Of course, this was an illusion of viewpoint: anyone standing at any other point along the stream, or walking through the seasons along the pathway that meandered along with the stream, in many places leaping over it in a gracefully arched bridge, would see the stream nearest him as level, with gardens reaching up before and behind, while overhead the waters would seem to cling to a narrow ribbon of ceiling and chuckle through upside-down trees hanging like living stalactites.
To the left and right were stars, visible through a vast sheet of hull material as transparent as air. The constellations were the same as seen from Earth, with only a few stars out of place. The turning of the stars matched the pace of the stream, for the waters were not flowing downhill—that word was meaningless aboard this vessel—but due to Coriolis forces.
Here and there in the garden was a fane or gazebo holding library books, wine bottles, or wardrobes for materials not meant to be endlessly recycled nor revised. In two places rose tall and slender towers with conical roofs, from which a pennant snapped, adorned with lozenges of black and gold. Through the upper window of each tower could be glimpsed the frills and ornaments of a woman’s boudoir. Rania—assuming the False Rania had been duplicated from the true one accurately in this respect—evidently preferred to sleep in partial gravity, a personal quirk of hers. Montrose was bitterly ashamed he had not known all her personal quirks.
Sun there was none. A flotilla of tiny fairy queens held a cluster of lanterns and heat sources in a luminous cloud that stood between the dead center and the summer quarter of the garden. Each twenty-four hours shiptime, these lanterns crept forward exactly one degree of arc. Each twelve hours, they were extinguished for the night watches. Directly opposite, the shadow of the dark sphere spilled across the center of the winter quarter.
Directly overhead, in the center point of the vessel, neatly bisecting the archway of the autumnal garden, was the true ship: like a miniature moon held frozen at the zenith, here was a dark sphere of opalescent ceramic material.
Oddly enough, the black sphere seemed to be made of a silicate called cristobalite, rather than some unheard-of exotic material created by superscience. It was an industrial ceramic, remarkably like what was used by Tellurians to coat kiln linings or jet nozzles.
This dark sphere was held in a cage of struts and supports made of wood, a single rootless and branchless tree, like a snake eating its own tail, growing in the shape of the seam on a baseball.
Some fancy or aesthetic notion of Rania’s had imparted life to the wood so that twigs, leaves, and cherry blossoms partly obscured the dark opal sphere from view. Why she has used wood as a framework material rather than metal or plastic, Montrose did not know for sure. The only clue of the vast energies harnessed by the engine sphere was the very slight rose-red gleam coloring the air, visible only to Patrician eyes, and a distortion or aberration of any object behind the sphere, which looked like a photograph on a piece of plastic that was puckered by the sphere’s weight. As one walked the pathway around the vessel, the sphere was always overhead, and the pucker of distortion was always behind it, moving as the viewpoint moved.
To the aft of the sphere, in the dead center of the great disk, held in place by invisible supports, floated a cluster of antennae and magnetic bottle instruments, including the spine of the main drive to one side. These instruments reached from the sphere and out through the unseen hull material into vacuum. These instruments communicated between the human vessel, the outside universe, and the alien mystery locked in the heart of the dark sphere.
There was no visible shroud house. Instead, thread-thin lines of magnetic monopoles, another exotic particle, reached from the black opal sphere, passing harmlessly through the magnetically neutral transparent hull, to a constellation of balls and teardrops held in two wide rings. These balls of the inner ring emitted lines made of exotic matter, some impossibly thin and impossibly tough material, adamantium gossamer threads able to cut through anything. These lines ran to a larger, outer ring of teardrops, and from each pointed end of each teardrop, more lines connected to the sails. The balls shrank when they extruded lines and swelled when they drew them in, but there was no visible mechanism of spools or spindles.
Opposite the main drive, in the dead center of the fore hull, was an airlock and a dock. At the moment, a landing boat, a streamlined icicle of shape-changing material, clung to the axial dock. Reaching from the airlock at the ship’s axis to a point not far from where Montrose stood was an elevator shaft of glass. Down it came a car.
Montrose was watching two figures, a man and a woman, in the approaching car. They were both weightless as they moved, hand over hand, from the airlock to the elevator car: an obese dark-skinned figure in bright robes, and a slender girlish shape in a long-trained dress that looked like blue cigarette smoke, moving and breathing on its own, a phantasmagoria of wandering scarves and billowing cape hems. Both of them oriented their feet toward Montrose as the car began to move, and gravity grew greater as they descended.
Montrose with no embarrassment embraced Mickey as a brother, and they pounded each other roughly on the back. The lady was Trey the Sylph, now Mrs. Primadonna Soaring Azurine de Concepcion. Mickey had insisted that she was no longer the third, but the first, and must change her name accordingly. She had insisted on adopting his family name, which was a tradition long forgotten in his day.
Montrose bowed and kissed her hand, which made her giggle, since she had never seen the gesture before.
“Save for one only, I am the oldest woman in the universe,” she said in her strange, dreamy voice. “I am the only living being from the same millennium as you—me!—except for your lover … and your hater. I wanted to see this through to the end, to see you duel your foe and find your princess, but I have a happy ending of my own to see through.”
He said, “I am glad you are so sure I can beat him. He is a fair hand with a pistol.”
She said, “Oh, no, he is a better shot than you. I am just hoping something unexpected will save you. That is the way happy endings work in real life, isn’t it?”
Montrose said, “Trey, you should not be here.”
“Alive, you mean? Yes, I am very unlikely, statistically speaking.”
“No, I mean climbing in the pool and having your mind copied over into an alien machine intelligence bigger than our whole solar system. Maybe you think a copy of you is you, or maybe you think it is a twin sister, or daughter, or whatever, but once there is a copy of you trapped in the Ain Principality, there ain’t no way out. Even if there is ever a way to create another physical body, all the copy can do is make a second copy there, while she stays behind. You, the copy, will continue in the mindspace until you are deleted—which is the end of you, that version of you.”
Her eyes came into sharp focus. She said, “I cannot let my husband go alone. Where a copy of him is, a copy of mine must be. There were no oaths, no vow-taking, among my people during all of our useless, floating, windblown lives. And what happened to all my people, my world? Mickey remembers them only as legend. The people of Tormentil—she changed her name for her marriage, too! Isn’t that sweet?—they don’t even remember what Earth is named. They call it Eden. To them, history began with Jupiter, and even the death of Jupiter is as mythical to them as the Day of Burning—the Ecpyrosis.” She giggled again and held her hand before her mouth. “Oh! But you remember that day, don’t you? You ordered it.”
“Naw. My horse did that,” Montrose said. He turned to Mickey. “How did you convince him to agree?”
Mickey smiled. “You forget that, for a time, I was the disciple of Exarchel and a loyal servant of the Machine. Del Azarchel has a noble nature, but fate placed him under a curse, and he will one day destroy himself. I appealed to his nobility. Did he want to be recalled by his subjects as the leader who abandoned them, sold them for a woman, even such a woman as Rania? And he knew he could trust me.”
Trey spoke in a dreaming voice, looking at the passing clouds
of winged fairy figurines, “I still don’t see why the two of them just could not agree … the Master and Meany, I mean.”
Mickey said to her, “They both had to give me their power of attorney and appoint me minister plenipotentiary to deal with Ain. Ain is too wise, my dearest, gentle bloom, and cannot be deceived. Both these men knew the other would sell him out for the chance to go by himself. But they both knew I would be willing to dash their hopes rather than see our children sold again into the indentured servitude which the return of Rania, false or not, truly freed us. Because I love you more than I love them. They both know me, and both trust me, and neither would dare in his wildest dreams break their solemn oath to me to abide by the outcome of whatever negotiations I can manage. Montrose will not break his word because he is too stubborn, and Del Azarchel is too proud.”
Trey said to Montrose, laying her hand on his elbow and leaning close, “You are lucky to have a friend in my Mictlanagualzin!”
Montrose said to her, “You are lucky you can pronounce his name.” And to him, he said, “But now I am abandoning you. You’ve been with me since—pestilence! How long has it been?—since the Forty-Eighth Century. Damn. What is it now? The Seven Hundred Thirty-Eighth?”
“You must,” said Mickey. “I insist. Because—”
“Why? Why this sacrifice? For me?”
“No. You are actually, well—if I may speak freely?”
“Better not. Speaking freely is overrated,” said Montrose.
Mickey nodded. “You can take it. There was a statue of you in the graveyard behind my mother’s mating house. We were supposed to sacrifice the colt of an ass once a year to you. Your statue had three eyes and a necklace of skulls, and when it rained on the tin roof of the little grave shrine, it sounded like drums, or the hoofbeats of the white horses legend said you kept with you underground and woke for wars in the dark places underground, with cavalry charges and countercharges that were the earthquakes. And the real you is quite—really, a disappointment. You are very obnoxious.”
“The hell you say! Ain’t I the damnified soul of refinement!”
“Do you know you wipe your mouth with your sleeve rather than use a napkin when you eat, in the exact same spot you wipe your nose rather than use a handkerchief? So, no, I am not staying behind for your sake.”
“Then why?”
“For her.”
“Who?” But the moment the word was out of his mouth, Montrose knew.
Mickey confirmed it. “For Rania, of course.”
“Why?”
“Menelaus, you met her, you saw her. You touched her with your hand, held her in your arms. You know her as a person, a real person. To me, she was the princess who stole a star and went to the land beyond the land of the dead, to plead for the soul of man. When Rania returned, and I saw her fall from the sky like a goddess brightly winged, I knew my faith had been sound, all those years, when I would sacrifice turtledoves to her shrine in high places, in the sacred groves. But to see her as real! It was ecstasy!” He shook his head sadly. “And then I found she was not real. That woman was a copy made by the aliens. For what purpose, no one can guess.”
Montrose said, “What are you driving at?”
“I need her to be real. She cannot be just a story, a false story, and man has no cure for the harms of the world, no one willing to journey beyond the farthest star for us! But if I do not stay behind and guide Ain through the steps of our bargain with him, who else can, or would? In some strange way, I know Ain’s mind, strange and supreme a being as he is. Haven’t you noticed he thinks like a Witch?”
“Like a what? How do you figure?”
“Ain burned his past. He lives for others. These are Witch traits. Besides, it is also for your sake I stay. Who else would you trust not to betray you to Del Azarchel, and who else would Del Azarchel trust not to betray him to you? The Scolopendra and Myrmidon descendants are his; the descendants of the Swans and Foxes are yours, and so on. No one has ever served both of you, but me. So I have to stay. I have to know that the Swan Princess is real. To know it, down to my bones. That means you have to go find her.”
“If ever I find her, it will be centuries after you are dust.”
“I will instruct one of my future incarnations, after achieving the Fourth Spiritual Density, to use the Elder Star Sign to transcend time and space and communicate with me here and now, and then I will know it, without knowing how I know.”
Trey smirked and stood on tiptoe and whispered something in his ear.
“Yes, ah! Strike that last comment!” Mickey hastily corrected himself, “I mean, I will be in heaven among the saints and martyrs, and, looking down, will know if you have met with success in your great quest.”
Montrose looked at him long and hard. “What is your other motive?”
Mickey looked a little surprised, but bowed and said, “Compassion for Del Azarchel. What if he meets the real Rania? She knows the secret of peace. As I have said, he will destroy himself. I have seen this in a dream. The White Christ whom once I reviled, and now I serve, can heal such wounds, wounds of the spirit, self-inflicted wounds; for the magic of the Son of Man is strong, stronger than earth, wider than sky, deeper than ocean, and deeper than the fiery inferno and therefore can overthrow all fates, heal all harms, and make all things new, which even Tash, Oroborous, nor Melkor, to whom once I bowed in adoration, cannot do. But the price is that one must humble oneself to receive the blessing. This, Del Azarchel will never do. But he might for her sake.”
Montrose said dismissively, “He does not love her.”
Mickey said, “Human emotions are complex and subtle beyond the lore of magicians or the wisdom of bishops. Was he not also her father? You don’t want to see him damned, do you?”
Montrose looked up and saw the elevator descending. The figure inside had swum through the air with the un-self-aware grace of an old space hand, and he wore the silver-caped black uniform of the Hermetic Order, and a red ring was on his wrist.
Montrose said slowly, “I am still sort of making up my mind about that. I have not forgot how much I owe Captain Grimaldi. He gave me the stars.”
3. The Circular Singularity
Del Azarchel passed through the door, which was a multistate material which turned fluid, parted around him like a bubble, and became solid glass behind him with a rubbery pop of noise as he stepped through.
He spoke without any preamble: “I was able to examine the interior of the black sphere using instruments that Ain described and Torment built for me. The attotechnology drive, I finally discovered, is a ring of singularity matter denser than neutronium spun at ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light so that particles of negative mass can be orbited near the event horizon, accelerated by the frame dragging of the ring, and shot out through the dead center where the gravity forces cancel out to zero, losing some energy due to tidal effects but keeping enough that they can be directed against the sail in a propulsion beam.
“It looks like a perpetual motion machine, as absurd as if a man in a sailboat were to wave an ostrich plume fan at the canvas and impart motion.
“What prevents it from being a true perpetual motion machine is two things: One is the negative mass of the Bondi-Forward particles. These particles, when encountering equal and opposite mass, produce a constant acceleration of the system toward the positive-mass object. It is from this that the ship derives her self-accelerating motion. Two, the point in time at which the universe will one day balance its books is lost in the depths of the ring singularity event horizon, where time passes so slowly, the bookkeeper demanding to know where the extra energy comes from will never—from our frame of reference—put in an appearance to demand the bill be paid.
“So, while, technically speaking, every action still has an equal and opposite reaction, and entropy still rules all things and ruins all things, and conservation is conserved, nonetheless we observers here in this frame of reference, aboard the ship but not inside the mi
crosingularity of the drive, we will never see the equal reaction. From our frame of reference, entropy is reversed, and momentum comes from nowhere—that is, from somewhere outside our frame of reference.”
Montrose said, “Why can’t the aliens just use these things to make an infinite amount of energy, then? Use one perpetual motion machine to spin a second up to speed, and the second gives back more energy than it takes to the first, and so on?”
Del Azarchel said, “As I said, it only seems to be a perpetual motion machine from one frame of reference. The drive also requires a supply of particles of negative mass, which don’t exist in nature, and which Ain cannot construct. He cannot fold spacetime into tiny knots with enough delicacy to make new and exotic fundamental particles, but this is apparently something the Domination of Praesepe can do—make the fuel, that is, not the drive. The drive disk is more massive than our whole solar system, when seen edge on from a femtometer away, but otherwise is seen as a lightweight substance akin to metallic hydrogen, possessing zero density and zero inertia. Do I need to say it is also made of attotechnology particles, quanta of fundamental matter-energy that cannot exist in nature? The drive cylinder is a substance that seems to be made of neutronium, but otherwise. Our old friend, Mother Selene would call it magic. Neither Hyades nor Praesepe can create an artifact like this drive.”
Montrose said, “I wonder why M3 gave it to False Rania.”
Del Azarchel said, “It is a treasure, now yours, and worth guarding most jealously.” He turned to Mickey and Trey. “No matter how advanced the technology, no one overcomes the laws of nature themselves. In this case, it is simply a fact that the human mind is too complex to broadcast across interstellar distances in any reasonable amount of time. Far more information can be embedded into tiny dark matter packages, but they travel slowly and require very delicate receivers to catch them. That is where the singularity drive comes in: