Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 4

  Drake went on working as hard as ever. He established a foundation and trust fund. It guaranteed continued care for Ana’s cryocorpse for many centuries, no matter what happened to Drake himself.

  Freed from a need for money, his work changed direction. Instead of endless composition he became feverishly busy soaking up all that he could learn of the private and personal lives of his musical contemporaries. He interviewed, entertained, courted, and analyzed them, and he wrote about them extensively. But never quite in full. In every piece he was careful to leave a hanging tail, a hint that said, “There is much more to say and I know what it is; but for the moment I am deliberately leaving it unsaid.”

  What would the people of the future most want to know about their ancestors? Drake had his own answer. Their fascination would not be with the formal works, the official biographies, the text-book knowledge. They would have more than enough of those. What they would want would be the personal details, the chat, the gossip. They would want the equivalent of Boswell’s journals and of Samuel Pepys’ diaries. And if there was a way that they could have not only the written legacy, but the recorder himself, to talk to him and ask more questions…

  It was not work that could be hurried. But finally, after nine long years, Drake was as ready as he would ever be. There was always the temptation to add one more interview, write one more article.

  He resisted, and briefly worried a different question. How would he earn a living in the future? It might be only thirty years, but it might be eighty, two hundred, or a thousand. Could Beethoven, suddenly transported from 1810 to the year 2010, have earned a living as a musician?

  More realistically, how would Spohr, or Hummel, or some other of Beethoven’s less famous contemporaries have fared? Drake was betting that they, and he, could manage very well as soon as they had picked up the tricks of the time. Better, probably, than the far greater genius, the titan of Bonn. The others were more facile, more flexible, more politically astute.

  And if he was wrong, and there was no way that he could make a living from music? Then he would do the twenty-third-century equivalent of washing dishes for a living. That was the least of his worries.

  One day he stopped everything, put his affairs in order, and returned home. Without notice he headed for Tom Lambert’s house. They had kept in touch, and he knew that Tom had married and was busy raising a family in the same house he had lived in all his life. But it was still a surprise to walk along that quiet tree-lined street, look over the same untidy privet hedge, and see Tom in the front yard playing baseball with a stranger, an eight-year-old boy who wore a flaming new version of Tom’s graying red mop.

  “Drake! My God, why didn’t you call and tell me you were in town? How do you do it? You’re as thin as ever.” Tom had lost some of his hair but added a paunch to make up for it. He ushered Drake into the house and fussed over him like the Prodigal Son, leading the way into the familiar study. While his wife went into the kitchen to kill the fatted calf, he stood and beamed at Drake with pride and pleasure.

  “We hear your music everywhere, you know,” he said. “It’s absolutely wonderful to know that your career is going so well.”

  Judged by Drake’s own standards, it was not. He felt that he had done little first-rate composition in years. But Bonvissuto had been right: Tom, like most people, was comfortable musically with what he found familiar. From that point of view, and in terms of commercial success, Drake was riding high.

  He itched to get down to business right away, but Tom’s three young boys hovered around the study and the living room, curious to see the famous visitor. Then came a family dinner, and liqueurs after it watching the sunset. Drake sat in the guest-of-honor seat, with Tom and his wife, Mary-Jane, doing most of the talking.

  At ten o’clock Mary-Jane disappeared to put the boys to bed. Drake was alone with Tom. At last. He took a deep breath, pulled out the application, and handed it to his friend without a word.

  As Tom looked at it and realized what it was, the happiness faded from his face. He shook his head in disbelief.

  “I thought you put all this behind you years ago. What started it going again?”

  Drake stared at him without speaking, as though he had not understood the question.

  “Or maybe it never stopped,” Tom went on. “I should have guessed it hours ago. You used to be so full of life, so full of fun. Tonight I don’t think I saw you smile once. When did you last take a vacation?”

  “You gave me your word, Tom. Your promise.”

  Lambert studied the other man’s thin face. “Never mind a vacation, when did you last take any sort of break from work? How long since you relaxed for an evening, or for an hour? Not tonight, that’s for sure.”

  “I go out all the time. I go to concerts and to dinner parties.”

  “You do. And what do you do there? I bet you don’t relax. You interview people, and you take notes, and you produce a stream of articles. You work. And you’ve been working, incessantly, year after year. How long since you’ve been with a woman?”

  Drake shook his head but did not speak.

  Tom sighed. “I’m sorry. Forget that I asked that. It was a dumb and insensitive thing to say. But you need to face a fact, Drake, and you shouldn’t try to hide from it: She’s dead. Do you hear me? Ana is dead. Work won’t change that. Wishing won’t change it. Nothing can bring her back to you. And you can’t go on forever with your own emotions chained and harnessed.”

  “You promised me, Tom. You gave me your solemn word that you would help me.”

  “Drake!”

  “Do you ever make promises to your children?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Do you keep them?”

  “Drake, you can’t use that argument, the situations are totally different. You act as though I made you some sort of solemn vow, but it wasn’t like that at all.”

  “Then how was it? Don’t bother to answer.” Drake took the little recorder from his inside jacket pocket. “Listen. Listen to yourself.”

  The words were thin in tone but quite clear.

  …if I come back to you, in, say, eight or ten years, and I ask you again, will you do it? Will you help me? I want you to give me an honest answer, and I want your word on it.

  Ten years from now? Drake, if you come back to me in eight or ten years and ask me again, I’ll admit I was completely wrong. And I promise you, I’ll help you to do what you’ve asked.

  An absolute promise? I don’t want to hear some day that you changed your mind, or didn’t mean what you said.

  An absolute promise. Sure, I’ll give you that… There was the sound of Tom’s relieved laugh.

  Drake turned off the recorder. “I said, eight to ten years. It has been nine.”

  “You recorded us, back then when Ana had just died? I can’t believe you would do that.”

  “I had to, Tom. Even then, I was convinced that you would change your mind. But I knew that I wouldn’t. You have to live up to your agreement. You promised.”

  “I promised to help you, to stop you from doing something crazy to yourself.” Tom’s face went ruddy with intolerable frustration. “For God’s sake, Drake, I’m a doctor. You can’t ask me to help you kill yourself.”

  “I’m not asking that.”

  “You might as well be. No one has ever been revived. Maybe no one ever will be. If they do learn how, Anastasia will be a candidate. She is in the best Second Chance womb, she had the best preparation money could buy. But you, you’re different. You’re not sick! Ana was dying before she was frozen, she had nothing to lose. You have everything to lose. You’re healthy, you’re productive, you’re at the height of your career. And you are asking me to throw all that away, to help you take the chance that someday, God knows when, you might — just might — be revived. Don’t you see, Drake, I can’t help you.”

  “You gave me your promise.”

  “Stop saying that! I also have my oath as a physician: to do no harm. Yo
u want me to take you from perfect health to a high odds of final death.”

  “I have to do it, Tom. If you won’t help me, I’ll find someone who will. Probably someone less competent and reliable than you.”

  “Why do you have to do it? Give me one good reason.”

  “You know why, if you think about it.” Drake spoke slowly, coaxingly. “For Ana’s sake. Unless I go on ahead, they may never choose to wake her. She could be one of the last on their list. You and I know her for what she really is, a unique and marvelous woman. But what will the records show? A singer, still not as famous as she would have been, who died young of a devastating disease. I’ve had time to prepare, I’m sure that they will wake me. And it’s an advantage that I’m in good health, because there will be no reason to delay my revival on medical grounds. As soon as I am sure that they have a cure for what killed Ana, I can wake her. We’ll start over, the two of us.”

  Tom Lambert’s cheeks had gone from fiery red to pale. “We have to talk about this some more, Drake. The whole idea is crazy. Did you really mean what you said, that if I won’t help you will go to someone else?”

  “Look at me, Tom. Tell me if you think that I mean it.”

  Lambert looked. He did not speak again; but his hands slowly came up to cover his eyes.

  It took six days of solid argument, another seven to make final preparations. Drake Merlin and Tom Lambert drove together to Second Chance.

  Drake took a long last look out of the window at the wind-blown trees and the cloudy sky, then climbed slowly into the thermal tank.

  Tom injected the Asfanil.

  Drake decided that the easy part was ending. That the hard part, if there was another part, was about to begin.

  A few seconds later the long fall began, dropping him steadily down the longest descent that a human can ever make.

  Down, down, down.

  All the way down, to two degrees absolute; colder than the coldest hell ever conceived by Dante.

  Chapter 5

  Awakening

  The great gamble had paid off, more successfully than he had dared to hope. Ana was alive, she was reanimated, she was healthy. But the technology of the future went far beyond health. It had made her, always beautiful, much more vigorous and desirable than she had ever been.

  She was dancing, and as she danced she sang; not a serious work by her usual favorites, Mahler or Hugo Wolf or Brahms, but a frothy and light-hearted confection by Gilbert and Sullivan. “My object all sublime, I shall achieve in

  time,” she caroled.

  And then she was fading. Her body became as transparent as glass, her rich contralto a vanishing thread of sound. “To let the punishment fit the crime, The punishment fit the cri-i-ime …”

  She was gone.

  Afterward, Drake could never be sure. Had he dreamed some superconducting dream, as he lay in the cryowomb twelve degrees colder than a block of solid hydrogen? Or had he only dreamed that he dreamed, as he came slowly back through the long thaw?

  It made little difference. After the vision of Ana, all feelings of peace and certainty bled away. In their place came an eternity of twisted images, a procession of pale and terrifying lights moving against a pitch-dark background. They arrived ahead of consciousness, and they went on forever. He fought his way through them, through torment that went on and on with no promise that it would ever end.

  It was daunting to learn later that he had been one of the lucky ones. In his case the freezing process had gone very smoothly. Some revivables awoke armless and legless, some shed their whole epidermis and had to be kept cocooned and motionless until it could re-grow. He lost nothing during the thaw but an insignificant few square centimeters of skin.

  But the pain of waking… that was something else. The final stages, from three degrees Celsius to normal body temperature, could not be rushed. They occupied a full thirty-six hours. For all that time Drake was pierced with an agony of waking tissues and returning circulation, unable to move or cry out. In the last stages, before full consciousness, hearing came before sight. He could hear speech around him. It was not in any tongue that he could recognize.

  How long? How far had he traveled in time? Even before the pain faded, that question filled his mind.

  The answer did not come at once. While he was still half-conscious he felt the sting of an injector spray. He blanked out again at once. After another infinite hiatus he came up all the way, opening his eyes to a quiet sunlit room not too different from the Second Chance facility where he had begun the descent.

  A man and a woman in yellow uniforms were watching him, talking softly together. As soon as they saw that he was awake the man pressed a point on a segmented wall panel. The two went on with their work, lining up two complex and incomprehensible pieces of equipment. One sight of that told Drake that he had succeeded in at least one way. Nothing that he saw was familiar. He was in the future — but how far in the future?

  The person who came in presently through the white sliding door was dark haired and oddly androgynous, with a face both clean shaven and also smooth and womanly. The clothing was equally uninformative, a loose-fitting suit of pale gray that concealed body shape. The newcomer stepped to the side of the bed and stood staring down at Drake with a pleased and proprietary air.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Drake knew then that it was a man. The language was English, oddly pronounced. That was reassuring. Drake had suffered two other worries as he slipped under. What if he were revived in just a few years’ time, when nothing at all could be done to cure Ana? Or what if he surfaced after fifty thousand years, a living fossil, quite unable to communicate his needs to the men and women of the future?

  “I feel all right.” He had trouble speaking. His tongue felt swollen, and his mind was slow to produce the words that he needed. “But I feel very weak and confused.” Drake thought of trying to sit up, and knew at once that he could not do it. “I can barely move.”

  “Naturally. But are you Drake Merlin?”

  “I am.”

  The man had an open eager face, with furry eyebrows and a high forehead. He laughed aloud in delight and rubbed his hands together. “Excellent! My name is Par Leon. Can you understand me easily?”

  “Perfectly easily.” Drake’s second worry returned. “Why do you ask that question? When am I?”

  “I ask it because the old languages are not easy, even with augments and much study. For your second question, in your measure we are now in the year 2512 of the prophet Christ.”

  Five centuries! It was longer than Drake had expected and hoped. But better long than short. Before he was frozen he had entertained awful visions of diving down to the bottom of the Pit and clawing his agonized way back up to thawed life, not once but over and over.

  “I have waited here through the whole warming and first treatment,” Par Leon continued. “Soon I will leave you so you can have rest, more treatment, and first education. But I desired to speak with you at once when you became conscious. It is not rational, but I feared that there might have been a mistake in identity — that it might not be Drake Merlin, the Drake Merlin of my curiosity, who was awakened.” Par Leon glanced at the equipment standing at the bedside and shook his head. “You are a strong man, Drake Merlin. Uniquely strong. The record shows that you did not once cry out or complain during all the thawing.”

  There had been more important things on Drake’s mind. Could Ana be cured? Where was she now? Had she been kept safe, for however much time had passed? Was it possible that she had been awakened before him, even long before him? That would be a disaster.

  He glanced across at the other two workers, who were still chatting together in an alien tongue. “Language must have changed completely. I can understand you easily, but I cannot understand them at all.”

  “You mean, understand the doctors?” The stranger Leon replied with a surprised expression on his lean face. “Of course you cannot. Neither can I. They are doctors. To each other
they are naturally speaking Medicine.”

  Drake raised his eyebrows. The look must have survived with its meaning intact across the centuries, because Par Leon went on, “That is right, Medicine. I cannot help you. I myself am fluent in Music and History — and, of course, Universal. And I learned Old Anglic to be able to study your times and to speak with you. But I know little or no Medicine.”

  “Medicine is a language ?” Drake felt that his mind had been slowed by the long sleep and thawing treatment.

  “Of course. Like Music or Chemistry or Computing. But surely this was already true in your own time. Did you not have languages specific to each — what is the word you use? — discipline?”

  “I suppose that we did; but we didn’t realize it.” Par Leon’s question explained a great deal. No wonder that Drake had found psychologists, professional educators, social scientists, and physicists — to name but a few — incomprehensible. Even in his original time, the special jargon and odd acronyms had been signaling the arrival of new protolanguages, emerging forms as alien as Sanskrit or classical Greek. “How do you speak to the doctors?”

  “For ordinary things? We employ Universal, which all understand. I do not attempt to speak actual Medicine. If I am in that subject-matter area, we keep a computer in the circuit to provide exact concept equivalents between language pairs.”

  It occurred to Drake that multidisciplinary programs must be hell. But not as bad as they had once been. Here at least there was an understanding that the problem existed. And what were computers like, after five more centuries of development? In his day they had been in their infancy. They ought to be able to do anything now, anything at all — like curing Ana. It was almost a surprise to see that there was still a place in the world for humans.

  He was beginning to feel oddly and irrationally euphoric, a combination of drugs and the idea that he might succeed more easily than he had dreamed.