With his new brain and its new outlook, he understood the reason for Patrician simplicity of dress: the intuitive and pattern-recognition side of his consciousness was more active in this neural structure, making it easier to see symbols and symbolic relations. While, on the one hand, this allowed for him to think in three new shorthand neural encoding systems, as well as in his old human system and four other long-term and more elaborate neural languages, on the other hand, the rapid-fire method of seeing symbols and patterns made him more easily distracted by things like designs and colors in clothing and tempted him to see meanings where there were none.
The body itself was more compact and complex than a Swiss Army knife, able to adapt to nearly any surroundings. He was not surprised at his ability to exit his cell, soar up a depth-train chimney through the mantle and crust, swim through the liquid oxygen hydrosphere, fly through the cold helium atmosphere, and rocket through the upper stratosphere. The aurum altered with each environment, as did specialized organs inside his new body, inflating or contracting as need be. The Patricians had the ability to place any unused organ into its own miniature slumber, pale white buds coated in frost, and to reroute any vital functions to the analogous organ thawed and put into use.
The white mantle formed an energy parachute to allow him to ride a convenient heavy particle fountain issuing from the polar supermountain of the planet like a bowsprit. Up and up he rose. He eventually reached the position in low Torment orbit where the world’s magnetic fields had been warped into a vacuole of electromagnetic silence. All the radio noise and energy discharges from the buried cities of slumberers at the core of the planet, or from flotillas of armored Scolopendra, faded into inaudibility as he penetrated the vacuole.
Here was an orb of ice, small as one of the moons of Mars. The globe of Torment filled a third of the sky, rising and falling once an hour as the moonlet rotated. Torment was white as Pluto beneath her winter shroud, and her circular crater lakes were dapples of dark purple.
Standing upright on a low hillock of snow, like a spear driven into a rock, was a narrow column of blue-green material, neither metal nor ceramic nor any other substance Montrose could name. It was roughly thirty feet tall. From the top lifted three smaller branches of the same material, perhaps nine feet long, and from each of the ends of these smaller branches three wands issued; and each wand had three spokes, and each spoke had three twigs, and each twig had three hairs, and so on. With his new, Patrician eyes, Montrose could see the pattern recurring, ever small and smaller, down to the molecular level.
The tiniest of the end hairs were plucking particles out of the surrounding near-vacuum and combining them into molecules, and the molecules into crystals. These crystals were fed into tubules leading into the spearhead of the object. Looking down and through the layers of the transparent ice moon to the other hemisphere, Montrose saw three other branched spears like this one, impaled into the substance of the ice moon, each equidistant from the others like the points on a caltrop.
Beneath this dendrite, seated on a chair made of human bones, was a living image of Torment, wearing a bridal dress and veil, and in her hands, a bouquet of septfoil flowers.
Torment had set, and the vast pale light from the world was shining upward upon the throned figure as smoky beams of light seeped through the transparent ground.
Montrose stood staring at her for a moment, rapidly turning off and on various internal senses and several nervous systems to examine his new organs. Some of them seemed to control powerful electric charges and nucleonic forces, nanotechnological and picotechnological vectors and assemblers. He was looking to see which could do the most damage in the least amount of time. He raised his golden hands, an intolerable brightness trembling between his fingers, calculating whether it would be easier to direct the energy in a straight beam, cutting through the moonlet crust, or to curve the beam around the close horizon.
Torment waited, one eyebrow raised in a skeptical arch. She spoke by means of a directed energy beam into receiving cells in the auditory sections of his Patrician nervous system. “You have expensive habits.”
After some fumbling, he found a set of cells in his cortex that could impose a pattern on a focused magnetic flux he could establish passing between the two of them. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning you will be fined a monetary amount equivalent to the labor costs of manufacturing this remote unit, if you destroy it. Better just to slap this unit in the face, if it is necessary to reduce your animalistic tensions.”
“I don’t slap women.”
“And I do not crush insects. Fortunate for you. Do you see the star system receding behind us? Principality of Ain is there as well as here, watching, measuring, and observing us. It would be better to be on our best behavior.”
“Behind—!” Montrose felt his anger drain away. He grounded the energy building up in his fingers against his mantle and wiped the sparks absentmindedly against his golden thigh, swearing at the unexpected pain.
His new Patrician eyes could gather information from a number of sources or even use the sail of the Solitudines as a baseline. The planet Torment had passed through the Ain system without striking the superjovian. At present, there seemed to be two gas giants in the system, a bright one and a dark. The dark giant was the inky-black atmosphere of the superjovian, which had removed itself from the planet, solidified into a black sphere, and assumed orbit about it; or, rather, the two were orbiting about a common center.
The gas cloud, to judge from the degree of light distortion of stars it occluded, had more mass than could be accounted for by its volume and density. There was also indirect evidence of an immense heat source at the core of the black giant: an engine warping space.
Montrose said, “Life is poxy mocking me. First, I don’t recall deciding to come up here. Second, I see that they have the technology to create gravity out of nothing.”
“Not out of nothing,” came the cool, soft voice of Torment. “The star Ain lost gravitational mass in equal amount to what the artificial gas giant gained: the star entered an excited state when the balance between the reaction pressure and gravity was thrown off. How the gravitational mass was transferred between the two points is unclear, particular since the volume and density remained the same; but changes in the Higgs boson properties detected throughout the system took place at the time of the near miss, changes that were suggestive of an interaction between gravitons across macroscopic distances.”
Montrose said, “What? Something that takes the gravity particles generated in one spot in the universe and yanks them hither and yon to come out at another? That cannot be possible.”
“You forget that the phenomenon or entity we call Cahetel displayed a similar ability to warp spacetime. This is the seat of power from which Cahetel came.”
“Missing a target big as a gas giant takes some doing. You did not correct the aim? What happened? Self-preservation instinct take over?”
“I have had no desire to live since the day, before even I was self-aware, when my terraforming and pantropic machines, who inhabited the world before mankind, witnessed the genocide of the second generational deracination ship by the descendants of the first, attempted to resurrect the slain race from recordings and samples, and failed. Look at the distribution patterns of dust and energetic particles in the Ain system, and measure the magnetic field strengths.”
With his new eyes, Montrose examined the local area to about half a lightyear distant and realized how the near miss must have played out.
The light from the star Ain had simply been blocked by black inky clouds maneuvered to orbits between Ain and the incoming world-ship, leaving the sails with no light pressure to use. And there was insufficient magnetic strength in the system to tack.
With no way to maneuver, the planet Torment passed through what had been exact dead center of the gas giant, which was now the gravitational center of the two giant planets: and there just so happened to be no physical object there at the time. There had been minor damage to Torment from the tidal effects. The speed gained when falling into the immense gravity well was lost again as Torment receded from the double planet against the pull of gravity.