“You recognized Captain Sterling from Asymptote. The only other person I met recently who did that was Ctesibius. You recognize the name?”

“Sure. Asymptote became famous when it was found that Mad Montrose the Fallen Hermeticist read it as a kid, and one of the characters was Cyrano Widget the Living Brain, and he became a mascot for the Order of Transhumanitarian Emulation Advocates. Aside from that, I read the dumb thing in First Ancestor class in school. As a comic, it was juvenile trash.”

Menelaus was taken aback for a moment. “Trash? It was about the dreams of the future.”

“Dreams of adolescent idolatry of science, you mean. Just everything gets better and better, and the women get fast and the cars get faster and the skyscrapers get scrapier, until one day we all download into machines that live forever and ever? Ri-iii-ight. I downloaded myself into a machine, and what did I get for my pains, my biofeedback training, and my radical brain surgery? My soul is dead, and I don’t look like I am going to waltz out of here whistling. Here I am buried alive in a Tomb with a bunch of poxy gene-tweaked freaks, and overhead is an empty world and a talking glacier. As far as happy predictions go, the comic missed the bull’s-eye.”

“I wasn’t talking about the comic. You recognize the name Ctesibius? You Savants were not in charge of the world for all that long, and there were not that many of you.”

“Fifty years is pretty long! How long do most Advocacies last? Yeah, I knew him. He was a Copt. He was one of the main planners for the Day of Gold. That is what pushed me over the edge.”

“Is that why you are a ‘sort of’ Savant?”

“That is why. You can call me a traitor, if you like. No sooner was I done betraying the Clan to the Machine, when I betrayed the Machine to the Giants. I turned myself in to the Giants to warn them about the Day of Gold. I let them make yet another copy of my thought patterns, a soul to serve them, so there could be no doubt of me. Maybe I thought if I had souls on both sides, I would survive no matter what happened. Then I realized that the Giants were crazy. They were planning to burn the whole Earth. They called it the Ecpyrosis. They gave me, and any other Savant they caught, a choice between burning up or long-term slumber: fire or ice. They did not want to kill us, just our Ghosts.”

“When were you interred? Before 2525? You didn’t live long enough to see it, but they did their job. The Giants burned all the power plants and cable nodes and torched the cities, towns, and villages; any outhouse large enough to house a mainframe.”

“Why are any people still alive?”

“It’s sort of a Noah’s Ark deal, except there were flotillas of arks, and they floated like Zeppelins.”

“You’re poxy kidding me.”

“Zeppelins with tentacles. That were atomic powered. And supersonic. And could turn into submarines. And strip all the proteins and complex molecules out of any life-form they passed over. With simple decentralized ratiotech brains. Which adored their masters and sang them songs.”

“Atomic-powered supersonic amphibious Zeppelin airships with tentacles…?”

“Right.”

“… that sing?”

“Um. If you saw the construction details, it is not as strange as it sounds.”

“Who built these again?”

“The Giants built them for the Sylphs, so that they could airlift the entire earth, all the populations of billions of survivors, to become nomads in these airskiffs, while the world underneath them smoked like the crater floor of hell.”

“And who were they?”

“The Sylphs?” said Menelaus. “Call them Noah’s family. Or his zoo. Sylphs were gene-engineered for lightweightness, with birdlike direction sense in their heads, and some were grown with an inbuilt moder-voder so to interface with their Mälzels and shipboard gimcracks more easily.”

“Jesus pissing in Palestine!” said the Savant. “Slumber for a few centuries, and you miss all the cool, weird scat.”

“Millennia. And there is a twenty-mule-team wagontrainload of weird scat left. All your Ghosts are long dead. Why are you pretending to be Montrose?”

“Just a misunderstanding,” the man said. “I was talking to the blue dwarfs through their little boxes, but those don’t do such a good job of translating. They got all a-twitter when I said my name. They took a blood sample and checked it against gene traces they found on a coffeepot. They offered me a cup of coffee. It twitter-pated them even more when I drank it.” He shrugged. “It seemed best to go along with their misapprehension.”

“What is with the fancy room?”

“Like it? It’s family only, direct lineage from the main bloodline. Even though I am incarcerated here, the local Prior for Knights of Malta, Sir Romegas, let me slumber here with my cousins. Once I made a hefty donation to their cause, of course. Even the damned Papists and bead-mumblers were not so bold as to deny me, keeping me locked up in my own stronghold. They were pretty decent about everything, considering. In any case, the whole chamber used to be packed full twice and thrice deep. Weird to see it empty. I assume my cousins got their Thaws as soon as the we took over the world again. I mean, if you run the Tombs, you run the Currents, right?”

“Why do you assume there are any Currents?” asked Montrose.

“You just said so. Besides, the Montrose family will live forever, so that means the human race will.”

“I hear Montrose did not get along with his descendents. Yanked the rulership of the Earth out from under them and gave it to the Uniate Catholic Orthodox Church.”

“That did not last, did it?”

“Not forever.”

“But the Cryonarchy is back in charge by now, isn’t it?”

“Nope.”

“Ah, give it a few more years! People need the Tombs. We form the bridge between past and future. Without us, what happens to tradition? It is not like the Europeans have the population levels to sustain a Current-to-Thaw ratio, what with their aging rates, that can…”

“Europe is gone.”

“W—What?”

“That land mass is called Baltica now. The Cryonarchy is not coming back. The Dawn-Age men, that is us, we are not coming back either.”

The other man was silent a while, appalled by the crushing weight of aeons that had gathered on his coffin while he slept. Menelaus waited patiently. He was so familiar with the sensation that he had dubbed it with a name of its own: chronovertigo.

Eventually Menelaus said, “I’m curious. Why did you call this your stronghold?”

“Sorry, but I was kind of famous in my day, so I guess I am used to people recognizing me on sight.”

“I know the feeling. But sometimes you just don’t recognize the people you know, even if you look right at ’em. Funny, ain’t it?”

“Well, I call this our stronghold because it belongs to us. The whole chamber here—it was designed by Gascoigneux himself, you know—used to be at Cheyenne Mountain. That statue there is the Abduction of Proserpine by Phidias. The ceiling is by Jourbert and programmed by Lockheed-Smith-Wesson. That Rania Clock is an original by the Pitcarne Studio, foremost radioactivists in France…”

“Yeah. Swell room. Who is ‘us’?”

“The World Advocacy. The government. The Clan.”

Menelaus was staring at him in puzzlement. “Mister, what is your name, anyway?”

“Montrose.”

“Uh?”

“No, really. Advocate-General Scipio Cognition Montrose of the World Concordat, Regent at Large, Lord Protector of the Dead, Director of the Endymion Hibernation Syndicate, and so on. After the First Ancestor blew the Cryonarchy to smithereens and stole our antimatter, leaving us shamed and penniless, I thought I would try working for the other team.”

“Your antimatter?”

“Simon-pure straight it was ours! If I ever get my mitts on that thieving crowbait of a First Ancestor, I’ll knock him galley west till he screams like a whore on nickel night,” said Scipio.