A Chapter at Random out of the Middle of My Current Project

Naturally the dishes had to be cleaned by hand, in a sink, since the last automatic dishwasher manufacturer had gone out of business over a century ago.

Menelaus did not mind it a bit. It was honest labor, and it left his mind free to wander through the airy landscapes of the new math system he was learning.

He could work with his goggles on, tuned to half-transparency, and his eye-motions or muttered commands were sufficient to write notes and proofs, or set bookmarks in motion to dog-ear certain passages and pages he needed to examine later in detail.

The other advantage of dishwashing was that, at the end of his shift, he could see the results of his work. He knew, because he had calculated it, the exact value in the point notation, what each stack of plates was worth in his bank book. He would take a picture of the gleaming porcelain stacks he’d piled up, and he would superimpose the image, one stack atop the previous, so that, at the end of the night, he’d have a doctored photo of the ever-growing tower of plates he’d scrubbed. Night by night, he watched the stack of plates grow slowly up past the windows and chimneys of the restaurant.

Meanwhile, Gaberlunzie used the search equation Menelaus had devised to find those people, hidden in the myriads of the data environment, worthy of interviewing or investigating. After his shift at the Restaurant, Menelaus would sit in the washroom at the Newspaper offices, and he would tinker with the parameters for hours, and then run the system search for a few seconds, and turn up the oddest overlaps and coincidences of the several demographic profiles Gaberlunzie was interested in. Gaberlunzie ran across several stories hidden in among the drama of the thaws of the Old Quarter, including one time he solved a murder mystery that had been puzzling historians for years, by finding a still-living witness among the thaws.

The Mercury newspaper rewarded Gaberlunzie with more inches of column in the hardcopy, and higher priority feed in the data environment.

By the time the Autumn leaves fell in March, the two men were able to afford Japanese-style sleeping shelves in a ladder-serviced hotel rack whose air was clean and sterile as a hospital’s. The shelves were no bigger than coffins, too small to stand up in. And the expense, when calculated over months, was actually higher than a more expensive walk-in apartment would be. But the claustrophobically narrow coffins did not smell of urine and despair, and the drawers, plumbing, and fold-out appliances in the walls were as exquisite in their space-saving efficiency as any Menelaus had ever seen aboard a ship. There was even a neatly-packed bag and hose system for taking a shower lying down. And the walls and ceiling of the coffins had stereo-optic fabric woven in, to allow one’s eyes to focus on some distant, if imaginary, scenery.

Gaberlunzie’s coffin ceiling was tuned to views of the green hills of Oxfordshire, the mysterious figure of the White Horse of Uffington. Menelaus had his walls, ceiling and floor of his sleeping coffin covered with star charts, and three-dimensional a dense maze of mathematic symbols. He would fall asleep between flowing equations and tables of opposition for multi-valued logic systems.

The time came when he had washed enough dishes, even with the collection agency taking nine tenths of his wages, to buy a handsome new suit and a haircut. He visited the seamstress, who, instead of asking him about his build, asked him about his prospects.

“I have worked with Thaws before,” said the seamstress, a narrow-faced dark-haired woman with flinty hard eyes, but her angelic face showed that she had expensive tastes in plastic surgery, or perhaps a patron among the upper classes. “The cut of cloth can be conservative, but not so old fashioned as to look ridiculous, and yet with that hint of dignity which can lend a nostalgia to the atmosphere of any affair. You understand atmosphere?”

She was speaking Spanish, of course, but the translation was clear enough. “Sure, Señora. We old folks look good dressed up,” he said.

“It is your carriage, how you hold yourself. I will expect you to cure that ridiculous leg, of course. Stupid of you to look crippled! Stupid! My pantaloons are a work of art. You understand art?”

“Yes, I understand art, but I was only coming in here to get a suit.”

“Your face is no good. It has a stupid look. You understand? You need to find a doctor, a sculptor, to give you a smart look, the look of a hawk. Otherwise, my suit, my work, all gone to waste! Pwaphf! It is not to be born!”

The shop was composed entirely of mirrors on the inside, and huge plate glass walls looking out on the boulevard. There was no place to change that Menelaus could se, no fitting rooms. Maybe people just stripped nude in plain view of the street? It would not have surprised him.

And he was attracting stares from passers-by. A group of schoolgirls in uniforms were pointing and giggling. An abnormally tall, dark-skinned man dressed in a lion skin was sizing him up as if he meant to take a poke at him, and he lowered his head to make some sardonic comments to the señorita draped catlike on his arm. Her goggles flashed in the sunlight when she tossed her head and smiled.

So, then. Too many witnesses to give this thin seamstress a swift kick in her skinny rear. Anyway, Menelaus was too well brought up to hit a girl. He’d have to look up her brother or husband or something, and beat the tar out of him.

“Sorry about my stupid face, but I figure I need some nice duds…”

“No, no! The question is—what will you do with my suit? With my name? For I can already see the look that will bring out your character. Once you fix your face, of course. Something bold! But not too old. The Aristo do not like to be reminded of the time before their time. A wide hat, with a brim, of course. A half-cape! But where will you be seen?”

Menelaus was in the act of clicking through his goggles to find out where this woman’s brothers or fathers lived, where her goggles changed color, and she started a conversation with someone else. With one hand she shooed him toward the door, dismissing him.

Her parting words—Menelaus thought she was talking to him, but one never knew—shouted after him along the street, were these: “Send me a list of the affairs, the places where you will be seen! And no more walking in back alleys! The lighting, the texture, is terrible! You must stay in places and along streets that are bright! Walk in parks, because green will bring out the hue, the highlights! You will make my designs famous, I am sure!”

He stopped at a café for a coffee and a smoke. A driverless car approached and called to him, and when he walked over, he found a package containing his new suit.

Menelaus stepped into the car and changed there. The Patagonians might not have a nudity taboo, but he was a civilized man.

The suit looked mighty fine. He did not need a mirror; he could get the point of view from any nearby street pole or doorpost to feed into his goggles, and look at himself from any angle.

It was a very dark pigeon-gray color, with a long coat, and oddly bloused-out leggings like a Japanese hakama. There was a colorfully patterned bolt of fabric that hung from one shoulder, and it might have been a Hindu fashion, or it might have been a Mexican one, like something a futuristic gaucho would wear. The fall of the drape hid the crookedness of his leg.

There was also a hat, a wide-brimmed low-crowned black affair, with a stylish brim decorated with jade and silver. With it clamped on his head, his face no longer looked as narrow and bony, but the shadow of the brim gave him the grim look of a figure of mystery.

A walking stick completed the outfit. It was made of cherry wood, and set with silver clasps. It looked like a miniature version of the long wands the dark giants bore. While carrying a stick would have seemed ridiculous to anyone back in his home town, Menelaus certainly did not mind leaning on something with his leg acted up, and the people here might just think he was a soldier like the giants were.

It was not until he was limping home that he realized he had not been buying a suit. Rather, she had been hiring him to wear an advertisement, in effect, for her skills. She was lending him her reputation, in the hope that it would augment her own.

So the days when the customers were always right were over, Menelaus thought darkly.

And he walked slowly home the long way around, despite the ache the long walk played with his bad leg, because he did not want to be photographed in an alley, or against a background not flattering to his lovely new suit. He stuck to the parks, as instructed.

1.

Menelaus only had to go back to the seamstress four more times to have minor adjustments made. She stood there with tape measure in hand and pins in her mouth, making chalk marks on the fabric. It was not smart fabric, so she could not make a mark on it just with a gesture from a stylus.

Some things had not changed. Even the future did not seem to be able to solve the problem of how to get a nice suit to fit right.

People wanted diversion more than they wanted clean dishes. With his new suit, Menelaus started to accept the invitations Gaberlunzie had sought and found for him through a publicity-seeking service.

2.

AD 2395-2397

With his rock-bottom notation rating, of course, no one important or even modestly well-to-do could afford to be seen with him. Nonetheless, the tale of the Man who Missed the Ship, the chance to meet him, made it worthwhile for certain families of the comfortable lower-middle ranks of society to invite him to certain events, dinner parties, charity fame-raisers, formal balls, bear-baiting.

These people, despite that they wore television computer screens before their eyeballs night and day, despite that they had endless libraries of past and present works able to appear in a twinkling, were oddly hungry for real-life naked-eye entertainment. And yet so artificial was their sense of how people spoke and emoted, Menelaus found himself being a play-actor in all these scenes, portraying, with much difficulty at first, their notions of what a man from the past might act like.

As years passed, with constant study and many sleepless nights, with painstaking care, he grew accustomed to it, and was able to hold himself credibly well. He had not understood, at first, that he could never tell the same joke twice, and his most important historical event, his missing the sailing of Hermetic, he had wasted in his first dinner party, and awkward affair with an unimportant Toledo family with five silly daughters, of no predominance and of no connection. Wasted—because no one wanted to hear the anecdote again. Once he had said it in public, it could just be looked up—and if he said it twice, both versions looked up and all the discrepancies compared.

Then, two years into his painful effort, he stumbled onto the key. Any little tale he told of his life at Bridge-to-Nowhere, the gossipy things apprentices talked about, the odd doings of his odd neighbors and odder friends, he could tell with a relaxed, unaffected fashion, portraying some particular sadness or lively joke, and deliver his punch-line with adroit timing. It was no worse, really, than speaking before a jury; it was no worse, really, than facing a man in the cold damp dawn-hour with a pistol.

Every tale about Stinky Feckle or Soapy Throwster made the girls look sad, of course, because all his friends and folks were dead.

And he could lie. There were no records to look up. The Yellow War had decimated the records the West Coast of the Reunited States, and the Boers and Patagonians of last generation had expended no particular effort to scan-code the records in from incompatible Anglosphere systems.

No one knew his neighbors had not included Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, Bre’r Rabbit, and Daniel Boone.

Menelaus had never been on a Whaling Ship, but these modern folk has so little understanding of history, that he told them he had served on the Pequod before the mast, a ship covered with the teeth and bones of whales, and told them of the antics of the noble Queequeg, the dour Starbuck, the good-humored Stubb, the pragmatic Flask, none could question it. He could fill in minute details of the practice of whaling, which were so boring and particular, that no one could doubt their authenticity.

Too bad he never found the end of that story—boredom had overwhelmed him before he reached the finish of it. But he was sure that Captain Ahab overcame his foe. A man with an obsession that strong, a will that iron-hard, could not be defeated in his quest, Menelaus was sure of that.

And so he told them sea stories, even though he had never been to sea, and war stories, mixing truth and falsehood, mingling his own seven months of service with the ten years of the his namesake Menelaus from Homer’s Iliad.

The elite of this day and age believed (and rightly so) that Menelaus killed three men in gun-fights, and so why should they be unwilling to believe his stories about the Horse-Captain Achilles of the Federal Mounted Military Police? The one seemed no more fanciful, to them, than the other.

Menelaus, at more that one soiree (and he would never tell the whole tale in one sitting, but always broke it off at a cliffhanger) spun the yarn of the anger of Captain Achilles of Austin, a fierce and choleric officer in the Aztlan war, who went AWOL when his pay bonus was cut short, and did not return to the siege of Mexico City until his best friend, Lieutenant Patrocles, went into battle wearing his Captain’s armor and helm, and was cut down by Antonio de Santa Anna, the enemy general.

One boring party or foolish sporting event at a time, he was gaining connections, winning admirers, increasing his store of little electronic notation points, more precious than money. Menelaus worked his way up the social ladder, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. He was a curiosity: a nonesuch. People wanted to see him in person.

By the spring of 2397, he was entertaining dames, then countesses, then marchionesses. By the autumn of that year, he was invited to the affairs of duchesses.

3.

Menelaus was invited, first to a wine-tasted patronized by the Duchess of Salerno, a woman of imposing girth and dignity that Menelaus found himself unable to charm, and next to a horse show held by the Duchess of Alba, a thin gray-faced mummy he was not allowed to approach.

There were tables set on the lawn of a green hillside, from which a clear view could be had of the horses on display, walking, trotting, galloping, on the level field nearby. The leaves had turned, and the autumn colors swirled and played on the wind.

Menelaus thought it was the wrong season for horseracing: back in his day, the Kentucky Derby was held in early summer. (Of course, back in his hemisphere, May was a summer month, not late fall.)

He never actually saw the Duchess of Alba. She was seated at the main table, which was on a lawn overlooking the race circus. The horseflesh of this day and age was something to see: the steeds were easily twice as fast as the record-breaking champions of his day, and he was bitterly sure biomodification or drugs were involved. The steeds ran like deer; the grace of their motion made him glad to be alive.

Menelaus was seated with other freaks and oddities. The first was a man who wore a bag over his head, who tried angrily to convince Menelaus that the world was flat, and that all space shots were frauds. The second was a track star who had had his feet replaced by horse’s hoofs, who claimed to be able to outrun racing steeds, and wanted his listeners to wager with him. The third was a boy of thirteen who had murdered his parents and younger brother, but who could not be accused under Patagonian law until next year, at which time he was almost certain to be executed. Menelaus wondered at the boy’s nonchalance, and could not understand why no one had strung the devilish little killer up. The fourth was an attractive but vapid heiress to a hotel fortune, whose claim to fame seemed to be that she had copulated with a goat in public not long ago, on the roof of one of her father’s expensive inns. The last claimed to be the final living member of the Alacaluf tribe of Tierra del Fuego, a sad-eyed old man with a wild mop of hair, who walked about stark naked, carried a bone-tipped spear, and ate a penguin during the repast.

The Alacaluf was actually a fascinating conversationalist: he was hoping to convince the duchess to support a relaxation of the biotechnology laws, so that he could clone and raise twin brothers of himself from babies, that his tribe and language might not perish utterly from the Earth.

“We have been called the most hardy people of all time,” he said sadly.

Menelaus stared in fascination at his face, which was a mass of wrinkles. The naked eyes were like pools in a deep forest. His flesh was the color of a bruise. His nose hung like a pendulous beak over a thin-lipped mouth. There was something solid about that face, something real, the Menelaus had not seen in the other faces here.

“My fathers walked in the sub-arctic winds without boots,” said the old man, “Without any coat or cloak. My fathers rubbed themselves in fish oil or seal oil. Naked we faced the world, and we endured it. You could not have withstood the cold even of our summer months, but for undershirt, shirt, coat, overcoat. No one knows how we adapted to the cold: the gene and the mutation is not known, even now, for there are none of us left to study. We were hunters, and wanderers, men of the spear and of the harpoon; and our canoes were more study than our huts, when we paused to weave huts. Aboard the canoes, held in sand, our fires burned, because we did not hide our comings, but we followed the seals into the oceans of ice. We built portages, some of them reaching for miles, to haul our boats from sea to sea. When Magellan found us, he called us giants.

“We feared no one,” the old Alacaluf said in a voice tired beyond bitterness, “Save Setebos, who is the dread spirit who drives the game away; we bowed to no one, save Watatauinewa, the Old One, and He made the world and hung the stars above us.”

“You would have made a good Texan, I guess,” said Menelaus.

“The Old One made the first man, and painted him, and so on the day the boy of my people becomes a man of my people, he is painted. For that day, he is as the first man was: he takes a stone and knaps the head of a harpoon from flint, so that we knew the first man hunted with us, and will bring game. It is not good when the children starve, or they have to be left for the sea to take.”

The old Alacaluf now looked right and left at the colored throngs of pretty dark-haired Spaniards, all eyeless behind their glittering goggles, all shining in their fabrics of blue, pigeon-blue, purple, white and scarlet, women in flowing silks, men in dark coats and feathered headgear, watching artificial beasts only somewhat related to horses speed down the greenway. In every hand was a crystal glass of Champaign, or a toothpick of candied fruit, or a luminous wand whose meaning Menelaus did not know.

“It is a strange world,” said the old Indian finally, sighing. “Perhaps it has slipped out of the hand of the Old One. There may be men after me, white men and black men, giants ever taller than what Magellan saw. But they will not be men of mine. They will not look on me as a man. I am the last man, and I cannot become the first man again merely by painting my skin.”

Menelaus said: “Why do you obey the White Man’s laws?”

The old man merely shook his white-haired head with great sorrow, but with great dignity.

“If you want to use biotech to clone yourself,” Menelaus said, “To get yourself a family, who is saying that is wrong? Who dares stand in your way?” And there was a snap of anger in his voice, so that the thirteen-year-old murder-boy seated two seats down from him flinched and picked up a steak-knife. Menelaus casually stood up, taking a firm grip on his walking stick, so he could break the child’s skull with a quick move if the brat was dumb enough to try something. At least, he thought it was casual.

A murmur ran through the crowd, and a some of the people stopped cheering for the horses. Even though no head was turned this way, they were (Menelaus realized) watching carefully though their goggles. At him? Wait for a fight, a murder?

Menelaus realized he had to offer to help this man, and not where everyone was watching. “How is the game, these days?”

The old man nodded. “Plentiful. During the war, my ancestors thought you were all dead, you know. All the Spaniards. Your roads were empty, and we moved north with the snows. Your lights went out and your power failed, and you could not live without light and power, when the ice-winds blew.”

“I lived in those times,” said Menelaus. “We called it the Japanese Winter. It was a military experiment gone wrong.”

“We multiplied. There were perhaps five thousands of us, and the game returned so abundantly, that we thought the years of the first man had come back. The shaman spoke of an ending to all the years. The land comes to an end with the sea; why should the years go on forever? But it was not the end of years, and the prophecies of the shaman did not come to pass. The tale of my people is ended, and the ending is not a happy one.”

“A lot of prophecies I heard didn’t pan out neither,” grimaced Menelaus. “Otherwise they’d be a moon-base by now, and I’d have that jetpack I’ve always wanted since I was a kid. Do you know jetpacks?”

The old man raised his hand, and said with a smile, “How could I not? Every time I walk down the street, some other kind heart offers me a pair of Mann goggles. They think I am blind without them. So I see motion funnies.”

“Motion funnies? You mean pixies, uh, animated cartoons?”

“I have seen Familia Del Cohete. I like the episode where the robot maid is broken, and pours coffee into the pants of Jorj de Cohete. Heh eh. And there is the one where little Juan writes a code for his Moon Scout troop, and the teenager, Julia, sends it into a song contest, and wins a date with Elvitrono Scramjet, the American rock star. Did you see that one? It is a classic. It will last forever.”

“No. Um. My mom, she weren’t one to let me watch pixies. Said it would stunt my learning.”

“Ayah! If my mother had been so strict, perhaps I would now be a man of accomplishment, as you are.” The eyes twinkled.

“Why? What’m I famous for? I missed my ship when it sailed.”

The old man laid a slender hand on his, and the touch was as light as cobweb. “You were up in the sky when you missed your ship. A star-sailor. None of my people, not even in our stories, not even in our dreams, sailed canoes up past the moon. We do not have a name for the planet Saturn. When the missionaries asked us our name for the moving stars, we had no names. Hunters in the cold have no time to lay and watch stars. But you! You were like Jorj de Cohete, no? Like a man in the funny-pictures, with a rocket under your feet. I am seeking notation points as you do, but I must seek pity. You seek admiration. Pity is venom, like in a snake’s tooth. Every day I feel a snake bite.”

Menelaus realized this man probably dressed normally at home, wherever home was for him. Probably some Old Folk’s Home, smelling of disinfectants. The whole Indian thing was an act, something he really had not much choice about. The Alacaluf was just as much inside Gaberlunzie’s barbwireless workcamp as Menelaus was.

“Let’s go hunting,” said Menelaus. “Or fishing. Ice fishing. For old times sake. You can wear a parka if you like. Leave that smelly fish oil off. What do you say? Just us, no goggles, no cameras, out in the wild where men can do as they like, talk as they please.”

The old man smiled and nodded.

“For old time’s sake.”

Menelaus, as he was leaving the party, made of point of donning his goggles as soon as it was polite to do so. He put them on, and scanned the area, first from a bird’s eye view, then from the party invitation menu, until he found the Alacaluf. He trained his goggles on him so the prompt would show the old man’s name: Yp’pa Takau-taku (no translation available).

4.

The proposed fishing trip into the Antarctic was apparently attracting notation, because Gaberlunzie reported, the next day, the offers from sporting good stores had appeared in his message center, will to lend Menelaus fishing and camping gear made of lightweight, sturdy materials.

This included a canoe that looked as insubstantial as cigarette smoke. It was made of a rigid foam called aerogel. This was a substance from the Postlunar First Space Age, lost during Menelaus’ lifetime, now rediscovered: a super-light, super-strong material in which the liquid components of the gel had been replaced with a gas. This one was made in zero-gee, in an orbital factory. The whole canoe was made of small, light replaceable panels. Despite the strength of the feather-light material, it could shatter like glass. This canoe was chemically treated to make it hydrophobic, as if it had been coated with oil, or a thin layer of grease. Menelaus could not wait to see the vessel’s performance in the water.

The fishing rod was likewise a thing of wonder, light and flexible and impossible to break, and instead of a reel, there were some sort of spinnerets like spider’s organ dotting the whole length of the shaft, able to make line as long as needed, and able to reel in at the touch of a thumb button. Menelaus spent an hour merely toying with it, trying to snap knickknacks off Gaberlunzie’s neighbor’s desks in the newsroom by fly-casting his weighted lure across the room.

“You want to try this?” Menelaus asked an exasperated Gaberlunzie, who was puffing his weighty frame here and there around the room, trying to put back the jade statues, goggle-rechargers, saint’s medals, coffee racks and datacard holders Menelaus was carefully knocking off newsdesks onto the smart-carpet. The smart-carpet surrounded each fallen object with a circle of attention light and whistled for the cleaning-turtle each time that happened.

“The trick is, in flycasting the weight of the line carries the fly to the fish. Its not your strength, but your timing that counts. See? Short arcs into the top of the rod for a short cast, like that vase right there. But load a more powerful stroke into the middle and bottom of the rod for a long cast, like that lightswitch. Oops. That wasn’t a lightswitch, was it? What’s it do? Call the police?”

Gaberlunzie sighed so heavily that his moustaches flew. “It does what everything does in Patagonia. Costs us debt points.”

“Old Yippie and I are going from Hoste Island, across Cook Bay and up Whaleboat Sound, to Londonderry Island. I am amazed this expedition attracts more attention from the media sluices than, I dunno, dinner with the Duchess, or something.”

“Whenever you try to get away from the public attention, it attracts public attention, I suppose. In those winds, in the dead of winter, not even a police spy-mosquito will be able to keep abreast of you. And for reasons you can explain better than I, no satellites are in geo-synchronous orbit above the Antarctic.”

“Its because when your inclination is ninety degrees, like in a polar orbit, the longitude of the ascending node has to be…”

“Please. When I sit down to write an article about orbital mechanics, I shall be fascinated with every detail of the topic. Otherwise, the only way to maintain a proper diet of the brain in this information-overweight age, is to vomit out whatever one cannot at the moment swallow and use. On-demand data, so to speak.”

“Gaberlunzie, this is a simple idea. Look at this orange. Or whatever this is. You cannot stand still over the pole of the rotating body, because your orbit has to carry your over both poles if….”

Gaberlunzie took off his goggles, and rubbed his eyes. “Someday, not here, you must tell me why you are risking your life sailing Cape Horn in midwinter.”

Menelaus, knowing that everything he said and did, even in an empty new office after midnight, was being recorded could only smile and shrug. “For fame and glory! What else does one do in a reputation economy?”

5.

It was exactly one month later, and Yp’pa and Menelaus were as alone as two men could be. With great effort they pulled their superlightweight canoe of blue smoke up the rocky, frost-coated beach of an empty island, part of the archipelago that formed the Tierra del Fuego.

They piled rocks in the boat to prevent it from blowing away in the storm wind. The weather was a combination of ice, hail and freezing rain, and the waves were the color of iron as they heaved, turning only into white foam where they battered the shore. All the air was filled with a sound of rage.

Menelaus was appalled by the wild sea and snow-covered deadly wasteland. It was as inhuman as scene he had seen in space, as desolate as the craters of the moon. It chilled his soul more than his shivering body. The universe was not made for man. Not even all places on Earth were made for man.

Making camp was a bitter process, taking the better part of an hour, but setting up the tent became easier once Yp’pa carved several large blocks of ice with his ax and set them up in a semi-circle, to act as a windbreak. The tent pegs were made of a futuristic material that was supposed to dig into the soil by itself, but the cold, or the iron-stubborn hardness of the rocky soil, defeated the circuits, so Menelaus pounded them into place with the back of his ax. The futuristic lantern-stove unit had also frozen, so the men had to be content with a fire made from frozen guano. Yp’pa built a chimney of ice blocks in front of the tent opening, and Menelaus sealed the tent flaps to the chimney sides with splashes of water from his canteen, which turned to ice instantly. The cold was such that not even a roaring fire could melt the chimney. The chimney pulled the smoke up out the tent, so the air inside was stale, but breathable, and warm as paradise.

Menelaus fell down on his blankets and sleeping bags, aching in every limb. Yp’pa sat with his coat and mittens off, cross-legged before the fire, holding up his hands to the little flames, and smiling a small smile to himself. He looked older than a Menelaus’ grandfather, but the exertion had not winded him.

“You guys are the toughest men on Earth,”

“The old ways are lost. My uncle could have taken off his coat outside, and felt no pain.”

“Listen. I came all the way out here, all that rowing, all the hiking, to tell you something.”

“No,” said the bent little man, with an odd smile.

“Yeah, I did. I can steal the material you need. I figured out how to do it, even with the goggles watching everything. Patagonians don’t bother to lock their doors, most of ’em, even biotech labs. If I get a group of guys, including a patsy we can frame up, I figure I can smash and grab my way….”

“No, that is not why you came,” said Yp’pa.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m telling you it is. Look, I fought these Spaniards in the war. Well, one of our wars—you wouldn’t have heard of it, I guess…”

“You served in the Reunited States Imperial 35^th Horse Brigade from April 2225 to May 2226, during the Counter-Reconquista. I have a pair of goggles, Dr. Montrose, and I can read.”

“Well, these bean-eating Spannies ain’t no friends of mine, is all I am saying, and so I got nothing against a wee little bit of armed robbery, not for a right cause. You cannot tell me you want your tribe to be extinct!”

“And I am telling you, that is not why you came, not to this barren shore, under these lightless skies, in this cold wind; the wind of Setebos. I know why you came.”

Now Menelaus sat up and looked at his friend. The gleam in the old man’s eye was a strange one, and his smile was strange also.

“Why did I come?” said Menelaus, wondering if this were a dream.

“To hear these words. The one who woke you sends this message by me. Menelaus Montrose, you are instructed to concentrate your efforts on the fifth through seventh radial symbol groups, including the variant notations in the associated cartouches, delta, epsilon, and upsilon. The key may be a Rienmann function, but use your best judgment to discover a mapping algorithm to the central alpha group, which has been translated.”

“By damn! You’re talking about the Monument!” Menelaus reached out and grabbed the old man’s bony shoulder. “Who told you this? Who woke me?”

“I do not know, and I cannot say.”

“What did they bribe you with?”

“Why do you ask? You are poorer than I am.”

“Never mind. They promised you your tribe again, didn’t they? Some way around the anti-cloning laws. Nothing else would touch your leathery old heart.”

“It has been a long time since I smiled, and I am happy to smile again. You must promise me, that if I die in this snow, to bring my body back to Patagonia. If you cannot bring the body back, leave it here in the snow, but bury me with my goggles sent on response, so that I can be unearthed later. My twins can be grown from my dead flesh.”

“What if I make you tell?”

“Friend, we have shared toil and food and heat together. One fire warms us both. Are we not brothers? I was a dead man, and now I have hope. Do you think anything, even if you broke my bones, would open my teeth, once my jaws are clamped on hope?”

And he laughed and laughed a wheezy, hiccoughing laugh.

They did not speak of this matter for the remaining time they spent together fishing on the island. Nor could they spend the long, long nights in silence. They spoke of women, and good luck and bad, and men they’d known, and drinks they’d had, and of little things they liked, and little things they hated.

They spoke of the stars and the earth, and the future and the past, and what it was like to have gone mad and slumbered a century and a half, so that the world you knew was lost, and what it was like to be the last of your kind, so that the world you knew was lost.

And because they woke before the tardy sunrise, and lay in the tent long after the premature sunset, and because they brought enough beer to make the dark hours merry, they talking of things too frivolous to be discussed at any other time, or far too serious. They talked of God. Yp’pa thought God was One, who existed before the dawn of time, who made man in His image from the ash of a celestial fire. Menelaus speculated that God would be something man would make in his image, once evolution was fulfilled, and who would exist after time had halted. And Menelaus said the celestial fire was inside Man right now: it could be seen in the eyes of every curious child, every boy who asks why? and every scientists who asks how? And the crime of man, and eternal temptation, was to smother it. Yp’pa did not believe these wild dreams, but his upbringing would not let him voice a disagreement, so he merely passed Menelaus another bulb of beer, and smiled, and said, “So, ah! Yes!”

But mostly, they boasted about fish, and in the way that only true friends can boast, once friendship has freed you from the need to speak the literal truth.

On the day after Midsummer’s Day, which, in this hemisphere, was the deepest winter, Yp’pa did not wake up again from his sleep, and Menelaus carefully wrapped the body in his sleeping bag, and lashed it securely, and loaded it on the canoe.

The voyage home was longer and more difficult than the voyage out, and the sky wept snow.