“I’d rather you thawed out fully.”

“My brain is working. What else do I need?”

“There has been a lot of wire corruption since you slumbered, Liege, and the Order made laws saying certain messages have to be delivered in person, naked eye, naked ear. Nobody uses or trusts the kind of interface implants you and I have.”

Montrose was not just surprised; he was shocked. His Cliometric calculations had not anticipated such a radical change in the basic social and technological patterns. One more thing to look into before he slumbered again. He said wryly: “Relicts already, eh?”

“A quarter century is a long time. And they insist I wear clothing, like an unevolved.”

“You ain’t talking aloud, are you?”

“No, Liege. Nerve jack. My suit has a short-range emitter.”

It took a long while for the molecular machinery clustered in the major cell groups in his vital organs, bone marrow, and parasympathetic system to restore him to life. Even through the nerve-block, there was something like growing pains, and his limbs trembled and shuddered. The last thing to happen was that special artificial glands released adrenaline into his system, and implants made of his own jinxed flesh, like the Hunter’s organ and Sach’s organ of electric eels, flushed with positively charged sodium and jolted his heart into action. Automatic circuits performed a few tests, just as undignified and invasive as anything a doctor would do, but with no bedside manner. Menelaus just gritted his teeth.

Montrose came up out of the gel, dripping, a white glass caterpillar-drive pistol in either hand. These 8-megajoule Brownings were waterproof, slightly curved, streamlined tubes of a white glassy substance, made with no moving parts and powered by a radioactive pellet likely to last 4.47 billion years. And they fitted nicely into his hands. (But he still missed his six-pound hand cannon as long as his forearm that he had used for dueling. The old Krupp railgun had been a handsome piece of artillery.)

Sir Guiden was still on one knee. He had removed his bulky helm, slung his goggles, and the wire from his skull-jack lay across his neck.

Underneath, his hair was close cropped, and he wore a black leathery cap that buckled under his chin. His face was rounder and fleshier than Menelaus remembered from 2501. Was that a touch of gray at the temples?

His age was hard to tell, since Sir Guiden sported a full-face tattoo shaped like a double-headed eagle: Wings surrounded his eyes, crooked talons curled on his cheeks, and twin hawk heads bearing crowns tilted left and right over his eyebrows. Montrose thought it one of the ugliest and most absurd decorations imaginable.

Montrose said, “I was wondering why you stepped in here all in full kit.”

“Because you are known to sleep with guns in your hands, sir. That, and no one else could talk to you.”

“So no one else has implants? The whole idea was that I could thaw my brain up to dehibernation, while leaving the rest of me iced, and that would save on wear and tear. Hurts like the pestilential devil to shock the heart awake, you know. Why couldn’t they just use a hand mic? Clip it to the coffin?”

“The technology is hard to come by, Liege. The automated factories were under Exarchel’s control.”

“What about that motorized ape suit?”

“You like it?” asked Sir Guiden, pleased.

“May my member get pustules if’n I don’t! Always wanted future soldiers to dress in roboexoskeletons. But it seems damnified impractical, and I surely don’t recall you wearing nothing alike to them when you climbed in your coffin.”

“I thawed in 2508 and again in 2526 to oversee certain operations.”

“War operations?”

“That, and moving the buried coffins when Rome was burned by orbital mirrors. The Vatican is gone.”

“How many people killed?”

“None. The city was already evacuated due to banner storms of hunger silk. The Consensus insisted that every city have an evac procedure in place, with an aeroscaphe like a lifeboat folded against the side of every house and tower. Lucky they did.”

“I don’t care about that,” said Montrose. He planned to have the current events, no matter how dramatic, be ancient history before he woke again. “Tell me about my coffins.”

“Safe. You’ll be interested to know I used your money to purchase Cheyenne Mountain from the government of Kansas.”

“That’s in Colorado.”

“There are six territories in the North American plains region calling themselves the United States of America. I made the land purchase from George Washington of the Government of the United States of America that is based in Topeka.”

“George Washington?”

“His name was Joua Ja Gomez before he was acclaimed to his position. All the leaders in Kansas become George Washington. He wears a tricornered hat and dresses in red, white, and blue. Very colorful. But Cheyenne Mountain and the surrounding land are now officially a part of the sovereign territory of Malta, and under the government and suzerainty of the Grand Master of the Order.”

Menelaus wondered how many more centuries the Knights of Malta would continue to hold government meetings, considering that they had not held Malta since Napoleon kicked them off it. They retreated without a fight, having sworn an oath never to raise weapons against other Christians.

“There is an old buried fortress beneath Cheyenne Mountain,” Sir Guiden said, “that should last thousands of years. If we move you there secretly, we might be able to endure undisturbed for longer.”

Menelaus realized that the kneeling man was waiting for permission to get to his feet. “Up! You don’t have to stand on ceremony with me, or wait for permission to wipe your bottom in the jakes. So who is this we? And why are we going to be holed up a thousand years? The Diamond Star is only fifty light-years away.”

The armored figure, with a hiss of motors, rose to his feet, spine straight as a rifle barrel. “We are. The Sovereign Military Hospitalier Order of Saint John, of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, of Malta, and of Colorado agreed to guard you in your coffin, Your Honor. We took an oath. I personally swore to you. Do you think merely the passage of time will cow me? Ninety men and eight stand without these doors, ready to retaliate upon any who would desecrate holy ground, where the honored dead lay themselves down, waiting.”

“It was ninety-nine when I went under, not counting you.”

“One of them, Sir Alof Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, during the thaw of 2526 was granted leave to depart the order that he might wed a current girl.”

“So why are we talking about a thousand years?”

“Thousands, sir. With an s.”

“You ain’t gunna tell me, are you? You have to drag this out and keep me on pins and needles.”

“Liege, there are some things that you must see with your own eyes. The observatory is directly above us, and drawing nigh.”

2. The Empire of the Air

Montrose was pleased, if a little shocked, that Sir Guy allowed him to walk around under the sky. It implied that assassins of the Cryonarchy were no longer seeking his life.

The Cryptonarchs had been, at one time, the only people Montrose thought he could trust with the secret of xypotechnology, cryotechnology, and with the power of the antimatter recovered from V886 Centauri, the Diamond Star. They had been his own extended family, grandsons and great-grandsons of cousins and nephews.

But the Cryonarchs proved unworthy of the trust Montrose had invested, and had fallen prey to time, to corruption, to weariness. He had removed them from power by the simple expedient of altering the orbital elements of the remaining world supply of antimatter, a few ever-dwindling crystals of anticarbon diamond. These centaurs occupied orbits beyond Neptune, where encounters with particles of normal matter were rare, but not so far as to encounter the paradoxically thicker areas of deeper, transplutonian space, where there was no solar light-pressure to clear particles away. Then Montrose had given the orbital elements to a priest named Thucydides Montrose, along with his latest formulation to create augmented intelligence.