“What are these?” asked Montrose in a whisper. He had never heard nor imagined such a thing as a solar system with five hundred worlds in it.

“Most are terrestrial-sized worlds sculpted very recently, within the last eighteen centuries, out from the massive corpse of Jupiter. They are called the Deodates. Others are Cold Potentates or Rogues, designed to dwell at slower thinking speed far from any star, but, startled by the deaths of Lethe and Styx, have made the long, slow voyaging hence from interstellar space, anchoring energy fields to their magnetospheres in imitation of the semi-immaterial sails of Rania’s Great Ship. Look to the horizon! As the globe turns, she will come in view.”

His view was blocked by the forest. Montrose impatiently scanned the treetops, found the tallest, and climbed it. He could not recall the last time he had climbed a tree, but he scampered up as lightly as when he had been a child, as quickly and efficiently as when he had been a sharpshooter for the cavalry. Perhaps this new body he had been given had muscles more pliant and potent than normal, or perhaps the soaring spirit in him, the eagerness, made him light and lent him strength.

3. Up a Tree

Above him, he saw a human figure. As he drew near, Montrose saw who it was. He did not even wonder how the man had known where to find him.

Blackie del Azarchel was seated on one of the upper branches of the tree, a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his brow, smoking a cigarette in a holder, his long legs crossed at the ankles and propped against a second tree branch. He was dressed in the expensive coat and leggings of a Spanish grandee of the Twenty-First Century, with a cravat at his throat and lace at his wrists.

“Dr. Montrose, I presume? Fancy meeting you here.” Del Azarchel smiled his most charming smile.

Menelaus stared in utter disbelief. And then his expression darkened, and his deep-set eyes began to glitter dangerously. He drew out the triangle of diamond from his sleeve and wrapped part of the sleeve tail around the base as an impromptu grip so he could hold the shard like a dagger without cutting himself.

Del Azarchel flicked his cigarette lightly away and tucked the cigarette holder into an inner pocket. “Not to worry, my man. It would be wrong for a man like me, who plays the long game, to interfere with another man’s honeymoon, foe or not.”

“State your business. I am in too good a mood to poxing rut with you, today of all days.”

“What is that diamond shard you carry? It is cognitive substance, probably containing more calculation power than our entire civilization, back when I ruled it.”

“I was picking my teeth with it.”

Del Azarchel controlled his expression admirably and said only, “Do tell. Whenever I begin to forget the many alluring aspects of your multifaceted personality, our next meeting always reminds me. I have come to give you a wedding present.”

“You told me you thought she would reject me and cleave to you. You giving up?”

“Not as such. As I say, I play the long game. No, I am merely conceding the point, not the match, and, as a gentleman, a type of being a clod like you perhaps will never understand, I wish to give you a gift.”

Montrose told him into which orifices, in which order, he could shove his gift sideways, no matter what it was. “I care for nothing from you, Blackie. You done me such ill as has never been done no man, before or since, not even in legend.”

“Ah!” said Blackie, raising a forefinger and laying it aside his nose. “But this is a gift which only I can give, and I selected it honestly, to be something you indeed would crave.”

“I doubt it.”

“Again, do you underestimate me? Such is your nature. My gift is my absence.”

“Come again?”

“I will depart for an age of time from this world, perhaps from the Empyrean altogether, and allow you two to reacquaint yourselves. Look! I see in your eye that you would want this very much.”

“What do you want in return?”

“It is a gift, freely given. But do tell Rania, when you see her, that I send my love and greetings. And ask her for me: What are you going to do with that ship? I mean, if she has no immediate need for it…” He shrugged and smiled again.

Before the startled eyes of Montrose, the shape of Blackie turned white, all his clothing, his face and hands, everything. Then Montrose realized that had been a puppet, a projection from a distance. The body sagged, turned into diamond substance, and began to sink back into the tree trunk from which it no doubt had been extruded.

Before it entirely disappeared, Montrose stepped on its collapsing face, reached for a higher branch, and kept climbing.

4. The Solitudines Vastae Caelorum

From the topmost and swaying branches of the crown, Montrose looked toward the distant mountains of glass with his new, unearthly eyes.

The eclipsed sun, a dark orb surrounded by a nimbus of fire, stood above the eastern mountains. Above the mountains, a great curve of pink arose and came into view, running from north to south as far as the eye could see. After a moment came another and a third curve, like the petals of a flower. The great round sweep of the fore royal, main royal staysail, and main upper topgallant rose first over the mountain crest as the turning of the Earth brought more and more into view. More than once, Montrose had to adjust his imagination to the size of the thing.

When thirty minutes had passed, nearly half the sails had risen above the horizon so that all the eastern sky was filled with a vast half circle reaching nearly to the zenith.

Rather than the one or two sails flown by ships like the Emancipation, this vessel flew scores of sails, ovals and circles elongated to leading points, rank upon rank. The sails were arranged in the Fibonacci sequence called the golden spiral, which gave the vast shape the haunting aspect of a rose in full bloom, with the smaller sails gathered toward the center. Some oddity, inexplicable to human science, Doppler shifted the light reflected from the sails so that they were a glowing red hue, pink toward the center, empurpled at the edges of the sails.

And it was bright! The sails were brighter than the morning star, brighter than the full moon, bright enough to flood the world with rosy light, as if the mountains and forest were bathed in cherry petals, bright enough to add an aura or haze of deep purple, loaned by the atmosphere, in concentric circles around the sail array.

When he saw the dazzling reflection of the sun in the bowl formed by the sails and saw the edge of the sail pass behind the eclipsed sun, he realized the vessel was in opposition—that is, on the far side of the orbit of the Earth from his position. The sails were concave, like a parachute, and behind the payload, since the ship was decelerating, braking against the light pressure from fountains and threads of laser energy issuing from fiery deeps of Sol.

Before another hour was passed, the colors of the sail brightened into a lighter pink, and the center grew white. Montrose saw the shadows of planets sliding across the inner surfaces of the sails, revised his estimate upward of how far away the vessel was, and recalculated the size of what he was seeing. From one side of the great rose-shaped sailing array to the other was a diameter greater than that of the orbit of Venus, over 120 million miles wide.

Then he realized that the center of the sailing array, the fore course, main course, and crossjack, were moving against the background of the other sails. The vessel had released her shrouds so that all but three of the sails were resisting the light pressure with no payload and hence would decelerate much more rapidly, coming to a halt in the outer system. As he watched, he realized that there were very slight misalignments between the petal-shaped sails of the fore, main, and mizzen lower topgallants and the course of sail before and behind. He concluded that the outer and larger sails had been cut loose weeks or months ago, while the vessel was still passing through the Oort cloud, and the middle ranks of sails set free when passing through the Kuiper belt. The vessel was too large to maneuver within the ambit of the inner solar system but had only kept a spanker and two staysails and a flying jib in place to decelerate the very last scintilla of distance.