“Six. The Clade system I introduced into the Hormagaunts to stop their disgusting Hobbesian war of all against all—and Exarchel lives in that same Hormagaunt pattern: he has no incentive not to eat and absorb any machine he meets, since he can get all the powers and abilities of that machine without having to beg or bargain, hire or swap. You wanted better for your King of Machines, so it can have all the lesser angels living in his head occupy the same mental ecology without flocks of vampire-Xypotechs like Exarchel preying on each other.

“Seven. And the Inquiline Code prevents the opposite problem of too much cooperation. You found that in a brain that size, you needed helper minds to do routine tasks in and among the main streams and rivers of the thought hierarchy which aren’t part of that hierarchy themselves: benevolent parasites or inquilines. You need the extra viewpoints, the competition, diverse thought.

“You see, what had me baffled was that I kept thinking you were building a thinking machine. You are not. You are not even building a race of thinking machines, are you? You are really building a whole ecology of thinking machines: Many minds of many different natures and formulae of behavior all knit into a cooperative and competitive balance, and all parts of a larger mind. An ecology of angels.

“But they have to be encoded along these lines: augmentation of intellect; immortality; a cooperation format; incentives to control them; and the discipline to overcome that control when need be; and then you need love, some reason not to treat every other organism as a prey; and, most of all, you need the altruism of Locusts and the independence of Inquilines tied together, a selfless love combined with an idea that the individual self is sacred.

“Without these last two, all the angels form just one mind with just one viewpoint, and it turns into a combination of Leviathan and Juggernaut, something too big and slow and stupid to stop or turn aside. Not an ocean of thought, but a slow and stupid glacier.”

4. Total Defeat

Del Azarchel looked impressed. “That is more, and, to be frank, more insightful than I expected you to know. I know how you guessed the outlines, but the details…”

Montrose said, “You are kidding, right? The details were the obvious part. You kept using Earth as the experiment to show me the problems you were facing, so that I would be dumb enough to offer a solution. You fit each part of the various psychologies into your overall structure, so that each weakness is checked by the corresponding strength of the other races: the Locust altruism formula defines the conscience of your system, the Chimera psychology defines the passions, the Nymphs the appetites, and so on. You are building a gigantic system of minds and ecologies of minds, empires of thousands and tens of thousands of emulations. Honestly, that is amazing.

“And meanwhile your dupes are dithering, trying to rule the Earth with five emulations, all told. Honestly, that is amazing, too. Amazingly cruel.”

Del Azarchel said, “Five? Not true! In addition to my Hermeticists, there are eighty-nine more. The Cetaceans have the computer capacity for that, now that the world is covered with—oh. Someone told you. I was hoping to awe you with that one.”

“Ctesibius figured it out and told me. You embedded a copy of Exarchel in the snow.”

“It is not quite snow. It is mites suspended in water droplets by van der Waals forces, but near enough. Plants and animals can drink it in and urinate or sweat it out, without ill effect, without knowing that an insubstantial genius mind was occupying the same physical location. As you say, with angels, physical location does not matter, only the data address.”

Montrose tried not to be impressed, but could not help it. “Damn, that is elegant. Do you know how many layers of awkward safety systems I had to put into Pellucid so that self-replicating nanotechnology could not possibly eat the whole damn world if it escaped into the human environment? I never thought of just making it—harmless.”

Del Azarchel smiled archly. “Actually, I do know. When Exarchel captured and absorbed Core Anomaly One, I got all your Xypotech records, memories, files.”

“‘Core Anomaly One’? Gah! Terrible name.”

“‘Pellucid’? Sounds like the name of a syrup used to sooth stomach ulcers.”

“Listen, if a Chimera can name his weapon, I can name mine.”

“Whatever it is called, I salute your weapon and compliment you, my worthy opponent. I will not hide that it was hundreds of years—no, let me be honest, it was thousands of years—before I ever thought of the idea that you simply had a bigger emulation system than I did, which was why you were consistently out-calculating me. Because everything you did showed such hatred of machine-based life: the Giants were antimachinists, and the Witches had to pretend to be for the sake of appearances; the Chimerae actually were, and actually did, at one point, successfully remove every single copy of me from the planet; the Nymphs and Hormagaunts did not have the technology to build computers of any kind—and so on. The idea that you secretly had a Xypotech, one hidden even from your knights and employees—it simply never occurred to me. Such cold-blooded hypocrisy! The most ferocious witch-hunter of all, secretly saying the Black Mass!”

“Hypocr—? Shut your hole, Blackie. I never once said I had an objection to emulating the mind of a beast. Killing a man’s dog may be the worst thing ever, but it ain’t homicide. Men are different from beasts, and even using the Moreau process on a dog might make it intelligent enough to talk, but it won’t give it a conscience. That takes more.”

“Well, whatever the reason,” smiled Del Azarchel, “I was not able to out-calculate anything toward which the core of the world turned its extremely vast but strangely limited intellect. An animal? No wonder it did not react to any of my feints and false trails. It thinks concretely, focused in the moment. Better than a man, in some ways. Harder to distract with ideals or abstractions. Ah, but I was behind you, far behind, for so long! It was not until the Locusts that we were able to reintroduce Exarchel into the human world. The Locust brains have a radically different cellular arrangement, and so my soul could be written directly into their brainspace, whatever percent of the brain was not actively in use. By the time of the Melusine, Exarchel and I, we finally had civilization under control, and could build arcologies, a cube a mile on a side, entirely filled with logic crystal. But even that was nothing compared to the brainspace capacity, the sheer volume, of your invention. I salute you.”

“Well, shucks and thanks and all, but you got in the last and best move,” said Montrose. “You have been winning our chess game (or fencing match, or whatever you call it) by impersonating my moves, forcing me, one at a time, to reveal the seven parts of Rania’s work on how to reconstruct a human mind—my broken mind—and now you have used it not to reconstruct, but to construct. And so you’ve made a last step! You’ve built this King of Machines, haven’t you?”

Del Azarchel smiled a smile of real pleasure. It was like the smile of a schoolteacher Menelaus dated once. She enjoyed talking grown-up talk after work. The Master of the World had nothing but servants around him, and certainly no one with whom the moves of the chess game for the fate of mankind could be discussed. No grown ups.

Del Azarchel nodded. “Yes, my last parry and thrust in our fencing match in the fog. Your blade is out of line, nay, out of your hand, and on the deck. Now to strike home! You know by now that my attempt to find where you were hiding in your Tombs was a feint. You moved to parry by not just entering the golden burial chamber of the Cryonarchs, but by blockading the door. I feint right and strike left. You are trapped in the chamber, and I have Aanwen deliver a supply of invasion crystal to deep in your crust. The nanotechnology cells spread over the walls of the evacuated tube in an instant, and begin to pull your Von Neumanns out from the walls. A simple manipulation of the linear accelerator, an override of the braking system, satchel charges to blow all the airlocks open at once, and Voila! I have my own launch rail, endless miles of acceleration line, already loaded with the Von Neumann crystals I need.