"How are you feeling?" It was English, oddly pronounced. That was reassuring. I'd had two worries when I went under, not including the obvious one. The first was that I would be revived in just a few years' time, when they would be unable to do anything at all to help Ana. The second, that I'd surface after fifty thousand years, a living fossil, unable to communicate my needs to the men of the future.
"I am all right. But weak. Weak as a baby." I thought of trying to sit up, then changed my mind.
"You are Drake Merlin?"
"I am."
He nodded in satisfaction. "My name is Par Leon. You understand me easily?"
"Perfectly easily. Why do you ask? When am I?"
"The old languages are not easy, even with much study. In your measure, you are in the year 2374 of the prophet Christ."
Three hundred and sixty years. It was longer than I had expected. But better long than short. I had hated and feared the idea of doing it all over, again and again, diving to the bottom of the Pit and then clawing my way back up to thawed life.
"I have waited here through the warming and the treatment," went on Par Leon. "Soon I will leave you for rest, more treatment, and education. But I wanted to talk with you first. I feared a mistake in identity, that it might not be Drake Merlin who was awakened. Also, some become insane with the pain of the awakening. You are a strong man, Drake Merlin. You did not cry out or complain at all during your thawing."
Other things were on my mind. I looked across at the two doctors who were chatting together in an alien tongue as they worked. Could they cure Ana? "Language must have changed completely," I said. "I cannot understand them at all."
"Understand them? The doctors?" He looked surprised. "Of course not. Neither can I. Naturally they are speaking Medicine."
I raised my eyebrows. The look must have survived with its meaning intact, for he went on. "I speak Music and History—and of course, Universal. And I learned Old Anglic to understand your time and speak with you. But no Medicine."
"Medicine is a language?" My mind was slowed by the long sleep and the drugs.
"Of course. Like Music, or Chemistry, or Astronautics. But surely this was already true in your time. Did you not have languages for each—what is the word—discipline?"
"I suppose we did, but we didn't know it." No wonder I'd found educators, psychologists and computer scientists—to name but a few—incomprehensible. The special jargon and odd acronyms had made new languages, more alien than classical Greek. "How do you speak to the doctors?"
"For ordinary things, in Universal, which all understand. For specialized talk, such as our discussion of you, we keep a computer in the circuit to give exact concept equivalents in any pair of languages."
Multi-disciplinary projects must be hell. But then they always were. I was beginning to feel strangely and irrationally euphoric. I pulled my strength together and made a determined effort to sit up. I got my head about five centimeters from the pillow, then fell back.
"Slowly. Rome—was not built—in a day." Par Leon was clearly delighted at coming up with such a prize piece of genuine Old Anglic. "It will be moons before you are fully strong. Two more things I will tell you, then I will let your treatment go on.
"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, particularly in your own time."
One of my bets of long ago had paid off. I wondered what modern music would be like. Could I learn to compose it?
"Under our law," went on Par Leon, "you owe me for the cost of revival and treatment. That is six years' work from you. You are fortunate that you were healthy and properly frozen, or that time would have been much longer. I think you will find your work with me pleasant and interesting. Together we will write the definitive history of your own musical period."
It looked as though it would be a while before I needed to worry about earning my own living—presumably Par Leon would feed me while I was paying off my debt.
"Second, there is good news for you."
Par Leon was looking at me expectantly. "When we woke you, the doctors found certain problems—defects?—with your body and your glandular balance. They hope they have cured these. You should now live between one hundred and seventy and two hundred years.
"The gland adjustment was more subtle. You showed some madness, an uncontrollable compulsion, a fixed idea about a woman. The doctors observed this as soon as you were thawed enough to respond to the psycho-probes. They have made small chemical changes and have, they hope, corrected the problem. What are your feelings now about the woman, Ana?"
He was watching me closely. My heart was racing and I felt as though there were weights on my chest. I closed my eyes and thought about Ana for a long moment, until I was calm again. When I opened my eyes, I looked at Par Leon and shook my head feebly. "There is nothing. Just the faint feeling that something once was there. Like the scar of an old wound."
"Excellent." He smiled and nodded. "That is most satisfying. The disease she had was eliminated from us long ago by mating choice—eugenics, that is your word for it? The doctors say they could revive her but they are not sure they could make a cure. It is important that thoughts of her should not interfere with your work for me."
"Her body is still stored?"
"Of course. We keep all the Cryo-corpses for possible future use. They are like a library of the past, to open when they will serve a purpose. Who knows? Two hundred years from now her disease may be cured and if there is a need for her, she too will live and work again."
"She is near here?"
"Of course not. What an idea!" Par Leon was shocked. "We cannot afford the space on Earth. The Cryo-corpse banks are kept on Pluto, where space is cheap and cooling needs are small."
That sentence, more than any other he had spoken, wrenched me into the future. What technology was it that found it more expedient to ship a few million bodies to Pluto rather than keep them in cold storage on Earth? Three hundred and sixty years was the time from Copernicus to Einstein, from Monteverdi to Schoenberg, from the first successful American colony to the first landing on the Moon. I had come a long way.
Par Leon was still looking at me, a little anxiously. "You ask again about the woman. Are you sure that you are all right—that you are cured?"
I cursed my own stupidity. I did my best to smile reassuringly. "Don't worry. As soon as I am strong enough, we will begin our work."
He nodded. "After you have had training—that is essential. You must learn to speak Universal and Music and know enough to live in this time. It is my responsibility to see that you find activity when your work for me is finished. Rest now. I will come again tomorrow or the next day, when you will be a little stronger."
As Par Leon left, the doctors brought a piece of padded head-gear and placed it on me. I went out at once, with no time to react to its presence.
When I awoke again, I already had a smattering of Universal and a good elementary knowledge of the civilization of the year 2374. Now I understood Par Leon's confidence that I would quickly pick up the knowledge that I would need to work with him.
Facts, vocabulary and rules could be taught almost instantaneously. Use of language came more slowly. After a couple of weeks I decided that two aspects of the times would be forever beyond me: modern science, and the morality that governed the age. It was no surprise that I would find science difficult. In my own time teachers had regarded me as hopeless as I struggled with Feynman diagrams and was baffled completely by axiomatic field theory. But morals? Surely they should be comprehensible? I comforted myself with the thought that Henry the Eighth would have been appalled at the idea of killing civilians in time of war and baffled by my revulsion at the idea of public executions.
After a month of preparation Par Leon and I were able to begin our work. I would keep my part of the bargain and give him six good, long years for his great lifetime project, the analysis of the musical trend
s of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. More important than any facts were the perspectives I could offer him. He found it hard to believe how much man-woman and man-man relationships had affected everything in my era. With modern methods of mating dictated by selection of desirable gene combinations, he found it almost unthinkable that people should have mated randomly, on impulse. He was fascinated by my comments. It was a little irritating to him that I had become a Cryo-corpse just before a couple of events that he was especially interested in had happened, but he accepted that philosophically and with good humor.
While we worked, I learned more about the times. The Solar System was explored, known like the back of a man's hand. Venus had been terra-formed, Mars colonized, and there were permanent manned stations—some 'manned' by organic computers—on all the major satellites of the outer planets and on Pluto. Space drives were available that would get as close to the speed of light as you wanted—but few people were interested. The stars were within easy reach, but no one seemed to be stretching out his hands. Civilization seemed changed, content with the limits of the Solar System. I took hypno-courses in astronautics and space systems and became expert in the practice of drive mechanisms. The theory, I suspected, was forever beyond me.
Work went on. I shouldn't give the impression that with Par Leon it was a one-way transfer of information. From his vantage point three hundred and sixty years away, he had developed insights into what was really happening in the musical world of my earlier life that left me gasping. So that was where those musical forms were leading, and that's where Krubak had been aiming in his much-ridiculed late works! Something—perhaps the glandular adjustments that the doctors had performed on me—made working with Par Leon a pleasant experience. Previously I had always been something of a loner. To say that I was perfectly content would of course be wrong, but given my preoccupations I was more content than I would have imagined.
The text we were producing steadily grew. By the beginning of the fourth year I knew we were writing a classic together. During the sixth year we were nearing completion and Par Leon was suggesting the possibility of other collaborations.
After the work was finally complete, Par Leon—a good man by any moral standards I would ever be able to comprehend—helped me to become established as a composer. It was easier than I expected. Knowledge of the centuries before Cryo-corpses was quite spotty, with some big gaps. I could steal tricks from the musical titans of my own past, use them in the modern style, and get away with it. After three years I had a growing reputation (which I secretly knew was undeserved), a group of imitators, and—most important—a substantial financial credit at my disposal.
At last I could wait no longer. I announced that it was time for me to take a long-overdue vacation and see a little more of the Solar System. The night before I left I took Par Leon out for dinner. We went to his favorite place, ate his favorite foods, and drank his favorite wines. Even though I suspected that if I told him the truth he would be my willing accomplice, I did not tell him what we were celebrating or why the occasion was so very special. My plans might involve danger and destruction and I did not want Par Leon to bear any blame when I was gone.
* * *
So there we were. Ana and I, together again. We were heading for Canopus in the space yacht that I had rented for a two-month tour of the inner Solar System. Murderer in one era, I was now thief and worse in another. Even with forged papers to help me, it had been a desperate and violent run through the Pluto wombs and the Solar security perimeter with Ana's Cryo-corpse. Twice I had been within seconds of collision and destruction, but my pursuers' fear of death had exceeded mine. They had changed course to avoid impact and I had fled through their net.
We were traveling at just one hundred and twenty-five meters a second below the speed of light and could get within a meter a second if I chose to. We were moving fast enough. Time dilatation made three years pass on Earth for every day of shipboard time. The trip to Canopus and back would be a little more than two months for us, and two hundred years back on Earth. I felt I could use the time to relax a little. The days before I collected Ana from the Pluto wombs, followed by our escape, had been more than hectic.
I never ceased to be amazed at the capacities of the ship—which, because of time dilation, mankind seemed to have found no real use for. The mass indicator showed more than one hundred and forty thousand tons, up from a rest mass of a hundred and thirty tons.
To an outside observer I would appear to mass about eighty-eight tons and be foreshortened to a length of less than two millimeters. Although it was hidden from me by the shields, I knew that ahead of us in the forward direction the three-degree background radiation left over from the Big Bang had been Dopplershifted up to visible wavelengths. Behind us, hard X-ray sources looked like pale red stars. And we were nowhere near the ship's limits.
I had started composing again—real music, not pot-boilers or derivative works. In the room aft, Ana lay peacefully in her Cryo-tank. I felt optimistic that two hundred years would be long enough for Earth to have developed a complete and certain cure. If not, we would head out again and repeat the cycle. There was plenty of time. If Earth could not at last provide our answer, we could go elsewhere, on to the stars to search for other solutions. The ship was completely self-sustaining and had ample power for many lifetimes. I hoped that the single trip would be enough, though; one of my ambitions on our return was to find the Cryo-corpse of my friend Par Leon, and return his favor to me.
As we swept up to the great flaring beacon of Canopus, I decelerated to gravitational swing-by speeds and let the ship fall through a tight hyperbolic orbit around the star. Canopus was a fearsome sight. More than a thousand times as luminous as the Sun, it was spouting green flares of gas hundreds of millions of kilometers long. I searched for planets and found only four gas-giants, each the size of Jupiter. There were no signs of an inner-planet system.
After two days of fascinated observation I turned the ship and headed back to Earth. Were mine the first human eyes to see the twisting striations—sun-scars, not sun-spots—that gouged the boiling surface of Canopus? Like a lost soul flying from Hell-gate, I ran for the shelter of our own Solar System. If another trip out were necessary, it would be to a smaller and less turbulent star.
That sight of Hell had affected me more than anything I could remember. It burned in my mind and I could not eat, drink or sleep. The urge to see Ana again, to seek peace in her face, grew on me and at last I went aft. She lay in her tank like a Snow-goddess, with pearly eyelids and skin of milky crystal. I took only one quick look, afraid to open the tank more in case it interfered with the cooling system. It was enough. I could control myself again and think of other things.
On the tranquil return trip, I wondered again at how easy everything had seemed. I had never thought of light-speed ships and time dilation when I was making my plans so long ago. At best, I had prepared for a chancy succession of freezings and thawings for me, further and further in time until at last there was a cure and Ana could safely be revived. As it was, Ana was with me; I could safeguard her myself and there was no risk at all.
In we came, past the barren outcroppings of Pluto and on to the inner planets. With no idea how Earth would have changed in two hundred years, I had no way to decide whether I should approach slowly and cautiously or rapidly and confidently. My decision was made for me. As we rode in above the ecliptic, avoiding the asteroid belt, we were locked by a navigation and guidance beam and steered to a landing on the Moon.
The spaceport was new, massive columns set in a regular triangular array. Spaceflight at least had changed since we left. The guidance system set us down gently. Prepared for anything—or so I thought—I stepped through the lock to meet a new generation.
One man greeted me in the lock corridor, a tall dignified figure with the distant eyes of a prophet. Somehow I had expected more, perhaps a show of weapons until my identity was known.
"Welcome
again to Earth-space, Drake Merlin."
The language was still Universal. I said I was prepared for anything—but I was not prepared to be recognized and named. I was taken aback, then I realized that the ship's identification was given in the communication codes, and I would be shown as the last pilot. The data retrieval presumably still held those records. I wondered what else the system showed about my wild flight from Pluto.
"Since you know my identity, then perhaps you also know my history. I am seeking assistance."
The man nodded. "We know your history, and your quest. It has come down to us from ancient times. One version holds that you lost control of your ship and were carried off to the far depths of space. Another tells that your disappearance at light-speed was intentional. Come with me, we will find conversation easier inside the city."
There were small pauses in his words, almost as though he had need to stop and think about many phrases. I wondered if Universal was a learned language to him, as Old Anglic had been to Par Leon. We settled into a reception room, close by the inner lock, and I felt a rising tension. In a few moments I would know if my search was over.
"The Cryo-corpse that you have with you in the ship. What was the disease?"
"I think there is no word for it in Universal. It disappeared from the race and from the language. The full medical description was given with the womb records."
He nodded. "Do you have the womb catalog number?"
I gave it to him. He stood motionless, eyes distant, for almost five seconds. Then he nodded again. "It can be cured. I have summoned the necessary medical resources."
Two waves of emotion swept over me. Wild joy, and an almost superstitious fear. Telepathy seemed to have been added to the human senses.
"You can transmit your thoughts?" I asked.
He looked puzzled, and again there was a brief silence. Then he smiled.
"Not in the way that you are thinking. I can exchange thoughts with others, and with the data banks, but you will be able to do the same in a few days' time. You will also be able to compute faster and better than the computer of the ship that brought you here. Look."
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