“The question phrasing is unclear.”

“Sorry, Pel, wasn’t talking to you. Rhetorical questions. Looks like Blackie has outsmarted me. Machine life can prosper just dandy on a world of ice, can’t it? But what the hell happened? Why didn’t you stop it?”

There was no immediate answer.

Montrose said, “Pellucid, those last two questions were for you. They were not rhetorical. Give me a précis of world history while I slept, and tell me what steps you took to reverse Del Azarchel’s manipulation of the climate.”

“While you slept, the posthuman group that rose to predominance was a gestalt-mind consisting of postwhale, postdolphin, posthuman, biotechnological, and xypotechnological elements. They were called the Melusine. The most common configuration was a whale-pod-based oceanic brain mass of immense size and complexity communicating by means of neural quantum entanglement narrowcast with five or seven human-shaped or mermaid-shaped manipulator bodies, and a swarm of lesser sensor packages, tools, weapons, and node relays housed as sea serpents, eels, snakes, and insects. The lesser bodies were thought-controlled to a cellular level, and treated like organs of the gestalt.”

“That’s what human beings look like these days? Sheesh. Sleep a few centuries, and you miss everything. What happened to the previous civilization? The little bald men with radio antennae?”

“The Noöspherical Cognitive Order dissolved in A.D. 8766.”

“I introduced a vector that should have seduced them into a more freedom-loving mental-economic system.”

“The individualism you introduced also triggered a series of world wars as political uniformity broke down. I did not wake you, because you left specific instructions not to be thawed merely for world wars.”

“Hmf. Coronimas told me his creations were meant to be total pacifists.”

“I believe he grossly overestimated the irenic or pacifying effect that radio-based neural connections would have on the individuals exchanging thoughts and memory chains: their wars were spectacularly brutal, and this was long before the Noösphere collapsed.”

“Fine. So Coronimas is an idiot, and their worldwide mind library broke apart. What happened next?”

“The electrotelepathic psychologically uniform subspecies called Locusts lingered in ever dwindling groups until the 8900s, when they were finally wiped out by Linderlings.

“The Linderlings and Inquiline elements of the previous Noösphere could not re-interconnect their library-minds due to sociopsychological divarication. They formed smaller groups called Confraternities. Then, about nine hundred years ago, several groups combined to re-create a new fashion of mankind consisting of link-minded mating groups of five specialized sexes and subsexes, including the admixture of material from the long-extinct Cetacean races. These were the earliest forms of the Melusine.

“As watchdogs, certain of Inquiline were designed to scan and review Melusine mental data streams, including conscious thoughts, by means of a specialized psychoscopic cadre, aided by land-based mainframes housed in mile-high arcologies called Granoliths. However, over the centuries, the exhaustion of certain critical natural resources, the increase of the polar ice caps, caused the Granolith infrastructure to fail.”

“Why didn’t they use weather-control technology to fix it?”

“Political considerations. The increase in ice caps altered the oceanic conditions in a way that bestowed a sudden increase on the aquacultural foundations of the Melusine economy, rendering hitherto marginal areas profitable, encouraging rapid growth and expansion, an increase in luxuries and a greater efficiency of labor, as well as an easing of coercive restrictions—I did not interfere, because these were ‘Renaissance’ conditions, akin to the political liberty and capitalist exchange-systems you have so often ordered me in the past to encourage. To maintain the previous climate would have led to insurrection, tumult, war.”

“So Blackie snookered you. He created a ‘Roaring Twenties’ boom so you would not interfere when he lined up a sudden population drop.”

“Perhaps that is the case. But the Melusine not only developed a space program, and planted outposts among the ruins of the partly terraformed Mars, but maneuvered the asteroid 1036 Ganymed into a sublunar orbit as a smaller second moon, honeycombed it with habitable garden-tunnels and cisterns and a spherical great lake in the hollow center. This is usually the type of project for which you express enthusiasm: I did not interfere with this course of events. Due to the increasingly hostile environment of Earth, the Melusine of Ganymed created a self-sustaining microecology, consisting entirely of artificial insects and fungi not based on any earthly models.”

“Wow,” said Montrose, impressed. “I guess I would have been snookered too. Just add a propulsion sail, point a launching laser, and you’d have a worldlet-size starship ready to launch. I would not have interfered either. But meanwhile Earth is entering an ice age. What happens next?”

“The balance of power between inland empires and coastal organizations could not be maintained. Then in a single generation, suddenly, the majority of remaining Inquiline either entered into full mental communion with the Melusine, which in effect absorbed them, or they refused communion and continued servicing severely depleted Granoliths, but could not track nor understand the thought patterns of the Melusine. This inferiority made them retire into lives of supine renunciation, isolating themselves from the mental life, arts and sciences, of the race.

“There followed strenuous efforts, over generations, of the coastal organizations to maintain the failing inland polities. The Melusine mating-harems could not maintain their population levels without the land-based agriculture to serve as an ecological basis for their human-shaped sexes. These efforts were unsuccessful due to an unwillingness of the Melusine to adapt their social customs and laws to match the new and more Spartan conditions.

“Meanwhile, among the Inquiline, several civilizations of the remnants consumed themselves in seeking mystical experiences through pharmaceutical and electroneural manipulations. When the population fell below a critical threshold, the world electronic communion fell into disrepair, and the survivors retreated into sealed and heated city-states, surrounded by ice, and surviving on yeast, soy, and proteins pyrohydroponically grown in geothermal taps. The loss of the electronic web cut me off from real-time examination of the records of the culture, and the geothermal taps interfered with my near-surface structures to such a degree that my observation posts had to be abandoned.”

“Wait. What? You just let these people blind you?”

“I have no reason to suspect that they knew I existed, and your instructions make it clear that I am not allowed to kill large populations of human beings indiscriminately. I could not attack their geothermal taps without inducing starvation in the sealed city-states, and I could not continue my near-surface subterranean activities without being detected by the taps.”

“You are allowed to defend yourself if Blackie is using some trick to encroach on the Tomb system.”

“The ecological and climactic changes appeared to be natural, therefore my self-defense imperative had no legal parameter in which to act.”

“Snot and skunk phlegm! Del Azarchel must have found out about you—probably for a long time—and worked out a statistical camouflage to hide the demographic and climactic changes over the centuries in the white noise, so your pattern-seeking subroutine would not see it, even though it was right before your eyes.”

“Unlikely, sir.”

“Likely enough that it actually happened. Brilliant! But how? Where did he get the capacity to outsmart you? Are there any mainframe structures on Earth capable of housing even one percent of your capacity, Pellucid?”