Count to a Trillion

9

Extraterrestrial Conflict Resolution

1. Shipsuit

Menelaus trotted after, and caught up to the nonwheelchair as it slid down the corridor. “But we’re right in the middle of something important here!”

“They must be included. We dare not defy their call.”

“You told me you were the Master of the World!”

“And I also told you the only title of mine that means anything is Senior of the Landing Party.”

“Come again?”

“The Hermetic is still aloft. Come, you have a lawyerly mind: What was the official end-date of the expedition?”

“Uh—When the final report to the Joint Commission gets filed.”

“It is not our fault the Commission disbanded while we were away, is it? You are also summoned. You are now awake and fit for duty. No longer on the sick roster.”

There came a clatter of many booted feet. Down the corridor toward them came Del Azarchel’s coterie of ministers and secretaries, footmen and officers, and a squad of Conquistadores in morion helmets, breastplates, and pikes.

The group also had a wardrobe master and a valet. Montrose stared goggle-eyed when the valet started stripping the tunic and trousers off of Del Azarchel, whose throne did not stop moving during this whole, awkward operation. The back of the throne folded down, changing it into something like a gurney, and assistants in blue uniforms with deft motions pushed the naked body of the Master of the World this way and that, in order to wriggle him into his clothing. It was done as nonchalantly as a nurse diapering a baby. The other courtiers and soldiers marched alongside, looking at nothing, noticing nothing.

One or two of the valets attempted a similar deal on him, but Montrose shrugged them away, grabbed the clothing out of their hands, and ran around a convenient corner with the bundle.

He unfolded it. The garment was a spacer’s uniform of ultra-lightweight black silk, with fittings at the wrists and neckline to accept gauntlets and helmet. The fabric looked almost like an organism, because countless tiny tubules for air and coolant ran through the cloth, like the branching veins in a leaf.

But the garb was clearly ceremonial: instead of painting his feet with insulator, for example, he was given a pair of black toe-socks decorated with clips of silver. A scarlet and sable oxygen hood hung down his back, obviously meant for show, not use, and a square of bright-cloth, mirror with its patterns of solar cells, was hung from one epaulette. It was not plugged into a battery, nor was there a parasol wand, so it was also for show, not to protect him from radiant solar heat in a vacuum.

Oddly, the gauntlets were not real gauntlets, there was no lining of pressure-reactive control material: They were just made of soft fabric, not vacuum-proof, and just tucked into his belt at a jaunty angle. Even more oddly, the left sleeve of the uniform was shorter than the right, leaving one forearm bare. Even if he had donned the left gauntlet, it would not have mated with the wrist fittings.

A valet came looking for him. Montrose was willing to let the other man dress him, for the simple reason that one could not fasten up a shipsuit properly by oneself, and Montrose did not know how closely this simpler copy mimicked the original.

He jogged back, finding Del Azarchel waiting in a garden-space beneath a blue dome, and a fountain and pool of water splashed on the tiled floor not far away. The throng had grown. Del Azarchel was now surrounded by a crowd of retainers and courtiers larger than what had been there before. He was telling them about the coming Armada from Epsilon Tauri. Montrose heard a tense question or two, and then a breath of relief swept through the garden-chamber. The courtiers were chuckling. “Eight thousand years,” said one, a handsome youth in a metallic wig. “It is further in our future than all recorded history rests in our past—”

Del Azarchel raised his hand, and the courtiers, all of them, fell silent as if a switch had been thrown. Del Azarchel was now dressed in a black shipsuit like Montrose wore, except that there were silver fittings at his throat and shoulders.

Montrose came forward, caught sight of himself in the glass on the wall behind Del Azarchel, and smiled. “We’re not going to shave our heads? The suit officer won’t let us board if we don’t have clean skull fits.”

Del Azarchel smiled with the left half of his mouth, raising one eyebrow. “You think this is not real? It is very real, I assure you. Hylics are not allowed to wear these fabrics. Only us.”

“Who-lacks?” Montrose recalled that the Iron Ghost version of Del Azarchel had also used the word.

Del Azarchel made a rueful smile. “Hylics. An unfortunate term, perhaps, coined in more contentious times—it refers to the common people, the mundane ones, those who trod the earth.”

“Whad’ya mean only us? Us who?”

“The Men of the Stars. The Learned. We who possess the secret knowledge. You remember the perfume of outer space? That smell, the strange ozone smell of the outer darkness? You remember what it is like to step into the airlock, and hear the ringing in your ears as pressure returns, and catch a whiff of that strange odor, it tingles in the nose like dark smoke, long after the valve is shut and the atmosphere is pumped in. You recall? Those who wish to depart the Earth and smell that scent, they are our servants here, and students. They are called by a nobler name: Psychics.”

From the looks of pride that stiffened on the faces of the men around him, Montrose understood this referred to the dandies in jeweled coats, wearing their odd wigs of white wire.

“I thought they were your roughhouse boys. Knights and bishops and, and, uh, rooks or whatever you call them. Count Dracula and Duke Ellington and so on.”

“Think of them as a Mandarin class. They have the power to rule, it is true, but it is due to the merit of their several attainments, the exemplary nature of their service to human destiny.” The men stood taller at these words, proud as petted hounds. “The elite of this new age are the acolytes and familiars of the Highest Order; students of the hidden truth; men who have moved beyond the Hylic stage of pure selfish materialism. It is a meritocracy of the mind, the rule by philosopher-kings. And so we call them Psychics.”

“Not people with way-cool mind powers? Damn. You got to pick a better word. That’s just misleading. I was sure folk in the future world would be able to focus their brainwaves, and blow folks’ skulls off, phlegm like that. What do you call the highest order, if these guys are just the students?”

“Pneumatics.”

“Jesus up a tree, you gotta talk to someone about picking better names for stuff, Blackie.”

Del Azarchel beckoned to a figure in white. The man stepped forward. It was the old Oriental doctor who had first examined Montrose when he awoke. This man did not wear one of those metallic wigs. Did that mean he was a servant, a Hylic, rather than a boss?

Del Azarchel said to Montrose: “I am sending you ahead of me, to the Conclave, because of this business I must here conclude. My court does not seem to be taking the matter very soberly—which is to be expected. Large numbers can stagger the mind, and large numbers of years dull the imagination. I will come rapidly. Meanwhile, the ride will give you an opportunity to be examined, since you just had another episode of your, ah, other self. If you would, please.”

Montrose had been pushed around a bit too much of late, especially with Del Azarchel playing a swift trick with that drink, and then accusing him of poaching his old lady. He thought it was about time to dig in his heels.

“Sending me? I’ll be damned first. You can ask. You seem to forget that I don’t work for you.”

“And you seem to forget that you are still a member of the crew, and I am in charge of the landing party.”

“What? That means landings on the Monument surface! Or some other alien body we might encounter. You are talking as if we never came home.…”

“This Earth is not the one we left. To us, it is an alien body. The ship is still aloft, and her weapons are all that hold the globe in check. Did you resign your commission?”

He thought, but did not say, There are no weapons mounted aboard the ship. That had been one of the conditions permitting her to launch. Instead he said, “But the Captain is dead.”

“A new Captain was appointed, as per our articles. Did you resign your commission?”

“No, I reckon not.”

“Then you are still a member of the crew. As soon as the doctor discharges you officially from the sick roster, you must report for duty. The carriage is yonder. Please move briskly. Time is short.”

“Short!” snorted Montrose. “Eighty centuries! What do you consider a long time?”

“A man might not have the patience to count to a trillion,” answered Del Azarchel coldly, “but the number is real whether he counts it or not. A man might not think he will live to see the future. But it will come, with him, or without him, by his effort, or by the effort of others. I am asking you to report to the Conclave not as a penalty, but as an honor, that you might be one of those men who will shape the future and make it come as it ought.”

Montrose had nothing to say back to that.

2. The Buried Carriage

Then the double doors slid shut, and Montrose found himself alone with the doctor.

“Please sit,” said the doctor in a voice that brooked no disagreement. “I will not have all my work on your skull undone merely because of a fall.”

Montrose realized that he could argue with the Master of the World, but not with a sawbones. He sat. He felt lightheaded as soon as he did, and this scared him a moment. Maybe his head was not back to normal after all. “Doc, I am feeling a little dizzy.…”

“That’s normal,” the doctor snapped.

“Normal for what? You didn’t give me any pills or anything.”

“Normal during descent.” The old man’s eyes crinkled as he stared at Montrose, with what seemed a rather impatient look. “This leg is a gravity train. After we leave the peninsula, there is a drop-off as we descend beneath the continental shelf. We have to descend to reach the main line, which follows the curve of the mantle of the Earth in a suborbital arc.”

“How do you maintain the tube walls against the pressure of the magma?”

The doctor shook his head. “Something called magnetic capillaries inflate a pipeline, which is composed of something else, a heat-resistant substance called openwork carbon nanofiber. Ovenwork? Something like that. I’m not an engineer. It uses up a great deal of energy to maintain pipeline integrity, but these days—” His shrug was eloquent. Energy was so inexpensive, that it was not even worth finishing a sentence to explain it.

“What peninsula?”

“The Florida peninsula. That was a complex buried beneath the old spaceport called Canaveral. It is the primary point for maintaining radio-link with the Hermetic.”

Montrose had notice no lightheadedness the first time he’d ridden this rail system, with Del Azarchel. Of course, he had been deep in talk with his friend, and had not just had a recent episode of unconsciousness, or superconciousness, or possession, or whatever it was. Also, he did not know if this branch of the evacuated depthtrain passed through the mantle of the Earth at the same angle as where he had been previously.

The smoothness had deceived him, and the lack of noise. The engines in his day always lost some energy through heat, noise, and vibration. Maybe here in the future, they had found a way to machine-tool their engines to more perfect specifications. More precise fits meant less vibration. Montrose realized the titanic energy supply the Hermeticists had brought back from the Diamond Star meant not just more raw power to level mountains and burn fortresses, but more energy, and hence more time, effort, and precision, were free to be spent on a wide variety of tasks. What was the major difference between a savage caveman and a civilized Texan, after all? Not just tools and organization, but the magnitude of power at his fingertips.

His mother once had said that the difference from a caveman was education. That may be. But what, ultimately, was education? Something to increase the efficiency of brainpower. What was brainpower? What was a brain, really, except for an engine that turned the noise into signal—an engine that took a chaos of raw sense data and turned it into organized patterns of pretty electroneural charges holding meaningful conclusions about the universe? The more energy a civilization controlled, the more brainpower it could bring to bear on a wider range of non-routine tasks.

The thought cheered him. Maybe the future that Del Azarchel had made was not so bad. It sure sounded like some sort of renaissance or industrial revolution was ongoing, if Blackie’s boasts were true.

Ah, but that was the stone in the shoe, wasn’t it?

“Hey, Doc. I was wondering about the fighting.”

“What fighting?”

“You know—brush wars, proxy wars, border disputes, Mormon lynching. That sort of thing. I mean, it seems quiet now, but you know how these things go.”

Nothing could have convinced Montrose more rapidly than the look of surprise on the old doctor’s face that perhaps he had misjudged Del Azarchel. Could there really be, for once in human history, no fighting going on? Montrose did not think it possible; and yet the shock of the doc was perfectly sincere.

The man said with a tinge of exasperation in his voice, “What are you talking about? Warfare was all abolished by the Concordats. The police are all locally controlled, each by their parish. There are unpaid volunteer militias in some areas, but they are armed with nonlethal weapons, pain-induction rays, and gumthrowers, for they face rioters and malcontents, not armed forces. There is no need to heed rogue stations—the accredited press maintains accurate reports.”

“Pox! No one has guns?”

The doctor turned his eyes upward, as if in thought. “The ruling houses in each area will keep retainers and men-at-arms, of course, or employ ignoble horse troopers to run down poachers or wiremen trying to set up pirate powercast rectennae. Most regional Parliaments maintain honor squads, as a symbol of their sovereignty. Protectorate areas are patrolled by Landkeepers, and they are armed. The Holy Father has the Swiss Guard. Of course, with contraterrene weapons, you do not need an army to depopulate a city, merely one civic assassin.” The doctor’s face was stern, and his shrug was short. He was clearly a man who did not think well of firearms.

“What is this Concordat?”

“The social covenant. The Princess has ordained peace throughout the world.” The old man’s face softened into a mass of wrinkles when he smiled. “We have no external enemies, and hence no wars. Peace has smiled on the human race at last!”

There was a light in his eyes when he said the Princess.

Montrose did not want to spoil the mood by pointing out that the Roman Empire and the Chinese had no significant external enemies, but were racked by horrific civil wars everytime a dynasty lost its grip on power, or someone thought it should.

“What’s your name, Doc?”

“Kyi.”

“Family name or Christian name?”

The doctor inclined his head respectfully. “That is my Medicine-Buddha name, which more fully is Sgra-dbyangs kyi rgyal-po, whom I emulate. My refuge name is Bhlogrochosnyi, Intellect Cosmic Order Sun, obtained when I took refuge in the three jewels of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. I am of Tashilhupo, who follow the Yellow Hat sect.”

“Uh … that’s right nice. Doctor Key…”

“Kyi.”

“Doctor Kyi … if I can ask. Who is this Princess of yours?”

The doctor looked amused. “So you are infatuated just from her picture?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“I am a doctor: I know the signs of neural imbalance. She is Her Serene Highness the Sovereign Princess Rania of Monaco, daughter of Rainier. Her mother bore her aboard the Hermetic, making the princess the first born beneath the light of another sun: Her phylum is classed as Exosolar. Place your dreams elsewhere. She is above your rank.”

“Impossible.”

The old man shook his head wearily. “Resign yourself. The effort the Noble Master expended in recovering your sanity has placed you in a debt beyond recovery. And I do not mean a monetary debt—only the lower orders concern themselves with such things. I mean the honor code that governs the arms-bearing class. By any rational calculation of debt, you are a client, a dependent, of the Nobilissimus, a retainer, even if you take no oath—and therefore you cannot impose yourself on his fiancée.”

Montrose forced a smile onto his face, and uttered a bitter laugh. “Why would I care about that? I never met the girl! Seems a little, ah, on the young side for him, though, don’t she? Where did you say she was born?—and anyhow, I meant it was impossible that she was birthed aboard ship.”

Dr. Kyi said coolly, “She was aboard the great ship when the Hermetic received the capitulation from the Old Order.”

“Which old order is that?”

“The Purity Order: Azania, the Coptic Union, and Greater Manchuria. Superceded, now. They were absorbed peacefully into the Concordat.”

“How did they win? The Hermeticists, I mean. The ship was an antique. She was not a warship, wasn’t carrying missiles or linears or nothing.”

“I am no soldier. I can only say what I have heard.”

“Then tell me.”

“Let me hook your suit to my bag first, that I may do a complete scan and checkup. May we proceed?”

Montrose submitted with ill grace.

The way the doctor told it, the weapons of the Hermetic were her sails and magnetic umbra. The ship enjoyed several incomparable advantages: Because contraterrene is ultralightweight, hard to detect, and impossible to deflect, once the vessels closed to engagement distances, even a microscopic fleck flung at an incoming vessel, striking any part of it, would emit a pulse of radiation hot enough to blind or cripple it.

With her immensely more powerful drives, the Hermetic was able to outmaneuver her foes, and she had no supply lines to protect. The Old Order vessels were overextended; they tried to re-supply by using unmanned high-acceleration canisters, but the Hermetic jinxed their radio-controls, and sent the supplies off-target. Her radio-emitters were more powerful than any Earthly emitter, even at interplanetary ranges. Her attacks were handled with a precision the finest computers on Earth could not match.

From beyond Mars, the Hermetic used her sail to focus (with impossible accuracy) solar beams onto navigation satellites orbiting the Earth, burning them like ants beneath a magnifying glass, and the captains of the scattered vehicles of the Old Order suddenly were blind and lost without Earth-based navigation.

“Perhaps,” the old doctor said, “had they been truly devout to their cause, the Copts could have calculated their positions with sextants and almanacs, and plotted their orbits with their onboard equipment, but then the voice of the Princess came across their radio-sets, calling them each by name, and offering them the Concordat. Their choice was to become the military backbone of the New Order, with land, dignities, and honors long denied to them, or to perish of exhaustion in the vacuum. Her voice none could deny: she is not of this Earth.”

Montrose sat up so quickly that the doctor’s black bag, connected to him by half a dozen sensitive lines, bleeped in annoyance. “Wait—What? Are you saying the Hermetic picked her up on some other planet? That she is an alien? But there are no planets like that, and even if there were, no star systems are between here and V 866 Centauri…”

“I said she was born aboard ship.”

“And I said that was impossible. Who was the mother? There were no women aboard.”

“Three women were smuggled aboard, disguised as crewmen who had washed out of the program, but were too ashamed to allow the public to know.”

“Oh, come on. Smuggled how? When? Why?”

“They were comfort women. It is thought best in polite circles not to inquiry too closely into the matter, in case face be lost. You see that the matter is delicate.”

“You mean whores?” Montrose uttered a laugh and slapped his knee. “Hee-howdie! That would have been a hoot. Playing belly-thumper all the way to Centauri and back. If’n I were a jane, I’d’a gone for it. Wait … you’re serious? You’re not serious.”

The doctor certainly looked serious. Of course, he probably looked that way most times.

Montrose guffawed. “Who told you we had strumpets aboard? Where was they stowed? Every square half-centimeter of space was accounted for. Or were the hussies just clinging to the outside of the hull like a remora fish on a submarine? That’d be quite a bit of clinging, considering that the ship’s carousel was spun for gravity. Hanging by your hands with the stars under your toes for fifty years, and the boys would have to be pretty lonely for you, cause you’d be older than grandma by the time the johns thawed out. Pee-shaw. Who came up with that stretch of baloney?”

“These women, arrested for breaches of public decorum laws in Argentina, were given the opportunity to escape the Decency Inquisition the newly-reconstituted Spanish Crown had initiated, by doing community service. Essentially they were volunteering for permanent exile. The women were smuggled aboard because one of the high-level expedition organizers thought it would be a good idea, necessary for the sanity and well-being of the all-male crew, to send along…”

Menelaus just shook his head, smirking in disbelief.

The doctor looked offended. “Would you accuse the Nobilissimus Lord Regent Del Azarchel himself of perpetrating a lie? Be warned!”

“Would you accuse Captain Grimaldi of being so jackass loco yack-stupid as to lock up three warm-blooded señoritas in a canful of two hundred ten lusty young men and lonely old professors? Be warned yourself, Doc. Be warned not to believe any tin-plate panner-junk they try to palm off on you. Del Azarchel should’ve asked me. I would’ve come up with a better whopper than that one. Space whores!” He shook his head, unable to suppress a smile. “That’s cracked.”

Dr. Kyi favored him with a cold look. “You were in a coffin the whole time. You have no knowledge of what occurred.”

“Impossible. Im—poss—see—bull. And the emphasis is on the bull.”

“Why are you so certain, Mr. Montrose?”

“Do you think someone could have just up and added an extra biosuspension unit aboard? How about three? The ship was designed for ninety-five percent of lightspeed. Do you want to see the figures on how much oomph it costs to accelerate even a single gram of mass to that velocity? The crew had to slim down like wrestlers training for a weight class too light for us. We were shaving our heads bald because two hundred ten crewhands’ worth of hair—I am talking about the weight of the hair—’tweren’t worth the cost of fuel to boost. Our uniforms was tissue paper, and it was more lightweight to paint our feet with insulator goop than to carry socks. We didn’t have shoes! Pox and plague, man! They had little plastic bags we were meant to pee into before docking, and we were going to leave them on the punt before we boarded, so that we’d be that much lighter before weigh-in. Each gram of urine counted.”

Dr. Kyi looked puzzled, even disturbed. Obviously Montrose’s words had struck doubt into him. “The history files are not clear. A large mass of data was lost when the Coptics and Voortrekkers aligned with the Chinese and came to power: One of the cybernetic battles—I cannot recall the historian’s name and number code for which microsecond it happened in—was called the Aneurysm.”

“Well, I can tell you that security aboard the ship was as airtight as the ship herself. Our biometrics were all on file in a separate back-up computer called Little Big Brother that was not even physically connected with the mainframe. Little Big Brother were these little black boxes dotting the inner hull that made sure no one entered or left officer’s country or the engineering deck where the manipulator-field controls were locked. You understand, we were going out there to mine antimatter, and nine-tenths of the ship’s complement was going to be cold slumber. It was not the kind of ship where a person could just hop around from deck to deck with no one looking. Only the captain had access to Little Big Brother, and the First Mate if and only if Brother thought the Captain was dead. You going to tell me Captain Grimaldi smuggled some painted trollops aboard and left behind needed crew? Not him. Never. You are talking about men I knew, a ship I served on—well, nearly.”

“But you were not privy to the decisions of the command. Or so the histories say. You were the only man from your nation aboard, and the world still regarded the Norteamericano with suspicion and contempt.”

“Well, shoot, I regards your tall tale here with suspicion and contempt. It don’t hang together. Where’re these women now?”

“They did not survive the voyage.”

“Convenient. Where’re the bodies?”

“Prince Rainier married all three, to remove the women from the use of the crew, and this contributed to the rebellion.”

Menelaus stared up at the roof of the chamber or, rather, the car. “There is no way the Captain Grimaldi I knew would have turned polygamous—his people had no love for the Jihadi, and keeping spare wives around was their knack, not a Monegasque thing at all. Speaking of which, the crew was one-third Indosphere, one-third Hispanosphere, and one-third were odds and ends, mostly from the Sinosphere—including me, since Oddifornia was Sino back in the day. How many of the expedition survivors were from the Spanish-speaking parts of the world?”

The doctor said stiffly, “These days, it is considered impolite to look into a man’s language loyalties or enthophylum. We do not take in account…”

“So they were all Beaneaters? All the ones who lived?”

“We do not use that kind of language—it is regarded as a matter of insult to…”

“Yeah, well, I damn well regard it as a matter of insult to tell a lie. In my day, your primary loyalty was to whoever talked like you. Not to your Church, like in the days of the Jihad, and not to your King, like in the First Dark Ages, not to your race, like in the Second—in my day, the lines were drawn between Anglosphere, Gallosphere, Hispanosphere, Sinosphere, and so on. Del Azarchel was Spanish. He would not have killed Argentine women. It never happened. There weren’t no women.”

The doctor regarded him with narrowed eyes. “Your suspicions have no ground.”

“Oh, I think the grounds are in what you said about the space battle. Sounds as if the Hermeticists outsmarted their opponents. Like a man outsmarting a monkey. And this girl just talked everyone into surrendering, did she? And the crew—by any chance, did they do any reconfiguring on the ship’s electronic brain while they were at V 886 Centauri? Never mind. You wouldn’t know the answer to that, would you? Anyhow, they are still outsmarting you.”

“In what regard?”

“You want to know how to sniff out a lie? Lies are told with a particular audience in the sites, see? If you understand the audience, you understand the lie. Your little story about three crewmen being too dishonored to be willing to admit they flunked out of the space expedition—you believe it, because that is the way you’d act, the way your generation expects people to act. I haven’t seen more than a glimpse of y’all in this time, but you are a military culture, and militant cultures have a cult of honor. Always have. People of my day did not act that way. We were a free-market culture. A guy who flunked out of Space Camp would have done pixies, maybe wrote a book, walked the lecture circuit. Because we cared about money, not honor so much, on account of the world was in a depression, and every penny counted. See what I mean? Time changes people, don’t it? That’s one reason why lies do not last.”

The doctor said, “Paranoia symptoms are the type of self-reinforcing neural-path behavior I regard as an bad sign: We do not want to see a collapse into your previous halt state.”

Menelaus leaned back in his chair, stuck his thumbs in his sash, and spread his legs in a comfortable slouch. “And is common sense a bad sign?”

“Then where did Princess Rania come from?” the doctor retorted. “You can see she looks like her father. Blood samples match. Her gene-print can open a legacy lock left by him in a Swiss Bank, for any heirs of his body born after him: this was one of the things done early on to confirm her right to the throne of Monaco.”

“Who nursed the baby, back aboard ship? We weren’t carrying no baby milk in bottles. We…” And then Menelaus got a strange, distant look in his eye, and he straightened up suddenly out of his slouch. “Of course, we did have biosuspension coffins. Equipped with molecular mechanisms to restore and replenish decayed cells … and matrices of formalized molecules, all lined up nice and pretty, the way they never do in nature, waiting for microscopic electron-commands to tell them what patterns to make. And the code for a milk gland is right there in anyone’s DNA: males have an X chromosome, after all, and all you need is two XX’s to persuade the molecular machinery to start making female cells. And a damnified totipotent cell can damn near turn into damn near anything—people been doing it since before I was born. All you would need is the right code. The right expression. Doc, you got a piece of paper? I wanna see how many transformation steps it would take, using a simple Pell Expression, to get from a flat array of molecules via the minimum number of knots to a complex spline formation. Because one of the theories we discussed for the Gamma Grouping of Monument signs was that it was a spline expression for a complex surface, and that this was a generalized model for a brain. Any brain, not just a human brain, seeing as how the spline function could simply be mapped onto other nervous systems—or whatever information system the little green men had instead of brains…”

“I don’t have a piece of paper, and I hardly think this is the time for you to be … you are about to meet with the Special Executive of the Concordat … and I am concerned that any thoughts along your habituated … Mister Montrose! What are you doing!” His voice rose to a sudden shriek of surprise.

Montrose had taken a glass vase from the decorative shelf, thrown the flowers and water over his shoulder, studied the geometry to determine possible stress weaknesses, and shattered the thing on the marble chessboard.

Now he had a sharp fragment of glass in his hand. With it, he was carving little Greek letters into the arm of his chair, which was varnished wood, so that the slightest scar showed up very nicely. He spoke without looking up from his figures. “What kind of barbaric society does not have paper around for back-of-the-envelope calculations? Lincoln never would’ve wrote the Gettysburg Address if it weren’t for scrap paper.”

The doctor looked annoyed. “It was very much against my professional advice that you were wakened under uncontrolled conditions in a high-stimulation environment, especially since we have yet to confirm if the damage done to your nervous system is mitigated. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Fifteen or so,” he said, still not looking up. Both chair arms were now covered, so he lurched to his feet, and plopped down into another chair. “I ain’t got room. Hey—what kind of surface does that chessboard have?”

“Do you remember who you are?”

He answered absentmindedly. “Menelaus Illation Montrose, J.D. and Ph.D., graduated Soko University in Nip Frisco, Class of ’34, before that, commissioned in ’25 as Lance-Corporal in the United State Imperial Calvary, the Tough-Ruttin’ Thirty-Fifth, decommissioned thank God, and after that, Monumentician and Semantic Logosymbolic Specialist, Joint Indosphere-Hispanosphere Scientific Xenothropological Expedition to Centauri V 866. Does that sound like I know who I am?”

“What race are you?”

“I am trying to work here.”

“Please answer, Mister Montrose.”

“Doctor. Purebred Tex-Mex. What’ya think?”

“No, I mean, do you know what species you are? Do I look like a member of your own species to you, at the moment?”

This made him look up. “What the hell kind of question is that? My what?”

“Are we both human?”

Montrose let out a laugh. “Rut me with a harpoon! You kidding? You ain’t kidding. What, is you aiming to rip off your mask and turn out to be a monster bug from Arcturus or something? Big clustery eyes and dripping sideways mouth and all? Damnation, go ahead! Let me see it. I dare ya! Do we have starships to Arcturus as yet?”

“There is but one manned starship, and she keeps the peace of Earth and cannot depart.”

“We’ll see about that one.”

“Extend your hands to either side, and, while closing your eyes, touch your nose. Quickly, please.”

“I will be damned if I will. You ain’t answering my queries, Doc.”

“Hm. Insubordination is not a mental disorder, I suppose, but it is not exactly a healthy sign, either.”

“I’ll show you a healthy sign.” He pointed at the chessboard. The surface was marble, and hence immune to his knifepoint, but the back was a thin layer of cork, and he had inscribed it with precise rows of little marks. “That’s where she was born.”

“Who?”

“Your Princess. I could have done it with the material in four coffins, and one dead body, of course, provided the flesh was burnt, because the carbon molecules were what the paramagnetic fields of the antimatter manipulators were designed to use. They can work on terrene matter just as easily. And the coffins were stuffed with nanomachinery. They were already like a womb for people like me to sleep in. And Grimaldi was nice and burnt to death, so he could serve as the raw material.”

Montrose grinned his skull-like gargoylean grin, which seemed to startle the poor doctor more than it should have. He continued: “Your Princess is like a digger wasp: an egg laid inside a corpse, except the artificial placenta used molecular mechanisms stripped out of the ship’s recyclers, which I hear weren’t much working so well no-how, to convert the material to nutriments. All you would need is the code. No one on Earth could solve that expression. But if you had the math, you could do it. Very sly. This is a damn fine piece of work. Brilliant. Poxing brilliant. But why? Why make another human being, if you were so low on supplies? And why make a little baby girl? And—Oh, sweet Jesus up a tree! He’s not going to marry her, is he? That is practically incest!”

“I do not understand what you mean. It would be incest only if Prince Rainier married his daughter, and he died shortly after she was born.”

“Shortly before, you should say. I mean this here is the Princess’s mother, and it came out of Blackie’s head.”

“But—that is a chessboard. You found it here in the coach, a few moments ago. It is an inanimate object.”

“No, jackass, I mean the expression! This is how she was born! You recognize a Diophantine Equation, don’t you?”

“I, ah, am not as familiar with that particular, um…”

“They taught you about Fermat’s Last Theorem in school, right? This here is a special case of that theorem and so has no solutions for numbers less than or equal to three. Now, Hilbert posed the problem of defining an algorithm for finding out if an arbitrary Diophantine equation has a solution. For first-order equations, answer is yes. Matiyasevich proved no general solution was possible. Not in human math, anyway. This expression represents a closed spline ball. Basically, it is a line drawn through a permutation of the vertices of an icosahedron: in this case the line represents the growth relation between totipotent cells in a blastula and a developed nervous system. It cannot be solved because the number of Bezier curves would have to equal the number of nerve cells, and the vertices change for each nerve state: there are not enough computers on Earth to get the raw calculating power to do it. But suppose someone else had done it for you. But now suppose you had solved a high-order solution for the Diophantine Equation defining the underlying icosahedron giving rise to this expression here.”

“I warn you, Mister Montrose, I have had the privilege of working with the Princess on your case for nine years now, and I will not have my work ruined, ruined, I say, because you are so uncooperative! If you do not care about your brain operations, I do! Do you know how much delicate molecular engineering went into just the path redaction? It’s a fragile and subtle piece of work—how dare you endanger it! My masterpiece! Her masterpiece! I don’t like these dopamine levels!”

Montrose took all the lines running from the doctor’s bag to points on his own body in one fist and yanked them out, ignoring the pain where needleheads pried free. “Well, it is my own damn brain. I got a right to it.”

“You don’t! Stop thinking so hard! We cannot build you another!”

Montrose laughed aloud. “Well, Blackie’s gotten pretty close to growing a second brain. He has got a working model, self-aware, able to talk like a man and everything.…”

The doctor snorted. “Impossible. Nobilissimus Del Azarchel himself spearheaded the effort to render research into artificial intelligence illegal. The scientific union declares the problem insolvable, and the Church condemns the creation of self-aware beings unable seek salvation to be an abomination. It is a slander for you to imply the Nobilissimus to be involved in such efforts.…”

“Boy, are you in the dark! I’ve just come from working on it.”

“Nonsense! I am the chief of the personal physician staff of the Nobilissimus—a member of the inner circle. I would know.”

“Yeah, well, I am his drinking buddy, and I carried him back to barracks on my back while he puked in my ear, so I see your inner circle and raise you.”

The doctor sat back, scowling. He regained his composure enough to muster a shrug. “The Princess says the development of artificial minds is both inevitable and beneficial, and this may be one reason why the Nobilissimus keeps her out of the public eye for decades at a time.…”

“He said she suffered from something called Earthsickness, and had to go into biosuspension?”

“We in the inner circle know the Nobilissimus both loves and fears her.”

“Wait. This magic Princess of yours, the one who wrote your Constitution and unified the planet. Are you saying she was the one who fixed my nerve damage? What is she, some sort of Jack of Trades, a female Tom Jefferson? A Renaissance Man Lady? Because if she is—I, hey, I … Doc! I think I dreamed about her when she was small…”

Montrose was so surprised that he dropped the chessboard.

“… When she was a little girl. I think I saw her on the ship. But how could I? I was in a coffin the whole time!”

Then he yowled in pain, because the heavy chessboard struck his foot. The doctor insisted on giving him a second medical scan, and no other discussion was allowed after that.

3. The Decorated Hall

In theory, if the tunnel followed a Brachistochrone curve, then any spot on the globe could have been reached in forty-two minutes, traveling the whole way in freefall straight through the core. Practically, Montrose was pretty sure the tunnels did not go that deep, and the trains did not travel so fast. They had not been in freefall: the wineglasses in the wall cabinet had not even rattled. At a guess, he estimated a magnetic levitation train passing through an evacuated tunnel could reach speeds of 5000 miles per hour, topping Mach 6.

This meant that when the carriage stopped and the door hissed open, and he stepped down a short corridor into the atrium of the Presence Chamber, he was sure he was nowhere near Florida: He could be anywhere from Alaska to Argentina, from Iceland to Europe to North Africa, or some island anywhere between Catalina to the Caribbean to Corsica. He did not even know which hemisphere he was in.

The doctor would not step out of the rail car when it finally came to a silent halt.

Montrose decided that he hated the buried railway system of the Twenty-Fourth Century. He wondered about the psychology of people who made superhighspeed trains without windows, and so smooth that there was well-nigh no sensation of motion. So far he had seen nothing like a platform. The experience was one of walking from one room to another, waiting a bit, and walking out.

He had no sense of relative locations. It was like being in a sprawling mansion stretched out over the planet: the whole world was indoors.

So far he had been nowhere but in Del Azarchel’s buried palace, his research campus, and here—and if this small sample was illustrative, that sprawling mansion that stretched over the world had darn few windows. Montrose wondered if everyone in the this century lived far underground, like gnomes.

He walked alone. His footfalls echoed up and down the hallway. The corridor was adorned in a gaudy Old World fashion, with war trophies of flags and shields, busts of Minerva and Mars, beneath a vaulted ceiling of thrones and crowns.

Montrose walked more and more slowly down this corridor, for he was studying the pictures here. Like the chamber he had first woken up in, this was decorated with pictures and portraits of the Space War, and the glorious return of the Hermetic.

Unlike the chamber walls, where he had to guess which pictures went with which events, this seemed laid out like a drama. The images were in chronological order.

Montrose’s footsteps grew slower. There was no image he had not seen before, but this artist had a more realistic style, and some of the images were photographs or stereophotographs rather than pigments.

An image of the Hermetic approaching Earth, her sails spread to catch the light from the orbital braking laser was followed by an image of the ship approaching Jupiter.

Hmm. That struck Montrose as odd. It looked like the great ship had left the deceleration beam before reaching Earth, and deliberately overshot the target. Why Jupiter? Montrose assumed the Captain was performing a gravity-sling, to let the giant planet’s gravity well curve the ship’s freefall into some new vector … no, wait. Not the Captain. Someone else was in charge of the ship during all this.

And where were the warships that had been fighting? Had there not been a space war going on when the great ship returned? Those pictures were next down the corridor: canister-shaped craft lifting off from Earth, bulky with strap-on tanks in the first picture, and open frameworks of missile platforms in the later pictures.

Then the pictures were of fire. This artist had drawn them correctly, as globes of blue-white expanding in zero-gee in all directions, following streams of oxygen issuing from cracked double-hulls.

But Earth vessels were not fighting each other.

One picture he thought was merely a symmetrical image of blazing light. But, no, he realized that it was a picture of the orbital braking laser opening fire on the Hermetic, and the great ship’s sails reflecting the energy back to the source, burning the laser and the crew in a frozen moment the artist had depicted as a field of white in which mere traces of skeletons and latticework from burning machinery could be glimpsed.

Next, occupying both walls of the corridor, was an image of a burnt city under a mushroom cloud. The artist had painted streaks and streams of odd color, green and indigo, issuing like a lighting bolt high in the air. The bolt was wider at the top than at the bottom, which was unlike a detonation or mass-driver strike. There was a tiny silver dot high up in the corner of the image.

Montrose stopped walking.

It was an orbital antimatter bombardment.

The magnetic launch-bottle could accelerate the particle to relativistic velocities, but the explosion, the total conversion, would happen at the outermost fringes of atmosphere, wherever contraterrene met terrene matter. The Hermetic’s mining aura, fired simultaneously, could focus a beam of magnetic influence to drive the resulting particle spray downward rather than in all directions, but it would spread. Only a fraction of the energy would touch the ground.

As a weapon, it was absurdly wasteful. As an act of conspicuous consumption, meant to awe the enemy into surrender, it was not wasteful at all.

Then came other images of cities dying in fire beneath the heavy canopies of mushroom-shaped clouds.

Once when he was young and in the service, Montrose had been kicked by a mule. It was an old beast, and he had been wearing a heavy jacket, so the blow did not kill him, but it sent him to the infirmary with his ribs taped up. The sensation he felt then was like that.

Back when he had first seen these pictures of mushroom clouds on the walls of the bedchamber where he woke, of course he assumed he was looking at a nuclear war. Of course he had not imagined the Hermetic at fault, because she carried no nuclear warheads.

Stupid. Stupid, because he knew enough high-school physics to know what causes clouds of that shape. Heat, not radioactivity. The characteristic mushroom cloud shape was a byproduct of energy expenditure. You would get the same thing above a large-scale meteor strike, or …

The next image showed the Hermetic and the open-framework cylinder-ships from Earth. It looked like the cylinders were making reentry. But no. The Hermetic had accepted the surrender of the crews (a string of suited figures was shown being drawn in the airlock) and was using the empty hulls as drop-energy weapons. A mass of metal that large, made of substances designed not to melt on re-entry, landing in a city, or atop a dam, would release as much kinetic energy as an atom bomb, but without the messy radioactivity.

There had been no war for the Hermetic to stop. Why had he assumed that? Because that was what he wanted to assume, maybe?

There was another portrait of the Princess here. In this one, she was crowned with the wreath of olive leaves, and held a dove on one wrist.

He now knew the meaning of the peace so lovingly portrayed at the end of the corridor. It was what might be called a Caesar’s peace: The peace a conqueror brings to a trampled land once he’s won total victory, and his wrath is sated.

He stared at the painted features of the lovely girl. The face was very similar to the face of Grimaldi, as if the Captain’s features had been redrawn in more delicate lines.

Montrose turned over in his head the Diophantine Equation he expected had been used to create her, the world’s first completely artificial being. Every gene must have been calculated through … this absurdly complex equation, not to mention medical tests and proofs-of-concept, would have had to have been performed before the corpse cooled.

Or beforehand. There was a ghost of a memory in his head. Montrose was sure he had seen the Captain’s dead body, floating in the zero-gee axial chambers of the Hermetic, where the coffins were stored. The body was not burned at that time. The carbonization must have happened after, as part of the preparation process to prepare the body’s mass to act as raw material, to create an artificial womb in one of the body cavities where the girl, Rania, was to be grown.

Which meant there had been no suicide. There had been a mutiny and a murder.

The corridor ended in a semicircular atrium paved in shining lapis lazuli beneath a slanted ceiling of polished onyx set with stars, images of Olympian gods, coats of arms, lozenges, and tablatures. Along the walls were suits of armor from the past and suits of space-armor from the present, as well as pikes and swords and daggers hung up in patterns like steel flowers.

He heard voices up ahead, speaking softly, but that was all. No one was near him, no one was watching. He turned. The door at the far end of the corridor was shut, presumably because the railcar beyond was gone. Montrose did not know by what control or signal another could be summoned. There had been no control, no strip of sensitive material near the door: To him, that door was firmly locked.

The weapons were not nailed so firmly to the wall. The largest dirk he could find, he tucked through two ring-clips on his back-harness, where the long scholar’s hood (hanging down his back like a miniature triangular cape) would cover it. He left behind one of the purely ceremonial oxygen tubes to make room.

4. The Undecorated Hall

Beyond, grim and dark, was a flattened dome held up by metallic ribs, an architecture as ungainly as the underside of an umbrella, as massive as the tomb of a pharaoh. It sharply contrasted with the splendor of the atrium outside.

This presence chamber of the Hermeticists, if it truly was the throne room and headquarters of the masters of the human race, was impressive in its Spartan simplicity: The chamber here was unadorned, utilitarian, severe. Beneath the flattened dome, a single table circled the room, with cushioned chairs on steel frames facing inward. The table was a hollow zero, surrounding a round central floor paved with high-quality library cloth. Eight large screens hung from articulated swivel-arms overhead. At the moment the screens were tuned to a luminous setting, and bathed the area in an aquamarine light. The walls and overheads were gray slabs.

There was only one ornament in the chamber: in an alcove to one side stood a life-sized iron statue of a Great Ape. There was a plaque at the statue’s feet, but illegible in the dimness. The statue was lit by a lonely spotlight set in the alcove roof directly above it, so that the brow ridge and jowls of the simian were cast into dark relief. The artist had emphasized the massive and sloped shoulders, the protruding belly, the crooked legs to the point of exaggeration: or perhaps the sculptor had never seen a living specimen. Come to think of it, unless one of the men in this room had made it, the sculptor certainly had not, since the species went extinct only a few years before Menelaus had been born.

No other decorations or amenities. Not even a carpet. That was it.

Menelaus did not see spittoons or ashtrays, and the pitchers and tumblers before each chair seemed to hold nothing but water. Apparently these new rulers of the world did not indulge in any drinking or smoking to soften their moods when they met, which Menelaus knew to be a big mistake. The Congress of the United States, back before the Disunion, always met sober, and look at what had come of that.

The other thing which struck him as odd was the lack of servants. There were no secretaries arranging papers, no computermen organizing data presentations. But the rulers of the world—if that is what they were—apparently set out their own papers and poured their own water pitchers, because several gray-haired men in black silk shipsuits were doing just that when Montrose entered the chamber.

Menelaus counted in his lightning-quick fashion, at a glance. There were seventy men in the chamber. No Princess. The girl was not there. Menelaus thought he should not feel so foolishly disappointed—he had more important things to fret him. He should have listened to his instincts, and known that any man, even a man as smart and bold as Blackie, who drinks of absolute power, gets drunk as hell. It mutates how he thinks, how he sees things. Blowing a whole city of innocent souls to Purgatory was merely a day’s labor, a matter for quiet pride of workmanship, or was merely the winning score in a game, a matter for cheers and toasts.

Foolish or not, he was still disappointed.

He noticed each man here was wearing a heavy armband of red metal, that same metal Montrose was sure had come from the machine shop aboard the Hermetic. From the way three or four of the men had inflammation and swelling on their wrists and forearms, Montrose realized these armbands were bioprosthetics: from the way the skin was pinched, he deduced that there must be more than one large intravenous needle or nerve-jack reaching from the inside of the armband into the inside of the arm.

The thick red bracelets could be medical appliances. The Hermeticists did not look like a healthy group.

There were three ancient figures near Montrose who turned and ambled toward him with a nightmarish slowness.

For one moment, they looked like crooked old men, murderers, mutineers, perpetrators of war crimes, and strangers. Then, suddenly, even though nothing changed, in the next moment, they were crewmen he had trained with, old drinking buddies, old friends.

Yes, he knew them.

The first was lean and lean-cheeked Narcís D’Aragó, thin as a rail and straight as a rapier, his hair little more than a hint of gray scruff above his ears. A saber with an insulated hilt, probably an electrified weapon, hung in a scabbard at his side. He still walked with a military posture, but he was a skeleton of his former self.

Next to him was Melchor de Ulloa, rheumy-eyed, with a wild thatch of white hair jutting from his skull in every direction. His spine was crooked, footsteps uncertain, the fingers of his blue-veined hands twitched and trembled. Melchor de Ulloa, who had been such a figure of romance among the ladies, now displayed his good looks lost beneath a wrinkled mask. He wore a medallion at his neck from some cult Montrose did not recognize: a circle inscribing what might have been a three-legged lambda, or else a chicken’s foot.

With them was Sarmento i Illa d’Or. The muscular, slablike body Menelaus remembered had all turned to doughy fat, his mouth surrounded by a tiny fringe of beard and moustache, white as snow.

In Space Camp, and aboard the satellite before boarding the Hermetic, these men, together with Del Azarchel, had formed the younger clique among the mathematicians of the expedition. They had been about Montrose’s age: the child prodigies. The young bloods. To see them now, wrinkled and thin or else stooped with years or sagging with fat, old as grandfathers, was quite a shock.

The final man of the clique had not come forward because he was parked near the huge table. Father Reyes y Pastor, like Del Azarchel, was wheelchair-bound. He was a splash of red in the dark room of dark-garbed men, for he wore his Cardinal’s robes, a ferraiuolo (a formal priest’s cloak), and biretta (a cap looking like a folded candy box with a puff atop it). Perhaps he took his uniform as a star-voyager and world-ruler to be less significant than his uniform as a Churchman. Or perhaps not, since the thick red amulet of the Hermeticists weighed on his wrist. Father Reyes y Pastor looked like a withered mummy, propped up in a wheelchair too big for him.

Montrose thought these three ancient figures were coming forward to greet him, but no. Melchor de Ulloa ignored Menelaus Montrose as if the other were a wax dummy, and spoke to Sarmento i Illa d’Or: “Glad this one’s finally here. A basic strategy of approach to the problem of forced evolution we’ve agreed beforehand, but the tactics will depend on what Crewman Fifty-One can tell us of the message details.”

With this, he reached out, and, as if Menelaus were a small child, took his hand and pulled on it, turning as if he expected Menelaus to follow him docilely.

Meanwhile Narcís D’Aragó stepped past Montrose and inspected a panel of read-outs bolted to the doorframe. “Scan shows no tattletales. We are secure.”

Menelaus yanked his hand out of de Ulloa’s grip. “What the pox?”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or was staring at Montrose, and his large, dark eyes in his baby-round face were cold and piercing. “We are not secure. This is the other one, isn’t it?”

Melchor de Ulloa now started and turned to look at Montrose as if Montrose had just materialized out of invisibility. “Learned Montrose! Is that really you?”

Montrose turned to Sarmento i Illa d’Or. “The other one what?”

Melchor de Ulloa gave an uneasy laugh. “Come, is this any way to greet old friends from old centuries? Good afternoon, Learned Montrose!”

Montrose spoke without turning his head. “G’daftanoon, gents—” His eyes never left Sarmento. “—the other one what?”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or uttered a noise like a dog’s bark, which may have been a sardonic laugh. “The one who does not bite fingers.”

Melchor de Ulloa stepped between the two, taking up Montrose’s hand once more, but this time to give it a vigorous shaking. He spoke slightly too loudly. “We have always felt you were something like our good luck charm, Learned Montrose. Agreed, you were in slumber during the days of tedium and terror, but the thought of you, ageless, in the coffin of your own devising—a martyr to science, no? The bravest of all of us, willing to risk everything!”

“Learned? What’s wrong with doctor? We all have doctorates.”

“It is an earthly title, fit only to represent earthly knowledge,” said Melchor de Ulloa, still shaking hands vigorously.

Montrose gripped the other man’s hand tightly, to stop it from moving. He tapped the heavy metal armlet with a fingernail. “What is this? A medical appliance? When did it become part of the uniform?” He felt the substance: not ordinary metal.

Melchor de Ulloa looked startled. “I would have thought Del Azarchel would have explained it by now! We have one prepared for you, of course, but—you are so young. What need have you to hide your years?”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or stepped forward, belly first, huge and black as a thundercloud in his silks, and Melchor de Ulloa moved aside for the big man. “Tell him nothing yet. I am not convinced of his fealty.”

From where he was seated several yards away, the priest, Reyes y Pastor, spoke up, pitching his voice to carry. “Learned Montrose has always been unstable. Why should today be unlike any other day? Besides, the decision rests with our Master of Arms, Learned D’Aragó.”

That was Narcís D’Aragó, who had been Master of Arms during the expedition as well. The thin, bald old soldier stepped forward, glaring. “With no ability to predict how the memory membrane operates across different intellectual topographies, we cannot say whether he knows more about us than we do. But I see no risk nonetheless. Is anything gained by continuing the masquerade inside? Is Montrose not a member? We have to show him sometime. Can we call the Conclave to order, so I can secure the hatch?”

The question was evidently directed toward Reyes y Pastor. “Not yet. The Senior member of the Landing Party is not arrived. But will you clear the Learned Montrose? Learned Del Azarchel has vouched for him in a private communication to me. Should we hold a formal vote, Learned i Illa d’Or?

Sarmento i Illa d’Or scowled so that his jowls bunched with displeasure. “Phaugh! I withdraw my objection!”

Montrose said, “What’s going on here?”

Reyes y Pastor raised both hands, touched his red armband, and worked some unseen control. The others in the chamber all copied the gesture, solemnly, all arms moving in unison, like a salute.

Reyes y Pastor answered him, “We meet in the Conclave to establish the destiny of the human race. We have the tools to shape the evolution of Mankind into higher forms: and since the Hyades will send emissaries to bind our remote descendants, we now have the necessity. And do not doubt we have the power. There are many mysteries our order learned in the deep of outer space we thought not fit to share with the base stock of Man.”

As he spoke, his voice changed, growing deeper and stronger. By the time he had done speaking, Reyes y Pastor had stood from his wheelchair on legs now perfectly whole. Dark color flushed through his hair. His skin was red, and his veins were visible, pulsing, and when the odd blush passed, his flesh was young, unwrinkled, without liver spots, moles, or marks. Age fell from him like a dropped cloak. His flesh was now plump and pink; a mummy no longer, he rose to his feet, kicking aside, as a discarded prop, his wheelchair.

A young man, hale and healthy, stood before him, blazing with virility. Only his eyes were uncannily old—old with the cruel wisdom of many years.

The sloppy flab of Sarmento i Illa d’Or flowed or crawled under his skin, changing and thickening into muscle tissue. The plump, old pear-shaped man was now a young Hercules with a bull-like neck, an immense, wide chest, shoulders that could bear mountains.

Montrose looked around the chamber. All the men were on their feet. Some of them endured the transformation as stoically as Reyes y Pastor: others where hissing, wincing, and wheezing, and their skins were swollen and flushed as if in some painful ecstasy. One man—it looked like a scarecrow version of Dr. Coronimas, the ship’s Magnetohydrodynamicist and Engineer’s Mate—was rolling on the floor, and those near him looked down with cool and impatient eyes. But even Coronimas climbed to his feet, smiling and youthful.

In less than a minute all stood there, their hair suddenly dark, arrogance fresh as early springtide shining on their faces, but wintry old age still in their eyes.

At that moment came footsteps from beyond the portal. Del Azarchel, dark, young, and handsome as a devil strode into the chamber. “All here? Good. Let’s get started.”

Narcís D’Aragó stepped behind Del Azarchel and touched his bracelet to a control-strip of sensitive material near the door. The immense steel values swung slowly shut on mechanical pistons, and fell to, clanging like an iron coffin lid.

The hue of the lights from the overhead screens became brighter, more yellowy. “Senior, Learned fellows, the hatch is shut.”

Montrose looked behind him. He was trapped in here with the mutineers.