“In what regard?”
“You want to know how to sniff out a lie? Lies are told with a particular audience in the sites, see? If you understand the audience, you understand the lie. Your little story about three crewmen being too dishonored to be willing to admit they flunked out of the space expedition—you believe it, because that is the way you’d act, the way your generation expects people to act. I haven’t seen more than a glimpse of y’all in this time, but you are a military culture, and militant cultures have a cult of honor. Always have. People of my day did not act that way. We were a free-market culture. A guy who flunked out of Space Camp would have done pixies, maybe wrote a book, walked the lecture circuit. Because we cared about money, not honor so much, on account of the world was in a depression, and every penny counted. See what I mean? Time changes people, don’t it? That’s one reason why lies do not last.”
The doctor said, “Paranoia symptoms are the type of self-reinforcing neural-path behavior I regard as an bad sign: We do not want to see a collapse into your previous halt state.”
Menelaus leaned back in his chair, stuck his thumbs in his sash, and spread his legs in a comfortable slouch. “And is common sense a bad sign?”
“Then where did Princess Rania come from?” the doctor retorted. “You can see she looks like her father. Blood samples match. Her gene-print can open a legacy lock left by him in a Swiss Bank, for any heirs of his body born after him: this was one of the things done early on to confirm her right to the throne of Monaco.”
“Who nursed the baby, back aboard ship? We weren’t carrying no baby milk in bottles. We…” And then Menelaus got a strange, distant look in his eye, and he straightened up suddenly out of his slouch. “Of course, we did have biosuspension coffins. Equipped with molecular mechanisms to restore and replenish decayed cells … and matrices of formalized molecules, all lined up nice and pretty, the way they never do in nature, waiting for microscopic electron-commands to tell them what patterns to make. And the code for a milk gland is right there in anyone’s DNA: males have an X chromosome, after all, and all you need is two XX’s to persuade the molecular machinery to start making female cells. And a damnified totipotent cell can damn near turn into damn near anything—people been doing it since before I was born. All you would need is the right code. The right expression. Doc, you got a piece of paper? I wanna see how many transformation steps it would take, using a simple Pell Expression, to get from a flat array of molecules via the minimum number of knots to a complex spline formation. Because one of the theories we discussed for the Gamma Grouping of Monument signs was that it was a spline expression for a complex surface, and that this was a generalized model for a brain. Any brain, not just a human brain, seeing as how the spline function could simply be mapped onto other nervous systems—or whatever information system the little green men had instead of brains…”
“I don’t have a piece of paper, and I hardly think this is the time for you to be … you are about to meet with the Special Executive of the Concordat … and I am concerned that any thoughts along your habituated … Mister Montrose! What are you doing!” His voice rose to a sudden shriek of surprise.
Montrose had taken a glass vase from the decorative shelf, thrown the flowers and water over his shoulder, studied the geometry to determine possible stress weaknesses, and shattered the thing on the marble chessboard.
Now he had a sharp fragment of glass in his hand. With it, he was carving little Greek letters into the arm of his chair, which was varnished wood, so that the slightest scar showed up very nicely. He spoke without looking up from his figures. “What kind of barbaric society does not have paper around for back-of-the-envelope calculations? Lincoln never would’ve wrote the Gettysburg Address if it weren’t for scrap paper.”
The doctor looked annoyed. “It was very much against my professional advice that you were wakened under uncontrolled conditions in a high-stimulation environment, especially since we have yet to confirm if the damage done to your nervous system is mitigated. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Fifteen or so,” he said, still not looking up. Both chair arms were now covered, so he lurched to his feet, and plopped down into another chair. “I ain’t got room. Hey—what kind of surface does that chessboard have?”
“Do you remember who you are?”
He answered absentmindedly. “Menelaus Illation Montrose, J.D. and Ph.D., graduated Soko University in Nip Frisco, Class of ’34, before that, commissioned in ’25 as Lance-Corporal in the United State Imperial Calvary, the Tough-Ruttin’ Thirty-Fifth, decommissioned thank God, and after that, Monumentician and Semantic Logosymbolic Specialist, Joint Indosphere-Hispanosphere Scientific Xenothropological Expedition to Centauri V 866. Does that sound like I know who I am?”
“What race are you?”
“I am trying to work here.”
“Please answer, Mister Montrose.”
“Doctor. Purebred Tex-Mex. What’ya think?”
“No, I mean, do you know what species you are? Do I look like a member of your own species to you, at the moment?”
This made him look up. “What the hell kind of question is that? My what?”
“Are we both human?”
Montrose let out a laugh. “Rut me with a harpoon! You kidding? You ain’t kidding. What, is you aiming to rip off your mask and turn out to be a monster bug from Arcturus or something? Big clustery eyes and dripping sideways mouth and all? Damnation, go ahead! Let me see it. I dare ya! Do we have starships to Arcturus as yet?”
“There is but one manned starship, and she keeps the peace of Earth and cannot depart.”
“We’ll see about that one.”
“Extend your hands to either side, and, while closing your eyes, touch your nose. Quickly, please.”
“I will be damned if I will. You ain’t answering my queries, Doc.”
“Hm. Insubordination is not a mental disorder, I suppose, but it is not exactly a healthy sign, either.”
“I’ll show you a healthy sign.” He pointed at the chessboard. The surface was marble, and hence immune to his knifepoint, but the back was a thin layer of cork, and he had inscribed it with precise rows of little marks. “That’s where she was born.”
“Who?”
“Your Princess. I could have done it with the material in four coffins, and one dead body, of course, provided the flesh was burnt, because the carbon molecules were what the paramagnetic fields of the antimatter manipulators were designed to use. They can work on terrene matter just as easily. And the coffins were stuffed with nanomachinery. They were already like a womb for people like me to sleep in. And Grimaldi was nice and burnt to death, so he could serve as the raw material.”
Montrose grinned his skull-like gargoylean grin, which seemed to startle the poor doctor more than it should have. He continued: “Your Princess is like a digger wasp: an egg laid inside a corpse, except the artificial placenta used molecular mechanisms stripped out of the ship’s recyclers, which I hear weren’t much working so well no-how, to convert the material to nutriments. All you would need is the code. No one on Earth could solve that expression. But if you had the math, you could do it. Very sly. This is a damn fine piece of work. Brilliant. Poxing brilliant. But why? Why make another human being, if you were so low on supplies? And why make a little baby girl? And—Oh, sweet Jesus up a tree! He’s not going to marry her, is he? That is practically incest!”
“I do not understand what you mean. It would be incest only if Prince Rainier married his daughter, and he died shortly after she was born.”
“Shortly before, you should say. I mean this here is the Princess’s mother, and it came out of Blackie’s head.”