Montrose figured now it was his turn to get mad. He stood to his feet, and his big bony hands knotted into fists. “Just a poxy minute, you phlegm-spewing unwashed pest! I was just working my brain to a nub trying to cobble your mechanical wonder over yonder into some sort of shape—as a favor to you! For you!—and you come back and accuse me of—”

Just as suddenly as it had come, his anger left him, blown out like a candle left near an unlatched door by the sheer unlikelihood of the accusation.

“—come to think of it, what in the pox are you blaming me for? What did I do? When?”

Del Azarchel’s black chair slid forward. He reached out and tapped the surface of the table, bringing it to life. “I was watching your operation. Look at this—”

2. Daemon and Ghost

The scene was an odd one indeed.

Montrose saw his own figure, his skin as red as if he were sunbathing, dancing around the room in a series of controlled, manic jerks. The motions seemed inhumanly smooth, despite the suddenness of the starts and halts, as if he had somehow achieved greater control over his muscles than normal nerve impulses allowed. His fingers fluttered through some sort of sign language. He was both humming and speaking and singing. How in the world he had trained the vocal cavities in his head and chest to do that, he had no idea.

It sounded like Chinese music, or, at least, something not on a diatonic scale. The melody wavered and paused, and then folded back on itself repeating and inverting certain chord progressions. It was like listening to Mozart, if Mozart were experimenting with a nonstandard scale.

The purpose was clear. The figure in the cold room, dancing naked, was trying to establish a multiple channel of interfaces with the Iron Ghost, like a typist keying two different messages with either hand, while typing out a third with foot pedals.

“How was I keeping myself warm?”

Del Azarchel pointed to an inset. Monitors in the room tracking his temperature showed his skin at 112° Fahrenheit. The dancing figure was running a fever.

“What kind of brainwave is that?”

Del Azarchel said, “Researchers call it the epsilon wave. Your brain is the only brain in history to produce it. Note the activity spikes. That is why you are hyperventilating and sweating. You body is trying to keep enough oxygenated blood flowing to your brain to keep you … awake.”

“Awake?”

“Possessed. Whatever you might call the epsilon brainwave condition.”

Montrose jerked back from the image, putting a hand up as if to ward off a blow.

Del Azarchel merely looked at him curiously.

“My eyes. I turned and looked at the camera. It was—it’s not—”

“Some crewmen reacted that way to your stare aboard the ship. This was before we sedated you. Interesting that you, too, would flinch.”

“My brother once told me you can make a dog back off if you stare into its eyes without blinking. Animals can’t hold a man’s gaze, except cats, I guess. Damn cats. Hey! Look at the floor!”

He meant the floor shown in the record. The image showed the cold room floor lit up with the spirals and angles of the Monument script. Screens and inset windows around the walls opening and closing rapidly, flickering.

While the naked man danced across them, parts of the Monument script lit up, rotated, and shifted position, trailing after his feet, spreading where his fingers flung them, to overlap other segments of the Monument. Colored lines and diagrams snapped quickly into and out of view around the knotworks and labyrinths newly-formed by the overlaps.

And there were two and three voices joining the chorus, singing counterpoint to the breathy wailing of the dancing figure. Then it was seven or a dozen voices singing and speaking.

“He is talking to me about the Monument. The other Del Azarchel, I mean. The Iron Ghost.” Of course the machine was not limited to merely human vocal cavities. It could produce as many sounds-threads as it could feed into as many electronic speakers as it controlled.

“You know what part we are analyzing?” Montrose asked. “Do you have the Index?”

“No need. I recognize it. The Omicron Segment of the Second Radial Statement, K202 though KH01. The Bhuti Expression,” said Del Azarchel.

“Which is what we hypothesized was the mind-body equation system. The Monument Builders must have invented a new type of mathematical and logical symbology just for that: otherwise, how do you deal with the self-reflectivity problem? And the incompleteness of—I didn’t see that part! It went by too quick! Turn it back! You got all this recorded, right?”

Del Azarchel politely refrained from pointing out that they were watching a recording right now. All he answered was, “I sent the file, everything up to time-stamp 81.14, over to the Conclave for analysis. They will call us when they have something. We will have leisure to study this in a perhaps at another time—”

“Why? What happens at the 81 mark?”

“Private matters.”

When the counter read 81, Del Azarchel tapped the table glass again, and slowed the feed. The dancing figure now writhed. Montrose found he could look the figure in the eyes, because now the expression—his expression, suddenly it looked like the face he saw in the mirror every morning—was one of sorrow and surprise.

The Iron Ghost was singing, or saying, “… I also love, yet cannot take. Why should he enjoy? My simpleton version, my father, he has stolen your girl! He will marry Rania. You will meet her at New Year’s, as arranged. But she has already outsmarted you both—and me—look at the social parameters—the conflux of trends in seven hundred twenty-one separate collaterals of a socio-economic dissolution—” The conversation then turned to economics, and both voices switched from English to other languages rapidly. The possessed version of Montrose seemed agitated, outraged.

Del Azarchel put his hand on Montrose’s elbow. Old though he was, his grip was still strong. “Why does he call my bride yours? On what grounds does he say I am stealing her? What is the arrangement? Answer me!”

Montrose tried to shake off the grip, and started in astonishment when he could not. Del Azarchel’s fingers were like iron, pressing into his arm. Montrose did not feel like breaking the old man’s nose with his palm, or kicking the wheelchair out from under the cripple, so he had to content himself with not wincing.

“Why the pox don’t you ask your damn machine? He’s the one who said it.”

“The technicians say it has to go through a sleep cycle, one longer than the one-third-to-two-thirds ratio of human sleeping-to-waking activity, because the cortical complexity has increased geometrically. It can only wake for a few minutes per every hour of sleep. They are trying to wake it again.”

Montrose said, “Well, then, why not ask you yourself? That machine knows what you know, don’t it? What is there in your head that would make you say such as that?”

Del Azarchel sank back in his black chair, frowning. He made a steeple of his fingers, and stared thoughtfully, not at Montrose, but at the image jerking and gliding in the surface of the table.

Montrose said, “What I cannot figure is how you would even think I was trying to talk your gal out of marrying you—By the way, I saw a portrait of her made back when she was young, and I gotta say she was really a fine-looking woman in her time—I mean, I am sure she is a perfectly nice old broad nowadays, but, just when she was young, whenever that picture was painted, uh—anyway, how could you think it? When would I have met her?”

“She is the one who did the major work on your brain, seeking a cure. She has spent many hours with you. Days.”

Montrose frowned. “Was I thawed or slumbered? Awake or asleep? And, hey, listen, if I said anything to your old lady while I was out of my five wits—”