Montrose poked his head in the tent, and saw both things he knew, sleeping rolls and lanterns, and things he did not. He tapped a bowl on the deck doubtfully with his toe, and it started up speaking in a highly formal version of the Melusine airborne language from the Tenth Millennium. It was a spoken form of Glyphic, based on Monument symbol logics.
“Greetings, noble sir! I am a chamber pot! For all your needs, from excretion to the expulsion of vomit during seasickness, it will be my pleasure to sterilize and cleanse various biological expulsive material you might be pleased to extrude. If you would care for a demonstration, merely direct any organ of elimination toward the clearly marked orifice…” Montrose kicked it again to hush it. The sleeping roll seemed comfy enough, but he dared not touch it to test its cushion. He was afraid it would begin singing lullabies.
Meanwhile Del Azarchel, having no concern for creature comfort, was standing on deck next to the tent and asking Amphithöe, “Who assigned you to us? Are you an ambassador?”
She said, “I am your mother. You are children in this world, which is strange and dangerous to you, and therefore I have been chemically imprinted toward you, to care for your well-being. This tent and these things are my possessions.”
Montrose pulled his head back out. “You ain’t my mother, miss. You’re a damn sight too pretty.”
Del Azarchel scowled at Montrose. “You insult our mother quite cavalierly, sir. Mind your tongue.” To her, with a gallant bow, he said, “As your sons, we will do what is needed to protect your person, your interests, and the honor of the family name. But excuse our confusion! In our time, those who awoke from other eras, either thaws or star-farers returning, created friction because they were alien to the current time. We did not solve the friction between currents and revenants in such a fashion. You are selected at random? Without consulting us?”
Montrose said, “It’s like dropping someone down a chimney and just hoping the house where he lands in the ashes to take a shine to him.”
Amphithöe smiled mysteriously. “And how is a mother giving birth so different? Children appear as oddly as if found at the hearth, and—how did you phrase it?—they shine in our eyes.”
“Close enough.” Montrose shrugged.
“The custom dates back to the time of the Nymphs, I take it,” said Del Azarchel. Montrose scowled, because whatever clue Del Azarchel had seen to allow him to deduce that was opaque to him.
Amphithöe bowed yet again. “Both of you, Master that Was and Judge no Longer—”
“Call me Meany, Mom. Call him Blackie.”
“—Meany, both of you suffered from revenant friction back in your earliest years, the Master that Was from direct attack by space pirates when he approached Earth from the long-lost and legendary Diamond Star, and you, from, ah—”
“Direct attack by Blackie,” supplied Montrose.
Amphithöe said, “—from the difficult situation in which Black-ye was perhaps required, either forgivably or not, to place you.”
Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps the style The Elevated Nobilissimus del Azarchel would be more apt—”
Montrose pursed his lips and raised both eyebrows. “Watch your tongue, sir! Would you stand on ceremony with Ma?”
She finished, “—it is to avoid additional situations like yours, where those who wake find no place in a world grown strange to them, that our custom of proxy adoption was founded.”
Del Azarchel said, “Unless I mistake the spirit of my compatriot, madam, we are not to remain long in this world. We must soon return to our tasks in the outer Solar System.” He looked at Montrose quizzically.
Montrose said, “What the hell you talking about, Blackie? No more tasks for us to do.”
“How so?” Del Azarchel arched his fine black eyebrows.
“The aliens ain’t never coming back, the human race was not advanced enough to live as slaves, and the prediction of history says we are going to be wiped out long before Rania returns.”
Del Azarchel laughed like a golden bell. “Lies! If any of that were true then neither you nor I would triumph. Our endless duel ends in a draw. Ha! Let us not contemplate self-evident absurdities, my friend!” He shook his head wearily, but flashed a bright smile. “What weakness has entered your wavering soul?”
“Glad you are in a chipper mood, you maggot-ridden skunk,” said Montrose, standing now straight and shoulders wide, a smolder of spirit in his eye. “So, do you have some plan?”
“Not as such. But I think speaking to Tellus is now inevitable. I am convinced his mind and mine will find a strange sympathy.”
“We would have to augment our brains up to the Archangelic level. I ain’t about to do that. So what do you think Tellus will say?”
“Who knows? He may say that once mankind is dead, it falls to us to create new races, and people the Solar System in preparation for Rania’s return. Will not the Star Colonies flourish? We can re-people Old Mother Earth from any of these fourteen Stepmother Earths to which the deracination ships now sail. And when Jupiter arises…”
“Pshaw and pee-shaw. You mean find a way to wake up the Jupiter Brain before the predicted twenty bazillion years from now? You and your goddamn Great Work. Ain’t gunna happen. The Swans said so.”
“The Swans also made this world you see. Do you trust them?”
Del Azarchel raised his arm and gestured grandly toward the ship and its sails, the wide ocean beyond. There were icebergs floating in an equatorial sea, broken from pack ice which could be glimpsed as a white line on the horizon of the south. The sky was afire with curtains of purple and green auroras. There was a too-black cloud of an odd liquid consistency, as unnatural as an inkblot on a portrait, unearthly, the product of the Domination technology from Hyades, far off in the atmosphere to the stern of the white-sailed ship with her masts of fiberglass and diamond. “Is this what you envisioned when you set all the First and Second Human Races free from my sovereignty and power? To free them from the Hyades? Are you happy with the result?”
Montrose, as if struck by the thought, turned and looked at Amphithöe. “There is one thing I sure ain’t happy with. Hey, Mom! That Witch with the dumb nose rings called you a slave. Issat true?”
2. Involuntary Consent
Amphithöe, smiled serenely. “Do you mean the Intercessor? I am a handmaiden: I thaw and slumber, and do whatever is commanded me.”
“For pay?”
She blinked, looking scandalized. “For love.”
Montrose said, “Of your own will?”
Amphithöe had an oddly distant, cool look to her features. “Of course. The chemical balances in my nervous system are adjusted and redacted to produce the willingness.”
Montrose sighed. “Then you don’t want us to set you free?”
Del Azarchel interrupted sternly, “Do not listen to any answer she might give. I have already said I would uphold the family honor.”
Montrose said, “If it is some sort of chemical hypnosis, fine, let’s break her out of here. But if she wants to be a servant, how is that different from you wanting to serve the Hyades Domination? B’sides, we don’t know her.”
“She is our mother.”
“That’s just make-believe! They chemicaled her into having feelings toward us, so’d she give us her tent to sleep in. So if the mother feeling is legit, then her loyalty to her bosses is legit. Ain’t it?”
Del Azarchel sneered. “Come now. I thought you and I were the last creatures left alive on Earth who understand the meaning of honor. Am I alone? Come back to your senses.”
“You’re the guy who says the Earth should be enslaved to the stars! You like the peculiar institution!”
“I am Spanish. We perfected the institution. The New World would not have been colonized had it not been for the slave trade. But you are from backward Texas. You are the one who believes that all men are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights—inalienable means they cannot be bartered, lost, bestowed, bequeathed, appropriated, or sold. She cannot volunteer to be an involuntary being.”