The carousel had blackened and shriveled like paper in a fire, shrinking inward, and everything, including what Montrose had thought was air and water, living creatures and hull material, was disassembling itself into a thick black ooze. In a vast wash of spiral mud and muck, the nanomachinery wrapped itself around the black sphere, one layer after another, and formed a featureless gray sphere around the buried black sphere. The only irregularity was the nodule which had once been the ice rink. His original body was still in there, frozen in molecular hibernation, but alive.
This featureless, geometrically perfect sphere was the true shape of the alien vessel.
Twinklewink was gone, erased to make room for Montrose, who could feel the jagged, angular shapes of the alien thought-forms of the operating system, like the bones of a skeleton, somewhere beneath the surface of his consciousness. This, then, was the true ship’s mind.
But he had no fuel and only the tiny cache of useful energy Blackie had not known about, generated when the ship had collapsed back into its primal goo, which Twinklewink had recovered and stored. A small ring of little black teardrops still contained magnetic monopolar lines linking them invisibly to the black sphere. The majority of the sails were no longer attached: they would begin to drift away before too many years had passed, pushed by interstellar light.
Perhaps, if he had time and energy, Montrose could have formed remote units like the once fairies, now teardrops, and sent them after the sails. But the little units, one by one, were running out of fuel, and they used the last of their maneuvering mass to set themselves drifting close enough to the gray sphere to rendezvous and be absorbed.
The singularity drive was unharmed and still functioning, but there was no energy to spin the disk up to operational speed. The tiny bit of fuel needed to expand and contract the shrouds was gone. There was not enough cached energy left to erect a ramjet field and scoop up interstellar hydrogen. There was a trickle of energy from the still-connected sail as it absorbed a barely detectable trifle from incoming starlight. If the ship had retained any ability to navigate, Montrose could have pointed her toward the nearest star and waited to get close enough to absorb and use the solar power. But the vessel was stricken, able to alter course and speed only by the small impulse of the ambient starlight on the torn saiclass="underline" a half a degree in any direction, or the loss of a few miles per hour over lightyears of distance.
Blackie had thought of everything, taken everything, and ruined everything.
It would be a while before he left the galaxy altogether, but his speed was so great that no star was within a vector he could approach. He could see the beautiful rose-red star called La Superba, also called Y Canum Venaticorum, only two degrees off his port bow, and only fifty lightyears distant. But at his immense current relative velocity to it, he could no more reach it than he could catch a bullet in his teeth. It was as far away, fuel-wise, as it had been when he was a little boy back in Texas, penniless and cold.
Check and mate. Montrose had lost the duel.
There was enough power to keep Montrose alive in a state of machine awareness, a ghost, overlooking his unliving body, a corpse. But even that was too much strain for the system: Montrose would have to sleep, leaving only a clock sequence awake to wake him every hundred years or so, just in case something in his hopeless condition changed.
“Well,” he said, “if this is better than being buried alive, I am not sure how.”
Foolishly, he used some of his last scrap of discretionary energy to form a radio laser emitter out of the gray substance, point it at M3, and send the strongest pulse he could manage, both in English and in Monument notation: Princess! I am coming!
And that effort was all. Darkness swirled in. Ghosts cannot faint, perhaps, but they can fall below self-awareness.
Neither alive nor dead, the featureless gray sphere with its black heart holding the ghost of Menelaus Montrose and his corpse sped through the void, and nothing but darkness was to every side.
APPENDIX A
Pedigree of Earths by Diaspora1
1LEGEND: Each colony is to the right of her mother system. Mother world noted (in parenthesis) as needed. Dominant race in [square brackets]. Planets in bold. *indicates Potentate (terrestrial planets) CAPITALS are Powers (Gas Giants), BOLD CAPITALS are Principalities (system-wide). Question mark when no certain record establishes which planet is mother. LY = lightyears.
APPENDIX B
Posthumans
Names of the Posthuman Species
Swans (Second Humans)—includes the Hierophants of the Cherishing (28th Millennium)
Myrmidons (Third Humans)—includes Megalodons (40th to 55th Millennium)
Kitsune (Fourth Humans)—also called Fox Maidens or Foxes
Patricians (Fifth Humans)
Last Men (Sixth Humans)—called by the Patricians Plebeians or called by the Foxes Athymoi—that is, Men without Chests—is created as the final race. It is a race addicted to servitude, unable to alter the cliometric conditions imposed on them.
Myrmecoleons (Seventh Humans)—found only on worlds in Orion beyond the boundaries of the Empyrean of Man, colonized by Torment in Exile. Also called the Evangels.
NOTE: Eidolons (47th to 48th Millennium) are a failed attempt at creating a new species.
Posthuman Subspecies (by Millennium)
20th Millennium—Hibernal Men
21st Millennium—Hibernals, Nyctalops, and Troglodytes
31st Millennium—Ghosts, Locusts, and Troglodytes extinct
46th Millennium—Vampires
47th Millennium—Eidolons
48th Millennium—Eidolons extinct
49th Millennium—Parthenocrats (Fox-Swan hybrids); Myrmidons extinct; Megalodons created
50th Millennium—Overlords created by Vampires; Vampires extinct (conformed into Patricians)
54th Millennium—Ougres, Sworns, Loricates; Foxes extinct
55th Millennium—Megalodons extinct
70th Millennium—Last Men
Other Variants and Hybrids—Nicors (Walpurgine sea-Hormagaunts); Optimates (Penitent Swan Patricians); Monsters (Terran Pericolosa Vampire-Myrmidons); Delectables (Nymph Patricians); Felicities (Melusine Non-Orthogonals); Sinners (Feline Chimera Patrician); Wraiths (Hungry Witch-Patrician); Joys (Fox-Nymphs); Renunciants (Willowflower Scholar Patricians); Nagual (Scholarized Fox-Myrmidon hybrids); Camenae (Asclepiad Fox-Melusine); Rusalka (Melusine Swans from Cursed Earth); Merrow (Giantess-Sylph Melusine); Rakshasi (Nymph-Fox-Sylph Vampiresses from Peachmountain); Asclepiads (Locust-Iatrocrats); Scolopendra (Melusine-Myrmidons); Myrmecoleons (Heirophant-Scolopendra of Torment)
NOTE: A “subspecies” is not a hybrid properly so called merely for sharing genetic information, which, due to Fox biotechnology, can be freely swapped between any species. Listed here are cliometric rather than biological subspecies—that is, groups embracing a particular, exclusive, and distinctive pattern of genetic, glandular, parasympathetic, neural, and social-psychological structures which impose a definitive vector on the shape of planetary history.