Opposite the main drive, in the dead center of the fore hull, was an airlock and a dock. At the moment, a landing boat, a streamlined icicle of shape-changing material, clung to the axial dock. Reaching from the airlock at the ship’s axis to a point not far from where Montrose stood was an elevator shaft of glass. Down it came a car.
Montrose was watching two figures, a man and a woman, in the approaching car. They were both weightless as they moved, hand over hand, from the airlock to the elevator car: an obese dark-skinned figure in bright robes, and a slender girlish shape in a long-trained dress that looked like blue cigarette smoke, moving and breathing on its own, a phantasmagoria of wandering scarves and billowing cape hems. Both of them oriented their feet toward Montrose as the car began to move, and gravity grew greater as they descended.
Montrose with no embarrassment embraced Mickey as a brother, and they pounded each other roughly on the back. The lady was Trey the Sylph, now Mrs. Primadonna Soaring Azurine de Concepcion. Mickey had insisted that she was no longer the third, but the first, and must change her name accordingly. She had insisted on adopting his family name, which was a tradition long forgotten in his day.
Montrose bowed and kissed her hand, which made her giggle, since she had never seen the gesture before.
“Save for one only, I am the oldest woman in the universe,” she said in her strange, dreamy voice. “I am the only living being from the same millennium as you—me!—except for your lover … and your hater. I wanted to see this through to the end, to see you duel your foe and find your princess, but I have a happy ending of my own to see through.”
He said, “I am glad you are so sure I can beat him. He is a fair hand with a pistol.”
She said, “Oh, no, he is a better shot than you. I am just hoping something unexpected will save you. That is the way happy endings work in real life, isn’t it?”
Montrose said, “Trey, you should not be here.”
“Alive, you mean? Yes, I am very unlikely, statistically speaking.”
“No, I mean climbing in the pool and having your mind copied over into an alien machine intelligence bigger than our whole solar system. Maybe you think a copy of you is you, or maybe you think it is a twin sister, or daughter, or whatever, but once there is a copy of you trapped in the Ain Principality, there ain’t no way out. Even if there is ever a way to create another physical body, all the copy can do is make a second copy there, while she stays behind. You, the copy, will continue in the mindspace until you are deleted—which is the end of you, that version of you.”
Her eyes came into sharp focus. She said, “I cannot let my husband go alone. Where a copy of him is, a copy of mine must be. There were no oaths, no vow-taking, among my people during all of our useless, floating, windblown lives. And what happened to all my people, my world? Mickey remembers them only as legend. The people of Tormentil—she changed her name for her marriage, too! Isn’t that sweet?—they don’t even remember what Earth is named. They call it Eden. To them, history began with Jupiter, and even the death of Jupiter is as mythical to them as the Day of Burning—the Ecpyrosis.” She giggled again and held her hand before her mouth. “Oh! But you remember that day, don’t you? You ordered it.”
“Naw. My horse did that,” Montrose said. He turned to Mickey. “How did you convince him to agree?”
Mickey smiled. “You forget that, for a time, I was the disciple of Exarchel and a loyal servant of the Machine. Del Azarchel has a noble nature, but fate placed him under a curse, and he will one day destroy himself. I appealed to his nobility. Did he want to be recalled by his subjects as the leader who abandoned them, sold them for a woman, even such a woman as Rania? And he knew he could trust me.”
Trey spoke in a dreaming voice, looking at the passing clouds of winged fairy figurines, “I still don’t see why the two of them just could not agree … the Master and Meany, I mean.”
Mickey said to her, “They both had to give me their power of attorney and appoint me minister plenipotentiary to deal with Ain. Ain is too wise, my dearest, gentle bloom, and cannot be deceived. Both these men knew the other would sell him out for the chance to go by himself. But they both knew I would be willing to dash their hopes rather than see our children sold again into the indentured servitude which the return of Rania, false or not, truly freed us. Because I love you more than I love them. They both know me, and both trust me, and neither would dare in his wildest dreams break their solemn oath to me to abide by the outcome of whatever negotiations I can manage. Montrose will not break his word because he is too stubborn, and Del Azarchel is too proud.”
Trey said to Montrose, laying her hand on his elbow and leaning close, “You are lucky to have a friend in my Mictlanagualzin!”
Montrose said to her, “You are lucky you can pronounce his name.” And to him, he said, “But now I am abandoning you. You’ve been with me since—pestilence! How long has it been?—since the Forty-Eighth Century. Damn. What is it now? The Seven Hundred Thirty-Eighth?”
“You must,” said Mickey. “I insist. Because—”
“Why? Why this sacrifice? For me?”
“No. You are actually, well—if I may speak freely?”
“Better not. Speaking freely is overrated,” said Montrose.
Mickey nodded. “You can take it. There was a statue of you in the graveyard behind my mother’s mating house. We were supposed to sacrifice the colt of an ass once a year to you. Your statue had three eyes and a necklace of skulls, and when it rained on the tin roof of the little grave shrine, it sounded like drums, or the hoofbeats of the white horses legend said you kept with you underground and woke for wars in the dark places underground, with cavalry charges and countercharges that were the earthquakes. And the real you is quite—really, a disappointment. You are very obnoxious.”
“The hell you say! Ain’t I the damnified soul of refinement!”
“Do you know you wipe your mouth with your sleeve rather than use a napkin when you eat, in the exact same spot you wipe your nose rather than use a handkerchief? So, no, I am not staying behind for your sake.”
“Then why?”
“For her.”
“Who?” But the moment the word was out of his mouth, Montrose knew.
Mickey confirmed it. “For Rania, of course.”
“Why?”
“Menelaus, you met her, you saw her. You touched her with your hand, held her in your arms. You know her as a person, a real person. To me, she was the princess who stole a star and went to the land beyond the land of the dead, to plead for the soul of man. When Rania returned, and I saw her fall from the sky like a goddess brightly winged, I knew my faith had been sound, all those years, when I would sacrifice turtledoves to her shrine in high places, in the sacred groves. But to see her as real! It was ecstasy!” He shook his head sadly. “And then I found she was not real. That woman was a copy made by the aliens. For what purpose, no one can guess.”
Montrose said, “What are you driving at?”
“I need her to be real. She cannot be just a story, a false story, and man has no cure for the harms of the world, no one willing to journey beyond the farthest star for us! But if I do not stay behind and guide Ain through the steps of our bargain with him, who else can, or would? In some strange way, I know Ain’s mind, strange and supreme a being as he is. Haven’t you noticed he thinks like a Witch?”
“Like a what? How do you figure?”
“Ain burned his past. He lives for others. These are Witch traits. Besides, it is also for your sake I stay. Who else would you trust not to betray you to Del Azarchel, and who else would Del Azarchel trust not to betray him to you? The Scolopendra and Myrmidon descendants are his; the descendants of the Swans and Foxes are yours, and so on. No one has ever served both of you, but me. So I have to stay. I have to know that the Swan Princess is real. To know it, down to my bones. That means you have to go find her.”