But then eventually he got a signal channel. It was Oenoe.—MY LOINS ACHE FOR YOU COMMA BELOVED AND ADORED COMMA AND I CARESS WITH LOVING FINGERS THE KEYPOINTS OF THE INPUT BOARD STOP—she typed out.

He found he could flick his implants off and on by grinding his teeth. The simplified brain woven into the strands of the tent material was able to turn the binary code into a Nymph symbol format. The trees could understand that format, and transmit through their roots to her mantilla. Oenoe’s mantilla was connected to the board she had discovered in the radio shack.

—STOP WITH THE DIRTY TALK STOP BE BRIEF STOP AND STOP MAKING ME SAY STOP STOP—he sent back.

To his surprise (and relief) the next message was just a description of the chamber she and Soorm had found, and the condition of the equipment. Soorm was able to sense some of the biotechnological circuits buried in the walls through his Sach’s organ, which was the weaker of his three electrocyte organs, ten volts, and able to throw the main switch in the chamber using his Main and Hunter’s organs, six hundred volts. At that point, the circuits on their own made contact with their emergency failover power cells, and the radio had power.

Menelaus walked Oenoe through the maintenance procedure step by step. Both she and Soorm came from ages with very advanced biotechnology, but very poor in metals, and they were not used to dealing with the nuts-and-bolts technology of dead metal and live copper wires Menelaus preferred. He did not even use fiber optics, since the material for him was harder to work and replace. Copper he could work with in a smithy. (And of course, whether the crust of the Earth was depleted of lodes of metals made no difference to him, since the depthtrains reached to the outer core.)

Then, very carefully, he had her power up the antenna, and listen first on the terahertz imaging frequency; then on the bands set aside, in his day, for amateur radio, wireless microwave signals, television, FM, shortwave, and AM and geophysical monitors.

No one was broadcasting. Dead air.

Impossible. Even had mankind retreated into a totally nonmetallic biotechnological phase, as they had with the Nymphs, there would still be organized signal traffic from the trees. Even the Sylphs, who had the most restrictive regime of technophobic radio silence in history, still produced detectable engine pulses from the automated factories on land, and energy residue from the high-energy vehicles in the air. There would be something out there!

Menelaus wanted to pound his head against the tree in frustration but he dared not move, lest he lose the contact with Oenoe in the radio shack.

Could Pellucid be correct? Was the human race simply … gone? Menelaus did not for a moment believe it.

Like stepping barefoot on a thorn, a doubt stuck him, and made him unsteady.

Why was Menelaus so sure? Could Mickey the Witch be correct? Was the conviction that Ximen del Azarchel still lived, and was still arranging every setback and sinister development in human history, no more than a lucky rabbit’s foot?

He said to himself that Ximen del Azarchel was too intelligent and too careful to let himself get killed by a big rock falling from space. He tried to stand on that conviction, to put his weight on the perfect certainty that Blackie is too damn smart—but the thorn was only driven deeper.

He answered himself with a sly, sarcastic thought: Oh, really? Just like the Judge of Ages is too damn smart to be locked outside his own Tomb system, eh? Behold! The great and powerful Posthuman of Oz, standing on one leg in the cold, with his arms outstretched, unable to reach his endless arsenal of tools and weapons and Xypotech serfs and biotech labs and bottomless treasures. What, you dropped your keys down a storm drain or something? And didn’t you misplace your wife somewheres, one of these many, many years past?

If that is how smart you are, what makes Blackie too smart to be wiped out by a dinosaur-killer asteroid? A mountain in space as wide as the island of Zanzibar fell down and pasted everything in the damn hemisphere, and lit up the other half like a Yule log covered in whiskey. What was he supposed to be able to do, push it aside with his brain waves? Be somewhere else when it hit? He was not in your Tomb system; you have too much set up to keep him out. If he was on Earth, and the disaster happened faster than he could prep a ship and find the right launch window, then he was burnt like a straw man stuffed with firecrackers tossed on the Independence Day bonfire.

Just because you are smarter than a man, does not mean you are not stupid, pal.

He hated losing arguments to himself, but all he could think of to say to himself was that people who talked to themselves too much were in danger of losing their minds.

“Well, I’ve lost my mind before, and it don’t look as it’s done me much harm,” he said. Then he wondered whom he was talking to.

There had to be a human civilization still alive, somewhere. Del Azarchel would not, could not have allowed man to fall below a pre-Marconi level of technology. There were only five hundred years left before the End of Days. That meant that somewhere, large-scale information technologies still operated, global scale or larger. The information libraries had to be considerably larger than they had been in Menelaus’ day, or else, even doubling yearly in size, they could not possibly match the Hyades when they came.

He had to make one more try to find the current civilization, the Advocacy or World Empire or whatever it was that was running this aeon.

Montrose sighed. The dogs were not punctilious about blowing reveille at the exact same minute each day. He would have preferred to do the radio check in the middle of the night, but dawn was the best time for certain ionosphere conditions, and the heavyside layer was halfway between its closer nighttime position and its farther position once sunlight expanded the atmosphere with incoming heat. He was not sure whether he had time to have Soorm and Oenoe perform one more check, not and swim out again, and make it back to the tents. But even he could not predict when the dogs would blow the horn. It was just a guess.

He guessed to have Soorm and Oenoe try one more thing. He ground out the message on his teeth, letter by letter.

To check in the extremely low frequencies in the 3- to 30-megahertz band, the main antenna was not used, but instead this “antenna” was actually leads drilled into the ground, which used the entire Earth as the antenna. In an atmosphere, waves on that low of a band were refracted so sharply that they followed the curve of the Earth and could, despite its electrical conductivity, penetrate seawater.

It was not totally passive, but the chance that someone could detect his carrier wave, he assumed, was nil.

WE DELIGHT TO RECEIVE A BROADCAST STOP—she typed.

YES AS SOON AS SOMEONE IS ON AIR STOP WHICH BAND QUESTION—he replied.

THAT SOON IS NOW SOON STOP ELF STOP—she sent.

IF YOU ARE PULLING MY LEG STOP PLEASE STOP STOP—he replied, wondering if he needed the second stop in that sentence.

The idea that the ELF band would be active was hard to believe. Naturally occurring waves on those extremely low frequencies were present on Earth, resonating between the ionosphere and surface. Montrose had been hoping to pick up a carrier wave from another Tomb station. The idea that a civilization still recovering from a recent asteroid strike would use this, rather than the more useful AM, shortwave, FM, or microwave bands was hard to believe.

LAST MESSAGE UNCLEAR STOP AM GRAFTING MESSAGE STOP—she typed.

He was not sure what she meant by grafting until the tree under his hand began to throb with additional energies. It was Monument emulation code. Since all human information systems, whether grown from trees or woven into cloth or cyborged into human nerve endings were based on Monument code basics, it was actually easier to send a cross-platform data packet from radio shack board to Nymph mantilla, tree-and-root network to Blue Man tent material to pre-Sylph-era implants using the raw Monument code than it would have been using either English keystroke hexadecimals, Nymphsong enzyme notes, or Intertextual machine dots, or Merikan internal biofed-signs. Due to the particular and unique structure of his brain, the implants could send a signal directly into his auditory nerve in the squawk-language of the Savants, which a trained subsection of his visual cortex could turn into the image of a ninety-mile-wide two-dimensional surface covered with Monument glyphs.