“And even knowing what was going on,” Montrose sighed, “you knew I was fool enough that I could not stand by and let a civilization, even a bad one, collapse, because then in the great chess game of fate, you would have just moved your queen Exarchel onto the board to pick up the broken pieces. I used to have nightmares about watching a bunch of barbarians dressed in animal skins tinkering with some old internal combustion engine or grinding gunpowder in a handmill while a tidal wave of that damn self-replicating gold goo the Savants worshipped was piling up on the horizon, too big for them to stop. So I could not permit a collapse. And I had to act.”

Del Azarchel smiled and nodded, like a good sportsman acknowledging a polite compliment from a defeated foe. “Yes, you had to act. And you had only one weapon that I did not have. I had more men, more resources, and more time—I could stay awake for twice your years while you slumbered, and age biologically at half your rate. But you had one thing I lacked. Rania’s solution. The seven-part Divarication solution.”

Montrose said, “So, as it turns out, this whole thing, all of history, was about me giving it to you, one little part at a time. I worked on the Giants, and you used that to create your emulations and Ghosts, your long-lived Witches. I tried to save the Witches. That was the first time, and you almost overplayed your hand; the Witch society is too obviously designed to fail. But I fell for it anyway, because, hey, I am a problem solver, and I love to solve problems. So, next time, you sacrificed a major piece, D’Aragó, just to draw me up to the surface, have a chance to see the state of misery of the Chimerae, misery I saw would be alleviated if they were just a little longer-lived. Men who live to see the future think about it, and men who think about the future think of war as a violent means to achieve political ends, not as a way to avenge insults against your king’s wife. And so on.

“But you really did fool me, Blackie, and I give you credit. Because every time I used another one of the seven solutions, you had one of your dupes—I guess I cannot call them your men, can I?—pervert my work to make some new problem appear, some new race of man, some new evil empire.

“But not you.

“You would take the solution, a few lines of code, whatever it was I did, and you went off by your lonesome, not telling your dupes what the real plan was.

“And because your dupes always did something with the code you rooked out of me, for the longest time, I thought that was what you meant to do, and all you meant to do.

“I thought you wanted to steal the cooperation gene to get the mathematical tools needed to make the Chimerae. But then you exterminated the Chimerae. Or I thought you wanted the Greencloak technology to create the addiction-world of the Nymphs. But then you interfered with their weather control, and drove the Nymphs out of existence.

“By the time the Hormagaunts appeared, and they were monsters out of a psychology textbook on sociopathic egomania, I knew theirs and the others could not be real civilizations, not something you actually meant to catapult into the next evolutionary stage of man. They were too simplistic. A science experiment. So I had seen through the first level of deception. You were not just fencing me to make the next mankind follow your dream rather than my dream. It was never about the dream of a superhuman liberty versus the dream of superhuman tyranny. There was no dream, only the seven solutions.

“Even then, I did not see through the second level of deception.

“I thought the whole point of the Hormagaunts was to winkle the Clade Code system out of me for use on some project on Earth, a blueprint for the Locusts. And next I thought the point of your move was to steal the Inquiline Code which I made to save the Locusts and pervert it to make the Melusine. But that was not it, was it? Like you said. Earth is nothing.”

“Exactly so. Feint low, disengage, strike high.” Del Azarchel was grinning broadly now. “How much have you guessed?”

3. The Seven Secrets

“I think I’ve guessed everything but one thing. Let’s get back to that later.

“The Hermetic Problem is how to make the Man Beyond Man, a mind that stands to us as we to beasts. Merely enlarging brain mass does not work. A macroscale machine, let’s say, the size of the Pacific Ocean or the polar ice caps, if it is just one big centralized brain, works about as handily as one big centralized bureaucracy. It takes weeks for a thought to get from one side to another of a brain so big.

“If you double and redouble the size of an ant until it is as large as an elephant, the ant would need stubby elephant legs to haul its mass, which is squared and re-squared; in just the same way, the mental architecture of a planet-sized man’s brain does not scale up. If you double the size of the cortex you have to square the size of the midbrain and cube the size of the hindbrain. Likewise, merely ramping up calculation speed does not work. That is what happened to you and me, Blackie. We think faster than men, but we make mistakes faster, too. You are looking for better thought procedures, not just faster ones.

“You decided to redesign the mind from the ground up, layer by layer. It was easy enough to anticipate that this is what you did—I can’t see any other path. I would have done the same. And you did it in seven steps—thanks to me.

“First. The basic Promethean Formula I released to make the Giants, you used to make your posthumans. Exulloa, Exillador, and so on; and De Ulloa used the same formula on elephants and dolphins, boars and horses and dogs to make his Moreau critters.

“But that was all smoke screen. Hidden far from prying eyes somewhere, you put together a much larger and more ambitious project. You used the Promethean Formula to make a King of Machines.

“Second. The Serpentine Code was a means to make a machine-mind effectively immortal, but it only worked on the limited scale. So you built a brain made up of countless tiny brains, the same way a man’s brain is made of countless individually living brain cells; so at least the physical substrate was immortal. These tiny and immortal brains were as countless as snowflakes. This was your platform, your foundation of stone. You built the King of Machines on top of this.

“Third. My genetic solution to allow the various Moreaus and Witches to learn to live together, you used to make these thousands of simple brains in the foundation of the King of Machines learn to cooperate. And all the other more complicated brains that were going to be swimming around in this fishbowl of thought, lesser minds inside greater minds like so many Russian dolls: fishbowl the size of the seven seas, an ocean of thought.

“Fourth. The Greencloak tech has an obvious application. Your King of Machines can do with electrons what the Nymphs do with molecules. It serves as the pleasure and pain centers of this emulated brain, or, if you like, as the rewards and punishments of a legal or economic system. You don’t care about the physical sensation of pain: you just follow the form with the math. Every lesser mind inside the mind of the King of Machines can be addicted or memory-dithered to suit his majesty’s fancy. All the little angels love the big bad archangel. I assume he is big and bad? I assume he is based on your template?

“Ditto for the Wintermind techniques, which act as a check against the addiction technology. An emulation of a man could use them just like a man with a flesh and blood brain, to shake off exoneurogenic addiction. There is no reason Exarchel cannot meditate and shake free of subconscious manipulation. In fact, he was hot to get my phantasm out of his head, weren’t he? You tell me how that is working out for you.