“Like the wife wants to hug a squid when she gets back! Hang up the picture.” And he passed the picture in his hand to the waiting squad of workmen, who grunted under the weight. With ladders and block and tackle, and helping finger from Big Montrose the size of a log, they mounted the portrait on a spot high on the wall just opposite the flag of Texas, which was hung between his gun collection and collection of coins from long-dead civilizations stamped with his image.
The runt-sized Montrose-men unwrapped the portrait.
There she was, with hair as yellow as a garden of gazania or yarrow growing in the golden valleys of the sun, eyes as blue as the Caribbean but deep as the Pacific, and that sweet half smile held between two impish dimples. Atop her coiffeur was the coronet of Monaco, a land long since sunk beneath the sea, and she wore her captain’s uniform, the void-black and starry-silver of the Hermetic Order. This was a form-fitting silky fabric freaked with branching veins like those seen through the translucent skin of a leaf, unintentionally emphasizing her curves. Technically, it was an older costume than the Hermetic Order, for it was originally the space-dress of the Joint Hispanosphere-Indosphere Expedition to the Diamond Star, which her father, Prince Ranier, had captained.
The image showed the arms of the Milky Way reaching up from the bottom of the frame and the globular cluster of M3 in Canes Venatici like a fireworks frozen in midburst above. A slender line, the projected flight path of the Hermetic, connected the two.
“Now read the date,” he said.
From the point of view of the smaller eyes in the smaller body the portrait loomed like the fane to a goddess. The calendar demarking the flight path was in repair, but, at this scale, the gradations were in millennia.
“Today, it is the Forty-sixth Millennium by the Vindication Calendar.” The Vindication calendar ran backward, as a countdown to the earliest possible date of her return. Montrose liked this method of reckoning the years.
“Now, you think if I play squid for that length of time, I won’t get used to it? What if I am unwilling to change back into a man when the wife comes home, eh?”
But the puppet answered, “You think she won’t be changed and strange by her time among the stars? You’re just punishing yourself!”
“Punishing my—! What the pox does that mean?” But when he looked through the thought structure to see the intent behind the comment, something deeper in his mind allowed him to be distracted. For the tall double doors which opened upon the titanic table opposite where he sat now chimed and swung wide.
6. The Four Third Men
Beyond the tall doors, the corridor curved upward, for the corridor deck was the outer wall of the carousel. Oval hatches opened to the left and right into other suites in the guest wing. His guests came into view, descending around the inverted horizon in the inner carousel wall, their bodies gleaming and glittering with living gold.
Rods and serpentines from the floor were all about Montrose like a scaffold around the statue of some seated colossus, forming a exoskeleton, cradling his head and limbs, supporting his spine. He looked both as pathetic as an ancient mummy from a pyramid, frail as a man on a deathbed too weak to raise his head, but because of his cyclopean stature, and the ferocious intensity of his superhuman eyes, he also looked as majestic as a pharaoh adorned in splendor at whose command the toil of countless myriads raised those cryptic pyramids.
The four creatures who walked, slithered, cantered, and rolled into the crystalline chamber had the brutal ugliness of efficient design, but none of the sleekness that natural evolution produced in beasts of prey.
They looked like semiliquid lumps of semitransparent gold. These shining lumps had assumed temporary shapes, and were held within iron-ribbed exoskeletons of different designs: a biped that looked more ostrich than man; a six-limbed shape like a headless centaur; a rattling snake skeleton surrounding a wormlike mass that moved like a sidewinder in lateral waves, such that only two points of the underbelly touched the deck at a time; an upright wheel set about the rim with eye-lenses and ear-horns, with a triskelion of arms issuing from either side of its hub.
Because the exoskeletons were open, organs or instruments could be formed at will out of the golden substance as need dictated, and reach through the bars and lattices of the bodily frame. The skeletal ribs and slats were like Japanese fans or Venetian blinds, and could be expanded to cover all the golden body with armor.
Montrose recognized the golden stuff as Aurum Vitae, the rod-logic substance which, long and long ago, the Savants had attempted to coat the world. Beneath the amber surface he could see dimly the central creatures, one or two in each exoskeleton.
The central creatures were shaped like unborn babies, big-headed things with shrimplike bodies curled below, vestigial hands and feet dangling. External nerve paths ran from the skull and spine of each creature throughout the volume of the lump of pulsing gold he occupied. Nutriment placentas and recycling cells were connected to navel and anus by umbilicus and catheter. The golden fluid acted both as brain and as womb to them. Additional inputs like bundles of cable ran to eye sockets, ears, and the jawless hole in the front of the skull. These connections ran to a sensory exchange box floating just under an iron mask each creature carried on the surface of its golden integument.
The ostrich carried his iron mask on his helmet; the worm on his bow. The headless centaur carried his on his upright turret. The wheel had a mask perched at either side of its hub, at the crotch where his three right or three left arms met.
The masks were jointed so that mouth-slits and eyebrow-lines could be arranged in crude representations of human expressions, to assist the word communication, but all four masks at the moment showed the same blank look of stoic dispassion.
“Well,” Montrose said in English, “ain’t you just the most suck-ugly little critters Frankenstein ever barfed up on a bad day?”
The biped replied on two channels of information, in a grammar format called Rosetta stone, so that parallel meanings could be compared.
The first channel was the Swan initiation language. No two Swans spoke the same language, so each pair or trio of Swans seeking to address each other formulated a separate language for that dyad or triad. (If there was ever a time when any Swan spoke to a crowd, Montrose was unaware of it.) The initiation language was a set of protocols to aid the speed of linguistic development. Circuits in the crystal walls where more of Montrose’s brain circuits were hidden began the process of comparing signal codes and developing a common language.
The second channel contained a set of chimes or reverberations, an auditory code based on Monument logic-sets very similar to the Savant language of old. It was so logical and so mathematically elegant that Montrose could almost translate it by ear, without reference to the Swan singing of the first channel.
The biped mask said, “The comment is irrelevant, and will be discarded.” The voice was calm, and could have been a human voice.
“Hm. Will you discard it if’n I says it twice? Y’all are the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen without a butt.”
“The comment is again irrelevant. What can you deduce of this embassy by inspection? It is more efficient not to repeat known values.”
That was a reasonable request to make to a man above one’s own intelligence. It would be a waste of time for the biped to repeat things Montrose had already figured out. “You’re Blackie’s men. I recognize his handiwork. So how come you did not radio ahead and ask whatever you meant to ask? I could have said ‘No’ and ‘Go burn in Perdition’ with a lot less expense and trouble, and saved y’all a trip. Who you hiding from? Jupiter? His intelligence level is roughly fifty million these days. I take it that means you think you can hide from him for a while, but not forever.” Montrose had the gigantic exoskeleton of crystal tubes supporting him raise up his left hand, as slowly as a crane lifting a support beam to an upper story of a skyscraper, so he could tilt his huge head and rest his cheek on his fist. “There be two things I cannot puzzle out, not just by looking at you. First is, who do you think you are? For what purpose were you made? Second is, what is the point of all this?”