Odd as it was, the other quarters of the village, from centuries nearer to the current day, were more odd. They were dormitories and breeding stalls formed in blocky proportions that bespoke no concern for human notions of beauty, and with strangely uniform streets and tools, and neither cathouses with their red lamps nor chapels with their silver bells anywhere in evidence.
The two old friends had been drinking boilermakers, and Mickey was cheating by using a technique to absorb the excess alcohol out of his cells, and so he was steadily and slowly drinking Montrose under the table.
Montrose Five, if he had been doing his duty, allegedly was awake and active due to the activity of Montrose Six, who, if he had been doing his duty, allegedly to spy out what schemes, if any, Blackie was weaving while the calendar counted down to the day of her return.
As best as Six could find out, Blackie was running a gymnasium and fencing academy, to teach young and idle bravos the formalities and finer points of swordsmanship. It was apparently an art that never entirely vanished from human history. He also received a small stipend from a museum to give lectures about his past, and from a clioseum to give lectures about his future.
“So that is why Six took up with this false Rania,” said Montrose Five. “Boredom. He got tired of watching a retired tyrant.”
Instead of returning to slumber, as his contract with himself stipulated, Montrose Five hired a gunsmith, hunted up an armorer, and began making arrangements. His activity, in turn, came to the attention of whatever angel or ghost was guarding Trey’s tomb, and thawed her, which triggered Mickey’s thaw as well.
The strange, modern world to which Mickey woke had forgotten the art of building cities, and the various races of Plebeians, those who chose not to fret about tomorrow, nor map out their futures, lived in small villages of grape-bunches of hemispheres. These huts were made of what looked like baked glass or transparent satin or bubbles of invisible pressure solid enough to keep out rain and cold.
Looming above their groves and plantations, the massive mansions of Patricians reflected an austere design of rectilinear geometry, with many a pillared portico, ambulatory, or chalcidicum of unsmiling caryatids circumvallating solemn cloisters, crowned with entablatures ordered by the golden mean, or belvedere, tower, and clerestory windows reflecting the Fibonacci sequence.
But they built no railways, no roadways, no airports, nothing but bridle paths for riding cheetahs and carriage panthers, aeries for the leather-winged quetzalcoatlus. The immortal and inhumanly patient Patricians of the current day had no motorized means of transit, aside from the expensive and metaphysically dubious method of donning a suicide helmet to copy one’s ghost through the senile Potentate at the world-core to be copied a second time into an empty body waiting elsewhere, leaving a trail of brain-clones behind.
So Mickey had taken in hand his charming wand as a walking stick, broadened his hat brim and lowered its crown to assume the aspect of a cockle hat, and pinned a scallop shell to his brim, the traditional attire in his day for wandering mages following a star.
He spent the better part of two years tramping the roads and working alongside talking apes and half humans as a deckhand on cog or knarr to reach the land north beyond the Mediterranean mountains.
Mickey shook his head. “You don’t know yourself. You would never betray Rania, not ever. All our holy writings say so! Why, just in the ancient and uncorrupted text of The Lion, the Witch, and the Warlord is the story of how a man named Orpheus wanted you to release his wife from suspended animation and return to the sunlight of the surface, and he sang of your own lost love, of Rania, so that tears flowed down your icy cheeks in your coffin. You agreed, but only on condition that he walk blindfolded from the buried tomb system so that he could reveal the position of the secret postern door to no man. But when he did not hear the footstep of a woman behind him—”
Montrose slammed the heavy pewter beer stein to the wooden tabletop with a loud noise that interrupted Mickey. “Of course I am tempted,” snarled Montrose, wiping the foam from his mouth with the back of his wrist. “The Fox girl looks just like her, talks like her. Just to hear the sound of her voice, I would die. But I ain’t never been fooled by no clones, and she’s not the first what’s been thrown at me.”
So then the talk turned to women.
Mickey asked him earnestly about conversion, and giving up witchcraft, and spoke of his fear that otherwise Trey the Sylph would not marry him. Montrose took a practical stance: “I am sure the hell-devils and hell-spooks you worship will understand, and if they don’t, to hell with them. Man should have a forgiving God as his boss. Otherwise life is too tough.”
“You don’t believe in God,” observed Mickey.
“Course I do! You can’t say, God Damn You and God Damn the Horse You Rode in On and Who Rode Your Mother and Put Her Away Wet, Sated, Panting, and Preggers, no, not and really mean it, if’n you don’t believe in God. B’sides, what would ladies do on Sundays, if they had no churching to do?”
“You think it’s real?”
Montrose was not sure what that meant, so he said, “Gen’rally, I take things as I find them,” and then he put his head under the table, looking for a spittoon. “What the plague? We in an era when no one chaws tobacco no more? Goddamn the horse their God’s mother rode them on in on. Or whatever I said.”
While Montrose had his head below the table, Mickey poured his shot glass of whiskey into Montrose’s and drank his own beer unadulterated. “I cannot believe you masticate that archaic leaf while drinking. It’s gross.”
The answer floated up from beneath the tabletop. “The chaw kills the bad taste of the brew, and the brew kills the bad taste of the chaw.”
Montrose pulled his head back up into view. Since Montrose had just used one of the boots Mickey had kicked off under the table as an impromptu spittoon, he thought it best to distract his drinking buddy. “So, brag to me, pard! Flap the lips! What’s so good about her, eh? What’s in her?”
Montrose turned off his perfect memory circuits so that whatever words he did not care to recall of the rambling and saccharine adulation of a man in love that was sure to follow would fade thankfully from his mind.
Nonetheless, the later recollection was clear: Mickey might not realize himself, but Montrose could see the reason. Mickey looked on Trey as a creature from the long-ago vanished age of gold, an age of splendor, when the machines were obedient to men, and the children of men drifted where they would. Aside from rare acts of piracy, it had been an age without war, without cannibalism, without slavery, without concubinage, and without the constant fear that one’s own talking dogs or other slave-beasts would lose their power of speech, revert to wolves, and rend their masters, a fear that made those masters arrogant and cruel. All these things formed the inescapable pattern for all the civilizations the Witches during nine centuries had erected. Thus, for him, meeting Trey was like meeting a lady of Camelot before the treason of Guinevere, or a daughter of Atlas in the Western seas of mythical Atlantis ere the flood.
“But what the hell does she see in you? You are the rightly most uncomely man I done ever lay eyes on, and you’ve got the dumbest hat of all history. I know; I been through all history, and that hat is really the dumbest.”
Mickey’s jowls grew creased with stern indignation, the tall hat stiffened so that its point quivered, and the cartoon eyes above the hat brim glared down. “To insult a Warlock’s headgear is to trifle with the wrath of Fortunato and Hades and dark, brooding Alberich! My millinery splendor is tall due to my pride of power, and this pointed cone distills astral and celestial essences directly into my Sahasrara, which the vulgar call the crown chakra, the seventh primary node of spirit! The wefts and shades and poltergeists flinch and bow the knee when the shadow of this towering—”
“You should marry the girl just so you can get a proper Christian hat, and leave the shady polecats of wherever-the-pox well enough alone. I’d say a Stetson. She ain’t marrying you for
your hat. I know. She ain’t blind in both eyes.”
Mickey leaned back and smiled a jovial smile. “Perhaps she thinks me solid and massy!” He slapped himself in the belly hard enough that ripples walked up and down the expensively silk-clad rotundity of that expanse. “I understand that in her day and age, all the men were frail and thin, with hollow bones like birds, to save on lift expense, so that only the truly rich could afford to gain mass. Or maybe it is because I make her laugh?” He spread his hands and shrugged. “I know the secrets of Earth and Air, of Red and of Black, the speech of birds and the secret lore of sea crabs, and can read the entrails of an ox to know the future—but who understands women? All I know is that no man is more fortunate than I am. I don’t know what she sees in me.”
Montrose said, “Damned straight. That’s always the way, ain’t it?”
They clanked their beer steins together and called out cheers. “Blessings of the Bacchants!” “Here’s mud in yer eye!”
8. The Right Question
When this memory surfaced, and fell into place with his other memories, Montrose swore a blistering oath, calling down the names of diseases long extinct.
Because Five had been disobeying, he had not communed with the central mind nexus, never had a second pair of eyes look over his experiences, and had never seen the obvious.
“If only I had not been so afraid of me,” Montrose said, “I would have hooked into more brainpower and seen it!”
“Seen what?” said Mickey, startled.
Trey was looking troubled. “So you think I should not have given up threesomes? Icky-Mickey weighs as much as two sex partners combined, and the priest told me—”
Montrose said to him, “Seen this.” And then he said to her, “Trey, snap out of it. Focus your attention. What did the other version of me, Version Number Six, hand to you for safekeeping before he died?”
Mickey said, “What is going on?”
Montrose said, “I’ve been sleeping badly, not been myself. I am fretting and scared that she won’t know me when she returns—for her, it’s been a few years. I am fretting and scared of what happens to the human race once she’s back. If’n we settle down and live out a normal life, while Blackie slumbers and wakes and makes more ghosts of himself each time he wakes—what then? She must be thinking the same thing. Only now, only now, did the thought leak up from my hinder parts of my brain to the front, and I can see it. She must be fretting, too. About the same thing, about what happens when she lands. So she should have sent a message, but not in the open. I did not know what was keeping me awake. Now I know. The silence. Then damned pox-damned triple-damned silence from the stars. Where is her voice in the stars? She should have damned called to me. I kept asking myself, deep down, in thoughts so hidden even I could not see them—why didn’t she send a message? The speed of light is faster than near lightspeed by definition. But that was the wrong question.”
Mickey said, “What was the right question?”
Montrose said, “The right question is not, Why ain’t there no damned message? The right question is, Where is the damn message?”
“Your pardon, but those seem to be the same, or much the same—”
“Not at all the same, Mickey! The right question has faith that she sent one, and asks about how to set about looking for it. Only the smaller and stupider mes was in touch with his instincts well enough to see that. And so—” He turned to Trey again, saying, “What did Number Six hand you?”
9. The Needle
Trey laughed and pulled a round leaf from a belt pouch. Through the leaf were thrust a number of pins with colored heads in order like a color wheel. Trey plucked out from the center of the leaf a pin with a red-and-white head, and held it out toward Montrose with a strange, eerie smile.
It was the first thing made of metal, aside from the weapons and armor of the duelists, Montrose had seen since his waking. The pin was three inches long, glistening in the girl’s fingers, and a point of light gleamed at its tip.
Another version of himself, connected electronically through his nervous system, said helpfully, “It is a memory needle. There is a way of storing information even more densely than the picotechnology of our day. Something to do with the enjambments and overlaps of quantum fields—it is a praxis that Rania sent back when her neutrino message reached the world fifty years ago. Apparently she discovered how to make a gravity laser, just something she invented for herself, cobbled together in her spare time, and this is one of the spin-offs. The newer versions of the needle, you do not need to stick into your flesh to read the info. It will adjust to the antique receiver ports you already have built into your brain. Just pick it up in your hand.”
Montrose stared at the needle, but did not touch it yet. “What the pox is going on? Why did I die? For this damned thing?”
Trey said, “This blessed thing. You all misunderstood yourself so badly, so very badly. No one but Shiranui the Fox-Rania was enough like Rania to figure out where she hid her personal letter to you. Shiranui would not agree to turn over her results unless you agreed to marry her. You did, and you did not lie to her. Number Six could not tell you what he was doing, because that would make his promise to Shiranui false. You knew you would die at your own hand on his wedding day, but before the wedding night, this one hour, so that you would never be unfaithful to Rania.”
“Why?” he asked. But he knew why.
He looked at where the false Rania, Shiranui, was standing by the side of the field. She had not bothered to come forward and mourn at the burial mound.
Shiranui must have had very good hearing indeed, or else have been connected to listening instruments, or else have been a good judge of character, because when the gaze of Montrose fell upon her where she stood across the field, without moving her lips, she sent a message directly into his brain. His normal barriers and defensive brain encryption neither detected nor even slowed the source of the words: My reason is simple. You will live until the end of time, and either as wife or widow, the memory of me will last. I believe in no gods: this is the only immortality to which a Fox Maiden can aspire.
Trey said, “Just as I put you in the armor, you handed me that pin and told me.”
“I would die to hear her voice again,” Montrose muttered, and he took the pin.
It was an audio file, but it silently fed directly into his auditory nerve. He heard her words, and they were private. True love neither years nor lightyears can abate, nor any yawning gulfs, my husband, of these vast desolations of heaven …
2
The Vindicatrix
1. The Voice Message
A.D. 37000 (EARTHTIME) OR CIRCA A.D. 2466 (SHIPTIME)
True love neither years nor lightyears can abate, nor any yawning gulfs, my husband, of these vast desolations of heaven. To your ears alone my words are meant: I will not share my tears with strangers.
I must be curt, for the information density even of a neutrino cascade is limited by Heisenberg and Planck. Let me say in a few words what a torrent of words could not express: I have never forgotten you nor failed you, Menelaus, and I keep the faith that you will somehow find a way to be alive, find a way to endure through all the ages of time, which vanish in a heartbeat for me, centuries while I blink a tear from my eye, millennia while it falls toward the carousel deck, toward the weird, distorted stars of this universe near the speed of light.
The ship seems of normal mass and length to those on board, of course, but amidships is surrounded by a rainbow of starlight compressed into bands of color. Aft is the glow of creation, the super-high-frequency echoes of the Big Bang, Doppler-shifted down into the visible range to form a bright cloud of spirals within spirals. The Big Bang looks like a Saint Catherine’s wheel, like fireworks. Fore is the ultra-low-frequency embers of the background radiation, three degrees above absolute zero, looking like a web of coals and ash, sculpted into an oddly symmetric pattern that contains one of the central mysteries of creation.
I am now th
e only one aboard. The starship of my stepfather, the Bellerophron, overtook us at the Diamond Star, for we had no choice but to decelerate for fuel. Niven’s law states that every starship is a weapon, for any machine able to accelerate such masses to lightspeed controls such power as can break planets. The two ships found themselves in a standoff the moment they came within firing solution range of each other’s sails, but the ghost of my stepfather could not bring himself to kill me, and I could not bring myself to foreswear my mission, my faith in mankind, my resolve to prove to the heartless cosmos we are worthy of sailing the stars. For this reason I was born.
It is best to say cruel things quickly: I left you. To save our dream, yours and mine, I resolved not to return to Sol for you.
He challenged me, saying that if I had faith in you, I would depart the galaxy and know you will await my return. If I agreed, he would meld his ship with mine, doubling our supply of needed goods and granting us the calculation power needed to convert the Diamond Star to a reaction mass.
It was calculation ability I needed. The engineering would have been impossible without him. The Bellerophron was disassembled and reassembled along the spine of the Hermetic and became her after sections. The combined ship anchored herself magnetically to the lee of the star at 300 AU trailing behind, in a vacuole my design placed in the pattern of sunspots, which were the exhaust chambers of a sun turned into a rocket. We took flight trailing behind our engine.
Never has there been so much fuel mass for so little payload! The star was held before us as a shield against the fast-moving particles, made absurdly dangerous by our velocity, each grain of dust more massive than a neutron star. But any explosion of our sun merely increased our speed.