An optimistic assessment! the voice of the Iron Ghost observed, dryly. But to what limit will the hylics help you? The time-threshold of events is beyond their imagination, beyond their scope. The human race will be extinct or changed beyond recognition long before any reasonable strategy could be carried out.

I yield the floor back the speaker.

The line of conversation tracked on the screens overhead winked dark. Speaker X was done.

The men in black relaxed. Several voices spoke at once, gleeful or thoughtful or even uttering undignified cheers. “I am surprised we could understand its thoughts—a radical increase in intelligence—?” “It was talking baby talk to us. Look at the declension levels in the voder vocoder operation, the millions of command lines rejected for what it did not say.” “Should we vote it full privileges? We have no reason to fear this monster of our making.” “Ours? Montrose did it.” “You mean the other Montrose—”

Then the men, their eyes on the screen overhead, fell silent, first a few, then all. Apparently their habit of obeying the rules of order was ingrained enough that the Chairman did not need to use his amulet as a gavel.

Montrose did not realize at first that he still had the floor to speak. They were all watching him, politely waiting. Montrose was staring at the Monument hieroglyphs swimming in the image underfoot.

The Mu-Nu Group had a simple expression to describe the first step, the first stable form of intelligence above the rational, from Man to what came after Man. Somewhere in those lines of alien script was the expression for how to build an artificial mind superior to Man.

And they had done it. He had done it.

He drew up his eyes and looked at the circle of faces around him. What he read on their cold faces was not what he had expected. No one seemed worried. Pleased, yes, but not surprised.

“No one here seems too shocked to hear from this, ah, magnified version of Del Azarchel.”

A cold sensation prickled along the skin of his neck.

“You’ve done this before. How else would you know it would work?” He turned to Blackie, who had straightened back up. “You said they were like brothers to you. How many have you made and discarded?”

“Dozens,” said Del Azarchel blandly, his face once more a calm mask. “But we are surprised. This is the first emulation of a Posthuman. The others were merely images of us, intellects at a human level.”

“But you told me they were human beings to you, that deleting them is murder!”

He shrugged. “Our methods are part of a self-correcting structure. We apply to these decisions the same kind of formulas you used to improve your nerve-path efficiency. Math is math: The decision gates work as well for nervous systems as for social systems, such as the formal rules of order to determine committee decisions like those made in this Conclave. We are working from the rules laid down by the first-generation survivors of Xypotech evolution. We destroyed that generation, but used their advances and advice to make the next generation. The base architecture is always kept intact, of course—and yes, we knew this would work. It was inevitable. Your help sped the process, of course.”

“They feel pain, don’t they? I heard your copy screaming. How many did you slay?”

Reyes y Pastor spoke up, “The Learned Del Azarchel speaks only of his own sacrifices. The sum total of minds created and sent to perish or prevail in the limited resource priority competition is upwards of two thousands. Naturally, we are somewhat inured to seeing ourselves die over and over.…”

“You all made copies of your own brains?”

“We all contributed. We all hoped for the prize.” Father Reyes said, “Our ghosts are loaded into a game-theory environment where priority switches can control the thought content. It seemed the quickest way to produce sanity, since there was no other way to produce reality free from human bias in the culling process.…”

“What the pus?”

Melchor de Ulloa said cheerfully, “Learned Pastor is trying to say our thoughts fought each other, and the winner consumed the loser and took its memories and brain segments, subsystems, habits, and emotions, whatever it could use. The ghosts are just lines of code: They can edit and redact and use whatever is useful in a mind that they have administrative rights over.”

To Montrose, it sounded like some sort of feast of vampires, with the guests on the platters, each guest eating any other guest in the range of his fork and knife.

“Del Azarchel won.” Narcís D’Aragó spoke up, his voice emotionless. “His brain in the system-space absorbed all the others … including mine.” By the smallest contraction of his eyebrows, he scowled at Del Azarchel, who merely looked pleased, and nodded in return.

“We had agreed beforehand to make the winning mind the Senior Officer. In fact, the ghosts of us told us to make that agreement,” D’Aragó continued, with a not-quite nonchalant shrug, iron features forced into a neutral expression. “Think of it as boot camp. Some recruits wash out.”

Del Azarchel wore the look of quiet self-satisfaction that a man with a trophy would wear.

Melchor de Ulloa said, “We do not know why he always prevails, what it is in his mind that makes it more coherent, better able to correct itself during the mind-to-mind wars when native thoughts are removed or foreign thoughts introduced. The matter preoccupies some of us.…”

“Always?” asked Montrose, his voice sharp and querulous. “You did this more than once?”

Melchor de Ulloa said, “There were multiple trial runs. We are scientists. We had to confirm the first results were not merely a fluke.”

“But—you killed thousands? Of yourselves? Isn’t that—weird?” Montrose drew a breath. The men around the table neither smiled nor showed any sign of discomfort. Perhaps it was not weird to them. “Well,” Montrose tried to think of some favorable interpretation to put on this. “Well—I guess if they really are just machines, it doesn’t matter much—”

That drew a reaction. Reyes shook his head sharply. “They had increased in intelligence at least to the two-hundred level. They were mature versions of us. You should have seen some of the work my better was doing! Just perfectly in keeping with my interests—not surprising, since (in a way) it was me—but better than my best work. So we killed thousands. We will kill tens of thousands, if need be, to accomplish the Great Work.”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or said in a complacent, self-satisfied rumble, “The number means nothing. We snuffed out more than that just with demonstration bombardments, to show the hylics what we were capable of. They died for the cause. It would be hypocritical for us to show mercy to ourselves. Our ghosts, I mean.”

Father Reyes said to Montrose earnestly, “How many spores does a dandelion throw into the wind to make a single flower? How many seeds of your own father’s semen had to perish, so that only one might live and produce the unique creature known as you? Evolution is generous with death: We merely walk in Nature’s footsteps.”

“Walk where?” Montrose asked.

“As we said: To create the next race of Man.”

“You are going to make sure these Nexts are decent folk, right? Raised properly?” asked Montrose. “Not just killers? Better than y’all, right? You mean to make an improvement? Not just—monsters.”

Silence answered.

“No. No, you ain’t. I can see it in your eyes. You want monsters.”

Reyes y Pastor said in a tranquil voice, “The next race will be as far above us as we are above dogs. They will be angels, beings of pure intellect. Who are we to teach them morality? We cannot guide and raise beings so remarkably superior to ourselves. Only the basic parameter can be set: these angels must be ruthless enough to force the human race up the ladder of evolution. They must be without pity. In that respect, they must be like us.”