“I speak ill, but I speak the damn truth, don’t I? They’d rather hang on to power and ride the wild tiger with its tail afire, risking war and world destruction, rather than go home and live on the farm like Washington did.”
“It’s a male trait, this lust for potency, I think,” she said.
“Weren’t Washington a male? Anyhow, Princess, I ain’t convinced you have the best set-up here, and I ain’t convinced seeing it shatter is so much more to cry over than seeing it kept.”
She shrugged her soft shoulders, ghostly in the light from the city underfoot, and the stars above. “This is not a gunpowder age. What if the world shatters also? You have not studied the problem, so how could you be convinced?”
“It’s still a damnified tyranny, and free men shouldn’t stand it.”
“Places on the globe where that is so, such places enjoy a greater liberty under our Concordat. Your North America is controlled only by alliances, media monopolies, and power stations. They still meet in their town meetings and have votes: but they cannot vote for war. Nor for anything that leads to war. Do you understand the limits of liberty? There are antimatter weapons in the hands of men like Del Azarchel and Narcís D’Aragó, men who like to see skyscrapers and farmlands on fire. The more power is in human hands to destroy human life, the more carefully limits must be placed on that liberty—why do you look askance! What I say is as much common sense as drawing in shrouds during a storm of sunspots, or walking more slowly when near a brink! If you would have me restore your precious liberties to the common men, I will have to take the antimatter away, and leave them in the dark.…”
At that moment the car wobbled in the high-altitude wind, and the couple found themselves in each other’s arms, looking into each other’s eyes, and talk of these disagreeable matters was interrupted, not without laughter, by divertissement more fascinating to them.
4. Reception
There was a reception awaiting them at twenty-five thousand feet. Even this was below the level of the Honeymoon Suite of the long-closed hotel. The staff were not concierges and maids, but instead were astronauts and engineers, Rania’s picked men, who had recently reopened the facilities, with much fanfare, and many announcements that another Space Age was soon to begin. Many of these men were Psychoi, the intelligence-augmented Mandarin class—but here in the tower they doffed their silver wigs and proudly displayed their spacer’s crewcuts, or wore the tight, uncomfortable bonnets meant to serve as padding for space helmets. Montrose spoke only to one or two, and he was not sure he trusted them, but they did seem to share his enthusiasm for a new space program, and there was champagne, and colored lights floating in the upper atmosphere beyond the pressurized windows, and many a toast and a cheer to the happy couple, and so Montrose decided to smother his suspicions. Perhaps he was finally home at last, in the future he had always dreamed. The bubbles in his glass twinkled like stars as he raised it to his bride, who blushed and smiled just like any girl, princess or not.
But Menelaus was impatient, full of laughter and lust, and would not stay for more. He seized upon his young bride, all wrapped in white satin and white silk, and hoisted her in his arms, amid calls and shouts and sprays of wine. Up they went again in the spider car, this one tied with ribbons and scrawled with well wishes. All fell silent as the atmosphere thinned outside.
There was no one else in the structure, which was not yet ready for civilian traffic: Rania and Menelaus went here partly for privacy, partly for publicity.
At last they were alone.
5. Honeymoon Suite
At midnight, she woke him, but when he turned on the sleeping mat to take her in his arms, she seemed oddly stiff and distracted. He felt something cold and rectangular, the size of a small book, in her hands. It felt slightly warm, as if circuits were active.
The deck of the suite was pressurized nano-diamond, transparent and practically invisible; the lights of the city beneath the clouds below could be glimpsed. It looked to Menelaus like a galaxy underfoot. Here and there were dim reddish glows from the teeth of active volcanoes, looking like nebulae where stars were born. To one side, the full moon hung above her twin sister gleaming in the sea. He looked for but did not see a line of golden glitter dancing like a restless road across the waters; this was the light reflected from the tower, and it had been visible when he went to sleep. At this hour the whole length of the tower was in night, and even Quito Alto high above them was occluded by Earth’s shadow.
It was the stars that were so bright, so beautiful. They seemed almost within reach.
The moonlight illumed the suite, picking out the white walls, the bird-painted paper screens, the lightweight fixtures of clear ceramic or diamond crystal. The tatami mats on the transparent floor were spread wide, so that little fulvous squares seemed to hang against the abyss of night air.
No fancy gold or marble here. It turns out that Rania, when alone, preferred something along the lines of the spartan space-habitat furnishings she’d been raised with.
Except the shower, of course. No spacer had a shower like this: it occupied most of the suite. The crystal walls were only slightly dimmed—what need had young honeymooners for privacy?—by showerheads, soap servers, and massage fingers, as well as waterproof speakers for bathing-music coordinated to the water play. One could swim in the glass basin with the Earth floating beneath. The moonlight from the sea below shined through the pond that Rania had left in the basin of her shower, and so a web of silver light, crisscrossed by ripples, breathed and fluttered on a chamber ceiling.
An imaginary picture of her stark naked and reading a book (not to mention the non-imaginary real girl, warm and girl-scented, supple limbs and clinging hairs of gold and all) for some reason was arousing to him. The girls back in his hometown, even ones he had been sweet on and too shy to court, had not had much use for book learning.
He rubbed his eyes and slapped himself in the cheek to wake himself up. Sternly, he told himself to pay attention to what was going on.
“I’ve read the Monument, up to the Xi Segment.” Her voice was haunted, strange.
“You haven’t been sleeping,” he said.
“What need have I for sleep? There are sections of my brain of which I was hitherto unaware.”
A sensation of terror overcome Menelaus. The changes he had introduced to her nervous system, his attempt to correct the errors in her base gene pattern, perhaps they had waited until she entered REM sleep to reorganize her consciousness.
“Are you still the same person?” he asked.
“More than I was,” she laughed, “but I have lost nothing.”
“What is it? Why are you awake?”
“You were snoring, you rude swine, falling asleep like that! And I could not sleep—I wondered at the joy and pain—”
“Jesus Christ! I didn’t hurt you!”
She giggled. “You are blushing!” Now she seemed normal again.
“Am not! And you shouldn’t talk of such things!”
“I am your wife. If you cannot discuss the mechanics of rutting with me, then with whom?”
“Gah! My mother would box my ears.”
“She is absent. I am the woman of your life hereafter.”
“That suits me.”
There was an intermission of kissing, and so forth. When she put her arms around him, he could feel the cold corner of the square in her hand, digging into his back.
They parted for air. He said, “How could you tell I was blushing? You can’t see me in this gloom.”
From the way her hair moved in the dark, he could sense the triumphant cock of her head. “I don’t need to see. I am your wife. I am yours. Yours. Nothing else you think you own, no wealth, no steed, no knowledge, no accomplishment will ever truly be yours as I am yours, your very own, for only I give myself wholly and fully, with all free will.”