That world was the target. Had their velocities been similar, so large a body could have absorbed Torment with no more disturbance than a stone cast into a pond. A few ripples in the cloud layer might pass, and then, nothing. But at one-tenth lightspeed, the disturbance would be akin to a bullet passing into a man, or, more to the point, a bullet passing into a powder keg, since every particle would be liberated in a wash of total conversion if the world did not slow to a stop.
Years passed, and the star system with its single massive planet grew ever closer, their mutual speed undiminished. The invisible point which it was not possible to arrest the motion of the Torment without destroying the planet or the sail array also grew ever closer.
Astronomers could see more of the system. There was no ringworld or strandworld circling the star, but there were clouds of tree-shaped macroscale structures, forming a set of four distinct rings around the star. Two rings were circular, an inner and an outer, both in the orbital plane of the superjovian; one ring was oval, with the primary and superjovian at its focal points; the remaining cloud was not a ring at all but a hyperbolic sweep, a smear of azure and cerulean, sapphire and cobalt forests that looped around Ain like a vast open rainbow.
These macroscale structures looked like leafless trees, or nerve cells, or the skeletons of parasols. Each structure consisted of a long trunk pointing away from the sun and three equally spaced branches pointing toward, and each branch was tipped with three smaller branches, and those smaller branches in turn tipped with three smaller yet, and so on. Some of the dendrite structures were orbiting in pairs, triads, rings, or complex dances of rings within rings, waltzing epicycles, and braids of orbits were woven in and out of each other in an inhuman complexity of the ring structures.
The average tree-shaped structure was some twenty-five thousand miles long, more than twice the length of a diameter piercing the Earth, or nearly two-thirds such a line drawn through Neptune. These structures were the height of worlds, but not the volume. The cylindrical trunks were at most nine hundred miles in diameter.
It was from these structures that the only sign of intelligent activity or energy use came: radio pulses, the infrared shadows of some form of biological or mechanical action passing from branches to trunk, or bursts of neutrinos. Only about one in a hundred of these countless dendrites displayed these actions.
The rest were as still and silent as trees in a winter graveyard, merely orbiting the great orange star.
There came a period where a second planet was seen in the system. It was an ice giant, the size and composition of Neptune, and it followed that belt or band of dendrite bodies forming a hyperbola around Ain.
The giant world came out of the interstellar space from the direction of Iota Tauri, a white dwarf star and an outlying member of the Hyades Cluster. For forty-five years, it sailed along a hyperbolic orbit, passed like a slingshot around the sun.
During a few hours at perihelion, the ice giant came to life. Torment could detect activity, flares of radiation, tiny packages of matter moving at high speed leaving the atmosphere. Energy emissions from the sun flashed into the thawed atmosphere. In opposition, on the far side of the star system, the black superjovian body stirred into life as inky black clouds leaped into ever higher orbits; a red dot of immense heat was detected at the core of the body whenever the black clouds parted for a moment. The neutrino count detected by receivers on the sail of Torment registered a high number of encounters during this period.
Meanwhile, the dendrite objects opened fire on the ice giant, sending out white-hot needles of material from their forward arms toward the Neptunian body. Whether this was an act of war or of commerce was unclear. Perhaps it was a method of delivering material rapidly to the gas giant’s atmosphere.
The solar system lapsed into silence after about ten hours of activity. The black superjovian grew quiescent, and the neutrino count dropped.
The ice giant was visible for another forty-five years heading outward again, still following the path of the dendrite cloud. It was lost to sight heading in the direction a pulsating variable star called V1362 Orionis, another member of the Hyades Cluster.
And still, there was no sign of any reaction from whatever form of intelligence—Principality or Virtue or Host—ruling this star system, to the threat posed by the vast speed of Torment.
The invisible point of no return was passed, and still there was no sign.
Once and twice and thrice during these years, increasingly desperate attempts were made to thaw Montrose and discover his opinion and advice. In annoyance, he told whoever woke him, man or machine, to relax.
“They is playing chicken with us, is all.” He snorted. “Let me sleep, you leprous scabnails! I don’t give a damn what your problem is. Solve it without me.”
An agent speaking for Torment said, “But we are passed the point where a laser from the sun could decelerate us safely, sir!”
“These damn things are like machines. They ain’t got no souls. They are controlled by their equations. The equations say they have to bring us to a halt. And they don’t give a damn neither.”
“We are on collision course for the superjovian body! If you are wrong—”
“Damn your eyes! If I were wrong on a simple thing like this, I would have been dead before your race was a twinkle in the eye of a scabby Hermeticist, you asinine sumpsuckler! Now shut your yap. I have had a long, hard, wearisome life, and I get to sleep the sleep of the just! Well, hmm, maybe not that. At least I can sleep the sleep of the I don’t give a damn.”
On he slumbered. On they sped toward collision.
3. Concubine Vector
A.D. 73723
Menelaus woke and saw the year, and before he opened his biological eyes, he examined the immediate environment of the hermit’s cell he had fashioned for himself in a bubble of metal near the core of the planet. Someone had disarranged certain of the mementos and coin collections he had carefully placed on the shelves before entering slumber, and the flag of Texas was hanging from one tack, a triangle of fabric drooping down in defeat. The coffeepot was cold, as if the automatic circuit had forgotten to prepare for his waking.
His glass pistols were missing, a fact he found more disturbing and disorienting than he could account for.
Through remote instruments he saw the frozen sea, and a sky that was half a dome of cold stars, and half a dome of vast pink sails like rose petals filling all space between zenith and horizon.
The cell now included a wardrobe of bodies into which his brain information could be downloaded. After much hesitation, he selected to be reincarnated as a Patrician.
Waking into a Patrician brain was like stepping into a stream of shockingly cold ice water. The neural arrangement seamlessly merged high-speed inner thoughts at the picotechnology level with his nanotechnological and biological architecture so that not only was each nerve cell working to keep his thoughts coordinated, but the chemicals in each cell stored additional information and the electron shells of each fluorine atom in those molecules as well. The normal confusion, self-deception, memory stalls, and waiting times of multilevel consciousness was minimized by the unique architecture or eliminated entirely.
He also decided to wear the traditional garb of the Patricians. His dress consisted of anointing himself with a gel of aurum vitae, the same substance of which Myrmidon flesh was made, which coated and melded to his skin, giving him the characteristic golden hue of the Patrician race; and over that he threw the severe white mantle of the Fifth Men.