“Hm, maybe you ain’t as changed as much as I thought. No, I meant, how did you get something as smart as her to listen to you? Or to anyone of our level of smarts?”
“Same reason a hunter takes along a dog when he hunts. I can see things she can’t, despite all her superhuman intelligence.”
Torment said, “There is more to it than that. When compared with Ain, your friend Mictlanagualzin occupies the same intellectual topology as I do, or any of my servants, archangels, angels, ghosts. Moreover, he possesses an uncanny ability to guess Epsilon Tauri behavior patterns.”
Montrose said, “So why did you and she pox with my alarm clock, Mickey, and keep real-world info out of my dreams as I slumbered?”
Mickey said, “Once it was clear that Ain meant to have us pass the point of no return, the zero point after which no deceleration beam in the system could halt us safely, the result seemed obvious. Ain was not going to break the Cold Equations, right? So there had to be a deceleration beam stationed outside the system, or a mirror array to dogleg one, or something. And Ain is the star from which all the Virtues that ever interacted with the human race originated, all except one—Nahalon in the Fourth Sweep. So this star both has the most experience with mankind and the most interest in keeping us indentured. Ain must have been heartbroken when Rania returned and mankind was vindicated. The Beast, that last ruling Virtue to come out of Ain and alter the history of mankind, it must have seen Rania on the way home and known she had been successful on her mission, since she was sailing in a vessel more advanced than anything the whole Hyades Cluster could produce. So what did the Beast do, before it left?”
Montrose said, “It populated worlds far from Sol but closer to target systems the Hyades wanted us to be able to visit or colonize and gave Iota Draconis that famous superpowerful launch laser. But Iota Draconis is farther from Ain than Sol is, by some ninety-three lightyears. We are on the wrong side of the celestial globe. So are all the other worlds of the Petty Sweep. If anything, Ain was trying to colonize worlds with human civilizations far away from it…” He frowned. “It wants to spread us around.”
Torment said, “There is nothing in the Cold Equations to explain this.”
Mickey said, “Ain clearly has some great interest in our race, an interest above and outside the Cold Equations, and has had since the advent of Asmodel. So Ain went to a great deal of trouble to get one planet full of humans, including the only remaining original primitive humans in existence.”
Montrose said, “Meaning me and Blackie?”
Torment said softly, “Montrose is unaware of the signals we have received from the stars we fled.”
Montrose said, “Let me guess. Everyone back home is a Patrician now, and the eighty earths of the sixty-nine human stars have fallen into a long somnolence, just as the False Rania predicted and wanted.”
Mickey said, “A good guess, but wrong on two counts. First, not everyone is a Patrician. The planets colonized by the Beast—namely, Feast of Stephen, Perioecium, Terra Pericolosa, Aerecura, and the World of Willows and Flowers are still inhabited by the variations of the races of Loricates, Myrmidons, Vampires, Overlords, and Sworns, and the capital world of Iota Draconis, named Bloodroot, remains in the hands of the Strangermen, who bribed the incoming Argives with the moon called Nightshade, whose crystals ring with strange music in the many magnetic fields of Wormwood. These last two worlds were both elevated to potentate status in record time, as were the other planets in the rosette of Vindemiatrix, the pilgrim worlds of Saint Agnes and Saint Wenceslaus. Something the Beast did when it selected the Petty Sweep planets to colonize keeps the ancient vitality of the human race alive.”
Montrose was appalled. “Sounds like the polity of man is a corpse, but with the outer parts, the hair and the fingernails, still growing.”
“And I think this world, Torment, is meant by Ain to be the seed of a new human polity.”
“Why?”
Mickey said, “Instead of explaining that, take a moment to cool your anger, and let me make one more prediction: I predict the Principality of Ain will be ready, no, will be eager to talk to us, and in as clear a fashion as possible. It will take the time and trouble to study our language and our forms of thought and make itself clear. That is what his logic diamond is for.”
Montrose looked down and picked up his feet. He floated about a yard high above the surface, peering at the soles of his sandals nervously. “This is Ain thinking-crystal?”
Then he realized he had lost his channel to Mickey, and he used one of his newfound Patrician energy-manipulation organs to pull his himself back down to the surface and magnetically anchor his feet there.
Torment said, “Yes. This moonlet is being formulated from our exosphere material. It has been growing here for some time. Not long ago, this location was nothing but the four dendrite mechanisms touching their tips together. The gathered and transformed material has been growing between the tips, forcing them apart. I assume Ain created this area of electromagnetic silence to aid in the reception of signals from the home Principality.”
Montrose peered at the figure representing Torment more closely. The symbolism of her dress and throne was clear to his new pattern-seeking Patrician brain. The bridal gown represented her willingness to assume orbit around Ain and become a satellite of Epsilon Tauri, a member henceforth of the Hyades polity rather than the human one. The throne of bones represented the cost in human lifetimes spent to pay back the debt incurred by Torment and her subject populations. In other words, the cost of slowing Torment and navigating her to an orbit optimal for his surface life would be measured in so many lifetimes that it was as if she sat on a heap of lives and lifetimes all consumed.
Montrose felt a stab of guilt. How many of these events had been his doing? What percent of blame fell at his feet? Whatever that percent, it was measured in centuries and millennia of servitude imposed on his fellow man, servitude that Rania had arranged mankind to escape, or, to be more exact, this was servitude the advent of the False Rania had arranged mankind to seem to escape. And this was servitude which Montrose had arranged the world of Torment to reenter.
With his new brain, he could see other patterns in the events leading to this moment, and other symbols in the scene. The chalice in her hand was a stirrup cup. The snakes represented a bitterness she could drink but survive. He said, “You mean to send me and Blackie onward, the two of us, by ourselves.”
Torment said, “That will be part of our price, yes. Otherwise there will be no agreement. We will continue into the void and perish, and the Principality of Ain will be fined or punished by their superiors.”
Mickey said, “Ain is afraid to try to keep the supership of Rania for themselves. My guess is, had Ain meant to keep it, or buy it from us, we would have been decelerated at a reasonable time and rate and given a hero’s welcome. Torment tells me the Cold Equations have several vectors where one of Ain’s superiors would simply pluck such a covet-worthy prize out of their little hands. An intelligent star system is still a very, very minor little elf in a big, bad galaxy filled with dragons and sorcerer-kings with iron scepters.”
Torment said to Mickey, “Ask this man you once worshiped as a demigod why he approached this ice moon in such anger and why he raised his hand against me.”
Mickey said, “Sorry. What happened before I walked up? Did you offend the goddess? Always a bad policy to tick off someone you and your household, and your whole country, are standing on top of, you know.”
Montrose said, “I was plenty mad, and she knows why.”
Mickey said, “I don’t. I was the one who enchanted your alarm clock to sleep. I thought you would be filled with grief at the suffering your, ah, miscalculation of the Cold Equations caused. So I wanted to spare you as much—”