“They said that they were the preferred darlings of evolution,” he guessed, grimacing.
She nodded, looking as if she felt ashamed for the men who raised her. “The fact that the noble Kshatriya and peaceful Brahmins died proved that they were never fit to survive: so runs the myth. That myth means the Hermeticists must kill themselves in proxy in their mental wars in dataspace. Such is the Hermetic spirit.”
Something in her poise and expression seemed odd to him. “There is something else.”
Her sea-gray gaze was upon him, glancing from the corners of her eyes, beneath heavily lashed lids. She said nothing.
“They’re fighting over you, aren’t they? In their electronic gladiatorial games. They are all in love with you, not just Del Azarchel. Well…? You don’t seem to be in any hurry to deny it.”
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing. It ain’t coming back to me. But I can picture it in my head. Since you was the only girl, with your girly scent and dancing eyes and your pheromones clogging the ship’s ventilation system, there you must have been, all bobbing around in zero gee, round and curving and giggly. For a while you were a sacralicious fourteen-year-old, then a coltish seventeen-year-old; just a curious, impish, playful, coy, smarter-than-all-get-out cute little package. Next you were a superintelligent, glittering nineteen-year-old, and the only one really fun to talk with, since you made each of them feel special. I seen you got that gift about you. Also, aboard the submarine-like conditions, the nineteen-year-old had to press up too close to them to see the view screens and work the controls and so on. And of course aboard the ship they are either half-nude to save on mass, or wear nothing but ultraskintight web suits which show off a girl’s extremely well-formed buttocks, and, in the cold, I’m thinking your nipples would…”
She hit him with a slab of ham before he could say more. “Men are disgusting creatures! Who in their right mind would design women to be attracted to them!”
But by that point, he had taken a handful of potato salad to her face in counterattack, and then there was nothing to do but settle the matter by wrestling.
“You better let me up,” she said. Her bottom lip was sticking out as she tried to huff and puff and blow a curl of her hair up out of her eyes. She was nonchalantly watching the lack of success with the stubborn hair strand, not looking at his blazing pale eyes, even though his face was inches from her face, his lips inches from her lips. “You’ll make my protectors nervous. Lèse majesté is a still a crime in these hey-ah parts, pardnah.”
“You trying to make fun of the way I talk?”
“Not trying.”
“What’s that crime again with the French name?”
“Lèse majesté. It is the crime of violating majesty.”
“I add it to the list of crimes I’m saving for our honeymoon.”
“Let me up. Let go of my wrists.”
“Say ‘please.’”
“You issue unlikely commands. Remember who is smarter between us.”
“I remember your belly being ticklish.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“A girl will only say that when she secretly wants you to dare. I keep this feather in my hatband just for times like this. Oh, now she struggles! Say, missy, writhe around and toss your hair some, and I am sure you can break free. I bet you could bite my nose if you tried harder. Sure. I feel my grip weakening. Writhe more and arch your back.”
He folded her wrists atop each other, so he could pin them with one hand. With the other, he drew the feather, and it twitched with playful menace in his fingers.
“It’s an ugly hat,” she pouted.
“Oh, you’ll pay for that comment, girl. This hat has sentimental value. It means I don’t need to comb my hair so often, and that means a lot to me.”
“And I am not a girl. I am a celestial maiden: the first exosolar posthuman chimera created from alien gene codes. Practically an angel!”
“No argument there.”
“What else do I have to do so you don’t think of me as a girl?”
“You’re still a girl. Human nature snaps back and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”
By then she was giggling too hard to catch her breath, and as predicted, her troopers came forward at a quickstep, railgun lances ready, to see what was causing the shrieks.
After explanations and apologies, they were left alone again, and he was lying on his back, and she was using his armpit as a pillow, and they both looked up at the high blue sky, and sought fractal patterns similar to Monument segments among the clouds.
She sighed, “I truly and deeply hope, my scarecrow of a suitor, that you do have a cure for the flaw in my design. I feel there are things buried, enjambed, structurally encoded in the Monument that are waiting inside me to wake. A destiny. I was meant for something. Do you believe in evolution?”
“I believe it exists,” he said. “I don’t believe that whatever comes next is any better than what comes before. It is non-directed, random, cruel.”
“I was not evolved, though. I was made. My makers followed instructions even they did not understand, from minds not human, not limited to human thoughts. It was directed. Perhaps it is not random, which means that I alone of all Mankind have a destiny and a purpose. Perhaps it is not cruel.”
She sighed and looked sadly at the clouds.
“Cure me, my scarecrow. Drive away the dark wings that beset me, I pray you. I am so tired of not being smart enough. I am weary of my own stupidity.”
He could not think of anything to say to that odd comment, so he turned and closed his arms and kissed her.
16
The Concubine Vector
1. Ceremony
A.D. 2401
Menelaus and Rania were married in June of 2401 in the Iglesia de San Francisco, the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Quito, nine thousand feet above sea level and fifteen miles south of the Equator. His Holiness, Pope Innocent XXIV, himself, performed the wedding Mass.
In the silent sky, the blazing star of the secondary drive of the newly re-outfitted Hermetic hung in the blue between the white clouds, above the doves, above the tile-roofed houses, above antique Spanish palaces, above the churches inlaid with Inca gold, and it was a light visible even by day.
The primary drive was a total conversion ion-reaction, and would not be lit while the vehicle was near Earth, for fear that contraterrene carbon particles might escape unconsumed from the magnetic drive core, and if entering the upper atmosphere, would annihilate an equal mass of terrene matter and release gamma radiation and exotic particles. It was not a reasonable fear: normal cosmic ray bombardments were more dangerous, but Rania, as ever, was deferential to the opinion of the common man.
While churchbells pealed, the bride and groom rushed down the carpeted steps into the flower-strewn plaza, half-blinded by thrown cherry blossom petals, she as lightly as a deer, he in his lurching, long-legged lope.
Two lines of dismounted cavalrymen in the magnificent livery of the Swiss Guard (costumes so beautiful legend incorrectly, but understandably, attributed the design to Michelangelo) crossed their pikes, adorned with garlands, high overhead, forming a tunnel of blades down which the couple fled. More Swiss Guard were mounted, their steeds adorned with gold and scarlet, and the line of horses kept the grassy lane before the cathedral clear of people, an avenue of escape. These were harsh-faced, keen-eyed young men, and the last four centuries of organized crime and disorganized brigandage surrounding Rome spread the fame of their hardiness. Pikes of modern materials but ancient design were in hands, and weapons more modern were holstered at hip: batons able to administer lethal shocks, or aiming lasers to call down fire from lightweight sniper platforms on rooftops or hanging invisibly in heaven on wings of gauzy blue.