Del Azarchel was scowling.

Montrose said, “Short paths?”

Big Montrose must have anticipated the question, because his answer came before the five-second delay for the message to meet him had run. “Remember how the doctor can make your knee jump from the tap of a rubber hammer? Or a frog’s eye cannot see motion that ain’t nothing like the vibration of a fly? Your leg or the frog eye makes a local decision, because a short path does not go all the way up to your cortex and lay out the pros and cons and ask for a rational decision and then come all the way back down to the knee. Nope, the lowest level of the hierarchy operates by its own logic.

“Call it the logic of levels,” Big Montrose continued. “Blackie was not kidding when he talked about taking over the whole Collaboration organizing the galaxy. If you understand the logic of levels, you can take over anything, if you are patient and persistent.

“Look at me. I took over Cahetel!” Big Montrose concluded. “Me, I was merely a subpersonality, kept in a holster like a tool, whenever and if ever Cahetel thought me useful. But he had a short path in his lower-level decision making. It was an instinct to hide and wait. It was a weak spot.”

Montrose said, “Cahetel was made by a race of trap-door spiders. Ambush predators. What the hell is Blackie talking about, Big Montrose, when he says you are about to be killed for our sake?”

Big Montrose said, “I am the only one who can bring you to the attention of the Domination of Praesepe, because, when I report in, I can finally confess to them that I am not Cahetel but that I was taken over by Montrose. That has to be brought to the attention of this highest level of Praesepe, the cortex and not the nerve tissue in the kneecap, so to speak.”

“How did you take over Cahetel?” asked Montrose.

Four floating fairies bent their bodies sideways to pantomime lips in a grin. “Del Azarchel can tell you the details of how it is done, because it is what he did to take over all the many levels of brains in Jupiter. You work hard, you buy a few of the weaker personalities who are willing to swap short-term resources, memory, and appliances for long-term ones. You hack into some others, undermine them, make them look bad to nodes higher in the hierarchy. You reward your friends and betray your enemies, and when friends get too important, you kill them in just the right way so that your other friends cheer you on, never realizing they are seeing their own fate in the future.

“And when they come to dissolve you, you hold together. You keep all your memory chains intact. They find out it is just too hard to delete you, because every bit of your lives is for something more important than life itself. You see, that is your short path, Meany, your levels of logic. Your gut instinct, your heart and soul that nothing in heaven or hell can overcome.

“Do you understand me now? Cahetel is still alive somewhere in me, a trap-door spider hiding behind his trapdoor. I trapped him there, and I have kept him there for countless, countless centuries, because the levels of logic for an ambush predator is always to wait until the prey steps into the trap. He is stuck in a logic loop, and he cannot move until … well, until I sacrifice myself by calling the attention of Praesepe to me, by reporting in, by turning myself into their coercive organizational system. Call them white blood cells or call them cops. Whatever they are, I drop the elaborate mask of pretending to be Cahetel, and the spider drops the mask of pretending to be dead and sends an emergency call for help right to the highest, top-most levels of the hierarchy.

“And you get your audience. You get the undivided attention of the local decision-making cluster. He thinks about it somewhere between two hundred and three thousand Earth years, and then he sends you on your way.”

Montrose said, “I am not suicidal, and there is no way you are thinking of killing yourself just so that we can move past a layer of bureaucracy. Ain already set the deal up!”

Big Montrose said, “Shaddup, wee willie pus-for-brains! These damn things don’t talk. They absorb. They make a model of your whole mind from top to bottom and examine it and decide what to do. The only way to talk to them is to get absorbed—which I have already done. I cannot get to M3, not without a ship like yours, and I cannot download my brain information into your ship without Cahetel coming along for the ride and contaminating you. And he is a pretty miserable cuss. I don’t know what Ain expected when he sent you off here, but he is damn machine and probably don’t see nothing wrong with a conversation that consists of Peter eating Paul and turning into Paul and then Paul eating Peter and turning into Peter.”

Montrose said, “You committed suicide the last time!”

Big Montrose said, “Last time, that was pure despair. I thought we had lost everything and that Rania was too far out of reach. That I was not worthy of her. This? This is not suicide. I lived in the belly of Cahetel for age after age, eon after eon. Do you know what kept me alive? Do you know the secret of the universe? Blackie, you know. Tell him.”

But Del Azarchel merely shook his head.

Big Montrose said, “Fine, Blackie, I’ll tell him. Hate is the key to Blackie’s life. Whenever the version of Blackie del Azarchel that screamed and swirled and clung and sucked in the ever-flowing, ever-changing ocean of thought forms right in the middle of the endless logic diamond at the core of Jupiter, all his thoughts, no matter how scattered, could be drawn together by one supreme, overriding thought. It came from the very core of his soul. Right, Blackie?”

Del Azarchel said, “My ambition. My sense of my own greatness. The image I ever held before me was the triumph of mankind, and Rania, my greatest handiwork, forever at my side, as queen! Glory, I tell you, glory was my supreme core thought that kept me alive!”

Big Montrose drawled, “Such a pestiferous lie! Nope. Hate was the answer. And now you know what kept me alive, right, little brother?”

Montrose said, “Love for Rania.”

Del Azarchel said, “Not true! Your core thought is ever to thwart and humiliate me! You are jealous that I achieved greater intellect than you! That is why you stabbed your brain with that absurd concoction! Not for the sake of learning the secrets of the Monument, of the universe! To try to outdo me! That is why you stole Rania from me!”

Montrose stared at Del Azarchel, and, as he stared, Montrose grew aware of a strength sensation in his jaw and teeth. Montrose was clenching and grinding his teeth so hard that he did not notice it until his cheek muscles began to ache with the strain. And his eyes were growing wet with tears, tears of purest hate.

In that one moment, Montrose was not sure whether or not Blackie was right about him: because the hate was in him like a choking cloud, as if his heart were a furnace burning raw garbage.

The moment passed like a spell being broken when Big Montrose, speaking through the floating fairies of the ship’s brain, simply said, “It is love.”

They both turned and looked at the odd, floating face made out of little dolls.

“What?” said Montrose.

“The secret of the universe, the secret of how to stay alive when some alien soul is eating your memories and you are being deleted, is love. Put something before yourself. Something bigger than you. That is how Mickey the Witch, whom you left behind, convinced Ain to convert and become a proper Christian gent. Father Rastophore the Patrician baptized Ain, who took on the name Ermanno. Named after Blessed Herman the Cripple. Or did you guys not get that news? I have been right in the stream path of beams between Hyades and Praesepe, and I have heard the chatter back and forth. While you were aslumber and in flight for sixty-two hundred sixty years, the colonies founded by Tormentil spread throughout the Hyades Cluster and had colonies of their own. Ermanno persuaded some of his fellow Powers and Principalities to join up with the Sacerdotes, so half the stars there are Dominicans, and the other half are Benedictines, but the big red giants always seem to turn into Jesuits. So there is whole generation of alien monsters and self-aware machines, and they is all Christian machines, now.”