“Howdy. What are you going here?” Montrose had to send a signal on several bands and got no response. Then he tried sending the words as small seismic vibrations through the ice moonlet surface into the approaching figure’s boots. The boots were evidently smart enough to recognize the wave-patterns and transform them into something audible inside the suit.

The reply came by shortwave radio: “How did you know it was me?”

“Who else but Mickey the Witch would put a pointed hat on a space suit?”

“I am Mickey the Sacredote now. This is the miter of my bishopric. I have a flock and everything. Mostly they are twenty generations of my own children, but still. You’ve been asleep six hundred years.”

“Kept asleep, you mean. Since when do bishops get married? And I can’t imagine you not as a Witch.”

Mickey turned his gauntlets’ palms toward each other and spread his armored fingers as if grasping an invisible ball, which was the spaceman’s sign showing nonchalance, a nonemergency condition. “The Sacerdotes have a lot more rites and rituals than we ever did, and, with no disrespect meant to my ancestors, they make a lot more sense. I mean, I always did used to wonder why Zeus was supposed to punish lawbreakers, him being an adulterer and a parricide and all. And seeing Earth and all the other planets thronging the solar system messed up my astrology something awful, and four of the nine sacred trees to which I used to sacrifice animals are all extinct. Two of those animals I sacrificed are extinct as well, and one of them was uplifted into sapience. Witchcraft is not very portable to other eons.”

“And Bible-thumping is?”

“You’d be surprised at the number of circumstances Roman law, Greek philosophy, and Jewish mysticism can find accommodating. Just knowing that Ain is my brother, the child of the same God who made me, I find to be quite a source of courage when my courage runs dry. A Witch stranded as I am in this alien star system would be required to assume that the Hyades were made and ruled by Hyades gods, masked and eyeless Demhe, Cassilda dressed in yellow tatters, or unholiest Yhtill, who once were served and worshiped in lost Carcosa on the misty shores of Lake Hali where black stars rise. How, then, could I know the rules of right and wrong, logic and illogic, were the same for me as for the Principality of Ain? If the gods were different, how could our nature be the same? How could I know that the little gods of wind and hill, howe and rill, would still protect me? There is no wind here, and Mount Olympus is sunk beneath the sea.”

“You gave up all your mumbo jumbo? You’ll hardly be the same man.”

“Even had Trey not forced my conversion, it was needed for this journey.”

“How so?”

“It is no coincidence that the one and only culture in history back on the home world that made a habit of discovering and exploring the unknown was not pagan. Who would dare venture into new regions and worlds of mystery and wonder, enigma and fear, save he knows which god rules there? Achelous of the silver-swirling river is a mighty god, but his reach extends no farther than Aetolia and Acarnania. That is not true of the Wounded God whose flesh each Sabbath I consume, whose reach is boundless. Here, in this horribly alien system, with its hidden gas giants and hollow suns, and leafless trees for worlds, my cruel and little pagan gods are left far behind in all senses of the word.”

Mickey passed to him a small, flat package. It was a case containing his glass railgun pistols. “I did not want you to shoot anyone before I had a chance to talk to you. Don’t be mad at Torment for keeping you asleep. I am the one who by my potent enchantments—ah, I mean, by my prayers, of course—persuaded her to keep you under.”

“You? How?”

“I prayed a rosary to each of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, starting with the noble youth Exacostodianos; followed by a novena to Saint Elijah and to Saint Christina the Astonishing, whose sway over these matters is uncontested.”

“Hm, maybe you ain’t as changed as much as I thought. No, I meant, how did you get something as smart as her to listen to you? Or to anyone of our level of smarts?”

“Same reason a hunter takes along a dog when he hunts. I can see things she can’t, despite all her superhuman intelligence.”

Torment said, “There is more to it than that. When compared with Ain, your friend Mictlanagualzin occupies the same intellectual topology as I do, or any of my servants, archangels, angels, ghosts. Moreover, he possesses an uncanny ability to guess Epsilon Tauri behavior patterns.”

Montrose said, “So why did you and she pox with my alarm clock, Mickey, and keep real-world info out of my dreams as I slumbered?”

Mickey said, “Once it was clear that Ain meant to have us pass the point of no return, the zero point after which no deceleration beam in the system could halt us safely, the result seemed obvious. Ain was not going to break the Cold Equations, right? So there had to be a deceleration beam stationed outside the system, or a mirror array to dogleg one, or something. And Ain is the star from which all the Virtues that ever interacted with the human race originated, all except one—Nahalon in the Fourth Sweep. So this star both has the most experience with mankind and the most interest in keeping us indentured. Ain must have been heartbroken when Rania returned and mankind was vindicated. The Beast, that last ruling Virtue to come out of Ain and alter the history of mankind, it must have seen Rania on the way home and known she had been successful on her mission, since she was sailing in a vessel more advanced than anything the whole Hyades Cluster could produce. So what did the Beast do, before it left?”

Montrose said, “It populated worlds far from Sol but closer to target systems the Hyades wanted us to be able to visit or colonize and gave Iota Draconis that famous superpowerful launch laser. But Iota Draconis is farther from Ain than Sol is, by some ninety-three lightyears. We are on the wrong side of the celestial globe. So are all the other worlds of the Petty Sweep. If anything, Ain was trying to colonize worlds with human civilizations far away from it…” He frowned. “It wants to spread us around.”

Torment said, “There is nothing in the Cold Equations to explain this.”

Mickey said, “Ain clearly has some great interest in our race, an interest above and outside the Cold Equations, and has had since the advent of Asmodel. So Ain went to a great deal of trouble to get one planet full of humans, including the only remaining original primitive humans in existence.”

Montrose said, “Meaning me and Blackie?”

Torment said softly, “Montrose is unaware of the signals we have received from the stars we fled.”

Montrose said, “Let me guess. Everyone back home is a Patrician now, and the eighty earths of the sixty-nine human stars have fallen into a long somnolence, just as the False Rania predicted and wanted.”

Mickey said, “A good guess, but wrong on two counts. First, not everyone is a Patrician. The planets colonized by the Beast—namely, Feast of Stephen, Perioecium, Terra Pericolosa, Aerecura, and the World of Willows and Flowers are still inhabited by the variations of the races of Loricates, Myrmidons, Vampires, Overlords, and Sworns, and the capital world of Iota Draconis, named Bloodroot, remains in the hands of the Strangermen, who bribed the incoming Argives with the moon called Nightshade, whose crystals ring with strange music in the many magnetic fields of Wormwood. These last two worlds were both elevated to potentate status in record time, as were the other planets in the rosette of Vindemiatrix, the pilgrim worlds of Saint Agnes and Saint Wenceslaus. Something the Beast did when it selected the Petty Sweep planets to colonize keeps the ancient vitality of the human race alive.”