1. The Cloud
A.D. 24087
Thousands of years ago, the cloud humans had dubbed Cahetel had been traveling so near to the speed of light that it seemed to earthbound observers to be a disk flattened in the direction of motion, blue-shifted into the cosmic ray band of the spectrum, and so massive that its gravity distorted the image of the star Epsilon Tauri, also called Ain, lying directly behind it.
The exact nature of the beam from Ain, which was pointed directly at Sol, occluded and filtered by passing through the cloud, proved impossible to analyze.
After the cloud passed the halfway mark at seventy-five lightyears, the beam of energy issuing from Epsilon Tauri changed in character, and the cloud began losing mass.
Earthly astronomers were not certain how a starbeam overtaking the Cahetel cloud from astern could be decelerating the cloud. There were many theories, from the sensible to the absurd. One of the more sensible was that the Ain beam was exciting certain volatile particles set aside for that purpose into jets facing forward into the bowshock wave of the cloud. These jets acted as rockets to brake the payload mass of the cloud, and at the same time the payload was polarized to not be affected by the beam, not accelerated further.
One of the more absurd was that that starbeam from Ain was magnetic, and retarding the progress of the cloud, or was made of antigravitons, or some other exotic particle, to act as drag-chute or sea anchor or tractor beam.
No one knew. But the loss of cloud mass as the centuries turned into millennia was more consistent with the absurd tractor beam theory than the sensible polarized beam theory.
The cloud was now slowing for a rendezvous for the Solar System, and had matched Sol’s lateral motion through the interstellar medium in Sol’s long, slow orbit around the galactic core. It was one lightyear away.
Montrose had parked his body somewhere, so that technicians could work on increasing his brain capacity, while his mind roamed the libraries of the Noösphere. From the many instruments of many astronomical satellites and observatories, he could see two sources of energy in and near the cloud. Something was boiling at the center of the cloud, giving off vents of X-ray and infrared radiation. There were also smaller flicks or blurs of light streaking the astronomical image, looking almost like a meteor shower.
Hundreds of pellets, from the size of baseballs to the size of aircraft carriers had been placed in the oncoming path of the Cahetel cloud, surfaces inscribed over with the lines and curves and hieroglyphs both of Monument notation and of the later Cenotaph notation left on the moon by Asmodel.
It was a contact message, explaining in the awkward pantomime language of the Monument and the Cenotaph, that mankind intended to defy Cahetel, to render the prospect of forced deracination to far colonies economically unfeasible according to the Hyades’ own cold equations of interstellar power.
“Well, well,” said Montrose to himself, “our modest message in a bottle. Our own little UNWELCOME mat.” Then, remembering his old facility at Fancy Gap, Virginia, he added,
SOL, HAPPY HOME OF THE HUMAN RACE
—M.I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—
THIS PLACE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE BADDEST
BOLDEST WOLF-HEARTED EAR-BITING SUMBITCH
ON WHICH THE SUN HAS EVER SHONE:
TRESPASSERS KILLED ON SIGHT. NO KIDDING.
NO SOLICITING.
He looked again, through many instruments, at the brightness in the core of the cloud. Every thinking processes causes entropy and sheds heat of some sort, no matter how near-perfect the engineering. The activity in the core may have been Cahetel warming up their judgment engines or thawing out their expert brains to think about the messages Earth had left in the path.
“Actually,” said Montrose to himself, “it is a Little Billy Goats Gruff message, ain’t it? Don’t pick on me. Eat my little brother instead.”
Over Montrose’s objection, the Myrmidon High Commands, many years ago when the capsules had been launched, had insisted on including a star map showing the distance and direction to the surviving colonies at Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis. Montrose had argued, but the amassed minds of the Myrmidons had spread out before him the cliometric codes showing that if Tellus were deracinated, neither she nor Nocturne nor Splendor would survive, whereas if Nocturne or Splendor were looted of their populations, Tellus might survive, therefore the human race. Montrose did not know how to argue against the sharp and clear conclusion of the mathematics.
“Well,” Montrose concluded glumly, “if the cart is being chased by wolves, sometimes you throw the smallest kid out so the rest can get away. It ain’t pretty, but that’s life.”
But was it the kind of life he wanted to live?
2. No Reply, No Countermand
A.D. 24097
The message pellets remained bright over the next decade. The cloud was bouncing some sort of beam off them, either searchlights to read them by, or analytical torches to volatize fragments for analysis. It clearly was reading and studying them.
No answer ever came from Cahetel.
During that same decade, Montrose found he had to kill three of the Myrmidon High Command who interfered with the war effort, or who crossed him. Myrmidons had neither families to avenge nor formal laws to forbid such murders, provided they were done with the victim armed, awake, forewarned, and facing you. Eventually he had himself declared Nobilissimus, and that brought the number of challenges and duels down to a manageable level.
Each day, every hour, Montrose expected an imperious command to ring out from beneath the cloud layer of Jupiter, instructing Tellus and the other planetary intelligences to prevent the human races from mounting any opposition to Cahetel.
The call never came. Montrose pondered the silence soberly for many years, and wondered what it meant. He also pondered it while drunk.
But he nonetheless continued with the preparations for the Black Fleet.
3. Fifty Worlds
A.D. 24099
When Montrose was born, there had been eight planets in the Solar System. Two hundred years before that, there had been nine; and two hundred years before that, only six; in antique times, there had been seven, counting the sun and the moon as planets, but not Earth.
During that brief golden age when he had ruled, it had offended the majesty of Nobilissimus Del Azarchel that older generations had more worlds in their Solar System than his, and so the Hermetic Order had decreed any object pulled by gravity into a sphere and greater than 250 miles in diameter was a planet.
Hence from those days onward were there fifty planets in the Solar System, including Ceres, Orcus, Pluto, Ixion, Huya, Varuna, Quaoar, Eris, and Sedna, and many other small, cold, outermost worlds named after small, cold, outermost gods: from Apollyon and Ahriman, through Ceto and Chemosh, Eurynomos and Erlig, to Orcus and O-Yama, to Pwcca and Proserpina and Typhon and Tunrida, and onward.
And schoolboys for many centuries after cursed Del Azarchel whenever they had to memorize and rattle off all fifty names, from Abaddon to Zipacna, no doubt wishing that all the hell gods from the various world mythologies whose names they recited would torment him.
Therefore it was upon the fiftieth planet, and the farthest and the coldest, that the admiralty and forward observation post of the Black Fleet of the Myrmidons was stationed, of old called Sedna, after the Eskimo goddess who dwelt in the sunless deeps of the frigid arctic seas.
This outermost world was far beyond the Kuiper belt, her highly elliptical orbit brushing the inner boundary of the protocometary Oort Cloud, ninety times the distance of Earth to sun, or three times the distance of Pluto. Her year was 10500 Earth years, her surface temperature was four hundred degrees below zero. Her face was a cratered mask of rust, an oxidized form of exotic metals, gallium or titanium, beneath a thin veil of silicon oxynitride and frozen ammonia, where no oxygen ever should have existed to combine with them. Sedna was suspected to be the remnant of a perished world from a warmer clime.
It suited Montrose perfectly as the far and final outpost of his long war against the invader from the Domination of the Hyades.
4. Stand off
Montrose, or several of him, was cut off from his central brain as suddenly and completely as if an aneurysm had blinded him, or robbed him of all feeling in his limbs. He sent electronic shouts back toward his central self, not knowing what was happening but fearing the worst.
The calls went nowhere, bouncing off a security wall impervious to password and override alike.
Other twins of his, farther away, replied to the calls, and all spoke at once. “We’re cut off from the gatehouse.” “Is there anything there? Any damn thing? A poxy janitor camera?” “Nothing. Not a plagued thing! Whatever the Myrmidons wanted to speak to big Me about, they didn’t want anyone outside the gatehouse chamber to hear.”
“Do you think they killed Big Me? Are things that bad?”
“Bad? It’s mutiny. What the hell do you think?”
Fortunately, all of them could all talk and listen at once. “Who is closest?” asked more than one of them. “We need to get in and see what is happening. Who is closest?”
“Me!” The nearest version of Montrose to the gatehouse chamber where his huge main body stood was a man-sized semi-independent remote used for astronomy watch. He was already leaping in long loping parabolic arcs down the tall crystal corridors of logic diamond which ran to all points beneath the rusty surface of cold Sedna. The gravity was weak, and the corridors were ten times as high as they were wide.
Taking up that heavy amulet of red metal that contained the launch codes for all the deadliest weapons he commanded, little Montrose sprinted toward the last known position of himself. Montrose could glide for hundreds of yards, kicking off the deck at the end of each leap.
He came suddenly into the central command dome through a hatch somewhere near the height of Big Montrose’s knee. Even when within line-of-eyesight with his larger self, he could not reestablish mind-to-mind electroneural contact. All the communication barriers were up, and all the gems’ bright input ports dotting the gaudy uniform of the huge body were snapped shut.
Little Montrose came through the hatch too suddenly to stop his forward motion. He fell in a long, slow arc, and struck, bounced, and struck the ice-smooth deck. He was in the midst of the no-man’s-land, slipping in microgravity across the floor of logic diamond before he could stop himself. Sliding like a clumsy penguin on his buttocks, he saw above him and behind.
It was a no-man’s-land because he was between the battle lines. Behind him, on a semicircular balcony running halfway around the dome, the dark and streamlined armor of the Myrmidons stood, weapons ready, and motionless as machines on standby. Their iron masks were all carried on the front of their helmets, as if they were humans. Their eye lenses were in their breastplates because their brains were in their chests. The ones who had additional brains in their bodies had additional masks on the back of their helmets, or on their epaulets.
The gold material of their logic-crystal bodies beneath the armor assumed the standardized bipedal humanoid form of the military. Even after all these years, even in space, the gear and weapons of the armed forces followed antique models, as it was easier to command the soldiers to assume identical proportions than it was to change the shapes of triggers and boots and cockpits and the height of doorknobs and control glasses.
That was behind him. Before him, the one-hundred-ninety-ton body of the central version of himself loomed. In the gravity of Sedna, titanic Montrose was only about eight thousand pounds, and with the specially designed muscles and reinforced bones of his larger body, he could stand upright without any exoskeleton, with only a fifty-foot-tall walking stick to lean on.
Except he was not leaning on it. Except it was not a walking stick, not anymore. The sights and trigger had unfolded from the old fashioned smart metal of the wand and the multiple barrels and launchers and emission apertures had opened.
Montrose was resting the fifty-foot-long barrel propped in his one good hand on the apex of the sixty-foot-high launch house directly under the zenith of the dome. This launch house was a metal box holding a wide, squat spool designed to be catapulted into space, unwinding a lifting cable that could reach above the pathetic few hundred yards to Sedna’s geo-synchronous altitude. The spool at the end of the fully extended line would act as the counterweight to the miniature space elevator. Of course the launch house was placed in the only spot where the surface-wide planetary armor was pierced with a dome.
The main barrel of the big gun shot a 914mm exploding shell, weighing one and a quarter tons, that could easily break the dome, and expel one and all of the men he faced, and himself, into outer space. The secondary emitter slung underneath the main barrel was rated for projection in the million-volt range.
Big Montrose was not steadying the weapon with his other arm because his other arm was in a sling. The microscopic machines in his bloodstream for weeks would not be done repairing the special substances he used for bone material.
He and one of the officers of the central Admiralty of the Myrmidons, a memory line named Superintendent of the First Elite Process, had had a falling out, and the Superintendent had been unwise enough to mention Princess Rania during the discussion. Some echo of the memories of Blackie, perhaps lacking Blackie’s diplomatic polish, had led the Superintendent to say that the marriage to Princess Rania was irregular, hence invalid.
“Pestiferous gods of Hell!” Montrose had replied. “You dare speak her holy name?”
The two had decided to settle the argument in the old-fashioned way.
It turned out that the Myrmidons had enough of Blackie’s memories and personality characteristics that the custom of dueling was common and respected among them. The duels were allegedly a matter of prestige among the more “limpid” of the Myrmidons, that is, ones who had or claimed to have more of Del Azarchel’s original memories, tics, tastes, and habits. But the duels which began with such formality and punctilio usually ended in brawls involving swordsticks, bolos, biforks, railguns, splatterguns, splitguns, and eventually explosives and energies that penetrated hull and killed whole companies and barracks in a frenzied surge of decompression.
The Superintendent was dead, and all his memory-clones committed seppuku, and Montrose, albeit victorious, was not yet recovered. Perhaps Montrose should not have fought a second duel with the dead man’s adjutant officer while still recuperating in a hospital coffin, bracing the barrel on the edge of the coffin and holding it steady with his feet. The powder-burns on his feet still pained him, and his slouch, resting his shoulder on the control rack behind him, was to keep his weight off his feet.
Ironically, it was because rather than despite these wounds that Montrose looked relaxed and casual, almost as if the mutineers were not worth the effort of raising his weapon to his shoulder.
Low-level Myrmidons would have lacked the normal human subconscious reactions to matters of poise and posture, nor been able to read expressions, but the higher-level Myrmidons, the generalissimos and grandees gathered here, were closer to Del Azarchel’s neural architecture, and hence closer to a basically human set of personalities and habits. The casual lean and lazy one-handed grip of Montrose, and also his sheer size, unnerved them.
He not only looked impossibly nonchalant, he looked splendid, like a warlord from the nigh forgotten past—but not forgotten by the Del Azarchel memories.
Montrose sported a huge bicorn hat with an eagle of gold in the center of the cockade. On his shoulders were epaulettes of steel. He wore a long blue single-breasted coat with ten ball-buttons of luminous gold, embroidered with froggings on the breast and chevrons on the sleeves, and all the hems stiffened with wire drawn from black murk and gold logic diamond, and matching designs on his trousers. Beneath this were tall black boots with bright gold cuffs.
To culminate the effect, he was wearing, in conformance with firing range regulations, a pair of mirrored goggles polarized against his muzzle flare and electrical beam weapon backscatter; and he was smoking, in defiance of air circulation regulations, a cigar longer than a tall man’s coffin. The cigar’s ring gauge was upward of 660. It was as if a smokestack dangled from his sneering lip.
Big Montrose was standing in front of the manual control rack to erect the lifting cable. The dome overhead was made of some material, neither liquid nor solid, which would part around solid objects passing through it, as if to them it were insubstantial as a curtain of rain, but conform so tightly to any shape passing slowly through, that its electrostatic edges could repel air molecules and keep them within.
Visible beyond this magically solid and unsolid dome, a large silvery balloon made similarly of a substance and a state of matter that had not existed when Montrose was young, was tethered to an ion-drive tug. This was a barge that consisted of little more than a biosuspension balloon holding an atmosphere. It was slow, but could return the deserters to the inner system in a century or less. It was their hope of escape.
The hundred-foot fall from balcony to diamond floor was not what was making the Myrmidons hesitate. The drop in microgravity would hardly have jarred their knee motors.
No, the hesitation had a different source. The larger Montrose was saying in a patient drawl, “I will personally take great pleasure, gentlemen, obliterating any man jack of you that steps down off that balcony. Ah”—It was at this point in time that the smaller Montrose slid to a stop near the toe of the immense black boots.—“looks like reinforcements are on their way. You know what kind of weapons I can train on this spot.”
One of the Myrmidons spoke. “No signals pass into or out of this place. Hence, no remote weapons can target us.”
Montrose said, “Maybe so, maybe no. My other versions of me might always toss a blockbluster-sized wad of jellied petrol here, and blow everything to stinking perdition. You think they won’t? All the little me’s have my curly-wolf cold-hearted killing personality, but there weren’t not no room to install my kindly nature. Atrocious little buggers, them. Either way, your brain signals will not leave this place, if you all die here.”
He paused to let that sink it, and shifted his massive and stinking cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Oh, sure,” he continued thoughtfully, “you may have twins and backups and earlier versions of yourself on some of the other planets of the Black Fleet. But none of your recent memories, none of those of you who decided to mutiny, none of that will get out. Because you shut off neural communications as soon as your thoughts started taking mutiny seriously, right? Because you fellers live with each other poking and moiling in each other’s brains all the time, right?
“So that means any twins of you, any memories of you, they will be loyal to me.
“And they know—like you know—that I am damn well going to kill any disloyal members among you.”
The one Myrmidon who had spoken, now stepped forward off the edge and floated to the diamond floor, saying, “We take our base memories from Del Azarchel, our prime, who knows you have not the strength of character to kill without reason. Hence your comment can be disregarded as a deception, as mere bluff.…”
Montrose, without changing the direction of his glance or taking his hand from his immense cannon, leaned and put his boot on the Myrmidon who was speaking, and slowly crushed him to yellow paste beneath his boot. For a moment, the Myrmidon screamed both vocally and on all electronic bands, trying to find a clear channel to send his brain information into another housing. What else he may have said was lost. Montrose ground the bootheel back and forth, collapsing the armored shell of the Myrmidon and popping his braincase and splattering the ground with gray matter from the organic component of the brains.
“I got a good reason and a damn good one.” Montrose slid his foot back, rubbing the boot free of goo on the angled floor clamp of the antenna cable spool. “This is the first time in human history we have a chance to strike back at the Hyades. They have never even bothered to poxing talk to us, we are so low on their evolutionary scale.
“And you see, I’ve been wondering for, oh, eleven thousand three hundred and one years now if I did the right thing by selling mankind into slavery and letting Blackie’s Jupiter Brain experiment and torture and breed the majority of man into freakish little suicidal sexless morts like you.
“I felt rather low about all that. I keep thinking Rania won’t like it when she finds out.
“But, Judas hopping on hotplates in Hell, if’n I do this, if I drive the shepherds away and free the sheep to roam as we’d like, well, I reckon that even Jupiter Brain will see no point in meddling with human history no more, and leave all the lower folk to mind their own business their own way.
“We get to kill all tyrants, foreign and domestic, with this one shot. Is Blackie’s personality really that chickenpoxed, that y’all flinch now?
“The Hyades maybe might not kill you, since they don’t love you like I do, but I surely will kill anyone else who crosses that line, or crosses my cherubic good temper.”
With all the electronics blocked, the Myrmidons could not speak among themselves without making noise. Big Montrose could overhear the first, since his ears were larger than an elephant’s, and his ear hairs as small and as fine as could fit into the wide spaces of his inner ear, giving him a range both higher and lower than normal human.
The Myrmidons, knowing this, did not bother to whisper. “Brother, we outnumber him. He is two and we are many. He cannot kill us all before we reach and deploy the elevator.…”
Little Montrose drew his sidearm, dialed it to induction field, and swept it back and forth over the control rack Big Montrose leaned against. The rack contained the energy cells controlling the deployment winches of the space elevator. The electrostatic charge danced over the cells with a spectacular display of pyrotechnics, and the cores melted into the gearbox. For good measure, Little Montrose splashed some hooch from his hip flask into the power cell bank, just so that puddles and flying drops of alcohol would flare up with a blue fire, and add to the general smell and smolder. Then he took a drink and pocketed the flask again.
Big Montrose (who had leaned in alarm away from the burning control rack) was grinning so hard that his cigar flicked upward like a gun being raised in salute. “Get back to your pestiferous goddamn posts, my good gentlemen. We have an alien invasion fleet to incinerate.”
5. Jiminy Cricket
The Myrmidons, in less dignity than perhaps they wished, had retreated. Regulars from other branches of the Myrmidon memory heritage, and militia of Firstlings (including incarnations from channels of the Telluric Noösphere more clearly loyal to Montrose) now occupied cross-corridors within the world-fortress of Sedna and within nodes within the planetary infosphere.
Montrose—both of him—was unwilling to leave the spot beneath the dome, as it was still the only location by which the Myrmidons could physically depart. But Big Montrose was weary, and had programmed the floor to assume the shape of a wide bowl or tub, now filled with salt water so salty it was practically mud. Into this the vast, groaning, naked body was lowered, and his bandaged arm was soaked, and his wounded feet.
Little Montrose, the same who had rushed in to aid him, was perched on the tentlike hills of cloth of the discarded uniform, watching the Sedna mind through her myriad remote-gauntlets (ranging in size from microscopic to serpentine limbs as thick as tree trunks) undo the damage he had done to the cells and gearboxes of the space elevator launch system.
Big Montrose grunted, by which he meant, “Where is the countdown at?”
Little Montrose held up his pinky and thumb, the spacer’s hand sign for six, by which he meant, “If everything is on schedule, the Solar Beam was ignited at Sol six hundred minutes ago. Five days and change. In half an hour, the beam should pass through this area of space, and we will see the Black Fleet start to accelerate.”
The fifty worlds of the Black Fleet formed a rough ring or toroid hanging in space. This armada ring could be seen on instrument screens lining the balcony rail below the dome. Their sails, tens of thousands rather than merely hundreds of miles in diameter, were deployed, spread by pressure beams radiating from the worldlets, and from this angle, fifty images of the sun could be seen gleaming in their mirrored surfaces.
“That’s assuming there was not a successful mutiny at the solar station,” continued little Montrose, speaking more in implications than in words. “The images we are getting now from the telemetry tower show the Montrose there still seems to be in command, as of four days ago. If he was overthrown, we will find out when the beam does not come.”
“Or if the core beam hits the world-ships and obliterates them,” observed Big Montrose sourly.
The operation plan was to have the core beam pass through the center of the armada ring, and carry the main destructive force to the enemy. The secondary beams surrounding this core, emitted at far lesser energies, were meant to act as acceleration pressure for the sails. Nothing known to or theorized by human science could endure for a microsecond within the action of the core beam.
“You don’t think the mutineers would go that far?” Little Montrose said, or implied. “The Myrmidons asked us to do this. To make war on the Hyades invader.”
“Well, considering that they asked us two thousand years ago, back when Earth life was still mostly living on the surface, maybe they changed their semi-collective mind. And, more important, back then I was just the senior civilian advisor to the Myrmidons. That was three coups d’état, two century-long worldwide riots, and one intercontinental war ago. Now I got Blackie’s old job, and I am the Master of the World in all but name, and even though in theory I still report to the Myrmidon High Commission to Lesser Races, and they in theory take orders from Jupiter. And Jupiter ain’t given no orders to no one for a thousand years, and no one, not Tellus, and not Selene, can figure out what he’s up to. If Jupiter gave some secret signal to the mutineers, made a deal with them, who knows? I been the smartest man on the planet for so long, I ain’t got the first clue how to act or how to think now that there is something out there smarter than me. Two things, counting Tellus. In half an hour, something will happen. Who the hell knows what?”
“And if the beam lights up as planned?”
Big Montrose gestured at the screens. The images showed the fifty worlds of the Solar System, all the smaller ones, including Ceres and Pluto and his own transplutonian worldlet of Ixion. The orbs had been converted into electrophotonic brains of golden nanotechnological Aurum with small black cores of copied picotechnological murk. All were crewed with additional biological brains of the Myrmidons, housed in independent bodies or wired into the mind core as duty and convenience dictated. Some had additional crew of First Men, Hibernals and Nyctalops, or squads of Chimerae, Giants, and Sylphs woken from ultra-long-term archives. One or two boasted Second Men advisors and observers, the eerie and solitary Swans.
For two thousand years mankind had been living in austerity, conserving nine-tenths of the energy budget of their civilization so that there would be enough power at hand to ignite the beam.
Even so much energy was merely the spark plug compared to the energy output of the alien rings of artificial neutronium that created the beam itself, drawing directly from the pressurized plasma beneath the surface of the Sun. But the earthly energy was needed to accelerate the rings to the space-distorting Einsteinian rotations needed for them to function.
The rings were focused to a point beyond the heliopause, along the incoming path of the Cahetel cloud, at a distance of one lightyear. On this scale, that was point-blank range.
“If all goes as planned,” said Big Montrose, “then the first beam impact bathes the Cahetel cloud in radiation, destroying ninety percent of its mass in the first nine seconds of the war. The cloud disperses as fast as it can, and the beam spreads to compensate, becoming less focused and so less potent. Another nine percent of the mass is destroyed during the next two years. Shortly after that, the Black Fleet passes through the area, using their worldlet-based observatories and weapons to detect and destroy the final nine-tenths of one percent. The real task begins then, a long hard war to insure no smallest particle finds other little bits of matter to attach to and convert into picotech substance.
“That one-tenth of one percent will haunt us for years,” Big Montrose continued, “but without matter and without energy, what good is it? Technology is the ability to use units of information to manipulate units of matter-energy into new forms. No matter how high the level of technology, there are Planck limits and Heisenberg limits to how much information can be packed into how small a space—and we can starve any small clouds coming from that remnant, and burn them with the solar beam if they approach closer than Neptune. That gives us an eight-hour sighting and response time, rather than the two-year interval we are dealing with now.”
“You’re optimistic,” said Little Montrose.
“Damn right I am!” Big Montrose grinned his alarming gargoyle grin, which looked monstrous when portrayed on a smile several feet wide. “Both Tellus and me have thought through every possible maneuver a decentralized cloud-shaped being could perform. It cannot move faster than the speed of light; it cannot see faster than the speed of light. So the first hint Cahetel can possibly have of our plan, the first thing it sees, is the core beam passing through the heart of the cloud. I don’t care what it is, if it is made of matter, made of small particles held in electron clouds around nucleons, held together with the weak and strong nuclear forces, then, by God, it comes apart. There is just too much energy in that beam for anything to absorb it. If it tries to disperse, the outer segments of cloud can only move as fast as their mass can account for if the remaining mass of the cloud is converted to pure energy and used as a perfect fuel—and in any case not faster than lightspeed. We keep opening the cone of the beam to kept the fleeing cloud segments under continuous fire. Hell! We’ve finally got them! The laws of physics are on our side. No matter how advanced these aliens are, they cannot break the laws of nature!”
“I meant you are optimistic by which I mean idiotic.”
“How you figure? What do you think you thought which Tellus ain’t thought through a zillion times over from every angle?”
Little Montrose said, “If it was that easy for conquered races to fight off the Hyades, they would not be the Hyades. And the Dominion at Praesepe Cluster would not have conquered Hyades and the other dominations. And the Authority at M3 would not have conquered Praesepe and the other dominions.”
“You’re a pessimist. Other planets might not organize resistance like this. Or maybe out of every thousand planets, only one gives in without a fight, and we are among the nine hundred ninety-nine that get our backs up and put out claws. Like I said, we thought all this through! Inside and out!”
“All theory. You sound like Del Azarchel.”
“Have some faith in smarter minds than yours.”
“Why am I here, again?” said the little Montrose, with a sour look on his face. “As a pet for myself?”
“To keep me honest, squirt.”
“Well, how honest was your little show just now?”
“What do you mean?” asked Big Montrose uneasily.
“You killed that man.”
“He ain’t got no folks, no mother to mourn him, no orphans left behind.”
“So that makes it worse, not better, don’t it?”
“You know I had to do it, squirt.”
“You didn’t had to do it so slowlike. Did you? I saw. You put your foot on him, pushed halfway down, let them hear him scream, and then crushed the life out of him. Pure sadism. Why not shoot him?”
“No shells in the damn gun. Besides, I had to do it slowlike enough to make my point.”
“The point was that some of these critters have that one little bit of Blackie’s brain that loves Rania, and that thought is a red-hot iron thorn in the tender groin of your self-love.”
The giant slowly shook his head. “You ain’t reading my heart aright.”
“Don’t need to. All I need to do is read my own heart. It’s all there plain enough.”
“Now I wonder why Pinocchio did not just step on his damned cricket. I am beginning to see the drawbacks of a conscience that talks aloud.”
“What? Gunna step on me, too?”
“It’s tempting…”
“Yeah,” grunted Little Montrose. “I know. That is why most consciences don’t talk aloud.”
The big man was silent for a moment, trying not to let a scowl darken his features. Slowly he stood, and small rivers poured from his vast limbs. Robotic arms, large enough to serve as cranes in the dockyard for seagoing battleships, draped the yards of fabric around him. It was easier, given his size, for the arms to hold the cloth segments up to his body and send sewing machines the size of mice scampering on many legs up and down the yards, to sew up seams. It was easier to sew on buttons rather than to button them. Big Montrose did not wince as the damaged arm had its bandages changed, and was wrapped up again to his chest.
Finally, he was once again the very picture of ancient military sartorial splendor. Big Montrose said, “If the solar beam ignited on time, we should see it light up all the sails in a moment. Now is not the time to fret on past misdeeds, eh? This will make up for it all. They will not send a Third Sweep if this Second Sweep is deep-fat-fried and gobbled up whole: they are just as much slaves to their goddam Cold Equations as we are to them.
“With the threat of the Hyades gone”—Big Montrose grinned—“the human race will have forty-six thousand years to kick back and enjoy ourselves before Rania arrives with our manumission papers. Jupiter will have no rationale to maintain his control. By the flaming dung in the latrines of Hell, what will a puny twelve thousand years of servitude to Jupiter be then? A few millennium of sadistic eugenic practice, experimenting on human babies, committing genocide on unwanted breeds, forced marriages, inseminations and abortions and abominations—everything Jupiter did to create the colonists and then the Myrmidons—” Big Montrose snapped his fingers, making a noise like the thud of a bass drum. “Ha! What will it mean? Merely a footnote in history!”
Little Montrose said, “You mean it’s a footnote we are hoping Rania won’t read when she gets back?”
Big Montrose scowled.
Little Montrose said, “I understand that there are things I can no longer understand. I am like a dog to you. But a dog knows when his master is in pain. Just because you are smarter, don’t mean you’ve changed your nature. The conscience still works the same way. You can push just so far and no farther. You push the conscience by playing tricks on yourself—and you have to play along with the trick, let it fool you, or it won’t work. Then you can stretch the truth and stretch it and stretch like India rubber. But there is always an outside limit. Always. When you try to stretch it too far, it snaps back and hurts you.”
Big Montrose said, “I’ve always done whatthehellever I had to do, to get what I want. So why is this different?”
Little Montrose sighed and spread his hands. “Now, I reckon, I’d’ve said I’ve always done whatthehellever I had to do, to get done what was right. If you were at rest with yourself, you would not have made a little Jiminy Cricket for yourself. Which brings us back to my first question. Why am I here?”
“You are here to witness my glorious victory,” said Big Montrose in a hollow, hearty voice that fooled neither himself, nor his other self. “There is nothing that can endure the output of a star focused into a narrow beam.”
“Nothing we know,” said Little Montrose sourly. “Tell me, Cap’n! What are the rings made out of? You know, those gigantic spinning hoops of infinitely dense material that rotate at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, drawing up the solar plasma into a lased beam? We call it artificial neutronium. What is it made of?”
Big Montrose said, “Sonny, rather than explain things that are way over your head and way out of your price range and way above your pay grade, why don’t we just toast the victory?”
“I toast it when I see it.”
“Skeptical you. Then let us toast her.”
Little Montrose pulled out his hip flask, poured himself a shot of whiskey in the cap that doubled as a chaser glass. “What’s the chance of getting a beer? Shouldn’t drink this straight up if we are on military duty here. Or is wheat and hops extinct?”
Big Montrose said, “We’ve entered a strange and new age. Matter is programmable, thanks to advances Jupiter has released to Tellus. I can have the anything-maker make you whatever we got the raw materials for, including an ersatz beer.”
“Just like the food replicators on Asymptote! When do we get teleport booths?”
“The same day we get faster-than-light unicorns that shoot rainbows out of their butts. We cannot turn anything into anything, but we can turn a lot of things into a lot of other things, and put thinking and talking circuits into nearly all of it.”
“Talking beer? I want to go back to the past.”
“Doesn’t taste as good as the real thing, but, hey—gotta have a drink to salute what we’re fighting and dying for.”
A silent Myrmidon in civilian garb—a shape that looked like a three-legged stool wearing its iron mask on the seat—now brought a beer stein to Little Montrose. The stein was covered with a low-gravity lid of semi-permeable membrane. Little Montrose raised the smaller glass to the titanic version of himself. “To her we drink, for her we pray, our voices silent never!”
The big version raised a mug the size of a bathtub and dropped a frost-covered whiskey glass the size of a bucket into it, glass and all. It fell with dreamlike slowness in the microgravity. “For her we’ll fight, come what may, fair Rania forever!”
The smaller man tossed the contents of the shot glass to the back of his throat, coughed and wiped his eyes and slurped from the beer stein, all before the bigger version took his first tidal-wave-sized sip from the huge mug.
The smaller man coughed again. “No fair you putting my brain into a body that cannot hold its liquor. Damnification!”
Both were silent, and watched through the dome overhead, seeing a line of sparks, glowing at first like embers, then more brightly, scattered here and there in the black sky. For less than a minute, they flamed, dazzling, and went dark.
With no background against which to judge depth, it was not until signals from other instruments orbiting far from Sedna could triangulate on the flare-bursts, and produce a stereoscopic view.
This was a cylinder of destruction wider than the diameter of a gas giant, that had intersected particles of gas, fragments of ice or stone, or comet masses between the size of a baseball and the size of a mountain. Everything within the core beam was not just incinerated, not just vaporized, not just ignited, but annihilated. Each atom of every dust-mote and asteroid exploded into a scatter of electrons, protons, and smaller particles.
Little Montrose was impressed, and let out a long, low whistle.
Big Montrose said, “Roughly five quintillion joules of energy.”
Little Montrose said, “Hope all the worldlets of the Black Fleet are clear of the beam path.”
“That is the plan.”
Even as they watched, the light grew cherry red and dimmed. As planned, after the initial discharge, the beam was spreading and dimming. The beam was now powerful enough to impart acceleration to the worldlets, but not so potent as to obliterate them. One by one, over the next few months, their orbits would carry them into the beam path, and they would begin their long, slow trek toward Cahetel.
The first contingent of the flotilla had been waiting in place, just beyond the deadly core beam, to catch the secondary beam as it spread. Their sails lit up. The worldlets and dwarf planets of the Black Fleet now shined like radiant angels, dazzling, immense, blindingly bright. Cheers came dimly from the other corridors and buried decks of Sedna.
Little Montrose started, embarrassed that he had forgotten he was not alone here, forgotten that the Myrmidons, Swans, and various Firstlings, Hibernals, Nyctalops, Giants and Sylphs and Space-Chimerae were still men, and still cheered at the launch of great and terrible fleets.
He suddenly saw the reason for the optimism of his larger, wiser self.
“I take it all back,” Little Montrose said. “The alien entity is big and smart, that is true. But the Cahetel Mass has made the crucial mistake of being made of matter.”
Little Montrose looked more closely at one of the worldlets which was in transit against the broad sail of another more distant member of the fleet. “Maybe we should keep Pluto and throw the other ones at’em,” he said. “I was always kind of sentimental about Pluto. It was not a planet when we were born. Poor thing, getting demoted like that.”
“No time for sentiment,” said Big Montrose. “I’d throw Jupiter at Cahetel, if I could figure how to rig a lightsail.”
“Strap it to his ring system,” suggested Little Montrose. “And now what?”
“Now we wait,” said Big Montrose. “Smoke’em if you got’em.”
But Big Montrose made no move to light up one of his titanic and odious cigars. Instead, his skin, acre by acre, was going pale as ice, as nanomachines in his bloodstream were placing his cells in biosuspension.
Little Montrose took the time to find a chair and sit down, and he did the same.
6. Upon Reflection
A.D. 24101
“Wake up, sleepyhead!” said Big Montrose in a cheerful voice. He was both smiling and scowling, an odd expression which drew his eyebrows together and turned the corners of his lips up mirthlessly. “You don’t want to miss the whole war! This will be all over but the weeping in four minutes. And a few decades or centuries of hunting down survivors, of course.”
Little Montrose shook the last of the biosuspension frost off his face and hands, and stood up, blinking. He stood up so quickly that in the microgravity he found himself floating awkwardly in midair. The chair politely extended a serpentine—a whip of semi-intelligent self-repairing metal—and drew him back to the deck.
Little Montrose was confounded to see a serpentine here, a technology invented by the Sylphs, and used in later ages by the Chimerae as weapons, events so far in the past that only he had living memory of them. The serpentine really was a plateau technology, it seemed. Like the shape of an axhead or shiphull, it would never need improvement.
The screens that thronged the dome showed the views from various elements of the fleet of worldlets. Sedna was currently near the rear of the flotilla, which occupied a doughnut-shaped volume. The flotilla had traveled roughly one hundred twenty light-minutes in the last two years, while the Cahetel entity had approached fifty-two thousand light-minutes closer to the Solar System. On an astronomical scale of a battlefield larger than solar systems, they could hardly said to have moved from their initial positions.
Little Montrose wondered, not for the first time, what kind of minds, with what kind of psychology, could grasp these astronomical distances and make plans along such astronomical intervals.
Pluto was the most forward of the planetary flotilla, and had polarized her mighty sails during the last month, to give her surface observatories a clear view of the enemy. Spending two years in the penumbra of the solar beam had heated her surface elements and formed an atmosphere, and the crewmen aboard Pluto had emerged to cover the lee hemisphere of the planet, the side facing the Sol’s beam, with gardens and arbors.
The reflected light from the cloud had reached Pluto, from Sedna’s frame of reference, over four hours ago, and the concentrated light from Sol had struck Cahetel a year ago, and took a year to carry the message of what had happened to the observatories on Pluto, which were then relayed to the receivers on Sedna. It was these images Little Montrose raptly watched.
“Space battles would be a lot easier if space was smaller,” muttered Little Montrose.
“Beam impact in ten … nine … eight…” Big Montrose was saying, his eyes fixed on the image of the vast, dark thunderhead of Cahetel. The cloud was irregular, with wispy arms reaching many thousands of miles in each direction. The energy of its deceleration jets, facing toward them, surrounded the whole mass with a spray of nebular discharge paths, glowing blue and blue-white on the upper wavelengths of the spectrum. The whole looked like some freakish flesh-eating blossom of the Amazon river, with a heart of blue and petals of black.
The main mass of the cloud of particles was roughly globular, but since it was four light-minutes in diameter, the trailing hemisphere of the cloud seemed oddly distorted, since the image of the light from the bowshock of the cloud reached the Plutonian receivers four minutes before.
Little Montrose tapped the serpentine still circling his waist, and said. “Hey. You awake? While I was asleep, did anyone ever figure out how Cahetel was decelerating in the middle of an acceleration beam?”
The serpentine said, “Yes. Observers on Pluto, able to detect and analyze short-range discharges, discovered that seven-tenths of the cloud mass are artificial particles such as existed, in theory, during the first three seconds of the universe, and not after. They possess a property called supersymmetry. Such particles were neither electromagnetic, nor neucleonic, nor gravitic, since the forces of the universe had not, before then, been separated into the forces known to the modern universe. The influence of the energy beam from Epsilon Tauri, coming from their stern, breaks the supersymmetrical particles into gravitons and photons and so on in the midst of a super-powerful toroidal magnetic field in the center of the cloud. This acts as a heavy particle accelerator…”
The serpentine helpfully showed him an image on a screen near at hand, the electromagnetic aura of the field throbbing at the center of the cloud, the source of its impossible reverse acceleration.
His eyes bulged, and his jaw dropped. He recognized the characteristics, the magnetic contours. It was a ring of artificial neutronium, a ring wider than the diameter of Earth. It was the same size and shape as the acceleration rings Asmodel had left floating in the surface of the sun. A twin. The energy contour was as identical as the shape of the same snowflake, the same fingerprint.
“POX!” shouted Little Montrose. “Stop the beam! Cease firing! When our beam hits, that thing is going to—!”
Of course, the events he was seeing had happened over a year ago. There was no stopping the solar beam.
“… two … one … Sorry, what were you saying . .?”
The beam struck. The observatory images from Pluto showed what looked like a lance of lightning impaling a storm cloud. The dark mass was suddenly bright with textures and folds of the cloudscape, complex as the folds of a brain cortex. The cloud was as wide as the orbit of Mercury, and even a beam as wide as the diameter of Saturn’s rings was merely a small spotlight playing across the valleys and hills and kraken-armed streamers and films of the cloud mass.
Nonetheless, where the beam touched, there was a point of light brighter than the sun, and an expanding sphere of destruction, and another, and another. The scattering particles ignited like fireworks. The screens tuned to the X-ray and cosmic-ray bands of the spectrum went white and fell blind. On the visible wavelengths and on radar lengths, the cloud expanded like a smoke ring from the playful mouth of a cigar smoker. The core of the cloud was briefly visible. There were five Earth-sized globes inside, coated with dark ice, arranged in a gravitational pattern called a Kempler’s Rosette. In their middle was a ringworld. The globes acted as shepherding moons to stabilize the spin of the ringworld. In the middle of the ring was glittering the star Ain.
For the first time in thousands of years, the star Ain, Epsilon Tauri, was visible to observers within the Solar System without the Cahetel cloud to obscure it. In the screen image, the star seemed as bright as a nova, for its stellar beam was pointed directly at the cameras and recorders of Pluto. But the star was reddened and distorted, surrounded by arcs and smears of light, as the photons shed by stars behind Ain suffered metric warp passing through the ring. The ring was rotating, creating a circular space warp, the frame-dragging effect. Only Ain, in the precise center of the distortion, was undistorted.
The solar beam of destruction glanced across the cloud like the beam of a warship’s searchlight. For a moment, less than a second, it shone straight, an unbent ray. Then, instantaneously, part of the cloud mass imploded, and a volume of particles larger than a gas giant collapsed suddenly into a pinpoint, smaller (so the instruments Montrose saw reported) than the diameter of an atom. This microscopic black hole bent the solar beam, and focused it into the direct center of the spinning ringworld.
But when the beam, charged with all the output of Sol, struck the center of the Cahetel ring, there was a flare of energy that crackled like lightning out from the ring surface, and traveled up the arms of the vents and filmy extensions of the cloud, as if these were antennae.
“I was saying,” Montrose said softly, in a dull, stunned voice, “that the technology the cloud uses for decelerating inside the beam from Ain will allow them to control our beam as well. That is why they did not come in the same shape as the Asmodel entity.”
And then the last thing Montrose could have expected or imagined happened. The cloud vanished, replaced by the peaceful and gleaming stars of empty space. Ain winked brightly in the middle.
Or, rather, it seemed to vanish. It was not the constellation Taurus he was looking at. It was the constellation Scorpio, and the bright star in the middle was not Ain, but Sol, shining with the deadly emission of the solar beam. Montrose shouted for the Sedna Mind to recalibrate and give him a closer view. The serpentine (which was still embracing him) said softly that Sedna was no longer able to answer.
“What the pox is going on, Big Me?”
There was no reply from behind him, but a ghastly smell. He put his hand on the serpentine to turn himself around.
The figure of the larger Montrose still loomed behind him, but his vast skull was on fire. Flares of a sparks, gushes of heat, and smoke were pouring from the holes where once mouth and nose and eye sockets had been.
The black substance of his brain was now running out of the eyes and nostrils and mouth of what had once been Big Montrose and spreading over the surface of his burnt and blackened head, crawling upward and backward. It looked like a flower opening. The black murk coated the globe of the head, and dripped in inquisitive ropes down his neck and shoulders.
The outline of the skull was visible through the coating of creaking black substance, holes like the fingerholes in a bowling ball marking the position of the eye sockets and mouth, which continued to emit fragments and worms of the murk material from which the brain of Big Montrose had been constructed.
The body of Big Montrose, in one last convulsive movement—almost as if the nerves of his arm and hand had been preprogrammed to perform this action if signals from the central brain were cut—gripped a cylinder of metal from his coat pocket, and extended it unsteadily toward Montrose. It was a standardized brain-storage biosuspension unit, bright green metal marked with a red cross. It slid from the dead man’s giant fingers and fell with dreamlike slowness toward the crystal floor of the domed chamber.
And the floor was no longer the golden white crystal of the Myrmidon Aurum. Starting from the feet of the titanic black-skulled corpse, the floor turned dark. A black snowfall of tiny particles of the murk substance dripping from the skull, eyeholes, and throat-pit of the vast corpse were falling to the floor, and where they touched, the picotechnology was altering the nanotechnology, and the floor grew wrinkled and dark.
The chair next to Montrose flexed, turned black as India ink, and grew wrinkled and crooked all across its surface. Montrose, in a swift reflex, yanked the serpentine in his hand out of the socket connecting serpentine with the chair arm. There were other serpentines connected to the back of the seat. They turned black, writhed in a momentary spasm, and froze in position, looking like strange undersea weeds. The serpentine in his hand remained silver, apparently unaffected.
7. Everything Talks
“What the hell is going on?” Montrose said aloud.
The serpentine answered him and said, “We are receiving a signal from the survivor on Pluto, a subaltern from the Vingtener memory-chain.”
“Survivor?” There had been hundreds of men and thousands of minds aboard Pluto.
“Only one survivor. He reports that all of our technology based on murk pseudo-atomic logic patterns has been absorbed by control signals from Cahetel. The supersymmetrical particle breaking system allowed Cahetel to reflect all photons back toward the source. The emission point sources accelerated rapidly during the broadcast and blue-shifted the visible light into the radio spectrum, on the wavelengths to which the murk was inherently reactive. The solar beam signal which Cahetel reflected will reach Jupiter four months from now, and Earth, who will be nearly in opposition at that time, forty-nine minutes later.”
Montrose, standing with his fists clenched and the muscle in his jaw twitching as he ground his teeth, twice had to override the automatic rage and fear reactions triggered in his parasympathetic nervous system. (He enjoyed being able to do that: he recalled how often his natural body just plunged him into a rage or a panic without so much as a by-your-leave.)
But perhaps some panic was reasonable now. The agents of Hyades had left behind the murk traces and the interstellar beam elements deliberately. They were confident that even an attack coming at the speed of light, with no warning, could be parried, manipulated, and flung back at the attacker in the specific wave-forms needed to paralyze and mesmerize and enslave an entire civilization.
And anyone not using the murk, anyone backward enough to rely on nanotechnology rather than picotechnology, was probably not able to think quickly enough and carefully enough to form a threat anyway. What could technology on the biochemical level of artificial life do against technology on the atomic level of artificial elements?
And who would use anything other than the starbeam praxis to launch an interstellar-level attack?
But the kind of mind Cahetel commanded, the sheer thinking power needed, to catch a destructive torrent of energy, and transform it into control signals, and reflect it back across the entire diameter of a star system was appalling in its magnitude. It was beyond monstrous. It was godlike. Montrose adjusted his nervous system carefully, to let a moderate degree of awe and terror grip him.
It was not so much fear as to prevent his next question: “Can we warn them? The Solar System?”
“Subaltern Vingtener’s signal should reach any open receivers two minutes after the control signals take control of such receivers. Whether Cahetel allows the receivers to pass the signal through to any survivors, or permits the brains of the survivors to hear the warning, is, of course, a matter for Cahetel’s discretion. Anyone who is entirely disconnected from the Noösphere, such as yourself, and using no murk technology, will be spared.”
Montrose, although much less intelligent than the larger version of himself who had died, was still much smarter than a baseline human. He saw the implication.
He looked again at the ghastly spectacle of the ninety-foot-tall corpse, which as yet had not fallen. It did not even seem to be relaxed from standing at attention, despite that heartbeat and breathing had stopped.
Montrose studied the artificial memory chains which were installed in this body he was occupying, saw how to issue the commands to the multivariable cells in various parts of his nerves and organs, and in short order grew a triple set of Melusine antennae, which he used to detect the electronic and neucleonic activity rippling and throbbing through the black murk coating the faceless horror looming over him.
Montrose said, “Can you translate for me? It is thinking in a variation of Cenotaph code.”
The serpentine said, “Yes, although I do not have an access point.”
Montrose drew out his sidearm. He stared at it carefully, remembering what Big Montrose had said about the manufactured objects in this era, and realizing for the first time that he, Little Montrose, had almost no memory of this era. He did not recall the worldwide wars or riots he had launched, the ministers and dignitaries he had killed, the other men he had humiliated, or robbed, or slandered, or ruined, in his ruthless attempt to become the Master of the World. He remembered that he had wanted and needed to seize control of the war effort of the whole Tellurian Noösphere and of all three human races, and all the resources and manpower of an entire interplanetary civilization—because he did not trust anyone else to make the right decisions on how to fight this war. And his decisions had led to this.
The pistol said, “Sir? Are you contemplating suicide?”
He was not surprised it could talk. “Why do you ask?”
“You have the expression on your face typical of suicides.”
“No, that is just the natural cast of my features.”
“And you have the neural and glandular contour consistent with the profile.”
“Um. It is the natural cast of my glands. Can you configure yourself to—”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the pox? You didn’t hear what I was going to ask.”
“Your previous orders on the topic were clear. You wish me to act as a transmitter capable of interfering with picotechnology-based information cascades, to enable you to attract the attention of software embedded in murk fragments.”
“When did I give those orders?”
“Before you issued me, along with a uniform, to the smaller version of yourself you had formed from isolated biological matrices.”
“Suit!” He slapped himself in the chest. “Can you talk, too?”
A voice came out of his uniform buttons. “Yes, sir. Everything talks. All matter is programmable using the techniques Jupiter developed.”
“What did I order you to do?”
“To keep your smaller version isolated from any neural contact with logical crystal systems or Noösphere channels connected to any murk-based system.”
Montrose closed his eyes. He felt a hot sting of tears under his lids. Big Montrose had known. He had known from the beginning. Damn him.
He handed the pistol to the serpentine. “Use this. Establish contact.”
“Sir? What message do you want me to send?”
“Start with ‘Hello, you bastard.’”
“That concept may not translate.”
“Start with the opening of the Monument First Contact message.”
There was a quiet hum from the serpentine. That was a surprise. Serpentine operations were nearly always silent. This task, apparently, was straining it to the utmost.
Time passed. Montrose stepped off the balcony, floated down to the dark floor, and picked up the brain storage cylinder.
The tag read: MONTROSE, MENELAUS ILLATION (FIRST, ELDER). HANDLE WITH CARE.
“You sentimental bastard,” said Montrose. And he began to weep.
It was his original, biological brain, held in suspended animation, slumbering.