“Are you as curious as I, amigo?”

“That I am, partner.”

“Then our alliance and nonaggression pact continues?”

“We need proper seconds and judges and a right good footing with no shipside Coriolis effect to throw off my aim. You don’t even need to ask. I ain’t going to shoot you in the back, and I know you ain’t going to shoot me in the back. The survivor will have to live with himself until the end of time. Cause both of us stopped aging a while back, and neither of us ain’t planning to cash out our chips early on … Jesus H. Christ in a thorny hat!”

“Please don’t blaspheme,” said Del Azarchel, which surprised Montrose, even though it should not have. Hard to remember that Blackie took his religion seriously, or seemed to.

“That weren’t no blasphemery! That was a pestilential prayer of poxed thanksgiving! I been hanging out with you too long, Blackie, that I almost forgot that I don’t believe nothing you say! You think the Hyades world-armada, that cloud of black slime the size of a gas giant, after coming all this way from Epsilon Tauri was sure to crush any resistance. You said mankind, not humans and not posthumans, not Swans and not Potentates, none of us could possibly hurt them nor drive them off! But I ain’t never said that!”

Del Azarchel said, “I don’t see your point.”

“Which shows that, no matter how smart you are, you cannot escape your axioms and assumptions. What is the simplest explanation for what we are seeing? Earth is here. The Varmint ain’t.”

“I still don’t…”

“We won. We drove them off.”

“Impossible.”

“Let’s get a radio message to someone, and get permission to land, read a newspaper, find out the story. We can always ripple our sail like a honking big heliograph and send them flashes in Morse code.”

“Or burn a city from orbit if they ignore or threaten us,” added Del Azarchel with a dark smile.

“You are one sick, sick puppy.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, or a world-ruler dispossessed, or so they say.”

“Start sending signals. How long can it take?”

7. Reply

A.D. 11055

“Cowhand, we’re getting a reply from the surface. It is in the Swan language, which, like the Monument code itself, contains its own self-reflexive predictions for its own semantic changes and semiotic drift.”

“So y’all were able to find a common language?”

“In theory we could have rendered one using infinite-variable calculus techniques to solve toward absolute syntax strange attractors. But it was just easier to use Latin.”

“Omnes viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam, I reckon. Who was it? What d’they say about the Varmint, or the location of the Earth? What happened?”

“It calls itself the Judge of Years and the Voice of the Swan, and seems not to be in the mood to answer questions. I cannot tell if this comes from some corner of planetwide Noösphere, or is some smaller, independent group, or even a lone crackpot with a radio. The signals are coming from the eastern shore of Africa. It says the Swan for whom it speaks grants us permission to make splashdown. It gives a longitude and latitude and a window of time. Do we trust this unknown voice?”

“Better than sitting up here in ice’tween our buttock cheeks. The Swans should not be able to see us or stop us, so we got the perfect smuggling vessel. Let’s risk it. Do I need to recite that poem from Kipling? If you can keep your hat when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”

“You are a man after my own bold heart, but spare me your clubfooted Anglo jingles, I who rejoice in the fiery wine of Manuel José Quintana, or who have flown to the pure classical summit of the Paradise by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos!”

“Anglo poems is better. I see you one Shakespeare and raise you a Chaucer.”

“I match them and find them wanting against the satire of Cervantes and earthiness of the Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita. In any case, I am willing to risk my heap of winnings on one turn of pitch-and-toss—”

“There is a ‘but’ a-coming, ain’t there?”

“—but this Judge of Years has warned us that neither will we be given nor sold any heavy water to spare for the fusion drive of the landing craft, to power a launch again. To land now is to be stranded.”

“Fine,” said Montrose, sending an X-ray version of his face cartoon, so Blackie could see him grit his teeth. “We nip out to the asteroid belt, find a likely chunk of ice, boil it down, render up enough heavy water to do a safe belly flop into their oceans … how long can that take?”

“I do wish you’d stop saying that.”

8. Splashdown

A.D. 11057

The new orbit of Earth made the winters much more severe than in prior eons. The Emancipation formed her mirrored sail as a magnifying glass to clear the icebergs from a generous volume of the Sea of Arabia. Here, not long after, the ship’s fifty-foot pinnace splashed down.

Bobbing to the surface, Montrose and Del Azarchel commanded the hatch of the flattened, trilobite-shaped craft to undog itself and admit the atmosphere of Earth, which neither had breathed for centuries. The air whistled in the dorsal hatch and internal xenon gas, which had been used as a preservative to fill the interior, streamed out of ventral gills just above the waterline, an unseen smoke.

Both bodies had been prepped for a quick thaw, so it was only a matter of minutes, rather than hours, before their coffin lids slid aside and they saw each other once more in the flesh.

Del Azarchel was naked, soaked with medical fluid, and holding a longsword whose hilts were crusted with dazzling work of diamond, topaz, and jacinth. The scabbard was white leather flayed from the flesh of the Coptic Patriarch who had reigned on Earth before the rise of Del Azarchel to power. Montrose had his white glass caterpillar-drive pistols in his hands.

“You look shaggy,” observed Del Azarchel.

“I cannot believe you programmed your coffin to trim and maintain your little goat beard thingie all these centuries.”

“Hair cells are cells; why should I grow uncouth, merely because I slumber? You must tidy yourself, though. The portable head unfolds from the deck, and I think there is a dop kit with a straight razor. You can program your coffin fluid into lather, if you like.…”

“I know what it can do! I designed the damnified Jell-O one molecule at a time. The message told us to land here. If they are surface dwellers, they will send a boat, or if they are sea dwellers, they’ll surface. Is there anything outside?”

Del Azarchel surprised him by not going over to the sensor panel (which was bolted down for gee-maneuver conditions) but by simply swarming up the newly formed ladder to the hatch, and sticking his head into the sunlight.

He yelled and jumped down.

Montrose readied his pistols. “You hurt? What happened?”

“Wind chill, Cowhand. It is cold as Erebus out there. There is a clipper ship made of fiberglass on the horizon, approaching from the south. I saw men and elevated animals aboard, and from the play of the waves I deduce they are accompanied by an escort of dolphins, which I assume are post-delphic Cetaceans. It is a six-masted ship with energy lanterns ranked on three firing tiers port and starboard, with swivel-mounted bow-chasers. So your little magnetic pistols may not be enough to sink her.”

“Yeah, well, I will leave you to sink the ship with your pigsticker. Think you can awl a hole in the hull with that piece of ironmongery?”

“Ah! Speaking of which—the Iron Crown of Lombardy! Shame I had to store it in a mere boat locker.” Del Azarchel moved over to a rack bolted to the overhead, and worked the catch, drawing out a transparent, macromolecular-locked diamond case.