With those words she turned again, and somehow her warm, supple, satin-clad body was in his arms, pressed up against his buckskin-clad chest.
“Oh, hell! Princess, I am yours to command!”
“Then take your medicine,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Marry me. We will depart the Earth, and return in the Hermetic to the Diamond Star, leaving this unhappy world to its fate.”
Montrose listened, rapt, breathless and unable to speak.
“Over Del Azarchel’s opposition, I have been outfitting, repairing, and restoring my beautiful ship, my world, my home,” said Rania in tones of silver. “I have selected cadets from among the psychoi order to serve aboard her. I am within my rights: The Landing Party cannot bind me to this world, merely because it wishes to conquer, rule, and live here. The future of the human race is at the Diamond Star, and written into the Monument that circles it! Will you obey my orders? I command you to reach with me for the stars!”
“Uh-h … Did you say marry?”
5. The Arrest
Her expression did not change, but her pupils did. He saw the dark part of her eyes expand suddenly, her eyes move left and right so quickly that they seemed to vibrate. At the same time, a blush of red began to spread, delicate as a rose, through her face, cheeks, and neck. He was holding Miss Hyde. At no time did she show surprise or shock on her face, albeit she must have been shocked. Her eyes were focused behind him. They had been overheard.
Montrose spun. There, on his silent, sliding throne of black, was Ximen Del Azarchel, Master of the World, his face (old again, silver-haired, lined and weathered and kingly) in such pain and sorrow that he seemed on the verge of fainting, or of tears. His eyes were hollow.
“You liar!” croaked Del Azarchel in a voice as weak as a mummy’s. “Gusano! You lying worm! You said there was nothing between you! Is this how you repay me!”
There were six Conquistadores with him, dark against the festive lights shining through the open door behind them. Despite their comic-opera costumes, they had the calm, hard look of professional veterans; men who had seen combat, seen friends die, and were willing to see it again.
So when Del Azarchel said in a hoarse voice, “Arrest him! Arrest that traitor!” the soldiers did not hesitate, but brought their pikes to the ready, and came forward at a quickstep, moving to flank him left and right.
Princess Rania stepped in the way, small as a golden doll, blazing with majestic ire. “He is my crewman! Space claims him, and you Earthmen have no authority. Miguel! Raum! Raeul! Do not step forward! Where is your warrant?”
The tall and warlike men hesitated. Perhaps they were shocked she knew their names. Menelaus Montrose drew his ceramic knife with one hand, and with the other picked up the nearest candlestand, which was the heaviest object in reach, and the candles fluttered and blew, so that the shadows swooped and swerved along the walls.
Later, wearing only a transparent pair of plastic overalls, sitting in a cold, white, featureless cube of a jail cell, and not answering any of the questions that spoke to him from the blank wall, Montrose truly and desperately wished he had thrown the knife through Del Azarchel’s damnified skull, and not listened to Rania.
He closed his eyes. He might have been able to hit the target, from that distance, in that light, and the blade might have flown point-first. It wasn’t impossible. It could have happened. The blade would have landed right between Blackie’s cursed eyes, hilt vibrating, and trickles of blood and brain-goo would have slid down over the look of astonishment frozen forever on his damned face.
It wasn’t impossible. Captain Sterling from the Science Patrol superspaceship Emancipation could have done it.
He raised his hand to the pad of sterile gauze taped to his head. The guards on the other side of the door in the armored depthtrain carriage bringing him here (wherever here was) had not acted quickly enough to stop him from dosing himself with the Princess’s version of the neuronanological cocktail. He was not suffering any mania, no disorientation, no delirium. He did not know if that meant it was working, or that it was not. It had not actually put him in agony: she had been joking about that. He wondered what else Rania said had been a joke, and what had been in earnest.
Eventually the jailors shut off the light. He lay in the dark, waiting, wondering if he were getting any smarter. He certainly didn’t feel any smarter.
15
Equality of the Sexes
1. No Particular Effect
The only effect, at first, the intelligence augmentation cocktail seemed to have on him was that he required more sleep. Over the next three days in his jail cell, he slept upward of eighteen hours a day. Dreaming seemed to be a waste of time, and so, on the third night, once he was done with the minor corrections and emotional association image-grafts that formed the basic business of the dream-cycle, he used that part of his mind to set up a little imaginary schoolhouse with a blackboard, so he could write out and examine some of the equations and Monument symbols he was curious about. He could program himself to dream certain things, and solve particular kinds of problems, so that the answers would be clearer when he woke. But Montrose was disappointed: if he was on the threshold of a breakthrough into another and richer state of human intelligence, there did not seem to be any real change. He was still the same cranky bastard as when he fell asleep.
Also while asleep he reviewed certain memories, but instead of the confused mixture of chimerical images that haunted normal sleep, he decided to index these memories both by association and time-value, peg each scene to a particular mnemonic, and play them as a set of perfectly sharp eidetic images.
The books he had read in Del Azarchel’s chalet in Alaska he found dull now that he had time to reread them—Montrose was pleased that he could summon up perfectly detailed pictures even of pages he had been flipping past without reading, and, as if looking at a photograph, read them normally. He found his reading speed increased when he invented (since this was a dream, after all) a cartoon character named Cyrano Widget to do the reading for him, and just give him a summary. Cyrano was human from the face down, but had a clear dome for a skull, in which an electronic brain could be seen winking and sparkling furiously.
Cyrano, sitting in the imaginary schoolhouse, shook its absurd cyborg head, and said, “Boss, Blackie Del Azarchel does not know what he is dealing with here.” Onto the blackboard the cyborg chalked an equation. It was a divarication function, showing the change in prices of various goods, the crime rate, and the frequency of the use of certain emotion-laden terms in the popular media. All this raw information had been in Del Azarchel’s books, but he had never put two and two together.
“Boss, look at these graphs, these tendencies. The cost of railgun components does not go up unless someone is buying and building a filthload of them.”
“What’s it mean?”
“War.”
Montrose looked at the graphs in wonder. “But I thought Blackie had the whole world figured out. He said he had a science, called Cliometry, that could forecast political and economic changes. He can’t see a war coming?”
The cartoon character leaned back on his imaginary school desk. “He sees it coming, and he is trying to avoid it.”
“What’s causing the problem?”
“Two problems. One is political. Lowering the price of travel to zero means that whole populations are within elbow-rubbing distance of each other. There are no national boundaries anymore.”
“Isn’t that good for the economy? Lowers the cost of shipping workers to where the work is, right? Free trade, free movement of goods, all that.”