There has been some climate change, too. Think of this as just like Serengeti, even though it isn’t.” Melissa pointed again, this time upward toward the afternoon sun. “One reason it’s not too hot, it’s midwinter and we’re fifteen hundred meters above sea level. Feel it in your lungs?” And, as Drake drew in a deep breath of thin but warm and pollen-laden air, she added, “Come on. You’ve been stuck inside for four years, or maybe it’s five hundred and four. Let’s see what sort of job they did when they tuned up your body.”
She had given up the usual gray dress in favor of bright pink shorts and a red T-shirt. Her legs were shapely but well muscled. She began to run toward the nearest grove of trees, maybe a mile and a half away. After a moment Drake set out in pursuit. They were each carrying a backpack, which when Drake had put it on seemed to weigh next to nothing. Within the first quarter of a mile he changed his mind. He could feel it bouncing up and down on his back, the straps cutting into his shoulders. How could a meal weigh nothing when it was on the inside of you, and so much when you were carrying it on the outside?
He began to pant harder and felt in his calves and thighs the first pain of fatigue and oxygen starvation. The altitude made a tremendous difference, far more than he would have expected, and he had not taken regular exercise since he was thawed. His new body was supposed to make it unnecessary. He forced himself to run for another couple of minutes, then he had to stop. He had forgotten what it was like to be physically exhausted. He dropped heavily to the ground, and lay there panting on the dry, grassy soil.
All the time that he was running, Melissa had steadily increased her lead. She went all the way to the trees, circled them, and headed back at the same speed. She came to where he lay and stood by him with her legs wide apart and her hands on her hips.
Drake rolled on to his back and stared up at her. “What did they do with
“Not a thing. This is the original me.” She squatted at his side. She wasn’t even panting. “Now do you agree that it was a good idea to get you away from work for a while?”
“If it doesn’t kill me when my heart gives out.”
“It won’t. Any problems like that would have been taken care of. Come on.” She reached down and helped him rise to his feet. “We have to keep going if we want to get to a monitor lodge before darkness.”
That sounded to Drake like an excellent idea. Lions might be twenty kilometers away. But how far were they likely to travel when they were hunting?
Melissa didn’t seem worried, although fast and fit as she was she could not outspeed a hungry lion. On the other hand, it occurred to Drake that she didn’t have to. All she had to do was run faster than him.
Drake’s idea of Earth’s future transportation system, if he had had one at all, was vague, busy, and grandiose — the chaotic vehicle mix of the late twentieth century, extrapolated to become faster, busier, and more tangled.
If the quiet open prairie had not set him right during the afternoon, Melissa did so that night. “The transportation system is all there,” she said, “and according to the reports it’s an excellent one. You can get anywhere in the world in just a few hours. We’ll see it for ourselves when we use it tomorrow. But it’s not heavily used. A few sightseers like us; and that’s about it.”
They had settled into a comfortable lodge, empty except for service machines, and they were eating dinner. It was Drake’s fourth meal with another human being since he had been resurrected. After three years of work together, Par Leon had shyly asked Drake if he would like to have dinner in person every three or four months. Drake took that for what it was, a sincere gesture of approval and friendship.
“So what happened?” he asked Melissa, as their empty plates vanished into the table. “I know that the population is down by a factor of ten from our time, but there still ought to be lots of traffic — people and goods. Why isn’t there?”
She sighed, with the tolerance of a person with a full stomach. Although she was smaller than Drake, she had eaten at least twice as much. But there was no fat on her body. He put it down to her high burn rate and her endless energy.
“You really did tune out for four years, didn’t you?” she said. “It must take a positive effort
“I was planning to learn a lot about transportation systems, on this planet and off it. But not yet.”
“There’s less to learn than you might imagine. We could have guessed this, too, if we’d bothered to think. Why do people need transportation?”
“To carry goods from where they’re made to where they’re needed. To take people to work, and to let them meet each other.”
“What you’re describing is nowadays called a primitive industrial society. You and I lived at the end of that, though I don’t think we knew it. Automated manufacturing and telework were just about to take off in our time. We are now in a postindustrial, machine-supported society. You don’t need to carry goods when they can be made on the spot from simple raw materials. The manufacturing is all done by machines, smart enough so they don’t need people to watch over them. People still work, but no one goes to work anymore. They don’t need to. You must know that from your own project. You told me you don’t actually
“So why is there a transportation system at all?”
“Because a few people want one and use one. Because it doesn’t really cost anything to maintain it — the machines do all that, without a single human being involved. Same as this lodge. When we arrived, our meals were cooked and our beds prepared, and we didn’t even have to request it. It’s an odd thought, but if all the people were to die, the housekeeper here probably wouldn’t notice. It would carry on as usual. I doubt if there’s another person — I mean on the surface — within a hundred miles.”
Drake went to the window and gazed out into the warm African night. It was bright moonlight, and fifty yards away he could see head-high grass swaying as some large invisible animal moved through it.
No other humans within a hundred miles of here. But there was a deeper question. What was
He could not give an answer that made sense. Somehow, Melissa Bierly’s requests carried the weight of absolute commands. He did not know how to refuse. If she told him to go outside and face hungry lions, he was sure that he would do it.
And there was another question. What was
He could not imagine what; but later, when they were lying side by side in the lodge’s quiet bedroom, he heard her
sighs. Melissa was moaning softly in her sleep. And every few minutes, until he finally fell asleep himself, he heard the sound of grinding teeth.
Morning restored Melissa’s cheerfulness and drive. She announced that she had changed her mind. She wanted to head upward, to the top of the peak that loomed to the northeast, before they used the transportation system and flew to South America.
“Birhan?” Drake had called up a large-scale map and asked for an optimal route. Now he called up a topographic map. “Are you sure? It’s a brute. According to this it rises above thirteen thousand feet. We won’t be able to breathe.”
“I’ll breathe for both of us.” Melissa was bursting with energy. “I’ll help you, and we won’t go all the way to the top. Just enough to get a view. Come on, let’s go.”
The housekeeper had anticipated their need for packaged food, just as it had provided breakfast and had a car ready. It knew which maps Drake had demanded, and it had decided that Birhan was not within a day’s walk for a human.
The hovercar moved smoothly, about three feet above the surface, and made almost no noise. It handled all kinds of terrain with ease, water as well as land. When they drifted across the rocky near-dry course of a broad river, Drake looked up from the display that was tracing out their path.
“This is the Blue Nile. I wonder what happened to it.”
“Diverted, four hundred years ago.” As usual, Melissa knew everything. “It was once completely dry. It looks as though the old dams are breaking down. No one needs them anymore.”
The ground was rising steadily, and the hovercar was following the upward slope effortlessly. So far as Drake was concerned he would have been happy to ride all the way to the snow-capped peak ahead. Melissa had
