“Not continuously. That is not the custom.” She laughed, and at the sound Drake felt his heart break. “Like most people, I choose short periods of wakeful-ness between long ones in hibernation — what you would call cryosleep. Almost everyone is curious to know the future, to meet the future.

“And for twenty-nine thousand years, I have been curious to meet you. Each time I woke, I checked your condition in the cryowomb. Each time, before I went again to hibernation, I asked to be awakened should you waken.”

“But I ought not to be awake now,” Drake protested. “I was supposed to remain in cryosleep until the restoration of Ana’s personality became possible. I gave those explicit instructions to my Servitor when I entered the cryotank.”

Entered the cryotank — twenty-nine thousand years ago. Long enough for steel to rust and stone to crumble. Long enough for even the concept of a Servitor to have been lost. Long enough for hopes and thoughts and wishes to have been forgotten. It was folly to expect anything to endure over thirty millennia.

Except that some things had endured. Drake’s own emotions had survived unchanged. He realized that he was delighted to be awake. To be sitting two feet away from Ana, watching the old expressions of thought and concern run across her face — that was infinite bliss.

“I am sorry.” The new Ana bowed her head. “Your-Servitor is not at fault. Your awakening is my doing. I came to Pluto, and as a human, I overrode the instructions given by you to your Servitor.” She frowned. “It says its name is Milton. An odd name for a Servitor.”

“Not really.” Drake felt a twinge of uneasiness at that comment, which he pushed aside. “Milton is the name that I gave it.”

“In any case, I directed that you be reanimated.”

“And I’m glad that you did.” Drake reached out to embrace her, but she leaned away.

“No. I should have realized that this might happen. Let me try to explain.” She stood up and drifted safely out of arm’s reach. “You feel that you know me well, and more than well. But you do not actually know me at all; and I do not know you. Although I have gazed at your picture and listened to your voice a thousand times, you are a stranger to me. When I first reached consciousness you were already in the cryowombs. As I grew older I learned everything that I could about you and your life. What you did — and tried to do — seemed to me the noblest and bravest thing in the whole universe. I cannot say how much I longed to see you, to speak to you, to thank you for giving me life. But despite that longing, through all past years I respected what you wanted. And I knew that you did not want me.”

“I have never wanted anyone but you.” “No. You want Ana — your Ana. I am Ana, yes, but I am a different person. I have my own memories, my own joys and sorrows, my own fears. You do not share them.” She sighed. “Anyway, a few months ago I agreed to do something that I have been asked to do many times: to go away with friends on a long journey. We will fly out to the human colony on Rigel Calorans. I expect to be away for many thousands of Earth years. When I made that decision to leave the solar system for so long, I wondered: When I return, who knows where Drake Merlin might be? I could not bear the thought that I might never, ever, see you and know you. So I gave the command for resurrection.” She gazed at Drake with those clear, gray eyes that he had known forever. “I did not think of what would come after that. I did not ask myself what pain I might cause you. I realize now that what I did was a selfish and an unforgivable act.”

“You are wrong. It is forgiven already.” “It may be forgiven by you, but it was nonetheless unforgivable. It was my plan to leave Pluto after speaking with you, and proceed to the edge of the Oort Cloud where the members of the Rigel Calorans expedition will assemble. I can no longer do that, at least at this time. I must respect your feelings. How can I atone for waking you against your will?”

“Stay with me.” Drake did not say it, but his mind added the word forever.

“I certainly owe that to you.” Ana smiled, with that familiar rueful downturn of one side of her mouth. “And now, like the self-serving wretch that I am, I will try to justify my own action in resurrecting you. There is a level of temporal shock after any hibernation, even if it is no more than a few hundred years. I have felt it many times; a reaction to changes in the world, in areas where no change was imagined and anticipated. In your case it has been nearly thirty millennia, and you were not prepared for it as we are. So I will take it as my task to lessen the blow of twenty-nine

thousand vanished years.” She reached out her hand, and her touch made him shiver. “Come along, Drake Merlin. Your patient Servitor is waiting outside. It is most irritated that a mere irrational human would override your explicit instructions. Come along with me, and listen to my abject apologies.”

Chapter 12

“These were never your true love’s eyes,

Why do you feign that you love them?”

Ana’s warning of temporal shock at first seemed greatly overstated. The evidence of human presence on Pluto was mostly the cryowombs. Drake could see little change in the wombs or the planet since his mad run from them, twenty-nine thousand years earlier.

“True enough.” Ana had all her old calm and common sense. “On the other hand, this is Pluto. You can’t do much without raising the temperature and disturbing the cryowombs, which no one wants to do. Almost everybody has ancestors stored here, even if they don’t quite know who they are.”

“How many have been resurrected?”

She grimaced. “I knew you would ask me that. The cryowombs still hold close to fifty thousand people. Fewer than five hundred of those have been revivified. None but you has been resurrected in the past twenty-five thousand years. You and Melissa Bierly are the only people to have entered the cryowombs twice, and been resurrected twice.”

“Melissa. What happened to Melissa?” Drake saw again those sapphire eyes, blazing with madness.

“She was resurrected.”

“Was she insane?”

“Once, she was. But she is cured.”

“She’s alive?”

“Very much alive. Still superhuman smart and healthy and intelligent, only now she’s happy and no longer suicidal.”

“You met Melissa?”

“Certainly.” Ana smiled at Drake, with an expression that he read as totally loving. “You have your obsessions, Drake, you must permit me mine. I sought Melissa out originally, just because she knew you. We have talked about you, many times. She forms part of the expedition to Rigel Calorans. More than that—”

Drake interrupted: “But I thought that resurrection had become trivial, for anyone who was properly frozen. Why have so few been revived?”

“Resurrection is trivial. The problem isn’t technological; it’s emotional and ethical. If I revive a cryocorpse, what are my responsibilities toward that person? What are my emotional commitments? Although everyone recognizes that their ancestors are here, those are remote ancestors. Think of your own time. Would you, if you could, have resurrected Hammurabi, or Augustus Caesar — even if you were a distant descendant? They would have been lost in your world of telephones and automobiles and computers. Yet they were exceptional people, not like most of the cryocorpses. Do you know the prime criterion that decided who was preserved in the cryowombs?”

Drake nodded glumly. “I can guess, from what the people at Second Chance told me. Money.”

“Exactly. It took money to be frozen, and much more to maintain the condition over the centuries. You are an anomaly, Drake. I read all I could find about you, and I know that money didn’t interest you. You acquired plenty, but only so you could be frozen. What you did was very smart. You learned things that people of the future would want to know. What you had in your head was true wealth. But wealth as you knew it no longer exists…