Your Ana is gone."

"She is gone. But gone where?"

"Drake Merlin, that is a meaningless question. It is like asking where the wind goes when it is no longer blowing, or where is the odor of a flower after the flower dies."

"It seems a meaningless question today. But it may not always be meaningless. You told me that I have an infinite number of choices. My choice is simple, and I say it again: I want to be placed in the Pluto cryowombs. Do I have that right?"

"You do." Trismon Sorel could not conceal his dismay and disappointment. "We cannot deny it to you. But I beg you to reconsider. You can return to cryosleep for as long as you choose, but when will you be awakened? In a century? In five?"

"I do not know. I want to leave this instruction with my freezing: Awaken me when new evidence comes into the data banks that seems relevant to the recreation of Anastasia's original personality. And not until then."

"It can be done. But I must be honest with you. I do not think such new evidence will ever appear. If you hope to sleep until your Ana can return, I believe that you will sleep forever."

You have everything to lose. You 're healthy, you 're productive, you 're at the height of your career. And you are asking me to throw all that away, to help you take the chance that someday, God knows when, you might--just might-be revived. Don't you see, Drake, I can't help you. Across a gulf of eight centuries, Tom Lambert's words reverberated in Drake's mind.

"I've heard that logic before," Drake said, "and it proved wrong. I will take that risk. It is smaller than risks that I have taken in the past. Can we begin . . . now?"

"If you insist." Trismon Sorel held up his hand. Drake was already rising from his seat. "But there is one thing more.

While we have been speaking, a group-mind meeting has been in progress involving every human within easy signal range. A conclusion has been reached. Your request will be granted, but with one condition: You do not go alone. You will have a companion for your travel into the future, just as each of us has a companion, to share our fortunes and to stand by our side through good and bad."

"I desire no woman in the cryowomb with me, other than my own Ana. And no man, either."

"We would condemn neither living man nor living woman to such an uncertain future. Your companion will not reside in the cryowombs. It will be a Servitor, designed for on-demand operation, exactly like my own Servitor." Trismon Sorel gestured to the little wheeled sphere with its metal whisk-broom head, waiting quietly at his side. "So long as you do not call upon its services, it will remain dormant and in communion with the data banks. When you need a companion or an assistant, it will be there to obey your commands."

Sorel stood up. "Come with me now. The preparations are already beginning for the cloning of Ana.

While that is proceeding, I will explain to you the endless virtues of the Servitor class. And you can decide on the appearance and name of your own personal model, to travel with you into the undiscovered country of the future."

Chapter 11.

The Return of Ana.

Drake woke quickly and easily, rising at once to full consciousness. He felt rested and full of energy, without pain or weakness. His immediate thought was that something had gone badly wrong. He was supposed to have descended into cryosleep. Instead he was awakening, as the effects of the first cryonic tranquilizing drug wore off.

He opened his eyes, expecting to see the cryolab facility and Trismon Sorel's face. Instead he found himself lounging at ease in a deep armchair. A woman with the strong features, raven hair, and dark complexion of a gypsy sat opposite.

She was watching him closely. When his eyes opened she nodded but did not speak.

"What happened?" His mouth was a little dry, but that was normal after sedation. "Why didn't I go into cryosleep?"

"And what makes you think you didn't?" She arched jet-black eyebrows at him. "Don't you believe in progress? The old barbarism of waking agony is long in the past. Today the thawing is no different from rising after a natural sleep."

She spoke not in Universal but in perfect English, unaccented and without pauses.

He glanced around him. His last waking sight had been of the cryolab, deep within the sterile interior of the Moon.

Now he was back on Earth, held to his chair by the familiar tug of a standard gravity. The room's long window faced out over a sandy beach and a restless ocean. It was windy outside. He could hear the gusts moaning around the outside of the building and see tiny sparks of sunlight reflecting from distant white-caps.

Suddenly, he knew exactly where he was. He and Ana, on one of their rare trips abroad, had worked together for a month in Italy. They had taken an extra two weeks of vacation after the assignment was over, and rented a small villa on the Sorrento Peninsula just south of Naples. He was there now. The restless sea that he was looking at was the Tyrrhenian Sea, part of the Mediterranean; the little island far to the west was Capri.

He even recognized the room and furniture of the villa.

Recognized it, after more than eight hundred years?

His moment of pleasure was swept away by fear. "How long?"

"I was hoping that we might postpone that question for at least a little while." The woman sighed. "I should have known better. All your records display a remarkable focus of attention. To answer your question, it has been rather a long time-much longer than I suspect you hoped. In your notation, this is the year 32,072. It is more than twenty-nine thousand years since you last descended into cryosleep."

Long enough, surely, for real progress in the reconstruction of his Ana.

But longer, also, than the whole of humanity's previous recorded history. Drake stared in disbelief. He had again tried to prepare his mind for anything, for any amount of change. And again he was surprised. The last thing that he expected was sameness. But the room he was sitting in was exactly as he remembered it. The scene outside was a pleasant day of late spring. The sun was high in the sky, and it must be close to noon. At any moment the villa's housekeeper would enter with an aperitif of sambuca, before serving lunch for him and Ana outside on the little paved terrace.

"It's not real, is it?" He gestured around him. "All this is an electronic simulation, designed for my benefit." A worse thought struck. "In fact, I'm not real, either. I've not been resurrected at all. I've been downloaded."

"Not true." The woman frowned reprovingly. "You have certainly been resurrected, and you are the real corporeal you, occupying your own revivified body. Although the capability exists to download a person to inorganic storage, this was not done in your case. It requires the consent of the individual, since once done it of course admits the possibility of multiple selves. However, you are right at least in part. The scene around you was synthesized from your own memories. It is being inserted for your comfort and convenience into your optic chiasma and other sensory afferent nerves-nonintrusively, I might add. The old indignities of body invasion disgust today's society."

"I don't find this either comforting or convenient. I want to know where I really am. I want my surroundings to be as they really are.""Very well." She paused. "Are you quite sure? We judged this synthesis to be the best way of minimizing cross-cultural shock."

"You were wrong. Get rid of all of it." Drake waved his arm at the room, the easy chairs, and the blue sea and sky beyond the long window.

"Very well. However, there is one other thing that you should know before you leave derived reality." The woman stared at Drake, her dark eyes troubled. "You are real flesh and blood. But I am not. I am a part of the synthesis, and I will disappear when it does."

She raised her hand in farewell.

"Wait a minute!" Drake found himself standing, on legs that shook with nervousness. "Don't go yet. I have to know.

Has there been progress in resurrecting Ana?"

"I am afraid that there has not. It is still considered an impossible problem."

"But I was supposed to remain in the cryowomb until there was hope of a new approach. Why am I awake?"

"I hear the question." The dark head nodded. "However, it is best answered by another. Good-bye, Drake Merlin."

She was gone. With her went the sunlit room and its pleasant prospect of a windswept ocean. Drake found himself recumbent on an adjustable bed surrounded by an array of unfamiliar machinery. The room was small, drab, and oddly shaped. Its octagonal walls bulged up to a multifaceted convex ceiling, across which crawled faint patterns like blue clouds. Earth's gravity had disappeared. His body was close to weightless. He felt that with a tiny effort he would become airborne, floating up to rest on that pale sky-ceiling.

Where was he? And why had he been awakened?

Trismon Sorel had assured him that his Servitor would accompany him everywhere, through space and time, and would be required to approve his resurrection. Drake stared around the room, seeking the wheeled form of the Servitor.

But then all questions of his location and condition vanished.

A woman waited in the narrow doorway.

It was Ana.

Ana, happy and blooming with health. She was standing exactly as he'd seen her a thousand times, head to one side and her mouth quirked into a question.

The moment of intense joy was blotted out by a terrible disappointment. This was another synthesis, more cruel than the last.

Drake tried to stand up, but instead he found himself rising straight into the air and turning end over end.

"Easy now." Ana was somehow at his side, steadying him. "I'm sorry, I ought to have waited until you had become accustomed to a low-gee environment."

"You are a synthesis-not real."

"That is not true."

"The dark-haired woman-the simulation of the woman-she said there had not been progress-"

"It spoke the truth." Ana had floated them back down, to sit side by side on the bed. "At least on that subject. There has been no progress in the problem that interests you."

"But you-you are here, you are alive." Again, the fear was there. Could a simulation be made to lie? "Aren't you?"

"I am indeed. But it is not the way you think it is." The gentle tone in Ana's voice was infinitely familiar. "Isn't it obvious to you who I am?"

"You are Ana."

"Yes. But I am not your Ana." She took him by the arm, and turned so that they were face-to-face. "Look at me. Can'tyou see the difference? I am the Ana to whom you gave life. I am the clone of your wife, the person grown from her cells by Trismon Sorel and his colleagues."

"But the other woman said it had been twenty-nine thousand years-have you been alive for so long?"

"Not continuously. That is not the custom." She laughed, and at the sound Drake felt his heart break. "Like most people, I choose short periods of wakeful-ness between long ones in hibernation-what you would call cryosleep.

Almost everyone is curious to know the future, to meet the future.

"And for twenty-nine thousand years, I have been curious to meet you. Each time I woke, I checked your condition in the cryowomb. Each time, before I went again to hibernation, I asked to be awakened should you waken."

"But I ought not to be awake now," Drake protested. "I was supposed to remain in cryosleep until the restoration of Ana's personality became possible. I gave those explicit instructions to my Servitor when I entered the cryotank."

Entered the cryotank-twenty-nine thousand years ago. Long enough for steel to rust and stone to crumble. Long enough for even the concept of a Servitor to have been lost. Long enough for hopes and thoughts and wishes to have been forgotten. It was folly to expect anything to endure over thirty millennia.

Except that some things had endured. Drake's own emotions had survived unchanged. He realized that he was delighted to be awake. To be sitting two feet away from Ana, watching the old expressions of thought and concern run across her face-that was infinite bliss.

"I am sorry." The new Ana bowed her head. "Your-Servitor is not at fault. Your awakening is my doing. I came to Pluto, and as a human, I overrode the instructions given by you to your Servitor." She frowned. "It says its name is Milton. An odd name for a Servitor."

"Not really." Drake felt a twinge of uneasiness at that comment, which he pushed aside. "Milton is the name that I gave it."

"In any case, I directed that you be reanimated."

"And I'm glad that you did." Drake reached out to embrace her, but she leaned away.

"No. I should have realized that this might happen. Let me try to explain." She stood up and drifted safely out of arm's reach. "You feel that you know me well, and more than well. But you do not actually know me at all; and I do not know you. Although I have gazed at your picture and listened to your voice a thousand times, you are a stranger to me.

When I first reached consciousness you were already in the cryowombs. As I grew older I learned everything that I could about you and your life. What you did-and tried to do-seemed to me the noblest and bravest thing in the whole universe. I cannot say how much I longed to see you, to speak to you, to thank you for giving me life. But despite that longing, through all past years I respected what you wanted. And I knew that you did not want me."

"I have never wanted anyone but you." "No. You want Ana-your Ana. I am Ana, yes, but I am a different person. I have my own memories, my own joys and sorrows, my own fears. You do not share them." She sighed. "Anyway, a few months ago I agreed to do something that I have been asked to do many times: to go away with friends on a long journey. We will fly out to the human colony on Rigel Calorans. I expect to be away for many thousands of Earth years. When I made that decision to leave the solar system for so long, I wondered: When I return, who knows where Drake Merlin might be? I could not bear the thought that I might never, ever, see you and know you. So I gave the command for resurrection." She gazed at Drake with those clear, gray eyes that he had known forever. "I did not think of what would come after that. I did not ask myself what pain I might cause you. I realize now that what I did was a selfish and an unforgivable act."

"You are wrong. It is forgiven already." "It may be forgiven by you, but it was nonetheless unforgivable. It was my plan to leave Pluto after speaking with you, and proceed to the edge of the Oort Cloud where the members of the Rigel Calorans expedition will assemble. I can no longer do that, at least at this time. I must respect your feelings. How can I atone for waking you against your will?"

"Stay with me." Drake did not say it, but his mind added the word forever.

"I certainly owe that to you." Ana smiled, with that familiar rueful downturn of one side of her mouth. "And now, like the self-serving wretch that I am, I will try to justify my own action in resurrecting you. There is a level of temporal shock after any hibernation, even if it is no more than a few hundred years. I have felt it many times; a reaction to changes in the world, in areas where no change was imagined and anticipated. In your case it has been nearly thirty millennia, and you were not prepared for it as we are. So I will take it as my task to lessen the blow of twenty-ninethousand vanished years." She reached out her hand, and her touch made him shiver. "Come along, Drake Merlin.

Your patient Servitor is waiting outside. It is most irritated that a mere irrational human would override your explicit instructions. Come along with me, and listen to my abject apologies."

Chapter 12.

"These were never your true love's eyes, Why do you feign that you love them?"

Ana's warning of temporal shock at first seemed greatly overstated. The evidence of human presence on Pluto was mostly the cryowombs. Drake could see little change in the wombs or the planet since his mad run from them, twenty-nine thousand years earlier.

"True enough." Ana had all her old calm and common sense. "On the other hand, this is Pluto. You can't do much without raising the temperature and disturbing the cryowombs, which no one wants to do. Almost everybody has ancestors stored here, even if they don't quite know who they are."

"How many have been resurrected?"

She grimaced. "I knew you would ask me that. The cryowombs still hold close to fifty thousand people. Fewer than five hundred of those have been revivified. None but you has been resurrected in the past twenty-five thousand years. You and Melissa Bierly are the only people to have entered the cryowombs twice, and been resurrected twice."

"Melissa. What happened to Melissa?" Drake saw again those sapphire eyes, blazing with madness.

"She was resurrected."

"Was she insane?"

"Once, she was. But she is cured."

"She's alive?"

"Very much alive. Still superhuman smart and healthy and intelligent, only now she's happy and no longer suicidal."

"You met Melissa?"

"Certainly." Ana smiled at Drake, with an expression that he read as totally loving. "You have your obsessions, Drake, you must permit me mine. I sought Melissa out originally, just because she knew you. We have talked about you, many times. She forms part of the expedition to Rigel Calorans. More than that-"

Drake interrupted: "But I thought that resurrection had become trivial, for anyone who was properly frozen. Why have so few been revived?"