Her head was poised, unselfconsciously graceful, and a mass of hair, golden and lucent, was pinned up behind her with networks of diamonds like stars. The constellation formed a crescent. It might have been a tiara. Or was she wearing a crown?
The slimness of her neck, the delicate curve of her jaw, and the mass of her hair piled high made her head look larger than it was: an illusion of a childlike figure, or some quaint large-skulled space creature.
In that same second, before he could blink, a silent explosion of light issued from the ball falling down in the illusionary Times Square. Immediately it was greeted with a roar of shouts, the screams and thunders of horns and sirens large and small, the ocean noise of mingled voices cheering.
He blinked, dazzled, and for a moment he could not see her, only a greenish negative image of a slim figure floating in his eyes. He heard, or, rather, felt her move forward.
The whispering hiss of satin should have been far too faint to hear in that uproar. The scent of a perfume (a sharp hint of aldehydes above a heat note of more subtle lavender) should have been indistinguishable in the smog of gunpowder and wine left in the air after so many hours of pyrotechnics and elegant intoxication.
“Happy New Year,” came a soft contralto. As if a dove could laugh, or a woodwind purr. “And welcome to the Twenty-Fifth Century.”
“Which does not begin ’til 2401. A year early, you are.” His own voice seemed hard and harsh in his ears.
“Technically, you are correct, but the error has, by now, among the common people reached such currency, that it would seem supercilious to ignore them.”
He put up his hands to rub his eyes. “If’n a million people can’t count, I can.”
“Ah! The young sir is a mathematician, then?”
“Young? If you call one hundred ninety years old ‘young.’ Best damn mathematician in the damn world, a regular Galois, I am.”
“Second best, perhaps.”
At that point, the explosions of light overhead darkened, and grew steady, and his vision cleared.
Perhaps time stopped; perhaps his heart.
It was she. Of course he knew her from her portrait. It had lived in his mind’s eye, shining, every night as he tried to fall asleep. The voice came as a surprise to him, and her scent, her nearness. He had not known what she would sound like. The library files had been remarkably scarce of recordings of her, almost as if, to increase her mystery, she was being kept away from the public view. To judge from the galaxy of glittering bugs that formed a respectful ring in the air around her, the public was as curious as he was.
He was staring at a face like an angel’s, save that her halo was golden hair with diamond sparks, fulvous beneath a semicircle of diamond studs and silver leaves. It was her eyes, almond-shaped, slightly tilted, fringed with dark lashes, her eyes that magnetized his gaze, lambent gray-blue, the color of a sky in storm, a strange hue he could not recall seeing in other eyes.
But it was not her features that ensorcelled him, or not merely that: her motions were graceful, as if every gesture were a choreographed work of art, a ballet, a pantomime of swans, and yet also as spontaneous as a dove in flight, as a child’s laugh, a sight whose simplicity and beauty pierced the hidden soul. He had spoken perhaps, what, a dozen words to her? Already his heart was roaring in his chest, telling him to live and die at her command.
The muscles clenched around his mouth, and his eyes narrowed. Inwardly, he was telling his heart to shut the hell up.
“Shall we start a new custom?” With a graceful flick of her wrist, she threw her wineglass into the shadowy rosebushes below.
“A perilous custom, throwing scrap blind onto the heads below. And you were talking so nice about heeding the little folk! What if you scratch a brow, or wet a dame’s hair-fixings she slaved a week to fuss into place, heh?”
She smiled, which was music to his eyes. He wished the many-colored dazzle overhead would cease its riot, so that he could see that smile in a clearer light. “I’d pay,” she said, a little sadly. “We live in a day when men have sold their souls, and any hurt to property or propriety can be soothed with coin. It gives the rich a license to act out their basest instincts, and the poor a reason to smile at their bruises and hurts. Have you seen the traffic in Paris? The taximeter carriages will send the low-passengers any tips the high-passengers paid to buy their right-of-ways, and bribe the favorable signals, so a rich man can speed through the boulevards at breakneck pace, while poor students can park their spindly cars in traffic, and let their meters run negative numbers, to earn their book money just by letting wealthier carriages take their place in queue and cut them off, yielding up their right to cross the crossroad.”
“Pshaw!” said Menelaus. “Save your money! And throw a bucket of champagne across the rail, or the whole bar, and, yea, the barkeep too, ’til it’s raining spirits, and old bottles of fine wine shatter and explode like grapeshot. If any jack of them is man enough to storm the balcony, ’tis I’ll who’ll pay them off, not you, and in iron, not in gold, which is truer coin, and one the years do not corrode.”
“You are so bold, Mr. Galois?” She lowered her lashes. He saw how delicate they were and how the long black lashes almost kissed the curve of her pink cheek. “The sovereignty under heaven is gathered into one, and the hellish suffering of this sad world, for once, for this season, has been soothed by the balm of peace. Surely it is perilous to break the peace—The celebrators and celebrities outnumber us by thousands.”
“In a pareto-optimal matrix of their possible moves and my possible responses, I need but render their losses beyond their utility ratio to put all the statistics in my own favor. If’n I’m worth ten of them, then they are not such men as would cheer to see nine die just to beef me. Can you smite them on the cheek and pay into their pocketbook to make them bow? Nope: I am worth eleven of them, or a flat dozen.”
“But if we threw the butlers and the wine onto their heads, it would be assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress, breach of the peace, and perhaps an act of contumely as the legates were drenched: So the law would be with them.” A ghostly smile almost danced about her perfect lips. Was she teasing him?
“I’ll hold them back!” Menelaus declared with wild humor, wishing he were serious. “These four corners here, from the balustrade down aways as far as that big pot of flowers, I can hold them, bottleneck all comers at the corner yonder, past the statue of the naked lass, if you can hold off a rush from the French doors. I’ll fill this little square of marble up with blood, and raise your petticoat to be our flag, and call you empress and queen within this five paces wide, until the great parliaments from Iceland to Japan recognize our claim of independency. Once we are called a sovereign state, we may act as pirates and scoundrels, and all the tribes and nobles of the world will rush to sing the virtues of our doings!”
“What virtue is in bloodshed? My conscience would upbraid me to be the mother of such misery: I would save even the nine men you would slay from the horror of war, if I could, no matter how small the war might be.”
“History always fawns on crooks, if they wear crowns! And we will make our own law, and force the other nations to bow.”
“Nation—there is but one, and she is mine, a Concordat of my own making. You do not think Del Azarchel skilled enough to solve a cliometric calculation involving six billion variables? In any case, you underestimate the warlike character of the dignitary houses, or that of the militia of the freeholds. They are not less valiant than you.”
“They would fail, ma’am, if you were in back of me, for their womenfolk are only ordinary fair, and will not put into them more heart than mortals know, where I will have the devil’s own heart in me, hot as hell from an angel’s face! Come, I will make you queen of this balcony, and I will be your champion and armed forces, and our custom will be to greet the New Year with a kiss.” And he stepped forward.