“Blackie, you are a damn crazy man,” opined Montrose.

“Compared to whom?”

“You are stark naked wearing a crown on your head.”

“I would say this shows a nicety of priority on my part. I had the ship fabricate any number of proper garments, which we, as historical figures of some import, should not hesitate to don.”

“Hope you included parkas.”

“I will break out your gear, Cowhand, while you are shaving. Are you really going to use that barbaric knife rather than a depilatory cream?”

“Bowie knife, not barbaric knife.”

“We are on a rocking deck! You’ll cut your jugular.”

“And deprive you of the pleasure of shooting me? Not likely.”

“Spoken like a true friend. I have laid out your…”

“Are you yanking my Johnson with this? What is this, a costume party?”

“I had thought, considering…”

“An English judicial robe and a long white wig. That is what you thought I wanted to wear?”

“As the Judge of Ages, that is the garb legend describes.”

“Legend can stick a snorkel up my bunghole and suck a heaping snort of dung fume. Besides, we been out of touch with local legends for quite a spell. Who knows what they think about us nowadays? Maybe they’ve forgotten us. That’d be a relief, wouldn’t it?”

“Not at all. It would mean a lot of work to reacquaint them with whom they are dealing.”

“I am not going to let you burn any more cities from orbit, you sick snot.”

“That was long ago, and a regrettable necessity, and all those people, had they lived, would have been every one extinct with all their racial stock by now in any case. We are the only true Homo sapiens left.”

“It weren’t so long ago that you ain’t still licking your lips over it like the tomcat what found the fishbowl. So what are you wearing?”

“Hm? The uniform of the Hermetic Order, of course. Simple, tasteful, black—does not show dirt. I brought yours as well, just in case you want to assume the rank and station to which you are entitled. I will take it as an honor if you would agree, amigo.”

“Nope. I’ll wear the damn fool Halloween costume instead. And you keep talking like we is still the cock of the roost. Pardner, the Giants is as smart as us, and the Swans are smarter, and moon has a mind many magnitudes smarter yet, and moon ain’t even one sixth of the volume used to be at the core. So maybe you should take off your dinky crown, forget that you used to rule the Earth, and remember you is now a beggar, you and me both, and there are super-beings as far above our mere posthuman selves as we are above a sheepdog of middle-to-average doggy smarts. Now, I grant you, sheepdog smarter than a sheep, but you think that makes the shepherd ready to give Rover a vote on whether he gets fixed?”

Del Azarchel had pulled a dark uniform about him. It was made of ultralightweight black silk, with a ring at the collar to fit an air hood. The hood itself hung down the back, a triangle of silver and red fabric. The fabric was woven through like the fine, many-branching veins in a leaf, with countless tiny tubules for life support, heating and refrigeration circuits, and air capillaries. Black gauntlets and black toe socks completed the outfit, and a silvery half-cape of shadow-cloth, dotted with a gem-design of energy cells.

Del Azarchel held up a massive bracelet or amulet of dark red touch-sensitive metal. It was fanged on the inner surface, and looked like a medieval torture instrument. He put his hand in the clamp, wedged the amulet against a flat surface, and leaned on it with his other hand and arm, shoving the big needles and spikes into his arm. He writhed and grimaced as the needles sought out veins and nerve connections in his wrist, and sent a probe into his bone marrow.

Montrose winced. “There are ways a sight less fearsomely painful to do that these days. Technology works wonders, y’know.” By way of demonstration, he put his left hand into the medical fluid of his now open coffin. When he removed it a moment later, there was a layer of hard flesh, like the shell of a tortoise, encircling his left wrist and grown into it, and the shell was nacreous ruby. It looked feminine compared to Del Azarchel’s heavy manacle, but the computing power used to oversee the continual process of reversing aging errors in cell growth by means of spoofed RNA was the same. Del Azarchel had shared the secret of eternal youth with Montrose when Montrose shared the secret of eternal slumber.

Del Azarchel held the arm which bore the ancient amulet high, and gazed at the antique biotechnology appliance with hawklike stare, his handsome eyes narrowing slightly.

“Menelaus,” he said softly, “it is not the opinion of the world that concerns me, nor am I a man to be moved by such light and trifling things, no, not even if the world contains such genius as cannot be estimated. I wear the Iron Crown because it be my right. My conquests I will not forget, even if history forgets, nor all the glory of them. This suit is symbol of my order. The world outside is my child, made by me and marred by you, and so it is a child who escaped control. No matter: my heart is already set on greater things. All this I did, all this, merely so that the Hyades and their superior powers would enfold us within their civilization. It is up to us whether we shall be like the Japanese when they met the European, whom they so soon imitated and surpassed, or like the Negro, who could neither combine to drive them off, nor learn from them—yet even the sons of slaves in whiter lands, once freed, earned and learned and equaled them and then surpassed. Even at the price of slavery, were they not better off? We are immortals, now, Menelaus. Nothing but the long term should concern us.”

“So you ain’t thinking of just beguiling away the time until my Rania comes back?”

“Mine, not yours,” said Del Azarchel with a humorless smile, sharply white within his black goatee, and a twinkle in his eye, dark and large beneath dark brows. “And I shall see to it that this world is fit for her to return to, or, if my ambition deceived me not, a horde of all the local stars. An extensive kingdom in space I will offer her as bride price!”

“Your pot is cracked, Blackie. She’s already married, so a-courting you shan’t go.”

“I have remade man in my image, albeit it took millennia, and now I wish to grant them to go forth to many stars and worlds and conquer and subdue. Not just to Adam and Eve, but now to the minds that inhabit Earth and moon and one day Jupiter, I shall say go forth and multiply.”

“Nothing wrong with kids learning math.” Montrose sighed. “Okay. You win.”

“What? Win … You mean you will join me in my glorious Great Work?”

“No, I mean I’ll put on the silly robes you brought. I was suddenly took by the strange feeling like some judgment ought to happen, or maybe a hanging, so I figure I’d as well dress the part.”

The sea wind was bitterly cold, and the upper hull of the pinnace was slick with ice, even along the armor of the nose friction-blackened by reentry heat. Both men stood with one hand on the rim of the open hatch to steady themselves against the pitch and roll.

They stood in the wind, one man in a black shipsuit with hood and cloak, crowned and armed with a sword, handsome as a satyr; the other a craggy-faced staring-eyed hobgoblin with a hook nose, wearing an absurd long white wig of curls beneath a square black cap and flowing red robes that blew and flapped in the icy air, two white pistols tucked in his cincture. Del Azarchel looked black as a Dominican; Montrose, scarlet as a Cardinal.

The sunset painted the horizon red as the pyre of a king. The sky above looked like a peacock’s tail. The aurora borealis filled the equatorial heavens. As she approached, the great clipper ship, vast and pale as a fog bank with her mast upon mast of sail, lit up colored lamps at port and starboard, a tradition of awe-inspiring antiquity, but then seemingly from every yardarm and line silver lamps surrounded by rings of glowing fog lit up, and the approaching ship was like a constellation walking toward them.