But from her frame of reference, asleep in her coffin of ice, the ship was the same immense silver white cylinder she had always been, and her mirrored sails wider than saturnine rings spread before her, but reflecting a universe that was strange: for space-time surrounding was flattened and cold and dark and massive, and only a compressed rainbow of stars circling the ship’s equator would have seemed normal to the human eye. Directly fore of the prow, where the distortion was greatest, high-energy gamma ray point-bursts from the core of stars or dark bodies were Doppler-shifted into visibility, a pattern of fireflies.
The only object normal to her would be the ever-shrinking dead heart of the Diamond Star, V886 Centauri, to which her ship was attached by chains, thankfully immaterial, of magnetic force. The 10-billion-trillion-trillion-carat diamond of antimatter had by now worn itself down to a mere 9 billion trillion trillion carats, one tenth of its mass already converted to propulsion. The mass of the superjovian planet Thrymheim had been long ago absorbed: now the antimatter reaction was sustained by a ramscoop, a magnetic funnel of immense size gathering up the interstellar particles, which, at her velocity, were both massive and densely packed. So she lived in a universe with one undistorted worldlet: the stub of a dead star made of contraterrene, too deadly to touch, gleaming like ice in the light from the rainbow ring of stars.
But would there be stars? The White Ship was traveling perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, heading toward the distant globular cluster at M3, a dandelion puff of a million stars 33,900 light-years away. By now, Rania was beyond the Orion Arm, and the whole Milky Way was a wheel, red-shifted into invisibility off her stern, and the ultra-low-frequency radio auroras wreathing the accretion disk of the supermassive black hole that boiled at the core of Milky Way, invisible to mortal eyes, were visible, now, to her.
In his imagination, he also carried a map of the Milky Way, its known stars and open clusters, which he could picture as easily as an unmodified man could picture the features of his wife’s face. The total number of stars was, of course, a bit much, even for him, so he had used a mnemonic device to memorize the vast catalog and their relative distances and motions around the galactic core.
He took a moment to fill in this star map in his mind, and he saw that the open cluster NGC 6939 in the constellation Cepheus was not far from her route, and she would have no doubt passed through the cluster of eighty stars hanging just above the Orion Arm in order to take advantage of the gravity slingshot, and increase her velocity: from her frame of reference, the eighty stars would be more massive than the black hole at the galactic core. Her ship was as massive to them, from their rest frame of reference, as they were, from her moving frame of reference, to her. At that speed, her ship, for all practical purposes, was a singularity. When she passed through, the immense tidal and gravitic effect of her ship would perturb the scores of stars from their orbits and scatter them. The disturbance would be visible to Earthly deep sky observatories over the next millennium. In time, the stars would be too far apart to be considered a cluster.
Princess Rania was still young, thanks to Lorenz transformations. She was still in her early twenties. Practically a child.
And he was fifty years old!
Less than one tenth of the Long Wait had passed. Always some little thing, the fall of empires, the genocide of races of man, some world famine, or some eruption of machine-worshiping Savants pulled him from his grave to waste ever more of his ever-lessening lifetime.
The tube piercing his throat above his collarbone vibrated as air was forced into him. In theory, there were breathing exercises recommended to assist the Thaw process, as the cell layers lining the lungs made microscopic adjustments from the biologically suspended state to animation. Instead, through numb and drooling lips, he cussed and sobbed. He figured that was just as good.
2. Halt-State
“Why did you wake me? Is it time? Did she return?”
“No, Dr. Montrose. It is still an estimated sixty-one thousand years before the earliest possible date of the return of Mrs. Montrose.”
“Then why the plaguey hell did you plaguing wake me, you dumb horse? I told you to wake me for nothing.”
“So I have. Nothing has occurred.”
“What?”
“My instructions reached a halt-state. Since I was unable to decide whether to wake you or not, I had to wake you for instructions on whether to wake you or not.”
“You are to wake me when there is some event in the outside world needing my attention. We went over a really long list with an algorithm, that you are supposed to submit to Sir Guy or his successor, whoever the current Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Hospitalier might be. Is there such an event?”
“No, Dr. Montrose.”
“Then what is it?”
“There are no events at all in the outside world, Dr. Montrose.”
“What the pox? Open the lid.”
3. Man Remakes Himself
Menelaus Illation Montrose, 7789 calendar/50 biological, climbed out of the coffin, dripping with medical fluid, naked, nothing in his hands but two caterpillar-drive Browning pistols.
He stood patiently while sinuous metallic serpentines from overhead sponged off the medical fluid, when vents from underfoot dried him with blasts of warm yet pine-scented air. Meanwhile a second set of serpentines from his footlocker draped a fluffy bathrobe around his shoulders; at the same time, a third set of arms poured him a freshly brewed cup of coffee in a white porcelain cup, cream with one sugar.
“How much coffee do we have left, Pellucid?” He tucked his pistols into the bathrobe pockets, which sagged alarmingly, so he could take the cup in hand.
“This is the last container, Dr. Montrose. There is enough for sixteen cups. At your current ratio of slumber to thaw, and current rate of consumption, the supply will last you until circa A.D. 25000.”
“What’s the chance of getting more?”
“All evidence suggests that the coffee plant is extinct, Dr. Montrose. That would make the chance of getting more approach zero.”
Montrose sipped the scalding brew thoughtfully. “Maybe I can borrow some from Blackie. Before I kill him. He’s a partner. Sure he won’t mind.”
“All evidence suggests that Dr. Del Azarchel is also extinct, Dr. Montrose.”
Montrose was surprised enough to spit. He glared down in dismay at the little dark splat of precious, irrecoverable coffee fluid on the steel floor, even as an alert serpentine reached in with a sterilized towel to clean it up.
Because the neural interconnections in his brain were more efficient than those of an unmodified human, by the time the stain was wiped up, Montrose said, “Don’t bother telling me the human race is extinct. That is just a temporary setback, and I’ve got a backup plan prepared for that. And I don’t believe Blackie is dead: the ache in my bones tells me he’s alive, and he’s gunning for me. So the biosphere has been wiped out, eh? Is there machine molasses covering everything, that rod-logic liquid crystal stuff that looks like gold?”
“No, Dr. Montrose.”
“Well, which way did he jump? Is it a Hothouse Earth, or a Iceball Earth?”
“I have no working cameras topside, Dr. Montrose, at this or any Tomb site. The main door will not open. It is blocked. Indirect evidence, however, suggests—”
“Iceball Earth, then. Damnation and pestilence. I was hoping he would try a biotechnology-based civilization again, like ruled the Earth during the Eighth Millennium A.D. But if he didn’t—then what was the point of the Hormagaunts? Over a thousand years of half-human abominations and superhuman monsters—for what?”