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Montrose set aside that question for later. At the moment, he meditated on one thing: the plans that the Hermeticists were making for the remotest future, eight thousand years from now when the alien machines arrive to claim the Earth as their property—the Hermeticists did, just as they said, intend to force human evolution to its next step. But the Hermeticists did not mean to fight to survive. They meant to collaborate; to cooperate; to surrender. A live horse is better than a dead ape.

The design for the next human race was meant to be creatures smart enough to be useful to the Hyades, but docile enough not to create any problems.

The asymptote was not meant to produce superhuman free men, but superhuman slaves.

All that talk of a golden future was a lie. Servitude was all that the destiny of Mankind held, and the transhuman race beyond humanity was to be held in subhuman subjugation.

Montrose raised his hands out of the gelatin and clutched his head. It was his best friend that was planning to sell Mankind and the children of men to the Hyades. Del Azarchel, of all people!

The hatred in his heart seemed sharper, purer, clearer than the muddy emotions he had known back when he was a merely human. He missed those days already.

The nurses came in, called by the monitors, or else by the gulping hiccups of Montrose’s sobs. He wanted to turn over, to turn his face away, but the bed of gel would not permit it.

It is embarrassing when superhumans cry.

3. Prenuptial Considerations

Before he even was fully recovered, Montrose found himself introduced to the Rulers and Sovereigns and Magnates of the world. He met Pnumatics dressed like peacocks, Psychics dressed like spacers in wigs, elected Bishops wielding political power, and elected Administrators from those cities or parishes with Republican forms of government dressed in simple drabs—and not a man jack of them he much cared for. He did not like the ceremony, the courtesy, the courtliness, the fawning. His Lone Star State spirit rankled at the inequality.

His disliking did not change when he was elevated to the highest ranks of this ranked society. But three things changed immediately.

First, it was to be a Morganitic marriage, meaning neither he nor his heirs would inherit his wife’s royal titles and noble rights; but she ennobled him and enfeoffed him with lands and rents in a recently-acquired county in Gascony, quite beautiful now that the bacteriological infection from the last war was dying off, the fungi dotting the hedges and trees like leprosy was vanishing, and both grapevines and vintners were returning to the wilderness area. Antiquarians were felling stalks of yeasty growth and burning spore-fields to uncover the abandoned relics the previous generations had mummified before evacuation: a miraculous number of cathedrals, famous houses, and fortresses were intact. Montrose congratulated himself on being from the same province as Cyrano de Bergerac. His title was Count of Armagnac.

Second, he was also given a red bracelet, heavy as a manacle, to wear on his wrist, and Rania’s servants told him he could not appear in public save in the black shipsuit to which he, as a man of outer space, alone was entitled. He kicked up a row and was a little surprised when he got kicked back.

A man named Vardanov, her security officer, was a dark-skinned Slav from Azania: one of those people from the “Old Order” who had been bribed into supporting the Concordat with a title and a heraldic escutcheon. The blond man kept his skin tuned as dark as ivory, and had used the recently-released RNA-spoofing techniques of the Hermeticists to add three feet and a hundred pounds of muscle to his frame. He dressed, like all the court soldiers of this ridiculous time period, in the peaked helmet and metal breastplate of a Spanish Conquistador. He was polite enough to remove his helmet and tuck it in his elbow, and give Montrose a stiff bow, before calling him a fool. The two stood in a small solarium of Montrose’s delightful little mansion in Gascony, looking out on the trellises of vines.

“Come again?” said Montrose, doubting his ears.

Vardanov had a melancholy face and large, sad eyes, so it was hard to tell how angry he was. He spoke in a thick, slow voice, like the voice of a thoughtful elephant. Menelaus could not place the accent: perhaps a combination of Russian and Dutch. “Fool!” he said again, “and why is it you are making my job more difficult, yes?”

The windows opaqued, putting the little richly-furnished chamber into twilight. The dark window also prevented anyone outside from looking in. The man’s big hand dropped casually to the hilt of his bayonet, which was sheathed in his web-belt.

Montrose resolved the man’s stance into a fractal pattern of vector motions, position of limbs and their kinetic values, and compared it with his own. Oddly, there did not seem to be a solution. With his greater mass and reach, if the two of them fought, Montrose (barring unforeseen factors entering the field) would lose.

So stepping forward and breaking the guy’s nose was, at the moment, not an optimal strategy.

Montrose decided that a diplomatic response was needed. “So why should I give a pair of donkey’s swollen black testicles what the hell your job is, or how difficult it is?”

Well, that was diplomatic for him. These things should be judged on a sliding scale.

The man showed no anger on his face, although with his new and heightened perceptions, Montrose could analyze the man’s blush response and microscopic pupil dilations. Here was a creature whose unsleeping anger, frustration, and paranoia, kept him in dangerous psychological balance by a sense of honor, an iron self-control.

“With all due respect, Your Excellency,” Vardanov said in his sad, slow voice, “my duty is to protect the person of Her Serene Highness. Do you understand that this is a matter of warfare on a personal level, yes? Yes. Supreme excellence in war, it is to destroy the enemy will to fight, not in striking his body.”

Montrose was impressed, not just because the man could quote Sun Tsu on the art of war, but because it occurred to him that Vardanov had done exactly that to him. When he did not see a feasible max-min vector-solution for an engagement, Montrose hadn’t struck a blow.

Vardanov said, “It falls to me to say what all know, and no one will say: you are an embarrassment to Her Serene Highness. Yes? Yes.” He nodded, as if happy to hear himself agreeing with himself. “In other years, other places, this means nothing. Alone in barn, you are a braying jackass, and no one hears your voice, no one is disturbed. But here! But now! You are in palace. It is time of tumult, maybe war. Esprit de corps is weighty thing, yes? Yes. The mystique, the awe, the love, the fear commoners behold Her Serene Highness, this is Her Highness’s first line of the defense. They say you have done something to that brain of yours, yes, to make you more than man. You can see without me to explain of it, yes?”

“Explain it anyway.” Montrose casually put his hands behind his back.

Vardanov gave a massive, slow shrug, and spread his hands. He casually dropped his hand behind a vase standing on a pillar near the door, which meant Montrose could not see if he had drawn a weapon from his wrist-holster. Since Montrose was reaching up his own sleeve for the hilt of the ceramic knife he kept in a forearm sheath, he decided not to draw it.

Vardanov spoke while shrugging. “Two things. One.” He held up a think forefinger. (Montrose recognized the trick involved and kept his attention on the other hand, the one hidden behind the vase.) “While you wear the uniform of the great starship Hermetic, you are protected by the weapons of the Hermetic, and the common people are in awe of fire from heaven. In the eyes of the law, no one can arrest you, no one can take and question you, because you are not of this Earth.”