Montrose said, “Whose exile? Yours? What, you think you are coming with me?”

Vigil shook his head. “Everyone is coming with you, save for myself alone and the Lighthouse crew. I alone am faithful enough to tend the beam of Iota Draconis, the most powerful beam in all the human polity, and center it into your sails no matter how long the wait. I will keep the beam centered even if sixty thousand years must pass by.”

“How you know I ain’t got a ship of my own?”

“You have been constructing sailcloth on the moon called Hellebore. Who else has motive?”

“A man named Mickey is doing it for me, and a whole race of half-Sylphs he has fathered there, but yeah. I got me a sailworks there.”

“But you have no vessel, or else you would have departed erenow. And unless you had some understanding with the Lighthousekeeper and the Aedile and whole Table, you could have neither a launching laser nor the resources to power it and keep it powered. Why is that? As for the Imperator, he is unconcerned with retaliation from Rania or any Angel or Potentate. Why is that? Obviously he has the means to flee from the Empyrean as he did once before, during the legendary era of the White Ship, when mankind set foot in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, and he flung worlds from star to star during their nova cycles. Obviously again, he cannot use that means, except as a threat. He boasted a moment ago of having weapons beyond any human technology, beyond what any Dominion could know. He means First Order technology. The sole example of this is the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum, the ship in which Rania, the False Rania, arrived. But he needs you to command the vessel.”

Montrose looked surprised and stared at Del Azarchel. “You got the giant Space Rose? That thing is bigger than the inner solar system!”

Del Azarchel said, “Six minutes left, Lord Hermeticist. And, yes, it turns out the sails are made of something that is neither matter nor energy, a collection of preons and quarks and antigravitons and other exotic particles for which we have no names. But the substance folds up into eleven dimensions quite nicely, like the mythical ship of the Norse gods, which could fit in a man’s wallet.

“I have the miracle vessel in tow behind the Emancipation,” continued Del Azarchel, “hidden from the gaze of Iota Draconis behind my aft push plate. But the fuel is just as exotic and cannot be manufactured with nanotechnology nor with picotechnology.

“The vessel is a bastard. She can be used as a sailing vessel, riding an acceleration beam, or as a self-propelled vessel, using the sails to gather particles from surrounding media as reaction mass. The speeds the False Rania achieved returning to the galaxy from outside it, the speeds needed to reach M3, comes from propulsion, not sailing, but that option, at the moment, is beyond me. So I mean to sail the Hyades, to the star the Swans call Ain and the Patricians call Coronis, and see if I can bargain for fuel to power the vessel.”

Montrose turned back to Vigil and said, “You seem to think he needs me.”

Vigil said, “I only deduce from what has happened here. If the Master of the Empyrean could have departed without you, he would have raised sail and found his way to Hyades, and eventually to M3, to recover the woman legend says you both love.”

“I love her,” said Montrose. “He’s just an ass.”

Vigil said, “I can see his eyes when you speak. Your death he never ceases to contemplate, and before his mind’s eye, he holds the details lovingly. He must need you very badly indeed, for his desire to see you dead is being checked by a stronger desire.”

Menelaus turned and looked at Del Azarchel. “I thought your hate for me was the only real, sincere, not-baloney human emotion inside that man-shape make-believe you call your immortal soul, eh, Blackie? What hankering you got in your black heart that is stronger than hate?”

“Curiosity,” answered Del Azarchel. “I was a scientist before I was a sovereign, was I not? Not only do I wish to recover my bride and queen and greatest handiwork, but to discover who wrote the Monument, the original Monument—for you and I have seen only a redacted version, an edited and false copy. I want to know the reason and purpose of the message. Only then will I understand who Rania truly is.”

Montrose uttered a curse. He turned to Vigil. “You are pretty damned smart. Can you figure what is his reason for needing me? Or why I should help him?”

Vigil said, “No. But I do recall that Princess Rania was born and raised aboard the Hermetic, which was controlled by a very simple artificial intelligence, but one which was programmed with certain laws and customs, including such things as inheritance. Is that legend true? She was captain of the ship at a very tender age primarily because the ship’s circuits would not obey the mutineers, who slew the first captain, but would obey someone of his bloodline, and she was close enough, as a clone of the first captain, to fool the simple machine. I have an intuition—a level-three intuition, mind you—that Rania, during her solitary return journey, programmed the alien ship according to what she herself knew and thought proper.”

Del Azarchel said, “You have struck the mark, Lord Hermeticist.” He scowled at Montrose. “The alien vessel is inhabited by an artificial mind which I cannot dislodge, which the False Rania, in perfect impersonation of the true one, for some mad reason taught and programmed with all her ideas, including her notions of marriage. Since you are the ex-husband of Rania, once I persuaded her that the False Rania was false, the ship declared you—as Rania’s lord and master—to be sole heir to her property. Rania is rather old-fashioned, even by my standards.”

Montrose swore an oath and exclaimed, “Ex-husband?”

Del Azarchel smiled thinly. “Your marriage was annulled by an act of Parliament of the Tellurian Concordat, sometime back in the Third Millennium. I forget which century.”

Montrose said, “And the ship’s brain does not recognize the legality of an act of Parliament to abridge a sacramental oath, I take it? Not if Rania, false or true or any sort of Rania, was the one who programmed it.”

Vigil said, “The alien ship is treating the discovery of the falsehood of Rania as the same as death, then. That is highly significant.”

Montrose said, “Why?”

“It means your voyage will not be in vain,” said Vigil. “This was not a deception practiced deliberately. Something beyond expectation, beyond even their expectation, happened at M3.”

Montrose turned to Del Azarchel. “What now? If this Table don’t disband and let you use their Lighthouse, what then? Are you going to draw the sword and threaten this group here to turn the deceleration beam right and proper into your sails?”

The Chronometrician spoke out of turn, cackling, his yard-long antennae swaying. “He has lost the desire and drive. The dark emperor of all mankind realized that he needs this world intact, unmarred by war, filled and overfilled with excess population!”

Vigil nodded. He turned and squinted at the statue of Torment. “You will pass out of range of the most powerful broadcast apparatus of the Empyrean, and so be beyond the retaliation from Triumvirate or any of the Powers of the greater planets. What would be your desire then, O murderess world?”

Torment said, “My thoughts are not like yours, but to be the mother of worlds, and to spread my children farther than even highly favored Tellus, that would be ambition indeed, and the old races that I love, the ancient things crafted by Hermeticists, nothing would be absorbed into the bland uniformity of the proud Patricians then. And you, my accuser, is your vengeance satisfied by exile, eternal exile?”

Vigil said, “If I were not satisfied, I would order my internal creatures to adjust my thoughts until I were. For I am true to my vows and must ever be.”