1. The Secret of Youth

“So you don’t tell anyone you came back with the secret of eternal youth, eh?” said Montrose, feeling anger prickle him, despite his awe.

And indeed he was awed: whatever programmed cell-bodies were stored into their armbands had acted immediately upon entering their bloodstreams, and started issuing molecular commands to the bodily cells. Even their hair changed immediately, losing its gray throughout the length of each strand, rather than merely at the roots. Montrose could not fathom the speed of it: No biological process known to him would happen so quickly. Each cell must have been separately programmed with a dimorphism, trained to return to its youthful shape and consistency at the first trace of stimulant.

Melchor de Ulloa smiled ingratiatingly. “It is extended youth, but not eternal. A genetic form of divarication correction—an application of your own work to cellular biochemistry. You should feel proud!”

Montrose remembered the wrinkled face of old Doctor Kyi. “I’d feel a damn sight prouder if’n we’d’ve shared it.”

Reyes y Pastor said calmly, “The Learned Conclave thought it not in the bests interests of Mankind to preserve the present generation, and all its accumulated genetic flaws and primitive memes. Extending the aging process slows the evolutionary process, as the older bloodlines must give way before the new bloodlines can arise, improving the breed.”

The mention of breeding brought something to Montrose’s attention. He saw the similarity of features: olive-skinned, dark-eyed, Mediterranean. There was only one blonde in the room: the Engineer’s Mate Coronimas, whose fair hair was a genetic marker of ancient Norse conquests in Portugal.

All of Latino descent. In other words, only the Hispanospheric moiety of the joint expedition had returned. The mutiny had fractured loyalties along racial lines.

Ximen Del Azarchel touched Menelaus Montrose on the elbow and gestured toward the table. “Please sit. Join us.”

Montrose recognized the O-shaped table for what it was. It was the Table Round, the gathering of King Arthur’s knights, from the stories Del Azarchel so loved. Had he not, years ago, likened the Hermetic expedition unto knight errantry?

Except that this group seemed more a gathering of Mordreds than of Galahads.

Montrose pondered a moment, torn between hot anger and cold curiosity. Whatever crimes this group had committed, even if new to him, were years in the past. And they were his friends—he was a member of the crew, after all, a position he had worked so hard to achieve.

Perhaps he owed them a hearing. No point in storming out before he found out what they had to say. In any case, he had nowhere else to go, and the doors were sealed. And, dammit, he wanted to know what they knew!

He sat.

The seat was not particularly comfortable. He took a sip from his water glass. It was not particularly cold. Whatever the Hermeticists were up to, they certainly did not coddle themselves.

The meeting of these seventy-odd scientific overlords of the world seemed to be handled with less formality than Montrose had seen in town meetings of the eight selectmen back in Bridge-to-Nowhere. There seemed to be no minutes being kept, and no one serving as Chairman.

The first order of business was reviewing Montrose’s cure of the Iron Ghost. The event had been recorded from the sensitive fabric of the walls, from every possible angle.

2. Mr. Hyde

At first, the overhead plates showed Menelaus, looking sleepy, laying on the floor next to a white-haired Del Azarchel in the cold room, surrounded by the cylinders and cables snaking across the floor. A small silver cup had rolled from the fingers of the prone figure and lay in the floor in a puddle of alcohol—and presumably whatever had been mingled with the alcohol.

The image of Del Azarchel wheeled his throne over to a tiny doll-like Menelaus, and leaned down to help him to his feet. In small, tinny voices, he and Menelaus discussed the divarication problem. Menelaus seemed to be sleepy, perhaps drunk, and his head hung down. He was speaking slowly but normally, his expression and body language normal.

It changed slowly. Menelaus seemed to get more excited. He began pacing and gesturing wildly. His face almost glowed. And then the image of Menelaus was speaking rapidly, face flushed red as if from some terrible exertion. There was something hypnotic, sinister, in the clipped, rapid, uninflected way in which he spoke, as if he meant to speak much more rapidly.

While he spoke, he opened up more and more screens on the walls around him, and produced an image of the Monument around him. He was no longer talking to Del Azarchel, but only to the pallid mask that had appeared on a large rear screen.

The eyes were the worst part. During the first moment of the speech, while Menelaus stared at the images of the Monument all around him, the eyes had danced and darted like the eyes of a man having a seizure, moving from point to point restlessly, drinking in every scrap of visual information. Then they went dead. Like two burning points, the intense eyes held unnaturally still, as if the mind behind them had mastered the art of absorbing all the sights from its peripheral vision as if the brain was developed enough to compensate for any part of the arc of vision where the pupil’s lens was not turned by merely deduction. A creature too smart to need to look directly at what it was analyzing.

His face. There was … something … staring out at the world with burning, supernal eyes, using his face as a mask.

The human mask spoke to the computer mask, speaking in a singsong voice like garbled Chinese. He started leaping from screen to screen, wall to wall, and he shook off his outer coat. At about that point he drove the flesh-and-blood version of Del Azarchel out of the chamber.

3. The Testament of Crewman Fifty-One

Around the large circular table, one man after another spoke, apparently the chairmen of divisions or ad hoc committees for reports. Again, Montrose did not see who was deciding who had the floor. But he noticed that the young bloods, Del Azarchel’s clique from the old days, seemed to do most of the talking.

Narcís D’Aragó spoke in his thin, colorless, precise voice, “In this recording, Fifty-One said the Monument Builders use a simple bilateral symmetry for expressing alternative concepts, and a triangle to indicate paradoxes and synthetic relations. The major glyph on a circled triangle was the pain-pleasure statement, the alternatives of good and bad, success and failure: The entire forty-five-degree section of the Eta Segment (roughly from ten degrees to twenty-five degrees on the Monument surface) was a mathematical analysis of game theory. Previous translation attempts had foundered because expressions of preference had not been recognized.”

Montrose raised his hand. “Fifty-One? Is that what you are calling me?”

It had been his crew locker number, also painted in huge numerals on the front and back of his space armor.

Del Azarchel said in a meditative voice, “That is our name for the creature you accidentally created in your own nervous system, built from your own brain cells, from your own soul, however you want to say it. The Posthuman. It is still alive in your brain, though I think it is wounded.”

Montrose said, “Delta-wave sleep patterns wake it up, no? My dreaming cycle restores the being. It wakes when I sleep.”

“Interesting theory,” said Del Azarchel noncommittally.

“You doped me to wake it up. The other me—” He turned and smiled at Sarmento i Illa d’Or, showing his teeth. “—The one who bites.”

Sarmento looked sour and cracked his knuckles.