant, it will be there to obey your commands.”

Sorel stood up. “Come with me now. The preparations are already beginning for the cloning of Ana.

While that is proceeding, I will explain to you the endless virtues of the Servitor class. And you can decide on the appearance and name of your own personal model, to travel with you into the undiscovered country of the future.”

Drake woke quickly and easily, rising at once to full consciousness. He felt rested and full of energy, without pain or weakness. His immediate thought was that something had gone badly wrong. He was supposed to have descended into cryosleep. Instead he was awakening, as the effects of the first cryonic tranquilizing drug wore off.

He opened his eyes, expecting to see the cryolab facility and Trismon Sorel’s face. Instead he found himself lounging at ease in a deep armchair. A woman with the strong features, raven hair, and dark complexion of a gypsy sat opposite. She was watching him closely. When his eyes opened she nodded but did not speak.

“What happened?” His mouth was a little dry, but that was normal after sedation. “Why didn’t I go into cryosleep?”

“And what makes you think you didn’t?” She arched jet-black eyebrows at him. “Don’t you believe in progress? The old barbarism of waking agony is long in the past. Today the thawing is no different from rising after a natural sleep.”

She spoke not in Universal but in perfect English, unaccented and without pauses.

He glanced around him. His last waking sight had been of the cryolab, deep within the sterile interior of the Moon. Now he was back on Earth, held to his chair by the familiar tug of a standard gravity. The room’s long window faced out over a sandy beach and a restless ocean. It was windy outside. He could hear the gusts moaning around the outside of the building and see tiny sparks of sunlight reflecting from distant white-caps.

Suddenly, he knew exactly where he was. He and Ana, on one of their rare trips abroad, had worked together for a month in Italy. They had taken an extra two weeks of vacation after the assignment was over, and rented a small villa on the Sorrento Peninsula just south of Naples. He was there now. The restless sea that he was looking at was the Tyrrhenian Sea, part of the Mediterranean; the little island far to the west was Capri.

He even recognized the room and furniture of the villa.

Recognized it, after more than eight hundred years?

His moment of pleasure was swept away by fear. “ How long?”

“I was hoping that we might postpone that question for at least a little while.” The woman sighed. “I should have known better. All your records display a remarkable focus of attention. To answer your question, it has been rather a long time — much longer than I suspect you hoped. In your notation, this is the year 32,072. It is more than twenty-nine thousand years since you last descended into cryosleep.”

Long enough, surely, for real progress in the reconstruction of his Ana.

But longer, also, than the whole of humanity’s previous recorded history. Drake stared in disbelief. He had again tried to prepare his mind for anything, for any amount of change. And again he was surprised. The last thing that he expected was sameness. But the room he was sitting in was exactly as he remembered it. The scene outside was a pleasant day of late spring. The sun was high in the sky, and it must be close to noon. At any moment the villa’s housekeeper would enter with an aperitif of sambuca, before serving lunch for him and Ana outside on the little paved terrace.

“It’s not real, is it?” He gestured around him. “All this is an electronic simulation, designed for my benefit.” A worse thought struck. “In fact, I’m not real, either. I’ve not been resurrected at all. I’ve been downloaded.”

“Not true.” The woman frowned reprovingly. “You have certainly been resurrected, and you are the real corporeal you, occupying your own revivified body. Although the capability exists to download a person to inorganic storage, this was not done in your case. It requires the consent of the individual, since once done it of course admits the possibility of multiple selves. However, you are right at least in part. The scene around you was synthesized from your own memories. It is being inserted for your comfort and convenience into your optic chiasma and other sensory afferent nerves — nonintrusively, I might add. The old indignities of body invasion disgust today’s society.”

“I don’t find this either comforting or convenient. I want to know where I really am. I want my surroundings to be as they really are.”

“Very well.” She paused. “Are you quite sure? We judged this synthesis to be the best way of minimizing cross-cultural shock.”

“You were wrong. Get rid of all of it.” Drake waved his arm at the room, the easy chairs, and the blue sea and sky beyond the long window.

“Very well. However, there is one other thing that you should know before you leave derived reality.” The woman stared at Drake, her dark eyes troubled. “You are real flesh and blood. But I am not. I am a part of the synthesis, and I will disappear when it does.”

She raised her hand in farewell.

“Wait a minute!” Drake found himself standing, on legs that shook with nervousness. “Don’t go yet. I have to know. Has there been progress in resurrecting Ana?”

“I am afraid that there has not. It is still considered an impossible problem.”

“But I was supposed to remain in the cryowomb until there was hope of a new approach. Why am I awake?”

“I hear the question.” The dark head nodded. “However, it is best answered by another. Good-bye, Drake Merlin.”

She was gone. With her went the sunlit room and its pleasant prospect of a windswept ocean. Drake found himself recumbent on an adjustable bed surrounded by an array of unfamiliar machinery. The room was small, drab, and oddly shaped. Its octagonal walls bulged up to a multifaceted convex ceiling, across which crawled faint patterns like blue clouds. Earth’s gravity had disappeared. His body was close to weightless. He felt that with a tiny effort he would become airborne, floating up to rest on that pale sky-ceiling.