She raised an eyebrow. “Well, I am flattered by the offer of a spanking, but I am your superior officer, and your sovereign, and higher on the ladder of evolution than you, and I have a fully armed starship, and several armed forces at my command, not to mention I can flick one of my hairpins up your nose. So any horseplay could turn out badly for you. Besides, what would my husband say if you assumed his privileges?”
“Wait? If you are married, how can you be engaged?”
“The marriage was not consummated, and my husband was not in his right wits at the time of the ceremony, which was private, so in the eyes of the law the oath is invalid.”
“Wait! Plague and damnation, girl, are you talking about me? Did I get married to you when I was Mr. Hyde?”
She fluttered her fingers at the ampoule. “Ask him yourself.”
“Pox!”
“Just one quick jab in the head. It should only sting a little. Well, actually, it will cause you blinding, unparalleled agony. Warn me first! So I can leave the room! I don’t want to hear you screaming while you are writhing and flopping on the floor like a fish. I do have medical technicians downstairs, who can strap you into a gurney. Be nicer for you if you took morphine first.”
“Lady, I just met you! I don’t know you from Adam!”
“Adam lacked a belly button. Or so it is said. You can distinguish me from him on that basis. No doubt he was taller than I.”
“I am not sticking your pestilential chemicals into my nice new brain, not after Dr. Kyi just fixed me!”
“He merely assisted. I did most of the work. So it is a little late to express distrust? Oh! And I forgot! That also makes me your physician, so you have to obey my orders. Will you break faith with me?”
“I ain’t taking no orders from some dame half my age!”
“Dame? You have severely demoted me, sirrah! I shall have my master of heralds contact your office in the morning.”
She stamped her little glass-shod foot so that her slipper rang like a bell on the floor, and she looked so regal and so wrathful that for a half-second Montrose thought he had really offended her. But then she burst out laughing in a most unladylike fashion (although she did hide her mouth behind her slender silk-gloved hand as she hiccupped her way through a giggle fit) so that Montrose stood there, unable to decide whether to be angry or confused or to join in.
His expression must have been uproarious to her, because the peals of laughter lasted a long moment. Her face was blushing a pretty rose-pink from the hilarity, and her skin was so delicate, that the blush of laughter went all the way down her throat, to her shoulders and down past her collarbone.
It was a regular Texas sort of laugh. He decided he liked it.
“Ma’am, don’t get me wrong. You’re the cutest little button on God’s green Earth, and smart as a whip, and I like your sass, and may Jesus beat me with a two-by-four with a honking big nail in it if’n I am telling a lie—but you also must be a little crazy. You think I am going to stick myself with some needle? And what hold you think you got on me? Why do you call it breaking faith?”
“Is my sass showing? I must certainly speak harshly to my seamstress.”
He tried not to laugh, but he shook his head. “Rania, Rania,” (how he loved saying that name!) “What are you thinking? What hold can you claim on me?”
Now she was sober. (But still pretty and pinkish around the edges.) “None,” she said, drawing a shaking breath, and shaking her head. “It is the Monument that holds you. It holds me as well.”
“Your own personal dragon. What’s that mean?”
“Have you understood nothing? And I thought you were a genius.”
“An unlikely stupid genius, I’d say. Didn’t no one tell you how I done stuck a needle in my head-bone?”
“The Monument is my dragon for all the reasons we have said. I was born from it—you have by now deduced that.”
It was a statement, not a question. He said, “Not hard to deduce. There weren’t women on the ship. But when did you figure it out?”
“You ask, in other words, when did I deduce that everything said by the beloved fathers who raised me was a lie, and that the picture of my beautiful mother, the picture I held when I cried myself to sleep in my cocoon on C-Deck, was a fake? I was old enough to dissemble my reaction, but too young to be forgiving.”
“How much of you is—homo sapiens? They used some real human DNA as a start.”
“Ranier Grimaldi was my matrix. He is my mother, so to speak; I have had gene scans. I have his chin, his eyes, his love of truth. As for the rest of me, I am a chimera, an ugly ducking. Who can say what I will grow into? Someone else acted as my Doctor Frankenstein, my designer, and established my basic looks.”
“Del Azarchel? He likes blondes?”
That made her smile. She curled a finger around a lock of her hair. “No, I like blondes. I had the hue adjusted by RNA spoofing. If wolves and rabbits change their hairs for their seasons, to match their backgrounds, I may do the same for the social season, which is my surrounding. Do you like my eye color? I jinxed it to match my gown.”
“Gah. My mom would not approve. She always said you had to stay as God made you.”
“There is much wisdom in the notion, and much vanity would be foresworn if it were followed—but the conceit cannot apply to me. The Hermeticists are less than omniscient, even if I had good cause to follow their wishes.”
Menelaus said nothing. He could think of a good cause why she should stop following their wishes, but he was reluctant to speak.
Her face was dreamlike, distant, melancholy. She said softly, “Am I human? Sometimes, when I feel rain of April upon my face, or see the children playing chase, or wonder at the Arc de Triomphe or St. Paul’s Cathedral, my heart expands with emotions I know all my fellow humans feel. I cry at funerals and dance at weddings. Whatever was added to me did not subtract from that. Sometimes, when I see the cruelties and stupidities of the race, I doubt my humanity, and would gladly leave them all behind.”
She turned toward him, looking up into his eyes. She continued: “But we all feel this way, at times, do we not? I am haunted by the doubts that haunt all young women, who wonder if any understand the great unexpressed truths they know. They wonder where the rainbow lands; they wonder if the air of spring was newly-made for them alone.”
Her eyes were lovely, but he turned his gaze toward the floor. “You owe them nothing! They murdered your father.” His reluctance to tell her why she should stop following their wishes had lasted, after all, only a moment.
“They also gave me life, the Hermeticists, and raised and cherished me. They sacrificed rations to feed me, and went hungry for me. So the matter is complex. I cannot in good conscience act against them. But I can serve a purpose higher than theirs.”
He raised his eyes. “What purpose?”
“I am born a messenger. Like you, I am a living emulation of a universal virtual machine, constructed following Monument logic-gates, and meant both to serve as a computing substrate and as a translating mechanism: I was born to read that Monument. I have no other purpose, really. And—can you understand this pain of mine?”
“What pain, Princess?”
“The Hermeticists did not translate something right, or a code was transposed, or the human frame is too small to hold what I should be. I am not suited to my purpose in life. The key does not fit the lock.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I can’t read it.” She put her white-silk-gloved hand out toward the writing on the walls, toward the mirror. The mirror flickered, and displayed the concentric circles and angles and lines of alien hieroglyphs, a labyrinth of signs within signs. “I am broken. I was put together wrong.”
And all of a sudden, she was sobbing and he was holding her in his arms, patting her awkwardly, and saying, “There, there.”