TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

Expansion of a novella, ``At the Eschaton'' (in Far Futures, ed. Gregory Benford, 1995), about composer Drake Merlin's obsessive desire for the company of his wife, Ana. Diagnosed with an incurable and terminal illness, Ana's been frozen in liquid helium to await a day when she can be revived and cured. Still young and healthy, Drake joins her. He wakes in the 26th century, but Ana's illness remains incurable, so he steals her away from the storage vaults on Pluto and heads—relativistically—off into space, returning after centuries have passed. On the journey, however, Drake foolishly opens Ana's capsule for an instant—and finds that she's dead beyond hope of revival. Only at the eschaton, a point in the remotest future when all is collapsing and all possible knowledge becomes available, might Ana's personality be recovered. As an electronic download, Drake's mentality might survive that long; and so, after various adventures—including an alien invasion that makes no sense whatsoever—more than 50 billion years hence, Drake's reunited with his beloved Ana and escapes with her into another universe. Mind-boggling cosmological extrapolations from the author of The Ganymede Club (1995), etc., but nothing much else here adds up.