The ice giant was visible for another forty-five years heading outward again, still following the path of the dendrite cloud. It was lost to sight heading in the direction a pulsating variable star called V1362 Orionis, another member of the Hyades Cluster.

And still, there was no sign of any reaction from whatever form of intelligence—Principality or Virtue or Host—ruling this star system, to the threat posed by the vast speed of Torment.

The invisible point of no return was passed, and still there was no sign.

Once and twice and thrice during these years, increasingly desperate attempts were made to thaw Montrose and discover his opinion and advice. In annoyance, he told whoever woke him, man or machine, to relax.

“They is playing chicken with us, is all.” He snorted. “Let me sleep, you leprous scabnails! I don’t give a damn what your problem is. Solve it without me.”

An agent speaking for Torment said, “But we are passed the point where a laser from the sun could decelerate us safely, sir!”

“These damn things are like machines. They ain’t got no souls. They are controlled by their equations. The equations say they have to bring us to a halt. And they don’t give a damn neither.”

“We are on collision course for the superjovian body! If you are wrong—”

“Damn your eyes! If I were wrong on a simple thing like this, I would have been dead before your race was a twinkle in the eye of a scabby Hermeticist, you asinine sumpsuckler! Now shut your yap. I have had a long, hard, wearisome life, and I get to sleep the sleep of the just! Well, hmm, maybe not that. At least I can sleep the sleep of the I don’t give a damn.”

On he slumbered. On they sped toward collision.

3. Concubine Vector

A.D. 73723

Menelaus woke and saw the year, and before he opened his biological eyes, he examined the immediate environment of the hermit’s cell he had fashioned for himself in a bubble of metal near the core of the planet. Someone had disarranged certain of the mementos and coin collections he had carefully placed on the shelves before entering slumber, and the flag of Texas was hanging from one tack, a triangle of fabric drooping down in defeat. The coffeepot was cold, as if the automatic circuit had forgotten to prepare for his waking.

His glass pistols were missing, a fact he found more disturbing and disorienting than he could account for.

Through remote instruments he saw the frozen sea, and a sky that was half a dome of cold stars, and half a dome of vast pink sails like rose petals filling all space between zenith and horizon.

The cell now included a wardrobe of bodies into which his brain information could be downloaded. After much hesitation, he selected to be reincarnated as a Patrician.

Waking into a Patrician brain was like stepping into a stream of shockingly cold ice water. The neural arrangement seamlessly merged high-speed inner thoughts at the picotechnology level with his nanotechnological and biological architecture so that not only was each nerve cell working to keep his thoughts coordinated, but the chemicals in each cell stored additional information and the electron shells of each fluorine atom in those molecules as well. The normal confusion, self-deception, memory stalls, and waiting times of multilevel consciousness was minimized by the unique architecture or eliminated entirely.

He also decided to wear the traditional garb of the Patricians. His dress consisted of anointing himself with a gel of aurum vitae, the same substance of which Myrmidon flesh was made, which coated and melded to his skin, giving him the characteristic golden hue of the Patrician race; and over that he threw the severe white mantle of the Fifth Men.

With his new brain and its new outlook, he understood the reason for Patrician simplicity of dress: the intuitive and pattern-recognition side of his consciousness was more active in this neural structure, making it easier to see symbols and symbolic relations. While, on the one hand, this allowed for him to think in three new shorthand neural encoding systems, as well as in his old human system and four other long-term and more elaborate neural languages, on the other hand, the rapid-fire method of seeing symbols and patterns made him more easily distracted by things like designs and colors in clothing and tempted him to see meanings where there were none.

The body itself was more compact and complex than a Swiss Army knife, able to adapt to nearly any surroundings. He was not surprised at his ability to exit his cell, soar up a depth-train chimney through the mantle and crust, swim through the liquid oxygen hydrosphere, fly through the cold helium atmosphere, and rocket through the upper stratosphere. The aurum altered with each environment, as did specialized organs inside his new body, inflating or contracting as need be. The Patricians had the ability to place any unused organ into its own miniature slumber, pale white buds coated in frost, and to reroute any vital functions to the analogous organ thawed and put into use.

The white mantle formed an energy parachute to allow him to ride a convenient heavy particle fountain issuing from the polar supermountain of the planet like a bowsprit. Up and up he rose. He eventually reached the position in low Torment orbit where the world’s magnetic fields had been warped into a vacuole of electromagnetic silence. All the radio noise and energy discharges from the buried cities of slumberers at the core of the planet, or from flotillas of armored Scolopendra, faded into inaudibility as he penetrated the vacuole.

Here was an orb of ice, small as one of the moons of Mars. The globe of Torment filled a third of the sky, rising and falling once an hour as the moonlet rotated. Torment was white as Pluto beneath her winter shroud, and her circular crater lakes were dapples of dark purple.

Standing upright on a low hillock of snow, like a spear driven into a rock, was a narrow column of blue-green material, neither metal nor ceramic nor any other substance Montrose could name. It was roughly thirty feet tall. From the top lifted three smaller branches of the same material, perhaps nine feet long, and from each of the ends of these smaller branches three wands issued; and each wand had three spokes, and each spoke had three twigs, and each twig had three hairs, and so on. With his new, Patrician eyes, Montrose could see the pattern recurring, ever small and smaller, down to the molecular level.

The tiniest of the end hairs were plucking particles out of the surrounding near-vacuum and combining them into molecules, and the molecules into crystals. These crystals were fed into tubules leading into the spearhead of the object. Looking down and through the layers of the transparent ice moon to the other hemisphere, Montrose saw three other branched spears like this one, impaled into the substance of the ice moon, each equidistant from the others like the points on a caltrop.

Beneath this dendrite, seated on a chair made of human bones, was a living image of Torment, wearing a bridal dress and veil, and in her hands, a bouquet of septfoil flowers.

Torment had set, and the vast pale light from the world was shining upward upon the throned figure as smoky beams of light seeped through the transparent ground.

Montrose stood staring at her for a moment, rapidly turning off and on various internal senses and several nervous systems to examine his new organs. Some of them seemed to control powerful electric charges and nucleonic forces, nanotechnological and picotechnological vectors and assemblers. He was looking to see which could do the most damage in the least amount of time. He raised his golden hands, an intolerable brightness trembling between his fingers, calculating whether it would be easier to direct the energy in a straight beam, cutting through the moonlet crust, or to curve the beam around the close horizon.