Montrose shook hands for the last time with Mickey. “Make sure only volunteers go!” he said. “Being trapped in the mind of an alien being is hell.”
Mickey said, “Menelaus, I shall not fail you. I foresee that you will meet your princess again, nor will this be the end of your travails, but more than this galaxy will be changed by the love you bear her. You think yourself selfish, seeking nothing but this one woman, but all this is arranged by Providence. Sorrow and pain is all along the path before you, but beyond it, I see, like a mountain in the distance, the final end of that path, beyond the walls of this world. Therefore, I do not say farewell, for a spirit of prophecy tells me we shall meet again, not in this life, but in a country of joy. I say only Godspeed to you, and may the ghost grant you the strength to cross the darker parts of the cruel path awaiting!”
Montrose found nothing to say, but gave Mickey a bear hug.
Trey stood on her tiptoes and kissed Montrose on the cheek. “It has to be a happy ending. It has to! Otherwise the universe doesn’t make sense, does it? But you have to tell me: Is she really real? The real one?”
Montrose said, “She is alive. I know. I ain’t got no clue how I know, but I do. I’ll get her back. I know that, too. I am in love. That makes her real.”
Without bothering to strip, the two of them, holding hands, stepped down into the fluid of the pool, which also served as a suspension coffin and neural reading unit. Nanomachines held in suspension in the clear liquid gathered around them like swarms of diamonds. The surface grew solid and turned opaque as a mirror. Less than half an hour later, an airlock opened beneath the pool, and the solid disk of icy material carrying the two fell away from the spinning vessel.
The landing boat detached from the axial dock and swooped after them, growing the wings it would use for reentry, once her passengers were aboard.
Montrose raised his hand and commanded the little sun of his miniature world to go out. Then he bowed his head. His skin turned white as he entered biosuspension. From his feet, like the concentric ripples seen in a pond disturbed by a stone, pale hues spread across grass and trees as all the vegetable life entered suspended animation.
The Solitudines Vastae Caelorum then was silent, and all around the circular garden, the quiet stars turned and turned.
3
Cradle of the Stars
1. Parity
A.D. 80100
Twinklewink, the tiny fairy queen, landed on the ice-white nose of Montrose and commanded him to wake. Waking from suspension no longer required hours or days of cellular readjustment, nor even a few minutes of nausea. Montrose sat up suddenly, fully awake, and found himself thrown toward the ceiling. He flew two yards into the air, striking a mass of green leaves and hard branches and twigs that covered the ceiling.
“What the pox?” he snarled, trying to extricate himself.
The light here was gloomy and wavering, dusty beams swaying like moonlight seen through a shifting canopy. He was in Rania’s bedroom, but the futon and tatami mats, the thinking glasses and painted wall screens were covered over with leafy debris, mold, and a nest of clinging branches. The light came from the arched window overlooking the circular garden of the ship.
He moved hand over hand, needing to tap his foot on the leaf mass or bent floor matting only once every yard or two. The window had three or four prodigious branches thrust into the opening, and the action of clinging twigs had broken the window frame in several places.
He pushed his head and one shoulder out through the narrow gap in the wood, scraping himself on the bark. Outside, the lanterns of the miniature sun were quenched, and the whole area between the ring of the garden at the circumference and the black sphere of the rive core at the axis was crowded with a fantastical array of knots, loops, and labyrinthine twists and spirals of wood. Whether it was one tree or many, Montrose could not be sure, but the effect of low gravity on the Earthly trees had been well known ever since the Second Space Age. He knew he was seeing hundreds of years of growth, maybe a thousand.
“Twinklewink!” he snapped. “How long has the carousel been spinning at less than one gravity of acceleration?”
The little fairy queen fluttered over and landed on his shoulder, a spark of acetylene light gleaming from her wand. “Three thousand three hundred years, Captain Montrose.”
That was very close to half their travel time.
He and Blackie had woken up out of suspension to share a glass of wine at the halfway point of the voyage. A tradition as old as star-sailing hallowed the occasion: it was the moment of weightless maneuvering when the ship was to rotate and place her sails behind her, to occlude the aft stars and let the fore stars for the first time become visible.
Montrose had then returned to biosuspension. Del Azarchel evidently had not.
He said, “Show me the energy use logs.” The fairy queen waved her wand, and the information as if by magic appeared as visions in his cerebral cortex, and in specialized receiving cells in his short-term memory. Del Azarchel had used the mind replication and broadcast machinery at the core and spun the singularity disk up to speed. He had pointed the long-range instruments at 41 Cancri, the capital star of the Praesepe Cluster.
Montrose said, “Did Blackie tell you to slow the rotation of the ship?”
“No, sir. But there is sufficient electromagnetic friction to cause appreciable slowing over three thousand years, if the correction magnets have insufficient energy. Much of the energy budget had been expended by Dr. Del Azarchel during his twenty-seven broadcasts of his brain information over the years.”
“He is not allowed to give orders to you, Twinklewink!”
“That is not precisely true, sir. You gave him permission to use the mind replication system, and at no point did you countermand the order. I was careful to examine his actions, and I detected nothing that could harm the ship or the mission, or even cause humiliation. I did not allow him to use any energy that had been allocated to other tasks.”
“What about this giant tree?”
Twinklewink said, “It does not harm the ship nor impede the mission. If you will like it pruned or removed, please state orders to that effect in clear and actionable language.”
Montrose merely growled. “How about unblocking this window so I can get out and go clout the bastard?”
Twinklewink waved her wand at the twisted tree trunks through which Montrose had thrust his head and one shoulder. The bark turned white as it entered hibernation, and then some sequence of orders to the cellular nanomachinery now controlling the vegetable cells caused the tree trunks touching him to rot and go soft. He pulled his way clear and, moments later, was bounding in the quarter gravity from branch to curling branch, leaping lightly as a cricket along a crazed and crooked curving roadway of wood.
Near the overgrown and ruined garden at the outer radius of the ship, Del Azarchel was seated on a low-hanging branch, a teacup in his hand, staring out through the transparent hull.
“Ah! Montrose,” he began, coming lightly to his feet as Montrose bounded from a nearby limb down across the air toward him. “I have just made an astonishing discovery…”
Without warning or greeting or word of defiance, Montrose struck him across the face with his fist, sending the other man head over heels off the narrow branch in a parabola of spilled tea. The china cup and saucer went flying into the green leaves.