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.