Montrose grunted, and spat, and watched the ball of icy spittle drifting slowly toward the surface of the moonlet, but miss and go into orbit. “I hate having my arm twisted.”
Del Azarchel said, “We are in a position to have our arms twisted only because you decided to use Torment as a sling bullet and threaten the giant with it, who charged us extra for our impertinence. This is your fault.”
“My fault or not, Ain needs us more than we need him!”
Torment said, “Ain needs but one of you. Ain knows well enough that if one of you balks or hesitates, the other will volunteer, since you both wish to travel to M3, and meet Rania, and leave your rival far behind.”
Del Azarchel turned back to stare at Montrose. Montrose said slowly, “If we worked together…”
Del Azarchel said, “It would be a bluff, and Ain would see through it. We do not dare trust each other, and neither of us dares risk to be left behind. Therefore, we will both agree eagerly to Ain’s terms, no matter how harsh. Selling a planet into slavery—one planet out of a hundred—is a small price. That is why I shall always prevail over you.”
“The plague you say.”
“Always.” Del Azarchel’s voice was almost sad, and his eyes were haunted. “I am always willing to pay the price. A messiah sacrifices only himself; I am willing to sacrifice others, innocent bystanders, anyone, everyone. That makes me greater.”
“Damn me to hell.” Montrose sighed. “What was I thinking when I asked you to remember your devil’s pride? If any man ever deserved to be buggered with a lightning bolt by God Almighty and Mighty Pissed Off, that’d be you, pardner! Why not let’s you and me get out our shooting irons and settle things here and now. Only one survivor means he gets to bargain with Ain, eh?”
Mickey laughed. Both men looked at him. “I have the solution,” he said. “Your pardon, but it is obvious.”
2. The Circular Garden
A.D. 73727
Not long after, Montrose stood in a garden of the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. A colonnade of pillars rang in a circle here, with a goldfish pond in the center, and to the left and right were cherry trees and forsythia bushes.
Hidden in nooks in low walls and benches were motionless white birds, slumbering; in small hutches were white rabbits; and, crouched in covets, little white deer. All were in suspended animation. Montrose did not care to thaw the decorative livestock. The greenery, however, had been mostly thawed; only here and there stood a tree or hedge bone-white and eerie in its timeless hibernation.
The fairies, which were mechanical rather than biological, were active. In and among the blooms, like bees, these tiny constructions darted and flew on gauzy or glittery wings of dragonfly, wasp, moth, or butterfly. These were petite female figurines in gowns of lace or glittering light, with tiny crowns or scepters adorned with many-pointed stars.
The world was a cylinder as narrow as a glass coin sitting on its brass edges, or as narrow as a tambourine with a transparent drumhead on either side.
To the eye, a babbling stream, with many a winding meander, run past the fane in what seemed an upward slope, ever more steeply, until, about three-fourths of a mile away, the water was flowing directly upward amid perpendicular the topiary bushes and small trees. In that quarter, the grass was brown with summer heat.
Directly overhead the stream passed through gardens splendid with autumn colors, and these gardens reached up and above and down again to either side like an arch or rainbow.
Then the waters flowed down again, if more slowly than it would seem they should if they were falling down a nearly vertical white slope, with the tops of leafless trees pointing parallel to what seemed level, sliding down a curve through perpendicular gardens, and then along an ever more gradual slope, shading from winter to spring.
Of course, this was an illusion of viewpoint: anyone standing at any other point along the stream, or walking through the seasons along the pathway that meandered along with the stream, in many places leaping over it in a gracefully arched bridge, would see the stream nearest him as level, with gardens reaching up before and behind, while overhead the waters would seem to cling to a narrow ribbon of ceiling and chuckle through upside-down trees hanging like living stalactites.
To the left and right were stars, visible through a vast sheet of hull material as transparent as air. The constellations were the same as seen from Earth, with only a few stars out of place. The turning of the stars matched the pace of the stream, for the waters were not flowing downhill—that word was meaningless aboard this vessel—but due to Coriolis forces.
Here and there in the garden was a fane or gazebo holding library books, wine bottles, or wardrobes for materials not meant to be endlessly recycled nor revised. In two places rose tall and slender towers with conical roofs, from which a pennant snapped, adorned with lozenges of black and gold. Through the upper window of each tower could be glimpsed the frills and ornaments of a woman’s boudoir. Rania—assuming the False Rania had been duplicated from the true one accurately in this respect—evidently preferred to sleep in partial gravity, a personal quirk of hers. Montrose was bitterly ashamed he had not known all her personal quirks.
Sun there was none. A flotilla of tiny fairy queens held a cluster of lanterns and heat sources in a luminous cloud that stood between the dead center and the summer quarter of the garden. Each twenty-four hours shiptime, these lanterns crept forward exactly one degree of arc. Each twelve hours, they were extinguished for the night watches. Directly opposite, the shadow of the dark sphere spilled across the center of the winter quarter.
Directly overhead, in the center point of the vessel, neatly bisecting the archway of the autumnal garden, was the true ship: like a miniature moon held frozen at the zenith, here was a dark sphere of opalescent ceramic material.
Oddly enough, the black sphere seemed to be made of a silicate called cristobalite, rather than some unheard-of exotic material created by superscience. It was an industrial ceramic, remarkably like what was used by Tellurians to coat kiln linings or jet nozzles.
This dark sphere was held in a cage of struts and supports made of wood, a single rootless and branchless tree, like a snake eating its own tail, growing in the shape of the seam on a baseball.
Some fancy or aesthetic notion of Rania’s had imparted life to the wood so that twigs, leaves, and cherry blossoms partly obscured the dark opal sphere from view. Why she has used wood as a framework material rather than metal or plastic, Montrose did not know for sure. The only clue of the vast energies harnessed by the engine sphere was the very slight rose-red gleam coloring the air, visible only to Patrician eyes, and a distortion or aberration of any object behind the sphere, which looked like a photograph on a piece of plastic that was puckered by the sphere’s weight. As one walked the pathway around the vessel, the sphere was always overhead, and the pucker of distortion was always behind it, moving as the viewpoint moved.
To the aft of the sphere, in the dead center of the great disk, held in place by invisible supports, floated a cluster of antennae and magnetic bottle instruments, including the spine of the main drive to one side. These instruments reached from the sphere and out through the unseen hull material into vacuum. These instruments communicated between the human vessel, the outside universe, and the alien mystery locked in the heart of the dark sphere.
There was no visible shroud house. Instead, thread-thin lines of magnetic monopoles, another exotic particle, reached from the black opal sphere, passing harmlessly through the magnetically neutral transparent hull, to a constellation of balls and teardrops held in two wide rings. These balls of the inner ring emitted lines made of exotic matter, some impossibly thin and impossibly tough material, adamantium gossamer threads able to cut through anything. These lines ran to a larger, outer ring of teardrops, and from each pointed end of each teardrop, more lines connected to the sails. The balls shrank when they extruded lines and swelled when they drew them in, but there was no visible mechanism of spools or spindles.