But then again, no, this sensation was different.
His elation was like dark woodsmoke, earthy, primal, rising as if from his blood and bone marrow, his cells and glands. It was not the joy of a youth getting a toy but of a man who gives himself so utterly to another that he forgets himself entirely. It was a sensation of conquest and surrender.
He remembered his first time seeing the cleavage of a buxom young swimmer in a bathing suit when he went to Soko University on the West Coast. It was the type of skimpy, clinging, immodest garb no proper Texan lass ever donned; but San Francisco was owned by the Sumitomo Zaibatsu, and things were different there. She was the captain of the swim team, which was closed to Texans and Northeastermen, even though Menelaus could outswim the shrimpy city boys on the team.
Her name was Hoshiko. Her eyes were bright as agates, and her dark hair fell past her hips, and she barely came up to his elbow. He had asked her to let him escort her to the Bon festival and the dance. She looked, if anything, even more adorable in her yukata than in her bathing suit. No other Mestizo freshman dared to court a yellow girl, because they feared the Nisei boys; and the Nisei boys feared her too much to court her themselves, because she was as pretty as an idol and sharp as a whip. (As for Menelaus, the evening when four young toughs followed him into a dark alley, where he had had the forethought to park a fire axe behind a trashcan, to express their discontent with the gaijin dancing with the pretty Japifornian girl, had been one of the shortest of the many altercations of his life. Three of the boys ran away as fast as their legs could carry them, with their leader hopping after as fast as his remaining leg could carry him.)
Earlier, he remembered his first crush on a dark-haired, hazel-eyed beauty from Austin, a girl he saw only twice a year, at fair time. Her name was Jacqueline.
Earlier again, he remembered his first kiss, stolen from his cousin Lizzy during a Christmas dance, and he had to manhandle her under the mistletoe to have a proper excuse and fight his cousin Lenny the next day, skinning his knuckles and knees and ending up with bits of Lenny’s ear in his teeth.
All these memories and more were in the background. In the foreground was a joy too bright to stare at, like the sun.
So there might have been a third reason why he felt no shock. He was too damned happy.
He opened his eyes, and they were filled with water, and he opened his mouth and choked. The unpleasant medicinal indignities of waking from long-term hibernation had changed, but they were still unpleasant.
He sat up, struck his head against what, at first, he thought was a coffin lid. But the surface, whatever it was, was instantly broken into shards and fragments about his head and shoulders. Fluid sluiced off him like soapsuds falling off a man who sits up in a bathtub.
The moonlight glaring in his damp eyes made a bright blur. Before he could blink his eyes clear and look around, from the texture and sound of the wind, he knew he was out of doors, but from the smell, or the lack of it, he could not imagine where. The sound was of a desolate, wide space, a solitude as broad as a desert. He heard no people moving nearby, no voices, no breathing, no birds, no sound of machinery, nothing.
He spat the fluid from his mouth. Another surprise: the fluid did not strike his chest as it fell. It did not fall, but sublimated instantly to vapor in his teeth. In fact, his chest and upper back, shoulders and arms likewise were bare and dry. The fluid had already vanished from his naked skin. There was no choking sensation in his lungs as normally accompanied switching from breathing hyperoxygenated liquid to breathing air. He felt no liquid in his lungs, but he felt a gush of mist from his nostrils, yet seemingly too small in volume to account for transition between fluid and air regimes. The implications of that were staggering: it implied a revolution of biotechnology at least, if the material was being so rapidly absorbed back into the cell lining of his lungs, or of physics at most, if it was being or reduced in mass or volume so suddenly, whisked away by means unknown.
He ran his wrist across his eyes, blinking and snorting. He touched his nose. It was still big and crooked. He felt his teeth with his tongue, and the small lump on his inner lip where he had fallen on his grandfather’s big wooden rocking chair when he was three years old, stitched up by the local horse-doctor, and it had never healed quite right. Whoever made this new mouth for him had put it together with the care and artistry of a professional counterfeiter. It made him feel right at home.
Then he looked around.
It was night. The moon and four other satellites he did not recognize were up. The moon was blue under layers of frozen oxygen, with the seas and oceans black with the debris of once-great forests and cities, now crushed into a strata of dark grit beneath the weight of the collapsed, failed atmosphere.
Despite the strangeness, the world he sat upon was Earth. But the land for miles and miles, as far as his eyes in the nocturnal gloom could pierce, was a flat and level shining surface like a mirror made of diamond, colorless in the blue moonlight. The world was as barren as a salt flat, empty of tower or house or highway, empty of bird or beast or bush or grass blade.
In a direction he deduced was west, the land fell away at a sharp cliff to a lower landscape no less flat and diamond-bright. There was a line of fog hovering over the middle distance of that lower glass plain, which might indicate the presence of a river canyon.
In the opposite direction, irregular peaks of white substance rose above the white surface, as if the mirror there were broken by some pressure from below, to form mountains. They looked black in the distance. The stars were bright, and the sky contained a few high clouds, tinged with sapphire in the blue moonlight, like ghostly feathers. He thought that was a good sign. It meant that somewhere, there was water on the surface of the globe.
So Menelaus Montrose, waking with the strange sensation of joy without a name, sat naked in a tiny pool of rapidly evaporating white fluid in a little pond smaller than a bathtub and poked his head and shoulders and chest out of the surface of the moonlit, diamond world. He looked like a chick emerging from an egg or like an arctic sailor smashing desperately upward through thin ice for air. He peered left and right, blinking like an owl, and saw the landscape coated with a substance smooth and shining as glass, a world as blank as creation on the second day.
And he uttered a single swear word.
2. The Patrician Rassaphore
Montrose stepped out of the hole where he woke and watched dubiously as it filled itself in and closed up behind him. That he was standing on the surface of some self-aware cognitive substance he had little doubt, but how to signal to it, he could see no way. He pounded on the ground and shouted at it for a while, more to amuse himself than in hope of establishing contact. Smashing at the diamond with his fist bloodied his knuckles, which was a sensation as familiar to him as the crannies and irregularities of his teeth were to his tongue. One diamond fragment of the radial cracks was a triangle long and thin enough to act as a toothpick, so he took up the diamond shard and picked his teeth as he walked.
He decided to travel toward the western cliffs, on the general theory that following the land downward was the best way to find a river, and a river the best place to look for people.