The first thing he bought was indeed an aspect of the future Menelaus wanted brought under his control. The second thing he bought was a stallion.

For this first thing, he purchased suspended-animation companies and cartels: huge companies like Endymion and tiny ones like Welsh Bart’s Sleepaway.

Not one or two. All of them.

Hold-outs he sued, on the grounds that he should have been granted a patent for the discoveries, based on his work, that made long-term biosuspension possible. He had to buy legislators and guilds to make the laws allow for retroactive patents; and then he had to buy political parties, judges, and arbitrators, and fund monasteries to get canon law on his side. He had to fund election campaigns in Democratic parishes and buy mansions and museums as bribes for princes in monarchic parishes.

The slumbering population was roughly eighty-five percent medical patients, enduring biosuspension in hope of cures to be developed in later years; ten percent were loyal spouses wanting to stay of the same age; the remainder were those who slumbered for reasons legal or illegal, rational or quixotic, to outwait the death of a hated relative or the downfall of a hated regime.

It was effortless. He did not even need to dress for the meeting of the stockholders. The meeting was conducted over the newly-revised world communication net, in an entirely fictional boardroom equipped with cartoon tables and props, and his projected image was dressed in a somber knee-length suit of dark gray, while he in real life was rocking in a hammock wearing loose Chinese pajamas. His lawyers (and he had hired so many he had already forgotten their names) were a buzzing whisper in his right ear. His intellectual property manager, an Australian named Sweetwater, whispered in his left ear, keeping him abreast of changes in the news channels, and his publicity-value, as the markets and newsfeeds reacted to the moment-by-moment changes in the meeting. For himself, he merely read off a prompter the speech his staff had prepared.

There were some procedural maneuvers raised to hinder him, so he logged off and turned his image over to his double (a young lady from Perth, who could do a passable impersonation of his word-patterns and wireframe mannerisms) to run him during the boring parts of the meeting while he ate his dinner. Once those delays ran their course, the votes were counted. It was no contest. It was like Josiah Palmer bidding against Chickenbone Jim at an auction. He was now the sole owner of every facility on Earth that used his method for biosuspension.

5. Nova and Yorvel

He was disappointed that the future people, having gone to the trouble of resurrecting the long-dead airs and fashions of knighthood, did not actually dress up in metal longjohns and whack at each other with meat-cleavers, as they ought. None of the “sirs” he met acted anything like the knights in the stories he’d read in childhood: not a one of them was fit to drive the Paynim out of Spain or go fetch the Holy Grail.

But they did have nice horses, many of these Aristos. That art they kept alive. He did a lot of riding during the days after his recovery from the infirmary, and argued with his doctors in the meanwhile. He named his beast Res Ipsa Nova, in honor of a sorrel from a hundred years ago.

He made few friends. The difference in intelligence gradient was too great: he could make more than an ordinary number of the normal humans, the Hylics, to like him, because it was easy to think of what to say to set them at ease.

One friend he did make, a friendship where brains just didn’t matter, was with one of Rania’s men, a chubby smiling little horse groom named Yorvel. His first name was Jesus, but Menelaus thought it sounded too much like swearing to call him that, and he couldn’t manage to pronounce it Hey Zeus, which also sounded like swearing, but in a different religion, so he called him by his last name.

They talked about horses, particularly the biologically augmented new breeds and neo-equines. The groom knew his stuff and more, had hands-on experience no books held. Menelaus found out it did not matter how smart you were on the uptake; if a dumb teacher knows more than you, it still pays to listen and learn.

6. Chessplaying Machine

There was not much anyone else to talk to, aside from Rania, and she was busy playing some planetary chessgame with princes and parliaments with Del Azarchel and his Hermeticists. The terms of the game were simple in the basics: she was trying to pressure him into abdication, as this was the only way to defuse the growing threat of war. And he was playing brinksmanship. Whether he was confident that he, or the human race, or both, could survive a world war with antimatter weapons was another matter, but he acted as if he were.

Now, it was not that Montrose, freshly-minted posthuman with a fine new brain and all, could not follow the intricate moves and feints of the game, and read the lies and half-truths and half-lies and threats that splashed all over the text files and documentaries of the infosphere—it was that politics bored him.

The Psychics (or, as they were also called, the “Psychoi”) actually were smarter, by fifty to one hundred points on the standard intelligence quotient scale, than the Hylics—because, despite what Del Azarchel had said, certain intelligence augmentation methods and processes, based on Montrose’s work, had been tried over the last fifteen decades. The results were cautious, and the intellectuals were not outside what was possible for humans. Montrose could have interesting conversations with them, as an adult with a bright child, especially about matters concerning Monument translation and the eventual destiny of Mankind, the threat of the Hyades Armada, and what it would mean when that force arrived.

As predicted, no Hylics had anything interesting to say on the matter. Those who were angry with Del Azarchel for inviting this attack talked as if the Armada would land within the next fifty to one hundred years. To them it was an almost religious image, an Armageddon, a Twilight of the Gods, a prophecy that merely floated somewhere in the distant yet-to-be, not a real event to occur at a real yet remote date.

Montrose realized with dismay that he had fallen into the habit of dismissing ordinary humans as “Hylics”—an Hermeticist term of contempt. On the one hand, it was simply a fact that he was smarter now than normal people. On the other hand, a superior intellect did not seem to change his personality, or make him a saint, or even a sage. It did not improve his bad temper, or even change his bad grammar.

Heck, if anything, greater intelligence put him under greater temptation to do greater evil. He saw how easy it would be to treat people like puppets: thinking back, he did not much like the way he had bought up the Endymion corporations. It was necessary for his plans, to be sure, but the people squeezed out of their companies and stocks had plans, too, didn’t they?

A bad man was much more a threat to the world than a bad dog; and a bad titan was worse than a bad man. Maybe his extra smarts would help he see and avoid the extra temptation the smarts brought with them.

At least the Hylics (or—he brought himself up short—the normal, decent people) who thought the coming of the Hyades Armada merely a prophecy thought on it. The average man would more likely complain about a stone in his shoe than some unthinkably remote eventuality destined for some unrecognizable descendant race of Mankind—assuming any lived so long.

The Psychoi would discuss the matter intelligently. But these metal-haired intellectuals made him nervous. They were smart enough that they could fool his reading of their tells and body language, and some of them worked for Del Azarchel—who was in hiding somewhere, no doubt experimenting on his own brain, trying to bring himself up to Montrose’s level.