He also knew he was in a private clinic, so when the door opened and Princess Rania glided in, he was not surprised.

Unlike Del Azarchel, she had no retinue with her. From the echoes of footfalls outside, he knew she had an extensive staff of neurologists and specialists on retainer, not to mention (for he heard the jingle of a weapon harness) soldiers and spies.

When he looked at her face, something clicked into place. He said, “You do not actually want there to be a war, do you? You are expecting Del Azarchel to step down. He won’t.”

She was dressed in a peach morning suit of conservative cut. It was so old-fashioned that it looked almost normal to him. However, she also wore a coronet and a sash of royalty. It made her look like a Beauty Queen. But of course—even with his new high-powered brain, Montrose found he could be surprised by little things—she was not a Beauty Queen, but a Queen Queen, the very thing beauty contest winners were using as a symbol, she was in truth.

Rania opened her mouth and squawked at him. He knew it was some sort of high-speed communication code, with thousands of items of information compressed into her voicewaves, but it meant nothing to him. She cocked her head to one side. He could see she was surprised, perhaps disappointed.

“State-related memory,” she said. She meant that his memory of the time aboard ship had not returned to him, no doubt because even with his newly-enhanced brain, the change from insane Posthuman to sane Posthuman had created a mnemonic lapse. The same reason why, in humans, a waking man cannot recall a dream well, or a man when happy finds his sad memories slipping aside, or why a tone of voice or childhood street will bring up recollections that written reminders might not, in this case did not allow Montrose to remember his days as Crewman Fifty-One. The two of them had agreed upon some high-density vocal code language, and she had been hoping he’d recall it.

Montrose looked carefully around the room—he realized he was doing that thing with his eyes, the sudden vibration movements to gather in additional information he had found so disturbing to look at back in his sleepwalker days—but he did not see any bugging devices. Perhaps a laser focused on the window could pick up air-vibrations, but he had been assuming the striations in the glass (for he had stared at them for some time, seeing the molecular patterns implied in the macroscopic texture) was proof against that type of eavesdropping.

Montrose drew in a surprised breath. He realized that Rania was fully expecting Man Del Azarchel to have augmented his own intelligence by now. The working copy of Ghost Del Azarchel could reproduce and solve everything Montrose had solved for himself. There could be multiple copies of Ghost Del Azarchel by now, Xypotechs of immense intellectual power and range and reach and imagination—and that meant minds equal to Rania’s, able to deduce new techniques or technologies for spying.

And it meant she was still afraid of him. Why?

“Even if we spoke in a secret language,” said Montrose, “Blackie could puzzle it out, sooner or later.”

She sat down on the edge of the gelatin slab that served him for a bed. With soft fingers she ran a slender hand through his hair, across his brow. “I would ask you how you are feeling,” she said. Meaning that the medical read-outs probably told her more about him than he knew himself. The implication was that she wanted to know when he would be well enough to be moved, presumably to a safer location, where they could talk freely.

Montrose let out a laugh. “I ain’t made of glass, missy!” and he started to climb free of the gel. It hardened around his limbs, and he thought he could calculate a system of muscular stresses to pull free. The gelatin was long-chain molecules that contracted or expanded under electrical current, and the computer-switching system controlling the current was operating by a certain set of reflex patterns. All he had to do was …

Rania reached around his skull, and applied a tiny amount of pressure with her finger to one of the bruises on his skull. “Ow!” he complained.

“Not made of glass, but still fractured,” she said, raising an eyebrow, and giving him a coy little pout. “Now you keep still.” Or she would call the anesthesiologist and have him sedated. Montrose was disappointed that having a more integrated nervous system did not give him immunity to chemicals injected into his bloodstream.

He settled back down. “Ha! Give a gal a crown, a starship, a few armies, infinite wealth, and she starts thinking she can give orders.”

“I am also your chief physician, Crewman.” She wore what could only be called a “Dr. Kyi” sort of look.

“Aw, be fair! I had to get my skull broke in order to get away from Blackie! They were going to cart me off!” To some secret location.

A quirk of her eyebrow said, louder than words: And you did not trust I would find you?

“You may be bright,” he said. But you do not know how bright Ghost Del Azarchel is. (He did not say that aloud, but the implication was clear to both of them.)

Why? Again, it was not words, just a change in her pupil dilation, but he knew what she meant.

“The first time I heard Ghost Del Azarchel speak, he said he wanted you and me to get together. He said it in the clear, nice and slow, in English, so that Man Del Azarchel’s pick-ups would hear. He told me you were going to slip me an invitation to your New Year’s Party.”

“Because of the number of people around,” she said, in answer to an unspoken question, “and he could not use the excuse of ‘Earthsickness’ to force me back into another decade or so of biosuspension. The last year of the old century was too important, symbolically—”

“Oh pox!” said Montrose, alarmed. “You were going to announce your engagement!” No wonder Del Azarchel had been mad. He looked at her suspiciously. His accusation was clear: Del Azarchel is too smart to fool himself, unless you helped him—you led him on, didn’t you?

She looked aloof, and her sea-green eyes seemed more stormy and mysterious than ever. “I appealed to his better nature; he answered with a baser nature. Do you think women were created just to watch men kill each other, and wear the widow’s veil, and weep beneath it? Women use the weapons nature gives us.” She said that aloud.

Partly in words, partly in expressions, he answered, “You mean what Del Azarchel gave you—he was one of your primary designers.”

Rania smiled cryptically, a smile not altogether pleasant. “Both Shelly’s Frankenstein and Shaw’s Pygmalion were in the ship’s library. Wasn’t that warning enough about infatuation with your own handiwork?” She shook her head sadly. “If you are going to play at God, divine love rather than romantic love might be in order—if he were willing to sacrifice himself, he would get everything he desired.”

“Ghost Del Azarchel is not infatuated with you,” said Montrose. “Because Man Del Azarchel walking in on us—you are too smart to let that happen. If you didn’t arrange that ‘coincidence’—”

She shook her head. Not I.

“Then he did. The ghost, I mean. But why would the Ghost Blackie first send me to find you, then save me from Man Blackie, feed me caviar and books, but then trip us both up?”

“Did he tell you which books to read?”

He opened his mouth to say No, but, looking back with crystal clear thoughts into his confused half-sleepy fog of what had back then been his brain, he realized that the voice from the chalet walls had dropped a word here and there, which, even when consciously forgotten, had drawn his attention toward certain shelves.

Which meant—what? What had the Iron Ghost been up to?

“Did he tell you how to open the gun case?” she said lightly.

Montrose nodded. “But I don’t see where this is leading.”