It was obvious now why his earlier effort had been prevented. He was emerging onto the surface of a moon or planet. It was a small one, with a horizon only a kilometer or so away. The hard and unvarying light of the stars above him suggested that if any atmosphere existed, it was far too thin to breathe.
Another mystery. The membrane wall had allowed him to push through easily, but it did not release its air. Nor did there seem to be a hole where he had passed through. Technology was still advancing.
Cautiously, he stood up. His feet felt pain at the ankles and were dead below. Balancing was not easy. He stared upward. The pattern of constellations had been unfamiliar on his earlier resurrection, so it was too much to hope that he would recognize them this time. One thing he was sure of: There were far too many stars, thousands after thousands of them. In such a crowded sky, it would be difficult for the mind to create the old imagined shapes of bears, dragons, swans, or crosses.
Where was he? Drake’s conviction that he had traveled far in time and space became stronger. A sky should appear so crowded only close to the center of the Galaxy, thirty thousand light-years from Earth.
Or not even there. The stars above were thickly scattered, enough to make vision easy; but not so thick that other objects could not be seen beyond them. High to Drake’s right, like a shadow behind the stars, he could make out a great misty spiral of light. He was looking at it from above and slightly away from its axis of rotation.
He had wondered where he was. Still he did not know, but now he could make a guess. His first thought had been that he was in the dense middle of his own galaxy, staring out at some other spiral. But there was no spiral galaxy nearly so close — the one he was looking at was bright and sprawled over a quarter of the sky. Unless he was in the unimaginably distant future, the object overhead must be the Galaxy, the one that formed the home of Earth and Sol. He was seeing it from a dense cluster of stars that in intergalactic terms was a close neighbor, one of the Magellanic Clouds — tight groups of billions of stars that were gravitationally tied to the Galaxy and a couple of hundred thousand light-years away from it.
And that gave a partial answer to his other question: When? Unless some method had been discovered to travel faster than light, he was at least hundreds of thousands of years beyond the time of his downloading. That, however, represented an absolute lower bound. His own feelings, irrationally combined with the sense of infinite age and weariness in his body, convinced him that he had moved many tens of millions of years into the future.
His companions, machines or bioengineered creatures, had waited patiently at his side. They were at ease in near or total vacuum. Maybe they were the “people” of the future, wearing superior physical forms. Unless he found a way to talk to them, he would never know.
They had no limbs, no eyes, no visible way of providing or receiving a message. Yet clearly they were able to communicate with each other. All their efforts to keep him inside the membrane until he had a suit had been tightly coordinated.
He stooped down and picked up one of the little umbrella crawlers. He hoped they would not misunderstand his motives.
The downward movement made his head swim. There was something awfully wrong with his resurrected body. Instead of becoming more at ease, he was experiencing greater pain and discomfort with every minute. He waited until his balance at last returned, then examined the crawler.
It had seven-fold symmetry. There were seven thin “ribs” that radiated from a central boss. At the very end of each rib, on the upper side, a small darker spot gleamed blackish green. It had the round structure of an eye, or a photoelectric cell. The crawlers could probably see him, and each other. It would simplify their acting in concert.
Beneath each rib was a small opening, no bigger than a fingernail. He could not examine the apertures easily in the position that he was holding the crawler, but it had been sitting motionless and unresisting in his grasp. He inverted it. It did not react. The bottom was seamless and uniform, the same deep black as the upper surface. At the middle he saw another and bigger hole, as wide as his thumb. That one was empty, but at the opening of each of the other holes he could make out a blue-green gleam. When he tilted the crawler to get a better look, he saw a stirring of movement. After a few seconds, one of the turquoise insect machines partially showed itself at the mouth of the hole.
He reached out and eased it clear. The move was almost one of desperation. He was sicker than he had realized on first awakening. His fingers had no sensations, and the pain in his arms and legs seemed to reach farther up his limbs. He also felt, nauseated. When he belched, a foul stench rose from his stomach and filled his suit. It was the smell of decaying meat, the stink of his own rotting insides.
He brought the little blue-green carapace close to his face, but his eyes were failing as fast as the rest of him. No matter how much he peered through the thin layer of his suit, all he saw was an unfocused colored blur of tiny legs and body. After a few seconds he gave up. He reached down and carefully placed the insect form on the rocky surface in front of him. He half expected it to scuttle off and hide within one of the other crawlers, but instead it ran aimlessly around in circles for half a minute, then froze.
Did each little blue-green robot, if that’s what they were, report to its own home crawler? Drake bent down, with swimming vision and swirling dizziness, and placed the crawler a few feet from the motionless turquoise glint. A high-pitched clicking and humming sounded at once. The lost beetle hurried back to the crawler, and disappeared. It seemed as though the one housed the other, at least most of the time; if they were bioengineered forms, they must be symbiotic.
The crawlers were moving again, all together across a smooth terrain. Drake followed. The surface was so uniform and highly polished that he wondered if the whole world was an artifact. The high curvature showed that the object must be no more than a few tens of kilometers across. Making such a thing would be trivial to the technology that far earlier had been able to turn Uranus into a new sun and change the whole face of the solar system.
He sniffed and was aware again of the charnel-house smell of his own body within his suit. The sniff was one of self-disgust — and not only at his smell. He ought to have learned over the centuries and millennia not to make flying leaps of logic. What proof was there that the progress of technology had been uniform, always in the direction of advancing capabilities? He already knew of three eras in which the definition of “progress” had changed, and there had been time since then for a hundred or a thousand such transitions. Certainly, nothing that he had seen in this resurrection suggested an orderly progression of civilization from Ariel’s time to this one. Other than basic astronomy, everything seemed beyond his knowledge and comprehension.
And where was Milton? Drake thought of his Servitor for the first time since his own resurrection. He could not imagine Milton deserting him, for as long as the Servitor possessed consciousness. It was more evidence of the passage of time while he had drowsed in electronic storage.
The crawlers had been heading steadily around the curve of the surface. The top of a building was appearing on the horizon. As he came closer Drake saw that it formed a squat truncated pyramid, its shiny gold walls jutting upward against the star-strewn sky. The crawlers led him toward an open door, about two feet square, sitting at the building’s base. It was barely big enough, but Drake lay on his belly and inched forward, following the crawlers through and up a gently spiraling tunnel. Another translucent wall lay at the end. He pushed through that membrane and found himself in a dimly lit chamber about twenty feet square and six feet high. The floor was more of the sticky, milky sheet on which he had first awakened. The walls had foot-wide round apertures spaced along them, windows providing views of the smooth outside surface and the dazzling star field. The center of the chamber was occupied by a transparent column filled with pink bubbling liquid. Scores of the black umbrella crawlers littered the floor, while half a dozen were slotted into a set of narrow letter-box slits that rose vertically against one wall.