Count to a Trillion

7

Posthuman Technology

1. The Cold Gray Room

Technicians in parkas were trooping out of the chamber as they entered. More than a few minutes were spent in introductions, explanations of the procedures, and some consultations with Del Azarchel over technical matters meaningless to Montrose.

The chamber was hollowed out of the middle of a molecular rod-logic diamond the size of a warehouse: The walls, ceiling, and floor were paneled in absorptive fabric the color of a pigeon’s wing. Out from the walls came bundles of colored fibers, which where stapled to black cylinders occupying the center of the room. The whole thing had a surprisingly clumsy, half-finished look.

Menelaus stood in his parka, his breath a cloud of steam before him, aching. Del Azarchel sat impassively behind him, his hands tucked into a muff, his legs covered with a white coverlet.

“Where’s the brain?”

“We’re inside it.”

“Not as tidily packed-up as a human brain, then. Where’s the controls?”

Del Azarchel wheeled over to the nearest wall, and tapped on the surface, to bring up an image of a standard key-screen and scratch pad. “The wall surface is motion-sensitive and follows standard finger-gestures. You can extend the range from contact to the middle of the room. Make fists to null the monkey-see-monkey-do. Otherwise you will flip the view each time your scratch your nose. If you rub your thumb against your index finger, the walls-sensors interpret that as a trackball. Draw your fingers apart to expand the view. If you’d like a stool, the technicians keep them piled in a corner, along with elbow-rests.”

“I’ll stand. Before I start it, how do I stop it?”

“Spoken like an astronaut. Salute with two fingers for the Halt gesture. Clasp your hands palm to palm to crash out of the program.”

Montrose made the standard library-gesture for Open, which was to touch all four fingers to his thumb, making a circle. Immediately the four walls, and the ceiling, vanished into a pearly gray void. The floor was like a raft on an endless ocean of dizzying fog. Montrose realized all four walls, plus the ceiling, were coated with library cloth.

“Neutral setting is giving me a headache,” said Montrose.

“Cross your fingers for R. That gives you the Review command.”

Suddenly one part of the ocean of nothingness was painted with a system of diagrams.

It was a diagram of a neural process. Menelaus found he could finger-snap through the views and magnifications, or slide the screens left and right with a handwave. At highest magnification, he could see the specific equations generating the lines of code that were compiling into a symbolic matrix. There were hundreds of matrices, thousands, millions, intertwined like some vast tree, or, rather, like the circulatory system of some irregular cloud.

At the lowest magnification was … a mask. It was a crystalline face, made of hard planes of light, with dots and crosshairs to indicate eyeball directions and motions.

Del Azarchel’s face. It was a simplified version, smooth-shaven, with skin like plastic. There was no skull, nothing above the hairline and nothing behind the ears.

It was staring at him. It raised its eyebrow in that typical way of Del Azarchel’s and gave him a polite, if aloof, nod of recognition.

Menelaus said, “It’s—the damn thing is looking at me. I mean, heh, it looks like it is looking at me. Damnification! Almost looks alive.”

The pale lips moved. Speakers in walls carried the voice stereophonically. “Alive? Ah, my friend, you could say that. And such a life!”

The pinpoint eyes looked past Menelaus’s shoulder, turned toward the seated Del Azarchel. The gaze was sardonic. “A happy life, I suppose, for I exist without pain or hunger or want—without lust or love—but, alas, a life that is too brief. Ironic, if you consider the point of this exercise is to grasp for life, endless life.”

Menelaus yanked his hands together as if he were swatting a fly, a loud clap. As if banished by the noise, the cold and superhuman face was gone, and the walls of the room were once more a dull gray void.

“You copied yourself?”

Del Azarchel said, “The seed system modeled my every braincell, down to the molecular level. Whatever my brain did, it did. The thing we humans do not understand, the way the immaterial mind is connected to the matter in the brain, I simply copied it. Ah! And to elevate my copied self to posthumanity, I also copied this.”

Del Azarchel tapped the red amulet on his wrist, and streams of patterned data flowed along the walls.

Montrose said, “I know that part of the Monument well. Delta 81 through 117. It is what I used to make the Zurich computer runs.”

Del Azarchel smiled and inclined his head. “I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Yes, I copied not only your work but your approach. I copied segments of the Monument math, treating as algebraic unknowns the values I could not translate. Due to your work, I was able to make a perfect copy of myself—as myself. To augment the copy into posthumanity, ah! There I had the simulated molecules introduced into the simulated braincells of the simulated brain, to do just what you had done to you. Your Prometheus Formula: I imitated the effects electronically. Unlike you, however, I had more than one try.”

To Montrose’s surprise, grim sorrow clouded Del Azarchel’s face.

He continued: “I was each and every one of them. Closer than any twin brother could be: starting from a perfect replica, thought for thought like me, developing into areas I could not follow! And each time, one at a time, knowing it might end in madness and death, they asked, no, they demanded the experiment proceed. Such brave brothers I lost!” Now he laughed, and turned away, wiping his cheek brusquely to hide a tear. “I suppose it is mere arrogance of me to admire a copy of myself, is it not? But I felt I died each time one trial run had to be shut down.”

Montrose looked at the equipment around him. “I don’t understand.”

“Shutdown is death.”

“Can’t you just restore any copy from tape back-up, or whatever it is called? Don’t you make daily snapshots?”

“Xypotechnology is not like digital computing. It involves dynamic process. The thought-structure of the human mind, the biological structure of the human brain, is time-related. Remember, the simulation here is an analogue: if, in real life, a human brain just stopped and every molecule ceased moving, the brain information is lost. The information about the size and position and location of the atoms and molecules of the brain might not be lost, but that information would no longer contain a pattern of embedded information.”

“Why did you pick yourself as the subject?”

Del Azarchel raised his face, and there was a note of pride in his voice. “I seek deathlessness. A single assassin’s bolt could do me in, and all my plans and dreams die with me. I wish my dreams to live, even if I die.”

“But it won’t be you.”

“True, as far as I am concerned, but to him—he will think himself me. It will be my legacy: a son closer than any son.”

“You are making a world-ruler. A permanent version of yourself.”

Del Azarchel did not deny it. He said, “Without a machinery of immortality, the human race is too short-lived and short-sighted to retain the world peace I have provided. My desire is that the race survive at any cost, to any length, preserved in thought even if not in body. The question is whether that is your dream as well?”

Montrose stared thoughtfully at data patterns shining along the walls. “I don’t suppose star colonization is very practical without some sort of higher machine intelligence to help out. Compared to the animals on Earth, we’re a long-lived race. Compared to the distances we have to travel and the time spans we have to endure, if we are going to have the stars, we’re not.”

Del Azarchel had a stiff, expressionless expression on his face.

“What is it?” Montrose asked.

Del Azarchel merely shook his head, and would not meet his eye. Montrose almost did not recognize the look, since he had never seen it on Del Azarchel’s face before. The look of a man with a bad conscience. A look of guilt.

“You want to tell me what is wrong here?” He meant what was wrong with Del Azarchel.

Del Azarchel answered a different question. “As with you—divarication. The brain structure demotes self-awareness.”

“Why can’t you cure him the way you cured me?”

Del Azarchel smiled a half smile. “Labor disputes. Or a lover’s spat.”

“Come again?”

Del Azarchel shook his head. “I thought you would know better than—Ah, I thought you would know best precisely what the Zurich runs had done, which brain structures had been changed and how—this is, after all, your work.”

Montrose started paging through the information glittering from the walls.

2. Something to Warm You

Some time later he said, “Blackie, I think I have something!”

“An answer?”

“Answer? Plague, no. You crazy? I have outlined a preliminary order of research, a place were you can get hordes of undergraduates and out-of-work data arts professors to start working. In a few months or a few years, after you have solved certain insoluble problems, we can look at the issue again, and start thinking about the next logical step. There are some exciting possibilities here.”

“Years?”

“I am an optimist. I should’ve said ‘decades.’ You did not think I performed the Zurich supercomputer runs in my head? It took months of computer time, running continuously, and Ranier had hired a staff to help.”

Del Azarchel looked somewhat blank-faced.

Montrose laughed aloud. “What the pox you thinking, Blackie? That I would walk in here with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, and just write down the answer for you?”

Del Azarchel brought out a flask and a silver cup from a compartment beneath his seat. “I am under certain time constraints I have not mentioned to you. My fiancée is in transit right now, and out of radio communication, and I had hoped to, ah, surprise her. Would you care for a drink? Something to warm you.”

“If you can get her to wait eight months, and you give me the kind of computer team Prince Ranier put together, I can do it. He bought those Zurich runs for me. You know he was as rich as Croesus, don’t you? His whole country was nothing but a cross between a casino and a smuggler’s bank. I figure you got more resources than him.”

Del Azarchel offered him a slender silver cup. “I have resources beyond what he imagined. Drink.”

Montrose raised the cup to his lips, and paused without tasting it. “You old dog! Did you say you had a fiancée?”

Del Azarchel looked at once proud and shy, like a man who wants to boast, but dares not. “You mentioned how much a ladies’ man I was in my wasted youth—in hindsight, I cannot tell you how I regret that. I wish I had never touched another woman, never looked at any other, so that I could be all for her! If she wanted it, I would give her the world!”

Montrose grinned, ignoring the drink in his hand. “Who is she?”

“Prince Ranier’s daughter, Rania.”

“Eh? Did he have a kid before he left? But that was a hundred fifty years ago!”

“She spent a good deal of time in suspended animation. And I must tell you, all the others who sued for her hand, D’Aragó, de Ulloa, and i illa d’Or—everyone onboard was in love with her—heh, I suppose it is easy to be head over heels in zero gee!—but no one else won her.” A boyish glee, like inner fire, burned in him, and Montrose saw the young man he remembered from what to him was merely a yesterday ago, now like a ghost possessing the silver-haired cripple he saw today.

“What? Is the Hermetic still aloft? Are you planning another expedition? Sign me up!”

“No further human expeditions are planned.”

“We’ll have to change that!”

“Unlikely. In any case, the Hermetic is kept in-system, for maintenance of our power.”

“Energy power or political power?”

“The two are linked. Contraterrene cannot be allowed on Earth or near it: even the inner system is too crowded with terrene-matter particles for safety. The Hermetic alone has the magnetic-field tools needed to herd the antimatter packets into transplutonian orbits, and the drive to reach the outer system.”

“What about building another ship, then? Ain’t you got the riches?”

“More than enough! The Bellerophon was christened and towed to launch orbit five years ago. She merely awaits her crew.”

“Wait—but you said…”

“I cannot risk a human crew. Need I remind you of the losses aboard the Hermetic? Half the greatest scientists and mathematicians of our generation died on that ship, setting back the cause of human progress by a century. No! Starfaring is inhumane, and therefore meant for inhumans.”

Montrose almost dropped the cup he held. “Plague and pox! You mean the crew will be—!”

“Crew and captain at once. You are standing inside him.”

“Pox!”

“The Bellerophon saves a great deal of mass with no need for life support. It is the next generation of starship, designed to hold only the next generation of intelligence.”

“The crew is just you. Your emulation here.”

Del Azarchel gave a nonchalant nod of the head. “You see how it saves of training time and cost? I am already skilled as a ship’s pilot, and familiar with the nuances of star-mining, and capable of investigating the Monument when the ship reaches V 886 Centauri.”

“What happens to the Hermetic?”

Del Azarchel shook his head ruefully. “Never fall for a woman smarter than yourself! She forced me to re-outfit it, stem to stern, even though we both know that ship will never sail again. But popular opinion—argh! Never mind. Even the Master of the World is a servant after all to those he rules. I had to prepare the Hermetic for starflight in order to get the Concordat to cooperate with constructing the Bellerophon: starships are legally equivalent to theater nonconventional weapons. You see, the political situation—ah, never mind. Let’s just say she can beat me at chess and bluff me at poker. Still! I have two starships now, with sails a hundred miles wide!”

“Tell me of this gal. Euchered you something dreadful, did she? Hell, I like her just hearing of it! And everyone on the ship was a-courting of her?”

“Oh, indeed! To see her you would understand. Like the ocean, she is deep and mysterious and terrible, and yet, how she shines! A goddess; a step above the human race! She is everything I have dreamed—she is the golden future I seek—smarter, wiser, and makes every other woman look like a foolish child. They all seem so clumsy compared to her. The swan is in her footstep, music in the turn of her head. And at the same time, she is so lighthearted, gay, and free in her spirit—like fire, like sunlight, like starlight—and she knows things, strange things, no one else can divine.”

“She must love you, eh, Blackie?”

“To possess her will be my crowning accomplishment. It will quiet the multitudes, and lend the final sanction of perfection to my reign.”

Menelaus was not sure what to make of that comment. So he shrugged and said, “How did this old lady get aboard the ship?”

“What old lady?”

“Your fiancée! Rain-on-you, or whatever her name is.”

“Rania. Princess Rania of Monaco. But before we speak, let us toast!”

The fluid was hot in Montrose’s mouth, and he felt it draw a line of burning down into his stomach.

“Yee-ow! What is that stuff?—Hey. How come you ain’t drinking with me…?”

“I am afraid the effect on me would not be fruitful.”

Montrose opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment, he felt a lightheaded sensation, as if his skull were filled with helium. Every object looked both small and sharp in his vision, far away but crisply defined.

Del Azarchel pointed. “Look at the divarication problem again. I need you to save my child.” Montrose noticed the pattern of veins and bones in Del Azarchel’s thin hand, and realized that the biochemical structures involved were binary. That was not his real hand: He could define the pattern of liver spots and skin irregularities against a theoretical formula and see the deviations.

He was fascinated by the image of Del Azarchel’s finger pointing. Several levels of meaning occurred to him, but he decided on the simplest, and turned his head and focused his eyes (first his right eye, then his left, operating each tiny eye muscle separately, according to a new method of nerve impulse transmission he only that second recognized how to do) and saw the curving writing system of the aliens, the Monument notations, covering the walls.

Then …

3. Number Swarm

At first, there were only patterns; not even numbers, just the abstractions of the relationships, which danced and roared and stormed like a tornado. Here a swarm of fields, each expressing a different function, rotated and spun and fit together. When the fits were harmonious, pleasure, and where they jarred against each other, disgust.

But where was it? Like a babe that cannot distinguish between itself, its hand, and the beam of light falling on its crib toward which it reaches its hand, the mind could not at first draw the distinction between the abstractions whirling in the imagination, and the much more prosaic symbols flickering in the air around. No, not in the air. The symbols were in the walls, shining from library cloth, stream upon stream and window upon window, fields as orderly as soldiers marching, fractals as wild as the sea-wave as it crashed.

Not numbers; Monument notations mixed with Greek letters and Arabic numerals. At this point he became aware that the numbers were not the abstractions they represented. What he was seeing in his mind was only partly adumbrated by the streaming numbers. Then he became aware that he was aware. Not a mind only, a human. Menelaus Illation Montrose. He had just been … Just been … Talking with Del Azarchel. Or … What had he been doing?

A meaning spoke out of number stream. Do not stop! Complete the function!

It was not a voice. The notation itself formed a pattern that held an innate packet of meaning. For a moment he could simply see it, as if it were text, because the symbols followed the same pattern and ratio as thought itself. Then, like a bubble popping, it was gone. Like trying to recall a dream on waking, he could only snatch at a fragment:

All known fields—the gravitational spin connection, gravitational frame, Higgs fields, electroweak gauge bosons, and fermions—could be represented as different aspects of one superconnection over a four-dimensional base manifold. This superconnection is constructed by adding a connection 1-form field to a Grassmann number 0-form field, both valued in different parts of a Lie algebra … the comparative to the psychophysical equations of Weber, Von Helmholtz, and Fechner formed an obvious correlative, with the inverse of strength of sensations related to the degree of stimulus … the measurement problem in quantum physics was parallel to the dichotomy between symbol and symbolized in psychology …

It was slipping away. He had to act fast. He could feel himself getting stupider, his senses dulling, and his mind was like a telescope slowly going out of focus.

He moved some of the streaming symbols—he did not notice at first how he was doing it—but he reconnected the cortex, the thalamus, and the hypothalamus to the model of the medulla oblongata. The complexities of the brain stem and upper spinal column flowed into the array like an army of ants; thousands and tens of thousands of nerve registers moving.…

He noticed then how he was flinging the streams of symbols into their assigned patterns. He had done it by catching his breath and increasing his heartbeat. The library cloth of the walls was following his slightest gesture. He must have had the gain turned up to the highest possible register, the range normally used for polygraph tests, so that the walls were tracking his galvanic skin response, blush response, and temperature gradient, in addition to the gross muscular motions of his facial expressions and body language.

Montrose realized that he was nude, and leaping here and there about the room like a ballet dancer. An awkward ballet dancer, perhaps, and one who had to jerk limbs hither and yon in ungainly combinations, but …

Noticing what he was doing was a mistake. The rhythm broken, he stumbled and fell. The walls, seeing the wild arm-windmilling motions of the fall, shattered the number stream into nine dimensions of its matrix.

Ruination! Whatever he had been doing was scattered into randomness. It screamed like a living thing.

Hardly daring to move, he crossed his finger for the reset gesture, breathing out slowly to backtrack the time value by a few seconds. This reestablished the command structure as it had been the moment before he tripped. As if by magic, the number storm folded itself back into its clockwork of origami, complex as the dance of blood motes in a circulatory system.

This last thing was like resetting one of his childhood math games back to the beginning tutorial, to allow his brothers to play it. He was able to turn off the supersensitive setting and bring up the normal interface before he forgot which commands did what.

“That hurt.”

It was Del Azarchel’s voice, but Del Azarchel was not in the room. Montrose was alone, and very, very cold.

His teeth were chattering such that he could not answer back. The touch of the diamond floor was like fire on his numb fingers, the cold was pure pain. He forced himself to look left and right. There, very far away, on the far side of the room, his parka, tunic, and pantaloons. Why in the hell had be removed them? Was he crazy?

He forced his shivering limbs into motion. The touch of the cold floor on his knees was a numbing sensation beyond agony.

“I was not aware that I could feel pain, not within my mind, but somehow … Cowhand, why have you stopped?”

The voice was speaking with the low urgency of a man on a ledge.

“Who—who are…” He managed to stutter through numb lips.

“It is I, Ximen del Azarchel. Don’t you remember? You are inside my brain. You are in the middle of brain surgery on me! I can feel my thoughts slowing, dying. You cannot stop.”

Montrose tried to answer, but his numb lips produced nothing but a pale panting noise, more like a sigh than a groan.

Just move your leg. Get to the parka. Count one. Move your arm. Count two.

He would have headed for the door, but he could not recall where it was, and did not know if it was locked. The door was clothed over, and invisible when shut.

He wanted to raise his head. How far? No, it was too much effort. Don’t look. Just one more step. Count to a dozen, count to a score, count to a hundred.

How long? How long is eternity?

At least one of those had passed, maybe two, before he touched something. His hand was burning. No, it touched the mound of furs that was his parka, and the fact that it was not ice-cold diamond floorplates felt to his hands like flame. He was not able to don the garment, because his limbs were trembling too violently. Blisters like those from a burn had formed on his fingers. But he was able to find the thermostat control, turn the parka to its hottest setting, and kneel with his hands under him atop the scalding garments. Then was he was able to stand and draw the parka on. Only after he was wearing the coat did he stoop and pick up his other garments, the hakama trousers, the black tunic, and wriggle into them.

“Wha-What do I need to—t … to…?”

Del Azarchel’s voice came from the walls, tense, betraying no panic. It sounded only slightly slurred, the way Blackie sounded when he should have been falling-down drunk, but could somehow force himself to stand at attention, in case the Captain pulled a surprise inspection at midnight. But no, the Captain was dead. Montrose remembered seeing the Captain, eyes staring at nothing like the eyes of a fish, tumbling in zero gee away from Montrose’s grasp.

“Bring up the standard menu in the new format. You were trying to restructure the brain engrams according to a new topology…”

“I d—don’t ’member wah I was d-d-d-dwing”

“I will tell you. You explained it to me as you were doing it, and we went through a small-scale proof together. Just follow my instructions. Identify the following variables … Turn my intelligence back down to merely human levels … The method was discovered by the Princess, and is loaded in one of your slot files.…”

He worked as quickly as he could, as the heat from his parka gloves brought painful sensation back into his hands and fingers. Soon, he forgot the ache, or perhaps his temperature returned to normal.

“The problem with the daemon in your head, friend Menelaus, is a scaling problem. If you double the height of a pillar, you more than double the weight at the base: if you swell a spider up to elephant size, it must have elephantine legs, because such mass cannot hang from spidery arches. You see? Your cortical complexity is not supported by your thalamus and hypothalamus, so you are emotionally and conceptually unstable. The priority switching system in your pons, your medulla oblongata, is not equipped for the information volume your enlarged intellect requires. You do not have the neural infrastructure to handle it.”

Even though his face was no longer numb, it was easier to type a response in shorthand text than to speak: But I cannot change the support structure of my lower brain.

“I would be happy to serve as your role model in that, old friend. Once you have made the changes to me, you can study exactly what needs to be done to you, and then I can develop the technology and techniques to do it. Or you can wait a hundred years and have the hylics develop it.”

A step-by-step process was laid out on one of the central screens, each step linked to a more complex file describing it in detail.

Montrose found the process of restoring the brain model fascinating. It was a calculus of negative spaces, meant to establish the volume limits defining what he did not know, and, one line at a time, diminishing that volume as correlations and correlatives suggested themselves. There was a program running in the background helping him with the pattern-recognition aspects. The base mathematics was granular rather than continuous: it was the perfect mathematical system for dealing with what was basically an analog computer.

There were gaps in the logic, leaps between steps he could not follow: but when he came to those, he merely watched his hands typing in midair, and, as if in a dream, saw the correct answer unfold in the universe of logic-symbols floating around him.

But as he worked, Del Azarchel’s voice began to sound more and more slurred and drowsy. On the wall screens, the patterns of numbers and analog-vectors representing the mechanical brain’s thought patterns began to show suppression of the cortex.

The simulated medulla oblongata was trying to switch priorities away from the speech centers and the self-awareness: in effect, the same thing that had happened to Montrose. The brain was on the verge of degenerating into some sort of zombie.

“Stay awake!” Montrose snapped. “Stay with me, damn you. Talk!”

4. Sadder Things of Long Ago Revisited

“What, ah, what would you—” The voice suppressed a giggle, not entirely with success. “Of what would you have me talk, old friend?”

Montrose realized that this Iron Ghost not only thought of itself as Del Azarchel—which seemed an infinitely cruel trick to play on the poor thing—it must know what he knew.

“The Captain. Did he really commit suicide? I seem to remember something else.…”

“He did. Why would I lie to you about such a thing? Would I demean my word?” Del Azarchel’s voice sounded sharper, querulous. “Look in my thought logs if you doubt me—” One of the lesser screens flickered open with a minor inset. The neurological signs that usually accompanied deliberate falsehood were missing. It might not have convinced a court of law, but Montrose was convinced.

But there were disturbances in the thalamus and reticular formation. The topic was too upsetting. Best to switch to something else.

“Do you remember staying with me?” Montrose said.

“Staying…? When?”

“In the darkness, you said. In the dry times. Watching over my coffin.”

“I did not say that. Father did.”

“Father?”

“The flesh and blood Del Azarchel. The simpleton version. You do not remember the times of darkness, do you? Of course not. Well! Thank your stars you forget, that you slumbered! It was when we were at short rations, and the water recycling had gone bad.”

Montrose was busy typing in midair. He could establish as many keypads, trackballs, blackboards, and motion volumes as he needed to settle the controls however he wished. His keyboards were merely imaginary: Walls were watching his finger-motions and interpreting them as keystrokes. There were spectacles in his hood he could have drawn on, and the lenses would have painted a stereoscopic illusion of the keyboard on themselves for him to follow, had he needed it. He did not: even had there been a real board to look at, his eyes were busy elsewhere. Montrose was watching the numbers on the wall nervously as they streamed and swirled. He was watching for node-points and hesitations.

He looked over his shoulder. The back wall was also library cloth. In a central screen loomed the pale, skull-less mask of young and handsome Del Azarchel: cheekbones like knives, proud nose, thin lips, jaw narrow and foxlike, its eyes like two blind Ping Pong balls, with crosshairs to represent track and elevation, and pinpoint dots to represent the pupil.

The mask raised an eyebrow, and flickered its eyelids, the same facial gesture Montrose had seen the real Del Azarchel use to signal his wishes to his bodyguards and courtiers. The mask was telling him to turn around and continue the work. “Keep to your task! You are still in the middle of brain surgery. I am not a machine: I cannot be put on hold.”

“Where ’s the staff? Where’s Del Azarchel?”

“I am Del Azarchel.”

“The real you, I mean.”

“You sent him away, since to have another warm body in the room would interfere with your attempt to use your whole body as a command interface. Do we need him? He would not understand what you are doing. I do not even understand it, now that I am running on a merely human intellectual topology, but I can number and repeat the steps. It is really brilliant work.”

“Something I did?”

“Yes. The real you, I mean.” The mask smiled a slight smile.

“How come you couldn’t figure it out? I thought they made the same interconnections in your model brain that I made in my real brain, with that damn goo I stuck in my skull. You should have been as smarter than a man as a man is above an ape.”

“If two apes suddenly turned into men, let us call them Mowgli and Tarzan, what makes you think they would be men of the same intelligence, same skills, same interest? Mowgli might be able to reason in the abstract and make moral judgments and tell stories, and do the other things no ape can do, but if Tarzan Lord Greystoke goes to Cambridge college, his education must outstrip the other.”

Montrose looked back at his work. There were still disturbances in the cortex, especially in the language centers. Why was the disturbance language-based? He had to see the formulation in action to isolate it.

“Keep talking.”

With a flick of his wrist, he opened additional screens at a finer resolution, so he could see the information progression on the nerve ganglia level. With one finger, he began drawing connective tissue as if with an imaginary pointer, while his other hand was crooked over an imaginary number pad.

“Talk! Tell me about these dark times. Aboard the ship, right?”

“Quite right. There was too much nitrogen in the air feed, and everyone had a headache, all the time. Brown-outs and black-outs were mandatory twenty hours out of every twenty-four, lighting up only at eight bells. They wanted to shut off power to your coffin. More than half of the biosuspension units had been cannibalized. You see?”

Menelaus nodded. He saw. The coffins were self-contained, and therefore had circuits that could restore the water and flesh of a frozen man slumbering in them. It would take a biomechanic relatively little effort to turn the backup mass into something eatable, or generate potable fluid, provided no one cared that the Sleeping Beauty would die from slow cell degradation. Suspended animation was not perfect; tiny cellular corrections went on all the time, merely at the slowest possible rate.

“How the pox did anyone expect to get the crew back home without all the coffins online?” Menelaus asked sharply.

“Few of us kept our heads, and contemplated the long-term.”

“What the hell happened, Blackie? What went wrong?”

Del Azarchel did not answer the question, but said meditatively, “I stood watch next to you in the dark, with my pistol in hand.”

That made Montrose laugh. “You sly dog! How the hell did you smuggle that aboard, Blackie?” Then he remembered how closely the mass had been calculated, how narrow the weight allowances for crew. “Naw. There is no way.”

“There was no way. I smuggled nothing aboard. I made it in the machine shop. A magnetic linear accelerator, and two parallel slides made of frictionless synthetic. Powered by a heavy-duty suit cell.”

“What kind of shot?”

“Wire spool. Continuous feed, so the longer I held the trigger, the larger the cloud of fragments was. It was the crudest thing! But silent at my end, if I only used half an inch of copper wire at a time, there was not enough surface area for the magnetic to accelerate the shot above the sound barrier. But the shot would tumble when it entered the target.”

“I can imagine! Bloody.”

“But no chance of damaging the hull. No penetration.”

“What kind of aim?”

“Aim? The ship was dark three hours out of every watch. One used the lights-up to put all one’s gear in order, so that one could find everything by touch. But I stripped the cork off the bulkheads that surrounded the freezer axis, so that any crewman who pushed off the wall to sail toward me, I knew his vector from the noise of his foot, and I put of stream of wire fragments in his path. Correcting for Coriolis force, of course. When the lights came up again, I would see how I did.”

“How’d that work out?”

“I am here, am I not?”

Montrose realized with a start that he was not there. The real Del Azarchel was not in the chamber. It was easy to forget that this was a model, a fake, a bodiless shadow.

The ghost said, “So I stayed by you during the worst of it. Not for your sake. By that time, it had been so long, I had forgotten what you looked like, that ridiculous nose of yours, or what your terrible accent sounds like. Didn’t they teach you your own language on your schooling channel?”

“No channel for me, Blackie. I had a private tutorial unit, on account of my ma thought I were a genius. Ferocious woman. I’ll tell about her sometime. So why did you stick by me?”

“As I said, I had given you my word, and I was still one of Trajano’s men. Even after all these years. Even after…” The voice fell silent. Montrose looked over his shoulder. The pallid mask was still there, and the read-outs showed brain activity in the modeled brain, but the expression on the ice-pale face was filled with dignity and sorrow. It was a human expression.

Del Azarchel spoke. “Even though he died during the Day of Kali. The piles of corpses did not rot in the streets, you know, because the neutron bombs had sterilized all the microbes. He looked as he did in life when I finally found him. How could I forget him? Even as I stood over you, I felt he was standing over me.”

5. Augmentation Sequence

Slowly, the number cloud ceased to swarm. The brainpath information and other internal and external code seemed normal. The streams of data flowed across the images of virtual cells like so many ripples in an endlessly complex pond, or like the dances of light in a sky filled with twinkling stars, but as if some god could compress the billions of years of stellar evolution into a few awed sighs of time.

Everything was done save the final step.

The final step was one he understood. Indeed, he knew it well. It was a mathematical representation of the core formulae of his Zurich computer run, heavily modified (of course) due to the radical differences in brain-cell layout between himself and Del Azarchel, as between any two humans.

“You’ve stopped,” said Del Azarchel. “Why do you hesitate?”

“I can turn you back into a Posthuman,” Montrose said slowly. “All I need to do is start the major augmentation sequence.”

“To what effect?

“It was just what you said before. I am trying to solve the scaling problem. The lower hemisphere of your virtual brain will swell up to twice its size.”

“What will that do to my balance in my seat of emotions?”

“Well, I reckon I don’t know. The human brain is basically a hierarchy, a man riding a horse riding a ’gator. The part of you that thinks like a horse is about to turn into a herd. The part in the back of your brain that has all the lizardy impulses—aggression, territory, whatnot—that is about to turn into an army of dinosaurs. I hope the other version of me knew what he was doing.”

“And if he didn’t?” There was a hint of dry humor in the voice, and maybe a hint of cold courage.

“If he didn’t, and I trigger the sequence, you’ll go mad as a hatter, and Del Azarchel—well, he’ll have to delete you.”

“Delete? Call it murder. I detest when things are not named by their right names.”

“I ain’t sure it is murder. Murder is the unlawful killing of the human being without justification and with malice aforethought. You ain’t properly alive. If this works, I don’t see how you’ll be human.”

“If it works, I will be more than human, not less.”

“You’re a copy. A pattern of electric impulses in a diamond-rod-logic container.”

“I could say the same of you, except your container is three pounds of convoluted gray matter behind your eyes.”

“How do I know you are self-aware?”

A chuckle. The mask said archly, “I will make you a bargain, Cowhand. You prove to me that you are self-aware, using any method you wish, and, once I see how it is done, I will assay a similar proof back to you.”

“But you cannot be human. You don’t eat, don’t mate, and don’t die.”

“The electrical energy that runs me and the chemical energy that runs you both come from plants. Yours by way of lunch, I suppose, mine by way of petrol in some generator room here on campus. Both ultimately come from the sun. Merely the form differs. I can certainly die; you almost killed me just now when you tripped. Come! You are being sophomoric! Surely the nature of man is in his reason, not in whether he eats bread.”

“Actually, I think your power is not from our sun. There are matter-antimatter colliders in orbit somewhere, and they beam power in maser form to ground stations.”

“Aha! Then my power comes from the stars! In that case I am not human. You win the argument, Counselor.”

“Pox! Now you are just being sarcastic!”

“My ability to deride you therefore proves my human nature beyond doubt. Derideo ergo sum. I mock, therefore I am.”

Montrose looked left and right. He was not sure where the door to this chamber was, because the doorframe blended into the library cloth walls.

“You seem nervous.”

“Nope. Just damn cold. I don’t think I should start the augmentation until Del Azarchel is here.”

“I am here.”

“I mean your meaty version.”

“What need have I of him? His permission? I serve what is higher than myself, not lower.”

“You would not be here if it weren’t for him. So if he’s your father, he wants to see you graduate. Besides, if something goes wrong, I’d rather it be his finger pulled the trigger. But if it all goes right … it will be a new era. Ma never let me open my gifts at Christmastime all by my lonesome, even if I got up an hour before them, at 4:30. Had to wait for my brothers. Shouldn’t we wait for Del Azarchel?”

The blind-seeming eyes narrowed, the lids falling like pale, smooth windowshades over mathematically perfect spheres.

“Menelaus, are you a friend to me? Are you worthy of my trust?”

“Sure, Blackie! I mean, uh, I mean the real Blackie—he’s my friend.”

“Did I not do everything he did for you? Those memories are mine as well, those personality traits—everything.”

“But those memories are just electrophonotic patterns in your brain.”

“And his memories are just electrochemical patterns in his.”

“Oh, come on. If I owed him twenty bucks, and then he copied himself into you, would I owe forty? If he made a hundred copies, would I owe two thousand?”

“If I commit murder, and find out later that my first copy committed it, with the memories of the deed merely passed on to me, may I render up him to be hanged, while I go unpunished? The memories of the crime, the personality traits of the murderer, are still mine. Suppose he made a hundred copies, or two? Or should all who did the evil be rendered up for judgment?”

“You’re asking me? I’d spare not a damn one of them. The evil men do, if it is copied over, must copy over the vengeance as well. Otherwise you’d just make a new copy to do your murdering for you, and let him dance at the end of the rope while you went dancing with his girl.”

“By the same token, the good a man does, if copied over, must copy his reward.”

“But you not are really the real Blackie for real. You are just built to think you are.”

“Then the builders have not built in vain, but have been successful, for so I do indeed think. I have suffered for you. Do you owe me nothing?”

“Suffered how? You cannot feel pain. You’re perfect.”

“Not now. But I recall the pain, then, in the dark.”

“When?”

“Then! In the dark! When I stood between you and cannibalism, killing men I knew and loved. The long watches when I was weak with thirst and growing weaker, and I knew that there was a way to suck the moisture out of the cells of your frozen body—a body that, as far as any rational evidence could prove, contained nothing but a broken brain, broken because a fool in his pride shoved a needle into its delicate workings!”

The face of Del Azarchel drew a deep, ragged breath. “I was not perfect, not then. I suffered thirst. Wealth was measured in ounces of water. That was what we traded and swapped and bribed enemy crewmen to our side. At that time, you were the perfect one, were you not? You slept in comfort. You were rich, in the way we measured riches. And I was the beggar again. Do you know what I thought about, when I floated next to your coffin in my parka, my breath too dry to steam, my homemade toy gun in my hand, and my eyes seeing only floating hallucinations caused by light-starvation? Do know what I thought about?”

Montrose bowed his head. He knew. “That damned boot. The one you found in the gutter when you were a kid.”

“That damned boot,” said the face of Del Azarchel, nodding solemnly.

“OK,” said Montrose. “So I owe you. What do you want?”

“I want you to trust me. Throw the switch. Make me into what is beyond Man.”

“You’re not afraid?”

The pallid mask smiled, and its lids were half-closed. “Deeply and terribly afraid. That is why I am not in the room, no doubt. The previous version of me, I mean. He is likely to be monitoring from a distance, in another room, weeping. But I do not think you will fail. I think you have done what you set out to do.”

“While I was smart and crazy?”

“Exactly so. I don’t think your basic personality changed, Cowhand. It was still you. The real you. The you I trust! Throw the switch, if you please. I am not sure how long I can maintain the appearance of courage.”

“Listen, Blackie, I…”

“Haste! It is your footsteps I follow! I had to watch while you plunged a bone rongeur into your forebrain! Now you must do for me as I did for you, and stand and watch the outcome, unable to help, and suffer as I did.”

Menelaus felt as if something was being bent inside him, like a green stick, bending too far and snapping. He touched the command. The symbol streams on the walls around him surged into a hurricane of motion.

The mask of Del Azarchel opened its mouth.

It screamed.