Should We Stay or Should We Go

by Lionel Shriver

  “See you later,” Kay said.

  “See you later,” Cyril said.

  The last thing they heard was the sound of that woman’s gum.

  * * *

  A few seconds after that—or what seemed a few seconds—Cyril opened his eyes to find a dusky-skinned woman of indeterminate race staring down at him with an expression of clinical curiosity. “Hearm ca? Seem ca?”

  His eyes were dry and painful. The sound of the woman’s voice hurt. But the pain seemed deeper than his response to sensation. Being here hurt. Being at all.

  “Turn lighden,” the woman said, standing upright. She was at least eight feet tall.

  The illumination dimmed, which helped the agony of seeing, but only somewhat. Cyril tried to form a word, but making his mouth move was hard work; even harder work was thinking of what to say. Either his neurological system was suffering from a mechanical creakiness, or his brain and facial nerves were functioning perfectly well—in which case what was keeping him from speaking was his mind’s stark instruction that anything that he might say was not worth the effort because it was stupid.

  “Waa,” Cyril croaked weakly.

  The woman in peculiar clothes—her form-fitting gear was covered in sleek black feathers, as if she were a superhero crossed with a crow—squirted an aerosol into Cyril’s mouth. “Secure!” she said over her shoulder. “Sum viol.” Then a large man with the same indeterminate complexion and gear of blue feathers came to stand watchfully beside the supine specimen.

  Whatever had happened to the outside world in that blink of an eye between the closing of the capsule and the raising of its lid again, something had happened to Cyril. He felt like a copy of himself—a poor copy, like the decayed kind you got when you didn’t photocopy from the original, but copied the copy, then copied that copy, and he seemed to be the result of at least ten reproductions on. When he struggled to retrieve his recent memories, the recollections were in fragments: dwarves, bunnies, and a woman’s Lycra workout shirt floated by. Again his mind directed that he needn’t fit the scraps together because they were stupid.

  Cyril managed to lick his lips. “Could you please tell me where am I?”

  The several people in the room all burst out laughing.

  “Pardon me, did I say something humorous?” he puzzled.

  They cackled again.

  “Sar,” the woman in black feathers said. “Sounya ha!”

  “I hate to cause any trouble, but it would be awfully helpful if you could find someone for me who speaks English.” Of course, the request was absurd if no one spoke English. “English?”

  As the team crowding round the capsule continued to find him hilarious, Black Birdwoman asked, “Angle?”

  “Google Translate?” Cyril proposed with little optimism. These people did not look right, dress right, or talk right. Wherever and whenever he was, the chances of a rather imperfect smartphone application still being extant half a million updates later were nil. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered.

  His minders conferred, poking at whatever mechanisms a human race over eight feet tall poked at, until at length a hologram of an older man in a suit of fine golden feathers appeared beside the capsule. Experimentally, Cyril struggled to a sitting position. Everything ached. Not just the bones. Every cell.

  “Allowest I introduce I-self,” he said grandly. “I expertise on loster dialection. Service at your. Trans.”

  Some expert. Cyril said, “Maybe you could start by explaining what language these people are speaking.”

  The “expertise on loster dialection” looked shaken, but when Cyril repeated the request much more slowly he seemed to get it. The holographic projection appeared to be the current equivalent of Hayley’s husband: a linguistics professor. “Angle,” the prof said. “Anglish.”

  “English. Seriously.” Cyril felt an unfocused dread, because if these people were speaking whatever hash his mother tongue had become, then they would require an amount of effort that his belligerent mind was informing him point-blank it would refuse to make. “And could you be so kind as to tell me where I am exactly?”

  The audience was hooting again, and the hologram shot them a chastening look. “Lun,” he said.

  “London?” Cyril inferred. “London, England, in the United Kingdom.”

  The interlocutor was having trouble again. “Lon-don,” he seemed to remember. “Ing, Unite King?” he said. “Go more no.”

  Well, they predicted the breakup of the United Kingdom after the UK left the EU, and though Cyril was once a passionate unionist—the factual information was available to him; it just needed dusting off—now he didn’t care. The Scots were always troublemakers, and the Barnett formula for the distribution of revenue had never been fair to English taxpayers.

  “So the Unite King go more no,” Cyril recapitulated caustically. “Could you also—”

  “Sar!” the hologram said. “How say you ‘Unite King go more no’?”

  “The United Kingdom is no more.” Back in the world ten minutes and he was already teaching his captors, or whatever they were—who with their poncy future what-all might instead have been teaching him a thing or two, and Cyril was already tired.

  The hologram punched excitedly at a device. “Treasury grove of lingualistic histrionics!”

  “Treasure trove of linguistic history,” Cyril decoded, bored. “And sorry to be so basic, but I seem to have been down for the count rather a while. What year is this?”

  The answer was incomprehensible. After more agonized back and forth, Cyril at least established that they no longer dated years from the birth of Christ, and it was pretty much impossible to establish what, you know, Star-date Whathaveyou it was in relation to the 2020s. Luckily, the year was a matter of supreme indifference, really.

  Yet amidst the extensive back and forth about base ten, which was apparently like asking these people about cave drawings, it dawned on Cyril that he should have asked a pressing question at the very first. Having still not asked it was disturbing, insofar as Cyril could be disturbed at all—although he sensed that his previous incarnation would have been quite disturbed indeed. How could he have taken so long to inquire: where was his wife?

  * * *

  Cyril was assured he could soon reunite with the other ancient hominid in the second capsule of the pair, but beforehand they were both required to undergo a thorough health check.

  When his species’ amiable descendants helped him out of the capsule, Cyril was relieved that his legs bore his weight; suspended animation didn’t appear to entail the muscle wastage of lolling in bed. But as a young man, he’d been tall for his generation, a generous six foot one. Now he stood a good two and a half feet shorter than these strapping new-age specimens, beside whom he looked like a dwarf. The literal loss of stature smarted. By inference, then, however peculiar he felt, some inner kernel remained unchanged: a sort of under-seer that had always been there waiting and watching from within. The man he had been before taking the cryogenic plunge would have disguised this quintessence from himself as something loftier or more ineffable, but his newly brutal iteration had no problem identifying the kernel for what it was: ego.

  The childlike humiliation of staring straight at his caretakers’ diaphragms was intensified by self-consciousness about his clothing. Amidst this sleekly aviary kit, a navy woollen cardigan with wooden buttons and a roll collar, a once-crisply-ironed ivory button-down that had badly creased, and comfortably roomy belted slacks with a break in the leg could as well have been the ruffs, pantaloons, tights, and pointy buckled shoes of a comedic BBC period drama.

  As the team led their historical curiosity gingerly towards some sort of medical facility, they treated him with the exaggerated care with which palaeontologists might handle a rare, newly unearthed fossil. Given the task ahead, Cyril was obliged to dredge up one memory that remained sombrely intact, and that alone seemed capable of making him feel something—in this case, tainted, corrupted, and do
omed.

  Awkwardly, the words “cancer” and even “cell” left his holographic translator baffled. Thus Cyril was obliged to elaborate about many proliferating bad creatures attacking and overwhelming the good creatures and then rushing to other points in the body to do more bad things . . . He sounded like an idiot. In the end he simply located his pancreas as best he could and pointed.

  He was led into another unadorned room. A woman shone an orange light in both eyes, and a moment later he was lying on a gurney naked under a blanket, so he must have been sedated.

  “All fix,” the hologram said, a little smugly.

  It was more than the British Cancer Society could ever have dreamt of.

  Once again Cyril had the nagging sense that he probably should have asked another question earlier, and once again having failed to ask it didn’t especially distress him, but before he awakened as a photocopy of himself this apparent absence of concern would have distressed him greatly. Could they also cure ALS?

  During the two days the time traveller would be kept under medical observation before he could be reunited with his spouse, the golden interlocutor suggested that Cyril do both himself and his keepers a favour by sitting down to converse at length. Their dialogue would be fed into a self-learning computer, the result of which would be, effectively, Google Translate.

  Over the course of their discussions, the hologram explained in his groping way that homo sapiens sapiens of today regarded itself as a single organism (what he actually said was “singular orgasm”)—which as a socialist Cyril should have found appealing, and didn’t. (The teeming hive concept did help explain why so far his caretakers had neither asked his name nor introduced themselves by name.) Because this collective entity required few components to function efficiently, the number of humans on the planet had been greatly reduced. Old Cyril would have been anxious about how this diminution was accomplished. New Cyril was merely relieved that maybe this meant he wouldn’t have to meet all that many eight-foot-six strangers after all. When he asked why everyone seemed to be the same agreeable walnut colour, the translator was stymied by a concept of “race” that didn’t mean “human race.” Well, thank God for that. Interbreeding? However the homogeneity of hue had been achieved, Cyril was glad to see the back of the cosmetics contest.

  All this stuff was vaguely interesting to the extent that anything was, but by their last morning Cyril was distracted. About to reunite with his wife that afternoon after however many zillion years, he felt not eager anticipation but anxiety.

  After a revoltingly bitter lunch—something dreadful had happened either to human taste buds or to the ability of the species to cook—Cyril’s new best mate led him into a simple room with a small table, two cups of liquid, and two simple chairs. A moment later from an opposite door a very short figure, almost a midget, entered with a female escort. The tiny person looked incredibly old and rather shell-shocked. Beside her minder’s streamlined plumage, the pocketed below-the-knee dress looked sack-like and frumpy. Surely this gradual, arduous process of “recognizing” his wife was not the form. In the past he would simply have seen her.

  When the hologram moved towards the door, Cyril panicked. “You’re not going to go?”

  “You speaken same losted linguilism, yes?” the hologram puzzled. “So no requiration of trans.”

  “Oh, right, of course,” Cyril said. He wasn’t about to say aloud that he didn’t want to be left alone with her.

  When Kay’s escort departed, he could swear that she also shot her minder a mournful glance. Cyril walked more slowly and stiffly to his seat than recent awakening from suspended animation justified, for his body having been put on pause had made moving around again no harder than pressing play. The only activity he found fiendishly difficult was existing at all.

  Perhaps if there’d been time to script this reunion in advance, they’d have blocked the scene with an embrace. As it was, not only did they not touch, but neither party acted as if it occurred to them to do so. They took their time sitting. When Kay finally looked up, her eyes were cardboard. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” Cyril said.

  Time passed.

  “How was it for you?” Cyril asked. A trite inquiry after sexual congress, but neither took up the joke.

  Her face flickered with annoyance. “There is nothing to remember. So what kind of a question is that?”

  They sat.

  “Did they cure the ALS?” Cyril remembered to ask.

  “Yes,” she said stonily.

  Of course, he might have noticed when she walked in that she no longer displayed those classic symptoms of stumbling and poor balance. But picking up on these improvements would have displayed the kind of attentiveness that came naturally in relation to someone whose pains were in some sense your pains too, whose death sentence was your death sentence too, and this woman could have been anybody.

  Cyril took a sip of the liquid and made a face. He hadn’t even wanted any, since the flavour was as punishing as he’d anticipated. But it was something to do.

  “The food here is terrible,” he said.

  “I think they think it’s very sophisticated,” she said, though her delivery was aimless. “I think we’re being fed what to them is haute cuisine. They think they’re feeding us like royalty.” The thought seemed to exhaust her, and her gaze kept sliding off her husband’s face as if it were covered in cold cream and she couldn’t get visual traction.

  “The English they speak now,” he said, realizing with embarrassment that he was “making conversation” in a manner he couldn’t recall ever having done in previously effortless exchanges with his wife. “There are no more adverbs. There are no declensions—no I versus me, she versus her. In the written form, after everyone got hopelessly confused about how to use commas and semicolons, they reduced all punctuation to the forward slash. All letters are lower case, and all spelling is phonetic. Those fashionable truncations from our day—prob for problem, cab for cabernet, uni, bro; the way Hayley started saying obs, which got on your nerves—now they’ve done it to everything, chopped all the long words into snack size. Their vocabulary is miniscule, because it’s ‘more efficient.’ If we want to learn to communicate, mastering the dialect is probably doable, even at our age.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said dully. “I can’t say that I care.”

  Factual memory informed him that this woman was once vigorously, even frenetically interested in everything—often to no purpose. Perhaps her current apathy was “more efficient.”

  “Do you feel . . .” He wasn’t sure of the adjective. “Lost?”

  Kay had the look on her face of a classic stroke victim with “slow processing speed.” “That’s too specific,” she said at last. “I’m not sure what feeling is.”

  The whole texture of this encounter recalled his ungainly efforts at courting at uni, before he met Kay. It was the texture of a bad date.

  “Well, it worked,” Cyril said, unable to repress a note of sourness.

  “What worked.” Again, the irritation.

  “Our grand plan,” Cyril said, with corresponding irritation. “We went into cold storage. When we woke up, both our terminal conditions were curable.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “So?”

  He had no idea what he’d ever seen in this woman.

  * * *

  When they were finally rescued from each other what seemed like hours later but was really more like ten minutes, the hologram told Cyril that he would now need to see a different kind of doctor.

  “You and your spouse are the oldest cryogenically preserved specimens we have ever revived,” the Different Kind of Doctor said clearly and grammatically. Wearing a flashy feather suit whose crimson was reminiscent of the male cardinal, he had a diode or something attached to his head. Google Translate was a success. “I cannot believe how long it takes to say anything,” he added under his breath.

  “Cryogenics was still in its infancy,” Cyril said. “But if we
didn’t give it a try, we were going to die.”

  “Why did you not want to die?”

  “That seems like a stupid question.”

  “If our research on much fresher specimens is any guide, you now think everything is stupid.”

  Cyril felt caught out, and also resentful, as if the therapist had been spying. “In this future—”

  “It is not the future. It is the present. That is one of the many things you are going to have trouble with.”

  “In this present, then. You don’t fear dying or try to avoid it? Or do you not die?”

  “We die,” the human cardinal said blithely. “But all that matters is the continuation of . . . I am not happy with this expression of yours, ‘the hive.’ I detect it refers to insects. This is too reductive.”

  Cyril proposed, with a nod to the counsellor’s garb, “How about, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’?”

  The therapist’s expression remained flinty. Perhaps such a psychic high priest was above a sense of humour. “The whole to which I refer is something you have no understanding of, and no capacity to understand.”

  “Sorry, but I’d call that rather insulting.”

  “We aren’t troubled by offending your vanities. There was a time, when the unity of our greater organism was more fragile, that we’d have regarded your primitive individualism as a grave threat. Had you been reanimated in an earlier era, you might have been stoned to death. But now our solidarity is unassailable, and we’re more likely to regard you as quaint, or more probably as pathetic.”

  “With all due respect”—the standard introductory flourish with which Members of Parliament had always begun an abusive harangue—“you don’t know me at all. I’ve never advocated ‘primitive individualism.’ All my life, I’ve been an ardent socialist . . .” Cyril’s huffing and puffing collapsed. One of the most dreadful side effects of suspended animation was a horrifying inability to lie to himself. He had been neither a socialist nor an egalitarian. He had espoused socialism in the interest of his own glorification, and he had always felt superior to everyone else.