Montrose loved the outdoors. He preferred seasons when the wilderness made noise: endless chirping, hooting, croaking, or the music of wind and rain. This world was silent and still and white.

Each dawn, when the wind was right, little graceful bits of fluff, looking like the down of dandelions, fluttered from the stations and towers he had grown. Each noon, seeds of the same substance drifted behind the tails of his dragonfly-winged flying machines like the plumes of cropdusters. He wrote love poems of appallingly bad doggerel in the skywriting, and was relieved as the slow, huge winds shredded them. As the sun sank in the west, the winds would die down, and the gigantic silence of the world return.

Each dusk he disturbed the hated silence with fireworks, as his launching tubes shot very tiny and very powerful intercontinental rockets up through the chimneys he had dug. Each multistage rocket with its delicate Von Neumann nanotechnological payload was flung into the stratosphere, little gleaming penstrokes of flame against the winter-crisp night sky.

Toward midnight, he would look north, seeking the tiny constellation of Canes Venatici, where the dogs of myth, Asterion and Chara, eternally held on the leash of Boötes, eternally chased the great bear of Ursa Major, with baleful Arcturus as their lantern. When the conditions were right, and skies clean of cloud or mist, he could find the speck of the globular cluster M3 in the darkness of heaven, until the image blurred and swam in his vision, and he did not bother to wipe the trickle of heat that fell down his cheek. There was no one to see him weeping, after all. The last race of man was more or less extinct, and the next had not yet been born.

Eventually, his days and nights of labor done, he returned below. It was more trouble closing the great door than opening it, since he had to haul equipment, block and tackle, and a diesel-powered winch from the Machine House on Level 6, but finally this was done as well.

Before he closed the lid of his coffin, he spoke to Pellucid.

“I still got one thousand years to wait until the armada from the Hyades cluster arrives, and over sixty thousand years to wait until Rania arrives, if she ever makes it back. First it was Ghosts, then Whales, then Witches, and then I had to wake up again when the Chimerae turned bad, and when the Nymphs turned good, and so on. And now, instead of a plague, or an ecological disaster, or an apocalypse, now it is the silence that wakes me.”

“Menelaus, we do not have proof that machine intelligences have wiped out the biosphere. Our instruments reached as far as Annapolis to Memphis, and were very spotty in between. There are heat sources in the sea—”

“I am not giving up hope, Pellucid. I am walking a long, long road, and each move and countermove is like another bump. And Blackie keeps jarring me awake. Six months here, a year there. Bumps on the road, but it adds up.” He uttered a bitter laugh. “Now it is an ice age. Just a little patch of ice on the road …

“So I am going back to sleep. Disconnect my coffin mind from your systems, and fake up the records like we agreed. It is going to take you a while to gather all the coffins I need from the sites I gave you, and they have to be placed in the way I said. I gave my word to my sleepers, and I don’t want innocent people in my care to be hurt. And don’t wake me up for anything else until I get robbed again. I miss my wife, dammit!”

His last thought after the medical fluid closed over his face and numbness seized his body was of how, ever since he was a child, he had always hated the snow.

PART FOUR

The Long Wait

1

The Tomb-Robbers

A.D. 10515

1. Half-Awake and Buried Alive

Nothing went as expected.

His next awareness was a foggy, gray sensation as the coffin he was in was being moved, and none too gently. Neither awake nor asleep, he could neither move nor see.

He could feel the sensation when the coffin was dropped and could hear the explosions of small arms fire. One of the slugs must have ricocheted from his coffin armor, because the interior rang like a bell.

Then there was a swaying sensation as someone or something grabbed the coffin again and moved it. It was an irregular motion, as if a gang of men were hauling it.

When his numb fingers were alive enough to be able to clench and unclench, he pawed against the inside of the lid, feeling for triggers and controls. Each of the knobs was differently shaped and textured to allow the slumberer to recognize them by touch. He pulled the switch to electrify the outer shell of the coffin, hoping to electrocute whoever was manhandling it, but there was no answering hum of power being discharged. He pulled the knob to open the outside pinpoint cameras, but again, there was no response. The inside of the coffin remained dark. This meant both the primary and secondary power cells had been cut, which implied someone who knew exactly how the coffins were built.

Fortunately, there were chemical-powered failover backup cells and, because he was careful to the point of paranoia, backups for the backups. He found a humidor of cells, each in its roughly-textured tube to one side of the coffin controls, drew one out, shook it, and was rewarded with a dull greenish light filling his cramped interior.

He had to act quickly. The physical sensation of weakness, the fatigue and nausea, told him he had not been properly thawed. Most likely the cables between the coffin and the cryonic plumbing had simply been severed, leaving him with a body full of microscopic machines that broke down under normal body heat: but not all at the same time. As each regime of cellular functions stirred back to life in bloodstream, muscles, bones, and nerves, the breakdowns must have happened in something close enough to the right order that the coffin’s internal emergency equipment (which also must have been operating) somehow was able to restart his heart and lungs before the internal power was cut. He was lucky he was not in a coma, or dead.

Or if it was not luck, the Tomb-robbers outside stealing him must have entered some sort of probe or mechanism in through the hinges, or through the conduit locks, to get at the mechanisms and dismantle just enough, and just in the right time, to ensure he would wake up sick, but not dead.

That was not good. The dim greenish light, and fog of his nausea, defeated his eyesight. If there was something snaking into the coffin, he did not see the hole. Of course, with nanotechnology, the machinery could be invisibly small, the hole smaller than the point of a needle.

The motion of the coffin became more violent, and then upended, so he was yanked against the straps and medical appliances that held him down. He was not quite standing on his head, with knees and feet trying to slide down into the corner where his head was lodged, and the swaying motion became more violent. His coffin was being dragged or hauled up a steep slope, perhaps with the aid of ropes.

Only then did he become aware that there was a breathing tube down his throat and another tube clutching his manhood. Fortunately, it was a condom catheter, also called a “Texas” catheter. He felt a moment of pride in the name of his homeland, grateful he did not have to decatheter himself with numb and unresponsive fingers.

He was willing to yank the intravenous needles out of his elbows and gastronomic tube from abdomen without further ado. Little droplets of blood floated through the interior of the coffin. He stared at them in wonder, unable to force his brain to realize what he was seeing. How were the blood droplets drifting in midair, if he was not in zero gee?