Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Earth.

But she just nodded. “Five times. It’s a backwater, but it’s on every tourist list. The original home, the birthplace, the shrine of humanity. But if most people were honest, they’d admit that it’s rather dull. It’s not where the action is. Are there other things that you want to see?”

“My old mentor, Par Leon, lived deep beneath the African plateau. That was high above sea level. I know the location. If we could just fly over there …”

“Of course.”

Ana agreed readily, although she must have suspected what they would find. Africa, at ten degrees north of the equator, was a seared world of dust and dead rock. The snows of Birhan were a memory, the peak a stark blackness jutting into a sky of fuming yellow. Drake looked at it and nodded to Ana. He had seen enough.

They took off for space and wandered to the innermost system. Venus terraforming, according to Ana, was right on schedule. The surface pressure was down from a stupefying ninety Earth atmospheres to less than twenty. Bespoke bacteria converted the sulfuric acid clouds to sulfur, water, and oxygen. The sulfur was delivered to the deep planetary interior. It would not emerge for hundreds of millions of years. Cyanobacteria, seeded into the upper atmosphere, went about their steady business, absorbing carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, fixing nitrogen, and delivering a rain of organic detritus to start a planetary topsoil.

“Water is still the main problem,” Ana said. “There’s simply not as much as we would like. Venus will always be dry, unless we do an extensive Oort Cloud transfer, or combine the planet with one of the big Jovian water moons, like Callisto.”

“Is that feasible?” The cure for temporal shock seemed to be working; Drake was starting to feel that anything was possible. But flying a satellite of Jupiter to coalesce with an inner planet? That still sounded ludicrous.

“It’s not feasible yet,” Ana said. “The impact would destroy Venus. But we’re learning how to do a soft merge. For the moment, I don’t recommend we make a Venus landing. It’s too hot down there — hotter than Earth ever got, even at the height of the runaway. It would have to be suits all the time. Are you ready to go somewhere else?”

Drake nodded.

“Right.” Ana paused at the control panel. “Lots of options. Unless you’re really keen, I suggest that we skip Mercury completely. It has the research domes, but nothing really worth seeing.”

The ship flew on, skimming the broad face of the Sun. Close up, that mottled surface was as raging and demonic as anything that Drake had encountered on his visit to Canopus. They passed through hydrogen prominences that roared and flamed with prodigal energy. Drake remained unperturbed. The ship’s refrigeration held the interior temperature at a comfortable level; in any case, Ana was at his side.

The Sun fell rapidly behind, and the outward journey began. Drake did not care where he went. It was at Ana’s insistence that they head for Mars.

“Just for fun,” she said.

It did not sound like fun. Drake recalled the fury of the Mars bombardment, the cloud-streaked sky of dirty gray and the torn and quaking surface.

But…

Twenty-nine and a half millennia was a long time. Drake’s memories were distant history. Their landing was in midmorning, on a calm world of thin, clear air and dark blue sky.

“A lot more atmosphere than there used to be,” Ana said, as Drake gazed out at a green cover of plants, a thin carpet from which jutted hair-thin stems with fat blue lollipops at their ends. “But there’s not nearly enough oxygen to breathe. Not for us, at least.”

“Why did they stop halfway?” Drake was becoming blasй when it came to planetary transformation. “I’d have thought Mars would be easy.”

“It would. You’ll see why in a minute.” Ana watched as Drake disappeared within his bulky symbiote. She tried to restrain herself, then began to giggle helplessly.

“I’m sorry. I know I’m going to be the same — but just look at you.”

Drake did. In a mirror he saw a mournful marsupial, an overweight kangaroo with a wobbling paunch and a long camel’s nose. The outsized ears stuck up to provide a constantly surprised expression. He stuck out his tongue. The face in the mirror extended a black appendage at least a foot long. He blinked. The dark liquid eyes blinked back at him, protected by an inner transparent membrane and outer lids with eyelashes long and thick enough to be the envy of any glamour queen.

Ana was allowing her own symbiote to envelop her. “Now we can go out,” she said, as her new body seemed to inflate before Drake’s eyes. “Follow me.”

To hell, if you ask me to. But he had already done that. Drake heard the hiss as the ship’s cabin pressure dropped. The hatch opened. He did nothing, but his great paunch began to move in and out with its own rhythm. He saw that Ana’s belly was doing the same.

“If you decided to live here,” she said, in a voice half an octave higher than usual, “you wouldn’t have to make a decision whether to live on the surface, where there’s not much oxygen, or in the deep caverns, where there is. You’d just let your symbsuit sort that out, and provide whatever you need. Mars surface dwellers never disengage from their symbsuits. They eat, drink, sleep, and die with them — even when they go to the caverns.”

Drake could understand why, when they left the ship and began to wander the broken plain outside. It didn’t feel anything like wearing a suit. The symbiote was his own body. It merely happened to be a new body that could endure extreme cold and make do on less than a quarter of a human’s oxygen needs.

“Eat, drink, sleep, and die,” he said. “Make love, too?”

“Can you imagine humans living for years in an environment where they couldn’t make love? See that group?” Ana was pointing to the horizon. “Go and ask them.”

Half a dozen people/symbiotes had appeared. They were moving in true kangaroo fashion, bounding along with fifteen-meter leaps in the low Mars gravity.

Drake watched them wave and point, inviting Ana and him over to an open structure beside a jumble of rocks.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s go and chat.”

He was curious to hear about life on the surface of Mars, but he didn’t want to talk to them about lovemaking activities involving a symbsuit. He was quite capable of conducting his own experiments on that subject.

The change took place on the second day on Mars. Ana became suddenly withdrawn and remote. Drake didn’t know what it was — something he had said or done? — and she did not want to talk.

That had never happened in the old days. It was not that they had never argued. But they had a standard rule. As Ana put it, “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”

When one’s feelings were hurt, the other always knew. They would sit and talk, argue as much as necessary, and get every nagging pain or upset out into the open. Once the sore point was exposed, the other could stroke it better.

But Ana refused to do it. She only said, “It’s nothing.” When clearly it wasn’t.

The return flight to Pluto, cruising out to where Drake’s Servitor was patiently (or perhaps impatiently) awaiting his return, was quiet and unsatisfying. According to Ana, the trip had been a complete success. If there had been major temporal shock, it now lay in the past.

But if it was a success, why was she so distant?

He found out on the final morning of the flight, minutes before they were due to land at the station on Charon. Ana had been a lot more cheerful during the previous twenty-four hours. He assumed that the trouble, whatever it had been, was over. Because his guard was down, the shock was so much harder to take.

“What do you mean, our last few days together?” Drake had been watching the ship’s automatic docking on Charon when Ana’s quiet statement jerked him to attention.

Had he heard right? Had she really said, “I wish we could have made more of our last few days together.”

He said, “I thought we could stay here in the outer system for as long as we like.”

“You can.” She moved to stand in front of him. “But I can’t. I made promises. The people heading for Rigel