The vessel herself had no propulsion, aside from three stubby and wide-mouthed tugs that were normally docked aft, remora fish snug against the belly of a shark. These were fusion engines, which doubled as ramjets, able to intake interstellar hydrogen for fuel mass. When positioned at the rim of the push plate, the ship fields and sail fields could funnel ionized particles into their gaping mouths, condense it into a hydrogen stream that could be ignited either with contraterrene micropellets or focused reflections of coherent light from the sail.

To eyes like those of Del Azarchel (which, with links and implants connected to the wings of his suit, Swanlike wings covered with eyes like a peacock’s tail, could see higher or lower on the electromagnetic spectrum) the beauty of the ship was also like the beauty of fire.

Fields invisible to human eyes reached out foreward to ionize and repel particles; lateral fields like spotlights played across the sail acreage, smoothing wrinkles and maintaining rigidity; aftward a vast bubble, field upon field, far from the hull, was ready to hold an astronomical cargo of magnetized contraterrene. The Emancipation was more than just a physical shell, just as a harpsong was more than merely a harp. She was a fanfare of energy, a glory of burning clouds, a dance of particles, and a spiderweb of fulguration.

And for so long the great ship had been his place of exile, expelled from Earth by Swans, and been his mausoleum; or, rather, had been his private little Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of frozen hell where Archbishop Ruggieri with Count Ugolino were buried together up to their necks in ice, closer than man and bride, and Ugolino gnawed forever upon Ruggieri’s skull.

So, too, had Del Azarchel been trapped with Montrose, gnawed upon by the man’s intolerable habits of thought and mind and personality, the smell of his unwashed feet and his endless cigarettes, and the abomination of uncouth grotesquerie which served Montrose for a sense of humor. Like a man who holds a burning glede as a trial by ordeal, and will not let go lest he be condemned, Del Azarchel would not, could not, permit himself to be the first to cease the cooperation between the two. He had, after all, agreed to a truce. He had given his word.

He wondered if the Cowhand had made a similar vow, and merely hid his discontent with it better than Del Azarchel could.

And the fool was skilled. There was no denying that. A genius himself. If only he had not been born in Texas! If only he had been born among civilized men!

Secretly, Del Azarchel had always longed for a day when his enemy would once again become his friend and servitor. He had not dared hope, but he had dared to daydream how it should happen: Montrose would contemplate the marching ranks and files of numbers and notations and symbols of logic, each rank holding as boldly as a line of Spartans. And Montrose would be frantically searching for some error in the alien’s logic, some slipped decimal in their codes, some ambiguity in their sign-to-signification ratio … and finding no error, no escape.

Del Azarchel had dreamed of Montrose finally being confronted with a truth so logical and so clear that even he, even Montrose, with his vast and supernatural capacity for sentimentality and self-deception would be unequal to the task of denying the obvious.…

Del Azarchel had dreamed of making Montrose more intelligent, forcing him to join Del Azarchel on a higher plateau of human evolution, commanding him to turn and look back down, back at what his lower, more apelike, less-enlightened self had done …

 … and admit Del Azarchel had all along been right. Had been superior.

All this was as it had been. And now? Now, all was changed.

Now, the vile smells and viler grammar were just droll eccentricities to Del Azarchel, a source of pleasure, because it gave Del Azarchel yet another pathetic thing to forgive in his pathetically fallen foe, and therefore made Del Azarchel’s magnanimity in victory more rare, more grand, more admirable, more large.

The sail was a thing too large to admire while admiring the vessel. Del Azarchel had to spread his wings and open up additional layers of visual interpretation in his cortex, more like the brain of a deer than a man, something with a wider angle of vision, to take in the immensity.

Seen from afar, the sail was a silver-white circle many miles wide. Closer, the details could be seen of the molecular textures of differing smart fabrics, which produced an intricacy like the crystal arms of a snowflake. This mix of fabrics was designed to alter performance characteristics in case any new acceleration-ray technologies were developed after launch. If the propellant were upgraded, for example, from laser energy to particle beam, pellet stream, or a collimated beam of mesoscopic particles, the sail fabric could alter its molecular profile to accommodate the change as easily as the skin cells of a chameleon.

At the moment, the sail was tuned to a basic mirrored setting, for she used only Sol’s focused sunlight, not laser light, to drive her. NTL Emancipation faced her mirror image in the vast circle of the sail. With his acute vision at its highest setting, Del Azarchel could see himself, black and winged, outlined by the mirror of his cloak behind him, reflected in that second sky shining in the sail.

Del Azarchel drank in the magnificent sight. Always before, to see a ship such as this hanging without motion, no further from Earth than Jupiter, was like hearing an ongoing sustained note of sorrow in the background of an otherwise glorious symphony of splendor.

Not this time. Now he knew joy.

“Soon,” he whispered. “Not soon as men count time, but I count it, soon, you shall fly from my wrist, and stoop the prey I seek, and all the secrets of the higher civilizations shall be ours.”

Del Azarchel felt a moment of admiration, perhaps even love, for these creatures of the Hyades stars, whatever they were, alien machinery, living systems, one species or many, or something that was at once neither or both, or so advanced that all those distinctions were nothing. They commanded the millennia by the tens and scores. They were ambitious on his level of ambition. In his heart, he counted himself as one of them, as a member of the galactic hierarchy, not as a man of Earth.

For it was the Hyades who broke Montrose’s rebellious spirit.

Del Azarchel had read his Dumas, and he knew full well that vengeance was allegedly a bitter thing, never satisfying to the avenger. And so he had been braced for a moment of dejection and ennui in his hour of triumph. But, no, it did not come. There was no loss, no cost, no terrible price paid. He simply was winning.

For Montrose had wept. Yes, hard as he pretended to be, as the years turned into decades, and the transmissions from the deracination ships had grown more infrequent and more desperate, Menelaus Montrose wept.

2. The First Diaspora of Man

A.D. 10917 TO 11125

It had happened in this wise:

On each vast deracination ship, the tens of thousands of the abducted nations, civilizations, and races were thawed and awake, confined in a cylindrical space many miles long. It was spun for gravity, and coated on the interior with electrosensitive polymorphic material like smart mud. Down the weightless axis was a tube of luminous plasma, a linear sun that never rose nor set. Beneath the mud, buried in solidified murk, were held the millions in suspended animation, flies trapped in amber. Whole cities had been swept up, and were scattered throughout the interior volume, so the prisoners did not lack for tools and even weapons.

The vast disk-shaped bulkhead of the aftmost hull was honeycombed with coolant tunnels, used for venting heat from the plasma sun, and in places the hull was transparent, or thin enough that patient and clever work could cut through. And after a disaster or two, it was discovered that even more patient and more clever work could erect a series of baffles and airlocks to prevent the ship from automatically expelling everything in the coolant tunnel near any breach, puckering it shut, and sucking the ejected debris through space to the mouth of the vessel, where the powerhouse for the plasma sun reduced everything to its elements.