“No normal girl says define your terms when you say you are in love with me.”

She nodded judiciously. “Being normal is a goal oft sought and rarely achieved, but not unenviable for all that. Statistically speaking, it would be unusual if everyone were average.”

“You are in love with the other me. Mr. Hyde. The Daemon. Crewman Fifty-One.”

14

Posthuman Sovereign

1. Defining Her Terms

She tapped the mirror, so that it turned into a mirror again, drew out a compact case, and began touching up her lip-gloss where the kissing had smudged it. At the same time, her sorceress’s flock of dragonflies began swirling around her head, using their tiny legs as combs, and, acting in concert, began resetting and repinning her coiffeur.

Rania spoke in a dreamy, absentminded tone. “When I was a child I heard a legend of the missing crewman, Number Fifty-One, who was kept in a special biosuspension coffin on Deck Zero, at the axis of the world. They called it a ship, my fathers, but it was the only world I knew. Every few years, when confronted by some problem no one knew how to solve, the fathers in wide-eyed fear would wake up Crewman Fifty-One.”

She turned toward him, and stepped closer, so she had to lift her chin to look up at him. Her eyes flashed like sunlight glancing on summer seas. “You odd man! Do you know yours was the first laughter, the first real laughter, I ever heard? You were the only one who was still young?”

Before he could answer, she had turned her back on him. Her elbows were high, and she put her hands in her hair as her insect-machines pinned her hair in place. He saw the line of her neck, the exquisite fineness of her back and shoulderblades, delicate as carved ivory sanded smooth. His eyes traveled down the line of her back to her trim waist, the swell of her hips, the parabolic drape of her satin train. He almost laughed, because her slippers were translucent. Glass slippers.

“I remember as a little girl seeing you bounce from bulkhead to bulkhead in the mess, starting a food-fight, and writing equations on the walls in ketchup that only I could read—I thought they were meant for me.

“And little, pale, gray, sickly men, the fathers who raised me, they seemed so feeble compared to you, until you taught them how to use the coffins to make them young again. Whenever you woke up, it was like a food watch, like Christmas.

“Yes, we had Christmas aboard—we had very few gifts to share.

“When I was twelve and thirteen, I used to solve some of the magneto-hydrodynamic containment engineering problems wrong, so the thrust would wobble, just to get them to wake you up again. And you had not aged a day! And sometimes you would speak to me, if I could get you to look at me, but you never knew who I was.”

2. The Cure

“You have a crush on Mr. Hyde?”

“O-oh, I would not call it a ‘crush.’ I do not love your madness. Del Azarchel sought to keep us apart. He forced me into suspended animation for many years, telling the people I suffered from ‘Earthsickness’—a lie no one believed. You, he was afraid to thaw. It was not until I told him how to program his emulation of himself, and copy your chemical brain-alterations, that I was able to force him to wake us both in the same time period.”

“What do you mean?”

“The matter was delicate, but not difficult, since time was on my side, not to mention public opinion.”

“He’s not actually getting older. Seems to me he had plenty of time.”

“No. This year is when the endless wealth must begin to come again, or come to an end.”

“What does that—oh! There are one hundred years worth of antimatter left. Enough to last while an expedition travels fifty lightyears to V 886 Centauri, mines the star, and travels back, right?”

“It’s more complex than that, since we are dealing with estimates of future use, but, yes, the fuel reserves which seem so immense compared to Earth’s energy needs, are small compared to the refueling time.”

Montrose understood. Antimatter was also the ship’s fuel. The closer you crowd lightspeed, the greater the energy cost of accelerating the mass will grow—and grow asymptotically. The longer Del Azarchel waited, the less time was left, therefore the faster the Third Expedition had to be. And in this universe, speeds near lightspeed were astronomically costly.

“Why did he wait so long?” Montrose asked.

“Some years were consumed in wars of consolidation, some in constructing a new vessel—even with his wealth, not a small prospect.”

“What was wrong with the Hermetic?”

“You mean, why did he not simply ravish it from me?” Her eyes in the mirror looked over her own shoulder at him, flashing. “Two reasons, one better than the other. The worse reason is that Little Big Brother, the onboard security computer, thanks to you, still thinks I am the Captain, since I have the genes of Grimaldi in me. The better reason is that his heart is tender toward me, and full of rose-colored dreams. He sought my hand in marriage, and not my hate. Why plunder your own dowry? The computer is old fashioned enough—once again, thanks to you, you oaf—to grant husbands a superior right over their wife’s property.”

“Ten years or twenty should have been enough to ready up another vessel.”

“He could neither go himself nor stay himself, since he was trapped by his own ambition, and by his own profligacy. He did not trust anyone to stay and rule the world in his stead, and did not trust anyone to go and gather the wealth and power from heaven for him.”

“But now—thanks to me, he can be in two places at once.”

“I gave him a problem only you could solve. His work is in Artificial Intelligence, and yours in Neural Divarication Theory. So I made his emulation—he calls it his Iron Ghost—”

“We met. I think he, or it, saved my life.”

“I helped with the architecture. But I programmed in a flaw, so that Ghost Del Azarchel would get sick and go mad with the Montrose madness. Then I pretended not to be able to solve the problem, and waited. He knew, because you had partly wakened Little Big Brother to self-awareness, that it had to be possible. He knew you had solved it. Why couldn’t he? It drove him almost to madness.” She smiled to herself. “I waited. There is only one other daemon in the world, aside from me: and that is you.”

Montrose spoke in a voice of slow horror. “Then the person you want killed—is me! You want this version out of the way so that the posthuman version of me can take over!”

She laughed. “Oh, that would be funny! No, matters are not so overwrought with tragedy as that. I went through all these steps to give you this.”

She drew a small gemlike vial from a fold in her skirt and tossed it lightly to him. He caught it, held it up. In the dim candlelight, he saw it had a folding needle. He realized that it was a bone rongeur, small and disguised as a piece of jewelry.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want you to take the cure. I have had it for years. In your initial Zurich runs, you made the classic compilation blunder, and did not scale up your lower nervous system to handle the greater stress load on your cortex.”

“And this?”

“It is the real Prometheus Formula, the one you did not know how to make.”

“You had it? Why not cure me with this before?”

“I had to work carefully when I was repairing you. If you were too alert too quickly, you would see through what Del Azarchel intended, and not help him with his divarication problem. So I had to leave you disoriented enough to do be willing to do the work, but oriented enough to see how to solve it. I discovered traces of your pre-posthuman personality buried in neural codes at the base level—the way a frog’s genes contains the pattern for a tadpole. It was not difficult to resurrect this you, your previous version, the one from before I knew you.”