“I am certain it will be,” said Zhu, with a peaceful look on his face.

“You’re sure this is safe?” I said to Hollus, as we floated down to the room where they would put me in cryogenic freeze.

Her eyestalks rippled. “You are flying through space at what you would refer to as breakneck speed, heading toward a creature who has almost inconceivable strength — and you worry about whether the hibernation process is safe?”

I laughed. “Well, when you put it that way—”

“It is safe; do not worry.”

“Don’t forget to wake me when we reach Betelgeuse.”

Hollus could be perfectly deadpan when she felt like it. “I will write myself a little note.”

Susan Jericho, now sixty-four, sat in the den in the house on Ellerslie. It had been almost ten years since Tom had left. Of course, if he’d stayed on Earth, he’d have been dead for almost a decade. But instead he was presumably still alive, frozen, suspended, traveling aboard an alien starship, not to be revived for 430 years.

Susan understood all this. But the scale of it gave her a headache — and today was a day for celebrations, not pain. Today was Richard Blaine Jericho’s sixteenth birthday.

Susan had given him what he’d wanted most — the promise to pay for driving lessons, and, after he’d received his license, the even bigger promise to buy him a car. There had been a lot of insurance; the cost of the car was a minor concern. Great Canadian Life had tried briefly to renege on paying out; Tom Jericho wasn’t really dead, they’d said. But when the media got hold of the story, GCL had taken such a beating that the president of the company had publicly apologized and had personally hand-delivered a half-million-dollar check to Susan and her son.

A birthday was always special, but Susan and Dick — who would have thought that Ricky would grow up wanting to be called that? — would also celebrate again in a month. Dick’s birthday had never quite had the proper resonance for Susan, since she hadn’t been present when he’d been born. But a month from now, in July, would be the sixteenth anniversary of Dick’s adoption, and that was a memory Susan cherished.

When Dick got home from school — he was just finishing grade ten at Northview Heights — Susan had two more presents for him. First was a copy of his father’s journal about the time he’d spent with Hollus. And second was a copy of the tape Tom had made for his son; she’d had it converted from VHS to DVD.

“Wow,” said Dick. He was tall and muscular, and Susan was enormously proud of him. “I never knew Dad made a video.”

“He asked me to wait ten years before giving it to you,” Susan said. She shrugged a little. “I think he wanted you to be old enough to understand it.”

Dick lifted the jewel case, weighing it in his hand, as if he could thus divine its secrets. He was clearly anxious to see it. “Can we watch it now?” he said.

Susan smiled. “Sure.”

They went into the living room, and Dick slipped the disk into the player.

And the two of them sat on the couch and watched Tom’s gaunt, disease-ravaged form come to life again.

Dick had seen a few pictures of Tom from that time — they were in a scrapbook Susan had kept of the press coverage of Hollus’s visit to Earth and Tom’s subsequent departure. But he’d never seen what the cancer had done to his father in quite this detail. Susan watch him recoil a bit as the images began.

But soon all that was on Dick’s face was attention, rapt attention, as he hung on every word.

At the end, they both wiped tears from their eyes, tears for the man they would always love.

34

Absolute darkness.

And heat, licking at me from all sides.

Was it hell? Was —

But no. No, of course not. I had a splitting headache, but my mind was beginning to focus.

A loud click, and then —

And then the lid of the cryofreeze unit sliding aside. The oblong coffin, made for a Wreed, was set flush into the floor, and Hollus was straddling it, her six feet in stirrups to keep her from floating away, her front legs tipped, and her eyestalks drooping down to look at me.

“Time” “to” “get” “up,” “my” “friend,” she said

I knew what you were supposed to say in a situation like this; I’d seen Khan Noonien Singh do it. “How long?” I asked.

“More than four centuries,” replied Hollus. “It is now the Earth year 2432.”

Just like that,I thought. More than four hundred years gone, passing by without me being aware. Just like that.

They were wise to have installed the cryochambers outside of the centrifuges; I doubt I could have stood up under my own weight yet. Hollus reached down with her right hand, and I reached up with my left to grab it, the simple gold band on my ring finger looking unchanged by the freezing and the passing of time. Hollus helped haul me up out of the black ceramic coffin; she then slipped her feet out of the stirrups and we floated freely.

“The ship has ceased decelerating,” she said. “We are almost to what is left of Betelgeuse.”

I was naked; for some reason, I was embarrassed to have the alien see me this way. But my clothes were waiting for me; I quickly dressed a blue Tilley shirt and a pair of soft, khaki-colored pants, veterans of many digs.

My eyes were having trouble focusing, and my mouth was dry. Hollus must have anticipated this; she had a translucent bulb full of water ready to give me. The Forhilnors never chilled their water, but that was fine right now — the last thing I needed was something cold.

“Should I have a checkup?” I asked, after I’d finished squeezing the water into my mouth.

“No,” said Hollus. “It is all automatic; your health has been continuously monitored. You are—” She stopped; I’m sure she’d been about to say I was fine, but we both knew that wasn’t true. “You are as you were before the freezing.”

“My head hurts.”

Hollus moved her limbs in an odd way; after a second I realized it was the flexing that would have bobbed her torso had we not been in zero-g. “You will doubtless experience various aches for a day or so; it is natural.”

“I wonder how Earth is?” I said.

Hollus sang to the nearest wall monitor. After a few moments, a magnified image appeared: a yellow disk, looking about the size of a quarter held at arm’s length. “Your sun,” she said. She then she pointed at a duller object, about one-sixth the diameter of Sol. “And that is Jupiter, showing a gibbous face from this perspective.” She paused. “At this distance, it is difficult to resolve Earth in visible light, although if you look at a radio image, Earth outshines your sun at many frequencies.”

“Still?” I said. “We’re still broadcasting in radio, after all this time?” That would be wonderful. It would mean —

Hollus was quiet for a moment, perhaps surprised that I didn’t get it. “I do not know. Earth is 429 light-years behind us; the light reaching us now shows how your solar system looked shortly after we left it.”

I nodded sadly. Of course. My heart started pounding, and my vision blurred some more. At first I thought something had gone wrong in reviving me, but that wasn’t it.

I was staggered; I hadn’t been prepared for how I would feel.

I was still alive.

My eyes squinted at the tiny yellow disk, then tipped down to the gold ring encircling my finger. Yes, I was still alive. But my beloved Susan was not. Surely, she was not.

I wondered what kind of life she had made for herself after I’d left. I hoped it had been a happy one.

And Ricky? My son, my wonderful son?

Well, there was that doctor I’d heard interviewed on CTV, the one who had said that the first human who would live forever had likely already been born. Maybe Ricky was still alive, and was — what? — 438 years old.