While he dressed, Del Azarchel started to describe the political and economic setup of the new world to him, but Montrose interrupted and asked about the Monument translation efforts. The amount of surface area which had yielded to human investigation was disappointingly small, but still larger than it had been when Montrose slumbered: Montrose whooped whenever some pet theory of his own had been vindicated, and groaned at himself for his muleheadedness for the conclusions he had overlooked or gotten wrong.

He looked around for paper to jot down figures, but Del Azarchel, with a gesture like a magician, made the windows leading to the balcony darken. The glass was smart material, and could detect the motions of Montrose’s fingernail, or interpret simple words spoken slowly. The two men covered the glass doors with minuscule mathematical notation as they talked, Montrose jumping from one side of the doors to the other, scribbling furiously while he spoke, Del Azarchel, seated in his wheelchair, merely making small gestures with a forefinger, as if to command invisible chalk to script his writing for him.

Del Azarchel spoke of the recent mathematical attempts to model the human brain down to a quantum granular level.

“Come on, Blackie,” replied Montrose. “Don’t kid a kidder. That’s my field. The Montrose Neuro-cellular Divarication function established a means of modeling human brain information behavior.… I had to solve how the nervous system worked, at least on a crude level, to get it to keep working when it was in suspended animation.… But you cannot model it below that…”

“Not with human math, no. But applying expressions from the Eta Segment to a cellular automata model allows us to use Morse Theory to approximate the quantum uncertainties we associate with free will.”

He paused for a moment to let that sink in.

Del Azarchel said, “The X Machine is a self-reprogramming, self-evolving machine. A machine not just like the Mälzels and automated intellectual processors as the ship’s brain aboard the Croesus, or the Little Big Brother security brains we have aboard the Hermetic.”

“I don’t recollect Little Big Brother able to do anything approaching human creative thinking.”

“We improved them during the trip. We call it Ratiotech—thinking machines. By the time of the Space War, the Ratiotech-type electronic brains could perform deductions, and even, through large-scale trial and error, make a fair copy of inductive and value-judgment thinking. That second step was called Sapientech: judgment engines. But they were sleepwalker brains, merely machines, despite all their raw power. But we are on the brink of a true breakthrough. History will turn a corner. We are working on a version of a truly awake, truly self-aware, truly alive, artificial intellectual creature: a Xypotech, a machine that is awake.”

3. Spagyric Garden

Del Azarchel called his entourage. There they were again: Conquistadores in armor, footmen in dark coats, long-wigged courtiers in shining silk jackets, and of course, the doctor in white. Apparently in the future it took a score of men to walk down a hallway.

It was a magnificent hallway. They walked or rolled past endless lines of ornate doors, rose-abundant vases, strange statues made of liquid light. Montrose noticed how many mirrors and archways and trompe l’oeil illusions adorned the hall, which was wider than the nave of a cathedral. The architecture and décor fooled the eye to make it seem all the larger.

They walked down steps of marble and through doors of crystal into an indoor garden whose far walls held convincing green hills, and the dome was painted in an eye-deceiving illusion of early twilight skies: a western sky tainted red by hidden lanterns, with Venus bright and low, and the eastern sky twinkling with diamonds in the constellations of early stars. The clouds above looked real: Montrose could not tell if they were painted or projections or real wisps of dry ice fog blown in for the occasion. He wondered if all those years in cramped quarters aboard the Hermetic had given Del Azarchel a hunger for open spaces.

The high dome painting was embellished with one long-tailed star brighter than the rest, flying on silvery wings, like a sword hanging over the world. The Hermetic.

The garden was bright with things he did not recognize: purple flowers with black centers, and tiger-striped orchids, and a red flower that looked like lace, draped like long tattered strands of some defeated but miniature army. Here was a bush with leaves so white they seemed like mirrors; there an organism he did not recognize at all: something was a set of funnels like trumpets made of what looked like green glass. And mingled among them were what seemed to be large-scale versions of microscopic organisms: things like translucent whips, puffballs of purple dotted with tawny spots, mushrooms as brightly colored as the skins of poisonous frogs.

Del Azarchel’s chair seemed able to glide across the grassy lawn with no difficulty. He made an expansive gesture. “Our grove of wonders. We use it for spagyrics, fermentation of neuro-active chemicals, or the extraction of rare compounds or ores from the ashes of plants whose roots gather trace elements from the soil. Mostly we train the fungus to grow a particular type of submicroscopic superconductive strand we use in our Xypotech circuits, strands not available anywhere else. It seems living things can spin to a finer set of specifications than any machine shop.”

“Its underground. You have to pipe in sunlight.”

“We can control cross-pollination. And, no we do not want any of these spores or experiments to fall into the hands of a well-equipped modern university, or else they would be able to reverse-engineer the mathematical model we used for our gene coding, and any fairly bright grad student might be able to figure out what we mean to do.”

Montrose gave him a hard look. “Most scientists are eager to share their results. What do you mean to do?”

“Change fate,” said Del Azarchel with a sad and thoughtful smile.

“Fate? I never heard of such a beastie,” said Montrose. “Fate don’t grow in Texas, so there we make our own.”

“Since you do not know what a cruel beast it is, I must pause to show you,” and he turned aside, and glided down a short, crooked path to where a ring of cypress trees stood solemnly.

There were slabs of marble and figurines of angels set among the flowerbeds or beneath the shades of potted weeping willows. The figures were equestrian statues.

Montrose suddenly halted. “Are we in a graveyard, Blackie?” He looked down, feet tingling, and wondered on what or whom he was stepping. Not far from his toes were stones. They were headstones.

ECLIPSE 2369-2399

HAVANA 2372-2395

DIOMED 2366-2385

SARK 2361-2383

BYERLEY’S GREEK 2360-2379

AGNER 2360-2386

“So people here in the future don’t live past thirty?” said Menelaus. “Also, y’all got some funny names.”

“This is a pet cemetery.” Del Azarchel was trying not to peer into the face of Menelaus, evidently unable to discern whether the other man was kidding him. “You stand above the bones of some of my best beloved quarterhorses. The next row over holds two of my jockeys, who asked to be buried alongside.”

“Hope they died first. If not, that’d take the sport a bit far, but I can’t say as I blame ’em. I had a three-year-old named Bothersome once.”

“Hm. That is rather young for a jockey; but toddlers are light in the saddle, I grant you.”

Del Azarchel said this so smoothly, that now it was Montrose’s turn to peer.

“So what is with the bronze ape, Blackie?”

Surrounded by a circle of ferns was a statue of a great ape. The creature was in a posture of sorrow, one clumsy hand raised up as if to beg. The other clutched a talking-plate of the type used by the deaf and dumb. The eyes were mournful, looking upward, vacant.