Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  He made a more determined effort to sit up. His head lifted maybe five centimeters from the pillow, then fell back despite everything he could do to hold it up.

  “Slowly. Rome — was not built — in a day.” Par Leon glowed, clearly delighted at coming up with such a prize example of genuine Old Anglic. “It will be moons before you are fully strong. Two more things I will tell you, then I will allow your treatment to continue.

  “First, it was I who arranged for you to be brought here and revived. I am a musicologist, interested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in particular your own time.”

  Drake’s five-hundred-year-old bet had paid off. He wondered what modern music sounded like. Would he be able to listen to it with pleasure? To compose it?

  “Under our laws,” Par Leon went on, “you owe me for the cost of your revival and treatment. This amounts to six years of work from you. You are most fortunate that you were healthy and correctly frozen and maintained, or the time of service would have been much longer. However, I also believe that you will find your indenture with me both pleasant

  and interesting. I am proposing that you and I, together, write the definitive history of your own musical period.”

  So the question of earning a living was postponed for at least a few years. Par Leon would presumably have to feed Drake Merlin while he was paying off his debt.

  “Second, I have good news for you.” Par Leon was gazing at Drake expectantly. “When we examined you, our doctors found certain problems — defects is the word that you would use? — with your body and its glandular balance. They hope that they have cured the simpler body malfunctions, and they have provided standard stabilization of your chromosomal telomeres. You will still age, but slowly. You should live between two and three hundred years.

  “However, the glandular imbalance represented a more subtle problem. It was likely to manifest itself as some form of madness, some uncontrollable compulsion. The doctors observed this as soon as you were thawed enough to respond to psychoprobes. They made small chemical changes and have, we hope, corrected the difficulty.” Par Leon was watching Drake closely. “Please tell me now of your feelings toward your former wife, Anastasia Werlich.”

  Drake felt his heart racing. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, and in his weakened condition it was as hard to breathe as if heavy weights had been dropped onto his chest. He closed his eyes for a long moment and thought about Ana. Gradually, he became calm again.

  It was obvious what the other wanted to hear; and Ana was worth a million lies. Drake looked up at Par Leon and shook his head feebly. “I feel very little for her. No more than a faint sense that something was once there. I know that she was once very dear to me, but I am not sure how. It is like the scar of an old wound.”

  “Excellent!” The smile had kept its meaning. “That is most satisfying. The disease that killed the woman was eliminated from the human stock long ago, by careful mating choice — eugenics, as your language put it. We could certainly reanimate her, but according to our doctors it is still not clear that we would be able to cure her. However, we can see no reason to awaken her at all. Like most in the cryowombs, she is of little or no value to us. Most important of all, an involvement with her might interfere with your work for me.”

  “So her body is still stored?”

  “Of course. We keep all the cryocorpses. Although most are of no present value, who knows what our future needs might be? The cryowombs are like a library of the past, to open whenever it will serve a purpose. Two hundred years from now someone may find a use for her, and her disease perhaps easily cured. Then she, too, may live and work again.”

  “Is Anastasia stored near here?”

  “Of course not!” For the first time, Par Leon appeared to be shocked. “What a waste of space and energy that would imply. The cryowombs are maintained on Pluto, where space is cheap, cooling needs are small, and escape velocity is low.”

  That sentence, more than any other that Par Leon had spoken, wrenched Drake forward in time. What technology was it that could casually ship millions of bodies to the edge of the solar system rather than keep them in cold storage on Earth? If, that is, Pluto was the edge of the solar system. How many planets were known now? Even in his day, there was talk of many more bodies out in a region known as the Kuiper Belt. Five centuries. It was the time from Monteverdi to Shostakovich, from Copernicus to Einstein, from the Columbus discovery of America to the first landing on the Moon. He had come a long, long way.

  Par Leon was still gazing at him, now a little suspiciously. “Again you ask about the woman, Anastasia Werlich. Why? Are you sure that you are in fact fully cured? If not, another course of treatment is easy to arrange.”

  Drake cursed his own stupidity and did his best to smile reassuringly. “I feel sure that will not be needed. Already her memory fades. As soon as I am strong enough, I am eager to begin my work with you.”

  “Wonderful.” The smile was back, but Par Leon was wagging his finger in warning. “We will certainly work together, but only after yon are fully recovered and have had some essential training. First, you must learn to speak Universal and Music and you must have enough background knowledge to live comfortably in this time. It will also be my responsibility to see that you are able to find suitable activity when your work with me is done, and for that you will need skills that today you lack.

  “Rest now, Drake Merlin. I will return tomorrow, or the next day. By that time you will already find yourself stronger. And you will be far more knowledgeable.”

  As Par Leon left, the medical technicians carried forward a transparent helmet with silvered lines inscribed on its upper part. They lowered it carefully onto Drake’s head.

  He lost consciousness at once, too quickly to be aware of its cool touch.

  Chapter 6

  Brave New World

  He awoke to the sound of two voices. One was an unfamiliar wordless chatter, a high-pitched and irritating tingle more in his brain than in his ear. The other voice he already knew. It was Par Leon, asking what seemed like an odd question after their previous conversation.

  “Do you understand me, Drake Merlin?” There was a pause, then, more loudly: “Can you hear me? Do you understand me?”

  “Of course I can. Of course I do.” But Drake was having trouble controlling his own speech. He had to seek out each word. He opened his eyes. “We already… established that we can… understand each other.”

  Leon was standing in front of him, nodding in satisfaction. “We proved yesterday that we could communicate in English. But listen again to me… and listen to yourself.”

  The words were perfectly understandable — but they had been spoken in an alien tongue.

  “What happened?” Drake asked. The sense of what he said was clear, but it sounded peculiar. With a deliberate effort, he repeated it in English, and the words came more easily. “What happened?”

  “You learned, exactly as I hoped and expected.” Leon replied in the same language. “But now” — Drake felt no decrease in his level of comprehension, yet he heard the change in the sounds — “now it is better if we both speak Universal.”

  “You said yesterday .” Drake’s shift from one language to the other was labored and sluggish. “You taught me Universal … in a single day? How were you able to do that?”

  “I am the wrong person to ask.” Leon shrugged. “If I were to attempt an explanation, beyond saying that the helmet taught you, it would surely be inadequate. A suitable reply would be provided in Electronics or Medicine, possibly using dialects of the latter such as Neurology. I was taught something of those languages, long ago, but I found them uncongenial. If they are to your taste, you will have opportunity to learn them later. For the moment, relax. Go slowly. In two or three weeks, Universal will come easily to you. But now we have other priorities. Can you stand up?”

  Rather than replying, Drake made the experiment. He pushed the helmet away from his head and ros
e to his feet. As he came upright there was one moment of unsteadiness, then he felt balanced and alert. Yesterday’s weakness was gone completely.

  “I feel fine,” he said, and meant it.

  “Splendid. Are you hungry?”

  Drake had to pause and consider that question. The prospect of food produced no physical reaction. It was as though during five centuries of sleep his body had forgotten the need for sustenance.

  Finally he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”

  Leon nodded sympathetically. “Let us then make the experiment. We will eat a meal at a restaurant. The world has changed much since your time, and there will be much that is different. But the need for nourishment has not changed. It will be reassuring for you to learn that some things are still the same.”

  Par Leon meant what he said; but to Drake, following him along a short corridor into a deserted white-walled room containing an array of cubicles, each equipped with a single chair and some kind of computer terminal, it seemed that

  nothing could be less familiar.

  This was a restaurant? There were no waiters, no menus, no signs of food or drink. Each cubicle would hold only one person.

  His bewilderment showed.

  “Ah,” Leon said. He seemed uncomfortable for the first time. “I am forgetting the customs of your era. Food today is normally taken alone. Only close associates and family eat in each other’s presence.” He pointed to a cubicle. “Sit down. The arrangement permits us to talk freely, even though we will be out of sight of each other.”

  Drake did as he was told, wondering what to do next. Was he supposed to indicate his preferences to the computer? Or would he somehow be fed automatically and ethereally, without the appearance of material foodstuffs? That was inconsistent with Par Leon’s claim that food was a constant of the world, but five hundred years was a long time. Interpretations would surely have changed, even when the same words were used.

  He looked more closely at the device before him. There was no screen or keyboard, only a flat rectangular box, and in front of that a level featureless surface like a small table.

  Par Leon had vanished into a neighboring cubicle.

  Drake waited through a long silence. Finally he said, not sure he would be heard, “I have a problem.”

  “Nothing is to your taste?” Leon’s voice was clear, though no other sound had come through from the next room.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been offered any food.”

  “That is strange. What did you order?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know how.”

  “One moment.” Then, after another and shorter silence, “This is my fault entirely. I assumed that general information had been provided to you along with your knowledge of Universal, but that is not so. It is scheduled for your next indoctrination period. The chef in front of you is simple enough to use, and tomorrow you will have no difficulty with it. This evening, however, with your permission I will order the meal for you.”

  “That’s fine.” It was Drake’s first indication as to the time of day. The room where he had awakened lacked windows, and so did this place. Physically, he had no sense of night, morning, or any diurnal rhythm.

  He waited and watched, until in a couple of minutes the box in front of him slid open where he had seen no seam, and delivered a steaming square container of food, a combined knife and fork utensil, and a transparent cylinder filled with red liquid.

  The vegetables were colorful but unfamiliar. The meat — if it was meat — could have been flesh, fish, or fowl. But Drake had not been widely traveled in his own time. For all he knew the whole meal could have existed then, as part of the little-known cuisine of some foreign country. He leaned over and sniffed the sauce. A satisfying combination of odors filled his nostrils: cumin, sage, fennel, tarragon. He lifted the tall cylinder and tasted.

  At last — thank God — something he recognized. He should have known. Wine had endured through five millennia before his time; it should be no surprise that it continued to cheer humans now, five hundred years later.

  He raised his glass in a silent toast — To us, Ana; we made it this far — and took a first, deep draft.

  Drake had no urge to talk while they were eating, but Par Leon was in a chatty mood. After promising that the world would be explained later while Drake slept, far better than he could do it during dinner and in much greater detail, Leon went ahead and explained anyhow.

  It became clear in the next hour where his own interests lay. He had a good but superficial knowledge of Earth civilization and society, but he knew and cared little about the rest of the solar system.

  The population of Earth, he said, was half a billion, less than one-tenth of what it had been in Drake’s era. It was holding steady now. In the next two centuries it would undergo a planned rise to almost one billion, then decrease again to about its present level. He did not know the reason for the change. That sort of thing was in the hands of the resource management specialists.

  And the population of other planets and moons? It was one of Drake’s few questions. Par Leon replied with a verbal shrug. There were people living out there, certainly, but who cared how many? Other planets and moons had no long history, in particular no long musical history. Therefore, they were without interest. If Drake wanted to know such strange things, he could do so without taking the valuable time of a human. The machines and data banks were available. Even if Drake had to learn a new language, that also would be no problem. Vocabulary and grammatical rules could be instilled almost instantly using the feedback helmets. Use of language, particularly spoken language, came a little more slowly, because it required physical coordination and practice. A week, maybe, rather than a day.

  “But now” — Leon had clearly spent as much time as he wanted to on such dull matters — “let’s talk about music.”

  He did. Happily, and incomprehensibly. Drake did not tell him that he could not understand. He would do his duty and learn about modern music when the time came. For tonight, he was content to sit back, eat and drink, and build his resolve for whatever lay ahead.

  A civilization consists of far more than facts, rules, and languages. After a couple of weeks of induced-knowledge nights, Drake began to wonder if some aspects of his new world would be forever beyond him, no matter how long he lived there.

  Science was one of them. Twenty-sixth-century science, particularly the basic assumptions that lay beneath it, totally eluded him. It was no surprise that he would find the subject difficult. That had always been the case. In his own time his teachers had accused him of having talent but no interest, and of dreaming his days away with words and music.

  Even so, the general ideas of science ought to be accessible. They were supposed to be no more than common sense, elevated to become a discipline. But he found himself struggling hopelessly — and he was struggling, hard, working to understand more than he had ever done as a young man. Ana’s salvation, when it finally came, would derive from science, not from music.

  Finally he sought help — not from Par Leon, who was itching for Drake’s indoctrination to end so they could get to work, and who neither knew nor cared about science. Instead Drake dived into the data net, developed beyond anything dreamed of in his own time. He asked for someone who would be willing to translate for him from Science, which he could not speak or write, to Universal. In return he offered knowledge of his own times.

  The woman who contacted him had no apparent interest in the early twenty-first century, or at least in the things that Drake might have to say about it. That confirmed the wisdom of his long-ago decision to provoke the curiosity of musical specialists. Cass Leemu was a specialist also, but her own field was one that Drake was unable to comprehend, even in general terms and even after hours of conversation and study. She said it was a form of physics. It seemed to be no more than pictures, that somehow yielded quantitative results.

  Cass was a black woman whose age, like Par Leon’s, was diffic
ult to determine. She was a tall brunette with a slightly large and blocky head, no eyelashes or eyebrows, and a sumptuous body. Drake suspected minor genetic modifications. Her motive in meeting was either pure curiosity in a specimen of primitive humanity — Drake — or it was for a reason beyond his comprehension.

  Her explanations were as clear as they could be, given Universal’s limits for scientific explanation.

  “It is the typical problem of a major paradigm shift.” They were in her private quarters. Cass Leemu was almost naked, lolling back on a couch and scratching her bare belly thoughtfully as she spoke. In an earlier time, Drake reflected, her exposed body would have been a major obstacle to simple information transfer. It would also have been considered a clear invitation.

  She went on, “Is the name of Isaac Newton familiar to you?”

  “Of course. Gravity, and the laws of motion.”

  “Right. Familiar, and easy to comprehend. We agree on that. But did you know that most of his contemporaries found his work quite beyond them? He introduced notions of absolute space and time, which they found implausible. They argued, with justice, that only the separation between objects could have physical meaning. The idea of absolute coordinates, as opposed to relative distances, made no sense to them. Also, his work was most easily derived and understood employing the calculus, which to the scientists of the seventeenth century was shrouded in the paradoxes of infinitely small quantities. It took three generations to resolve the paradoxes, absorb the new world view, and work with it comfortably. The same thing happened two centuries later, when Maxwell elevated the concept of a field to central importance. Many of his contemporaries, to the end of their lives, tried to devise mechanical analogies that dispensed with the need for an electromagnetic field. And in the twentieth century, when uncertainty and undecidability assumed a dominant position in the prevailing world view, even the greatest scientist of his

  time — Einstein — had trouble accepting them.”