“You trying to make fun of the way I talk?”

“Not trying.”

“What’s that crime again with the French name?”

“Lèse majesté. It is the crime of violating majesty.”

“I add it to the list of crimes I’m saving for our honeymoon.”

“Let me up. Let go of my wrists.”

“Say ‘please.’”

“You issue unlikely commands. Remember who is smarter between us.”

“I remember your belly being ticklish.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“A girl will only say that when she secretly wants you to dare. I keep this feather in my hatband just for times like this. Oh, now she struggles! Say, missy, writhe around and toss your hair some, and I am sure you can break free. I bet you could bite my nose if you tried harder. Sure. I feel my grip weakening. Writhe more and arch your back.”

He folded her wrists atop each other, so he could pin them with one hand. With the other, he drew the feather, and it twitched with playful menace in his fingers.

“It’s an ugly hat,” she pouted.

“Oh, you’ll pay for that comment, girl. This hat has sentimental value. It means I don’t need to comb my hair so often, and that means a lot to me.”

“And I am not a girl. I am a celestial maiden: the first exosolar posthuman chimera created from alien gene codes. Practically an angel!”

“No argument there.”

“What else do I have to do so you don’t think of me as a girl?”

“You’re still a girl. Human nature snaps back and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”

By then she was giggling too hard to catch her breath, and as predicted, her troopers came forward at a quickstep, railgun lances ready, to see what was causing the shrieks.

After explanations and apologies, they were left alone again, and he was lying on his back, and she was using his armpit as a pillow, and they both looked up at the high blue sky, and sought fractal patterns similar to Monument segments among the clouds.

She sighed, “I truly and deeply hope, my scarecrow of a suitor, that you do have a cure for the flaw in my design. I feel there are things buried, enjambed, structurally encoded in the Monument that are waiting inside me to wake. A destiny. I was meant for something. Do you believe in evolution?”

“I believe it exists,” he said. “I don’t believe that whatever comes next is any better than what comes before. It is non-directed, random, cruel.”

“I was not evolved, though. I was made. My makers followed instructions even they did not understand, from minds not human, not limited to human thoughts. It was directed. Perhaps it is not random, which means that I alone of all Mankind have a destiny and a purpose. Perhaps it is not cruel.”

She sighed and looked sadly at the clouds.

“Cure me, my scarecrow. Drive away the dark wings that beset me, I pray you. I am so tired of not being smart enough. I am weary of my own stupidity.”

He could not think of anything to say to that odd comment, so he turned and closed his arms and kissed her.

16

The Concubine Vector

1. Ceremony

A.D. 2401

Menelaus and Rania were married in June of 2401 in the Iglesia de San Francisco, the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Quito, nine thousand feet above sea level and fifteen miles south of the Equator. His Holiness, Pope Innocent XXIV, himself, performed the wedding Mass.

In the silent sky, the blazing star of the secondary drive of the newly re-outfitted Hermetic hung in the blue between the white clouds, above the doves, above the tile-roofed houses, above antique Spanish palaces, above the churches inlaid with Inca gold, and it was a light visible even by day.

The primary drive was a total conversion ion-reaction, and would not be lit while the vehicle was near Earth, for fear that contraterrene carbon particles might escape unconsumed from the magnetic drive core, and if entering the upper atmosphere, would annihilate an equal mass of terrene matter and release gamma radiation and exotic particles. It was not a reasonable fear: normal cosmic ray bombardments were more dangerous, but Rania, as ever, was deferential to the opinion of the common man.

While churchbells pealed, the bride and groom rushed down the carpeted steps into the flower-strewn plaza, half-blinded by thrown cherry blossom petals, she as lightly as a deer, he in his lurching, long-legged lope.

Two lines of dismounted cavalrymen in the magnificent livery of the Swiss Guard (costumes so beautiful legend incorrectly, but understandably, attributed the design to Michelangelo) crossed their pikes, adorned with garlands, high overhead, forming a tunnel of blades down which the couple fled. More Swiss Guard were mounted, their steeds adorned with gold and scarlet, and the line of horses kept the grassy lane before the cathedral clear of people, an avenue of escape. These were harsh-faced, keen-eyed young men, and the last four centuries of organized crime and disorganized brigandage surrounding Rome spread the fame of their hardiness. Pikes of modern materials but ancient design were in hands, and weapons more modern were holstered at hip: batons able to administer lethal shocks, or aiming lasers to call down fire from lightweight sniper platforms on rooftops or hanging invisibly in heaven on wings of gauzy blue.

The bridal veil was yards upon yards of white satin, trimmed with diamond studs and sparkling sapphires, held by a score of young queens who, in this age of the world, were as slim and lovely as the craft of genetic engineering could make them.

Montrose and Rania had released to the public the secrets of the Hermetic second-youth procedure. At the moment, only the wealthiest and most powerful of the elite could afford the painstaking cell-by-cell alteration: but as if overnight, the rich and mighty were also the young and dazzling.

Montrose hated the trend he could already see forming, but he could see no way around it. The human brain reacts to physical beauty on a preverbal level—it is instantly easier to trust and like handsome features, and remarkably easy to adore and follow. A gulf between ugly commoners and alluring aristocracy in prior ages had been a matter for clothing and ornament: hereafter it would be woven into gene and blood, flesh and bone.

As Rania ran, some hidden signal in the threads was triggered, the long satin train fell away, divided itself neatly into streamers of cloth. The twenty queens now raised their gloved arms, to beckon these streamers upward. Up the fabric flew, high overhead, to the delight of the cheering crowds, and diamonds rained down on them.

Menelaus, grim-faced with happiness, his pale eyes blazing at the adoring crowds, galloping on his long rangy legs, had drawn the ceremonial saber he wore with the absurd uniform. No doubt he would have thrust aside (or thrust into) any unwary well-wishers who dared impede his path away from the celebration and toward his hotly-awaited marriage bed: but the servants of Rania, both uniformed in scarlet and gold or hidden in the crowd, kept the singing mob in check.

The kiss Menelaus and Rania had exchanged before the Pope still burned on his lips: the strange, acrid scent of the high mountain grasses that grew along the lanes for ground-effect vehicles was in his nostrils, and whirled his thoughts like wine.

“You should not have made your legs longer,” he growled. There had been no time for last-minute alterations for the wedding dress, despite the number of seamstresses and fabric-programmers on her staff, so Rania had suffered an overnight modification, to trigger an artificial youth-cycle in her cells, and suffer a growth-spurt to add the needed inches to her height. She now had the coltish legs of an adolescent, a more willowy silhouette.