Montrose was appalled. “Sounds like the polity of man is a corpse, but with the outer parts, the hair and the fingernails, still growing.”

“And I think this world, Torment, is meant by Ain to be the seed of a new human polity.”

“Why?”

Mickey said, “Instead of explaining that, take a moment to cool your anger, and let me make one more prediction: I predict the Principality of Ain will be ready, no, will be eager to talk to us, and in as clear a fashion as possible. It will take the time and trouble to study our language and our forms of thought and make itself clear. That is what his logic diamond is for.”

Montrose looked down and picked up his feet. He floated about a yard high above the surface, peering at the soles of his sandals nervously. “This is Ain thinking-crystal?”

Then he realized he had lost his channel to Mickey, and he used one of his newfound Patrician energy-manipulation organs to pull his himself back down to the surface and magnetically anchor his feet there.

Torment said, “Yes. This moonlet is being formulated from our exosphere material. It has been growing here for some time. Not long ago, this location was nothing but the four dendrite mechanisms touching their tips together. The gathered and transformed material has been growing between the tips, forcing them apart. I assume Ain created this area of electromagnetic silence to aid in the reception of signals from the home Principality.”

Montrose peered at the figure representing Torment more closely. The symbolism of her dress and throne was clear to his new pattern-seeking Patrician brain. The bridal gown represented her willingness to assume orbit around Ain and become a satellite of Epsilon Tauri, a member henceforth of the Hyades polity rather than the human one. The throne of bones represented the cost in human lifetimes spent to pay back the debt incurred by Torment and her subject populations. In other words, the cost of slowing Torment and navigating her to an orbit optimal for his surface life would be measured in so many lifetimes that it was as if she sat on a heap of lives and lifetimes all consumed.

Montrose felt a stab of guilt. How many of these events had been his doing? What percent of blame fell at his feet? Whatever that percent, it was measured in centuries and millennia of servitude imposed on his fellow man, servitude that Rania had arranged mankind to escape, or, to be more exact, this was servitude the advent of the False Rania had arranged mankind to seem to escape. And this was servitude which Montrose had arranged the world of Torment to reenter.

With his new brain, he could see other patterns in the events leading to this moment, and other symbols in the scene. The chalice in her hand was a stirrup cup. The snakes represented a bitterness she could drink but survive. He said, “You mean to send me and Blackie onward, the two of us, by ourselves.”

Torment said, “That will be part of our price, yes. Otherwise there will be no agreement. We will continue into the void and perish, and the Principality of Ain will be fined or punished by their superiors.”

Mickey said, “Ain is afraid to try to keep the supership of Rania for themselves. My guess is, had Ain meant to keep it, or buy it from us, we would have been decelerated at a reasonable time and rate and given a hero’s welcome. Torment tells me the Cold Equations have several vectors where one of Ain’s superiors would simply pluck such a covet-worthy prize out of their little hands. An intelligent star system is still a very, very minor little elf in a big, bad galaxy filled with dragons and sorcerer-kings with iron scepters.”

Torment said to Mickey, “Ask this man you once worshiped as a demigod why he approached this ice moon in such anger and why he raised his hand against me.”

Mickey said, “Sorry. What happened before I walked up? Did you offend the goddess? Always a bad policy to tick off someone you and your household, and your whole country, are standing on top of, you know.”

Montrose said, “I was plenty mad, and she knows why.”

Mickey said, “I don’t. I was the one who enchanted your alarm clock to sleep. I thought you would be filled with grief at the suffering your, ah, miscalculation of the Cold Equations caused. So I wanted to spare you as much—”

“I don’t remember deciding to come up here,” said Montrose.

“Eh?”

Montrose said, “That is why I am mad. Because I do not recollect ever deciding to fly up into low orbit; nor do I recollect deciding to visit this orbiting iceberg that was not here when I went to sleep. I woke up, spent quite a while deciding what body to put on, turned into a Patrician, and came out of a little set of pods growing on vines in one of the buried cities. Then I took a high-speed pressurized tube up through the crust to the bed of the layered oceans of liquid atmosphere, looked up with my magic new eyeballs, and came straight here to this little snowball of a moonlet. Which turns out to be made of logic diamond. And here was Torment in her remote-control puppet body waiting. See? She did something to my mind to make me come here without me realizing it.”

Torment said, “Not I. It was done with far more fineness and nicety than I could ever manage. And, in any case, I still hold myself to be obligated not to meddle with human affairs, since, in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of my own conscience, I am still bound by the ruling made by Triumvirate, at least for now. Once I wed Ain and become one of his harem of worlds, his laws will govern me. But look!” She raised a slender, pale finger and pointed. “Your dark shadow and spiritual twin approaches. He is more cautious than you, or perhaps more self-aware, and more quickly realized the extent and depth of the manipulation that enchants and summons him. He pauses, he hesitates, he deliberates! His curiosity wars with his pride. Perhaps he will fall in wrath back to the surface, willing to forgo this high consultation that he might later boast he was not summoned by a glamour so easily as you.”

It seemed curiosity was a greater force in him after all, for just then, like a vast black bat, came Del Azarchel winging low over the close horizon. His gold Patrician-style body was strikingly handsome against the coal-black mantle he had donned. With a seemingly effortless mastery of the delicate balancing of propulsive and attractive fields, he came to a perfect halt half an inch from the surface and merely lowered his sandal toes to the surface.

Unlike Menelaus, he did not fumble when establishing a field to carry his communication signals. “You called, madam? I would have come at a gentler invitation. Know that I am offended by your casual presumption on the sovereign integrity of my mind. My vengeance—”

She said, “Your vengeance means exactly nothing. Once you and your bright shadow and spiritual twin are vanished from this domination and realm, taking your paired monomania with you, all my calculations will be returned to normal levels, and the freakish unknowns you continue unknowingly to intrude into history with vanish with you.”

Montrose said, “’Lo, Blackie. Happened to you, too, huh?”

He spread his hands. “It was so subtly done that even now I am not certain. Perhaps it is but airy whim and a coincidence that I am come! And yet here I find you and my oldest servant—now, ironically, serving the Church which is the only human institution older than I.”

“Not human,” said Mickey.

Montrose said, “Creepy, ain’t it? Something called us here. I don’t find no broken memory chains, no record of a break in any damn firewall, no nothing. That means…” He paused, frowning. “That means the suggestion was put into my head through something in the environment.”

Del Azarchel said, “Such as what? Tiny clues carefully calculated to play off buried memories? Or the smallest possible neural energy pressures adding and subtracting the tiniest bit from memory flows or associational chains without breaking them?”