Opposite this parade of glories was a bent graybeard, clouds around his knees, leaning on a scythe, his silver hourglass held above a more melancholy group of shapes. Larger than thunderheads, blurred and bluish in the distance, rose faces Menelaus did not recognize. Something about the stiffness, age, and solemnity of the images told him he was looking at an obituary of famous figures who had passed away that year—famous, he supposed, to the people of this time. To him, it was a procession as solemn and strange as the rain-worn angels seen in some ancient boneyard.

Between these two parades, one image, taller than the rest, arrested his attention: Times Square in New York, an artist’s representation of what the city might have looked like had it survived to the present day, was painted across the night sky. The glittering ball of Waterford Crystal from the top of the Allied Chemical Building was poised to descend. In the gloom of colored lanterns below him, Menelaus could hear the chanting of the people as they counted, some upon the sward of gray grass patched with snow puddles, some in boats and pleasure barges drifting in the fanciful ponds some architect had scattered through the French gardens, their waters crystal blue in the December midnight:

Tien! Negen! Acht! Zeven! Zes! Vijf! Vier! Drie! twee …

Despite the importance and formality of the event, Menelaus wore no more than a rough jerkin and leggings of buckskin he had sewn himself, mittens of white rabbit fur, a shako cap made from a wolverine pelt, its teeth on a thong around the crown.

He had sauntered up to the party with a pistol tucked into the rope he was using as a belt, but a man-at-arms dressed like a waiter (Menelaus could tell by how he stood and held his eyes that the man was a soldier) carrying a silver tray oh-so-politely asked him to check his weapon. The soldier-in-servitor-tux stared at the way Menelaus was dressed, but said nothing. So polite.

No, there was nothing wrong with checking your weapon at any place where drinks were served. It had been that way back in Houston, back in the Twenty-Third Century—no barkeep would let someone packing a piece in his saloon. But it was the fact that the people among the crowds outside did not wear those sashes or baldrics, or wore metallic wigs—none of them could carry a weapon, drunk or sober. The members of the upper class, the psychics or psychoi, as they were called, or soldiers in their employ or retainers in their service, only they could bear arms.

There had been Marines in full dress kit at the huge main doors of castle De Haar, but they were for show. The real weapons were tiny electronic things, no bigger than dragonflies, controlled from some remote location. Everyone important had arrived with a horse-drawn carriage or a ground-effect car, and had brought a dozen people, retainers and ladies-in-waiting and whatnot trailing after like so many brightly colored ducklings after a duck. Montrose, on the other hand, arrived on foot, alone, walking up from the riverside, threading his way to reach the front entrance through the back gardens (where off-duty servants sat drinking beer to cheer the New Year on). Neither the servants in back nor the Marines in front stopped him. He did not even bother to display the self-luminous, singing, and engraved invitation the messenger had brought him (this had been a thin and supercilious youth, dressing in luminous silk, with a steel-blue wig of shoulder-length hair—but a careful youth, despite his dandy looks, because he gave Montrose the slip when Montrose tried to shadow him through the narrow and crooked streets of Tripoli). Montrose still was not sure if the message, or the messenger, were real.

He looked down at himself, at his buckskin costume, this silly dancing-bear outfit, which he wore because he was too proud to wear the black silken shipsuit which the age said he was entitled. And he came to this party because the mad thing in his head told him to come. Was he real? Either of him?

The fact that this world was one where not all men had the right to self-defense was one he deeply resented. Resented? No, it was a hatred, so black and primal he could not understand it. When had the idea of destroying this ridiculous future and all its broken promises began to seem normal to him?

It had been at the chalet, he decided.

2. Mount Fairweather

Menelaus had dwelt for over a month in a little cabin in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, a few hours’ tramp through the snow from a lonely spot where the Brachistochrone curve of the supersonic train broke through the crust to the surface. The Iron Ghost of Del Azarchel had been his only companion, a disembodied voice that drew expressions and figures on the walls of luminous glass. This voice from the walls claimed to be Del Azarchel, and therefore had title to the chalet, and could do with it what he wished, without consulting his fleshly father, and Montrose did not argue the point.

Montrose wondered about the legal implications of eating delicacies from the icebox of a man whose electronic copy—a being with no need or ability to eat—has given you permission to consume his provisions: The whiskey in the cellar and the tobacco in the humidor the Ghost unlocked for him.

By day, when he grew sick of charity or sick of caviar, Montrose hunted. It was Del Azarchel’s chalet, after all, and had a well-equipped gun case. He did not want to eat the man’s food, but he had no qualms about borrowing a well-oiled rifle.

He also borrowed a prize pistol from the collection in the case. It was a Mauser septentrion, one main launcher with six escorts, breech-loaded, with interstitial chaff packages, and an onboard 300 IQ. Two-point-two pounds of shot. Effective counterfire of about eight meters. The mainshot was rated for 2500 feet per second straightline flight, up to 270 degrees of vector alteration post-launch, and it carried its own countermeasures in a bead behind the explosive head. The frame was milled from a solid piece, with no pins or screws used. Montrose felt, first, that it would have been a crime not to take it out of the case and do some target practice against some tree stumps across the snowy field below the chalet, and, second, he clearly had to have some protection should he be attacked by wolves, or challenged to a duel by wolves (seeing as how this weapon was no damn good for hunting), and third, Man Del Azarchel was rich as Croesus, and so he’d never miss it, and Ghost Del Azarchel couldn’t hold a pistol or take any joy from it.

The width of the wilderness outside may have been due to war depopulation, or perhaps Blackie had just bought himself a few thousand acres of alpine forest. In either case, there was no lack of venison or firewood for a man who could handle a rifle or an axe.

Del Azarchel was an old-fashioned enough gent to have a shed out back with materials for stretching and tanning hides. Montrose was unwilling to let any part of his game go to waste, especially after all the effort it took hauling the dang carcass back through the hillsides of pathless snow and rock. So he spent many an afternoon scraping and curing the hide, and making busy with an awl and a line, and so made himself quite a nice buckskin coat, fleecy and warm even in bad weather, and this saved on the thermal batteries in the suit he wore under. He eventually hunted down a pair of rabbits to make himself a pair of white mittens, and a healthy broth of coney stew.

The bedchamber window (when Montrose switched off its blackboard overlay) framed the tremendous glacier-lapped mountain that dominated the landscape. The window gave the name as Mount Fairweather, and painted the view with elevation and ecological information until Montrose discovered how to shut off the smartglass, and just enjoy the view. The mountain, despite its name, was half-hidden in fogs and clouds of white when it wasn’t wholly hidden in stormclouds of black.