Charles Sheffield - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Where was he? And why had he been awakened?

Trismon Sorel had assured him that his Servitor would accompany him everywhere, through space and time, and would be required to approve his resurrection. Drake stared around the room, seeking the wheeled form of the Servitor. But then all questions of his location and condition vanished.

A woman waited in the narrow doorway.

It was Ana.

Ana, happy and blooming with health. She was standing exactly as he’d seen her a thousand times, head to one side and her mouth quirked into a question.

The moment of intense joy was blotted out by a terrible disappointment. This was another synthesis, more cruel than the last.

Drake tried to stand up, but instead he found himself rising straight into the air and turning end over end.

“Easy now.” Ana was somehow at his side, steadying him. “I’m sorry, I ought to have waited until you had become accustomed to a low-gee environment.”

“You are a synthesis — not real.”

“That is not true.”

“The dark-haired woman — the simulation of the woman — she said there had not been progress—”

“It spoke the truth.” Ana had floated them back down, to sit side by side on the bed. “At least on that subject. There has been no progress in the problem that interests you.”

“But you — you are here, you are alive.” Again, the fear was there. Could a simulation be made to lie? “Aren’t you?”

“I am indeed. But it is not the way you think it is.” The gentle tone in Ana’s voice was infinitely familiar. “Isn’t it obvious to you who I am?”

“You are Ana.”

“Yes. But I am not your Ana.” She took him by the arm, and turned so that they were face-to-face. “Look at me. Can’t

you see the difference? I am the Ana to whom you gave life. I am the clone of your wife, the person grown from her cells by Trismon Sorel and his colleagues.”

“But the other woman said it had been twenty-nine thousand years — have you been alive for so long?”

“Not continuously. That is not the custom.” She laughed, and at the sound Drake felt his heart break. “Like most people, I choose short periods of wakeful-ness between long ones in hibernation — what you would call cryosleep. Almost everyone is curious to know the future, to meet the future.

“And for twenty-nine thousand years, I have been curious to meet you. Each time I woke, I checked your condition in the cryowomb. Each time, before I went again to hibernation, I asked to be awakened should you waken.”

“But I ought not to be awake now,” Drake protested. “I was supposed to remain in cryosleep until the restoration of Ana’s personality became possible. I gave those explicit instructions to my Servitor when I entered the cryotank.”

Entered the cryotank — twenty-nine thousand years ago. Long enough for steel to rust and stone to crumble. Long enough for even the concept of a Servitor to have been lost. Long enough for hopes and thoughts and wishes to have been forgotten. It was folly to expect anything to endure over thirty millennia.

Except that some things had endured. Drake’s own emotions had survived unchanged. He realized that he was delighted to be awake. To be sitting two feet away from Ana, watching the old expressions of thought and concern run across her face — that was infinite bliss.

“I am sorry.” The new Ana bowed her head. “Your-Servitor is not at fault. Your awakening is my doing. I came to Pluto, and as a human, I overrode the instructions given by you to your Servitor.” She frowned. “It says its name is Milton. An odd name for a Servitor.”

“Not really.” Drake felt a twinge of uneasiness at that comment, which he pushed aside. “Milton is the name that I gave it.”

“In any case, I directed that you be reanimated.”

“And I’m glad that you did.” Drake reached out to embrace her, but she leaned away.

“No. I should have realized that this might happen. Let me try to explain.” She stood up and drifted safely out of arm’s reach. “You feel that you know me well, and more than well. But you do not actually know me at all; and I do not know you. Although I have gazed at your picture and listened to your voice a thousand times, you are a stranger to me. When I first reached consciousness you were already in the cryowombs. As I grew older I learned everything that I could about you and your life. What you did — and tried to do — seemed to me the noblest and bravest thing in the whole universe. I cannot say how much I longed to see you, to speak to you, to thank you for giving me life. But despite that longing, through all past years I respected what you wanted. And I knew that you did not want me.”

“I have never wanted anyone but you.” “No. You want Ana — your Ana. I am Ana, yes, but I am a different person. I have my own memories, my own joys and sorrows, my own fears. You do not share them.” She sighed. “Anyway, a few months ago I agreed to do something that I have been asked to do many times: to go away with friends on a long journey. We will fly out to the human colony on Rigel Calorans. I expect to be away for many thousands of Earth years. When I made that decision to leave the solar system for so long, I wondered: When I return, who knows where Drake Merlin might be? I could not bear the thought that I might never, ever, see you and know you. So I gave the command for resurrection.” She gazed at Drake with those clear, gray eyes that he had known forever. “I did not think of what would come after that. I did not ask myself what pain I might cause you. I realize now that what I did was a selfish and an unforgivable act.”

“You are wrong. It is forgiven already.” “It may be forgiven by you, but it was nonetheless unforgivable. It was my plan to leave Pluto after speaking with you, and proceed to the edge of the Oort Cloud where the members of the Rigel Calorans expedition will assemble. I can no longer do that, at least at this time. I must respect your feelings. How can I atone for waking you against your will?”

“Stay with me.” Drake did not say it, but his mind added the word forever.

“I certainly owe that to you.” Ana smiled, with that familiar rueful downturn of one side of her mouth. “And now, like the self-serving wretch that I am, I will try to justify my own action in resurrecting you. There is a level of temporal shock after any hibernation, even if it is no more than a few hundred years. I have felt it many times; a reaction to changes in the world, in areas where no change was imagined and anticipated. In your case it has been nearly thirty millennia, and you were not prepared for it as we are. So I will take it as my task to lessen the blow of twenty-nine

thousand vanished years.” She reached out her hand, and her touch made him shiver. “Come along, Drake Merlin. Your patient Servitor is waiting outside. It is most irritated that a mere irrational human would override your explicit instructions. Come along with me, and listen to my abject apologies.”

“These were never your true love’s eyes,

Why do you feign that you love them?”

Ana’s warning of temporal shock at first seemed greatly overstated. The evidence of human presence on Pluto was mostly the cryowombs. Drake could see little change in the wombs or the planet since his mad run from them, twenty-nine thousand years earlier.

“True enough.” Ana had all her old calm and common sense. “On the other hand, this is Pluto. You can’t do much without raising the temperature and disturbing the cryowombs, which no one wants to do. Almost everybody has ancestors stored here, even if they don’t quite know who they are.”