D’Aragó and Coronimas were joined by Father Reyes y Pastor, seated in a wheelchair, but splendid in his cardinal’s robes of brightest red. Montrose walked out of that ballroom and into another. Bugger them. It had been the respect of Captain Grimaldi that Montrose had sought, those days long ago, not theirs—a man they helped to murder.

All three had altered their flesh to look like old men again, and they were the only white-haired heads in the room.

Evidently the secret of hair loss and loss of pigment had been solved, for the other old folk in the room all had long lush hair, mostly dark, with one or two fair-haired people for contrast. He saw no redheads at all—he went through some genetic statistical calculus in his mind to figure out if perhaps the breed was extinct.

Hours he had spent, a drink untasted in his hand, trying to ingratiate himself with some witticism or caper of speech into the little circles and cliques of conversation. But evidently he was a pariah: Each time he spoke, some ball-gowned lady or dew-lipped debutante would ask him to dance, an offer his ignorance of their strange figures would not allow him to accept, but which the rules of courtesy would not allow him to escape. So he either ended up capering like a buffoon bear, turning right while everyone else turned left, or taking the hand of the wrong woman when the line shuffled here and there; or he ended up making excuses at women who must have practiced looking cold-eyed and offended yet smiling unmeaning smiles in their bedroom mirrors, they each did it so perfectly. If only they had had a caller, like a proper square dance, he could have managed it. As it was, his knack for numbers, which usually gave him an edge, just threw him off. He was so busy trying to reduce the motions of the dance (which he mapped out on a Cartesian plane moving toward the time-direction t to sweep out a cubic volume) to an algorithm that correlated to the notes, note-frequency, and rhythm of the tune, that he got distracted. And some people were too polite to titter when he kept dancing for four beats after the music stopped, but some were not.

So he stayed away from all the music rooms after that. He was afraid if the numbers started getting too lively in his imagination, he might strip off his clothes and start doing weird ballet again, and singing in multitonal, multinomial, and made-up languages.

It was one time in his life when he really wished he wasn’t him, but someone less fun and more normal.

Toward midnight, while everyone else clustered on the western balconies of the castle, for the best view of the splendid displays lighting the night sky, Menelaus found himself alone on the balcony facing east. He could still see more than he was in the mood to see.

She had not appeared during the evening.

Something the size of a ladybug, but with tiny, dun camouflage markings on its shell, landed on the marble balustrade near his hand. The instinctive, quick motion he used to crush the thing also tossed his wineglass spinning off into the fragrant darkness, a parabolic tail of liquid sparkling after it, no doubt for some rendezvous with the rosebushes below, or some tipsy ambassador’s wig, or the paper hat of a festive baronet. The grit beneath his finger felt wrong. Not an insect, then, but a video-pickup, or bioconstruct. Then he saw they were in the air all around, at least two score dark, silent spots half-invisible against the scenes of colored light, gardens, flares, and fire-painted clouds beyond.

He wondered why the cameras would be gathered here. As the only star-man who was expelled from the Table Round of the Hermeticists, no doubt he was a figure of some public interest, or perhaps Del Azarchel’s police wanted to keep track of him. Of maybe it was just his outrageous hand-stitched buckskin coat. Or …

Or maybe they were not looking at him at all. The clustered eyes of the robotic insects were turned toward a point behind him.

He turned his head just as the crowd roared Een!

6. Her Serene Highness

Silhouetted against the shining doors leading in to the silent ballroom was a lightfooted feminine shadow, hourglass-shaped, pausing as if to catch her breath, in mid-sway.

The evening gown was dark stuff, so he saw only a mass of shadow sweeping up from the floor to a pinched waist. Above that, a ruby resting over her heart gathered the satin fabric into two plaited hemispheres of streamlined ripples. This same ruby caught the fireworks light into an ember glow, and sent tiny reflections across her curves.

Her long gloves were of a whiter hue, so that two slender arms seemed like disconnected ghosts in the gloom. The way the light fell emphasized the slimness of her waist, the curve of her naked shoulders, the delicate line of her collarbone and neck.

Her head was poised, unselfconsciously graceful, and a mass of hair, golden and lucent, was pinned up behind her with networks of diamonds like stars. The constellation formed a crescent. It might have been a tiara. Or was she wearing a crown?

The slimness of her neck, the delicate curve of her jaw, and the mass of her hair piled high made her head look larger than it was: an illusion of a childlike figure, or some quaint large-skulled space creature.

In that same second, before he could blink, a silent explosion of light issued from the ball falling down in the illusionary Times Square. Immediately it was greeted with a roar of shouts, the screams and thunders of horns and sirens large and small, the ocean noise of mingled voices cheering.

He blinked, dazzled, and for a moment he could not see her, only a greenish negative image of a slim figure floating in his eyes. He heard, or, rather, felt her move forward.

The whispering hiss of satin should have been far too faint to hear in that uproar. The scent of a perfume (a sharp hint of aldehydes above a heat note of more subtle lavender) should have been indistinguishable in the smog of gunpowder and wine left in the air after so many hours of pyrotechnics and elegant intoxication.

“Happy New Year,” came a soft contralto. As if a dove could laugh, or a woodwind purr. “And welcome to the Twenty-Fifth Century.”

“Which does not begin ’til 2401. A year early, you are.” His own voice seemed hard and harsh in his ears.

“Technically, you are correct, but the error has, by now, among the common people reached such currency, that it would seem supercilious to ignore them.”

He put up his hands to rub his eyes. “If’n a million people can’t count, I can.”

“Ah! The young sir is a mathematician, then?”

“Young? If you call one hundred ninety years old ‘young.’ Best damn mathematician in the damn world, a regular Galois, I am.”

“Second best, perhaps.”

At that point, the explosions of light overhead darkened, and grew steady, and his vision cleared.

Perhaps time stopped; perhaps his heart.

It was she. Of course he knew her from her portrait. It had lived in his mind’s eye, shining, every night as he tried to fall asleep. The voice came as a surprise to him, and her scent, her nearness. He had not known what she would sound like. The library files had been remarkably scarce of recordings of her, almost as if, to increase her mystery, she was being kept away from the public view. To judge from the galaxy of glittering bugs that formed a respectful ring in the air around her, the public was as curious as he was.

He was staring at a face like an angel’s, save that her halo was golden hair with diamond sparks, fulvous beneath a semicircle of diamond studs and silver leaves. It was her eyes, almond-shaped, slightly tilted, fringed with dark lashes, her eyes that magnetized his gaze, lambent gray-blue, the color of a sky in storm, a strange hue he could not recall seeing in other eyes.