Charles Sheffield: Tomorrow and Tomorrow

The breathless feeling was fading. Drake again had control of himself. He waited patiently until Tom was finished, then nodded agreement.

“I’ll do as you say. I’ll get away from here for a while. But if it turns out that you are wrong — if I come back to you, in, say, eight or ten years, and I ask you again, will you do it? Will you help me? I want you to give me an honest answer, and I want your word on it.”

The tension drained visibly from Tom Lambert. He snorted in relief. “Ten years from now? Drake, if you come back to me in eight or ten years and ask me again, I’ll admit I was completely wrong. And I promise you, I’ll help you to do what you’ve asked.”

“An absolute promise? I don’t want to hear some day that you changed your mind, or didn’t mean what you said.”

“An absolute promise. Sure, I’ll give you that.” Tom laughed. “But I’m not worried that I’ll ever be called on it. I’ll bet you everything I own that after a year or two have gone by, you’ll never mention that promise again. Hard as it seems to believe today, you’ll be living a new life, and you’ll be enjoying it.” He walked over to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. “I’d like to propose a toast, Drake. Or actually, three toasts. To us. To your future. And to your next — and greatest — composition.”

Drake raised his glass in return. “To us, and the future. I’ll drink to those. But I can’t drink to my next work, because I don’t know when I’ll create it. I have lots of other things to do — for one thing, you told me to get out of town. I’m going

to do that, right away. But don’t worry, Tom. I’ll be in touch when the time is right.”

There were two problems. The first was easy to define but hard to solve: money.

In the early days, Drake and Ana had been very poor. As a result they talked about money quite a lot. She would glance through their joint checking account book, with its zero balance, and groan. He would laugh, with more worry than humor, and once he quoted something he had just read by Somerset Maugham: “Money is the sixth sense that enables us to enjoy the other five.” He added: “I guess that leaves us six senses short.”

Unfortunately, neither groans nor quotations produced income. Money, or the lack of it, seemed important, as important as anything in the world except music” and each other.

Career success brought a change of attitude. Ana had her teaching and her concert appearances, Drake had pupils and occasional commissions. Their needs were modest. They bought a house, a big old-fashioned brick Colonial with four bedrooms and half an acre of fenced yard, expecting that someday they would need all the space for an expanded family. Neither of them wanted to travel or be wealthy. Wordsworth was quoted rather than Maugham: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

Now all that was past. Drake needed money, lots of it. He had to make sure that Ana could remain safe within her icy womb for the indefinite future, until she could be safely thawed and her disease cured. Then her life would begin again. There were a few things he couldn’t guard against, such as a total collapse of the world to barbarism, or the rejection of all present forms of currencies and commodities. Those were risks that Ana — and he — would have to accept.

The other problem was more subtle. According to Tom it might be a long time before a cure was found for Ana’s rare and highly malignant disease. As he pointed out, something that killed only a few people a year did not get the attention of common cancers and heart diseases, which ended the lives of hundreds of millions.

Suppose that a cure was not discovered for a century, or even for two centuries. What knowledge of present-day society would interest people in the year 2200? What must a man know or a woman be, for the inhabitants of that future Earth to think it worthwhile to revive them? Drake was convinced that even when a foolproof way of resuscitating the revivables was discovered, most bodies in the cryowombs would stay exactly where they were. The contracts with Second Chance provided only for maintenance in a cryonic condition. They did not, and could not, offer a guarantee that an individual would be thawed.

Why thaw anyone at all? Why add another person to a crowded world, unless he or she had something special to offer?

Drake imagined himself back in the early nineteenth century. What could he have placed into his brain, then, that would be considered valuable today, two hundred years later? Not politics, nor art. Knowledge of them was quite adequate. Certainly not science or any technology — progress, in the past two centuries had been phenomenal.

What would the people of the future want to know about the past?

He decided that he had lots of time to ponder his own question; time, which had been denied to Ana. It would be foolish to hurry, when he could plan and calculate at his leisure. He set a goal of ten years. That would still allow forty of the shared fifty that he had looked for and longed for. But he was quite willing to stretch ten to fifteen if he had to.

If it did take more time, it would not be because he allowed himself to be distracted by other activities. His only diversion was to estimate the probabilities that everything would work out as he hoped. Always, the odds came out depressingly low.

While he was trying to decide what he needed to learn, he still had to solve that difficult first problem: making money.

He decided to visit his old teacher. His relationship with Bonvissuto had passed through three distinct phases. At first

there had been absolute awe of the professor’s musical skill and encyclopedic knowledge. Bonvissuto seemed to know, and be able to play by heart at his cherished Steinway, his own piano transcription of any work by any composer. After three years of study, Drake’s attitude changed. He still respected and admired his mentor’s learning, but in matters other than music he came to think Bonvissuto a bit of a comic figure. He could not ignore the elevator heels, red carnation buttonholes, dyed-brown shoulder-length tresses, unreliable Italian accent, and relentless romantic activity.

It was Ana, in Drake’s final year as Bonvissuto’s student, who revealed to Drake another side of their teacher.

“Can’t you see how much he envies you?” she said, as they sat one afternoon poring over a marked-up score of Carmina Burana.

“Who?”

“Bony. Who else?”

“Me?” Drake put down the score. “Why on earth do you think he would envy me? He knows ten times as much about music as I’ll ever know.”

“He does. But just the same he envies you — for the same reason as /envy you. He teaches music. I perform music. But you create music. Neither of us is able to do that. Can’t you see the look in his eyes, whenever you bring him a beautiful original melody? He’s delighted, yet sad. It must kill him inside, to be so gifted and yet be missing that one essential spark.”

Ana’s insight led Drake to a final opinion of his teacher. The professor could be sarcastic and short-tempered. He was certainly vain, and a dedicated womanizer. But he loved music, with a passion and a strength and a devotion far beyond anything else in life.

And again it was Ana who stated it best. When a discussion of Haydn’s “English” songs was interrupted by a telephone call from Bonvissuto’s current flame, she said to Drake, quietly and with real affection for their teacher, “Listen to him. He tells Rita — and Charlene and Mary and Leah and Judy — that he loves them, and I think he really does. But he’d trade the lot in for one new Haydn symphony.”