allow Ana to be cured?
“Well?” Melissa had moved to stand in front of him, her hands on her hips.
He shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s impossible. I’m busy on a long-term collaborative project.”
“If it’s long-term, why can’t it wait a little while?” She moved closer and reached out to touch his hand. It was their first contact, and Drake felt the irrational spark of attraction.
“We wouldn’t need to be gone long,” she continued. She was smiling down at him. “Come on, come with me. Just for a few weeks. Surely you must have taken breaks in your work before.”
“Never.”
“How long have you been working on this project?”
“Four years.”
She stared at him incredulously. “Without any time off at all? You
Drake felt no need of a vacation. He had resisted the idea strongly, the half-dozen times that Par Leon suggested it. He had known Melissa Bierly for less than a quarter of an hour. But, beyond his comprehension, he found himself reaching out to call Par Leon.
Leon was sure to say no. There was no way, given the current status of the project, that he would agree. While the call was going through, Drake told himself to expect a refusal. And once Leon had said no, Drake would have something tangible to counterbalance his own irrational urge to say yes, and go off with Melissa to the ends of the Earth.
Then the screen was alive, Par Leon’s open, dignified face was staring out at them, and Drake was making a half-coherent request to delay their work for a while.
And Leon was nodding, even before Drake had finished. “Of course you may go. I have plenty of work that I can manage very well in your absence. The project will not suffer. Go, and enjoy.”
Even in Drake’s dazed state of mind he felt that there was something wrong. Par Leon had no expression in his voice. It was as if the request had come to him as a follow-up on some earlier conversation. Also, Leon had not asked when Drake wanted to go, or where, or how long he might be away. And Drake had provided none of that information. Indeed, he did not know it himself.
But before he could speak again, Leon was gone; and Melissa had taken both his hands in hers and was lifting him easily to his feet.
“There,” she said. “What did I tell you? Now that’s done, we can sit down together and make plans and begin to get to know each other. You’re very cramped in here. Why don’t we go to my place? It’s a lot more comfortable.”
Drake thought for one moment of Ana. She lay secure in her frigid cryowomb, on far-off Pluto. But it was Melissa, warm and breathing and somehow compelling, who held his hands. It was her sparkling blue eyes, rather than Ana’s gray ones, that smiled into his.
Unresisting, he allowed her to lead him to the door and out of his little apartment.
Drake was heading for the open air of Earth for the first time in five hundred years. Since the surface seemed to play no part in his plans after his resurrection, he had ignored its existence during his time working with Par Leon. And if he had been asked what he expected to find as the elevator carried him upward, he would have been hard put to provide a single answer. In any case, the answers he might have given were nothing like what he and Melissa found when the deep elevator finally reached the surface.
In the past few days she had taken charge of their lives. Although she had been thawed for less than seventy days, she seemed to know more than Drake about everything in their new world. After the first twenty-four hours he had surrendered his independence. She was like a force of nature. He did not attempt to argue with her or resist her. She knew where they were going, how they would get there, what they would do when they arrived.
Only occasionally, when they were waiting for something, did he notice a difference. The forceful, all- competent manner changed. The blue eyes became frenzied and crazy, and dark shadows crossed her face like demons.
It was happening now. They were at the surface, and the giant elevator doors were ready to release them to the outside air. Melissa should have been bubbling over with energy and excitement. Instead she was withdrawn, staring at the floor a few feet in front of them as if she saw all the devils of Hell in the pattern of tiles. It was Drake who was wide-eyed and curious, too absorbed to worry about the change in Melissa. Even the doors themselves aroused his interest. They had not opened, like normal doors, but seemed to dissolve to gray mist and then quietly vanish. Was this what the induced teaching meant, when it referred to “the transforming technology provided by a mastery of molecular bonds”?
He stared through the doors as they silently faded. Half a dozen possibilities filled his mind as to what he might see outside: a world completely paved over, with roads and vehicles everywhere? vast amounts of airborne traffic of strange and unfamiliar design, flying above his head? postnuclear devastation? gigantic buildings, arcologies in which half a million people could live? shimmering heat, as global warming ruled; or sheeted ice and visible breath, the precursors to some new Ice Age held at bay in his own time only by the widespread burning of fossil fuels? Or maybe the ozone layer was lost, and sunlight was now so fierce and strong in ultraviolet radiation that unshielded skin would turn purple black within minutes.
All these, and more, had been confidently predicted.
Drake looked. He saw an endless prairie, dotted in the distance with small clumps of trees. Of humans, and human influence, there was no sign. Melissa came to his side and took his hand. He glanced at her and saw that she was back once more to her usual confident self. She began to lead the way, walking toward that far-off blue- gray skyline.
As they went, Melissa explained. She had returned to her normal manner instantly, as soon as the doors were fully
open and the surface beyond was visible.
“I could certainly see the signs in my time,” she said, “and I’d be surprised if they weren’t already visible in yours. If I was asked to provide a single word for what started the change, I’d give one that I’ve never seen quoted: glass. Before people had glass, there was a time when they didn’t have buildings at all. They lived outside, in the middle of whatever was out there — animals of all sizes, from fleas to elephants. They might not have liked it, but they couldn’t do a thing about it. As time went on people learned to make buildings and could live indoors. But if you wanted to see what you were doing, there had to be holes in the walls to let in light. You could make the holes small, so the elephants and wolves and bears couldn’t get in. But there was no way of making the holes big enough to let light in, yet small enough to keep insects and spiders and wood lice and centipedes out. People still expected to live in the middle of bugs of all kinds. So they squashed them, or encouraged them — spiders will keep your house free of flies — or just put up with them.
“But then cheap, good-quality glass became available. You could make windows that let the light in and kept the bugs out. And that’s when people started to think that spiders and cockroaches and ants were ‘dirty,’ and even ‘unnatural.’ I’ve known women who would scream if they found a decent-sized spider in their bathroom. And as for doing
She reached down to the tall grass at their feet, and stood up again holding a big grasshopper gently in her cupped hands. “I knew people who wouldn’t touch a harmless bug like this, not if you paid them. Don’t you think it’s peculiar, even the word
Go twenty to thirty kilometers that way, you’ll find gazelles and wildebeest and cheetahs. Maybe lions, too.”
“Are we in the tropics? Or has the climate changed?” One other confident prediction of Drake’s own time had been that in another generation all the hoofed wildlife and the big predators would be gone.
“We’re in what used to be Africa, about ten degrees north of the equator. It’s what you would call Ethiopia.
