There was an Ice Age covering most of the Earth’s surface in the early Twentieth Millennium. At the same time, energy discharges consonant with very large-scale industrial activity had been detected near Ceres, Vesta, and soon the other large asteroids in the main belt. Changes in mass indicated that they were being hollowed out. Changes in surface reflections indicated that they were being spun for gravity. The whole miniature world would form a carousel, against whose walls the centrifugal force could hold a layer of air, parks and lakebeds, farms and gardens. Montrose was delighted. It was something from his childhood comics come to life: O’Neill colonies! Someone had finally figured out that the surface of a planet was not the wisest place to live in this dangerous universe.

Then the Ice Age came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the millennium. A number of energy discharges consonant with the use of asteroid drops as weapons erupted over the globe on several continents. The impacts not as severe as the fall of 1036 Ganymed had been, but severe enough to abolish the ice practically overnight. A structure of flux tubes issuing from the north and south pole of Earth and reaching to the Van Allen Radiation Belts became a permanent part of the magnetosphere during this era; Montrose could not fathom their purpose. Perhaps they acted as guidepaths for energy beams meant to deflect or deter the asteroid drops.

Energy discharges consonant with major wars between the asteroid-based civilization and the Earth continued to register even on instruments as far away as the Ixion plutino across the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Millennia. Then the traces stopped. Unwilling to believe that man had learned the arts of peace, Montrose assumed that a new form of weapon, deadlier or cheaper or both, than antimatter or asteroid drop had been developed.

From these clues, he could deduce something about the nature and mission of the emissaries aboard the vessel hanging near him, but those deductions merely opened larger and deeper questions.

One drawback of knowing that there was a smarter version of yourself you could wake yourself into was that, no matter how sure you were of your results, you always wanted the more expensive energy-hogging super-version of yourself to double-check them.

And here was a mystery too deep for him. This ship should not be here.

3. Picotechnology

Ironically, the asteroid-sized Angel-mind version of Montrose was bulkier than the Archangel-mind version of himself. This higher version of Montrose was housed in a chunk of murk, partly solid, partly liquid, and partly extending half an angstrom into eleven dimensions, which occupied the space in his skull in and around and between the cells of his flesh and blood brain. This brain system was above the ten thousand level, roughly the intelligence Selene commanded.

The science of picominiaturization discovered from retro-engineering the murk left behind in the First Sweep allowed mankind, not without astonishing effort and expenditure of resources, to fit the intelligence complexity and capacity of the core of the moon into a body not much larger than a post-cetacean Melusine.

So, yes, Montrose, at ninety-four feet six inches length, and one hundred ninety short tons mass, roughly the size of a blue whale, had put on a little weight over the years. In zero gravity, the larger body had more advantages than disadvantages. He kept his scars and crooked teeth and crooked nose, because he wanted Rania to recognize him when he returned.

The process of replicating his one brain engram at a time into the portable picotechnology was slow enough that he did not let himself fret about the philosophical and theological implications. He still felt like himself. And besides, his original brain (or, rather, the seventeen-yard-in-diameter remote descendant of his often-repaired and often-replaced clones of his original brain) still occupied the analogous spot near the top of his spine of the leftover space in his now absurdly vast skull, and he could always switch his point of view back to it, when he wanted to go back to a slow, stupid, blurry, and easily distracted version of himself.

Montrose finally yawned, stretched, and floated free from his coffin. One of his smaller selves (out of whose eyes he could see himself) used a barge pole to pass a bulb of nutrient fluid the size of a balloon canopy into his hand. Another little remote puppet of himself in another corner of the endless crystal chambers of his ghost-self was dressed, under gravity, and in an atmosphere. That remote had a cup of hot and black coffee in his hands, and was waiting to drink it when Archangel Montrose drank the nutrient.

He had once experimented with making himself coffee when he woke, in pots the size of swimming pools and drinking from cups the size of bathtubs, but the drink tasted funny to his giant tongue, even if he made all his taste buds coating its acre of flesh a standard size. The fluid did not flow correctly in his mouth, because the fluid dynamic behavior did not scale up. He could have adjusted his sensorium not to be bothered by the oddity, but that seemed like an uncanny way to flirt with unreality; or he could have given up drinking the scalding, bitter fluid when he woke, but to give up a bad habit of such venerable age struck him as an abomination. How would he recognize himself in a mirror when he shaved, if he changed that much?

So instead he merely had the taste sensations of one of his smaller bodies transmitted into him. And then he drank a bathtub full of bathtub whiskey, mixed the signal from both sets of taste buds in his cortex. He called the mix his Irish coffee.

While he sucked on the nipple of the nutrient bulb, he turned a nearby plane of the logic crystal forming his suspended animation cell into a mirrored surface, looked at his five o’clock stubble warily. He programmed the skin cells to reverse the action of his hair follicles, and to reabsorb the beard-hair into his face.

“What is the god-pestifical-damned situation, me?” Montrose asked.

“Situation normal, all fetid ungodly,” the image of his face (from whose many cameras he could also look) grunted to himself from the crystal wall.

“That bad, eh?” He wiped whiskey from his drinking bulb onto his palm, and slapped himself in the jaw once or twice, to act as his aftershave.

4. Texas Hospitality

The approaching vessel looked like a mirrored sphere. Landers dropped from the sphere were tripods that looked something like grappling hooks connected by cables. As if she were a pirate ship of old, the sphere threw out grapples and prepared to board.

Bags of biological and nanotechnological material were carried like wobbling egg sacks down the cables to the landing tripods. There was an exchange of signals between the egg sacks and the mirrored sphere, mostly biotechnological information. Ghost Montrose amused himself by warming chambers carried on a carousel, which he spun up to Earth’s gravity, feeding in oxy-nitrogen atmosphere and so on, and watching the biotechnical information change and change again, trying to keep up and match the expected environment.

After a month or so of that, the egg sacks decanted a crew. Montrose expected the brain information of the crew aboard the sphere, or perhaps back at Jupiter, to be downloaded into the crew shapes remotely; instead disembodied heads traveled down the cables from airlocks in the sphere, were gathered to the biomechanical bodies, and fitted themselves into place.

The creatures were walking across the face of his asteroid like ants on a wall. Four of them made for the airlock he had so generously poked like a periscope out through the stone shell of his asteroid-body.