4: WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES

February–March 2069

Bisesa was glad to get out of the sleep facility itself. It stank of the bad-egg hydrogen sulphide they used to stop your organs taking up oxygen.

In the hospital, it took the doctors three days to put her blood back into her veins, to persuade her organs to take up oxygen, and to get her through enough basic physiotherapy that she could walk with a Zimmer frame. She felt unutterably old, older than her forty-nine biological years, and she was wasted too, a famine victim. Her eyes were particularly prickly and sore. She suffered odd vision defects, even mild hallucinations at first. Also she had the unpleasant sense that she smelled of her own urine.

Well, for nineteen years she had had no pulse, no blood, no electrical activity in her brain, her tissues had consumed no oxygen, and she had been held in a fridge almost cold enough to rupture her cells. You had to expect to be a bit sore.

Hibernaculum 786 had changed while she had been in the tank. Now it felt like an upmarket hotel, all glass walls and white floors and plastic couches, and old, old people—at least they looked old—in dressing gowns, walking very tentatively.

Most drastically of all the Hibernaculum had been moved. When she got to a viewing window, she found herself overlooking an immense wound in the ground, a dusty canyon with strata piled up in its scree-littered walls like the pages of a tremendous book. It was the Grand Canyon, she learned, and it was a spectacular sight—rather wasted on the sleepers in the Hibernaculum, she thought.

She found it disturbing in retrospect that the complicated refrigerator within which she had slept her dreamless sleep had been disconnected, uprooted, and shipped across the continent.

As her convalescence continued she took to sitting before a bubble window, peering out at the canyon’s static geological drama. She had made only one tourist-trip visit to the canyon before. Judging by the way the sun cycled through the spring sky she must be on the south rim, perhaps somewhere near Grand Canyon Village. The local flora and fauna seemed to have recovered from the global battering of the sunstorm; the land was littered with cacti, yucca, and blackbush. In her patient watching she spotted a small herd of bighorn sheep, and glimpsed the slinking form of a coyote, and once she thought she saw a rattlesnake.

But if the canyon had recovered, much else seemed to have changed. On the eastern horizon she made out a kind of structure, a flat metallic array raised on legs, like the framework of an uncompleted shopping mall. Sometimes she saw vehicles driving around and under it. She had no idea what it could be.

And sometimes in the sky she saw lights. There was one bright, moving spark, panning over the southern evening sky in forty minutes or so: something big in orbit. But there were odder sights to be seen, much more extensive: pale patches in the blue daylight, glimmerings of swimming starlight at night. A strange sky in this new age. She thought she ought to be curious, or possibly afraid, but at first she was not.

That all changed when she heard the roar. It was a deep rumble that seemed to make the very ground shudder, more geological than animal.

“What was that?”

“Bisesa? You asked a question?”

The voice was smooth, male, a little too perfect, and it came out of the air.

“Aristotle?” But she knew it could not be, even before he answered.

There was an odd delay before he replied. “I’m afraid not. I am Thales.”

“Thales, of course.”

Before the sunstorm there had been three great artificial intelligences on the human worlds, remote descendants of the search engines and other intelligent software agents of earlier technological generations, and all of them friends of mankind. There were rumors that copies of them had been saved, as streams of bits squirted off into interstellar space. But otherwise only Thales had survived the sunstorm, stored in the simpler networks of the sturdy Moon.

“I’m glad to hear your voice again.”

Pause. “And I yours, Bisesa.”

“Thales—why these response delays? Oh. Are you still lodged on the Moon?”

“Yes, Bisesa. And I am restricted by lightspeed delay. Just like Neil Armstrong.”

“Why not bring you down to Earth? Isn’t it kind of inconvenient?”

“There are ways around it. Local agents can support me when time delay is critical—during medical procedures, for instance. But otherwise the situation is deemed satisfactory.”

These responses sounded rehearsed to Bisesa. Even scripted. There was more to Thales’s location on the Moon than he was telling her. But she didn’t have the spark to pursue the matter.

Thales said, “You asked about the roar.”

“Yes. That sounded like a lion. An African lion.”

“So it was.”

“And what is an African lion doing here, in the heart of North America?”

“The Grand Canyon National Park is now a Jefferson, Bisesa.”

“A what?”

“A Jefferson Park. It is all part of the re-wilding. If you will look to your right….”

On the horizon, beyond the north rim, she saw blocky shapes, massive, like boulders on the move. Thales caused the window to magnify the image. She was looking at elephants, a herd of them complete with infants, an unmistakable profile.

“I have extensive information on the park.”

“I’m sure you have, Thales. One thing. What’s the structure over there? It looks like scaffolding.”

It turned out to be a power mat, the ground station of an orbital power station, a collector for microwaves beamed down from the sky.

“The whole facility is rather large, ten kilometers square.”

“Is it safe? I saw vehicles driving around underneath it.”

“Oh, yes, safe for humans. Animals too. But there is an exclusion zone.”

“And, Thales, those lights in the sky—the shimmers—”

“Mirrors and sails. There is a whole architecture off Earth now, Bisesa. It’s really quite spectacular.”

“So they’re building the dream. Bud Tooke would have been pleased.”

“I’m afraid Colonel Tooke died in—”

“Never mind.”

“Bisesa, there are human counselors you can speak to. About anything you like. The details of your hibernation, for instance.”

“It was explained to me before I went into the freezer…”

The Hibernacula were a product of the sunstorm. The first of them had been established in America before the event, as the rich sought to flee through the difficult years ahead to a time of recovery. Bisesa hadn’t entered hers until 2050, eight years after the storm.

“I can talk you through the medical advances since your immersion,” Thales said. “For example it now appears that your cells’ propensity for hydrogen sulphide is a relic of a very early stage in the evolution of life on Earth, when aerobic cells still shared the world with methanogens.”

“That sounds oddly poetic.”

Thales said gently, “There is the motivational aspect as well.”

She felt uncomfortable. “What motivational aspect?…”

She had had reasons to flee into the tanks. Myra, her twenty-one-year-old daughter, had married against Bisesa’s advice, and pledged herself to a life off the Earth entirely. And Bisesa had wanted to escape the conspiracy-theory notoriety that had accrued about her because of her peculiar role in the sunstorm crisis, even though much of what had gone on in those days, even the true cause of the sunstorm, was supposed to have been classified.

“Anyhow,” she said, “going into a Hibernaculum was a public service. So I was told when I signed over my money. My trust fund went to advance the understanding of techniques that will one day be used in everything from transplant organ preservation to crewing centuries-long starship flights. And in a world struggling to recover after the storm, I had a much lower economic footprint frozen in a tank—”

“Bisesa, there is a growing body of opinion that Hibernaculum sleeping is in fact a sort of sublimated suicide.”

That took her aback. Aristotle would have been more subtle, she thought. “Thales,” she said firmly. “When I need to speak to someone about this, it will be my daughter.”

“Of course, Bisesa. Is there anything else you need?”

She hesitated. “How old am I?”

“Ah. Good question. You are a curiosity, Bisesa.”

“Thanks.”

“You were born in 2006, that is sixty-three years ago. One must subtract nineteen years for your time in the Hibernaculum.”

She said carefully, “Which leaves forty-four.”

“Yet your biological age is forty-nine.”

“Yes. And the other five years?”

“Are the years you spent on Mir.”

She nodded. “You know about that?”

“It is highly classified. Yes, I know.”

She lay back in her chair, watched the distant elephants and the shimmering sky of 2069, and tried to gather her thoughts.

“Thank you, Thales.”

“It’s a pleasure.” When he fell silent there was a subtle absence in the air around her.