For a moment his mind reeled. He could not follow what she was saying. How had she jumped to that conclusion? He tried to picture the geometric rotations she rapidly uttered, but found he could not visualize them, not and keep up. He had been following along, sometime leaping ahead of her line of proofs not half a moment ago. But now he was back in his right mind, and the dizzying architecture of speculations, certainties, and guesses was too great to hold in his imagination. The next step … was it correct or not? What was that about astro-algorithmic logic-gate matrices? In what sense was it a specific application of a more general case of emulating a universal virtual machine in n-dimensional coordinates?
Then he noticed she had his ceramic knife in her hand. He did not member handing it to her. She was scratching diagrams and equations in neat rows of Greek and Latin letters, alephs and infinities, as well as the dots and triangles and Celtic knots of Monument hieroglyphs, all along the wallpaper. She was cutting figures into the wood underneath the wallpaper. This was not modern wallpaper, not smart fabric meant to be written on. This was some antique and horribly expensive stuff, probably hand-painted, probably by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo together, then touched up by Rembrandt, using solid gold paintbrushes.
And, of course, right next to her equations, in a larger, rougher handwriting, were his equations and notes. There was a deep scar where he had circled a particularly important multicovariable expression. And there were the slashes where he had put three exclamation points through the gold leaf into the wood paneling.
Next to him in the hallway was a crystal vase with flowers in it, carefully arranged. He plucked the bouquet out, hoisted the crystal jar, and dashed water into his own face.
The shock of the water helped somewhat. He no longer felt faint.
Princess Rania, who had been talking very loudly (for her), and very rapidly in an almost monotone singsong, now stopped. She turned.
All at once she was in his arms, on her tiptoes, and kissing him passionately.
It was like a bolt of lighting traveled up his spine. It was perfect.
And, then, just as suddenly, it was not perfect. She writhed out of his grasp, elusive as starlight, graceful as a sleek lioness, and danced back, her face blank.
He was looking right at her face when it happened: her expression returned to normal. It was like watching a ghost fade out of the body of some possessed person on those old faith healer shows everyone in his family save him used to watch so raptly. Like an actress turning off a character and surfacing. But not like an actress. There was nothing fake about it.
She was not panting, but Rania was breathing a little heavily. Long, slow breaths that made her bosom rise and fall.
“You’re the other one. Ah. Welcome back.”
This time, he understood how she slipped so effortlessly out of his hands: the point at which his two arms could trap her formed a folded set that could be expressed as a Hilbert space. Solving for the shortest vector distance, she leaned on his arm, and when he instinctively tightened it, she had put her center of balance elsewhere at the point of least resistance. It was as perfect as a ballet move. He wondered if the speed of her nerve impulses traveling to her muscles was momentarily increased, it was so smooth, and so rapid.
“Your are possessed, too, ain’t you? You are a Mrs. Hyde!”
Rania stared at him quizzically.
“Miss Hyde, I would prefer. I am a maiden yet.” She showed dimples when she smiled. “Unless you are proposing? I warn you, I am spoken for.”
Menelaus backed up, his arm raised as if to ward off a blow. “You are not in love with Del Azarchel!”
“I don’t recall saying I was.”
“You are in love with me.”
“Define your terms,” she said, favoring him with an arch look. She wiggled the knife at him playfully. He carefully took it from her gloved hand, and slipped it back up his sleeve.
“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.”