“No. This year is when the endless wealth must begin to come again, or come to an end.”
“What does that—oh! There are one hundred years worth of antimatter left. Enough to last while an expedition travels fifty lightyears to V 886 Centauri, mines the star, and travels back, right?”
“It’s more complex than that, since we are dealing with estimates of future use, but, yes, the fuel reserves which seem so immense compared to Earth’s energy needs, are small compared to the refueling time.”
Montrose understood. Antimatter was also the ship’s fuel. The closer you crowd lightspeed, the greater the energy cost of accelerating the mass will grow—and grow asymptotically. The longer Del Azarchel waited, the less time was left, therefore the faster the Third Expedition had to be. And in this universe, speeds near lightspeed were astronomically costly.
“Why did he wait so long?” Montrose asked.
“Some years were consumed in wars of consolidation, some in constructing a new vessel—even with his wealth, not a small prospect.”
“What was wrong with the Hermetic?”
“You mean, why did he not simply ravish it from me?” Her eyes in the mirror looked over her own shoulder at him, flashing. “Two reasons, one better than the other. The worse reason is that Little Big Brother, the onboard security computer, thanks to you, still thinks I am the Captain, since I have the genes of Grimaldi in me. The better reason is that his heart is tender toward me, and full of rose-colored dreams. He sought my hand in marriage, and not my hate. Why plunder your own dowry? The computer is old fashioned enough—once again, thanks to you, you oaf—to grant husbands a superior right over their wife’s property.”
“Ten years or twenty should have been enough to ready up another vessel.”
“He could neither go himself nor stay himself, since he was trapped by his own ambition, and by his own profligacy. He did not trust anyone to stay and rule the world in his stead, and did not trust anyone to go and gather the wealth and power from heaven for him.”
“But now—thanks to me, he can be in two places at once.”
“I gave him a problem only you could solve. His work is in Artificial Intelligence, and yours in Neural Divarication Theory. So I made his emulation—he calls it his Iron Ghost—”
“We met. I think he, or it, saved my life.”
“I helped with the architecture. But I programmed in a flaw, so that Ghost Del Azarchel would get sick and go mad with the Montrose madness. Then I pretended not to be able to solve the problem, and waited. He knew, because you had partly wakened Little Big Brother to self-awareness, that it had to be possible. He knew you had solved it. Why couldn’t he? It drove him almost to madness.” She smiled to herself. “I waited. There is only one other daemon in the world, aside from me: and that is you.”
Montrose spoke in a voice of slow horror. “Then the person you want killed—is me! You want this version out of the way so that the posthuman version of me can take over!”
She laughed. “Oh, that would be funny! No, matters are not so overwrought with tragedy as that. I went through all these steps to give you this.”
She drew a small gemlike vial from a fold in her skirt and tossed it lightly to him. He caught it, held it up. In the dim candlelight, he saw it had a folding needle. He realized that it was a bone rongeur, small and disguised as a piece of jewelry.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want you to take the cure. I have had it for years. In your initial Zurich runs, you made the classic compilation blunder, and did not scale up your lower nervous system to handle the greater stress load on your cortex.”
“And this?”
“It is the real Prometheus Formula, the one you did not know how to make.”
“You had it? Why not cure me with this before?”
“I had to work carefully when I was repairing you. If you were too alert too quickly, you would see through what Del Azarchel intended, and not help him with his divarication problem. So I had to leave you disoriented enough to do be willing to do the work, but oriented enough to see how to solve it. I discovered traces of your pre-posthuman personality buried in neural codes at the base level—the way a frog’s genes contains the pattern for a tadpole. It was not difficult to resurrect this you, your previous version, the one from before I knew you.”
“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!”