Larisse sits among the cryopods and plucks an angular melody from the strings of her chitarre. The bare concrete walls give the cryostasis room the acoustics of a concert hall. The tune is four hundred years old, the words a thousand.
“Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays” she sings
“Est Flora, la belle Romaine…”
Tell me where, in what land, is Flora, the Roman beauty? asked Francois Villon in medieval Paris. Where are Heloise, Beatrice, Blanche de Castille? It’s two in the morning, there’s nobody else on the night shift to hear; and Larisse sings Villon’s words for the woman who lies, frozen a few degrees above absolute zero, in the pod beside her. And you, Nina my love, where are you? she thinks, as her lips continue the song. Your body is here, but where have you gone?
“Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine
Qu’Anglois bruslerent a Rouen…”
The verse ends. Larisse falls silent, lets the last chord die away. Like Joan of Arc, burned by the English in Rouen, Nina had fought the extraterrestrial invaders with every fierce fibre of her being. She had come home safe from the Battle of Japan, all brash grin and crewcut. She’d survived Antarctica with only mild radiation poisoning. But she’d been flown home from the Second European Action in a medically induced coma, her lithe body so broken that the medics had offered no hope short of cryogenic stasis. Five years, they said, ten at the outside; nanotechnology improves every year, and soon we’ll be able to heal her. Weeping, Larisse signed the papers; and they froze sweet Nina and placed her in one of the cryostasis centres that were sprouting like mushrooms.
Weeks later, a bomb–Earth’s, the enemy’s, who knew?–destroyed the university where Larisse taught. The next day she packed her things, got on a train, and talked her way into a job as a guard here, where Nina waits to be healed. Outside, Earth’s devastated economy struggles to recover; wages are low, food is scarce, and electrical power unreliable. But Nina and her comrades await their day of return like King Arthur’s knights in Avalon, their pods powered by a near-immortal micronuke generator in the basement.
There is a noise out in the hall, feet, nervous voices. Intruders. Larisse silently lays her chitarre on the floor and takes up a wicked-looking laser gun. Slowly, she turns, aims the gun toward the door, and stands motionless.
Soon four people–three men and a woman, all stunted by malnourishment, probably none over twenty-five–tiptoe into the crypt. They carry crowbars and hacksaws: looters, after copper and steel. They’ve got nothing powerful enough to break through the heavy outer doors: somebody must have sold them the passcode. They haven’t noticed her yet.
“You!” she shouts. “Halt!” They startle, turn; a crowbar clangs to the floor. One kid reaches for a weapon: she burns him down. He shrieks, but only for a moment; the others drop their tools and run for their lives. Larisse lets them go, takes a shaky breath, then walks over and makes sure that the kid’s dead. She has few regrets: there is nothing in this building to steal except parts of the machinery that keeps Nina and the others frozen. For an armload of metal, this pathetic scavenger would have let them thaw and rot. She kicks the skinny corpse viciously, hears a rib crack, then grabs an arm and drags the body out of the podroom, down the corridor, and out through the gaping door into the night. More gently, her anger and frustration ebbing, she pushes the body against the wall and leaves it for the coyotes and the crows. She goes back inside, clangs the door shut and, tongue pressed against teeth, makes an emergency change in the passcode. The supervisor can set up a proper one in the morning.
And this is what we’ve has come to, she thinks, in the thirty years since we defeated the invaders. A world of beggars, fighting over crusts. One day, perhaps, there will be money for food, for education, for that long-promised nanotechnology research. Until then, Nina and her comrades must sleep.
She walks back to the cryopod, and picks up the chitarre.
“Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine
Ou elles sont, ne de cest an,
Qu’a ce refrain ne vous remaine:
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan!”
Tell me, Nina, my love: where, where are the snows of years gone by?