Second, he was also given a red bracelet, heavy as a manacle, to wear on his wrist, and Rania’s servants told him he could not appear in public save in the black shipsuit to which he, as a man of outer space, alone was entitled. He kicked up a row and was a little surprised when he got kicked back.

A man named Vardanov, her security officer, was a dark-skinned Slav from Azania: one of those people from the “Old Order” who had been bribed into supporting the Concordat with a title and a heraldic escutcheon. The blond man kept his skin tuned as dark as ivory, and had used the recently-released RNA-spoofing techniques of the Hermeticists to add three feet and a hundred pounds of muscle to his frame. He dressed, like all the court soldiers of this ridiculous time period, in the peaked helmet and metal breastplate of a Spanish Conquistador. He was polite enough to remove his helmet and tuck it in his elbow, and give Montrose a stiff bow, before calling him a fool. The two stood in a small solarium of Montrose’s delightful little mansion in Gascony, looking out on the trellises of vines.

“Come again?” said Montrose, doubting his ears.

Vardanov had a melancholy face and large, sad eyes, so it was hard to tell how angry he was. He spoke in a thick, slow voice, like the voice of a thoughtful elephant. Menelaus could not place the accent: perhaps a combination of Russian and Dutch. “Fool!” he said again, “and why is it you are making my job more difficult, yes?”

The windows opaqued, putting the little richly-furnished chamber into twilight. The dark window also prevented anyone outside from looking in. The man’s big hand dropped casually to the hilt of his bayonet, which was sheathed in his web-belt.

Montrose resolved the man’s stance into a fractal pattern of vector motions, position of limbs and their kinetic values, and compared it with his own. Oddly, there did not seem to be a solution. With his greater mass and reach, if the two of them fought, Montrose (barring unforeseen factors entering the field) would lose.

So stepping forward and breaking the guy’s nose was, at the moment, not an optimal strategy.

Montrose decided that a diplomatic response was needed. “So why should I give a pair of donkey’s swollen black testicles what the hell your job is, or how difficult it is?”

Well, that was diplomatic for him. These things should be judged on a sliding scale.

The man showed no anger on his face, although with his new and heightened perceptions, Montrose could analyze the man’s blush response and microscopic pupil dilations. Here was a creature whose unsleeping anger, frustration, and paranoia, kept him in dangerous psychological balance by a sense of honor, an iron self-control.

“With all due respect, Your Excellency,” Vardanov said in his sad, slow voice, “my duty is to protect the person of Her Serene Highness. Do you understand that this is a matter of warfare on a personal level, yes? Yes. Supreme excellence in war, it is to destroy the enemy will to fight, not in striking his body.”

Montrose was impressed, not just because the man could quote Sun Tsu on the art of war, but because it occurred to him that Vardanov had done exactly that to him. When he did not see a feasible max-min vector-solution for an engagement, Montrose hadn’t struck a blow.

Vardanov said, “It falls to me to say what all know, and no one will say: you are an embarrassment to Her Serene Highness. Yes? Yes.” He nodded, as if happy to hear himself agreeing with himself. “In other years, other places, this means nothing. Alone in barn, you are a braying jackass, and no one hears your voice, no one is disturbed. But here! But now! You are in palace. It is time of tumult, maybe war. Esprit de corps is weighty thing, yes? Yes. The mystique, the awe, the love, the fear commoners behold Her Serene Highness, this is Her Highness’s first line of the defense. They say you have done something to that brain of yours, yes, to make you more than man. You can see without me to explain of it, yes?”

“Explain it anyway.” Montrose casually put his hands behind his back.

Vardanov gave a massive, slow shrug, and spread his hands. He casually dropped his hand behind a vase standing on a pillar near the door, which meant Montrose could not see if he had drawn a weapon from his wrist-holster. Since Montrose was reaching up his own sleeve for the hilt of the ceramic knife he kept in a forearm sheath, he decided not to draw it.

Vardanov spoke while shrugging. “Two things. One.” He held up a think forefinger. (Montrose recognized the trick involved and kept his attention on the other hand, the one hidden behind the vase.) “While you wear the uniform of the great starship Hermetic, you are protected by the weapons of the Hermetic, and the common people are in awe of fire from heaven. In the eyes of the law, no one can arrest you, no one can take and question you, because you are not of this Earth.”

“What’s two?”

Vardanov held up two fingers, but this time pointed them at Montrose. “The great and the small alike are unhappy that you, not Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, have taken the hand of the Star Maiden, yes? Oh, yes. But if you are star-man…” He shrugged. “Then discontent, it is not so much.”

“They can go jack themselves. What do I care?”

“You care for her? Then you care for her people, for they are hers and she is theirs. To be royalty is to keep the people happy, to keep all parts of the world in balance, nobles and merchants, military and clergy, workers and shopkeepers. Royalty is mystique in the mind of people. It is magic. To be a princess, it is to stare at the snake and force the snake not to strike. Yes? Yes. Do not break the spell.”

Montrose scowled. “I don’t cotton to wearing that damn suit. Traitors wear it. I ain’t one of them.”

“Cotton is what?”

“I mean I don’t take to it.”

“Is not for you to take, yes? Copernicus changed the world. After him, Man was not center of all things. You, you are still in world before Copernicus. You think the sun revolves around you. No? No. You revolve around sun. She is the sun; you are not the only one who orbits her. You have married all of her. Whole solar system, not just sunshine.”

And the tall man’s eyes narrowed with pleasure, because he saw that he had won.

After that, Montrose took to wearing the black silk shipsuit in public, and the red metal armband of the Hermeticists.

4. Rich as Croesus

The third thing that changed was his wealth. Before the marriage, Montrose was vested with a healthy share of Rania’s stock in the World Power Syndicate.

Like most men of modest means, Menelaus had assumed the difference between rich and poor in this time was merely something like the difference between Mr. Josiah Palmer back in his hometown, a respectably well-off rancher, and Chickenbone Jim, who had to beg at the Meeting House door to buy a coat. It was nothing like that. The difference was far deeper than he had imagined.

Except for a few paupers who heated their cottages with wood they chopped themselves, or some eccentric branch of the neo-Amish that used no modern technology and burned only petroleum, the entire economy hung by the contraterrene, both power source and currency. The whole economy was owned by the World Power Syndicate. It was wealth almost beyond measure.

He was not able merely to buy stuff. He could buy policies, loyalties, public opinion, and princes; he could buy a chunk of history, and force things to go his way. Beyond a certain critical mass, wealth became so concentrated that it exerted a warp on society like the gravity of a neutron star: whole sectors of the economy unrelated to you were thrown off their courses.

The sheer number of people, a sizeable percent of the world’s population, that had bought into Del Azarchel’s way of doing things, his way of thinking, merely because they had been bought by this kind of dealing, was staggering. Menelaus now had that kind of wealth; the kind that could topple thrones.