“String atoms rather than ball atoms.”
“If you like. These strings are analogous to elements and can be woven together in knots and sheets in a fashion analogous to molecules, but with distributed strong and weak two-dimensional interaction areas rather than zero-dimensional point sources. The material interacts with normal chemicals and photon excitement in a somewhat predictable way, but the number of fractal folds which can be made in a molecular sheet of the material is practically infinite. Hence, the amount of information that can be encoded and stored in the energy states of the subatomic particles, in the vibrations and waveforms of the strings, and then transferred by changes in the surface folds to chemicals released into neural systems greatly exceed what either molecular level storage density of logic diamonds or the atomic level storage density of murk.”
“Still sounds plagued impossible. You cannot stuff a planet-sized brain into a human body.”
“Your subatomic particles, variations in electron shell orbits, nuances of nucleonic organization, and so on can store as much information in a single atom as is coded in a large brick of murk technology by stringing the atoms together into binary sequences. It is as if an entire library were written on a silk sheet so fine that it could be wadded up and placed in the head of a pin. But come! These dry matters are no fit discourse for such a day as this!”
The man of gold raised his arm, pointing at the blue-white sky. “This is the hour of joy! Look upward. We have made your eyes like ours so that you can see her approach. We have devised that your eyes will return to their more traditional appearance when she more closely approaches, for then they will be needed to meet her gaze and speak all lovers’ vows which words cannot encompass. But for now, your eye must be stronger than human, to see her afar. Look where I point. There is her ship, the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum! There!”
“I see nothing but a blue sky, pardner. You jaspering me, is that it?”
“Not so. I merely overestimated the rate at which your mind would adapt to our neural formats. You should be able to penetrate the opaque day sky with eyes like ours. The knowledge you drank is not yet digested. It does not matter. We will blot out the sun for you.”
Montrose said, “Wha-what did you say?”
But he had heard right. Less than eight minutes later, a black bite seemed to be taken out of the sun. These new eyes could look directly at the sun without harm, and so he got to see something he had never seen with naked eyes before: a full eclipse. The black disk occluded the sun, and an eerie twilight fell across the landscape of forest, glass mountain, and purple wine-dark sea.
From the crescent of light at the edge of the disk, Montrose could tell this was a planetary body, not a sail nor an orbital mirror. How the technology of this era could maneuver another world into position between Earth and sun without shattering it was a mystery.
“You can move the planets?”
“Not I. That honor I granted to the living planet Pyriphlegethon, who well recalls aiding you in beforetimes to behold her. Now, by his shadow, he shades your eyes. Your sensitivity is greater far than you might believe, because each incoming photon can be separately analyzed into preons and entangled photon pair information deduced. The deeper your heart desires, the clearer your vision! Look, I say! Look!”
And he saw. At first in the night sky he noticed only that certain distant dots of light moved more rapidly than others. Then his eye resolved them into crescents waxing or waning, gibbous or full. Then he could see them as globes with continents, seas, swirls of clouds. One was green as a lime, covered pole to pole with layers of viridescent storm; the next was white and crisscrossed with fine dark lines and crater marks too evenly spaced to be natural. The next had a ring like Saturn’s, but made of a single band of exotic material, connected by dozens of space elevators to the equator; then a world entirely ocean with polar icecaps covering half the north and south hemispheres. To stare at worlds from space is like to stare at human faces, for each was individual, rich with secrets, handsome.
And on and on. There were two hundred which had lights, like the lights of cities seen at night, shining between the horns of their crescents. Then there were three hundred more, coated from pole to pole with the pallid yellow white of logic diamond, or with morbid indigo and black of murk, or else with the opalescent blue-white glass, like the landscape where he woke seen from afar. Half a thousand worlds altogether were here, ranging in size from balls smaller than Ceres to superterrestrials eight times the mass of Earth. Mars and Venus, far away indeed from the orbits they had known in his youth, were lost in the thicket.
The distant spheres of Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus were visible, but of the old asteroid belt, or Pluto and the outer planets, there was no memorial. Neptune was surrounded by an extensive artificial ring system equal parts murk and logic diamond: his Angels and Archangels, and moons to replace the ones he had lost in old wars, to house his Potentates.
“What are these?” asked Montrose in a whisper. He had never heard nor imagined such a thing as a solar system with five hundred worlds in it.
“Most are terrestrial-sized worlds sculpted very recently, within the last eighteen centuries, out from the massive corpse of Jupiter. They are called the Deodates. Others are Cold Potentates or Rogues, designed to dwell at slower thinking speed far from any star, but, startled by the deaths of Lethe and Styx, have made the long, slow voyaging hence from interstellar space, anchoring energy fields to their magnetospheres in imitation of the semi-immaterial sails of Rania’s Great Ship. Look to the horizon! As the globe turns, she will come in view.”
His view was blocked by the forest. Montrose impatiently scanned the treetops, found the tallest, and climbed it. He could not recall the last time he had climbed a tree, but he scampered up as lightly as when he had been a child, as quickly and efficiently as when he had been a sharpshooter for the cavalry. Perhaps this new body he had been given had muscles more pliant and potent than normal, or perhaps the soaring spirit in him, the eagerness, made him light and lent him strength.
3. Up a Tree
Above him, he saw a human figure. As he drew near, Montrose saw who it was. He did not even wonder how the man had known where to find him.
Blackie del Azarchel was seated on one of the upper branches of the tree, a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his brow, smoking a cigarette in a holder, his long legs crossed at the ankles and propped against a second tree branch. He was dressed in the expensive coat and leggings of a Spanish grandee of the Twenty-First Century, with a cravat at his throat and lace at his wrists.
“Dr. Montrose, I presume? Fancy meeting you here.” Del Azarchel smiled his most charming smile.
Menelaus stared in utter disbelief. And then his expression darkened, and his deep-set eyes began to glitter dangerously. He drew out the triangle of diamond from his sleeve and wrapped part of the sleeve tail around the base as an impromptu grip so he could hold the shard like a dagger without cutting himself.
Del Azarchel flicked his cigarette lightly away and tucked the cigarette holder into an inner pocket. “Not to worry, my man. It would be wrong for a man like me, who plays the long game, to interfere with another man’s honeymoon, foe or not.”