Montrose had taken a glass vase from the decorative shelf, thrown the flowers and water over his shoulder, studied the geometry to determine possible stress weaknesses, and shattered the thing on the marble chessboard.

Now he had a sharp fragment of glass in his hand. With it, he was carving little Greek letters into the arm of his chair, which was varnished wood, so that the slightest scar showed up very nicely. He spoke without looking up from his figures. “What kind of barbaric society does not have paper around for back-of-the-envelope calculations? Lincoln never would’ve wrote the Gettysburg Address if it weren’t for scrap paper.”

The doctor looked annoyed. “It was very much against my professional advice that you were wakened under uncontrolled conditions in a high-stimulation environment, especially since we have yet to confirm if the damage done to your nervous system is mitigated. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Fifteen or so,” he said, still not looking up. Both chair arms were now covered, so he lurched to his feet, and plopped down into another chair. “I ain’t got room. Hey—what kind of surface does that chessboard have?”

“Do you remember who you are?”

He answered absentmindedly. “Menelaus Illation Montrose, J.D. and Ph.D., graduated Soko University in Nip Frisco, Class of ’34, before that, commissioned in ’25 as Lance-Corporal in the United State Imperial Calvary, the Tough-Ruttin’ Thirty-Fifth, decommissioned thank God, and after that, Monumentician and Semantic Logosymbolic Specialist, Joint Indosphere-Hispanosphere Scientific Xenothropological Expedition to Centauri V 866. Does that sound like I know who I am?”

“What race are you?”

“I am trying to work here.”

“Please answer, Mister Montrose.”

“Doctor. Purebred Tex-Mex. What’ya think?”

“No, I mean, do you know what species you are? Do I look like a member of your own species to you, at the moment?”

This made him look up. “What the hell kind of question is that? My what?”

“Are we both human?”

Montrose let out a laugh. “Rut me with a harpoon! You kidding? You ain’t kidding. What, is you aiming to rip off your mask and turn out to be a monster bug from Arcturus or something? Big clustery eyes and dripping sideways mouth and all? Damnation, go ahead! Let me see it. I dare ya! Do we have starships to Arcturus as yet?”

“There is but one manned starship, and she keeps the peace of Earth and cannot depart.”

“We’ll see about that one.”

“Extend your hands to either side, and, while closing your eyes, touch your nose. Quickly, please.”

“I will be damned if I will. You ain’t answering my queries, Doc.”

“Hm. Insubordination is not a mental disorder, I suppose, but it is not exactly a healthy sign, either.”

“I’ll show you a healthy sign.” He pointed at the chessboard. The surface was marble, and hence immune to his knifepoint, but the back was a thin layer of cork, and he had inscribed it with precise rows of little marks. “That’s where she was born.”

“Who?”

“Your Princess. I could have done it with the material in four coffins, and one dead body, of course, provided the flesh was burnt, because the carbon molecules were what the paramagnetic fields of the antimatter manipulators were designed to use. They can work on terrene matter just as easily. And the coffins were stuffed with nanomachinery. They were already like a womb for people like me to sleep in. And Grimaldi was nice and burnt to death, so he could serve as the raw material.”

Montrose grinned his skull-like gargoylean grin, which seemed to startle the poor doctor more than it should have. He continued: “Your Princess is like a digger wasp: an egg laid inside a corpse, except the artificial placenta used molecular mechanisms stripped out of the ship’s recyclers, which I hear weren’t much working so well no-how, to convert the material to nutriments. All you would need is the code. No one on Earth could solve that expression. But if you had the math, you could do it. Very sly. This is a damn fine piece of work. Brilliant. Poxing brilliant. But why? Why make another human being, if you were so low on supplies? And why make a little baby girl? And—Oh, sweet Jesus up a tree! He’s not going to marry her, is he? That is practically incest!”

“I do not understand what you mean. It would be incest only if Prince Rainier married his daughter, and he died shortly after she was born.”

“Shortly before, you should say. I mean this here is the Princess’s mother, and it came out of Blackie’s head.”

“But—that is a chessboard. You found it here in the coach, a few moments ago. It is an inanimate object.”

“No, jackass, I mean the expression! This is how she was born! You recognize a Diophantine Equation, don’t you?”

“I, ah, am not as familiar with that particular, um…”

“They taught you about Fermat’s Last Theorem in school, right? This here is a special case of that theorem and so has no solutions for numbers less than or equal to three. Now, Hilbert posed the problem of defining an algorithm for finding out if an arbitrary Diophantine equation has a solution. For first-order equations, answer is yes. Matiyasevich proved no general solution was possible. Not in human math, anyway. This expression represents a closed spline ball. Basically, it is a line drawn through a permutation of the vertices of an icosahedron: in this case the line represents the growth relation between totipotent cells in a blastula and a developed nervous system. It cannot be solved because the number of Bezier curves would have to equal the number of nerve cells, and the vertices change for each nerve state: there are not enough computers on Earth to get the raw calculating power to do it. But suppose someone else had done it for you. But now suppose you had solved a high-order solution for the Diophantine Equation defining the underlying icosahedron giving rise to this expression here.”

“I warn you, Mister Montrose, I have had the privilege of working with the Princess on your case for nine years now, and I will not have my work ruined, ruined, I say, because you are so uncooperative! If you do not care about your brain operations, I do! Do you know how much delicate molecular engineering went into just the path redaction? It’s a fragile and subtle piece of work—how dare you endanger it! My masterpiece! Her masterpiece! I don’t like these dopamine levels!”

Montrose took all the lines running from the doctor’s bag to points on his own body in one fist and yanked them out, ignoring the pain where needleheads pried free. “Well, it is my own damn brain. I got a right to it.”

“You don’t! Stop thinking so hard! We cannot build you another!”

Montrose laughed aloud. “Well, Blackie’s gotten pretty close to growing a second brain. He has got a working model, self-aware, able to talk like a man and everything.…”

The doctor snorted. “Impossible. Nobilissimus Del Azarchel himself spearheaded the effort to render research into artificial intelligence illegal. The scientific union declares the problem insolvable, and the Church condemns the creation of self-aware beings unable seek salvation to be an abomination. It is a slander for you to imply the Nobilissimus to be involved in such efforts.…”

“Boy, are you in the dark! I’ve just come from working on it.”

“Nonsense! I am the chief of the personal physician staff of the Nobilissimus—a member of the inner circle. I would know.”

“Yeah, well, I am his drinking buddy, and I carried him back to barracks on my back while he puked in my ear, so I see your inner circle and raise you.”

The doctor sat back, scowling. He regained his composure enough to muster a shrug. “The Princess says the development of artificial minds is both inevitable and beneficial, and this may be one reason why the Nobilissimus keeps her out of the public eye for decades at a time.…”