She turned and nodded. The dark figures nodded and stepped back, their suits taking on the hue and patterns of brick and climbing rose-vine of the wall behind them. In the complex patterns of the fireworks, their suits could not react at speed, and so human-shaped bubbles with dark goggles hovering at eye-level were visible, even in the gloom. But then the light steadied, and grew bright, and the cheers of the crowds changed, and became a steady roar, and the soldiers faded into invisibility, paradoxically harder to see, as the light grew stronger.
“What—wait—? You’re the Captain?”
Menelaus wondered how he could have missed the point. There were clues enough. Del Azarchel had mentioned the Princess being “in transit” and out of radio communication, and had said the same thing of the Captain. Montrose had assumed “in transit” meant in the middle of traveling, but no, Del Azarchel had used the word in its spacer’s meaning: the Hermetic had been between Earth and the Sun. Radio communication was always difficult for targets lost in the electromagnetic glare and radio-noise Sol put out.
“Y—You were not at the Conclave,” Menelaus stammered, feeling foolish.
“That is for crew, the civilian arm of the expedition. I represent the military—the sole military officer of the expedition. Do you forget neither the Spanish nor the Hindu ethnospheres would accept the other’s leadership? That the Hermetic sailed under the flag of the Princedom of Monaco, under the banner of Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince? Ah! One would think a lawyer would pay more attention to such legal niceties.”
Her eyes were sparkling with mirth as she shook her head in disbelief.
Rania was flirting with him. He was sure. That look of her eyes half-lidded! Or not. There was something speculative in that look. Cool curiosity. The star-princess looking at some Earthbound relic of the past. He was imagining it. He had to get a grip on himself! But never had he wanted to keep on imagining anything so badly.
The perfume was driving him mad.
“So!” she said, “you offer to fight all the world for me—again. It is gallant, to be sure, but as your proposed conquest is carved out from lands already his, it would mean fighting my betrothed and your Senior Officer, whose world this is. Ximen calls you his brother. A brother like Cain, is it to be?”
Montrose jammed his hands into his pockets and scowled. “I didn’t mean nothing by it—I mean, if you are promised to that skunk Blackie, I shouldn’t be kidding around—”
“Did I reject your offer? This earthly orb is as precious as a jewel, or the beating heart of a nightingale, but small. Will you help me on a larger conquest, one that involves no bloodshed? For that reason I summoned you—for that reason I cured you—for that reason I stirred you from your frozen slumber. Though I have the right to demand your aid, instead I ask it.”
Before he could think of what to answer, there was a flare from overhead like a flash of lightning. Then the light steadied and the cheers of the crowds changed, and became a steady roar.
Menelaus turned, and saw his own scowling face, enormously amplified, looming like the face of megalithic sphinx, splashed against the canopy of stars. Here was his nose, large and misshapen, hanging overhead. He blinked, and saw his eyelids, large as two moons, waft shut and open.
But this was but a corner of the scene that filled the heavens, which all the voices of the people cheered: She was raising one gloved hand to acknowledge the tumult of applause, and smiled with true and heartfelt joy at their adoration.
De god redt de Koningin! Rania! Rania!
She spoke without moving her teeth, nor did her eyes look at him. “I am not really a Queen, you know. The daughter of the Prince of Monaco is not royalty. The Buckhurst case established that members of the Sovereign’s family who do not hold peerage dignities are actually commoners.”
He said, “I thought you ran the whole planet.”
“No. That is the concern of the landing party. The Captain only has authority above the atmosphere. The crew controls the Concordat, which controls the world, so I suppose I reign in truth, even if I do not rule in name. The world does not call me Captain.”
“Eh? So what do they call you?”
“Serene,” she said, showing her dimples. “Her Serene Highness. Isn’t that sweet of them?”
He raised his hand and mustered a smile and waved as well. The radar-invisible ceramic knife he had slipped into his palm when the bodyguards startled him by moving, he let slip back up his sleeve, of course, before he raised his hand. “Well, Princess, even if you ain’t no real Queen, if the common folk make such an error over so much time, you say we got to honor it, right?”
That made her lift her chin and laugh, and so the titanic mouth hanging in the heavens above them opened wide, and the teeth like a Great Wall of China flashed white; the huge, beautiful eyes, vast as windswept lakes, narrowed with mirth, so that her whole face glowed. The cheers below redoubled.
13
Philosophical Language
1. Her Champion
The hollering of the crowd, and the Princess smiling and waving down to them went on and on. Even though he was being photographed by those flying bugs, and his image was projected titan-sized on to the clouds above the castle, Menelaus got bored of smiling, as his face was not built for it. So he rolled a cigarette, slouched against a nearby statue, struck a match against the statue’s buttocks, and had a smoke. He examined his huge picture overhead. You know, his handmade buckskins really did look rather shabby, come to think on it, especially next to this princess.
Montrose was lost in thought, looking down at the shining coiffeur of her hair, jeweled and elaborate. Her scent, warm and feminine with a hint of lavender, was like a half-heard note of music, seductive as spring air. He noticed that the top of her head did not reach his chin: she might be too short to dance with. Not that the people of this day danced proper dances, woman in a man’s arms. They bowed and swayed in lines and figures. How could something like the waltz, Mankind’s greatest invention, simply pass away? Menelaus told himself he would have to reintroduce the custom. Otherwise there would be no chance to take this little golden woman in his arms.
He did not notice when her vast face vanished from the clouds above, and the cheers changed into sea-wave sounds of more ordinary mirth; but suddenly it was dim on the balcony again. She tilted up her finely-boned chin. He could not help but look at the red arc of her full lower lip, the tiny crease between chin and lip. What was that line called? Did it have a name?
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked gaily, waving her gloved hand to the winter midnight horizon, the houses and fields below aflame with fireworks and colored torches.
Since he did not know what she was talking about, he nodded and said, “Very.”
Rania said, “I was told by my fathers, the men who raised me, that my mother died bringing me into the world—my world, what you call a ship. Madalena, they said her name was. One memento I had from my mother was a picture of the Virgin Mary, crowned in stars, and with the moon beneath her feet. I did not know what it was, so I thought it was a picture of ‘Mother Earth’ of which the crew so often spoke, the world that once beamed a whole library of messages to us, and then fell silent. You see, I did not know your world was a globe. I had never seen a living globe. And so I loved this world because I pictured her as a beautiful mother, crowned in stars. Can you say, in truth, my picture is worse than those who think this world is merely a rock in space, coated with a thin film of water and air?”