But Menelaus was impatient, full of laughter and lust, and would not stay for more. He seized upon his young bride, all wrapped in white satin and white silk, and hoisted her in his arms, amid calls and shouts and sprays of wine. Up they went again in the spider car, this one tied with ribbons and scrawled with well wishes. All fell silent as the atmosphere thinned outside.

There was no one else in the structure, which was not yet ready for civilian traffic: Rania and Menelaus went here partly for privacy, partly for publicity.

At last they were alone.

5. Honeymoon Suite

At midnight, she woke him, but when he turned on the sleeping mat to take her in his arms, she seemed oddly stiff and distracted. He felt something cold and rectangular, the size of a small book, in her hands. It felt slightly warm, as if circuits were active.

The deck of the suite was pressurized nano-diamond, transparent and practically invisible; the lights of the city beneath the clouds below could be glimpsed. It looked to Menelaus like a galaxy underfoot. Here and there were dim reddish glows from the teeth of active volcanoes, looking like nebulae where stars were born. To one side, the full moon hung above her twin sister gleaming in the sea. He looked for but did not see a line of golden glitter dancing like a restless road across the waters; this was the light reflected from the tower, and it had been visible when he went to sleep. At this hour the whole length of the tower was in night, and even Quito Alto high above them was occluded by Earth’s shadow.

It was the stars that were so bright, so beautiful. They seemed almost within reach.

The moonlight illumed the suite, picking out the white walls, the bird-painted paper screens, the lightweight fixtures of clear ceramic or diamond crystal. The tatami mats on the transparent floor were spread wide, so that little fulvous squares seemed to hang against the abyss of night air.

No fancy gold or marble here. It turns out that Rania, when alone, preferred something along the lines of the spartan space-habitat furnishings she’d been raised with.

Except the shower, of course. No spacer had a shower like this: it occupied most of the suite. The crystal walls were only slightly dimmed—what need had young honeymooners for privacy?—by showerheads, soap servers, and massage fingers, as well as waterproof speakers for bathing-music coordinated to the water play. One could swim in the glass basin with the Earth floating beneath. The moonlight from the sea below shined through the pond that Rania had left in the basin of her shower, and so a web of silver light, crisscrossed by ripples, breathed and fluttered on a chamber ceiling.

An imaginary picture of her stark naked and reading a book (not to mention the non-imaginary real girl, warm and girl-scented, supple limbs and clinging hairs of gold and all) for some reason was arousing to him. The girls back in his hometown, even ones he had been sweet on and too shy to court, had not had much use for book learning.

He rubbed his eyes and slapped himself in the cheek to wake himself up. Sternly, he told himself to pay attention to what was going on.

“I’ve read the Monument, up to the Xi Segment.” Her voice was haunted, strange.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” he said.

“What need have I for sleep? There are sections of my brain of which I was hitherto unaware.”

A sensation of terror overcome Menelaus. The changes he had introduced to her nervous system, his attempt to correct the errors in her base gene pattern, perhaps they had waited until she entered REM sleep to reorganize her consciousness.

“Are you still the same person?” he asked.

“More than I was,” she laughed, “but I have lost nothing.”

“What is it? Why are you awake?”

“You were snoring, you rude swine, falling asleep like that! And I could not sleep—I wondered at the joy and pain—”

“Jesus Christ! I didn’t hurt you!”

She giggled. “You are blushing!” Now she seemed normal again.

“Am not! And you shouldn’t talk of such things!”

“I am your wife. If you cannot discuss the mechanics of rutting with me, then with whom?”

“Gah! My mother would box my ears.”

“She is absent. I am the woman of your life hereafter.”

“That suits me.”

There was an intermission of kissing, and so forth. When she put her arms around him, he could feel the cold corner of the square in her hand, digging into his back.

They parted for air. He said, “How could you tell I was blushing? You can’t see me in this gloom.”

From the way her hair moved in the dark, he could sense the triumphant cock of her head. “I don’t need to see. I am your wife. I am yours. Yours. Nothing else you think you own, no wealth, no steed, no knowledge, no accomplishment will ever truly be yours as I am yours, your very own, for only I give myself wholly and fully, with all free will.”

“Now you’re blushing.”

“I don’t blush. I glow. And you cannot see me.”

“Pox. I don’t need to see. I’m your man.”

“Not just my man, my crewman.”

“Pox on that! I wear the pants in this family.”

“You are not wearing pants now.”

“I am still chief. You squaw. Got it?”

“Yes, milord, my husband, and my master. What are your orders?”

“I order you to tell me what you want me to do. It ain’t like I ain’t wrapped around that wee little finger of yours.”

“For my part, I swore to love, honor, and obey. I will honor you now. You alone can I trust with what I discovered.” And she pressed the square into his hands.

It was an antique desk pad, scarred and battered with use, and covered with cheery little pictures of flowers and butterfly-winged fairies. There was also in brass an emblem of a youth with winged sandals and winged cap, snake-twined rod in hand, one toe on a globe, one hand on a star: the symbol of the Joint Hispanosphere-Indosphere Hermetic Expedition.

She tapped the surface of the pad. A crowned and twinkling fairy-sorceress appeared in the glass, displayed a list of menu choices, one of which was Stinky Baby’s Monument Translation.

Montrose realized that this was her personal bookpad, the one she had aboard the ship as a little girl. “Who is Stinky Baby?”

“You.”

“What!”

“My name for you back on my ship. You were the only man I had ever seen who was not gray and wrinkled, and you slept in your coffin for months and years, and that fit the definition I read in the dictionary for a baby. Besides, you wore a diaper, because you did not know how to use a toilet bag. How was I to know what you were?”

“Stinky?”

“The diaper had to be reused.”

She touched the pad again. The bookpad screen had a fairy figure dancing across the surface, waving a wand dripping sparks, and in her wake an image formed of the labyrinth of alien mathematical codes from the Iota and Lambda segments. Lambda was a reprise of the political economic calculus of the Iota Segment, but drawn out in more detail. In floating windows in the margins were translations into the simplified Monument Notation, and then into the Human-Monument Pidgin.

She said, “The Monument Builders have a mathematical expression in the Iota Segment to define the degree of mutuality extended to each measured rank of lesser beings. We are a form of life which might prove useful to their purposes, in a marginal way, even as dogs do tasks for shepherds.”

“Wolves, you mean. We’ll fight and die first.”

“While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution.”

“You got a better one?”

“Yes, for now is the hour of my awakening. I am here to do what I was meant to do. You, my husband, have made me whole.”

She was speaking in a calm, almost eerie voice, but then suddenly her voice broke into sobs and she was in his arms, weeping, rubbing her tears against his chest.