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 rose 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.