“Sounds like everyone takes a cut of the kitty, then. Winners all round, eh? But what makes anything think I am willing to make another truce with Blackie? I did it once before and hated every minute. ’Sides, he means to kill me.”
“If I may.” Del Azarchel leaned forward and pointed a finger at the black surface of the table and then, very lightly, tapped it. “This here is the cliometric design of the future of what happens as Triumvirate, carrying out the plans of False Rania. That is what becomes of the human race. Now, if you can do the calculus just in your head, or perhaps we should ask the Stranger boy, who seems to be something of a math prodigy, if he can do the calculus just in his head: What basic cliometric vector is introduced if this world-sized moon, the huge body called Torment, sails grandly across the sky? Suppose we use the mirrored sails of the Emancipation to deflect part of the acceleration beam from Iota Draconis into the sails of smaller vessels and send them out laterally to other stars between here and there? Suppose we form a Sixth Sweep all of our own? I understand the slumbering population here outnumbers the living considerably, due to wretched surface conditions. What happens then to the spirit of man?”
But Montrose did not need to do any calculations. He merely laughed. “Well, you might call this world a hellhole, but damn my eyes if it don’t remind me of Texas in some ways. If we sail the whole planet with us, we spread the pioneer spirit. And your idea of a medieval hierarchy gets forgotten forever!”
Blackie smiled, and there was a darkness and a cold, cold hatred in his eyes, but he laughed and pretended to smile. “What do I care if the lowest of the low, the mortal creatures, imagine themselves equal to each other? This whole galaxy vindicates my view, for everything is ranked and placed from humblest to highest, Principalities and Hosts, then Dominions, then Dominations, Authorities and Archons, Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim. Besides, egalitarian societies always eventually break down as a natural aristocracy emerges. Come! If I depart the hundred-lightyear-wide bubble of stars called the Empyrean of Man, then no more wars nor mischief will proceed, not from my hands. Is there anything on Earth, or any world behind us, that you crave more than this?”
Montrose smiled back, and the fire in his deep-set, unwinking, blue-white eyes was just as terrifying to behold, and there was some joy in his toothy grin, the joy of a man who imagines an enemy dead. “It is a deal, then, Blackie!”
Vigil said, “I will keep my faith with you gentlemen, and prevent any interruption of the launching beam.”
The Chronometrician cackled, and by the intuition of one of his internal creatures, Vigil knew exactly why Montrose, the Judge of Ages, had agreed once more to sail with Ximen the Black.
Had the Judge of Ages not agreed, Ximen would have gone his separate route, in a vessel of different design and origin, and therefore, risk was too great, in all the endless infinity of space, the appalling abyss of eternity, that the separation between them would grow, one day becoming too vast to overcome; hence they would never again meet; hence never walk onto the field of honor together, that only one would walk away from it.
Vigil Starmanson, the Lord Hermeticist, understood then that there were things as strong as honor, which would keep men chained to their fates for longer, far longer, than a normal human life span. Love was one such thing. Hate was another.
He shivered.
And the Aedile called to adjourn and disband. The Table surface grew dull and plain, and the mind within the metal slept, not to wake again until it was moved to Bloodroot, to empty buildings haunting that world and would once again house the Lords of Cliometry, decades or centuries hence.
The statue of Torment shivered and grew still. What the mind at the core of this planet thought, no one could say, but apparently the world consented to depart human civilization forever, to be torn from her orbit and to be sailed across the stars.
Outside the hall, very dimly, one of Vigil’s internal creatures picked up the sound of the bells, still ringing, and voices still singing out a welcome to a ship which now, as it so happened, actually was coming under friendly colors, with gifts and new sciences to bestow, much plenty, and new populations.
So it seemed the song was not to be in vain.
PART TEN
The Seven Daughters of Atlas
1
The Eye of the North
1. Braking Maneuver
A.D. 72260
All worlds when seen from space are breathtakingly beautiful.
Torment in summer was a cratered gemstone of golden sands and green crater lakes, and, in winter, an opal of white on silver as the atmosphere froze, dappled with darker azure zones of crater lakes and frozen volcanic gases.
Now, departed from her orbit forever, she sailed through the endless winter of interstellar space and was hanging in the middle of the spiral of sails sixty million miles in radius, pink at the center, purple at the topgallants.
The average velocity of the planet Torment across the abyss of 194 lightyears separating Eldsich from Ain was roughly one-tenth lightspeed. The acceleration beam contained over one hundred yottajoules per second. The precision with which it was maintained in the sails was admirable. The acceleration beam was aimed by means of thousand-mile-radius Fresnel lenses stationed in a line through the Oort cloud of Iota Draconis. The planetary vessel fell out of the beam due to microscopic Brownian jittering in the aiming lenses only ten percent of the time. Out of the millennium of flight, the time spent in free fall was less than a century, all told.
From time to time, Montrose would wake in his coffin at the world’s core and send his mind into such a body as could survive the Plutonian environment. He traveled to the aft pole.
The Scolopendra, housed in armored cybernetic cetacean bodies like living submarines, circled and swam through the liquid nitrogen on high holy days about the monstrous mountain of ultradense artificial materials they had raised directly at the aft pole. The peak reached above the thin atmosphere. A golden space elevator reared beyond sight overhead. Swarms of assembly clouds moved slowly upward over the centuries, infinitesimally shrinking the globe and extensively lengthening the infinite tower of their space elevator, and power gathered from the sail electrostatically charged the great golden length. The assembly cloud drew upon the thinnest and most insubstantial of particles and motes swept up by the world-ship’s sails as Torment flew through the infinite night.
As the journey neared completion, the tower’s length was such that it was more properly called a tail, for it streamed for millions of miles behind the body of Torment. A small section of sail directed energy against the threadlike length, building up a static electric charge greater than that found in the storm clouds of Jupiter before his fall.
Perched on the hull of the lowest section of the tower, along the insulated miles forming the base, buffeted by the cold and screaming winds of hydrogen and helium, Montrose could look down at the roiling humps and odd waves of liquid oxygen, beneath which was a second ocean, like a rippling sand plain, of liquid nitrogen; and farther down, but clearly seen through the young and pristine ocean layer, he saw the crags and glacier tops and crooked peaks of carbon dioxide ice.
Storm clouds of tiny particles formed an immense spiral sweep of colored turbulence in each direction. Here, at the aft pole, it was always noon, and the laser pinprick of dazzling light from Iota Draconis was directly overhead, and the ever-growing topless tower pointed directly at it. The closer one traveled to the fore hemisphere, the lower sank the brilliant dot of sunlight. At dusk was a terminator belt of eternal storm winds circling the whole planet. The fore hemisphere was shrouded in Plutonian night, and the gases formed a perfect dome of atmospheric ice beneath a thin blanket of liquid helium.