Charles Sheffield - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

He felt like staying where he was, closing his eyes, and giving up. But Melissa Bierly’s words, from long ago, would not permit that. “Keep your faith, Drake, and go on … somewhere, sometime, you will find Anastasia.”

There was a dark side to those words, one that he had never appreciated before. Assume that he had been downloaded because there was now a way to resurrect his Ana. Into what kind of future world would he be bringing her? It would be supremely selfish to pull Ana from her fermata of endless sleep, if the universe that he had to offer was so alien that pleasure and happiness were impossible.

Well, it was his job to find out. And it would not do to be a pessimist. Since he had been downloaded, no matter how far in the future he had come, the human information network of an earlier time must still exist. Other humans, in flesh or in electronic form, would also exist. They, like he, could be placed in a cloned form of their original body, whose genetic blueprint was stored with the contents of their minds and memories. So his problem would be to contact those humans, in whatever form they endured.

Drake sat up, cursing his own physical weakness. His heart was pounding. That was probably the air. It smelled strange, and he had to breathe faster than usual. He started again toward the wall of the room, determined this time to force his way through and see what lay on the other side. His head was pushing against the wall when a dozen of the little umbrella crawlers came in from the other side of the membrane. Their hissing and clicking reached a new level of excitement when they saw what he was doing. They bunched up in front of him, pushing at his hands and forearms. At first he resisted, but a dozen reinforcements came through the wall and added their efforts to the others. Each one was carrying a narrow section of transparent flexible sheet. One of them waved a piece urgently at Drake.

They were trying to tell him something. And since they had resurrected him, they were probably not intending to do him harm. He allowed himself to be shepherded to the middle of the hemisphere, and laid out flat on his back. Hundreds of the blue-green insectile objects emerged from the crawlers. They seized the flexible sheets and began to place them in position around his body. Where the edges met, the sheets formed a tight and invisible seal.

Drake finally knew what the blue-green workers were doing when a sheet was placed in position over his face. He reached up to tear it free of his mouth and nose, then realized that it left a couple of inches of free space there.

“A suit!” he gargled. “You making me a suit?”

He did not expect an answer. Now he understood the reason for the excitement when he tried to push his way through the wall of the room where he had been lying. Whatever was out there, he could not handle it without special protection. The crawlers knew it. Either they were intelligent themselves, or they were under the control of an intelligence. That intelligence would eventually tell him where he was, and how far into the future he had traveled.

He began to cooperate more actively, lifting his arms and legs so that the sheets could be placed into position. The turquoise workers moved faster, scuttling all around him to make a complete sheath around his body. Each finger, each toe, each ear, was precisely and individually wrapped. He was nervous when the last big piece went into place, sealing

off the back of his head and his access to the air in the room. The suit could hold only enough air for a few minutes. He told himself to relax. If they didn’t want him alive, why would they have resurrected him?

He noticed no change at all in his breathing. As an experiment he spoke again, through clotted and phlegm-filled vocal cords. “All right, what’s next?”

Apparently sound passed through his body sheath with no difficulty. The crawlers hummed and clicked in reply and retreated from him. The blue-green workers returned to them and disappeared through small apertures beneath the ends of the umbrella spokes. All the crawlers headed together for the wall of the room, and paused there.

Drake followed. This time there was no objection when he pushed against the sticky membrane. He forced his way through.

It was obvious now why his earlier effort had been prevented. He was emerging onto the surface of a moon or planet. It was a small one, with a horizon only a kilometer or so away. The hard and unvarying light of the stars above him suggested that if any atmosphere existed, it was far too thin to breathe.

Another mystery. The membrane wall had allowed him to push through easily, but it did not release its air. Nor did there seem to be a hole where he had passed through. Technology was still advancing.

Cautiously, he stood up. His feet felt pain at the ankles and were dead below. Balancing was not easy. He stared upward. The pattern of constellations had been unfamiliar on his earlier resurrection, so it was too much to hope that he would recognize them this time. One thing he was sure of: There were far too many stars, thousands after thousands of them. In such a crowded sky, it would be difficult for the mind to create the old imagined shapes of bears, dragons, swans, or crosses.

Where was he? Drake’s conviction that he had traveled far in time and space became stronger. A sky should appear so crowded only close to the center of the Galaxy, thirty thousand light-years from Earth.

Or not even there. The stars above were thickly scattered, enough to make vision easy; but not so thick that other objects could not be seen beyond them. High to Drake’s right, like a shadow behind the stars, he could make out a great misty spiral of light. He was looking at it from above and slightly away from its axis of rotation.

He had wondered where he was. Still he did not know, but now he could make a guess. His first thought had been that he was in the dense middle of his own galaxy, staring out at some other spiral. But there was no spiral galaxy nearly so close — the one he was looking at was bright and sprawled over a quarter of the sky. Unless he was in the unimaginably distant future, the object overhead must be the Galaxy, the one that formed the home of Earth and Sol. He was seeing it from a dense cluster of stars that in intergalactic terms was a close neighbor, one of the Magellanic Clouds — tight groups of billions of stars that were gravitationally tied to the Galaxy and a couple of hundred thousand light-years away from it.

And that gave a partial answer to his other question: When? Unless some method had been discovered to travel faster than light, he was at least hundreds of thousands of years beyond the time of his downloading. That, however, represented an absolute lower bound. His own feelings, irrationally combined with the sense of infinite age and weariness in his body, convinced him that he had moved many tens of millions of years into the future.

His companions, machines or bioengineered creatures, had waited patiently at his side. They were at ease in near or total vacuum. Maybe they were the “people” of the future, wearing superior physical forms. Unless he found a way to talk to them, he would never know.

They had no limbs, no eyes, no visible way of providing or receiving a message. Yet clearly they were able to communicate with each other. All their efforts to keep him inside the membrane until he had a suit had been tightly coordinated.

He stooped down and picked up one of the little umbrella crawlers. He hoped they would not misunderstand his motives.

The downward movement made his head swim. There was something awfully wrong with his resurrected body. Instead of becoming more at ease, he was experiencing greater pain and discomfort with every minute. He waited until his balance at last returned, then examined the crawler.