Montrose said to her, “You are lucky you can pronounce his name.” And to him, he said, “But now I am abandoning you. You’ve been with me since—pestilence! How long has it been?—since the Forty-Eighth Century. Damn. What is it now? The Seven Hundred Thirty-Eighth?”

“You must,” said Mickey. “I insist. Because—”

“Why? Why this sacrifice? For me?”

“No. You are actually, well—if I may speak freely?”

“Better not. Speaking freely is overrated,” said Montrose.

Mickey nodded. “You can take it. There was a statue of you in the graveyard behind my mother’s mating house. We were supposed to sacrifice the colt of an ass once a year to you. Your statue had three eyes and a necklace of skulls, and when it rained on the tin roof of the little grave shrine, it sounded like drums, or the hoofbeats of the white horses legend said you kept with you underground and woke for wars in the dark places underground, with cavalry charges and countercharges that were the earthquakes. And the real you is quite—really, a disappointment. You are very obnoxious.”

“The hell you say! Ain’t I the damnified soul of refinement!”

“Do you know you wipe your mouth with your sleeve rather than use a napkin when you eat, in the exact same spot you wipe your nose rather than use a handkerchief? So, no, I am not staying behind for your sake.”

“Then why?”

“For her.”

“Who?” But the moment the word was out of his mouth, Montrose knew.

Mickey confirmed it. “For Rania, of course.”

“Why?”

“Menelaus, you met her, you saw her. You touched her with your hand, held her in your arms. You know her as a person, a real person. To me, she was the princess who stole a star and went to the land beyond the land of the dead, to plead for the soul of man. When Rania returned, and I saw her fall from the sky like a goddess brightly winged, I knew my faith had been sound, all those years, when I would sacrifice turtledoves to her shrine in high places, in the sacred groves. But to see her as real! It was ecstasy!” He shook his head sadly. “And then I found she was not real. That woman was a copy made by the aliens. For what purpose, no one can guess.”

Montrose said, “What are you driving at?”

“I need her to be real. She cannot be just a story, a false story, and man has no cure for the harms of the world, no one willing to journey beyond the farthest star for us! But if I do not stay behind and guide Ain through the steps of our bargain with him, who else can, or would? In some strange way, I know Ain’s mind, strange and supreme a being as he is. Haven’t you noticed he thinks like a Witch?”

“Like a what? How do you figure?”

“Ain burned his past. He lives for others. These are Witch traits. Besides, it is also for your sake I stay. Who else would you trust not to betray you to Del Azarchel, and who else would Del Azarchel trust not to betray him to you? The Scolopendra and Myrmidon descendants are his; the descendants of the Swans and Foxes are yours, and so on. No one has ever served both of you, but me. So I have to stay. I have to know that the Swan Princess is real. To know it, down to my bones. That means you have to go find her.”

“If ever I find her, it will be centuries after you are dust.”

“I will instruct one of my future incarnations, after achieving the Fourth Spiritual Density, to use the Elder Star Sign to transcend time and space and communicate with me here and now, and then I will know it, without knowing how I know.”

Trey smirked and stood on tiptoe and whispered something in his ear.

“Yes, ah! Strike that last comment!” Mickey hastily corrected himself, “I mean, I will be in heaven among the saints and martyrs, and, looking down, will know if you have met with success in your great quest.”

Montrose looked at him long and hard. “What is your other motive?”

Mickey looked a little surprised, but bowed and said, “Compassion for Del Azarchel. What if he meets the real Rania? She knows the secret of peace. As I have said, he will destroy himself. I have seen this in a dream. The White Christ whom once I reviled, and now I serve, can heal such wounds, wounds of the spirit, self-inflicted wounds; for the magic of the Son of Man is strong, stronger than earth, wider than sky, deeper than ocean, and deeper than the fiery inferno and therefore can overthrow all fates, heal all harms, and make all things new, which even Tash, Oroborous, nor Melkor, to whom once I bowed in adoration, cannot do. But the price is that one must humble oneself to receive the blessing. This, Del Azarchel will never do. But he might for her sake.”

Montrose said dismissively, “He does not love her.”

Mickey said, “Human emotions are complex and subtle beyond the lore of magicians or the wisdom of bishops. Was he not also her father? You don’t want to see him damned, do you?”

Montrose looked up and saw the elevator descending. The figure inside had swum through the air with the un-self-aware grace of an old space hand, and he wore the silver-caped black uniform of the Hermetic Order, and a red ring was on his wrist.

Montrose said slowly, “I am still sort of making up my mind about that. I have not forgot how much I owe Captain Grimaldi. He gave me the stars.”

3. The Circular Singularity

Del Azarchel passed through the door, which was a multistate material which turned fluid, parted around him like a bubble, and became solid glass behind him with a rubbery pop of noise as he stepped through.

He spoke without any preamble: “I was able to examine the interior of the black sphere using instruments that Ain described and Torment built for me. The attotechnology drive, I finally discovered, is a ring of singularity matter denser than neutronium spun at ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light so that particles of negative mass can be orbited near the event horizon, accelerated by the frame dragging of the ring, and shot out through the dead center where the gravity forces cancel out to zero, losing some energy due to tidal effects but keeping enough that they can be directed against the sail in a propulsion beam.

“It looks like a perpetual motion machine, as absurd as if a man in a sailboat were to wave an ostrich plume fan at the canvas and impart motion.

“What prevents it from being a true perpetual motion machine is two things: One is the negative mass of the Bondi-Forward particles. These particles, when encountering equal and opposite mass, produce a constant acceleration of the system toward the positive-mass object. It is from this that the ship derives her self-accelerating motion. Two, the point in time at which the universe will one day balance its books is lost in the depths of the ring singularity event horizon, where time passes so slowly, the bookkeeper demanding to know where the extra energy comes from will never—from our frame of reference—put in an appearance to demand the bill be paid.

“So, while, technically speaking, every action still has an equal and opposite reaction, and entropy still rules all things and ruins all things, and conservation is conserved, nonetheless we observers here in this frame of reference, aboard the ship but not inside the microsingularity of the drive, we will never see the equal reaction. From our frame of reference, entropy is reversed, and momentum comes from nowhere—that is, from somewhere outside our frame of reference.”

Montrose said, “Why can’t the aliens just use these things to make an infinite amount of energy, then? Use one perpetual motion machine to spin a second up to speed, and the second gives back more energy than it takes to the first, and so on?”

Del Azarchel said, “As I said, it only seems to be a perpetual motion machine from one frame of reference. The drive also requires a supply of particles of negative mass, which don’t exist in nature, and which Ain cannot construct. He cannot fold spacetime into tiny knots with enough delicacy to make new and exotic fundamental particles, but this is apparently something the Domination of Praesepe can do—make the fuel, that is, not the drive. The drive disk is more massive than our whole solar system, when seen edge on from a femtometer away, but otherwise is seen as a lightweight substance akin to metallic hydrogen, possessing zero density and zero inertia. Do I need to say it is also made of attotechnology particles, quanta of fundamental matter-energy that cannot exist in nature? The drive cylinder is a substance that seems to be made of neutronium, but otherwise. Our old friend, Mother Selene would call it magic. Neither Hyades nor Praesepe can create an artifact like this drive.”