With no answered word, Del Azarchel leaped up the ten feet—not a difficult jump in the low gravity—and drove the blades toward Montrose, cutting him deeply along the left forearm that Montrose had raised to block. Montrose grabbed Del Azarchel’s right wrist as the blade sought his throat. The momentum carried them both off the branch and into one of the many decorative pools that dotted the garden. As they fell, the blade that Montrose was holding away from his throat suddenly elongated, driving its point inward.
The water rose up slowly and oddly in the low gravity, more like oblate balloons than like a natural splash two men striking the surface should have made. As the water closed over them both, Montrose felt the blade enter him and begin to hoax the cells touched, spreading the command to enter hibernation.
His throat turned white, and his nervous system shut down, forcing him to use his molecular-based nanotech brains scattered throughout his body as a backup.
Over and over in the liquid the combatants tumbled, blood and hibernation fluids staining the medium. Montrose was unable to draw his pistol, since both hands were involved in the clench, but he could send an electric signal from his brain to the firing mechanism, to turn off the shielding and fire. It was an old-fashioned magnetic linear accelerator or caterpillar drive gun, and the expended slug struck Del Azarchel in the foot, removing his big toe; but, more importantly, the electromagnetic pulse from the unshielded firing charge scrambled the brains in Del Azarchel’s daggers, turning them both into limp whips of metal and preventing any more signals from the dagger blade from interfering with Montrose’s internal tissue command structure.
Unexpectedly, the water between the two of them grew thick like mud, solidified, and threw the two of them apart. Both regained their feet. They stood on opposite sides of the pond, near the lip, where it was shallow, Del Azarchel with a metal whip in either hand, Montrose with one hand hanging useless at his side, white and coated with blood, the other holding a glass pistol pointed squarely at Del Azarchel’s head.
“When I decide you need a beating,” said Montrose, “you’ll take it and like it and ask for more!”
“Or what, you subhuman cur? You’ll kill me? We have already agreed on that. It is you who broke the truce between us, not I! My honor is clean!”
“You are up to something, you sneaking spore mold! What were you doing?”
“Scientific research. I was broadcasting my brain information ahead to various points in the Praesepe Cluster, attempting to make contact with the Domination here. If we are to continue, I would like parity of weapons.”
Montrose looked surprised, and looked down at the glass pistol in his hand.
“You have the advantage,” Del Azarchel continued. “I expected you to use a firearm against a man without, but your use of the water here is cowardly.” Montrose saw that the fluid had solidified around Del Azarchel’s legs. “It is understandable that you programmed the objects in the ship to protect you from me.”
“My aunt Bertholda’s scrofulous uvula I did! As if I needed help with a loathsome egomaniacal persistent pandemic pest like you!” He thrust his pistol back into his sash. “Twinklewink! Release him! And put his toe back on while you are at it. Why did you break up the fight?”
A tiny glittering wisp of light glowed from behind a leaf dangling from the low-hanging knotwork of vast trunks and branches overhead. “Captain, I ordered the motile elements in the nanofluid to part you because of your order.”
Del Azarchel arched an eyebrow and delivered a scornful look at Montrose. “I admit I am surprised to have caught you in a lie. This seems somewhat out of character, Cowhand. You are usually too dull to fib.”
Montrose gritted his teeth. “Dammit! I want you dead, but I can’t have you thinking ill of me. I did not give that order!”
Del Azarchel said, “No one else can give orders to the ship but you.”
Montrose said, “Twinklewink! Why did you say I gave that order?”
The leaf moved, and a tiny fairy figurine peered out. Her voice was high and sweet. “I have double-checked with my two backup and parallel sister systems, Glitterdink and Dwinkeltink, and the identification is not in error, despite a margin of divarication. It was clearly you who gave the command.”
Montrose glanced at Del Azarchel, from long habit looking to see if his rival had figured out the puzzle before he did. And Del Azarchel, who had the same habit, was glancing uneasily at him. Each saw the bewilderment in the other man’s face, almost a look of wonder, or fear.
Montrose said, “Point to the spot where I was standing when I gave the order.”
2. Stained-Glass Dyson Sphere
The little fairy figurine raised her tiny wand and pointed away from both of them, at the carpet of twigs and fantastically curled branches blocking the forward hull. As she pointed, dozens of other little darting fairies erupted from nearby clouds or beehives and danced across the branches and trunk segments, turning them white as ice, and a moment later, pulled them apart like a curtain.
The branches fell aside, revealing a glittering vista of space: occupying more than half of the visible universe was a giant curve composed of thousands and tens of thousands of overlapping translucent plates colored like stained glass, rose and crimson, scarlet and blood-red, lilac and lavender, fulvous gold, emerald and smaragd. Only after a moment could the overall shape be discerned: All the plates in their fleets and flotillas were perpendicular to an unseen central sun. Each rectilinear plate was a few hundred miles on a side, a few microns thin, albeit a few were much thicker, and had atmosphere and hydrosphere inside their hollow interiors, as well what might have been manufactories, energy stations, temples, radio houses, quays for docking shuttles. The clouds of plates were not orbiting at the same rate, but were arranged in concentric globes at various distances from the star. A nimbus of crepuscular rays poured out where the colored plates swarmed less thickly and glittered against what might have been escaping particles of gas or winged tools no larger than particles rushing to unknown tasks.
Where a gap in the plates occurred, the rose light of a hotter interior could be glimpsed, with a smaller and tighter curve of orbiting plates within, blue and blue gray, orbiting at an Earth-like distance to the star, and in its gaps, another even deeper, purple and indigo, perhaps the radius of the orbit of Venus.
In the middle distance, orbiting the great sphere at the same altitude as the vessel and off her bow, hung a ringworld the size of the orbit of Mercury. Five planets, large as Earth, orbited the ring as shepherding moons. Two of the satellites were volcanoscapes of rusty soil and ice the color of dried blood; two others were black like burned coals. But the final one was a jewel of beauty: a blue world of white clouds, with the lights of cities shining gemlike on the hemisphere facing away from the sun. The flocks of colored plates had been made thin here so that a beam from the central sun, like a spotlight, was striking that blue planet. From the x-ray emissions, it was clear that an invisible, perhaps microscopic, neutron star hung at the dead center of the turning ringworld, and the ring material itself shielded the five planets surrounding it, for they all orbited in the plane of the x-ray shadow.
In the near distance was the limb of a crescent planet, boiling with red, cerise, brown, and black storm clouds, with vortices and whirlpools or cerulean and indigo like staring eyes. There was also a beam where the plates had parted striking here. Despite the change in color, Montrose recognized this world as the Neptunian ice giant which had accompanied them and which, during the second half of the journey, had acted as a reflector for the deceleration beam Ain kept centered on the vast globe, and those reflected rays slowed the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum during the brief deceleration phases in the last half of her long voyage to the Praesepe Cluster. Its atmosphere of solid methane ice was now a boiling gas, and wisps of material, including tree-shaped dendrite housings from Ain, large enough to be seen at this distance, were progressing slowly or swiftly up the beam of sunlight, making it visible. At one time it had possessed a r
ing system as grand as Saturn’s, made entirely of dendrites. It evaporated, its components set about other tasks.
A score of other gas giants were visible like crescent moons, and if there were more than this in the star system, they were hidden beyond the immense curve of the Dyson sphere. Of worlds inside the outer course of the Dyson sphere, four were visible as circular shadows cast on the glowing curve of the colored panes.
The star before them, a yellow giant called Vanderlinden 133, coated with a semitransparent Dyson cloud of concentric layers, was neither the largest star nor the one sending and receiving the most signals.
The Praesepe Cluster contained over three hundred stars and fifty additional dark bodies as large as stars, which may have been opaque Dysons or other elements, nodes, or neural transmission stations in the vast brain of the Domination. The blue stragglers in the group—that is, stars hotter and bluer than other stars of the same luminosity—turned out to be, ironically, the undeveloped star systems, uninfluenced by stellar engineering. The others were coated by spheres and clouds of various thicknesses and consistencies. Certain stars had been artificially induced to ignite as novae: these were coated by nearly solid Dysons, but the excess heat permitted to leak out was sufficient for these stars to be seen from Earth and miscategorized as red giants. Montrose stared in wonder at an object less than a lightyear away, a Dyson oval much like an egg, at whose foci two stars rotated about each other.
Compared to these wonders, even the staggering immensities of the macroscale engineering at Ain were as nothing: a burdei pit-house next to a shining skyscraper.
The central core of the cluster was eleven lightyears in radius. There were two subclusters or lobes in the interstellar brain, one of which gave off stronger x-ray emissions than the other. This indicated that Praesepe was the remnant of two smaller clusters having collided some eight hundred million years ago, some two million years before Praesepe had ejected the stars which later were to form the Hyades Cluster. What convulsions, or wars, or divorces, or epileptic fits these great collisions and expulsions represented, no human knew.
The little fairy pointed at the ringworld. “There you are, Captain. That is you, there.”
Montrose looked at the ring of material. “Wait … this is impossible…” He said softly. “Cahetel…?”
3. The Jupiter Effect
Del Azarchel was also staring at the ringworld in wonder. “My discovery is somewhat less surprising than yours, as it turns out. I was going to tell you that there are human beings living here, on that blue world. I did not realize that one of them was you.”
“I think they are all me,” said Montrose with a strange little laugh. “Damnification and pestilence! He ate me, and I did not agree with his digestion. He was eating a virus. Is that what Ain meant? Is that what Hyades is expecting to happen all over the place, to every civilization men are sent?”
Del Azarchel said, “Did Ain beam a copy of you to the Praesepe Cluster? I was the one running the mental replication system all those years, and you slumbered! There was no copy of you made at any point on planet Torment. How can this be?” But then he said, “Ah! No! You did this long before, I think, while I tarried in Sagittarius. Very subtle!”
Montrose said, “I think my takeover of Cahetel was by accident, so don’t compliment me yet. But you see what happened?”
Del Azarchel pointed toward the ring encircling the blue planet. “Cahetel absorbed a complete copy of your brain information during the first hour of the Second Sweep, when all the Black Fleet was turned. And it could not leave well enough alone and so brought your memories out of storage a few times to help understand what the humans were doing, how to get them settled on the colonies, and so on. I assume Cahetel had other tasks to perform at other stars after leaving Sol?”
Montrose said, “Praesepe controls nine Dominions seated at star clusters and nebulae reaching from Sol past the Pleiades and the Trapezium Cluster to the dark Cone Nebula in Monoceros, twenty-seven hundred lightyears away. All of them must have clients and serfs and founding civilizations as well. That is a lot of folk to talk to. I bet Cahetel tried me out as an emissary for the same reason Ain wants the human race. Some quirk in our psychology, allow us to fight the mental environment, to try harder, to come out on top … some desperate drive…”
“Sexual drive,” said Del Azarchel.
Montrose said, “No, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Why are you here? For Rania. Why am I here? Same reason.” Del Azarchel shrugged. “It is true that certain of these races seem to have two sexes, at least at one time, in the far past and so therefore should be motivated by that basic, primal, caveman urge. Ah, but contemplate how long they have been artificial. Even when they download themselves into bodies of flesh and blood, everything is a handiwork, deliberate, and controlled. They are not allowing the raw energy of the evolutionary process to burst forth: whereas our younger race…”
Montrose said, “That is pure-quill unadulterated pee-yew stinkerino horse flop, Blackie, and you know it. There is something deeper. Something deep inside human nature, or … just maybe … something planted inside human nature…”
Del Azarchel said, “Are you thinking of something Ain said was impressed or impregnated into our very souls by the Monument? That is mere mysticism and obfuscation. How would it change the whole race? Only you, and I, and my dearest Rania now survive of the Hermeticist who touched the Monument. Unless you want to suggest something was enjambed or embedded at such a deep level, that we unknowingly passed these characteristics along to the Swans and Myrmidons, Foxes, and so on?”
“Or you could just poxing ask me, you lumphead, instead of guessing. I am right here.”
Montrose was startled, because he had not spoken.
Both men still stood knee deep in the ceremonial pool, letting the nanomachines in the water tend their wounds. Both men turned and peered, for the voice had come from a thick curtain of leaves nearby. The deep male voice, Montrose’s voice, was coming from a cluster of fairy figurines who were drifting closer.
The cloud of figurines now danced into a new configuration, forming the rough outline or caricature of a head with protruding ears, deep-set eyes, a large and out-thrust jaw. The four somber-faced fairies whose linked arms and legs formed the jaw flew up and down to make the mouth move. Two fairies in red pantaloons floated sidewise with their feet touching, acting as lips, and a fairy floating behind them, looking over her shoulder, flapped her short red cape to mimic the motions of the tongue.
“Well, that is a mite disturbing,” said Montrose.
Del Azarchel said, “So your security merely lets alien beings take over locked circuits and essential systems, while I have access to nothing aboard this ship but live like the Abbé Faria in the Château d’If! I am not even allowed to unlock the pantry!”
The floating insectoid face made of fairy women said, “Your ship knew who I was and unlocked the security for me. I am still me, Big Montrose, even if I’ve been out of touch a powerful long parcel of time, now. What happened back on Earth? I mean, after the Thirtieth Millennium. Rania turned out to be a fake? A copy?”
Montrose said, “How did you know?”
There was a five-second delay as the radio signals traveled from Twinklewink, the ship’s brain, to the ringworld and back again. His own voice answered him: “Because there is no other reason for you and Blackie to be sharing Rania’s supership that the Authority of M3 gave her as a gift. This ship passed through this area of space twelve thousand years ago, but everyone with a telescope saw her fly past, so everyone knows where she hails from.”
Del Azarchel said, “Rania christened her Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. The Wide Desolation of Heaven: this ancient expression was penned on maps where wastelands reserved for holy hermits stretched. Do you know why the Rania who was returned was a copy, not the real one?”
Again, a five-second delay. “Sure, that is simple enough. You put Rania together using code you did not u
nderstand, and there was something broken about her—ain’t that right, Blackie, you verminous excretion from the south end of a snake? You experimented on little girls and did not know what in the blue plague-bearing perdition you was doing, right? Did you guys figure out that the Monument had a missing message and that a fake message was covering the real one? You are both a mite slow-witted, so tell me to hold up if I be going too fast for the lumps of soup you call brains. On account of you are really stupid compared to me.”
Montrose said, “You know, I really am a small dollop of obnoxious, ain’t I? It’s a wonder I don’t get punched more often in the nose.”
Del Azarchel said, “Yes, Cow-hetel—or whatever you might call yourself—yes, we are aware that there is a recent message covering an older and redacted message coating the Monument.”
“Call me Big Montrose. That deeper message in the Monument got into Rania’s genes and then into her brain somehow. When she got downloaded into the M3 mind—which I deduce she must have done, ’cause otherwise no copy would have been made—that part was taken out of her.”
“Why?” asked Montrose and Del Azarchel together.
Five seconds passed. “Don’t know. But I do know this: someone smarter and older and more cunning than M3 is arranging things behind the scene. I’ve crunched some numbers on how unlikely it is that my life would end up the way it has and that I would arrive here, just in time to see you, one last time, before the big good-bye. It is so unlikely, that it cannot be coincidence. That it means something smarter than M3 is inside the real Rania, whoever made the real Monument. I assume you’ve figured out that the Monument Builders are good guys and the Monument Redactors are bad guys?”
“Ain told us this,” said Del Azarchel.
“What big good-bye? You can come with us!” said Montrose.
“You fool,” said Del Azarchel. “Big Montrose—or rather the corpse of Cahetel inhabited by Big Montrose—is about to be killed for our sake. There is no other way to overcome the scaling problem.”