The bridal veil was yards upon yards of white satin, trimmed with diamond studs and sparkling sapphires, held by a score of young queens who, in this age of the world, were as slim and lovely as the craft of genetic engineering could make them.
Montrose and Rania had released to the public the secrets of the Hermetic second-youth procedure. At the moment, only the wealthiest and most powerful of the elite could afford the painstaking cell-by-cell alteration: but as if overnight, the rich and mighty were also the young and dazzling.
Montrose hated the trend he could already see forming, but he could see no way around it. The human brain reacts to physical beauty on a preverbal level—it is instantly easier to trust and like handsome features, and remarkably easy to adore and follow. A gulf between ugly commoners and alluring aristocracy in prior ages had been a matter for clothing and ornament: hereafter it would be woven into gene and blood, flesh and bone.
As Rania ran, some hidden signal in the threads was triggered, the long satin train fell away, divided itself neatly into streamers of cloth. The twenty queens now raised their gloved arms, to beckon these streamers upward. Up the fabric flew, high overhead, to the delight of the cheering crowds, and diamonds rained down on them.
Menelaus, grim-faced with happiness, his pale eyes blazing at the adoring crowds, galloping on his long rangy legs, had drawn the ceremonial saber he wore with the absurd uniform. No doubt he would have thrust aside (or thrust into) any unwary well-wishers who dared impede his path away from the celebration and toward his hotly-awaited marriage bed: but the servants of Rania, both uniformed in scarlet and gold or hidden in the crowd, kept the singing mob in check.
The kiss Menelaus and Rania had exchanged before the Pope still burned on his lips: the strange, acrid scent of the high mountain grasses that grew along the lanes for ground-effect vehicles was in his nostrils, and whirled his thoughts like wine.
“You should not have made your legs longer,” he growled. There had been no time for last-minute alterations for the wedding dress, despite the number of seamstresses and fabric-programmers on her staff, so Rania had suffered an overnight modification, to trigger an artificial youth-cycle in her cells, and suffer a growth-spurt to add the needed inches to her height. She now had the coltish legs of an adolescent, a more willowy silhouette.
Menelaus had solved Rania’s neural divarication problem, and she had not been willing to wait, either to put off the wedding for the medical process, or to put off the medical process for the wedding. Since her preset RNA-spoofing black cells in her bloodstream were already programmed to make a universal and rapid change, it was nothing to tweak totipotent cells into her leg bones and muscles. She spent the night before the wedding in a biosuspension coffin, with seven quarts of nanomachinery moving through her body, while Menelaus struggled with the fear that she would wake up as someone different.
So far, she seemed to be normal.
“We discussed this,” she said, eyes elfin, mouth impish, “during our spat. Our first lovers’ quarrel! You lost.”
He hated the fact that the top of her head no longer fit nicely under his chin when they hugged. Now the crown of her head was at the level of his lower lip, and it bothered him more than it should have: it reminded him of the time he found out when he was four years old that pi could not be resolved to any rational number. It seemed obscurely unnatural, as if someone had made a mistake when putting the universe together.
“I’ll be made of sterner stuff when we reach the bridal bower, my fair rebel. Bad enough womenfolk can’t decide what to wear; what damn fool gave them the science to fashion up their flesh and bone, tissue and face?”
“Why! The recent breakthroughs in biotechnology are due, my beloved, to someone’s policy of total honesty to the public. We cannot blame the Hermeticists—they did not invent the system. Someone else performed a mathematical analysis of combination-solutions in genes, a notation system he read off the Monument back when he was insane. Who is to blame, then?”
“What? Next you’ll say the apeman who invented fire is to stand trial for every act of arson since the Stone Age.”
“Hush, for there are sure to be press and spy-bees near the bridal car.”
When they came to the end of the carpet, the flower-festooned electric car was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was Yorvel, looking plump and ridiculous in the gold-purple-scarlet livery of the Pope’s Swiss Guard, pole-arm held gingerly in one hand, bridle held firmly in the other. He was trying to restrain a nervous, stamping steed, a red horse the hue of blood.
Rania said in a voice of limpid surprise, “But where is our car?”
Menelaus petted the nose of the huge horse, who gently nuzzled him, sniffing with large, delicate nostrils the gold and ebony costume, the wide lace collar, wherein bridegrooms of this era and rank were clad. “What? The Pope arrives with forty-nine white horses and one red charger that I’ve owned for a year now, and you don’t recognize him?” He petted the long nose carefully. “There, my hayburning poop-factory. What does she know? She didn’t mean it. Born in a tin can in space, she was. No, no, don’t be wroth. Now, upsy daisy.”
“What? Husband mine, your delirium is to have me, in all my fine and delicate satin, balance atop the spine of this outsized uncouth mammal? Am I an acrobat? Am I a cavegirl, to be juggled and bounced atop a zoo creature? Where are the brakes? Where is the safety setting? The whole system of muscles and veins—I speak now as a lady who has more than dabbled in engineering—seems to be directly controlled by the organic brain of a horse, with no manual override or direct interface. As a motile arrangement, ungainly, and less responsive than having the caterers carry me in a punchbowl.”
“My strong right arm is your safety, my horsemanship your control.”
“I shall look ridiculous.”
“History books’ll clean it up, Rainy. ’Sides, if you look good to me, hang the world.”
“I say I will not have it.”
“And I say you will. Who is to be the man in my house, eh?” And with no further ado, he took her in one arm and swung her into the saddle, where Res Ipsa Nova, sensing her nervousness, danced and trembled. She emitted one short yelp of surprise, and clung to the mane; and the delighted crowd roared.
Yorvel meshed his fingers and bent, as if to allow Menelaus a leg up. Menelaus ignored both Yorvel and the stirrup, but merely put his hands on the horse’s flanks and vaulted himself into the saddle, half-colliding with his mussed bride. Her coronet was askew, and the trailing lace in her hair was tangled, but Rania sat with straight posture, and favored the crowd with a wave of her gloved hand.
“My master is a madman, and is too mad to know he is mad,” murmured Yorvel from about the level of Menelaus’s knee. “Do you know what I had to do to spread your bribes? The Schweizergarde were snickering in their mustachios. They never would have agreed to smuggle in your horse, except they are die-hard romantics. And you don’t treat your beast right: leaving him here in this heat with this caparison! And now you are going to double his load? He will buck you off, and you will fall on your royal buttocks, Master! The picture bugs will photograph it, and all the newsfeeds will show it, and add comic music as a soundtrack to the sidebar.”