“He woke you because he was desperate to wake Xypotech Del Azarchel—I weary of saying the phrase—I hereby dub him ‘X’-Archel.” (She pronounced it Exarchel.) “By this means he hoped to send to the Diamond Star the only person he trusted not to overthrow him when he returned. Himself. One immortal version of his mind would rule the world while the other—the first of an endlessly self-replicating multitude of Van Neumann ships—would conquer the stars. He has no more need of the human race, for the posthuman starfaring race he intends to be is merely himself, multiplied to infinity.”

“And the rest of Mankind?”

“The myriads of the human race suffer the fate of those spermatozoa who fail to penetrate the egg.”

“Fine. We get to the Diamond Star first, come back, and make his worst nightmare come true, overthrow his damned tyranny, set up something where everyone gets a vote!”

She shook her head. “While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution, perhaps self-defeating. I suggest that only a plan even more far-sighted and ambitious than his will prevail.”

“Har! Or is it just that you helped designed this worldwide tyranny, so you don’t want to see it blasted?”

She said, “The world we found when the Hermetic descended was not as culturally coherent as some English colony like your America with two hundred years of experience ruling themselves. I had to work with the people who were as I found them, people more fearful of bioterror and plague and poverty than they were of servitude. They have their limitations. And I, my husband, even I have mine. I hope you are not like Ximen, and think of me as some fairy-being with a magic wand?”

“You’re on a first-name basis with him?”

“What? With my ex-fiancée, who raised me from a child, and I lived in a starship within shouting distance of him my whole young life? It would be odd if I were not.”

“So what are your limitations? Can’t hit a piñata while hoodwinked?”

“I don’t know what that is. My limit is that while I can inspire a social and political system for humans to maximize personal liberty within the context of minimizing external conflict, I simply cannot reduce the how and the when and the why to adjust the system to a simple algorithm. There must be a posthuman to make adjustments, personal authority on several levels, wise judges, statesmen who transcend the mere hedonistic calculus of power and politics. You see the problem?”

“The problem is you were raised on a ship, so you think everyone obeying one captain is the norm. The problem is you did not set up a Democracy.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Democracy on a worldwide scale? The Chinese outnumber the Australians, and would have voted to abolish international corporate structures. The Azanians would have merely bribed Africa to vote their way on matters of public import. The Copts would have voted the Jews out of Babylon.”

“I mean a limited Democracy.”

“Oh, but I did limit it! The aristocratic class forms a bulwark against overreaching by the commoners. I encouraged an irenic but established sacerdotal order to create legal sanctuary against overreaching aristocrats. I encouraged a formal system of intelligence-augmented bureaucrats to check the fervor of religious zeal, and also to give a harmless outlet to the morbid impulses of academics. I encouraged the arrogance of the plutocracy to check the warlike desperation of the common man, who otherwise would elevate a despot to check the aristocrats: the plutocrats can only maintain their precarious positions by serving rather than commanding their customers. And so on. The parts are all balanced against each other.”

“What went wrong?”

“Intelligent I may be, but not experienced. Book learning is not the same. I am younger than you are, biologically. I am just a girl.”

“That don’t sound like a mistake to me. You being a girl and all.”

“Yet I underestimated the bull-headed blindness of the male of the species. I put too much faith in incentives, and too little faith in the original sin. You see? The Hermeticists are as a ship in a storm, and I have left them only one safe landing zone: namely, they must organize an expedition to the Diamond Star to replenish the energy of civilization, or else the whole structure will collapse. This means they must abdicate power, and decentralize their Conclave to another structure I have prepared to receive it, the Special Advocate Executive of the Concordat. There are several legal mechanisms in place to do this, including an appointment by agency, or invoking a general convention of the Parliament. The Advocacy includes agents of mine, men I have intermittently trained and cultivated over decades. They have so often acted for the Conclave that the Commons would accept them as legitimate. But…”

Her voice trailed off.

“… But the Hermeticists are too stupid.” He finished the sentence for her.

She nodded sadly. “You speak ill of the men who raised me. They are my fathers.”

“I speak ill, but I speak the damn truth, don’t I? They’d rather hang on to power and ride the wild tiger with its tail afire, risking war and world destruction, rather than go home and live on the farm like Washington did.”

“It’s a male trait, this lust for potency, I think,” she said.

“Weren’t Washington a male? Anyhow, Princess, I ain’t convinced you have the best set-up here, and I ain’t convinced seeing it shatter is so much more to cry over than seeing it kept.”

She shrugged her soft shoulders, ghostly in the light from the city underfoot, and the stars above. “This is not a gunpowder age. What if the world shatters also? You have not studied the problem, so how could you be convinced?”

“It’s still a damnified tyranny, and free men shouldn’t stand it.”

“Places on the globe where that is so, such places enjoy a greater liberty under our Concordat. Your North America is controlled only by alliances, media monopolies, and power stations. They still meet in their town meetings and have votes: but they cannot vote for war. Nor for anything that leads to war. Do you understand the limits of liberty? There are antimatter weapons in the hands of men like Del Azarchel and Narcís D’Aragó, men who like to see skyscrapers and farmlands on fire. The more power is in human hands to destroy human life, the more carefully limits must be placed on that liberty—why do you look askance! What I say is as much common sense as drawing in shrouds during a storm of sunspots, or walking more slowly when near a brink! If you would have me restore your precious liberties to the common men, I will have to take the antimatter away, and leave them in the dark.…”

At that moment the car wobbled in the high-altitude wind, and the couple found themselves in each other’s arms, looking into each other’s eyes, and talk of these disagreeable matters was interrupted, not without laughter, by divertissement more fascinating to them.

4. Reception

There was a reception awaiting them at twenty-five thousand feet. Even this was below the level of the Honeymoon Suite of the long-closed hotel. The staff were not concierges and maids, but instead were astronauts and engineers, Rania’s picked men, who had recently reopened the facilities, with much fanfare, and many announcements that another Space Age was soon to begin. Many of these men were Psychoi, the intelligence-augmented Mandarin class—but here in the tower they doffed their silver wigs and proudly displayed their spacer’s crewcuts, or wore the tight, uncomfortable bonnets meant to serve as padding for space helmets. Montrose spoke only to one or two, and he was not sure he trusted them, but they did seem to share his enthusiasm for a new space program, and there was champagne, and colored lights floating in the upper atmosphere beyond the pressurized windows, and many a toast and a cheer to the happy couple, and so Montrose decided to smother his suspicions. Perhaps he was finally home at last, in the future he had always dreamed. The bubbles in his glass twinkled like stars as he raised it to his bride, who blushed and smiled just like any girl, princess or not.