Montrose looked over the mind-dazing immensity of the sails of the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. There were twin puncture holes somewhere the size of a two supergiant worlds, but the scale defeated even his miraculous new powers of vision. The diameter of a superjovian would not even be a pinprick to a sheet of ultrafine material wide as the orbit of Venus.
Montrose said, “You and I worked together for a long time. I helped you create a world where all the old memories of the past could be kept alive. But you were thinking of selling yourself to the Hyades since—well, since when? Since the hour you figured out my Rania never came back from M3?”
Torment did not answer directly, but spoke in a casual, almost absentminded, tone. “There is a vast sail array positioned six hundred AU fore of us. The Principality of Ain would not have maneuvered the array save that they will offer to decelerate us and even to impart acceleration back toward Ain. The superjovian orbit is not only similar to that of Wormwood of Iota Draconis, upon dissolution of the black gravitic body back into a cloud cover, the orbit will be identical, allowing Torment to have precisely the same seasonal variations of precisely the same periods as we enjoyed back home. What does that suggest?”
Montrose said, “It suggests their damned Concubine Vector: the allowable amount of scabby clapmembered-up-your-hinderparts anyone in a strong position can shove up into those in a weak position. The Cold Equations show that they are still legally required to halt us and grant us port. But there is some fine print in the Monument you and me never saw, or never saw the implications to, is that it?”
“As you predicted, the Principality governing this solar system is required to spend the energy to bring us to port safely. However, Ain has elected to spend considerably more energy that is strictly necessary, in order to place us into an indentured servitude much longer than you calculated. The arrangement of bodies in this solar system make that clear. We must pay for the gravitational engine operations, the cost to restore the superjovian to its previous condition, the cost to create a remote deceleration beam station six hundred AU away, and so on.”
“Why go to so much trouble? Build a birdcage just to suit you, and then lure us into it?”
The throned figure shook her veiled head. “That, Ain has not revealed.”
“But you have a guess?”
“Think you so, mortal man? Observe the nearest of yonder parasol-shaped memory habitats. Each of the macroscale dendrite structures in orbit around the star has a mental carrying capacity equal to my own. Look more closely at what seem to be four asteroid rings, or at what seem to be gas clouds. Your eyes should be able to resolve the images. The same dendrite shapes also exist as forty-kilometer-long vehicles, nine-centimeter-long tools, and as nanoscopic molecular assemblers. Every single last scrap of rust and rock and ice in this star system has been sophotransmogrified. Were you impressed at seeing that Sol is now a system with five hundred worlds? It is a circle of mud huts surrounding a single fire pit compared to this. The intellectual volume of the Ain System taken as a whole is in the five billion range, whereas mine is in the five hundred thousand range.”
A figure in a rotund suit of armor came suddenly over the too-near horizon of the miniature moonlet. The boot soles were coated with a layer of material that changed state with every step, solidifying into glue when the boot made contact with the surface to anchor the walker in place, then liquefying again to release the rear foot for its next step. The midsection of the armor was round like a ball, and the helmet was topped with a conical section like a dunce cap. There was no faceplate, of course, merely a cluster of pinpoint cameras on the front of the solid helm.
“Howdy. What are you going here?” Montrose had to send a signal on several bands and got no response. Then he tried sending the words as small seismic vibrations through the ice moonlet surface into the approaching figure’s boots. The boots were evidently smart enough to recognize the wave-patterns and transform them into something audible inside the suit.
The reply came by shortwave radio: “How did you know it was me?”
“Who else but Mickey the Witch would put a pointed hat on a space suit?”
“I am Mickey the Sacredote now. This is the miter of my bishopric. I have a flock and everything. Mostly they are twenty generations of my own children, but still. You’ve been asleep six hundred years.”
“Kept asleep, you mean. Since when do bishops get married? And I can’t imagine you not as a Witch.”
Mickey turned his gauntlets’ palms toward each other and spread his armored fingers as if grasping an invisible ball, which was the spaceman’s sign showing nonchalance, a nonemergency condition. “The Sacerdotes have a lot more rites and rituals than we ever did, and, with no disrespect meant to my ancestors, they make a lot more sense. I mean, I always did used to wonder why Zeus was supposed to punish lawbreakers, him being an adulterer and a parricide and all. And seeing Earth and all the other planets thronging the solar system messed up my astrology something awful, and four of the nine sacred trees to which I used to sacrifice animals are all extinct. Two of those animals I sacrificed are extinct as well, and one of them was uplifted into sapience. Witchcraft is not very portable to other eons.”
“And Bible-thumping is?”
“You’d be surprised at the number of circumstances Roman law, Greek philosophy, and Jewish mysticism can find accommodating. Just knowing that Ain is my brother, the child of the same God who made me, I find to be quite a source of courage when my courage runs dry. A Witch stranded as I am in this alien star system would be required to assume that the Hyades were made and ruled by Hyades gods, masked and eyeless Demhe, Cassilda dressed in yellow tatters, or unholiest Yhtill, who once were served and worshiped in lost Carcosa on the misty shores of Lake Hali where black stars rise. How, then, could I know the rules of right and wrong, logic and illogic, were the same for me as for the Principality of Ain? If the gods were different, how could our nature be the same? How could I know that the little gods of wind and hill, howe and rill, would still protect me? There is no wind here, and Mount Olympus is sunk beneath the sea.”
“You gave up all your mumbo jumbo? You’ll hardly be the same man.”
“Even had Trey not forced my conversion, it was needed for this journey.”
“How so?”
“It is no coincidence that the one and only culture in history back on the home world that made a habit of discovering and exploring the unknown was not pagan. Who would dare venture into new regions and worlds of mystery and wonder, enigma and fear, save he knows which god rules there? Achelous of the silver-swirling river is a mighty god, but his reach extends no farther than Aetolia and Acarnania. That is not true of the Wounded God whose flesh each Sabbath I consume, whose reach is boundless. Here, in this horribly alien system, with its hidden gas giants and hollow suns, and leafless trees for worlds, my cruel and little pagan gods are left far behind in all senses of the word.”
Mickey passed to him a small, flat package. It was a case containing his glass railgun pistols. “I did not want you to shoot anyone before I had a chance to talk to you. Don’t be mad at Torment for keeping you asleep. I am the one who by my potent enchantments—ah, I mean, by my prayers, of course—persuaded her to keep you under.”
“You? How?”
“I prayed a rosary to each of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, starting with the noble youth Exacostodianos; followed by a novena to Saint Elijah and to Saint Christina the Astonishing, whose sway over these matters is uncontested.”