34
Absolute darkness.
And heat, licking at me from all sides.
Was it hell? Was —
But no. No, of course not. I had a splitting headache, but my mind was beginning to focus.
A loud click, and then —
And then the lid of the cryofreeze unit sliding aside. The oblong coffin, made for a Wreed, was set flush into the floor, and Hollus was straddling it, her six feet in stirrups to keep her from floating away, her front legs tipped, and her eyestalks drooping down to look at me.
“Time” “to” “get” “up,” “my” “friend,” she said
I knew what you were supposed to say in a situation like this; I’d seen Khan Noonien Singh do it. “How long?” I asked.
“More than four centuries,” replied Hollus. “It is now the Earth year 2432.”
Just like that,I thought. More than four hundred years gone, passing by without me being aware. Just like that.
They were wise to have installed the cryochambers outside of the centrifuges; I doubt I could have stood up under my own weight yet. Hollus reached down with her right hand, and I reached up with my left to grab it, the simple gold band on my ring finger looking unchanged by the freezing and the passing of time. Hollus helped haul me up out of the black ceramic coffin; she then slipped her feet out of the stirrups and we floated freely.
“The ship has ceased decelerating,” she said. “We are almost to what is left of Betelgeuse.”
I was naked; for some reason, I was embarrassed to have the alien see me this way. But my clothes were waiting for me; I quickly dressed a blue Tilley shirt and a pair of soft, khaki-colored pants, veterans of many digs.
My eyes were having trouble focusing, and my mouth was dry. Hollus must have anticipated this; she had a translucent bulb full of water ready to give me. The Forhilnors never chilled their water, but that was fine right now — the last thing I needed was something cold.
“Should I have a checkup?” I asked, after I’d finished squeezing the water into my mouth.
“No,” said Hollus. “It is all automatic; your health has been continuously monitored. You are—” She stopped; I’m sure she’d been about to say I was fine, but we both knew that wasn’t true. “You are as you were before the freezing.”
“My head hurts.”
Hollus moved her limbs in an odd way; after a second I realized it was the flexing that would have bobbed her torso had we not been in zero-g. “You will doubtless experience various aches for a day or so; it is natural.”
“I wonder how Earth is?” I said.
Hollus sang to the nearest wall monitor. After a few moments, a magnified image appeared: a yellow disk, looking about the size of a quarter held at arm’s length. “Your sun,” she said. She then she pointed at a duller object, about one-sixth the diameter of Sol. “And that is Jupiter, showing a gibbous face from this perspective.” She paused. “At this distance, it is difficult to resolve Earth in visible light, although if you look at a radio image, Earth outshines your sun at many frequencies.”
“Still?” I said. “We’re still broadcasting in radio, after all this time?” That would be wonderful. It would mean —
Hollus was quiet for a moment, perhaps surprised that I didn’t get it. “I do not know. Earth is 429 light-years behind us; the light reaching us now shows how your solar system looked shortly after we left it.”
I nodded sadly. Of course. My heart started pounding, and my vision blurred some more. At first I thought something had gone wrong in reviving me, but that wasn’t it.
I was staggered; I hadn’t been prepared for how I would feel.
I was still alive.
My eyes squinted at the tiny yellow disk, then tipped down to the gold ring encircling my finger. Yes, I was still alive. But my beloved Susan was not. Surely, she was not.
I wondered what kind of life she had made for herself after I’d left. I hoped it had been a happy one.
And Ricky? My son, my wonderful son?
Well, there was that doctor I’d heard interviewed on CTV, the one who had said that the first human who would live forever had likely already been born. Maybe Ricky was still alive, and was — what? — 438 years old.
But the chances were slim, I supposed. More likely, Ricky had grown up to be whatever sort of man he’d been destined to become, and he had worked and loved, and now . . .
And now was gone.
My son. I had almost certainly outlived him. A father is not supposed to do that.
I felt tears welling in my eyes; tears that had been frozen solid not an hour ago, tears that just sort of pooled there, near their ducts, in the absence of gravity. I wiped them away.
Hollus understood what human tears signified, but she didn’t ask me why I was crying. Her own children, Pealdon and Kassold, must surely now be dead, too. She floated patiently next to me.
I wondered if Ricky had left children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren; it shocked me to think that I could easily have fifteen or more generations of descendants now. Perhaps the Jericho name echoed on still . . .
And I wondered whether the Royal Ontario Museum still existed, whether they’d ever reopened the planetarium, or if, in fact, cheap spaceflight for all the people had finally, properly, rendered that the institution redundant.
I wondered if Canada still existed, that great country I loved so much.
More, of course, I wondered if humanity still existed, if we had avoided the sting at the end of the Drake equation, avoided blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons. We’d had them for fifty-odd years before I’d left; could we have resisted using them for eight times longer than that?
Or maybe . . .
It was what the natives of Epsilon Indi had chosen.
And those of Tau Ceti.
Of Mu Cassiopeae A, also.
And of Eta Cassiopeae A.
Those of Sigma Draconis, as well.
And even those amoral beings of Groombridge 1618, the arrogant bastards who had blown up Betelgeuse.
All of them, if I was right, had transcended into a machine realm, a virtual world, a computer-generated paradise.
And by now, with four centuries of additional technological advances, surely Homo sapiens had the capability of doing the same.
Perhaps they had done it. Perhaps they had.
I looked at Hollus, floating there: the real Hollus, not the simulacrum. My friend, in the flesh.
Maybe humanity had even taken a hint from the natives of Mu Cassiopeae A, blowing up Luna, giving Earth rings to rival those of Saturn; of course, our moon is relatively smaller than the Cassiopeian one and so contributes less to the churning of our mantle. Still, perhaps now a warning landscape was spread out across some geologically stable part of Earth.
I was floating freely again, too far from any wall; I had a tendency to do that. Hollus maneuvered over to me and took my hand in hers.
I hoped we hadn’t uploaded. I hoped humanity was, well, still human — still warm and biological and real.
But there was no way to know for sure.
And was the entity still there, waiting for us, after more than four centuries?
Yes.
Oh, perhaps it hadn’t stuck around all that time; perhaps it had indeed calculated when we would arrive, and had nipped off to take care of other things in the interim. While the Merelcas was traversing the 429 light-years at a hair below the speed of light, the view ahead had blueshifted into ultraviolet invisibility; the entity could have been gone for much of that time.
And, of course, perhaps it wasn’t really God; perhaps it was just some extremely advanced lifeform, some representative of an ancient, but entirely natural, race. Or maybe it was actually a machine, a massive swarm of nanotechnological entities; there was no reason why advanced technology couldn’t look organic.
But where do you draw the line? Something — some one — set the fundamental parameters for this universe.