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.
“I figured you wanted to be all waked up to go talk to ’em,” his ghost said from the wall mirror.
“Plague! Don’t they understand the word ‘git’?” said the gigantic version of Montrose.
“You mean like Brit slang for bastard?”
“No, I mean like ‘git off my land.’ Let’s show ’em some Texas hospitality.”
“Real Texas hospitality? Like we show them the business end of Black-Eyed Suzy?” Suzy was the pole-to-pole rail gun. Ghost Montrose displayed a ghastly grin. “Sure! Got a payload ready, Big Me. When I saw we had company, I built me a long train of cabins circling the major axis of the asteroid out of my logic diamond, and revved it up to Earth-normal gravity. The rail gun fields are all matched up, so all I need to do is spike the juice, and shoot the whole damn guest wing into orbit and through that billiard ball of the ship.”
“Nope. I mean real Texas hospitality, like we treat them royal, slaughter the fatted calf, bring out the hooch, and if they act inhospitable, such as by jawing my ears awry or riling up my nerves, then show them the business end of Black-Eyed Suzy.” He sighed again. “Time to stop talking to myself. If none of the lesser me’s object, let’s integrate up.”
None of the lesser versions objected, which, considering how ornery he thought of himself as being, always surprised him. It was unexpected, and bore closer examination.
He told himself to remind himself to look into this mystery later, until he remembered that he was folded into a single consciousness configuration mind, and so could not tell himself reminders.
“Now I actually am talking to myself,” he muttered. “That is downright loco.” But there was no one to answer.
The titanic, archangelic version of Montrose swam in zero gee to a locker and got out a portrait of Rania, which he handled carefully.
Since this was a formal occasion, he put on a loincloth, a gunbelt, and a poncho. The guns were vehicle-mounted cannons set with pistol-grips big enough for his elephantine hands, but he used a variation on his old glass-barreled caterpillar-gun design for old time’s sake. They fired a sixteen-inch shell designed to shatter into shrapnel small enough not to pierce his walls and hence not hurt his brain.
5. Hanging Her Portrait
He swam to a spin-lock. Once he was in the spin-lock, it began barreling along just inside of the ring of the carousel containing the guest quarters, accelerating. When the spin-lock matched speed with the guest quarters, he opened a hatch in the floor, climbed down. Because a ninety-foot-tall body shaped like a man was as stupid an idea as a man-sized body shaped like a spider, he took the precaution of filling the spin-lock and the reception chamber underfoot with high-density superoxygenated fluid thick as mud. Through this he sank. He managed to get himself seated on the floor without breaking any bones. The fluid drained away, and the environment switched over to an airbreathing regime.
One of the man-sized versions of him was standing on a ballroom-sized table of logic diamond at which Big Montrose sat. The surface was slightly higher than his elbow. On this plane was the wet bar, fancy chairs, dining table set with vittles, a mechanical bull, and whatever else Montrose could think of that his guests might need.
The man-sized puppet detangled from the mental unity long enough to make an independent comment, looking up and saying, “I can see up your nose. I often ask myself why the plague I bother having a humanoid body after all this time. For zero-gee, squids are better.”