“You are all machines, now?”
Not so. We return to our biological mode to reproduce at irregular periods, as duty or longing dictates.
“So you understand male and female?”
Yes. Man is the only other race divided into male and female encountered within the current eon of time. It is the most rare reproductive regime in the Orion Arm save one.
The thought that he would never otherwise know the answer to the question caused Montrose, even at this crucial moment, to be distracted, “Really? What is more common than sex?”
Really. Asexual reproduction by fission is most common, followed by sporogenesis, and next, in order, are hermaphroditism, dichogamy, trioecy, gynodioecy, subgynoecy, androdioecy, subandroecy, androgynomonoecy, and polygamodioecy. Permanent sexual dioecy, as found in both our species, is nearly unknown. Synoecy is more rare yet, but the worlds and orders in Orion who employ this reproductive regime follow original forms issuing from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
“And in the other arms of the galaxy?”
Molecular-based life divided into discrete species and sexes is nearly unknown outside this arm of the galaxy. Scutum-Crux spreads by self-immolation; Galactic Core races by amalgamation and gravitational imprecation; Perseus by resonance; Sagittarius by replication; Cygnus by induction.
5. The Death and Ecstasy of the Consorts
A.D. 83088 TO 91066
Del Azarchel sent him an aside, “What in the name of the wounds of Christ are you doing, Cowhand? Did you actually have a plan, or is this another stupid bluff of yours?”
Montrose ignored him and said to Praesepe, “So they would never know what love is. But you do?”
I know.
“And being willing to die for love? You know what that is?”
Do you consume your mates during the mating rite?
“Not very often. We mate several times and have many offspring, the more the merrier. I come from a big family. I had ten brothers.”
I also come from a big family. I had forty-one thousand six hundred brothers. We know indeed what it means to be willing to die for love.
“How do you know?”
The central conflict of all our precivilized history was the effort to feed the queen mothers with chemical substitutes for male hormones produced during the mating rite, so that queen mothers who fasted and abstained during the mating ritual would produce healthy offspring nonetheless. It was the consort willingness to die for the sake of offspring which formed the core psychological obstacle to the emergence of civilization. Their efforts were sublimated and driven into other channels: into exploration, spaceflight, star-faring, and warfare. Conquest was made part of the courtship ritual. So the misdirection of our natural impulses, for us, proved very beneficial. I am the sole survivor of those days, the eldest; I recall the pain of resisting the temptations of ecstasy and suicide, and still suffer it from time to time.
“But if you are a swarm, what do you care if the individual bugs ate each other?”
The change in our natural ways was needed for civilization. If one part of the swarm murders another part, the whole is demeaned.
“You must help us, just for that same reason. Because otherwise all the Orion Arm will be demeaned, because you will have stopped me from getting to my bride, which, as you just told me, is worse than death.”
Nothing is worse than death. This is the decree of the Absolute Extension of M3. Life serves life.
“Your own words make that a lie. You and me, we are the only two in the whole accursed and godforsaken galaxy that know love is more than life, more than anything. Even a damn space-bee hive-mind has to see the plain—”
Montrose laughed and was surprised to hear it aloud, for he had forgotten his mouth was thawed.
Praesepe said, Explain: You make a mouth-signal indicative of mirth or good disposition, but also used to express irony, surprise, or several variants of emotion unknown to us. What does this mouth-signal portend?
Montrose said, “It is not important. I just realized you are bees. A lot. On Earth, in ancient times, long before we had any first contact with you aliens, our astronomers called this cluster of stars the Beehive Cluster. See? Bees are a swarming critter, too. They got queens and drones. Don’t eat their mates, but some spiders and wasps do. I just thought it was really odd that you turned out to be bees. Quite a coincidence, eh? And, uh, my brother used to work with bees, so I always kind of liked you. ’Cause he got stung.”
It is mathematically impossible that this is coincidence: it indicates your race, even in your ancient days, when yet below third order capacity, had access to second order information. This, in turn, implies interference by a first-order entity. Who is it?
“Who is what?”
Who is the first-order entity directing your actions?
“You can first order my rutting rod! What the plague does that mean?”
The evidence suggests an Authority or Archon, Throne, Cherubim or Seraphim has introduced strange attractors into the cliometric topography surrounding you. Someone is changing history. Identify this one!
“I got no idea what you’re blathering about, Bugsy!”
Del Azarchel said, “Mary, Mother of God! Did you just give the Praesepe Domination one of your infernal nicknames? I swear by the soul of my mother and by Saint James I will see your blood if this monster helps us now!”
Montrose thawed his whole upper body so that he could turn and look in surprise at Del Azarchel. “What are you jawing on about?”
Del Azarchel shouted, “Every time you call someone by one of your stupid pet names, they end up aiding you! It is maddening! Such a thing cannot be allowed to happen in a rational universe! Every being of every world under all the strange and wild stars of the galaxy should grope for strangling wires and bludgeons to choke your foolish voice in to silence and club your filthy lunatic brains into porridge! Everyone should hate you! God Almighty should hate you! Why does everything and everyone go mad when you are around? What the hell did you do to Father Reyes? How did you—”
But Praesepe said, There is no need for physical transfer of resources. By a process of hyperposition, I have already found and transformed the tritium aboard your vessel into its most congruent negative-mass form. No further communication is required or will be permitted.
Amid a deafening shower of lightning discharges, the tetrahedron wept, sagged, gushed, fell into the pool, broke into eight parts, then sixteen, and then dissolved back into fluid.
The pond surface flickered with ripples and then grew still. Praesepe was gone.
6. Just Dumb Luck
Del Azarchel also thawed his upper body, because now he clutched his head with both hands, as if he feared his brain cells would explode outward from his skull. “Dear God in Heaven, smite me dead this instant! No pit in hell is worse than this! Has the universe gone mad? How did the idiot win again! How does he always—it’s impossible! What did you do? How did you do that?”
Montrose was enjoying the sight, but he just spread his hands and shrugged. His thought had been merely that if Rania were confronting someone who owed her nothing, she might try sweet-talking it out of him, just by plain asking and being nice. But all he said aloud was, “Hell, I ain’t got no idea. Chalk it up to dumb luck.”
Del Azarchel was trying to control himself and actually had his own fingers wrapped at this throat as if to choke his windpipe back into his control, and yet his voice kept jumping into high, shrill pitches. His hair was mussed, and his eyes were as whirlpools. “No, that—that cannot be right! It’s unfair! Dumb, dumb, dumb luck cannot outwit superior genius time after time across centuries and millennia of time! Once or twice—maybe—but not—this is impossible!”
“I would tell you to calm down, but, hell, this is sweeter than peach pie, watching you go bonkers, Blackie.”
“I have to kill you! I have to!” Now he giggled, and laughed, and could not stop laughing. But he could not stop talking either, so he gasped
. “You! Arrogant! Filthy! Ugly! Yankee! You’ve robbed everything from me! Jupiter and Rania are gone! And the whole crew is dead! And you stole my idea, and suborned Cahetel—how did you even know?—but no! You did not know! Dumb luck! Dumb! I am drowning in dumb!”
“I ain’t no Yankee, Spanish Simon. Watch your mouth.”
A fairy figurine landed on the shoulder of Montrose, saying in her high, sweet voice, “Captain! There is no evidence of any remaining traces of the Praesepe embassy mind anywhere in the ship’s thoughtware. We have discovered that the fission cylinders of tritium now exhibit negative-mass properties. They are already in proper position for injection into the singularity drive. I have calculated several short courses, in case you wish to test the performance of the drive, and also calculated the shortest path to M3.”
Montrose breathed such a sigh of satisfaction as he could not remember. “Pestiferate my pogo! Maybe my future has arrived!”
He saw that Del Azarchel, while still red in the face and panting like a dog, nonetheless was slowly rediscovering his famous self-control. There was a little fairy half-hidden under Del Azarchel’s long locks of hair, whispering into the Spaniard’s ear, but Montrose was in too good a mood to ask Twinklewink what she had said to calm the man down. He almost felt sorry for the fellow and did not want to spoil the luxury of the sensation of an utterly undeserved and unexpected victory.
A nagging curiosity did, all too soon, push the feelings of glee aside. Montrose frowned.
Why had Praesepe changed its vast, inhuman, collective mind?
5
The Wreck of the Vast Desolations of Heaven
1. A Polite Rude Awakening
A.D. 91917
His first awareness, upon awakening, was of the scent of cherry blossoms, the tintinnabulation of a stream, the twittering of larks and the humming of bumblebees, and the deep knowledge that something was very wrong. He could feel the motion of the carousel, which, even though it was a mile wide, nonetheless still imparted an artificial feeling of gravity. The weight of his limbs and the pressure of air in his lungs told him the ship was spinning at her proper rate. He opened his eyes. Between two the pink rice paper screens of Rania’s boudoir, through the pointed arch of the fairy-tale tower window, he could see the narrow and rising sweep of the garden, green and fresh with late spring. The window was facing the hull one-quarter of the great wheel of the ship away, so the strip of land looked like a green bridge across a field of stars to either side.
Stars meant the vessel was still in the Milky Way. An internal calendar told him it was far, far too early to have allowed any circuit to waken him, and the lack of klaxons or damage reports indicated that he had not been stirred awake by any of the emergencies he had so carefully placed into his thaw instruction logic.
And the birds and bees would not be taken out of hibernation during an emergency. In fact, they could not be taken out of storage at all, except on his direct command. Which he had not given.
Twinklewink was compromised.
Thus he was not surprised when Twinklewink, dressed all in a black costume with a silvery cloak fluttering behind her, came lightly through the window, lugging a gentleman’s white glove behind her. She sped past his ear, drawing the glove behind, to slap him across the face with it.
2. The Challenge
He rubbed his cheek ruefully, cursing himself inwardly with every disease and pest and rot for which he knew the names. What had happened was obvious in hindsight. At some point after the midflight rotation and before their arrival at the Dyson sphere, Del Azarchel beamed a copy of himself into the mind swarm of Praesepe, or, at least, that segment of the Praesepe interstellar mind seated at the Vanderlinden 133. Obviously Del Azarchel had survived, made some sort of deal, suborned or corrupted some of the data entities living in the lower levels of the Praesepe mental universe, and risen to some sort of high position, several millennia before the physical ship carrying the physical version of Del Azarchel arrived. Montrose himself had given the order to lower the drawbridge and welcome in the alien emissary mind into the ship’s braincase. And Exarchel—if that was the right name for him—simply sneaked in with the ambassador, stayed behind when the ambassador left, seized control of central nodes and brainpaths before Twinklewink awoke, and, with her as his helpless, brain-dead puppet, merely ordered her to report to Montrose that all was well. Meanwhile, she also had whispered into the ear of Del Azarchel that he was now master of the ship, and Montrose his captive. No wonder the man had regained his composure so quickly.
The little fairy figure danced in front of him again, curtseying. The miniature black uniform she wore was a replica of the Hermeticist spacefaring garb: black with threads of red running through it like the veins on a leaf, with a mirrored cloak. About her tiny wrist was an even tinier hoop of red metal. In her high, sweet voice, she said, “Certain formalities needs must be honored in the breach. There is no one to act as Seconds, or surgeon, and I assume you will not accept the ship’s brain to act as judge?”
Montrose sighed. “No, you can be judge. I think you are honest enough, in your own twisted way, to stop yourself from pulling any funny business during a proper duel. Damnify and infect my male member if I can figure why. You are the kind of man who can kill a million people without blinking an eye, but you will not cheat at cards.”
The little figurine curtseyed. “Simple enough. My sense of honor is important. The lives of lesser men are not. Will you come?”
The staircase that descended from the spire to the floor of the tower was an ancient design: the first part, where gravity was half, was merely an open space down which he jumped; then came three-quarters gravity with its spiral ramp, loose at the top and tight at the bottom; and below that, stairs. When he reached the bottom stair, he was in one Earth-normal gravity of acceleration again.
He opened the iron-bound oak door and stepped into an herb garden. A fawn was nibbling the grass to one side. To the other babbled and lapped the endless brook that wound all the way around the ship. The season here was springtime. Looking upward, he could see the cluster of light sources and heating elements peeping out from behind the wood-wrapped black ball where the singularity engine and the alien machinery of the diametric drive were hidden, along with the thinking machinery of the ship’s brain. Clockwise, he saw the band of the garden rising up, tree leafless. In the middle of winter was the round shadow of night cast by the machinery sphere. Directly opposite, to the counterclockwise, was summer, and the lamp cloud that served as a miniature sun glittered in the brook as it ran, dazzling. Autumn was directly overhead, a mile away.
He saw the stars to the aft, including the Praesepe Cluster, now some eight hundred lightyears behind them. Unlike a proper sailing ship, the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum currently was flying with her sails before her, distended by an invisible and nigh-impossible spray of ionized helium particles issuing from the diametric drive, energy whose imparted momentum, at least in the frame of reference for the ship, was met by no equal and opposite reaction.
These stars were redder than they should have been and gathered more closely together, albeit only his superhuman Patrician eyes allowed him to detect such a thing. They were traveling above ninety percent of the speed of light. To the fore, the entire hemisphere of stars was occluded by the rose-colored film of the sails.
He brought his eyes back down. The fairy figurine beckoned. He followed the little finger-sized doll a hundred paces to where an airy gazebo of white and pink with columns carved into fretted lace stood next to a glass bridge, lightly arched, that leaped the endless brook. Within was Blackie del Azarchel, smoking a thin cigar. At his feet were two boxes, one of cedarwood and one of battered metal painted olive green. Both were open. The green metal box held the Krupp dueling pistol Montrose had brought and which, last time he’d seen it, had been safely packed in his private supply chamber halfway between the soil level and the outer hull, under gravity slightly higher than Earth-normal. On the dark velvet in the c
edar box was another pistol Montrose of course recognized. He had last seen it in the hands of the homunculus used by Jupiter in their duel. Montrose was not in the habit of forgetting any pistol down whose barrel he had stared in what might have been the last moment of his life, but was not. Blackie’s own pistol. He had saved it from since that day.
On a clean white sheet laid out between the two boxes were cartridges of chaff, slugs and accelerators, beam guides, a miniature lathe and other chaff-cutting tools, a programmer’s pin set: everything needed to pack and prepare a weapon.
To one side of the gazebo was a full set of dueling armor, standing on its metal boots, helmet open and empty. To the other side was another set. But behind each stood a young man in livery: one was in black and gold, Rania’s colors. The other was in black and red and purple. Their faces were albino white and eyes pink, and their hair was as fine as the down of a newborn.
“No smoking on deck,” said Montrose coldly, without any other greeting. “You want to strain the air recycler?”
3. A Gentlemen’s Agreement
“I granted myself an exception to the ancient rule, as captain. I grant you your choice of arms and armor,” said Del Azarchel airily, and as he waved his hand, the blue cigar smoke left a circle in the gesture’s wake. “Obviously you are more used to your piece than mine, but then again, it might throw me off my aim to use yours.”
“You’re cracked, Blackie. More cracked than normal.”