The Future We Wish We Had

WAITING FOR JULIETTE by Sarah A. Hoyt

It was the first summer of the twenty-first century, and I was looking for a way to forget.

The sanctuary had looked good two hours ago, from the other end of Denver. It had looked like sweet respite wrapped up in what the doctor ordered. Here, up close and personal, from the corner of Colfax and oblivion, it didn’t seem like such a sure bet.

I should have gone straight to the sanctuary. I’d made an appointment. But the impenetrable brick facade with no windows and only one broad door, the word Sanctuary painted in a discreet shade of gray above it, had looked too much like the entrance to the tomb.

And I’d detoured to the diner across the street, where I sat, drinking cheap coffee, while the afternoon shadows elongated on the sidewalk, and the solar street lights flickered hesitantly on.

The problem was a girl. Her name was Juliette Jones. Mine was Romeo Smith. You could say it was destiny. I say it was proof that someone up there had a sense of humor. A nasty one.

“What will it be, honey?” the waitress asked, taking the order pad out of her apron pocket.

“Just… coffee,” I said.

“Come on,” she said. “You need something more. That coffee will eat your stomach lining if you don’t get some food to go with it. The souvlaki is good.”

I considered telling her I couldn’t eat because I was going into the sanctuary. But that wasn’t even true. They’d told me they didn’t care much what I did, provided I was neither drunk nor drugged. In full command of my faculties, in fact.

Of course, I hadn’t slept in two days. I rubbed my hand across my face to chase away the spiderwebs that seemed to veil my vision. But sleep deprivation didn’t count. “Yeah, the souvlaki will do,” I said, trying to shut her up as much as anything else.

And I tried to think through my predicament, with a brain that didn’t seem disposed to do anything much.

Don’t make jokes. We’ve heard them all. I suppose I’d have heard the jokes long before meeting Juliette, while working at the moon-launch-pad in Denver. Only I was born and raised on Luna. Mom was a romantic; Dad indulged her. And when they both died in the Tycho disaster, I was brought up in a Luna city orphanage-where no one knew enough about Shakespeare to make a single joke.

They called me Rom, guy, or hey you until it became clear my grades were good enough for a scholarship to Earth’s space center. And then they called me ours. Not that they wanted to keep me; rather, they wanted to flaunt me.

By the time I finished my space medicine degree, with honors, I was known as the Luna City Kid and people I’d never heard of were sending me gifts from Lunaward. I was their boy who made good.

And then I met Juliette. OK. No enmity of houses. But she was from old Earth money. And she’d trained to be an astronaut. Heck, her mom had her enhanced in womb to improve her chances of being an astronaut. She was the best of the best. And she was going to be the first woman on Mars. And then when she came back we were going to get married.

I swilled a bit more of the coffee and frowned at the street outside, at the sanctuary with its blank facade.

The waitress put a souvlaki platter in front of me, and I ate a couple of fries.

There were no passerby that I could see, only a lone car now and then. And yet people trickled into the diner, workmen from the nearby warehouses, students, cops.

They sat around the tables and talked. Fries whooshed into the deep fryer. Hamburgers hissed on the grill.

Perhaps I didn’t need to cold-sleep. I eyed the entrance to the sanctuary. Perhaps I could get over it in the normal way. Surely people would stop talking about it eventually. Surely…

The eight o’clock moon ship roared overhead, and the windows of the diner rattled. Someone turned on the TV.

And there, in grainy color, the capsule was flaming on reentry. It was supposed to flame. They’d told us it would happen. What they hadn’t told us about was the complete loss of communications-the capsule splashing into the sea, sinking, sinking. And nothing, nothing at all. Twenty-four hours of nothing. Before even the most optimistic had to admit everyone on board was dead.

Shocked, I looked at the replay of the scene that I saw behind my eyelids every time I closed my eyes. I was too far away to hear the words, but I didn’t need to. All around me, the working-class people who frequented the diner were talking, buzzing with sympathy, with horror.

“All dead.”

“Tragic.”

“Great loss.”

The tube changed, flickered. A picture of Juliette flashed up-red hair neatly caught into a braid at her back, her dark brown eyes-smiling. I stared at it, feeling my eyes swim with tears.

“First woman on Mars,” a woman at the next table said, and sighed.

“They say they’re going to name the next expedition after her,” a man said further on.

“Very pretty,” another man said.

“I hear she was engaged to be married,” said his girl.

And I realized my nails had bit into my hands so hard they’d left half-circles of blood. I needed to get over it. I needed to go on.

Juliette and I had been together for years. I couldn’t look at anything anywhere around and not see her. We’d walked every street in Denver. The moon launchpad base was our normal workplace. All our friends knew about the engagement. I’d already received more than my share of condolences. And they would go on.

“Here’s your bill,” the waitress said. And then, as I looked down at the slip of paper she’d dropped on the greasy table, “Oh my.”

I looked up. She was staring at the TV, at the image that filled the screen. The picture of Juliette and me that had been used to announce our engagement in the paper.

“You’re him,” she said. “No wonder you look so tired. I’m sorry, honey.”

It would go on like this. Our story had captured enough imaginations. “Orphanage kid to marry Earth heiress” was a surefire eye grabber. And now, in the biopics, the stories played out over the next half century. Everyone would see those pictures, hear that story.

Total strangers would give me their condolences and speak in hushed tones around me. I would never be free to live my own life as anything but the fiancé of a dead space exploration hero. Even any other girlfriends I might have would know. I would never be able to forget.

“It’s okay,” I told the waitress, my mind finally made up, and I dropped the money on the table. “I’ll feel better after a sleep.”

She nodded sympathetically and I walked across the street and into the sanctuary.

Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. Not cheerful pink walls, decorated with the sort of inspirational posters that turn most office buildings into veritable madhouses of positive thinking.

There were children flying kites and women running atop gently sloped hills against improbably sunny skies. Sitting on the sofa upholstered in a white fabric, I read all the posters. Sleep away your cares. Gone today; back tomorrow. The future is better.

“Mr. Smith?” a pale blond woman with sweet features called. I got up.

She shook my hand. “I’m Elizabeth Ryes, your counselor,” she said, and in the adjoining office-painted in pale blue and furnished with two chairs upholstered in robin’s-egg blue-she proceeded to question me. “You will pardon me,” she said. “But you seem too young and healthy to be doing this.”

“I thought it was volitional,” I said. “Provided one had the money to pay for the sleep-and I do-and wanted to sleep, one was allowed to.”

She smiled, the smile of an angel faced with a mad-man. “It is that,” she said. “But the sanctuary doesn’t wish to be exposed to lawsuits. So I verify that you’re not doing this on the spur of the moment and for no good cause.”

“Lawsuits?”

“Your mom, your dad, your girlfriend, any of them could sue us.”

It hit too close to home. I sucked in breath like a man drowning and then I said, “They’re all dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Accident? Recently?”

“My parents died in the Tycho accident in sixty-eight,” I said.

“And your girlfriend?” She had the blank look of someone too young for the Tycho accident to mean anything. The hundreds of people dead when the dome cracked, the public mourning, all of it would have happened when she was still in diapers. More than twenty-five years ago. Ancient history.

Which is what I was counting on.

And in the next second, she looked up, looked at my face as though seeing it for the first time, and her hand went up to cover her mouth. “Juliette Jones,” she said. “You’re her fiancé. That’s why you looked familiar.”

I nodded. It was then very easy to explain why I couldn’t stay in this time. How the emotional wound was a half of it; the other half the fact that it would blight my whole life.

She signed all the papers and accompanied me to the first step of the procedure-to the room where they anesthetized me, preparing my body to sleep for fifty years-to be on the safe side.

I was holding her hand as the IV started dripping soporific into my veins, and my eyes weighed down. I took the image of her blonde loveliness with me into sleep. When I woke up, that little oval face, looking down at me with sympathetic anguish, would be lined and sagging. She would be a grandmother.

The first question I asked when they woke me-after the long period in which I couldn’t talk at all-was, “Do you remember Juliette Jones?”

The slim, dark-haired young woman who had been massaging my shoulders-while I lay on my stomach on the heated bed, enduring one of the many days of conditioning that would be needed before I was restored to normal life-wrinkled her pretty forehead and said, “Who?” Then, after about thirty seconds, “Isn’t she that new sensie star? Didn’t she play Margaret in Vina Does Venus?”

And I knew I was safe. I endured the next two weeks in quiet calm. Oh, sleeping away fifty years didn’t make the memory of Juliette more distant, or make me miss her less. Only now, no one around me knew who she was.

I mean, she was in the history books as first female to walk on Mars. I checked. But she was not the first human-that distinction belonged to Joseph McDonald-and if she came up at all it was as the bonus credit question on a test, or a bit of interesting trivia.

I would be able to heal here. I would be able to survive. I received subconscious updating for society manners and morals, read the medical journals voraciously, and prepared to return to college to learn the other stuff they’d discovered while I slept.

There were colonies on Mars now. And not one but two artificial cities in space, one orbiting the Earth and one orbiting the moon. You could call the moon using some technology I didn’t understand, and you wouldn’t know you weren’t talking to your aunt upstate.

It was a brave new world, and I was dying to discover it.

The day I was discharged, they handed me my personal effects-my suit, now fifty years out of date but, if I was lucky at all, perhaps retro chic, and my ATM card, which gave me access to an account that had grown wildly as I slept. And a letter. Sealed.

My heart flopped in my chest at the handwriting. My name on the front. Hers on the back. Juliette Jones.

It was a mistake. It had to be a mistake. Perhaps a letter she’d written me before leaving for Mars? Or a letter she’d left with her mother, in case something happened.

But the first line of the letter disabused me. Dear Romeo, it said. The sanctuary won’t tell me how long you signed up to sleep. I only managed to trace the sanctuary and that you signed up for sleep with the help of a detective. They wouldn’t even admit to that. They cite privacy rules. You’re probably very surprised to read this. I know we were declared dead and were publicly mourned for two weeks before it was found out the sensors were wrong. We came down blind and without instruments, it’s true, but we didn’t sink. And we managed to get out and swim to a nearby island. Which only made it harder to find us.

I wish I could be mad at you, but I heard what it was like-with the entire country wallowing in a grief fest. I understand what that must have been like after all the public mourning for your parents.

And yet, the fact remains that I can’t marry you while you’re in cold sleep. And I really don’t want to marry anyone else. So, when I finish writing this, I’m going to go in and sign up for cold sleep for a hundred years. I figure you won’t have chosen to sleep that long, but when you wake they’ll give you this letter. And then you can go in for however long your need to wake up at the same time I do. And then we can get married.

She’d signed with a little heart. But my own heart sank. Another fifty years before I could see her.

And yet, if I went back in, I could sleep those years away as though they were nothing.

Without bothering to put my suit back on, still in the hospital gown-and how come fifty years later the hospital gowns still left your behind uncovered?-I trudged out one door and around the building to the front again.

The diner across the street was still going, I saw. I wondered if the clientele was still of the same type, but I had no wish to check it out.

Inside the sanctuary the decor had changed. The front room now had been painted in bright yellow and was upholstered in something dun that looked like beanbag chairs but which-from what I’d seen in the sensies from my recovery bed-was actually a biological chair of some sort. It was supposed to warm you and accommodate you.

I wasn’t prepared to sit on living things, so I stood, moving from foot to foot.

Some things don’t change, not in fifty years. Possibly never. Another blond counselor-who could be the other woman’s granddaughter-came out to meet me, led me gently inside and demanded to know why I’d sign up to sleep again, right after being awakened.

I showed her Juliette’s letter. “She was presumed dead when I went to sleep,” I said. “That’s why I went to sleep. Till people stopped talking about it.”

She tilted her head sideways. “I see. And you’re sure you want to cold sleep again till she wakes?”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course.” The idea of Juliette being awakened and my being an old, wrinkled man was unbearable. Even worse, the idea of my trying to live a normal life, trying to marry and raise a family while I knew that Juliette was asleep and waiting for me was ridiculous.

“I want to be awakened when she is,” I said.

“Well, that is a problem,” the counselor answered. She’d been fidgeting with a computer while she spoke and now frowned at the screen. “You see, she didn’t leave us permission to tell anyone when she’d wake. It’s possible she didn’t know, or considering that there seems to have been a media furor around her at that time, she might have thought someone would be here the day she woke up. So we don’t know when exactly she’ll wake.”

It didn’t matter. Two or three days either way didn’t make a difference. Or two or three months. That much we could afford to lose. I thought I’d sleep another fifty years, but add another six months, as she had. On the principle that she would get a note from me when she woke, and then know when to wait for me.

I calculated the date painstakingly and wrote a note, which I sealed and handed to the counselor. Juliette would get my note when she woke up. And she would know exactly the date when I’d wake.

She could be there waiting for me.

I fell asleep feeling much better than I had last time.

And woke up alone.

Through the almost twenty-four hours when I couldn’t talk, I chomped at the bit, wondering where Juliette was. Had I miscalculated? Or had she changed her mind?

In a fever of expectation I waited, till I could ask, “Isn’t there a lady waiting for me? A Juliette Jones?”

The nurse who’d been adjusting my IV shook her head. Then she gasped, and her hand went to her mouth. “Juliette?” she asked. “Jones?”

She touched something on the side of my bed, and images-3D images-formed at the foot, floating in midair.

It was like a TV screen without the TV or the screen. And it was showing a blue vehicle erupting into flames.

“It was the first extrasolar expedition,” the nurse said. “They think the quantum engine malfunctioned on return to the solar system. It… exploded.”

I felt as if I were living a nightmare. They said you didn’t dream in cold sleep, but I wondered if it was true. This could not be happening again. Juliette could not be dead-again.

“Everyone died?” I asked, with a sinking feeling.

“Oh, no,” the nurse said. “Oh, no. They saved them all. But the injuries… You know, we don’t think they’ll be able to live till the regeneration of tissues is more advanced. It’s still in its infancy, just now.”

“So they’ll die.”

She looked at me as if I were insane. She had eyes the same molten-chocolate color as Juliette’s. “Of course not. They’ve been put into cold sleep till the technology can be developed.”

Ah. Cold sleep. “And how long do you think that will be?” I asked.

“Ten years or so.”

On the way down to restart the process-the nurse insisted on wheeling me, or rather propelling me in a chair that hovered three feet off the ground-the nurse told me Juliette had awakened six months ago and, once she was in shape again, had been accepted for the first extrasolar expedition. She was to be, the nurse said, the first cold-sleeper to go to space.

They wouldn’t let me see her, of course. I made my painful calculations. Perhaps science would be slower than we expected. I would allow twenty years.

“Is there any way to let her know exactly when I’ll awake?” I asked. “Can you let her know?”

“Only if it’s reciprocal,” the counselor said. She brought up what looked like tri-dimensional letters writhing in midair in front of her face.

“But she was put in cold sleep for medical reasons,” I said.

“She was conscious when she came in.” The woman looked at the computer some more.

Why would it be reciprocal, I wondered. I tried to imagine Juliette wounded, suffering. Only the greatest of loves would remember me in those circumstances. We’d pursued each other through time, but would we ever meet again?

“Oh, there it is,” the counselor said. “She has asked that if you go into cold sleep you ask to be awakened when she is.”

“And is that possible?”

“It is if both consent,” the woman-who could be a clone of the first counselor-said. And she handed me something.

It was a small note. It said, Dear Romeo, I’m writing this on paper-though they all think I’m crazy-because I want you to have something to hold onto when you go back in to wait for me. I asked this time that you be awakened when I am. We will meet again.

Two hours later, I was falling asleep with her note clutched in my hand. It was the winter of 2100 and I had not the slightest intention of forgetting.

I would meet my love again when I woke up.