Torment waited, one eyebrow raised in a skeptical arch. She spoke by means of a directed energy beam into receiving cells in the auditory sections of his Patrician nervous system. “You have expensive habits.”

After some fumbling, he found a set of cells in his cortex that could impose a pattern on a focused magnetic flux he could establish passing between the two of them. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning you will be fined a monetary amount equivalent to the labor costs of manufacturing this remote unit, if you destroy it. Better just to slap this unit in the face, if it is necessary to reduce your animalistic tensions.”

“I don’t slap women.”

“And I do not crush insects. Fortunate for you. Do you see the star system receding behind us? Principality of Ain is there as well as here, watching, measuring, and observing us. It would be better to be on our best behavior.”

“Behind—!” Montrose felt his anger drain away. He grounded the energy building up in his fingers against his mantle and wiped the sparks absentmindedly against his golden thigh, swearing at the unexpected pain.

His new Patrician eyes could gather information from a number of sources or even use the sail of the Solitudines as a baseline. The planet Torment had passed through the Ain system without striking the superjovian. At present, there seemed to be two gas giants in the system, a bright one and a dark. The dark giant was the inky-black atmosphere of the superjovian, which had removed itself from the planet, solidified into a black sphere, and assumed orbit about it; or, rather, the two were orbiting about a common center.

The gas cloud, to judge from the degree of light distortion of stars it occluded, had more mass than could be accounted for by its volume and density. There was also indirect evidence of an immense heat source at the core of the black giant: an engine warping space.

Montrose said, “Life is poxy mocking me. First, I don’t recall deciding to come up here. Second, I see that they have the technology to create gravity out of nothing.”

“Not out of nothing,” came the cool, soft voice of Torment. “The star Ain lost gravitational mass in equal amount to what the artificial gas giant gained: the star entered an excited state when the balance between the reaction pressure and gravity was thrown off. How the gravitational mass was transferred between the two points is unclear, particular since the volume and density remained the same; but changes in the Higgs boson properties detected throughout the system took place at the time of the near miss, changes that were suggestive of an interaction between gravitons across macroscopic distances.”

Montrose said, “What? Something that takes the gravity particles generated in one spot in the universe and yanks them hither and yon to come out at another? That cannot be possible.”

“You forget that the phenomenon or entity we call Cahetel displayed a similar ability to warp spacetime. This is the seat of power from which Cahetel came.”

“Missing a target big as a gas giant takes some doing. You did not correct the aim? What happened? Self-preservation instinct take over?”

“I have had no desire to live since the day, before even I was self-aware, when my terraforming and pantropic machines, who inhabited the world before mankind, witnessed the genocide of the second generational deracination ship by the descendants of the first, attempted to resurrect the slain race from recordings and samples, and failed. Look at the distribution patterns of dust and energetic particles in the Ain system, and measure the magnetic field strengths.”

With his new eyes, Montrose examined the local area to about half a lightyear distant and realized how the near miss must have played out.

The light from the star Ain had simply been blocked by black inky clouds maneuvered to orbits between Ain and the incoming world-ship, leaving the sails with no light pressure to use. And there was insufficient magnetic strength in the system to tack.

With no way to maneuver, the planet Torment passed through what had been exact dead center of the gas giant, which was now the gravitational center of the two giant planets: and there just so happened to be no physical object there at the time. There had been minor damage to Torment from the tidal effects. The speed gained when falling into the immense gravity well was lost again as Torment receded from the double planet against the pull of gravity.

Montrose looked over the mind-dazing immensity of the sails of the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. There were twin puncture holes somewhere the size of a two supergiant worlds, but the scale defeated even his miraculous new powers of vision. The diameter of a superjovian would not even be a pinprick to a sheet of ultrafine material wide as the orbit of Venus.

Montrose said, “You and I worked together for a long time. I helped you create a world where all the old memories of the past could be kept alive. But you were thinking of selling yourself to the Hyades since—well, since when? Since the hour you figured out my Rania never came back from M3?”

Torment did not answer directly, but spoke in a casual, almost absentminded, tone. “There is a vast sail array positioned six hundred AU fore of us. The Principality of Ain would not have maneuvered the array save that they will offer to decelerate us and even to impart acceleration back toward Ain. The superjovian orbit is not only similar to that of Wormwood of Iota Draconis, upon dissolution of the black gravitic body back into a cloud cover, the orbit will be identical, allowing Torment to have precisely the same seasonal variations of precisely the same periods as we enjoyed back home. What does that suggest?”

Montrose said, “It suggests their damned Concubine Vector: the allowable amount of scabby clapmembered-up-your-hinderparts anyone in a strong position can shove up into those in a weak position. The Cold Equations show that they are still legally required to halt us and grant us port. But there is some fine print in the Monument you and me never saw, or never saw the implications to, is that it?”

“As you predicted, the Principality governing this solar system is required to spend the energy to bring us to port safely. However, Ain has elected to spend considerably more energy that is strictly necessary, in order to place us into an indentured servitude much longer than you calculated. The arrangement of bodies in this solar system make that clear. We must pay for the gravitational engine operations, the cost to restore the superjovian to its previous condition, the cost to create a remote deceleration beam station six hundred AU away, and so on.”

“Why go to so much trouble? Build a birdcage just to suit you, and then lure us into it?”

The throned figure shook her veiled head. “That, Ain has not revealed.”

“But you have a guess?”

“Think you so, mortal man? Observe the nearest of yonder parasol-shaped memory habitats. Each of the macroscale dendrite structures in orbit around the star has a mental carrying capacity equal to my own. Look more closely at what seem to be four asteroid rings, or at what seem to be gas clouds. Your eyes should be able to resolve the images. The same dendrite shapes also exist as forty-kilometer-long vehicles, nine-centimeter-long tools, and as nanoscopic molecular assemblers. Every single last scrap of rust and rock and ice in this star system has been sophotransmogrified. Were you impressed at seeing that Sol is now a system with five hundred worlds? It is a circle of mud huts surrounding a single fire pit compared to this. The intellectual volume of the Ain System taken as a whole is in the five billion range, whereas mine is in the five hundred thousand range.”

A figure in a rotund suit of armor came suddenly over the too-near horizon of the miniature moonlet. The boot soles were coated with a layer of material that changed state with every step, solidifying into glue when the boot made contact with the surface to anchor the walker in place, then liquefying again to release the rear foot for its next step. The midsection of the armor was round like a ball, and the helmet was topped with a conical section like a dunce cap. There was no faceplate, of course, merely a cluster of pinpoint cameras on the front of the solid helm.