She sighed and looked sadly at the clouds.
“Cure me, my scarecrow. Drive away the dark wings that beset me, I pray you. I am so tired of not being smart enough. I am weary of my own stupidity.”
He could not think of anything to say to that odd comment, so he turned and closed his arms and kissed her.
16
The Concubine Vector
1. Ceremony
A.D. 2401
Menelaus and Rania were married in June of 2401 in the Iglesia de San Francisco, the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Quito, nine thousand feet above sea level and fifteen miles south of the Equator. His Holiness, Pope Innocent XXIV, himself, performed the wedding Mass.
In the silent sky, the blazing star of the secondary drive of the newly re-outfitted Hermetic hung in the blue between the white clouds, above the doves, above the tile-roofed houses, above antique Spanish palaces, above the churches inlaid with Inca gold, and it was a light visible even by day.
The primary drive was a total conversion ion-reaction, and would not be lit while the vehicle was near Earth, for fear that contraterrene carbon particles might escape unconsumed from the magnetic drive core, and if entering the upper atmosphere, would annihilate an equal mass of terrene matter and release gamma radiation and exotic particles. It was not a reasonable fear: normal cosmic ray bombardments were more dangerous, but Rania, as ever, was deferential to the opinion of the common man.
While churchbells pealed, the bride and groom rushed down the carpeted steps into the flower-strewn plaza, half-blinded by thrown cherry blossom petals, she as lightly as a deer, he in his lurching, long-legged lope.
Two lines of dismounted cavalrymen in the magnificent livery of the Swiss Guard (costumes so beautiful legend incorrectly, but understandably, attributed the design to Michelangelo) crossed their pikes, adorned with garlands, high overhead, forming a tunnel of blades down which the couple fled. More Swiss Guard were mounted, their steeds adorned with gold and scarlet, and the line of horses kept the grassy lane before the cathedral clear of people, an avenue of escape. These were harsh-faced, keen-eyed young men, and the last four centuries of organized crime and disorganized brigandage surrounding Rome spread the fame of their hardiness. Pikes of modern materials but ancient design were in hands, and weapons more modern were holstered at hip: batons able to administer lethal shocks, or aiming lasers to call down fire from lightweight sniper platforms on rooftops or hanging invisibly in heaven on wings of gauzy blue.
The bridal veil was yards upon yards of white satin, trimmed with diamond studs and sparkling sapphires, held by a score of young queens who, in this age of the world, were as slim and lovely as the craft of genetic engineering could make them.
Montrose and Rania had released to the public the secrets of the Hermetic second-youth procedure. At the moment, only the wealthiest and most powerful of the elite could afford the painstaking cell-by-cell alteration: but as if overnight, the rich and mighty were also the young and dazzling.
Montrose hated the trend he could already see forming, but he could see no way around it. The human brain reacts to physical beauty on a preverbal level—it is instantly easier to trust and like handsome features, and remarkably easy to adore and follow. A gulf between ugly commoners and alluring aristocracy in prior ages had been a matter for clothing and ornament: hereafter it would be woven into gene and blood, flesh and bone.
As Rania ran, some hidden signal in the threads was triggered, the long satin train fell away, divided itself neatly into streamers of cloth. The twenty queens now raised their gloved arms, to beckon these streamers upward. Up the fabric flew, high overhead, to the delight of the cheering crowds, and diamonds rained down on them.
Menelaus, grim-faced with happiness, his pale eyes blazing at the adoring crowds, galloping on his long rangy legs, had drawn the ceremonial saber he wore with the absurd uniform. No doubt he would have thrust aside (or thrust into) any unwary well-wishers who dared impede his path away from the celebration and toward his hotly-awaited marriage bed: but the servants of Rania, both uniformed in scarlet and gold or hidden in the crowd, kept the singing mob in check.
The kiss Menelaus and Rania had exchanged before the Pope still burned on his lips: the strange, acrid scent of the high mountain grasses that grew along the lanes for ground-effect vehicles was in his nostrils, and whirled his thoughts like wine.
“You should not have made your legs longer,” he growled. There had been no time for last-minute alterations for the wedding dress, despite the number of seamstresses and fabric-programmers on her staff, so Rania had suffered an overnight modification, to trigger an artificial youth-cycle in her cells, and suffer a growth-spurt to add the needed inches to her height. She now had the coltish legs of an adolescent, a more willowy silhouette.
Menelaus had solved Rania’s neural divarication problem, and she had not been willing to wait, either to put off the wedding for the medical process, or to put off the medical process for the wedding. Since her preset RNA-spoofing black cells in her bloodstream were already programmed to make a universal and rapid change, it was nothing to tweak totipotent cells into her leg bones and muscles. She spent the night before the wedding in a biosuspension coffin, with seven quarts of nanomachinery moving through her body, while Menelaus struggled with the fear that she would wake up as someone different.
So far, she seemed to be normal.
“We discussed this,” she said, eyes elfin, mouth impish, “during our spat. Our first lovers’ quarrel! You lost.”
He hated the fact that the top of her head no longer fit nicely under his chin when they hugged. Now the crown of her head was at the level of his lower lip, and it bothered him more than it should have: it reminded him of the time he found out when he was four years old that pi could not be resolved to any rational number. It seemed obscurely unnatural, as if someone had made a mistake when putting the universe together.
“I’ll be made of sterner stuff when we reach the bridal bower, my fair rebel. Bad enough womenfolk can’t decide what to wear; what damn fool gave them the science to fashion up their flesh and bone, tissue and face?”
“Why! The recent breakthroughs in biotechnology are due, my beloved, to someone’s policy of total honesty to the public. We cannot blame the Hermeticists—they did not invent the system. Someone else performed a mathematical analysis of combination-solutions in genes, a notation system he read off the Monument back when he was insane. Who is to blame, then?”
“What? Next you’ll say the apeman who invented fire is to stand trial for every act of arson since the Stone Age.”
“Hush, for there are sure to be press and spy-bees near the bridal car.”
When they came to the end of the carpet, the flower-festooned electric car was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was Yorvel, looking plump and ridiculous in the gold-purple-scarlet livery of the Pope’s Swiss Guard, pole-arm held gingerly in one hand, bridle held firmly in the other. He was trying to restrain a nervous, stamping steed, a red horse the hue of blood.
Rania said in a voice of limpid surprise, “But where is our car?”
Menelaus petted the nose of the huge horse, who gently nuzzled him, sniffing with large, delicate nostrils the gold and ebony costume, the wide lace collar, wherein bridegrooms of this era and rank were clad. “What? The Pope arrives with forty-nine white horses and one red charger that I’ve owned for a year now, and you don’t recognize him?” He petted the long nose carefully. “There, my hayburning poop-factory. What does she know? She didn’t mean it. Born in a tin can in space, she was. No, no, don’t be wroth. Now, upsy daisy.”