In the near distance was the limb of a crescent planet, boiling with red, cerise, brown, and black storm clouds, with vortices and whirlpools or cerulean and indigo like staring eyes. There was also a beam where the plates had parted striking here. Despite the change in color, Montrose recognized this world as the Neptunian ice giant which had accompanied them and which, during the second half of the journey, had acted as a reflector for the deceleration beam Ain kept centered on the vast globe, and those reflected rays slowed the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum during the brief deceleration phases in the last half of her long voyage to the Praesepe Cluster. Its atmosphere of solid methane ice was now a boiling gas, and wisps of material, including tree-shaped dendrite housings from Ain, large enough to be seen at this distance, were progressing slowly or swiftly up the beam of sunlight, making it visible. At one time it had possessed a ring system as grand as Saturn’s, made entirely of dendrites. It evaporated, its components set about other tasks.
A score of other gas giants were visible like crescent moons, and if there were more than this in the star system, they were hidden beyond the immense curve of the Dyson sphere. Of worlds inside the outer course of the Dyson sphere, four were visible as circular shadows cast on the glowing curve of the colored panes.
The star before them, a yellow giant called Vanderlinden 133, coated with a semitransparent Dyson cloud of concentric layers, was neither the largest star nor the one sending and receiving the most signals.
The Praesepe Cluster contained over three hundred stars and fifty additional dark bodies as large as stars, which may have been opaque Dysons or other elements, nodes, or neural transmission stations in the vast brain of the Domination. The blue stragglers in the group—that is, stars hotter and bluer than other stars of the same luminosity—turned out to be, ironically, the undeveloped star systems, uninfluenced by stellar engineering. The others were coated by spheres and clouds of various thicknesses and consistencies. Certain stars had been artificially induced to ignite as novae: these were coated by nearly solid Dysons, but the excess heat permitted to leak out was sufficient for these stars to be seen from Earth and miscategorized as red giants. Montrose stared in wonder at an object less than a lightyear away, a Dyson oval much like an egg, at whose foci two stars rotated about each other.
Compared to these wonders, even the staggering immensities of the macroscale engineering at Ain were as nothing: a burdei pit-house next to a shining skyscraper.
The central core of the cluster was eleven lightyears in radius. There were two subclusters or lobes in the interstellar brain, one of which gave off stronger x-ray emissions than the other. This indicated that Praesepe was the remnant of two smaller clusters having collided some eight hundred million years ago, some two million years before Praesepe had ejected the stars which later were to form the Hyades Cluster. What convulsions, or wars, or divorces, or epileptic fits these great collisions and expulsions represented, no human knew.
The little fairy pointed at the ringworld. “There you are, Captain. That is you, there.”
Montrose looked at the ring of material. “Wait … this is impossible…” He said softly. “Cahetel…?”
3. The Jupiter Effect
Del Azarchel was also staring at the ringworld in wonder. “My discovery is somewhat less surprising than yours, as it turns out. I was going to tell you that there are human beings living here, on that blue world. I did not realize that one of them was you.”
“I think they are all me,” said Montrose with a strange little laugh. “Damnification and pestilence! He ate me, and I did not agree with his digestion. He was eating a virus. Is that what Ain meant? Is that what Hyades is expecting to happen all over the place, to every civilization men are sent?”
Del Azarchel said, “Did Ain beam a copy of you to the Praesepe Cluster? I was the one running the mental replication system all those years, and you slumbered! There was no copy of you made at any point on planet Torment. How can this be?” But then he said, “Ah! No! You did this long before, I think, while I tarried in Sagittarius. Very subtle!”
Montrose said, “I think my takeover of Cahetel was by accident, so don’t compliment me yet. But you see what happened?”
Del Azarchel pointed toward the ring encircling the blue planet. “Cahetel absorbed a complete copy of your brain information during the first hour of the Second Sweep, when all the Black Fleet was turned. And it could not leave well enough alone and so brought your memories out of storage a few times to help understand what the humans were doing, how to get them settled on the colonies, and so on. I assume Cahetel had other tasks to perform at other stars after leaving Sol?”
Montrose said, “Praesepe controls nine Dominions seated at star clusters and nebulae reaching from Sol past the Pleiades and the Trapezium Cluster to the dark Cone Nebula in Monoceros, twenty-seven hundred lightyears away. All of them must have clients and serfs and founding civilizations as well. That is a lot of folk to talk to. I bet Cahetel tried me out as an emissary for the same reason Ain wants the human race. Some quirk in our psychology, allow us to fight the mental environment, to try harder, to come out on top … some desperate drive…”
“Sexual drive,” said Del Azarchel.
Montrose said, “No, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Why are you here? For Rania. Why am I here? Same reason.” Del Azarchel shrugged. “It is true that certain of these races seem to have two sexes, at least at one time, in the far past and so therefore should be motivated by that basic, primal, caveman urge. Ah, but contemplate how long they have been artificial. Even when they download themselves into bodies of flesh and blood, everything is a handiwork, deliberate, and controlled. They are not allowing the raw energy of the evolutionary process to burst forth: whereas our younger race…”
Montrose said, “That is pure-quill unadulterated pee-yew stinkerino horse flop, Blackie, and you know it. There is something deeper. Something deep inside human nature, or … just maybe … something planted inside human nature…”
Del Azarchel said, “Are you thinking of something Ain said was impressed or impregnated into our very souls by the Monument? That is mere mysticism and obfuscation. How would it change the whole race? Only you, and I, and my dearest Rania now survive of the Hermeticist who touched the Monument. Unless you want to suggest something was enjambed or embedded at such a deep level, that we unknowingly passed these characteristics along to the Swans and Myrmidons, Foxes, and so on?”
“Or you could just poxing ask me, you lumphead, instead of guessing. I am right here.”
Montrose was startled, because he had not spoken.
Both men still stood knee deep in the ceremonial pool, letting the nanomachines in the water tend their wounds. Both men turned and peered, for the voice had come from a thick curtain of leaves nearby. The deep male voice, Montrose’s voice, was coming from a cluster of fairy figurines who were drifting closer.
The cloud of figurines now danced into a new configuration, forming the rough outline or caricature of a head with protruding ears, deep-set eyes, a large and out-thrust jaw. The four somber-faced fairies whose linked arms and legs formed the jaw flew up and down to make the mouth move. Two fairies in red pantaloons floated sidewise with their feet touching, acting as lips, and a fairy floating behind them, looking over her shoulder, flapped her short red cape to mimic the motions of the tongue.
“Well, that is a mite disturbing,” said Montrose.
Del Azarchel said, “So your security merely lets alien beings take over locked circuits and essential systems, while I have access to nothing aboard this ship but live like the Abbé Faria in the Château d’If! I am not even allowed to unlock the pantry!”