He told himself, for the hundredth time, how fortunate he was. He had never dreamed of light-speed ships and time dilatation, when he had made his plans so long ago. At best he had envisioned a chancy succession of freezings and thawings, farther and farther off in time, until at last Ana could safely be revived and cured. He had imagined and dreaded the uncertainty of multiple awakenings, not sure where he was, not sure where Ana might be, not even sure if she still lay within a cryowomb.
Instead of such a dangerous quest, Ana was here with him. He could safeguard her himself and protect her from all risks.
The rest of the journey home was, if anything, more tranquil than the voyage out. During the final phases he scanned all the ship’s communication channels, electromagnetic and neutrino, wondering what might await him back in the solar system. He found nothing but silence. The centuries must have changed technology again; he had been away long enough for some totally new communications system to have taken over. Three centuries were also — a frightening prospect — time enough for humanity itself to have changed; even, perhaps, for humans to have destroyed themselves.
He would proceed with great caution, until he knew the nature of the system to which he and Ana were returning. While still far from home he decelerated from their near light-speed race. Moving at a steadily diminishing velocity the ship coasted in toward Sol; past the barren and arid Dry Tortugas, the outermost limits of the Sun’s gravitational domain; past the outer borders of the Oort Cloud; into and through the Kuiper Belt. There was no sign of human presence. The scouts who had been busy on the Outer System survey when Drake left were all gone.
By the time that they came to the frozen wastes of Pluto, the ship was drifting inward at only a few hundred kilometers a second. Drake was becoming worried. The imaging system, even at highest resolution, showed no evidence of
activity on either Pluto or Charon. The research station had vanished.
Did Melissa Bierly lie in the Pluto cryowombs now? Or had a treatment been found, one that could relieve the torment of a flawed masterpiece of genetic science? Drake realized that he was afraid of Melissa’s power over him. Rather than approaching the planetary doublet for a landing, as he had intended, he stepped up the ship’s speed and headed for the inner planets. He had started from Earth; he would return there, and make his case to whomever or whatever he found.
The mode of his approach to the inner system was taken out of his hands as the ship passed the Asteroid Belt. As they floated high above the ecliptic, a navigation and guidance beam locked on to them, taking over the ship’s internal controls. Drake attempted a manual override. It had succeeded once, but now his command was ignored. Powerless to affect his path, he watched the ship steered steadily in to a landing on the surface of the Moon.
The spaceport was new. Drake was dropping toward a flat plain of gleaming yellow, dotted with massive silver columns set in a regular triangular array. Ships, if they were ships, formed dark, windowless tetrahedra at the center of each triangle. Nothing remotely like Drake’s ship was visible. Space flight, and perhaps everything else, had changed in three centuries.
A small wheeled guide met Drake at the ship’s lock. Its body comprised a one-foot sphere, with a thin up right cylinder above it, and a whisk-broom of flexible metal fibers above that. The broom head dipped toward Drake in greeting. The machine rolled toward a head-high oval aperture at the base of a silver column. Drake followed, ducking his head, and passed through the opening. There was no sign of an airlock, but his suit monitor suddenly showed breathable air and a comfortable outside temperature. He removed the suit as his wheeled guide instructed and followed it along a short corridor to another interior chamber.
One man was waiting there, a dignified figure with the distant eyes of a prophet. Drake had expected more: a reception committee, perhaps, or maybe even a show of force. The man merely nodded and said quietly in Universal, “Welcome again to Earthspace, Drake Merlin.”
Drake had been wrong. He had thought himself prepared for anything. What he had never expected was to be recognized, and named.
Even with that thought, he realized that he had no reason to be surprised. The ship would have revealed its identity back in the Asteroid Belt, during its first handshake with the navigation and guidance beam of the inner system. The data banks would have shown the ship’s history. Presumably they would also have recorded its sudden disappearance from the solar system.
Drake wondered what else the files might say about the ship’s run from Pluto. No matter what they said, he would gain nothing by lying about his actions.
“Since you know my name,” he said, while the other man regarded him calmly and without expression, “then perhaps you also know my history. If you do, you will realize that I have returned to seek your help.”
Drake found it hard to accept that he had been greeted in a familiar language. Par Leon had been able to speak to him on his resurrection, but only because of long preparation for Drake’s arrival, and extensive studies of the right historical period.
Had language become static, totally fixed over the centuries because it had become embedded within the universal data banks? Or was the robed figure in front of him simply giving a formal greeting, a single sentence that he had learned of Universal?
But the man was nodding and speaking again. “My name is Trismon Sorel. I know something of your history as it has come down to us from long ago, although a serious… event, almost a century ago, led to our records being seriously incomplete and inconsistent. In your case, there are two versions of events. One states that three centuries ago you lost control of your ship, and were carried off unwillingly to the far depths of space. Another version suggests that your removal of a cryocorpse from the Pluto cryowombs and the immediately subsequent departure of your ship were linked events. It proposes that your disappearance at close to light speed, however curious and bewildering, was intentional. I await your elucidation. However, we should first proceed to another environment, where we will find conversation easier.”
There were small pauses in his speech, slight hesitations in places where it was not natural to break the pattern of words. As Drake was led out of the room and down a spiral flight of metallic stairs, he decided that Universal must be a learned language for Trismon Sorel, just as Old Anglic had been for Par Leon. But to learn Universal so quickly and so well, in the day since the return of Drake’s ship to the inner system, was beyond the powers of the learning inducers. It
suggested that Trismon Sorel, in spite of his normal appearance, represented some huge advance in human mental powers.
They had entered a room that could have existed in Drake’s own time. Only the light lunar gravity, one-sixth of Earth’s, told Drake that he was far from home. Sorel gestured to two comfortable-looking chairs and settled into one of them. As the little wheeled servant moved forward with refreshments, he gazed at Drake with steady, knowing eyes.
“Speak, Drake Merlin. Tell your story.”
Drake nodded and sat down opposite Trismon Sorel. He felt a rising tension. In a few minutes he would know if the long quest was finally over, and his life could begin again.
“My departure from the solar system was indeed intentional.” It had become difficult to speak, and he had to swallow and pause before he could continue. “It was intentional, and done for a good reason. But I cannot begin there. I must begin long ago, more than eight hundred years ago. At that time, the cryocorpse who now lies safe within the ship that brought me here was my wife. After many happy years together, we learned that she was suffering from an incurable disease …”