It was not difficult to reach an overall assessment. He had been embodied in a near corpse, and the necrosis was spreading throughout his whole body. If he was to survive, he had to reach a place where technicians could work on him the sort of medical miracles that had once been possible. And he had to do it quickly.

Drake lifted himself onto his hands and knees and moved over to the porthole. This time the crawlers did not object.

Three of them crabbed their way along at his side as he placed his nose close to the window. The surface was sticky and smelled like acetone.

He looked out. The planetoid where he had been resurrected was invisible, far behind them. To his left, the blue-white star dominated the heavens, outshining all the scattered millions of the Cloud cluster. The star loomed in the sky, three times the size of Sol from Earth. They were too close. Habitable planets, if there were any, ought to be farther out.

He looked, but it was an impossible task. A planet would be one more spark of light among the millions. A computer, attached to a telescope and observing for many days, might distinguish a planet from the starry background by comparing images and noting the planet's motion over time relative to the slowly moving stars. But Drake did not have a computer; he did not have a telescope; and he was sure that he did not have many days.

Just as he concluded that finding a planet would be impossible, he saw a dark shape biting into the edge of the blue-white sun. He decided that he was indeed seeing a planet, then one second later realized that it could not be so.

The shape was wrong-a sharp-edged oblong, rather than a circle-and it was growing in size far too fast. The ship could be no more than a few kilometers away from it. The object was far smaller than the planetoid that they had left a few minutes earlier. It was probably no more than a hundred meters along its longest side.The ship drifted nearer, its drive powered down to provide a tiny final deceleration. As it came alongside the dark oblong, Drake could take a closer look. The surface was a roughened and pitted black, nothing like the shiny gold of the ship. It seemed perfectly flat and featureless, but presumably the crawlers knew better. Half a dozen of them had wandered across to the entry tunnel. They were hovering there as though waiting for him. There had been no attempt to provide him with another suit.

He wasn't sure how much physical effort he could manage, but he had no choice. He lay on the floor and inched his way painfully through the white membrane and on into the spiraling tunnel. He could feel the rotting skin of his naked chest sticking to the tunnel floor, then tearing free as he pushed forward. At one point he could go no farther until the crawlers, behind and beside and ahead of him, eased him along through a tight spot.

They emerged into a sounding, cavernous chamber. It was totally sealed, totally dark, and icily cold. Not even starlight penetrated. Drake, shivering and listening to the sound of his own labored breath, did not know what to do. At last the crawlers accompanying him began to glow. A line of green light like a ghostly bioluminescence showed along each of their seven ribs. As their light brightened and Drake's eyes adjusted, he was able to make out something of his surroundings.

The fittings of the great chamber showed that it had once held scores or hundreds of identical objects, serried ranks of them running off into the distance. That had been long, long ago. The objects had all gone. Dust filled every marked furrow where something had once rested. Dust in a deep layer covered everything.

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.

"Than to expose you all at once to our situation." The man in the other chair was so real, so tangible, that it was impossible to think of him as some ghostly and evanescent swirl of electrons. "Heaven knows, we've talked enough about temporal shock. We have plenty of experience with it. You'd think we would have learned to believe in it."

"I'm not feeling temporal shock."

"You will. Do you insist on this form of interaction, by the way? It will severely limit the rate of information transfer."

"I can handle this. I couldn't take it the other way."

"Then I suppose we'll have to live with it. That is temporal shock, even if you don't want to use the term. You'll get used to the new reality after a while. I'd suggest we take this slowly, maybe have little practice sessions until you learn how to structure and sort inputs."

"I'm ready to sort some inputs now, Tom, without any practice at all. Tell me three things. Can Ana be brought back to me? When am I? And where am I? And don't tell me that I'll have trouble understanding or accepting whatever the truth is. I've heard that line of talk every time I've been resurrected, and every time I managed."

"I'll see what I can do." Tom leaned back, pipe and lighted match in hand. He was still in his tobacco-addiction days, shortly before acute sinus problems and the anomaly of a physician practicing the opposite of what he preached had forced him to give up smoking. "You know, Drake, some of the questions that you asked are pretty damned hard toanswer."

"I thought they seemed very basic."

"Well, you asked about time again. I know what you mean: How many years has it been since your upload into the data banks? But you must understand that with people buzzing all over the Galaxy, or operating in electronic form, or sitting in strong gravitational fields, everyone's clock runs at a different rate. We use a completely different technique for describing time now. If I told you how it worked, it wouldn't mean a thing to you. I'll give you an answer, I promise.

I'll find a way of showing you. But for the moment, why don't we just agree that however you measure it, it's been a very long time compared with your previous dormancies."

A very long time-compared with fourteen million years? Drake suspected he would not like Tom's answer, when it was stated in his old-fashioned terms.

"What about Ana?"

"Sorry. No real change since last time. We have confirmed the closed nature of the universe, so there is a possibility of ultimate resurrection close to the Omega Point, in the far, far future. Today, we can't do a thing for her."

"So why am I awake, instead of dormant in electronic storage? Have you forgotten what I requested?"

"Not at all. We have honored your wishes for a long time . . . perhaps too long. But we have our worries, too. Our own needs have finally reached a point of urgency that cannot be denied. More to the point, if we do not solve our problem, your own needs and requests will become academic. We have to save ourselves if we are to save you."

Tom Lambert was adding to Drake's perplexity. He could imagine that the composite might have problems; but the composite must also possess overwhelming capabilities and resources. Drake could not see how his own resurrection and involvement would change anything. If he had been a living fossil long ago, he was far more of one now.

"I don't understand what your problem has to do with me, Tom. And I don't see what I have to do with it. But I think you'd better tell me about it."

"I intend to. And believe me, it is a problem, the very devil of a problem, nothing to do with you or Ana. We have gone beyond desperation. I'll be honest, you are our last hope, and a long shot it is. A damned long shot. We need a new thought. Or maybe an old thought." Tom's mouth trembled, and the fingers holding his pipe writhed. On the fringes of Drake's mind he heard again the cry and yammer of countless terrified souls. He suppressed them ruthlessly, building a gate in his own consciousness that admitted only the calmest components.

"Thanks. That's a lot better." Tom took the pipe from his mouth and laid it down on the broad window-sill. He rummaged in his pocket for his tobacco pouch. Drake noted, with no surprise, that it was a black leather one given to him by Ana.

"Might be a good thing if I show you directly," Tom continued, as he filled and tamped his pipe. "Let you see for yourself, eh? You know the old advice that Professor Bonvissuto drilled into your head: Don't tell, show."

"Do it any way you like. I'll let you know soon enough if I can't take it."

"Fine. I'm going to begin with the solar system. It is relevant, even though you may think at first that it isn't. Hold on to your hat, Drake. And hey, presto." Tom clapped his hands. The inside lights turned off. The scene beyond the picture window changed. The Bay of Naples had gone. Suddenly it was dark outside, with no hint of sea or sky. The room hovered on the edge of a bleak and endless void, lit only by glittering stars.

As Drake stared, the scene began to move smoothly to the right, as though the whole room was turning in space. A huge globe came into view. It was bloated and orange red, its glowing surface mottled with darker spots.

"The Sun," Tom Lambert said simply.

Drake stared at the dull and gigantic orb. "You mean, the Sun as it is today?"

"That's right. Real time presentation. Of course, we're not as close as it looks. That's as seen through an imaging system. But you're looking at Sol, the genuine article, with realistic colors and surface features."

Sol transformed-by nature, or human activities?

"Did you make it that way?""Not at all." Tom was lighting his pipe again, and his presence was revealed only by a dull red glow that waxed and waned. "We could have done it, but we didn't. Natural stellar evolution made the change."

Sol had been transformed by time, from the warm star that Drake had known into a brooding stranger. He had learned enough over the millennia to understand some of the implications. Tom Lambert had answered one of Drake's questions without saying a word. The change of the Sun from the G-2 dwarf star of their own day to a red giant required five billion years or more of stellar evolution. Sol had now depleted most of its store of hydrogen, and was relying for energy on the fusion of helium and heavier elements.

"What happened to the planets? I don't see them at all."

"Not enough natural reflected light. But I can highlight them for you." The field of view changed as Tom spoke, backing off from the Sun. Brighter flashes of light appeared on each side of the glowing ball of orange. "That's Jupiter." One light began to blink more urgently. "And that's Saturn, and Uranus, and Neptune."

"Uranus used to have its own fusion reaction. Jupiter, too."

The glowing pipe bowl moved in the darkness, as Tom shook his head. "Long gone. Those couldn't be more than short-term fixes, given the limited fusion materials."

"What about the inner planets? What about Earth? Can you show me them?"

"No. Sol's red giant phase is a hundred times its old radius, two thousand times the old luminosity. If Earth had remained in its original orbit it would have been incinerated, just like Venus. Mercury was swallowed up completely.

Don't worry about Earth, though, it still exists. The singularity sphere has been removed, and it is more like the Earth that you knew of old. But it was moved far away, along with Mars. There's no point in looking for it"-Drake had unconsciously been turning his head to scan the sky-"you'll never see it from our present location. If you like I can show you the Moon. We left that behind."

Far away. How far away? What would a human (if there were still such a thing as a living, flesh-and-blood human) see today, looking upward from the surface of that distant Earth?

" 'I had a dream which was not all a dream.' " Drake muttered the words as they welled up in his mind. " 'The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.' "

"Sorry?" Tom's voice was puzzled. "I don't quite grasp what you're getting at."

"Not my thoughts. Those of a writer dead before we were born. Don't worry about me, Tom, I'm not losing it. Let's keep going."