Ariel bowed his head. “I am sorry that you will not join us, and I am sorry that you refuse derived reality. I believe that we could have soothed your pain.”
“Forget me and my pain. There are worse things in the world than pain. As soon as you are able, I want to become dormant.”
Drake paused. He had said all that he needed to say, yet it felt incomplete. Something ought to be added of his own great personal debt: to this epoch, to his faithful Servitor, to Ariel, and to the people who had finally offered him a faint and far-distant hope that he might succeed. It was unlikely that he could ever repay Ariel and Milton and their descendants, but he must make the offer.
“Waken me in one other circumstance.” Drake could feel his attention fading. Ariel was taking him at his word, and already moving him toward dormancy.
“Wake me if ever you have problems” — he had to struggle to think, struggle to finish what he wanted to say — “tough problems, ones where I might be able to help. Bring me from dormancy, and I will do my best for you.
“Don’t hold out too much hope. I haven’t had a single idea in fourteen million years, but who knows? Maybe in another fourteen million I’ll get lucky and come up with one.”
Interlude:
Dying
It was easy to say, hard to believe. Every fiber of every muscle was at full contraction. Tendons stretched, bones creaked and bent.
Something had gone wrong; terribly, terribly wrong. That knowledge filled Drake’s mind as the agony continued without end. If this was the price of electronic downloading into a new body, he would take a thousand primitive thawings any day.
One thing, and one thing only, saved his sanity: if he was being resurrected, it must be because there was also some new hope of resurrecting Ana. For that promise, any pain could be endured.
The knotting of his muscles was finally easing. It was replaced by a great weariness and lassitude. He opened his eyes.
Too soon. He saw only darkness shot through with streaks of flickering white. He lay back and waited.
Now he could both hear and feel. A high-pitched series of clicks sounded, very close. The skin of his chest and belly prickled and tickled, disturbing but not painful.
Vision was returning. He was lying on his back with his head turned to one side. In front of his eyes he saw a milky, translucent sheet, bowed down into a shallow depression under his weight. It felt cool and sticky on his cheek. He tried to lift his head and managed to do so even in his weakened condition. That success convinced him that he was not on Earth or in a simulated gravity close to that on Earth. He was
Pluto again? One of the asteroids, or a moon of one of the bigger planets? Or somewhere totally new, out in the Oort Cloud or beyond? Or perhaps he was in derived reality, where anything was possible. The real question, as always, was
Something had appeared in his field of vision. It was a black, shiny, convex surface, ribbed with spokes that radiated from a central boss like the spokes of an open umbrella. It was small, not much bigger than an outstretched hand. And it was moving, inching its way down past his body.
He tried to speak, to ask a question in Universal. All that emerged was a gargling grunt. His throat felt filled with phlegm. He tried again, lifting his head and coughing out a single word:
No human was visible to answer him. Looking down the length of his naked body, he saw four more of the black umbrella objects crouched close by. He learned the source of the gentle prickling on his chest and belly. Dozens of tiny turquoise objects, hard-cased and articulated like small insects, were crawling busily over him. His movement and garbled attempt at speech aroused them to a frenzy of activity. They scurried down the sides of his body and vanished underneath the little arched umbrellas. He heard a louder sequence of excited hisses and clicks from the umbrellas themselves. They all lifted and began to walk on the ends of their spokes, away across the white, sticky membrane on which he was lying. The turquoise insects went with them, clinging to their undersides, or perhaps lodged inside the umbrella crawlers.
Drake realized that the whole surface on which he lay was only a few meters across. It was surrounded and covered by a hemispherical dome. The crawlers advanced to the dome’s edge, pushed against it, and slid easily through.
Drake was alone. And he had never felt more alone.
He summoned all his strength and managed to sit up. His pains had not disappeared, but they had become more localized. His hands and feet burned, with the pain of returning circulation. He lifted his right hand close to his face and studied it. It was his own hand, he recognized the familiar pattern of lines on the palm. But the skin was wrinkled, as though he had been immersed in water for a long time. The fingertips were blue-white and dead looking. When he pinched his forefinger between the thumb and fingers of his left hand, there was no sensation. He had feeling only in his palms and wrists — and that feeling was pain.
He could not stand, but he could crawl. On hands and knees he made his way to the edge of the little hemispherical room. He found that he could push his hand into and through the wall. Presumably he could push the whole of him through just as easily.
And go where?
Weakness was sweeping over him again, and he lay down on his stomach on the sticky floor. An awful conviction filled his mind. Nothing that he had seen was in any way familiar. Perhaps the strangest thing about his previous resurrection, fourteen million years beyond the time of his original birth, was not that so much had changed. It was that so much had been the same, that humans had endured, that something remained recognizable. At the time of his first freezing, true humans had been less than three million years old. How many million years would the species continue, in any form? And after humans, what? Perhaps machines were the inheritors — but machines so different from any that he had ever seen that he would not even know what they were. Machines, like the ones that he had seen creeping over his body.
He felt like staying where he was, closing his eyes, and giving up. But Melissa Bierly’s words, from long ago, would not permit that. “Keep your faith, Drake, and go on … somewhere, sometime, you will find Anastasia.”
There was a dark side to those words, one that he had never appreciated before. Assume that he had been downloaded because there was now a way to resurrect his Ana. Into what kind of future world would he be bringing her? It would be supremely selfish to pull Ana from her fermata of endless sleep, if the universe that he had to offer was so alien that pleasure and happiness were impossible.
Well, it was his job to find out. And it would not do to be a pessimist. Since he had been downloaded, no matter how far in the future he had come, the human information network of an earlier time must still exist. Other humans, in flesh or in electronic form, would also exist. They, like he, could be placed in a cloned form of their original body, whose genetic blueprint was stored with the contents of their minds and memories. So his problem would be to contact those humans, in whatever form they endured.
Drake sat up, cursing his own physical weakness. His heart was pounding. That was probably the air. It
