“You mean—he is not possessing me? I am possessing him?”

“I suppose one could regard it that way.” She was done with her hair, and now she turned back, and favored him with another sunny smile. “In any case, at the same time, I maneuvered the Senior into programming into his emulation a neural divarication error of the kind I knew you already knew how to repair—you must have been suspicious that it was so easy to solve?”

“No. I just thought I was that damn good. But I don’t understand! Why not just cure my brain malfunction and wake me up straight off?”

“With the Senior Del Azarchel standing right by your bedside? I feared for your life. He is a dangerous man.”

“Then why did you agree to marry him?”

“As I said, he is a dangerous man.”

3. A Personal Dragon

Montrose looked back and forth along the walls, now ruined and covered with mathematical scratches. He was not sure what to think.

“What were we just talking about?”

She looked at him through the corner of her eye. “You can’t understand it?”

“It’s the drug. The recipe for the Prometheus Formula. You reduced the entire Zurich run, what took a multiple-volume computer months to deduce, into a simple expression…”

“Are you guessing, or are you recollecting?”

He turned his back to her, since he did not want her to see his expression. Unfortunately, the mirror was right in front of him, and so he saw the look of anxious uncertainty—of fear—on his features, and in the glass she bestowed the twinkle of an impish smile on him.

“I don’t know what or who I am anymore,” he said.

She said, “Whenever my beautiful, great ship was in trouble, or my people faced a problem we could not solve, they woke you up. It was always fun, in a dangerous way, but only sometimes could we get you to listen to us, or look at the problem we put before you. You would bounce off the bulkheads and make me laugh. And then you would fix the problem, and save us. That is who you are. My hero. My manic-depressive hero.”

He spun angrily, and caught her by the shoulders. “You are trying to trick me!”

She looked thoughtful, and pouted. “Quite possibly. That is one of the things behind every man–woman relationship.” She shrugged her scented shoulders very slightly in his hands. “Do we have a relationship?”

He let go and stepped back. “Stop toying with me. I cannot trust myself. Either of me.”

“There is only one of you, silly man. And I have no need of feminine wiles—when speaking the truth, as befits a princess, will serve me better. Because you are convinced of a false belief that Mr. Hyde is different from you, you will debate in your mind for a time whether to trust that vial I gave you, or destroy it. But it does not matter, since I just here and now have shown you how to formulate it. Sooner or later you will realize that you are the Mr. Hyde, the lesser version, and your posthuman self is Dr. Jekyll, the greater. Your discontent with the human condition will drive you to enter into the discontents of the posthuman condition. Or your fear of Del Azarchel, and your need to be smarter than he. Or your desire to have a conversation with me, one to one, as equals.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said you were above me, little lady, and I won’t stand it. I’ve a mind to turn you over my knee!”

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, I am flattered by the offer of a spanking, but I am your superior officer, and your sovereign, and higher on the ladder of evolution than you, and I have a fully armed starship, and several armed forces at my command, not to mention I can flick one of my hairpins up your nose. So any horseplay could turn out badly for you. Besides, what would my husband say if you assumed his privileges?”

“Wait? If you are married, how can you be engaged?”

“The marriage was not consummated, and my husband was not in his right wits at the time of the ceremony, which was private, so in the eyes of the law the oath is invalid.”

“Wait! Plague and damnation, girl, are you talking about me? Did I get married to you when I was Mr. Hyde?”

She fluttered her fingers at the ampoule. “Ask him yourself.”

“Pox!”

“Just one quick jab in the head. It should only sting a little. Well, actually, it will cause you blinding, unparalleled agony. Warn me first! So I can leave the room! I don’t want to hear you screaming while you are writhing and flopping on the floor like a fish. I do have medical technicians downstairs, who can strap you into a gurney. Be nicer for you if you took morphine first.”

“Lady, I just met you! I don’t know you from Adam!”

“Adam lacked a belly button. Or so it is said. You can distinguish me from him on that basis. No doubt he was taller than I.”

“I am not sticking your pestilential chemicals into my nice new brain, not after Dr. Kyi just fixed me!”

“He merely assisted. I did most of the work. So it is a little late to express distrust? Oh! And I forgot! That also makes me your physician, so you have to obey my orders. Will you break faith with me?”

“I ain’t taking no orders from some dame half my age!”

“Dame? You have severely demoted me, sirrah! I shall have my master of heralds contact your office in the morning.”

She stamped her little glass-shod foot so that her slipper rang like a bell on the floor, and she looked so regal and so wrathful that for a half-second Montrose thought he had really offended her. But then she burst out laughing in a most unladylike fashion (although she did hide her mouth behind her slender silk-gloved hand as she hiccupped her way through a giggle fit) so that Montrose stood there, unable to decide whether to be angry or confused or to join in.

His expression must have been uproarious to her, because the peals of laughter lasted a long moment. Her face was blushing a pretty rose-pink from the hilarity, and her skin was so delicate, that the blush of laughter went all the way down her throat, to her shoulders and down past her collarbone.

It was a regular Texas sort of laugh. He decided he liked it.

“Ma’am, don’t get me wrong. You’re the cutest little button on God’s green Earth, and smart as a whip, and I like your sass, and may Jesus beat me with a two-by-four with a honking big nail in it if’n I am telling a lie—but you also must be a little crazy. You think I am going to stick myself with some needle? And what hold you think you got on me? Why do you call it breaking faith?”

“Is my sass showing? I must certainly speak harshly to my seamstress.”

He tried not to laugh, but he shook his head. “Rania, Rania,” (how he loved saying that name!) “What are you thinking? What hold can you claim on me?”

Now she was sober. (But still pretty and pinkish around the edges.) “None,” she said, drawing a shaking breath, and shaking her head. “It is the Monument that holds you. It holds me as well.”

“Your own personal dragon. What’s that mean?”

“Have you understood nothing? And I thought you were a genius.”

“An unlikely stupid genius, I’d say. Didn’t no one tell you how I done stuck a needle in my head-bone?”

“The Monument is my dragon for all the reasons we have said. I was born from it—you have by now deduced that.”

It was a statement, not a question. He said, “Not hard to deduce. There weren’t women on the ship. But when did you figure it out?”

“You ask, in other words, when did I deduce that everything said by the beloved fathers who raised me was a lie, and that the picture of my beautiful mother, the picture I held when I cried myself to sleep in my cocoon on C-Deck, was a fake? I was old enough to dissemble my reaction, but too young to be forgiving.”

“How much of you is—homo sapiens? They used some real human DNA as a start.”

“Ranier Grimaldi was my matrix. He is my mother, so to speak; I have had gene scans. I have his chin, his eyes, his love of truth. As for the rest of me, I am a chimera, an ugly ducking. Who can say what I will grow into? Someone else acted as my Doctor Frankenstein, my designer, and established my basic looks.”