“English. Seriously.” Cyril felt an unfocused dread, because if these people were speaking whatever hash his mother tongue had become, then they would require an amount of effort that his belligerent mind was informing him point-blank it would refuse to make. “And could you be so kind as to tell me where I am exactly?”
The audience was hooting again, and the hologram shot them a chastening look. “Lun,” he said.
“London?” Cyril inferred. “London, England, in the United Kingdom.”
The interlocutor was having trouble again. “Lon-don,” he seemed to remember. “Ing, Unite King?” he said. “Go more no.”
Well, they predicted the breakup of the United Kingdom after the UK left the EU, and though Cyril was once a passionate unionist—the factual information was available to him; it just needed dusting off—now he didn’t care. The Scots were always troublemakers, and the Barnett formula for the distribution of revenue had never been fair to English taxpayers.
“So the Unite King go more no,” Cyril recapitulated caustically. “Could you also—”
“Sar!” the hologram said. “How say you ‘Unite King go more no’?”
“The United Kingdom is no more.” Back in the world ten minutes and he was already teaching his captors, or whatever they were—who with their poncy future what-all might instead have been teaching him a thing or two, and Cyril was already tired.
The hologram punched excitedly at a device. “Treasury grove of lingualistic histrionics!”
“Treasure trove of linguistic history,” Cyril decoded, bored. “And sorry to be so basic, but I seem to have been down for the count rather a while. What year is this?”
The answer was incomprehensible. After more agonized back and forth, Cyril at least established that they no longer dated years from the birth of Christ, and it was pretty much impossible to establish what, you know, Star-date Whathaveyou it was in relation to the 2020s. Luckily, the year was a matter of supreme indifference, really.
Yet amidst the extensive back and forth about base ten, which was apparently like asking these people about cave drawings, it dawned on Cyril that he should have asked a pressing question at the very first. Having still not asked it was disturbing, insofar as Cyril could be disturbed at all—although he sensed that his previous incarnation would have been quite disturbed indeed. How could he have taken so long to inquire: where was his wife?
* * *
Cyril was assured he could soon reunite with the other ancient hominid in the second capsule of the pair, but beforehand they were both required to undergo a thorough health check.
When his species’ amiable descendants helped him out of the capsule, Cyril was relieved that his legs bore his weight; suspended animation didn’t appear to entail the muscle wastage of lolling in bed. But as a young man, he’d been tall for his generation, a generous six foot one. Now he stood a good two and a half feet shorter than these strapping new-age specimens, beside whom he looked like a dwarf. The literal loss of stature smarted. By inference, then, however peculiar he felt, some inner kernel remained unchanged: a sort of under-seer that had always been there waiting and watching from within. The man he had been before taking the cryogenic plunge would have disguised this quintessence from himself as something loftier or more ineffable, but his newly brutal iteration had no problem identifying the kernel for what it was: ego.
The childlike humiliation of staring straight at his caretakers’ diaphragms was intensified by self-consciousness about his clothing. Amidst this sleekly aviary kit, a navy woollen cardigan with wooden buttons and a roll collar, a once-crisply-ironed ivory button-down that had badly creased, and comfortably roomy belted slacks with a break in the leg could as well have been the ruffs, pantaloons, tights, and pointy buckled shoes of a comedic BBC period drama.
As the team led their historical curiosity gingerly towards some sort of medical facility, they treated him with the exaggerated care with which palaeontologists might handle a rare, newly unearthed fossil. Given the task ahead, Cyril was obliged to dredge up one memory that remained sombrely intact, and that alone seemed capable of making him feel something—in this case, tainted, corrupted, and doomed.
Awkwardly, the words “cancer” and even “cell” left his holographic translator baffled. Thus Cyril was obliged to elaborate about many proliferating bad creatures attacking and overwhelming the good creatures and then rushing to other points in the body to do more bad things . . . He sounded like an idiot. In the end he simply located his pancreas as best he could and pointed.
He was led into another unadorned room. A woman shone an orange light in both eyes, and a moment later he was lying on a gurney naked under a blanket, so he must have been sedated.
“All fix,” the hologram said, a little smugly.
It was more than the British Cancer Society could ever have dreamt of.
Once again Cyril had the nagging sense that he probably should have asked another question earlier, and once again having failed to ask it didn’t especially distress him, but before he awakened as a photocopy of himself this apparent absence of concern would have distressed him greatly. Could they also cure ALS?
During the two days the time traveller would be kept under medical observation before he could be reunited with his spouse, the golden interlocutor suggested that Cyril do both himself and his keepers a favour by sitting down to converse at length. Their dialogue would be fed into a self-learning computer, the result of which would be, effectively, Google Translate.
Over the course of their discussions, the hologram explained in his groping way that homo sapiens sapiens of today regarded itself as a single organism (what he actually said was “singular orgasm”)—which as a socialist Cyril should have found appealing, and didn’t. (The teeming hive concept did help explain why so far his caretakers had neither asked his name nor introduced themselves by
