Vectors (33 page)

While all this was going on, I was feverishly busy soaking up all that I could of the personal lives of my musical contemporaries. I interviewed, entertained, courted and analyzed them—and I wrote, in summary form, of my actions. What would the people of the future want to know of the present? I was betting that it would not be the formal works, the text-book knowledge, the official biographies—they would have more than enough of those. The historians would want to hear the personal details, the chat, the gossip. They would want the equivalent of Boswell's journals and Sam Pepys' private diary. I was careful in my own writings to tantalize my reader, hinting that I knew far more than I was putting into print.

It took time, but after nine long years I felt that I was as ready as I would ever be. I hadn't given as much attention as I would have liked to the question of earning a living in two hundred years' time—but it might be fifty, two hundred, or a thousand. Could Beethoven, suddenly transported to the year 2000, have earned a living as a musician? Let me be less presumptuous—make that Spohr, or Hummel, or some other of Ludwig's less famous contemporaries. I was betting that they could, with ease, as soon as they had picked up the tricks of the time. If I were wrong, I'd do the twenty-third-century equivalent of washing dishes for a living.

I put my affairs in reasonable order, then went over to see Tom Lambert. We hadn't kept up such close contact since Ana had gone. I'd had other things on my mind, and Tom had married and was busy raising a family. He was genuinely glad to see me and fussed over me like the returning Prodigal Son. We settled in the same familiar study while Tom beamed at me and his wife went to the kitchen and killed the fatted calf.

"I hear your music everywhere, Drake," he said. "It's great to know that your career is going so well."

It wasn't, in the strictest musical sense. I had done no really first-rate composition for many years. But Tom had no ear at all for music. Perhaps that was the reason that we had always got along so well—there was no chance of any professional jealousy.

I hated to spoil Tom's pleasure, but the sooner it was done, the better. I took out the application and handed it to him without speaking.

He looked at it and all the happiness faded from his face. He shook his head in disbelief, then looked at me closely.

"Drake, when did you last take a vacation?"

I did not understand his question.

"When did you last take any sort of break from work, Drake? How long since you relaxed for an evening, or even for an hour?" he went on. "I hear that you've been working incessantly, year after year. Face it, Drake.
Ana is dead.
You can't live forever with your own emotions chained and harnessed."

The study seemed to be much too warm, and I was having trouble in catching my breath. I swallowed several times and finally pointed at the application that Tom was still holding in his hand. I could not speak. Tom's words washed over me but I could not understand them.

"You've done all you can do for Anastasia," he said. "She's in the best womb, she had the best preparation that you could get. You can't go on with your obsession. You're famous, you're productive—what more do you want? You want me to help you to give up all this and take the long chance that someday, God knows when, they'll find a way to revive you. Drake, you're physically healthy and in the prime of life. Don't you see? I can't help you." He looked again at the application form. "It's against my oath as a physician. I'd be taking you from health to a high odds of final death. Drake, you need real emotional help, more than I can give."

I was at last able to force myself to speak. "You gave me your word, Tom."

"My word, damn my word. You can't ask this of me." I said nothing and finally he spoke again. "Why, Drake? Why would you do this?"

"I have to, Tom." I spoke gently. "You know why, if you think about it. Unless I go on ahead, they may never wake Ana. She may be one of the last on the list. You and I know her as she really is, but what will her records show? A singer, not too famous, killed by a devastating disease. You know they'll wake the ones they need first. I
have
to be there. I must make sure that they wake Ana as soon as they have a certain cure. I've had the time to prepare, she didn't. I feel pretty sure that they'll wake me."

Tom looked blind with misery. "Drake, you can't see reason. You're set on this, aren't you? If I say no, you'll just go to someone else?"

I nodded, again without speaking, and he put his hands over his face. At that moment I knew that I would be able to gain his cooperation.

Five days later Tom Lambert had made all the preparations and we went together to Second Chance. I took a last look out of the window at the trees and the sunshine, then climbed slowly into the thermal tank. Tom injected the Asfanil and after a few seconds I began the long fall, dropping forever down the longest descent a man can ever make. All the way down to two degrees absolute, colder than the coldest Hell ever conceived by Dante.

* * *

Did I dream my superconducting dreams, lying there twelve degrees colder than a block of solid hydrogen? Or did I only dream that I had dreamed them, as I came slowly, slowly back through the long thaw? It makes little difference. There was an eternity of twisted images, of a procession of pale lights moving forever on a black background, long before I had any form of consciousness.

I was one of the lucky ones. The freezing process must have gone very smoothly, and all that I lost during the thaw was a few square centimeters of skin. But the pain of waking—ah, that was something else. The slow final stages, up from three degrees Celsius to normal body temperature, took thirty-six hours. For most of that time I was pierced with the agony of waking tissues and returning circulation, unable to move or even to cry out. In the last stages, before full consciousness, hearing came back before sight. I could hear speech around me, but not in any tongue that I could recognize. How far had I traveled? As the pain slowly faded, that was my first thought.

I had to wait for the answer. While I was still half-conscious, I felt the sting of an injector spray, and I went out again. Next time, though, I came up all the way, opening my eyes to a quiet sunlit room, not too different from the one in the Second Chance building where I had started the freeze.

A man and a woman were watching me, talking together softly. As soon as they saw that I was fully awake, they pressed a point on a segmented wall panel and went on with their work, lining up two complex pieces of equipment.

The man who came in presently through the smooth white sliding door was dark-haired and clean-shaven, with a smooth, almost womanly face. He came to the side of the bed and looked at me with a pleased and proprietary air.

"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.