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.”