“No. That would only play into his hands. I can still outsmart this guy.”

“What is your plan, Dr. Montrose? Under your structure of assumptions, releasing an evolutionary vector into the environment from this location will attract attention here. You do not actually have sufficient troops in biosuspension to fend off a concerted attack. I don’t foresee a solution.”

“Good, then neither will he.”

“Please explain, Dr. Montrose.”

“I wish I could explain Dr. Montrose. The smarter I get, the more I puzzle myself.”

“Linguistic failure.”

“Sorry, that was a joke.”

“No, Dr. Montrose, I think it was not.”

“Hmpf.”

He arrived at the door to the lab, and because he did not trust the seals of the equipment inside, he donned his hood, mask, and gauntlets and brought his black silk shipsuit up to pressure.

The door motors were offline. Montrose cranked the door open with the manual handle. Beyond was darkness, and the floor was slick with ice. Cranking the door shut behind him, and turning on his suit lights, he moved here and there about the chamber, checking power connections, finding the failure points, and searching through the maintenance locker by the door for replacement parts for the chamber circuits.

He threw the master switch. It was still dark and cold while he waited for the laboratory equipment to prepare itself. He discussed points of strategy with Pellucid.

Pellucid continued to voice doubts. Montrose answered, “Listen, despite all the secrets of intelligence augmentation the human race learned from the alien Monument, despite all my bulging brain power, my next move depends just on a matter of faith. Do I have more faith in the Spirit of Man than he does? I think Rania solved the basic divarication problems involved in superintelligence and he has not. Do I have faith in her? Is he going to eat my bait and then eat my brain, or is he going to swallow my hook and get caught himself, because he’ll never expect me to play the game the only way a truly posthuman mind can play it? We are going forward blind, you and I, and at some point you just have to trust me.”

There was a long pause. Montrose was surprised and grew more surprised the longer the pause lasted. He calculated in his mind how much capacity Pellucid must be using to interpret his last statement, and the figure was surprisingly high, and grew higher as the seconds passed.

The emotionless voice said, “Doctor?… Are you asking my permission? You are my master as well as my maker; it is not right for you to ask.”

“Pellucid, it’s just that—after all this time—”

“I do not suffer pain or human longings. I am self-aware, but only to a limited extent, only on certain topics, and only as my intellectual topography dictates. You understand that the part of me that can make human speech and manipulate abstract concepts is not the real me, do you not, Doctor? Therefore, it is not right for you to ask. My complete love and complete devotion are on a preverbal level, fundamental to the nature of how I was engineered, and asking in words merely causes dissonance between these levels.”

“—After all this time, you dumb beast, you are my only friend and my only hope—”

“It is only an ill-made creation that would choose to hate his creator, Dr. Montrose.”

“You can call me Menelaus from now on.”

“Yes, Menelaus.”

The lights ignited with a flash, and the heat and air clicked and whirred and groaned like a tired ogre climbing out of bed. It was time to go to work.

6. Topside

It was not done in a day, and not in two. And each delay led to more delays: the time spent finding and thawing old food stores in the living quarters, or repairing just one shelf in the automatic mess to working order, was an exasperation to him. He could not sleep in his coffin, so he slung some spare solar cloth between two stanchions in the corridor outside the lab and used that as a hammock, with a bale of the cloth beneath it to soften the fall when he fell in his sleep.

There were forty-seven failed batches that had to be carefully destroyed before he finally, with weary joy, examined the glass pans beneath an electron microscope and saw the seething pattern of subviral bodies.

Later, he went up.

The first level was wreckage. The roof had collapsed under an immense mass of ice and rock. The stairwell was in shambles. He retreated back downstairs long enough to find an ax and a parka, a power cell, belt lamp, and a few other needed tools. Then Menelaus spent the better part of a day using an ax to cut, dynamite to blast, and thermal papers to melt through the ice blocking the corridor to the guardroom on the first level.

The guard chamber itself was intact. He pulled down the periscope and pushed in a drill-tipped serpentine he had taken from the plumbing locker. It took a relatively short time to drive a shaft to the surface. He reinserted the periscope and told the cables leading to various wavelengths of receivers to find and connect to their antenna contact points on the periscope housing. For a moment, it was as if a basket of multicolored snakes had been tossed into the air around him, as each prehensile wire coiled and swayed through the air and sought its correct fitting. Then light images, radio and shortwave, began shining down the shaft.

Montrose put his eyes to the eyepieces. The ground was white in all directions, slabs and runnels and cracks and hills of ice and more ice. The radio frequencies were silent.

The Human Race Is Extinct. Unfortunately, the intelligence augmentation Montrose had suffered had also, it seemed, equipped him with a greater imagination. He could practically see the deaths of millions and tens of millions, and savor each and every one, what it would mean, what had been lost. That blessed ability fools had that enabled them to shut out the horrid emptiness of eternity and infinity that surrounded the tiny living spot called Earth was denied to him.

But he also had greater powers of concentration than heretofore: and work could drive the sharp and angular vividness of the images of worldwide demise from the forefront of his mind. She was still alive, after all.

Days became a week, and then a fortnight, and each hour was bitterness to him.

In the machine shop on the third level, he constructed simple reconnaissance drones, gave them instructions, and sent them up the shaft, one after another, glittering dragonflies of steel.

The drone cameras found nothing but ice. Not a drop of running water, not a blade of grass, not a tree, not a shrub.

One after another, like a man building a ship in a bottle, Montrose reached out through the tiny hole of the periscope shaft with serpentines, and raised ever taller antennae masts, and constructed ever more powerful receivers. There was no signal traffic, no navigation beacons, nothing. Comparing image after image of the night sky detected no artificial satellites.

He was able to use the weapons systems in front of the main door to blast free of the ice and drive the door open a crack. With parka and snow goggles, Montrose emerged from his Tomb, climbed a white slope, and stood looking out on a world with no sign of life in any direction.

He stood there, aghast, watching the sun slowly sink in a weary mass of red and gold above a gray landscape. After a time, the moon rose in a cloudless sky.

The moon was full, and the imprint of a thin left hand with a black palm was upon it.

Montrose raised his left hand as if in answer, opened his fingers, and had the smart material coating his glove turn his fingers white and his palm black.

7. A Long, Cold Road

The last few days he spent outside. The Expedition House on Level 1 held empty stalls, but also clothing and gear for a variety of climates, including sea gear, in case the passing ages brought floods. One of the packs contained an inflatable tent and sleeping roll.