Sun there was none. A flotilla of tiny fairy queens held a cluster of lanterns and heat sources in a luminous cloud that stood between the dead center and the summer quarter of the garden. Each twenty-four hours shiptime, these lanterns crept forward exactly one degree of arc. Each twelve hours, they were extinguished for the night watches. Directly opposite, the shadow of the dark sphere spilled across the center of the winter quarter.

Directly overhead, in the center point of the vessel, neatly bisecting the archway of the autumnal garden, was the true ship: like a miniature moon held frozen at the zenith, here was a dark sphere of opalescent ceramic material.

Oddly enough, the black sphere seemed to be made of a silicate called cristobalite, rather than some unheard-of exotic material created by superscience. It was an industrial ceramic, remarkably like what was used by Tellurians to coat kiln linings or jet nozzles.

This dark sphere was held in a cage of struts and supports made of wood, a single rootless and branchless tree, like a snake eating its own tail, growing in the shape of the seam on a baseball.

Some fancy or aesthetic notion of Rania’s had imparted life to the wood so that twigs, leaves, and cherry blossoms partly obscured the dark opal sphere from view. Why she has used wood as a framework material rather than metal or plastic, Montrose did not know for sure. The only clue of the vast energies harnessed by the engine sphere was the very slight rose-red gleam coloring the air, visible only to Patrician eyes, and a distortion or aberration of any object behind the sphere, which looked like a photograph on a piece of plastic that was puckered by the sphere’s weight. As one walked the pathway around the vessel, the sphere was always overhead, and the pucker of distortion was always behind it, moving as the viewpoint moved.

To the aft of the sphere, in the dead center of the great disk, held in place by invisible supports, floated a cluster of antennae and magnetic bottle instruments, including the spine of the main drive to one side. These instruments reached from the sphere and out through the unseen hull material into vacuum. These instruments communicated between the human vessel, the outside universe, and the alien mystery locked in the heart of the dark sphere.

There was no visible shroud house. Instead, thread-thin lines of magnetic monopoles, another exotic particle, reached from the black opal sphere, passing harmlessly through the magnetically neutral transparent hull, to a constellation of balls and teardrops held in two wide rings. These balls of the inner ring emitted lines made of exotic matter, some impossibly thin and impossibly tough material, adamantium gossamer threads able to cut through anything. These lines ran to a larger, outer ring of teardrops, and from each pointed end of each teardrop, more lines connected to the sails. The balls shrank when they extruded lines and swelled when they drew them in, but there was no visible mechanism of spools or spindles.

Opposite the main drive, in the dead center of the fore hull, was an airlock and a dock. At the moment, a landing boat, a streamlined icicle of shape-changing material, clung to the axial dock. Reaching from the airlock at the ship’s axis to a point not far from where Montrose stood was an elevator shaft of glass. Down it came a car.

Montrose was watching two figures, a man and a woman, in the approaching car. They were both weightless as they moved, hand over hand, from the airlock to the elevator car: an obese dark-skinned figure in bright robes, and a slender girlish shape in a long-trained dress that looked like blue cigarette smoke, moving and breathing on its own, a phantasmagoria of wandering scarves and billowing cape hems. Both of them oriented their feet toward Montrose as the car began to move, and gravity grew greater as they descended.

Montrose with no embarrassment embraced Mickey as a brother, and they pounded each other roughly on the back. The lady was Trey the Sylph, now Mrs. Primadonna Soaring Azurine de Concepcion. Mickey had insisted that she was no longer the third, but the first, and must change her name accordingly. She had insisted on adopting his family name, which was a tradition long forgotten in his day.

Montrose bowed and kissed her hand, which made her giggle, since she had never seen the gesture before.

“Save for one only, I am the oldest woman in the universe,” she said in her strange, dreamy voice. “I am the only living being from the same millennium as you—me!—except for your lover … and your hater. I wanted to see this through to the end, to see you duel your foe and find your princess, but I have a happy ending of my own to see through.”

He said, “I am glad you are so sure I can beat him. He is a fair hand with a pistol.”

She said, “Oh, no, he is a better shot than you. I am just hoping something unexpected will save you. That is the way happy endings work in real life, isn’t it?”

Montrose said, “Trey, you should not be here.”

“Alive, you mean? Yes, I am very unlikely, statistically speaking.”

“No, I mean climbing in the pool and having your mind copied over into an alien machine intelligence bigger than our whole solar system. Maybe you think a copy of you is you, or maybe you think it is a twin sister, or daughter, or whatever, but once there is a copy of you trapped in the Ain Principality, there ain’t no way out. Even if there is ever a way to create another physical body, all the copy can do is make a second copy there, while she stays behind. You, the copy, will continue in the mindspace until you are deleted—which is the end of you, that version of you.”

Her eyes came into sharp focus. She said, “I cannot let my husband go alone. Where a copy of him is, a copy of mine must be. There were no oaths, no vow-taking, among my people during all of our useless, floating, windblown lives. And what happened to all my people, my world? Mickey remembers them only as legend. The people of Tormentil—she changed her name for her marriage, too! Isn’t that sweet?—they don’t even remember what Earth is named. They call it Eden. To them, history began with Jupiter, and even the death of Jupiter is as mythical to them as the Day of Burning—the Ecpyrosis.” She giggled again and held her hand before her mouth. “Oh! But you remember that day, don’t you? You ordered it.”

“Naw. My horse did that,” Montrose said. He turned to Mickey. “How did you convince him to agree?”

Mickey smiled. “You forget that, for a time, I was the disciple of Exarchel and a loyal servant of the Machine. Del Azarchel has a noble nature, but fate placed him under a curse, and he will one day destroy himself. I appealed to his nobility. Did he want to be recalled by his subjects as the leader who abandoned them, sold them for a woman, even such a woman as Rania? And he knew he could trust me.”

Trey spoke in a dreaming voice, looking at the passing clouds of winged fairy figurines, “I still don’t see why the two of them just could not agree … the Master and Meany, I mean.”

Mickey said to her, “They both had to give me their power of attorney and appoint me minister plenipotentiary to deal with Ain. Ain is too wise, my dearest, gentle bloom, and cannot be deceived. Both these men knew the other would sell him out for the chance to go by himself. But they both knew I would be willing to dash their hopes rather than see our children sold again into the indentured servitude which the return of Rania, false or not, truly freed us. Because I love you more than I love them. They both know me, and both trust me, and neither would dare in his wildest dreams break their solemn oath to me to abide by the outcome of whatever negotiations I can manage. Montrose will not break his word because he is too stubborn, and Del Azarchel is too proud.”

Trey said to Montrose, laying her hand on his elbow and leaning close, “You are lucky to have a friend in my Mictlanagualzin!”