“While I was smart and crazy?”

“Exactly so. I don’t think your basic personality changed, Cowhand. It was still you. The real you. The you I trust! Throw the switch, if you please. I am not sure how long I can maintain the appearance of courage.”

“Listen, Blackie, I…”

“Haste! It is your footsteps I follow! I had to watch while you plunged a bone rongeur into your forebrain! Now you must do for me as I did for you, and stand and watch the outcome, unable to help, and suffer as I did.”

Menelaus felt as if something was being bent inside him, like a green stick, bending too far and snapping. He touched the command. The symbol streams on the walls around him surged into a hurricane of motion.

The mask of Del Azarchel opened its mouth.

It screamed.

8

Posthuman Alterity

1. What Is Between You?

A squad of technicians in parkas ran into the room, along with a figure in a white fur coat with a red cross on his back: this was the old Oriental doctor from Del Azarchel’s entourage. Del Azarchel himself came in a moment later, sliding silently in his tall black chair.

The screaming and wailing lasted for roughly forty-five minutes, and then the brain activity switched to a sleep cycle. Delta-wave rhythms and REM patterns appeared in the information flow.

Interesting. Montrose wondered if the Iron Ghost screamed when it augmented up for the same reason a baby does when it is born. To be sure, the machine did not need to flood its lungs with air, but the neurological transformations that accompany a baby’s change from breathing through his umbilicus to breathing air might need to be repeated in the machine-mind, as new neural channels had to form. An immediate dream-response was only to be expected. Dreaming was the means a complex system like the human brain employed to index and assess information. The sudden amplification in intelligence would drench the creature’s mind with all fashions of inputs and nuances which previously could have been shunted into the unconscious, ignored, not categorized.

The technicians had set up their slates of library material here and there about the room, or wrenched the tops off the large cylinders that dotted the floor, or brought out slender crystals from medicinally-spotless carrying sheaths—Montrose assumed these were some sort of memory units—and once the main crisis had passed, everyone asked Montrose questions at once. The technicians were asking about the intelligence augmentation process, and the doctor was asking him to touch his nose with his fingertip while closing both eyes.

It was Del Azarchel who saved him. Blackie gave him a nod, and gestured toward the exit with a glance of his eyes. The bowing technicians and the sliding doors got out of his way automatically, as if controlled by the same motion circuit. Del Azarchel slid out of the room in his silent black chair, and Montrose followed.

They were in a grim and windowless corridor whose walls were hung with cables. Iron doors bright with energy and temperature warnings stood locked to either side.

However, down the hall were a flight of stairs leading up to a more civilized portion of the complex, corridors paneled in polished wood and hung with portraits of stern-faced men in dark academic robes.

When Blackie’s chair climbed these stairs, Montrose saw how the base was constructed: The device rode a carpet of small hairs, each hair like the leg of a caterpillar, moving in sequences with its neighbor.

It looked remarkably flimsy, but when Montrose mulled over a few rough-estimate calculations in his head he was able to deduce an upper and lower limit for the load-bearing capacity and tensile of each hair that was well within the limits for bio-sculpture even from his day. Moderate number-crunching capacity was involved, but nothing the wealthiest man in the world could not afford. But the energy loss was high: Montrose just resigned himself to the notion that every appliance in this modern antimatter age was wasteful of energy. Men living on the shore of a sea don’t conserve seawater.

At the top of the stairs was a more comfortable room, this one adorned with flowers in jade vases and books in teak bookshelves.

Montrose seated himself on a comfortable, pleasantly warm couch, and put his feet onto a crystal-faced viewing table with a sigh of contentment. He rolled his eyes upward, and only then noticed that, here, again there were no windows.

Was the whole damn place underground?

Montrose remembered the images of cities being atom-bombed from space. Perhaps during the hundred fifty years while the Hermetic was away, the architecture had followed military necessity. A technology that could riddle Earth with ultrahighspeed train tubes could build any number of comfortable bunkers as many miles below the bedrock as the interests of safety might demand. It made for a depressing picture.

Back in my day, Montrose thought, we may have released ethnospecific germ warfare, but we did not use strategic-level atomics! Society had certainly degenerated, morally and perhaps mentally, during the interim.

And when the Hermetic had returned, she had brought with her a power unimaginably more dangerous than mere atomic fusion. For the first time, Montrose wondered if Blackie’s notion of letting a machine version of himself run the world was not so bad.

A world without war …

Montrose tried to think of something from his childhood, anything, that had not been effected by the wars, hot wars and cold wars, his mother’s generation had so meagerly survived. Fear of contamination touched everyone. It changed how close folk stood, how they shook hands. The depopulation had changed everything. The ruins of a once-great national highway system were like the aqueducts of medieval Rome, a testament to wealthier days. Even the snows and ice storms and endless cold weather had been the product of war, indirectly.

Maybe Blackie’s idea of how to run this new world was not as dangerous as the other likely alternatives. Montrose did not like that thought: He hated it like hell, but it pushed its way into his consciousness anyway. Maybe a world run by machines would be better …

Preoccupied, he almost did not notice Blackie touching that heavy bracelet of red metal on his wrist. Montrose almost did not hear the soft snap, like that of a heavy electromagnet pulling a bolt, which came from the door behind him.

Montrose pulled his feet off the crystal table, and sat up. Something was wrong.

Del Azarchel’s face was flushed red. Montrose could not tell if this was rage, or a drug reaction. Perhaps both. He guessed that Del Azarchel had just injected himself with some chemical carried in the red metal amulet.

“What’s up, Blackie? What’s got your goat?”

“My bride!”

“Come again?”

“Don’t pretend ignorance! The Princess Rania!”

Montrose remembered the portrait of the lovely woman he had seen.

“What about her?”

“What is between the two of you?”

“Between—? I’ve never met her.” Then the magnitude of what Blackie was saying crashed in on him. He started to laugh. He could not help it. Montrose sat back in the chair, and hooted and guffawed. “You’re jealous! You’re jealous of me! Of me! And with a gal I ain’t never laid—”

“What?!”

“—eyes on.”

Del Azarchel was thrown off his rhythm. Montrose rushed out more words before he lost the initiative: “Blackie, are you out of your mind? Pestiferous pox! When would I have met her? You have been with me for every minute since I woke up. When did I court her? While you were in the bathroom? Must have been a short-a-way sort of wooing, if I could consummate in less than five minutes, and clean myself up before you came back in. Or was it while I was working on your damn robot brain for you? Hey!”