She stood at the lake’s edge for centuries.
“She’s awake.”
Soft light fell all around, like snow. Time passed. Darkness. Light again. I’m under the snow, she thought. Darkness.
“She’s awake.”
Her arms were moved. Light was provided. A question was asked. A tube was pulled from her throat. She was hurt. All very passive. Darkness.
“She’s awake.”
Elizabeth forced her eyes open. An older man sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand. Beside him stood a medical technician in a lab coat. The man holding her hand had a haggard face. Worry lines across his forehead. A little baggy in the jowls. It wasn’t until she blinked her vision clear that she could see his eyes.
“Henry?”
He mouthed a silent, “Yes.”
“How long?”
He patted the top of her hand. “Six hundred years.”
She tried to sit up. Before she was halfway, though, her calves cramped.
“Probably easier to lay still right now,” Henry said. “The doctors here have some wonderful treatments. Since you’ve made it this far, you should be up soon.”
Breathing softly, Elizabeth considered what he said for a moment. “There was a doubt?”
“Big one for a long time.”
The ache in her legs dwindled to a dim reminder, no worse than the one she felt in her neck and back and chest. She squeezed his hand. “Henry, I’m glad you’re here.”
“You can take care of her now,” he said to the lab-coated man.
For the next two days, doctors came and went. They wheeled her from one examining room to the next. Most of the time she couldn’t tell what they were doing. Strange instruments. Peculiar instructions. Doctors nodding to each other over results that didn’t make sense to her. Even their conversation confused her, speaking with a dialect too thick for her to decipher. Although she did have one moment of relief when one asked her to stick out her tongue and say, “Ahh.” The tongue depressor even appeared to be made from wood.
They weren’t subservient, however. Brisk, efficient and friendly, but not servile. When she saw Henry again, she asked him about it. He met her in a sitting room where other patients sat reading or visiting quietly. The medical techs insisted she stay in a wheelchair, although she walked quite well in a physical therapy session earlier in the day.
“All that I’ve learned from our strange journey, Elizabeth, is that time changes everything. You’re not a religion anymore. Actually, now you’re kind of a curiosity. I expect someone from the history guild will want to talk with you. Marvelous opportunity, you know, to actually chat face to face with the Elizabeth Audrey.”
Something in the way he said it caught her ear. “What about my holdings? What about the corporations?”
Henry covered her hand with his own. “Gone, I’m afraid. Long, long gone now.”
The tears came unbidden. She thought of herself as a strong person. Finally, she shook the tremors off and dried her face. “We need to get to work then to get it back. How close are we to finishing the project?”
Henry smiled. She’d always liked his eyes, but now the years in his expression set them off beautifully. “I’ll let you judge for yourself.”
When he stood, a medical tech who had been waiting a few seats away, rushed over to help.
“That’s okay. I’ll take her,” Henry said.
“Thank you, sir,” said the tech. “I’ll be close if you need me.”
Elizabeth looked from the tech to Henry and back again. She recognized a power order when she saw one. “How old are you Henry? How long have you been awake this time?”
He turned her chair toward the exit and began rolling her toward the door. “Twenty-two years. I’m sixty-two now.”
The door opened into a wide space. A ceiling a hundred feet above enclosed the multiple levels and balconies she saw on the other side. Pedestrians walked purposefully to and fro.
“What is this, a mall?”
“More like a business park, but you’ve got the right idea.”
A pair of woman dressed in dark, functional leather longcoats walked past them. One laughed at something the other said. Pale clean circles surrounded their eyes in faces that were uniformly filthy.
“Prospectors do a lot of trading here,” said Henry, as way of explanation.
He wheeled her to a garage a level lower and helped her into a car. This one didn’t appear nearly as heavy as the truck she’d ridden in with him what seemed like a lifetime ago.
“It’s time for you to see Venus in its glory,” said Henry.
A half hour later he parked the car on what might have been the same hill he’d taken her to before, but now the burgundy sun rested low on the opposite horizon, and where before the landscape was marked by wind, rock and water, plants grew everywhere. Thick-stemmed vines clung to the rocks beside the road. Low bushes dotted the slope to the water’s edge. Here and there, short pine-looking trees poked from the soil, their trunks all leaning the same way and their branches pointing away from the lake. And there was color everywhere. Not only were there the gray and black rocks she remembered, but also tans and browns and yellows. Across the face of the hill to their left, a copper sheen caught the sun, and on the hill to their right, the mossy clumps growing between the rough stones were a vibrant blue.
But no heather covered the hills. Where she imagined a world with waterfalls, there was only sharp-edged stone. Where she hoped for soft yellow light on fields of flowers, there was a red sun, bloat as a toad on the horizon. She saw a rough land.
A figure dressed in a leather longcoat, goggles covering the eyes, walked past their car, saw Henry and tipped his leather hat as he continued on toward the lake where a small complex of buildings serviced two long docks and a dozen moored boats.
Elizabeth tried to contain her disappointment. “This is not even close to what I worked so hard for. I wanted a world that was what Earth should have been, what it could have been if we hadn’t ruined it. Venus could have been paradise!” The outburst left her short of breath. In the car’s confines, her breathing sounded loud and harsh. “I had a brother…”
“You were an only child.” Henry sounded quizzical.
“No, I…” Panic rose in Elizabeth’s throat. She did have a brother, didn’t she? It took a second for her to sort it out for herself. A thousand years of dreaming could feel more convincing than a few decades of reality.
“We have to get out of here. Take me back.”
“Wait,” said Henry. He reclined his seat a little before folding his hands across his chest. He watched the sun setting on the lake’s other side. Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, her heart thudding hard.
The sun slipped deeper into the hills behind the lake. Elizabeth relaxed. Could she get the money back again? She knew no one. The game was surely different now. A wind scurried across the water, rocked the boats, and then rushed up the road to toss sand against the car. Shadows lengthened. She felt so tired, so truly, truly old.
“You know,” Harry said, “I talked to the doctors before I went to sleep the last time. It took considerable persuasion on my part, but I discovered you’d told them to work on me again. For a while, I thought the best action would be to go to your bed and kick out the plug. It was tempting.”