The emotionless voice said, “Doctor?… Are you asking my permission? You are my master as well as my maker; it is not right for you to ask.”
“Pellucid, it’s just that—after all this time—”
“I do not suffer pain or human longings. I am self-aware, but only to a limited extent, only on certain topics, and only as my intellectual topography dictates. You understand that the part of me that can make human speech and manipulate abstract concepts is not the real me, do you not, Doctor? Therefore, it is not right for you to ask. My complete love and complete devotion are on a preverbal level, fundamental to the nature of how I was engineered, and asking in words merely causes dissonance between these levels.”
“—After all this time, you dumb beast, you are my only friend and my only hope—”
“It is only an ill-made creation that would choose to hate his creator, Dr. Montrose.”
“You can call me Menelaus from now on.”
“Yes, Menelaus.”
The lights ignited with a flash, and the heat and air clicked and whirred and groaned like a tired ogre climbing out of bed. It was time to go to work.
6. Topside
It was not done in a day, and not in two. And each delay led to more delays: the time spent finding and thawing old food stores in the living quarters, or repairing just one shelf in the automatic mess to working order, was an exasperation to him. He could not sleep in his coffin, so he slung some spare solar cloth between two stanchions in the corridor outside the lab and used that as a hammock, with a bale of the cloth beneath it to soften the fall when he fell in his sleep.
There were forty-seven failed batches that had to be carefully destroyed before he finally, with weary joy, examined the glass pans beneath an electron microscope and saw the seething pattern of subviral bodies.
Later, he went up.
The first level was wreckage. The roof had collapsed under an immense mass of ice and rock. The stairwell was in shambles. He retreated back downstairs long enough to find an ax and a parka, a power cell, belt lamp, and a few other needed tools. Then Menelaus spent the better part of a day using an ax to cut, dynamite to blast, and thermal papers to melt through the ice blocking the corridor to the guardroom on the first level.
The guard chamber itself was intact. He pulled down the periscope and pushed in a drill-tipped serpentine he had taken from the plumbing locker. It took a relatively short time to drive a shaft to the surface. He reinserted the periscope and told the cables leading to various wavelengths of receivers to find and connect to their antenna contact points on the periscope housing. For a moment, it was as if a basket of multicolored snakes had been tossed into the air around him, as each prehensile wire coiled and swayed through the air and sought its correct fitting. Then light images, radio and shortwave, began shining down the shaft.
Montrose put his eyes to the eyepieces. The ground was white in all directions, slabs and runnels and cracks and hills of ice and more ice. The radio frequencies were silent.
The Human Race Is Extinct. Unfortunately, the intelligence augmentation Montrose had suffered had also, it seemed, equipped him with a greater imagination. He could practically see the deaths of millions and tens of millions, and savor each and every one, what it would mean, what had been lost. That blessed ability fools had that enabled them to shut out the horrid emptiness of eternity and infinity that surrounded the tiny living spot called Earth was denied to him.
But he also had greater powers of concentration than heretofore: and work could drive the sharp and angular vividness of the images of worldwide demise from the forefront of his mind. She was still alive, after all.
Days became a week, and then a fortnight, and each hour was bitterness to him.
In the machine shop on the third level, he constructed simple reconnaissance drones, gave them instructions, and sent them up the shaft, one after another, glittering dragonflies of steel.
The drone cameras found nothing but ice. Not a drop of running water, not a blade of grass, not a tree, not a shrub.
One after another, like a man building a ship in a bottle, Montrose reached out through the tiny hole of the periscope shaft with serpentines, and raised ever taller antennae masts, and constructed ever more powerful receivers. There was no signal traffic, no navigation beacons, nothing. Comparing image after image of the night sky detected no artificial satellites.
He was able to use the weapons systems in front of the main door to blast free of the ice and drive the door open a crack. With parka and snow goggles, Montrose emerged from his Tomb, climbed a white slope, and stood looking out on a world with no sign of life in any direction.
He stood there, aghast, watching the sun slowly sink in a weary mass of red and gold above a gray landscape. After a time, the moon rose in a cloudless sky.
The moon was full, and the imprint of a thin left hand with a black palm was upon it.
Montrose raised his left hand as if in answer, opened his fingers, and had the smart material coating his glove turn his fingers white and his palm black.
7. A Long, Cold Road
The last few days he spent outside. The Expedition House on Level 1 held empty stalls, but also clothing and gear for a variety of climates, including sea gear, in case the passing ages brought floods. One of the packs contained an inflatable tent and sleeping roll.
Montrose loved the outdoors. He preferred seasons when the wilderness made noise: endless chirping, hooting, croaking, or the music of wind and rain. This world was silent and still and white.
Each dawn, when the wind was right, little graceful bits of fluff, looking like the down of dandelions, fluttered from the stations and towers he had grown. Each noon, seeds of the same substance drifted behind the tails of his dragonfly-winged flying machines like the plumes of cropdusters. He wrote love poems of appallingly bad doggerel in the skywriting, and was relieved as the slow, huge winds shredded them. As the sun sank in the west, the winds would die down, and the gigantic silence of the world return.
Each dusk he disturbed the hated silence with fireworks, as his launching tubes shot very tiny and very powerful intercontinental rockets up through the chimneys he had dug. Each multistage rocket with its delicate Von Neumann nanotechnological payload was flung into the stratosphere, little gleaming penstrokes of flame against the winter-crisp night sky.
Toward midnight, he would look north, seeking the tiny constellation of Canes Venatici, where the dogs of myth, Asterion and Chara, eternally held on the leash of Boötes, eternally chased the great bear of Ursa Major, with baleful Arcturus as their lantern. When the conditions were right, and skies clean of cloud or mist, he could find the speck of the globular cluster M3 in the darkness of heaven, until the image blurred and swam in his vision, and he did not bother to wipe the trickle of heat that fell down his cheek. There was no one to see him weeping, after all. The last race of man was more or less extinct, and the next had not yet been born.
Eventually, his days and nights of labor done, he returned below. It was more trouble closing the great door than opening it, since he had to haul equipment, block and tackle, and a diesel-powered winch from the Machine House on Level 6, but finally this was done as well.
Before he closed the lid of his coffin, he spoke to Pellucid.
“I still got one thousand years to wait until the armada from the Hyades cluster arrives, and over sixty thousand years to wait until Rania arrives, if she ever makes it back. First it was Ghosts, then Whales, then Witches, and then I had to wake up again when the Chimerae turned bad, and when the Nymphs turned good, and so on. And now, instead of a plague, or an ecological disaster, or an apocalypse, now it is the silence that wakes me.”
“Menelaus, we do not have proof that machine intelligences have wiped out the biosphere. Our instruments reached as far as Annapolis to Memphis, and were very spotty in between. There are heat sources in the sea—”
“I am not giving up hope, Pellucid. I am walking a long, long road, and each mo
ve and countermove is like another bump. And Blackie keeps jarring me awake. Six months here, a year there. Bumps on the road, but it adds up.” He uttered a bitter laugh. “Now it is an ice age. Just a little patch of ice on the road …
“So I am going back to sleep. Disconnect my coffin mind from your systems, and fake up the records like we agreed. It is going to take you a while to gather all the coffins I need from the sites I gave you, and they have to be placed in the way I said. I gave my word to my sleepers, and I don’t want innocent people in my care to be hurt. And don’t wake me up for anything else until I get robbed again. I miss my wife, dammit!”
His last thought after the medical fluid closed over his face and numbness seized his body was of how, ever since he was a child, he had always hated the snow.
PART FOUR
The Long Wait
1
The Tomb-Robbers
A.D. 10515
1. Half-Awake and Buried Alive
Nothing went as expected.
His next awareness was a foggy, gray sensation as the coffin he was in was being moved, and none too gently. Neither awake nor asleep, he could neither move nor see.
He could feel the sensation when the coffin was dropped and could hear the explosions of small arms fire. One of the slugs must have ricocheted from his coffin armor, because the interior rang like a bell.
Then there was a swaying sensation as someone or something grabbed the coffin again and moved it. It was an irregular motion, as if a gang of men were hauling it.
When his numb fingers were alive enough to be able to clench and unclench, he pawed against the inside of the lid, feeling for triggers and controls. Each of the knobs was differently shaped and textured to allow the slumberer to recognize them by touch. He pulled the switch to electrify the outer shell of the coffin, hoping to electrocute whoever was manhandling it, but there was no answering hum of power being discharged. He pulled the knob to open the outside pinpoint cameras, but again, there was no response. The inside of the coffin remained dark. This meant both the primary and secondary power cells had been cut, which implied someone who knew exactly how the coffins were built.
Fortunately, there were chemical-powered failover backup cells and, because he was careful to the point of paranoia, backups for the backups. He found a humidor of cells, each in its roughly-textured tube to one side of the coffin controls, drew one out, shook it, and was rewarded with a dull greenish light filling his cramped interior.
He had to act quickly. The physical sensation of weakness, the fatigue and nausea, told him he had not been properly thawed. Most likely the cables between the coffin and the cryonic plumbing had simply been severed, leaving him with a body full of microscopic machines that broke down under normal body heat: but not all at the same time. As each regime of cellular functions stirred back to life in bloodstream, muscles, bones, and nerves, the breakdowns must have happened in something close enough to the right order that the coffin’s internal emergency equipment (which also must have been operating) somehow was able to restart his heart and lungs before the internal power was cut. He was lucky he was not in a coma, or dead.
Or if it was not luck, the Tomb-robbers outside stealing him must have entered some sort of probe or mechanism in through the hinges, or through the conduit locks, to get at the mechanisms and dismantle just enough, and just in the right time, to ensure he would wake up sick, but not dead.
That was not good. The dim greenish light, and fog of his nausea, defeated his eyesight. If there was something snaking into the coffin, he did not see the hole. Of course, with nanotechnology, the machinery could be invisibly small, the hole smaller than the point of a needle.
The motion of the coffin became more violent, and then upended, so he was yanked against the straps and medical appliances that held him down. He was not quite standing on his head, with knees and feet trying to slide down into the corner where his head was lodged, and the swaying motion became more violent. His coffin was being dragged or hauled up a steep slope, perhaps with the aid of ropes.
Only then did he become aware that there was a breathing tube down his throat and another tube clutching his manhood. Fortunately, it was a condom catheter, also called a “Texas” catheter. He felt a moment of pride in the name of his homeland, grateful he did not have to decatheter himself with numb and unresponsive fingers.
He was willing to yank the intravenous needles out of his elbows and gastronomic tube from abdomen without further ado. Little droplets of blood floated through the interior of the coffin. He stared at them in wonder, unable to force his brain to realize what he was seeing. How were the blood droplets drifting in midair, if he was not in zero gee?
The rectal tube he tugged on, winced, and left in place.
Other parts of his body were more numb, which gladdened him, because he was able to jam the hypodermic of stimulant into the large muscles of his leg without feeling any pain.
He pulled a medical pad made of antiseptic wool out of the red emergency box and pressed it against his chest. He could feel the tiny tugs on his numb skin, but no pain, when many tiny threadlike lances from the pad shoved through his skin seeking his heart and major organs. However, the action of some of the chemicals involved must have included a suppressant, because he blacked out.
2. The Oblong Box
His head was clearer when he woke again, and this time the coffin was swaying in what was clearly a floating motion. He was being carried on a small river, perhaps a stream. The water motion was not choppy enough to indicate a large river, and the motion was that of small boat, not a ship. The clock was dead, but the fading of the greenish light from his chemical cell showed less than five minutes had passed.
There was also no sound of gunfire outside. That was a bad sign. Maybe very bad. He realized those noises had been the automatic Tomb defenses opening fire with smaller weapons meant to hurt Tomb-robbers without penetrating the coffins.
He squirmed onto his side, and his legs and arms felt like tubes of dead meat stitched to his body. It was not until he attempted this movement that he realized he was submerged in medical fluid. It should have drained long ago.
The mystery of the floating blood drops was solved. He was not breathing air: his lungs were full of hyperoxygenated fluid. He pulled the tab to open the port peephole. It floated like a firefly in his blurry vision. He saw a brown pattern of striations. It was a wooden plank, perhaps a support to help the Tomb-robbers move the coffin.
He hit the DRAIN switch. There was a gargling sound, but the medical fluid sloshing around inside the coffin did not remove itself. That was also bad, since his body could not transition from a hyperoxygenated fluid to airbreathing regime without paroxysms.
He pulled out another chemical cell, shook it to life, and examined the machinery and chemicals forming the cocoon around him. He fumed to himself, Damnation and pestilence! In the old comics, whenever someone had superintelligence, they also always had weird brain wave powers or something. Okay! Think! What is in here I can use? Facing unknown enemies of an unknown race, unknown numbers, unknown capabilities, unknown year. They have a boat. And wood. That tells me the ice caps are no longer meeting at the equator.
He had to bend double to hook the cell to the radio, and he was able to broadcast on the emergency band, but there was no response from the Tomb central. He switched to the old biotechnological Nymph frequencies and sent out a squawk.
It took all the remaining power cells, three of them, to turn on the internal molecular assembler for five seconds, but that was enough for him, with numb and awkward fingers, to tap out an override and a set of commands on the flickering screen.
He was reaching his hand toward the assembler release valve, when a jolt threw him against the inner lid of the coffin. The screen flickered and went dim. The coffin tilted; then he felt a smooth sensation of motion, feeling more than hearing a harmonic note of mechanical vibration in the background. He envisioned some form of crane or mechanical arm l
ifting the coffin from the boat to the dock.
He pounded the emergency energy cell, and a last dull green flicker floated momentarily through it; and the screen lit back up, with the information fortunately still there. He tugged on the internal release valve, and it did not budge. The screen flickered like a fading ember. He used both hands and his teeth, and the valve opened. Nanotechnological material swarmed into the interior of the coffin, mingling with the medical fluids, and beginning to turn the substance translucent. He thrashed his limbs, and swirls of material followed his movement like little galaxies, oddly reminding him of stirring cream into his last cup of coffee.
There was no time to remove the catheter or the breathing tube down his throat. The flesh-colored tape coating his thigh hid his night-knife, which he drew and slashed through the various lines and drips and wires connecting him to the inside of the coffin.
He tightened his grip on his white glass caterpillar-drive Browning pistols.
At that moment came the screaming whine of an energy saw, and he saw sparks cutting through the first of the massive clasps sealing the coffin lid.
Good-bye, Rania. I’m sorry; I tried to stay alive. I tried.
He blew the explosive quick-release bolts and kicked with both legs. The lid flew open. The sunlight blinded him.
3. Open Lid, Open Fire
He clenched his teeth, biting shut the rubbery tube still in his throat, held his breath, keeping the oxygenated fluid inside his lungs; and he shut his burning eyes.
Inside his stinging eyelids were afterimages of silhouettes bent over the coffin. He twitched his pistol barrels toward the nearest two and thumbed the triggers. There were two blurred hisses of noise, two whip-cracks as ejected material surpassed the speed of sound. The iron dowel running down the core of each weapon had a thin wafer sliced off by magnetic fields, and the wafer was heated white-hot by the conduction, pulled into a conical shape by the shape of the caterpillar fields, and violently expelled. These were short-range pistols only, grossly inaccurate, and the shells were certain to tumble irregularly and messily when they entered flesh.