“You have a powerful imagination, Drake. Imagine this. Imagine resurrecting somebody who proves to be a money-hungry fanatic — someone who was once very rich, expects to be rich now, and hopes to receive special

treatment simply because of that. Such people almost surely know nothing of interest to us. How could they be anything but miserable today?”

“You’re saying it’s becoming less and less likely that someone will be resurrected. So why are the cryowombs maintained?”

“What else can we do with them?” Ana shook her head in frustration. “The people in the wombs are legally dead, but because they can be resurrected we cannot think of them as dead. So what do we do? We do nothing, and pass the problem to our descendants.”

She was sitting in the pilot’s seat of a two-person ship, and now she stabbed at the control panel. “Don’t give us too much credit, Drake,” she said, as they lifted from Pluto’s craggy surface. “People haven’t changed at all. When it comes to making tough decisions, we’re no better now than we were in your time.”

People haven’t changed. Perhaps not, but other things certainly had. The evidence that Ana was both right and wrong began to appear as the ship cruised closer to the Sun. It was her idea to introduce Drake to the new solar system in a practical way, by visiting or passing close to every planet and major moon, then heading out for the remoter and less familiar region of the Oort Cloud. It had been Drake’s idea to use the small two-person ship, and leave their Servitors behind on Pluto until they returned.

Ana had also preferred a leisurely tour, one that would give them time to talk and Drake time to adjust. On their two-day journey to Neptune he decided that he was going to need all of it. Ana had stated that people had not changed. But what were people?

He had called for information about Neptune, and now he was staring at the three-dimensional image in the ship’s display. It showed a large silvery superspider, fourteen multijointed legs emerging from a smooth central ovoid. The object was described as an “inhabitant of Neptune.”

“What does it mean, ‘inhabitant’?” He turned for the fiftieth time to Ana for assistance. “That suggests I’m looking at something intelligent, something that lives on Neptune. I thought that was impossible.”

After the first few hours, he had stopped puzzling over the mysteries of language. Another sea change in communications technology had occurred since Par Leon’s and Trismon Morel’s time. The old languages, filled with their magical resonances of old times and beauties, still existed; but a new language, pruned of ambiguities and redundancies, had been created.

It was much preferred for factual transfers of information, and he and Ana were using it now. Misunderstanding in the new language, according to Ana, was almost impossible.

Maybe. But Drake, approaching communication with a context that was thirty thousand years out of date, suspected that he was coming perilously close.

“That’s a Neptune dweller all right.” Ana did not share his misgivings or confusion. “Of course, it’s not an organic form — we may have evolved organic forms by now that can survive on Neptune, but I don’t know what they are. That’s an inorganic form, and it operates deep enough in the Neptune atmosphere to be buoyant and mobile.”

“But it says there, male human.”

“Correct. That means it’s a fully human male intelligence, downloaded to a brain of inorganic form. If it were anything different, it would say ‘human-modified,’ or ‘human-augmented.’ ”

“How can you say a downloaded intelligence is human? That thing is nothing like a human.”

“That argument ended a long time ago. Or let’s just say, people gave up on it. Can you define a human? I know I can’t. It says it’s human, that Neptune dweller. That’s good enough for me.”

“But what happened to the original human being?”

“I don’t know. I expect he’s around somewhere close by — on the big moon, Triton, more than likely. Neptune has been developed in a very natural way. There are colonies of humans and machines on Triton, and even a few on Nereid, though that doesn’t have much to offer. The planet hardly needs human intelligence at all. There are plenty of Von Neumanns.” She laughed at the look on Drake’s face. “No, I don’t mean the downloaded person. He died before cryocorpses. Von Neumanns are just self-reproducing machines.”

“How many of them are on Neptune?”

“Millions? Billions? I have no idea. I doubt if anyone does, since they’re self-reproducing. They’re mining volatiles and collecting the rare heavier elements, and they manage very well on their own. The human Neptunians are not there for supervision. They have other reasons: to satisfy their curiosity, to experiment with extreme forms, or to maintain some privacy.”

Neptune has been developed in a very natural way. Drake, peering down through endless kilometers of hydrogen and helium atmosphere smudged with icy methane clouds, could see no evidence of development; but according to Ana and the ship’s information service, Neptune beneath those cloud layers swarmed with the spin-offs of human activity, with machines capable of independent activity like humans, and with humans that seemed more like machines.

He would call it anything but natural development.

He changed his mind when the ship flew on to their next port of call. Compared with Uranus, Neptune’s development was natural.

Something monstrous was happening to Uranus.

The major moons, except for little Miranda nearest to the planet, had gone. The ship swung into co-orbit with Miranda and circled Uranus for two full revolutions. The gas-giant world was marked with a pattern of bright spots, ninety-six of them evenly spaced around the flattened sphere of the planet.

“Nothing yet,” Ana said in reply to Drake’s question. “In another two thousand years or so, when the preparation work is all done, those will be the main nodes. The stimulated fusion program will begin. Uranus is too small to maintain its own fusion, so there will have to be continuous priming and pumping. They’ll move Miranda farther out, and do the fusion pumping from there.”

She spoke casually, as though the conversion of a major component of the solar system from planet to miniature star was a routine operation. And perhaps it was.

“What happened to all the other moons?” He could see fifteen listed in the ship’s data set, from tiny Cordelia, barely more than an orbiting mountain that shepherded the Uranus Epsilon ring, out to Titania and Oberon, good-sized worlds half as big as Earth’s Moon. Miranda was now the only survivor.

“Oh, they’re all right. They’ll be moved back eventually.” Again, the astonishing thing about Ana’s reply was her offhand manner. “Miranda couldn’t be moved, because it was needed. But the others must have been in the way for this phase of the work.’’

Drake stared out of the ports and wondered. Uranus had not been a promising candidate for life to begin with. It would become an impossible one when hydrogen fusion turned the whole world to incandescence.

The thought nagged at him: Why do such a thing, within the original home system of mankind? On those rare occasions in the old days when he thought about the far future, he had imagined Earth, together with all the other planets of the solar system, preserved as some kind of grand museum. Humanity might spread out across the Galaxy, but the home worlds would always be there. Preserved in pristine condition, they would remind people of their origins.

But what had made him believe that, when Earth itself had already provided such a different lesson? Humans had been changing Earth in a thousand ways for five thousand years: draining lakes, damming rivers, making deserts bloom, razing mountains, clearing forests. Why would they stop, simply because they had left Earth?