Pluto again? One of the asteroids, or a moon of one of the bigger planets? Or somewhere totally new, out in the Oort Cloud or beyond? Or perhaps he was in derived reality, where anything was possible. The real question, as always, was when. How long had he been downloaded and dormant before entering his new body?

Something had appeared in his field of vision. It was a black, shiny, convex surface, ribbed with spokes that radiated from a central boss like the spokes of an open umbrella. It was small, not much bigger than an outstretched hand. And it was moving, inching its way down past his body.

He tried to speak, to ask a question in Universal. All that emerged was a gargling grunt. His throat felt filled with phlegm. He tried again, lifting his head and coughing out a single word: When?

No human was visible to answer him. Looking down the length of his naked body, he saw four more of the black umbrella objects crouched close by. He learned the source of the gentle prickling on his chest and belly. Dozens of tiny turquoise objects, hard-cased and articulated like small insects, were crawling busily over him. His movement and garbled attempt at speech aroused them to a frenzy of activity. They scurried down the sides of his body and vanished underneath the little arched umbrellas. He heard a louder sequence of excited hisses and clicks from the umbrellas themselves. They all lifted and began to walk on the ends of their spokes, away across the white, sticky membrane on which he was lying. The turquoise insects went with them, clinging to their undersides, or perhaps lodged inside the umbrella crawlers.

Drake realized that the whole surface on which he lay was only a few meters across. It was surrounded and covered by a hemispherical dome. The crawlers advanced to the dome’s edge, pushed against it, and slid easily through.

Drake was alone. And he had never felt more alone.

He summoned all his strength and managed to sit up. His pains had not disappeared, but they had become more localized. His hands and feet burned, with the pain of returning circulation. He lifted his right hand close to his face and studied it. It was his own hand, he recognized the familiar pattern of lines on the palm. But the skin was wrinkled, as though he had been immersed in water for a long time. The fingertips were blue-white and dead looking. When he pinched his forefinger between the thumb and fingers of his left hand, there was no sensation. He had feeling only in his palms and wrists — and that feeling was pain.

He could not stand, but he could crawl. On hands and knees he made his way to the edge of the little hemispherical room. He found that he could push his hand into and through the wall. Presumably he could push the whole of him through just as easily.

And go where?

Weakness was sweeping over him again, and he lay down on his stomach on the sticky floor. An awful conviction filled his mind. Nothing that he had seen was in any way familiar. Perhaps the strangest thing about his previous resurrection, fourteen million years beyond the time of his original birth, was not that so much had changed. It was that so much had been the same, that humans had endured, that something remained recognizable. At the time of his first freezing, true humans had been less than three million years old. How many million years would the species continue, in any form? And after humans, what? Perhaps machines were the inheritors — but machines so different from any that he had ever seen that he would not even know what they were. Machines, like the ones that he had seen creeping over his body.

He felt like staying where he was, closing his eyes, and giving up. But Melissa Bierly’s words, from long ago, would not permit that. “Keep your faith, Drake, and go on … somewhere, sometime, you will find Anastasia.”

There was a dark side to those words, one that he had never appreciated before. Assume that he had been downloaded because there was now a way to resurrect his Ana. Into what kind of future world would he be bringing her? It would be supremely selfish to pull Ana from her fermata of endless sleep, if the universe that he had to offer was so alien that pleasure and happiness were impossible.

Well, it was his job to find out. And it would not do to be a pessimist. Since he had been downloaded, no matter how far in the future he had come, the human information network of an earlier time must still exist. Other humans, in flesh or in electronic form, would also exist. They, like he, could be placed in a cloned form of their original body, whose genetic blueprint was stored with the contents of their minds and memories. So his problem would be to contact those humans, in whatever form they endured.

Drake sat up, cursing his own physical weakness. His heart was pounding. That was probably the air. It smelled strange, and he had to breathe faster than usual. He started again toward the wall of the room, determined this time to force his way through and see what lay on the other side. His head was pushing against the wall when a dozen of the little umbrella crawlers came in from the other side of the membrane. Their hissing and clicking reached a new level of excitement when they saw what he was doing. They bunched up in front of him, pushing at his hands and forearms. At first he resisted, but a dozen reinforcements came through the wall and added their efforts to the others. Each one was carrying a narrow section of transparent flexible sheet. One of them waved a piece urgently at Drake.

They were trying to tell him something. And since they had resurrected him, they were probably not intending to do him harm. He allowed himself to be shepherded to the middle of the hemisphere, and laid out flat on his back. Hundreds of the blue-green insectile objects emerged from the crawlers. They seized the flexible sheets and began to place them in position around his body. Where the edges met, the sheets formed a tight and invisible seal.

Drake finally knew what the blue-green workers were doing when a sheet was placed in position over his face. He reached up to tear it free of his mouth and nose, then realized that it left a couple of inches of free space there.

“A suit!” he gargled. “You making me a suit?”

He did not expect an answer. Now he understood the reason for the excitement when he tried to push his way through the wall of the room where he had been lying. Whatever was out there, he could not handle it without special protection. The crawlers knew it. Either they were intelligent themselves, or they were under the control of an intelligence. That intelligence would eventually tell him where he was, and how far into the future he had traveled.

He began to cooperate more actively, lifting his arms and legs so that the sheets could be placed into position. The turquoise workers moved faster, scuttling all around him to make a complete sheath around his body. Each finger, each toe, each ear, was precisely and individually wrapped. He was nervous when the last big piece went into place, sealing

off the back of his head and his access to the air in the room. The suit could hold only enough air for a few minutes. He told himself to relax. If they didn’t want him alive, why would they have resurrected him?

He noticed no change at all in his breathing. As an experiment he spoke again, through clotted and phlegm-filled vocal cords. “All right, what’s next?”

Apparently sound passed through his body sheath with no difficulty. The crawlers hummed and clicked in reply and retreated from him. The blue-green workers returned to them and disappeared through small apertures beneath the ends of the umbrella spokes. All the crawlers headed together for the wall of the room, and paused there.

Drake followed. This time there was no objection when he pushed against the sticky membrane. He forced his way through.