Then he smiled. He realized that the long white wigs were all an impersonation of the way Del Azarchel wore his hair. Since all spacemen shave their skulls bald (or at least to a very tight crew-cut), wearing his hair as long as a woman’s must have come as a great comfort and relief to Del Azarchel, a way of letting his shirttails hang out. If the courtiers were bald under those wigs, that might be a sign of something else—maybe a symbol to show that they were ready to return to space at any moment. This hinted that the future might hold an active space program, something Menelaus could not contemplate without a toothy grin of pleasure.

“Fancy digs you got here. Much better than where you came from, seems to me.” Menelaus accepted the delicate glass with a grin of thanks. “Only two glasses? What about them?” He gestured at the throng of soldiers and servants. “Ain’t they included?”

Del Azarchel looked lost for a moment, as if he did not know to whom Montrose referred, but then his face lit up. “Of course! Thoughtless of me. All of you, drink to the health of Menelaus Montrose, the man closer than a brother to me! Get glasses—Tirado, can you see to it? Captain, perhaps your men can be off-duty only for the moment it takes to drink a toast with me?”

An old Oriental in white (either a doctor or a fencing instructor, to judge by his garments) bent his head and began arguing in whispers with Del Azarchel. Del Azarchel waved the man’s objections away. “Please, Doctor! I value your advice more than I treasure the sight of the stars themselves, but surely, surely one small drink will do no harm to such a man as Menelaus Montrose. He is made of rawhide and whalebone, enjoys more lives than a cat, and has a tougher constitution than that of a maddened boar! The brain of an Einstein, of Newton, hides beneath that thick skull. He is harder to kill than a cockroach! A sip of wine will not do him in!”

The old doctor straightened up, a look of skepticism in the arch of his eyebrow. “Just as you say, sir, but it seems your Newton had enough brainpower to scramble his brain like an egg, which we have only now found how to separate white and yolk and put them back into the shell.”

Menelaus examined the soldiers as they drank. Comic-Opera Spanish seemed to be in style. Either these were Halloween costumes, or morion-style helmets were back in fashion. The helmets were peaked fore and aft and bore a steel rooster comb aloft. The men looked like Conquistadores: armor, lace collars, puffy sleeves and all.

Their breastplates were a substance Menelaus did not recognize. Metal? Plastic? Something in the way the light glinted into rainbows along the inky plates—he visualized the deviation of photonic through-paths needed to produce those shades, and turned the picture into numbers in his mind, and then into a set of graphs—convinced him that the substance was meant to break up coherent light, and scatter incoming energy-fire.

He ran through an equation or five in his mind to get an upper and lower value for the energy delivery system, given this type of defense. The result surprised him, because such weapons, if they existed, were absurdly wasteful. Of course, just out the window were roofless gardens heated in the midst of a frozen mountainscape. Absurdly wasteful. Menelaus was sure his mother would not have approved. This was a more luxurious time than he was used to, that was sure.

Del Azarchel said with a small laugh, “Did I ever tell you of the time I drank stagnant rainwater from the heel of boot I found in a gutter? I had to drive away the most enormous rat one might envision: large as a housecat. My only weapon was—”

Montrose laughed. “Yeah, the broken spike from an organlegger’s monkey cart, with the snark-juice still inside it, and stinking like hell. But the rat was a different time, remember?”

“Wait? Are you certain? No, my friend, that boot—every time I drink, I think on it—it was when I was in pre-Kali Andalusia. I was twelve.…”

He noticed the other people in the chamber, footman and steward and doctor and nurse, the soldiers in Conquistador get-up, all stiffened, and hid looks of surprise. Evidently it was out of style to correct Del Azarchel, even when he made a mistake. Montrose assumed the man was of pretty high rank, however this society measured rank.

“Yup. I know, cause I was there everytime you sat down to drink, and you tell the damn story every time,” sighed Montrose. He sat himself down on the big four-poster bed, and the sheets crinkled under his weight. Once again the courtiers in the room were holding their breath, while trying not to stare. Evidently it was also not in style to sit down in Del Azarchel’s presence.

He raised the estimate of Del Azarchel’s rank. Of course, he had no baseline to plot it against, and no clear way to digitize an abstraction like the degree of deference being shown a boss. Maybe if he used degrees of deviation of the spinal column from upright, he could compare other submission behaviors to that …

Montrose (with the mental equivalent of a shrug) decided the styles of this time didn’t apply to him. He said, “The big rat—it was smaller last time you told it, only as big as a kitten—you were fighting that big rat over a hambone a drunk Jihadi had dropped. When you got it up to your lips, turned out to be a baby’s arm, all fried in grease, on account of the Mogadorians was eating on you Spaniards during the last days of the siege. I heard the yarn. The boot thing was a different time, before when you met that guy that turned your life all right-side out, made you learn how to salute and whatnot, even though you are a whatcha call it, a pilluelo, a gutter skunk. What was his name? That guy? ‘Trashcan?’ Something like that.”

“Trajano Villaamil,” the older man said, nodding his snowy head. “Ah! Truly a name of glory! Even though his army was nothing but a group of half-starved youths, he made us his true and loyal followers, like knights-errant. Every theft and crime to serve the cause, the poor no more to be preyed upon, the widow to be shown respect, and the media to witness every theft, so the honor, and not just the supplies, of the haughty conqueror would be stolen! Such were the rules he beat into us. Within the confines of the street from the dead Cathedral to the dry Canal, he was king. He was the master of the beggar’s quarter, where the patrols dared not go. I would have wished him to see me now, now that I am Master of the World. I never knew him to break his word, not once.” Del Azarchel sighed in mingled nostalgia and wonder. “Not once! And to think—it was for his sake that I stayed with you.”

“Stayed with me?” Montrose had been sitting in a slouch, but now he straightened up.

“In the darkness, during the hunger watches … Ah! The old times are not always the best times, are they? Let us speak of happier things.…”

Del Azarchel must have noticed the stiffness with which his servants and retainers were regarding Montrose, for he smiled and asked them to step from the room.

The officer in charge of the Conquistadores gave Montrose a thoughtful look. He turned toward Del Azarchel, who gave the officer a smile. Del Azarchel raised his left wrist, displaying the crudely fashioned red wristband Menelaus had noticed earlier, a wristband not at all in keeping with the fineness of ornament that otherwise adorned the elegant, white-haired figure of Del Azarchel. The officer nodded, saluted sharply, and departed.

That exchange of looks was not lost on Montrose. The captain of the guard had not wanted to leave his boss unarmed in a room with a man whose brain may or may not be fully healthy. The red metal armband Del Azarchel wore was something that reassured the Captain. But what was it?

He looked at the wristband carefully. In his mind’s eye, Montrose converted the surface irregularities into a mathematical expression, and calculated the standard deviation. The resulting figures were consistent with something machine-lathed in zero-gee, using old equipment. Not an ornament, then. And not something he trusted any of his men to refashion.