She looked dreamy, thoughtful and melancholy, yet the shadow of a smile touched her scarlet lips. Menelaus decided now was not the time to tell her that her mother was a Petrie dish.
Menelaus shrugged with one shoulder. “I like the world just fine, mountains and trees, all that good stuff. Plague, I even like the Alaska wastes where I was snowed in not long back—hunting and ice-fishing. I just don’t like the people, mostly. You got a rotten set-up here, Princess, and it sounds like you were the setter-upper, not Blackie.”
“Perhaps the people of the world have not been as kind to you as they have to me. It would be ungrateful of me to feel less than love, after all the warmth this world has shown. A world of wonder! Do you ever smell the air, feel the flowing wind, and simply marvel at it? You have breathed bottled air, I know. But you were not born breathing it.”
Menelaus had seen simple joy shining on the faces of children; but this was different. This was intelligent joy, adult and profound. It was a strange thing to see. In his life, the people he met did not rejoice—if that was the word for it—in the simple act of breathing.
“I was born breathing free, alright. I would prefer to live in a Democracy.”
“If the people also preferred it, so should we all be. I was not born in a crown, or surrounded by fine things—these were pressed upon me by a grateful world, relieved from the endless tears and horrors of war. You know, I did not even know what war was at first, or murder? I lived among elderly scientists.”
Montrose thought now was not the time to tell her that those elderly scientists were very well-acquainted with murder indeed, having killed the Captain and more than half the crew.
Instead he said, “I don’t believe people don’t want to be free.”
“Nor do I, but there are two kinds of freedom: license to indulge any desire, base or noble, natural or unnatural, provided no one and nothing hinders you is the first kind, and it is deadly to men. The second kind is the freedom that comes of fulfilling or completing the work of nature that is half-formed in us. Men who are free in the first sense of the word will freely vote their freedom away, in return for lucre, prestige, and safety. In the early days, the Senior Del Azarchel simply bought the elections he needed, until the free nations of the world had prime ministers and parliaments composed of his creatures, who joined the Concordat willingly.”
A strange look came into her eyes, which Montrose did not know how to interpret. Nostalgia? Sorrow?
“It was proud and stubborn kings and warlords of small or backward nations, which had returned to a more personal and less bureaucratic form of government, that held out against him. They had the second type of freedom, not the first: They were not dehumanized. Bad as they were, those kings regarded their subjects as their children, not as their customers or patients or wards or subjects of their latest experiments in sociopolitical engineering. But they lacked the first type of freedom, and those subjects were not free enough to resist us.”
Montrose wondered where the Princess had gotten her notion of what princesses acted like. Where else? From the royalty she defeated, the princes who treated their subjects like children. The strange look was one of admiration.
“What did you offer them?” he asked.
“Honors and offices—the Copts and Manchurians and Boers form the backbone of our officer cadre, and they are allowed forms of dress and address denied other men, and in the wild areas of the world, they rule unchecked. The Concordat allows them indulgences the Church denies to others, such as divorce and contraception: They do not replace their numbers, and in a generation their vestige must find another fate. Much evil is done in my name that I abhor. If I were free to be ungrateful, I would flee my post. As it is, here I am chained as if with chains of gold, fair and gleaming, and only the terrible voice of a stronger duty can call me away.”
Montrose said, “What’s this talk of chains? Aren’t you in charge?”
“I have all the power a Captain might have over her ship, if her sails were in darkness.”
For a moment, he thought she meant a seagoing ship, sailing at night. But, no: in her world there was no night, only the darkness between stars. “A lightship out of her guiding lightbeam is in free fall, Princess,” he said.
Rania nodded. “Exactly so. Such a Captain is merely trapped in an elaborate construction of steel, and merely carried along. The power of the Sovereign rests on the consent, tacit or open, of her subjects. Either they love her, or she does not lead. You know that. I was not born of this world: Every breeze and breath of air is a gift to me, not something I made for my own. I must repay as best I may, not counting the cost.”
He squinted at her. This sounded like the kind of thing men facing danger told themselves.
“What cost are we talking about? You said you wanted my help. Are you in trouble?”
“I expect you to be fearless, in any of your aspects or avatars.”
He was taken aback. “What does that mean? What exactly are you aiming I can do for you?”
“Learned Montrose, you surprise me! You know where you excel.” Her tone seemed playful. Or perhaps he was imagining it.
“My jobs, in no particular order, were weaponsmith, pony-soldier, duelist, lawyer, a short stint as a spacehand, and a shorter stint as a xenomathematician. Oh, and human guinea pig for self-inflicted brain experimentation. I am not a failure at two of them.”
“I have no need for your counsel as an attorney, being well-supplied with staff in that regard. It is your other professions that interest me.”
“Great! Who do you want me to kill?”
“There is a dragon, O my champion, I require you to slay.”
“What? I mean, begging your pardon? Did you say you wanted me to kill what again?”
“Come. Walk with me.”
Rania merely tucked her shoulder under his arm, and wound her slender hand around his, so that he found himself half-embracing her as he had just been imagining.
The sensation of her silken glove on his hand sent a curious ripple up his arm.
This is it. He thought. I am falling in love. Or I got the stomach flu.
He breathed deeply. Her loveliness was an aura around her, a warmth, a perfume. He walked, feeling like a bull being led by the nose-ring by some slender farm girl. The strength in her arm surprised him: there was lioness muscle under that soft skin.
And she was another man’s girl! He hated himself, at least a little bit, at the thought of being a poacher, and he hated himself again for not hating himself more. But in the back of his mind, he thought it as clear as day that Blackie did not deserve her.
But the strength of his own infatuation puzzled him. He had seen pretty women before—no one fell in love that fast, just in the twinkling of an eye. But she had been in his mind since first he saw her portrait at Blackie’s. Why did she look so … familiar? He felt in his heart as if he already knew her.
She was not leading him back into the ballroom, but down the balcony to a smaller door to one side. The half-invisible soldiers softly opened the door for them. The soldiers did not enter, but stayed behind.
Beyond was a corridor, one he had not seen coming in, wainscoted in highly polished wood up to waist-high, and above that, an intricate wallpaper in blue with gold highlights, a motif of lianas, leaves, and lilies.
As she crossed the threshold, she touched the ruby that rested between her breasts. It must have been a control surface, because up from her coiffeur, glittering like dragonflies, rose a swarm of tiny, winged machines. Her hair came undone, and formed a momentary cloud of scented gold around her face. It was not that the strands were weightless in the night-breeze around her, but Menelaus had a ghost of a memory in his mind that it should have looked that way.