“There are no occupied structures at all upon the Earth, Dr. Montrose.”

“What?”

“The last remaining city-state ceased drawing power from its geothermal tap centuries ago. This was the domed city of Nyiragongo in the Virunga Mountains. There has been no detectable radio traffic or engineering signals since that time. I believe the human race is extinct.”

“Pox! And you did not wake me up?”

“It was not one of the eventualities covered in your otherwise thorough instructions, sir.”

4. Extinction Event

Montrose was silent a moment, face dark with wonder and horror.

“What about outside these city-states? Is there anyone alive anywhere else? What happened to the human–dolphin hybrids you mentioned living in the sea, the Melusine? What happened to the space colony?”

“Unfortunately, after the sudden drop in Inquiline population levels, all Melusine internal signal traffic became closed to me. I could not maintain espionage systems within their data streams without the Inquiline to act as intermediaries. Their external signals became increasingly rare and cryptic: I assume they evolved to the next intellectual topology.”

“Smarter than you? Or just different?”

“Unknown.”

“Why didn’t they stop the extinction?”

“Unknown. The external evidence is that the Melusine dismantled their long-term prognostication houses and dissolved their method of peaceful reconciliation of disputes due to a neurophysical and psychological divarication between the coastal, undersea, and the spaceborne Melusine.

“There was a period of anarchy and collapse: the indirect evidence suggests a drop of their industrial capacity in ten years to two percent of its former levels, with a corresponding dieback of unsustainable population, either through voluntary mass suicide or mass euthanasia.

“In the final period, the undersea Melusine and spaceborne Melusine entered into what was apparently a war of mutual extermination, which ended with the collision of the asteroid 1036 Ganymed in the Eurafrican continent.”

“Wait,” said Montrose. “Which continent?”

“While you slumbered, this continent was formed by the closing of the Mediterranean, which is now a mountain range.”

“Oh. About fifty million years before schedule, wasn’t it?”

“During the Locust War, certain of the powers used applied volcanism to maneuver plate tectonics to their military advantage. But that continent in turn no longer exists, as it was bisected by an inland sea that reaches from the isthmus of Ethiopia to the Gulf of Guinea. I thought the terminology North Eurafrica and South Eurafrica inelegant, so I called the northern continent Baltica, and the southern, Pannotia. Normally, I would have waited for the decision of an accredited scientific or Linnaean consensus before selecting a naming scheme, but as the human race is extinct, it seemed unproductive to wait.”

“Oh. Well, use those names until we find if Blackie’s got something nicer sounding. Describe the impact.”

“The impact released energy equaling the explosion of one hundred thousand gigatons of TNT, and the seismic reaction was twelve point five on the Richter scale. It formed several impact craters from Ethiopia to Sudan to Cameroon, making a scar some seven hundred and fifty miles wide and two thousand miles long, into which tidal waves poured. The reentry of ejecta produced infrared radiation sufficient to kill all exposed organisms in the eastern hemisphere, and elevated levels of sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere. Continent-wide firestorms igniting all exposed plant life raged throughout the other hemisphere. The dust cloud blocked the sunlight for thirteen months. The year of darkness increased the speed of glaciations, and the polar ice caps, as of my last reliable report, reached to tropical areas, and may have met at the equator.”

“Last reliable report? When was that?”

“Twenty-two hundred hours, thirteen January of A.D. 9500. The impact of 1036 Ganymed distorted the Earth’s crust and destroyed all my type-one sensor periscopes, and damaged half the near-crust depthtrain tubes. Increasing ice levels combined with atmospheric changes rendered my type-two sensors inoperative. I do not have the resources to repair, nor stores to replace, these systems. I have partial surface access from three hundred and thirteen sites, total access from none, and no remote capacity. Was I right to thaw you?”

“Dammit, you were. I never thought Blackie would actually slam a rock into the Earth and kill the whole human race just to get at me. He’s lost his mind, or he is smarter than both of us—and as far as I care, either option is worse than the other.”

5. The Immortal Game

He heaved a sigh and swallowed his coffee, which had grown cold while he talked. Scowling, he said, “We have one thousand years and change before the Hyades World Armada descends. That is not much time. Warm up the nanobiochemical Lab seventeen and give me the records of the most recent interments.”

“Lab seventeen? Are we planning biological warfare, then, Dr. Montrose?”

“Not quite. Evolutionary warfare. I am going to release Von Neumann machines into what’s left of the biosphere, along with spores, algae, and the basic terraforming package I was saving for that starship voyage I apparently am never going to take. I also need our most recent biological information on whatever might be left of the human race on the surface.”

“Doctor, I believe there is none.”

“And I believe you were fooled, you dumb horse. Do as I say.”

Montrose, now dressed in a black shipsuit taken from his footlocker, climbed up twelve levels of the Tombs, which required more than a few minutes.

The second level was crowded, with two coffins to every cell, and the warehouse chambers filled with dismantled equipment, everything from refrigeration units to nano manipulators to robotic weapons to lighting fixtures, all of which should have been on the first level.

“Which is the most recent coffin?”

Pellucid answered: “We inducted our most recent client on January twenty-third, A.D. 9296. His name is name unknown, cause unknown, duration unknown. My records are in disorder, and no further details are available. Are you planning to thaw him?”

There were coffins occupying the corridors, linked by lines running through T-splitters to overcrowded cells where more coffins lay piled one atop the other. Montrose followed a glowing line of light on the floor, climbing over the coffins, to find the most recently interred one.

He wiped the screen set in the coffin’s hull free of frost and switched it on. Inside was a streamlined, narrow-headed body, unusually tall but unusually thin. It was oceangoing: it had the thick skin, webbed fingers and toes, gills like Venetian blinds under its armpits, of a standard sea-modified hominid. It was utterly lacking in facial hair, and the sexual organs were folded into a crotch pouch, so Montrose could not tell if it were a merman or mermaid. The skin was a black as shoe polish. Negroes were called “Black” in his day, and so were Dravidians, but they were a dark pink or a dark brown, not so much darker than himself after a hot summer. This creature was black as obsidian, black as onyx. It gave the man an almost statuelike inhuman look. Nothing like it had existed on earth the year when Montrose was born.

The most radical modifications were evidently to the nervous system. On the front of the narrow skull of the sleeping form, above the huge eyes and above the infra-red-sensing eye-pits, tendrils of some sort of radio-linked neural interface curved back from the brow like antennae: one pair was gold, one was silver, one pair was blue. It had two sets of ears, a smaller pair covered by folding tissue set behind and below the human-looking pair. The back of the skull was dotted with three symmetrically spaced pair of input and output ports. Whoever had designed the species evidently expected them to draw in a great deal of sense impressions from their environment.