Because Five had been disobeying, he had not communed with the central mind nexus, never had a second pair of eyes look over his experiences, and had never seen the obvious.

“If only I had not been so afraid of me,” Montrose said, “I would have hooked into more brainpower and seen it!”

“Seen what?” said Mickey, startled.

Trey was looking troubled. “So you think I should not have given up threesomes? Icky-Mickey weighs as much as two sex partners combined, and the priest told me—”

Montrose said to him, “Seen this.” And then he said to her, “Trey, snap out of it. Focus your attention. What did the other version of me, Version Number Six, hand to you for safekeeping before he died?”

Mickey said, “What is going on?”

Montrose said, “I’ve been sleeping badly, not been myself. I am fretting and scared that she won’t know me when she returns—for her, it’s been a few years. I am fretting and scared of what happens to the human race once she’s back. If’n we settle down and live out a normal life, while Blackie slumbers and wakes and makes more ghosts of himself each time he wakes—what then? She must be thinking the same thing. Only now, only now, did the thought leak up from my hinder parts of my brain to the front, and I can see it. She must be fretting, too. About the same thing, about what happens when she lands. So she should have sent a message, but not in the open. I did not know what was keeping me awake. Now I know. The silence. Then damned pox-damned triple-damned silence from the stars. Where is her voice in the stars? She should have damned called to me. I kept asking myself, deep down, in thoughts so hidden even I could not see them—why didn’t she send a message? The speed of light is faster than near lightspeed by definition. But that was the wrong question.”

Mickey said, “What was the right question?”

Montrose said, “The right question is not, Why ain’t there no damned message? The right question is, Where is the damn message?”

“Your pardon, but those seem to be the same, or much the same—”

“Not at all the same, Mickey! The right question has faith that she sent one, and asks about how to set about looking for it. Only the smaller and stupider mes was in touch with his instincts well enough to see that. And so—” He turned to Trey again, saying, “What did Number Six hand you?”

9. The Needle

Trey laughed and pulled a round leaf from a belt pouch. Through the leaf were thrust a number of pins with colored heads in order like a color wheel. Trey plucked out from the center of the leaf a pin with a red-and-white head, and held it out toward Montrose with a strange, eerie smile.

It was the first thing made of metal, aside from the weapons and armor of the duelists, Montrose had seen since his waking. The pin was three inches long, glistening in the girl’s fingers, and a point of light gleamed at its tip.

Another version of himself, connected electronically through his nervous system, said helpfully, “It is a memory needle. There is a way of storing information even more densely than the picotechnology of our day. Something to do with the enjambments and overlaps of quantum fields—it is a praxis that Rania sent back when her neutrino message reached the world fifty years ago. Apparently she discovered how to make a gravity laser, just something she invented for herself, cobbled together in her spare time, and this is one of the spin-offs. The newer versions of the needle, you do not need to stick into your flesh to read the info. It will adjust to the antique receiver ports you already have built into your brain. Just pick it up in your hand.”

Montrose stared at the needle, but did not touch it yet. “What the pox is going on? Why did I die? For this damned thing?”

Trey said, “This blessed thing. You all misunderstood yourself so badly, so very badly. No one but Shiranui the Fox-Rania was enough like Rania to figure out where she hid her personal letter to you. Shiranui would not agree to turn over her results unless you agreed to marry her. You did, and you did not lie to her. Number Six could not tell you what he was doing, because that would make his promise to Shiranui false. You knew you would die at your own hand on his wedding day, but before the wedding night, this one hour, so that you would never be unfaithful to Rania.”

“Why?” he asked. But he knew why.

He looked at where the false Rania, Shiranui, was standing by the side of the field. She had not bothered to come forward and mourn at the burial mound.

Shiranui must have had very good hearing indeed, or else have been connected to listening instruments, or else have been a good judge of character, because when the gaze of Montrose fell upon her where she stood across the field, without moving her lips, she sent a message directly into his brain. His normal barriers and defensive brain encryption neither detected nor even slowed the source of the words: My reason is simple. You will live until the end of time, and either as wife or widow, the memory of me will last. I believe in no gods: this is the only immortality to which a Fox Maiden can aspire.

Trey said, “Just as I put you in the armor, you handed me that pin and told me.”

“I would die to hear her voice again,” Montrose muttered, and he took the pin.

It was an audio file, but it silently fed directly into his auditory nerve. He heard her words, and they were private. True love neither years nor lightyears can abate, nor any yawning gulfs, my husband, of these vast desolations of heaven …

2

The Vindicatrix

1. The Voice Message

A.D. 37000 (EARTHTIME) OR CIRCA A.D. 2466 (SHIPTIME)

True love neither years nor lightyears can abate, nor any yawning gulfs, my husband, of these vast desolations of heaven. To your ears alone my words are meant: I will not share my tears with strangers.

I must be curt, for the information density even of a neutrino cascade is limited by Heisenberg and Planck. Let me say in a few words what a torrent of words could not express: I have never forgotten you nor failed you, Menelaus, and I keep the faith that you will somehow find a way to be alive, find a way to endure through all the ages of time, which vanish in a heartbeat for me, centuries while I blink a tear from my eye, millennia while it falls toward the carousel deck, toward the weird, distorted stars of this universe near the speed of light.

The ship seems of normal mass and length to those on board, of course, but amidships is surrounded by a rainbow of starlight compressed into bands of color. Aft is the glow of creation, the super-high-frequency echoes of the Big Bang, Doppler-shifted down into the visible range to form a bright cloud of spirals within spirals. The Big Bang looks like a Saint Catherine’s wheel, like fireworks. Fore is the ultra-low-frequency embers of the background radiation, three degrees above absolute zero, looking like a web of coals and ash, sculpted into an oddly symmetric pattern that contains one of the central mysteries of creation.

I am now the only one aboard. The starship of my stepfather, the Bellerophron, overtook us at the Diamond Star, for we had no choice but to decelerate for fuel. Niven’s law states that every starship is a weapon, for any machine able to accelerate such masses to lightspeed controls such power as can break planets. The two ships found themselves in a standoff the moment they came within firing solution range of each other’s sails, but the ghost of my stepfather could not bring himself to kill me, and I could not bring myself to foreswear my mission, my faith in mankind, my resolve to prove to the heartless cosmos we are worthy of sailing the stars. For this reason I was born.