It is mathematically impossible that this is coincidence: it indicates your race, even in your ancient days, when yet below third order capacity, had access to second order information. This, in turn, implies interference by a first-order entity. Who is it?

“Who is what?”

Who is the first-order entity directing your actions?

“You can first order my rutting rod! What the plague does that mean?”

The evidence suggests an Authority or Archon, Throne, Cherubim or Seraphim has introduced strange attractors into the cliometric topography surrounding you. Someone is changing history. Identify this one!

“I got no idea what you’re blathering about, Bugsy!”

Del Azarchel said, “Mary, Mother of God! Did you just give the Praesepe Domination one of your infernal nicknames? I swear by the soul of my mother and by Saint James I will see your blood if this monster helps us now!”

Montrose thawed his whole upper body so that he could turn and look in surprise at Del Azarchel. “What are you jawing on about?”

Del Azarchel shouted, “Every time you call someone by one of your stupid pet names, they end up aiding you! It is maddening! Such a thing cannot be allowed to happen in a rational universe! Every being of every world under all the strange and wild stars of the galaxy should grope for strangling wires and bludgeons to choke your foolish voice in to silence and club your filthy lunatic brains into porridge! Everyone should hate you! God Almighty should hate you! Why does everything and everyone go mad when you are around? What the hell did you do to Father Reyes? How did you—”

But Praesepe said, There is no need for physical transfer of resources. By a process of hyperposition, I have already found and transformed the tritium aboard your vessel into its most congruent negative-mass form. No further communication is required or will be permitted.

Amid a deafening shower of lightning discharges, the tetrahedron wept, sagged, gushed, fell into the pool, broke into eight parts, then sixteen, and then dissolved back into fluid.

The pond surface flickered with ripples and then grew still. Praesepe was gone.

6. Just Dumb Luck

Del Azarchel also thawed his upper body, because now he clutched his head with both hands, as if he feared his brain cells would explode outward from his skull. “Dear God in Heaven, smite me dead this instant! No pit in hell is worse than this! Has the universe gone mad? How did the idiot win again! How does he always—it’s impossible! What did you do? How did you do that?”

Montrose was enjoying the sight, but he just spread his hands and shrugged. His thought had been merely that if Rania were confronting someone who owed her nothing, she might try sweet-talking it out of him, just by plain asking and being nice. But all he said aloud was, “Hell, I ain’t got no idea. Chalk it up to dumb luck.”

Del Azarchel was trying to control himself and actually had his own fingers wrapped at this throat as if to choke his windpipe back into his control, and yet his voice kept jumping into high, shrill pitches. His hair was mussed, and his eyes were as whirlpools. “No, that—that cannot be right! It’s unfair! Dumb, dumb, dumb luck cannot outwit superior genius time after time across centuries and millennia of time! Once or twice—maybe—but not—this is impossible!”

“I would tell you to calm down, but, hell, this is sweeter than peach pie, watching you go bonkers, Blackie.”

“I have to kill you! I have to!” Now he giggled, and laughed, and could not stop laughing. But he could not stop talking either, so he gasped. “You! Arrogant! Filthy! Ugly! Yankee! You’ve robbed everything from me! Jupiter and Rania are gone! And the whole crew is dead! And you stole my idea, and suborned Cahetel—how did you even know?—but no! You did not know! Dumb luck! Dumb! I am drowning in dumb!”

“I ain’t no Yankee, Spanish Simon. Watch your mouth.”

A fairy figurine landed on the shoulder of Montrose, saying in her high, sweet voice, “Captain! There is no evidence of any remaining traces of the Praesepe embassy mind anywhere in the ship’s thoughtware. We have discovered that the fission cylinders of tritium now exhibit negative-mass properties. They are already in proper position for injection into the singularity drive. I have calculated several short courses, in case you wish to test the performance of the drive, and also calculated the shortest path to M3.”

Montrose breathed such a sigh of satisfaction as he could not remember. “Pestiferate my pogo! Maybe my future has arrived!”

He saw that Del Azarchel, while still red in the face and panting like a dog, nonetheless was slowly rediscovering his famous self-control. There was a little fairy half-hidden under Del Azarchel’s long locks of hair, whispering into the Spaniard’s ear, but Montrose was in too good a mood to ask Twinklewink what she had said to calm the man down. He almost felt sorry for the fellow and did not want to spoil the luxury of the sensation of an utterly undeserved and unexpected victory.

A nagging curiosity did, all too soon, push the feelings of glee aside. Montrose frowned.

Why had Praesepe changed its vast, inhuman, collective mind?

5

The Wreck of the Vast Desolations of Heaven

1. A Polite Rude Awakening

A.D. 91917

His first awareness, upon awakening, was of the scent of cherry blossoms, the tintinnabulation of a stream, the twittering of larks and the humming of bumblebees, and the deep knowledge that something was very wrong. He could feel the motion of the carousel, which, even though it was a mile wide, nonetheless still imparted an artificial feeling of gravity. The weight of his limbs and the pressure of air in his lungs told him the ship was spinning at her proper rate. He opened his eyes. Between two the pink rice paper screens of Rania’s boudoir, through the pointed arch of the fairy-tale tower window, he could see the narrow and rising sweep of the garden, green and fresh with late spring. The window was facing the hull one-quarter of the great wheel of the ship away, so the strip of land looked like a green bridge across a field of stars to either side.

Stars meant the vessel was still in the Milky Way. An internal calendar told him it was far, far too early to have allowed any circuit to waken him, and the lack of klaxons or damage reports indicated that he had not been stirred awake by any of the emergencies he had so carefully placed into his thaw instruction logic.

And the birds and bees would not be taken out of hibernation during an emergency. In fact, they could not be taken out of storage at all, except on his direct command. Which he had not given.

Twinklewink was compromised.

Thus he was not surprised when Twinklewink, dressed all in a black costume with a silvery cloak fluttering behind her, came lightly through the window, lugging a gentleman’s white glove behind her. She sped past his ear, drawing the glove behind, to slap him across the face with it.

2. The Challenge

He rubbed his cheek ruefully, cursing himself inwardly with every disease and pest and rot for which he knew the names. What had happened was obvious in hindsight. At some point after the midflight rotation and before their arrival at the Dyson sphere, Del Azarchel beamed a copy of himself into the mind swarm of Praesepe, or, at least, that segment of the Praesepe interstellar mind seated at the Vanderlinden 133. Obviously Del Azarchel had survived, made some sort of deal, suborned or corrupted some of the data entities living in the lower levels of the Praesepe mental universe, and risen to some sort of high position, several millennia before the physical ship carrying the physical version of Del Azarchel arrived. Montrose himself had given the order to lower the drawbridge and welcome in the alien emissary mind into the ship’s braincase. And Exarchel—if that was the right name for him—simply sneaked in with the ambassador, stayed behind when the ambassador left, seized control of central nodes and brainpaths before Twinklewink awoke, and, with her as his helpless, brain-dead puppet, merely ordered her to report to Montrose that all was well. Meanwhile, she also had whispered into the ear of Del Azarchel that he was now master of the ship, and Montrose his captive. No wonder the man had regained his composure so quickly.