Drake sagged with weakness and disappointment. There was nothing for him here, no reason for the crawlers to have brought him so far and with such effort. But they were once more moving forward, then waiting as though expecting him to follow.

He could barely propel himself, even in such a negligible field. He dragged himself along for a few yards with his arms through the thick dust; then he was forced to pause and rest. The crawlers came to either side, lifting his body and easing it along. They were helping him, but why?

Where were they taking him? Why did they think he might want to see it, whatever it was?

He was not resisting, but neither was he helping. He simply allowed himself to be carried, eyes almost closed, until at last the crawlers released their hold and eased away from his body.

Your move, that said. But it was no move he could imagine.

He forced his weary eyes to open. In front of his face, no more than a few inches away, stood a vertical wall of dark metal. He raised his head, and saw that it ended two feet or so above his own recumbent eye level. He made a supreme effort, reached up to the top of the wall, and lifted himself. He peered over the edge.

It was not a wall. It was the side of a big tank. And not just any storage tank. He recognized it, this was a cryotank. The seals had been broken, the outer and inner lids removed.

He peered inside. It was empty. He stood, dazed and bewildered. A cryotank.

And, a few yards farther along, another. Just the two of them. He held on to the tank side for support, and clawed and scrabbled his way around toward the other tank.

It, too, stood with the seals broken. The outer and inner lids had been removed.

But it was not empty. Drake stared, eyes failing and mind reeling. There was a body inside. A dried and mummified body that he recognized.

It was Ana’s body. He knew the color of the hair, the shape of the beloved skull that showed its bones beneath the taut and yellow skin. Ana’s body.

He wanted to groan, but his throat was too agonizingly sore. Not really Ana, but the empty husk of what she had once been. It was the end of all hope, the end of everything.

Then the remnants of reason came back. He should not be here, standing by an ancient cryotank. He had been downloaded into electronic storage. His resurrection had been promised from that electronic storage, into a new, cloned body. And Ana, too, had moved to electronic storage.

So what was this tank, and why was he here?

Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. These were the original cryotanks, the ones that had held him and Ana.

“Each tank has its own long-lived power source, able to preserve a cryocorpse for an extremely long time without external support… The cryowomb with its cryotanks is already at the extreme edge of the Oort Cloud, and it is steadily drifting farther out to interstellar space. You and Ana have long been its only occupants.”

It had never occurred to Drake that those original cryotanks might be left to wander wherever the winds of space chose to take them, but why not? It would not have occurred to Ariel and his composite to destroy the tank and the womb, since from their point of view the only important versions of Drake and Ana were the ones in electronic storage.

Drifting farther out to interstellar space — and farther yet. How many millions, or more likely billions, of years had it taken for the wandering flotsam of the cryowomb to find its way beyond the Galaxy, all the way to the Magellanic Cloud? How many millions more before it was found by the exploring crawlers?

No wonder that Drake had seen the discontinuity of technology development everywhere. It was not discontinuity — it was an independent development. The crawlers were aliens. There was no connection between them and human civilization. Drake was probably their first evidence of the existence of humans.

And no wonder, either, that the attempt at resurrection by the umbrella crawlers and the workers had produced such an ailing, sickly, and imperfect result. Without prior knowledge of human physiology or the correct thawing procedure, it was a miracle that the umbrella crawlers had done as well as they did. Drake had been revivified, even if only for a short time.

Or maybe they had succeeded as well as anything ever could. Drake had been downloaded to electronic storage precisely because cryotank storage was unreliable over long time periods. He had no idea how long it had been since he joined Ana in the cryowomb. Long enough for resurrection to be totally unreliable? Long enough to make his present disintegration inevitable?

The great thing was, it didn’t matter. This was not the end of all hope, the end of everything. The hollow shell beside him was not the only Ana, just as he was not the only Drake. Somewhere he and Ana still existed in electronic storage. Somewhere, at some time, they might be reunited. No. They would be reunited.

Drake ignored his pain and weakness. He laughed aloud.

It was a mistake. The decaying fabric of his lungs ripped under the stress like wet paper. His throat filled with blood, and he died.

PART TWO

Iliad

Chapter 16

“By a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney.”

There are worse things in the world than pain.

Pain can be channeled and concentrated, marshaled and molded, directed to draw some element of the world into bright particular focus. Harsher pain can force a tighter focus.

But panic, heart-stilling, gut-twisting panic, has no redeeming value. It dissipates instead of distilling. When blind panic roars and surges, all concentration is lost.

Drake awoke to that knowledge. Terror and horror howled at him from every direction. He had no idea of the cause. Worse, he did not know how to find out. He was blind to everything, deaf to all but the screaming of frightened minds. He tried to order the chaos around him and structure the questions that he wanted answered:

Where am I? When am I? How long was I dormant? How far in the future have I traveled this time? What progress has there been in restoring Ana ?

It was hopeless. He could form the questions, but a hundred billion replies came raging in at once. They said everything and nothing, individual vectors combining to give a null resultant.

He tried different questions: Why are you so afraid? What is the source of fear?

A hundred billion answers came in unison. The force of the signal was too much to handle. Drake made a supreme effort. He ignored the torrent of inputs from those countless billions of accessible minds, and looked inward to create his own working environment.

A sunny room, windowed and comfortable. The familiar prospect beyond it of a windswept Bay of Naples.

And in the seat opposite, ready to answer his questions -

Drake recoiled. Instinctively he had thought of Ana, and she sat waiting. It was the worst possible choice. In Ana’s presence, even with an Ana that he had himself created, he would not seek answers. Like the lotus-eaters, he would dream away the time.

Who?

People flickered into the armchair. Par Leon, Ariel, Melissa Bierly, Trismon Sorel, Milton, Cass Leemu…

None would hold. They appeared, and were as quickly gone.

Who?

Tom Lambert. Yes, yes, yes. Don’t go!

The outline of the doctor had been faint and wavering. Now his figure stayed and steadied. He shook his head reprovingly. “Dumb, very dumb. I don’t mean you, Drake. Us. Not your fault, but ours — the composite’s. We should have known better.”

“Better than what?” Drake saw that it was Tom at thirty, leaner than the paunchy and balding version of their last meeting.