“We will come to the question of scientific progress in due course. For the moment, we judge it best for you to begin with something familiar. Your Servitor will show you around the solar system. Then it will be time for us to talk again.”

“I don’t want a stupid tour of the solar system. Last time, that made me feel worse. I’m interested in people, not planets. I want to know what changes in the past fourteen million years might affect Ana’s return.”

Drake leaned forward, ready to argue. He was given no chance to do so. With one final wave of his hand, Ariel vanished; in the same moment, Drake was on board a ship.

Although Drake’s frozen body remained in the cryowomb, the illusion that he had been reanimated was quite perfect. He and Milton seemed to be traveling together in a real ship, its motion and progress constrained by the laws of dynamics and solar system geometry. He experienced real hunger and fatigue. After eighteen or twenty hours of subjective wakefulness, he would begin to yawn and feel the need for sleep.

It was the new solar system that seemed to lack reality.

They had begun close to the Sun, where the familiar, steady beacon offered constancy and comfort. A few million years were nothing within the lifetime of a G-class star. It had looked down on Drake’s birth, and it would probably look down unchanged on his final death, whenever that might be.

But unlike his birth, final death would not take place on Earth. Drake had stared from the ship’s ports unmoved as they swept out past the hot cinder of Mercury and the garden world of Venus, with its blue-white atmosphere, placid seas, and sculpted continents. The transformation of the second planet might have been surprising and wonderful to those in Drake’s own time, but it had been predicted since the era of Par Leon; the transformation had been well underway during his last resurrection.

His interest was focused on Earth long before they arrived there. The near-disastrous environmental runaway whose consequences he had seen on his last visit had lasted a few tens of thousands of years, but that was a mere blip on the long scroll of Earth’s history. Ana had assured him that the correction was made. She had been sure that a similar mistake would never be allowed again.

So what would the home world have become, after so many millions of years of habitation and development?

As they drew closer, Drake looked and looked again. Something was wrong, but what was it?

The Earth-Moon doublet was growing in the ship’s displays. The proportions were right, Earth’s disk bulking more than ten times the area of its satellite; but the colors were peculiar. The smaller world was an angry red tinged with yellow smears. The larger one, instead of the familiar blue gray of Earth, gleamed a dull and mottled white that was naggingly suggestive and familiar.

He stared hard at that pale orb. The perspective shift took place within his mind.

“That big one’s the Moon, the markings are changed but it has just the right color! But then where’s Earth? Unless it was changed to look like the Moon, and the Moon… Milton, I know this is a simulation. Does this represent reality, or are you playing tricks?”

The Servitor was at his side. It had spoken little since the journey began, but now the response was immediate. “It is not a simulation in the usual sense. It is a representation. By which I mean, although our whole journey is in derived reality, what you are seeing exactly matches the physical solar system, as it exists today.”

“What happened to Earth?”

“It is easier to say why than what. As we told you, while you were in cryosleep another direction was three times taken by humanity. In two of those, technology was ignored. In the third, it took a leap that even now we do not understand. The center of that new technology was Earth. One day, without warning, Earth collapsed to a fraction of its old size. Its surface closed. Its mass remained unchanged.”

“It collapsed while it was still inhabited?”

“Correct.”

Drake gazed in horror on the shrunken red- and yellow-smeared orb. “So everyone and everything on Earth was killed?”

“We think not. We believe that in some form everything on Earth has survived. Space within has been folded, and we believe that on the interior there was no collapse. We have no direct proof of this, since even after a million Earth years, no one has managed to penetrate the sphere that you see. It emits its own radiation, but it remains impermeable to everything from outside. Sometimes we see changes, occasionally there are what look like planet-wide lightning storms. Our best theory is that the sphere is constantly maintained by a single entity within it, a supermind combination of organic and inorganic intelligence.

“Of perhaps greater consequence to the rest of the solar system, at the time of Earth’s collapse and closure the planet was the central repository of all solar system data banks. Their loss had a profound effect on human development — even on human sanity. Everyone was suddenly deprived of a vital group memory and a species cohesive force. The process of reconstruction was begun, from partial databases elsewhere, but it was slow, uncertain, and imperfect. After Earth’s closure, every person in the Pluto cryowombs was revivified. Their memories assisted in the re-creation of the oldest historical records.”

In Drake, that information produced a feeling of bitter irony. He had been wrong, totally and hopelessly wrong. He had argued, back in the quiet suburban house while the children were noisy upstairs and Tom Lambert sat pale-faced

before him, that his own sacrifice was necessary. Without his help, Ana would never be resurrected. In fact, every long shot placed in Second Chance had paid off; even the “useless” ones, whom he had thought no one would bother to revive.

Instead of freezing himself he should have followed Tom Lambert’s advice, and lived out his life. Better yet, instead of fleeing from Pluto he should have placed himself with Ana in the cryowombs there. They would have been resurrected together, to live the rest of their lives with each other.

Instead…

“I said, everyone was revivified,” the Servitor continued. “That was of course not quite true. You alone, because I was armed with your specific instructions on your resurrection, were exempt.”

“I am conscious now, even if I am not resurrected.”

“True. We will come to that question in due course. But now, do you wish to go closer to Earth, for sentimental reasons?” The Servitor’s wiry broom of sensors turned toward Drake. “Even were we not in derived reality, it would be quite safe to go to Earth. There has never been interference with an approaching ship, not even ones that have landed upon the impenetrable outer surface. They are simply ignored.”

“That isn’t Earth, no matter what you call it.” Drake turned his back on the displays. “Take me away. There’s nothing for me here.”

Nothing for him, perhaps, anywhere in the solar system. That thought grew stronger as they flew outward from the Sun. It was not a problem of physical changes, which were substantial: Jupiter, glowing dully like a dying ember, flooding its satellites with abundant infrared radiation; the rings of Saturn, gone; Uranus like a miniature second sun illuminating the outer system; Neptune, vanished; Pluto basking in new heat to the point where nitrogen was a liquid on its surface and the cryowomb containing Drake and Ana — and only Drake and Ana — had been moved far out to a cooler location.

More important than all those were the changes that could not be seen. When Drake heard the words “fourteen million years” he had not at first thought through the implications. The news that everyone else in the cryowombs had been resurrected brought the understanding that he had become what he had once most feared: a living fossil, a creature from the remote past. Nothing he knew or was could interest anyone in this far future. Even the cryowombs themselves were an anachronism. Drake owed his own and Ana’s continued existence in cryosleep only to Milton’s literal, persistent, and conscientious mind.