He heard groans. There was a flare of electricity—in the absolute dark it looked dazzlingly bright. In the flash of light, he could see his first opponent face-down on the floor, a gloved hand crooked at a horrible angle: it looked as if Montrose had broken his fingers. The look of surprise on his face was greater than the look of pain.
Unfortunately, he only saw one other opponent. This second man was off-balance, stumbling, but had projected an electric wire from his baton whose live head (glancing off a metal boot stud) was making the momentary flare of light.
It was too good an opportunity to miss. Montrose spat, and the spittle passed through the live spark and struck the bare leg of that second man above his boot where his insulating legging had ripped free. The string of liquid was just enough to make a circuit. The man jerked in a spasm. Montrose knew he would not be awake long enough to actually see the man fall.
(Montrose contemplated the shock on the toppling man’s lower face. It was clear enough that these guys did not know how Montrose knew they were fakes. To them it must seem miraculous, bizarre, unexpected. That was sort of disorienting to Montrose: were things so obvious to him, so opaque to them? The noises they had made while approaching the door did not match the standard noises, the pauses, the click of thumb keys, the sleeve-rustle as salutes were exchanged, of real guards. How could they be surprised? They were like children trying to fool a grown-up.)
Since he did not see the third man, and since he did not have enough time to twist and bring the baton under him up to parry, all he could do was jerk his head forward, hoping the blow from behind would do less damage if the relative velocity were less.
He had two last thoughts. First, Del Azarchel’s men, despite their orders, would not dare take him anywhere else but the prison infirmary. Once there, there would be too many official records, too many witnesses, for a second abduction attempt. By the time Del Azarchel organized his next moves, Princess Rania’s attorney should have him freed. Second, he wondered what Dr. Kyi would have said, had he known how reckless Montrose was being with the brain they both so admired.
Then, a blunt impact to the base of his skull scattered his consciousness, just as if he had been of ordinary intelligence. It seemed somehow unfair.
2. Recovery
Montrose seemed to have more time to think things over, but his experience in the fight told him his nerve cells were not firing any faster than a normal man’s. It was a question of more efficient neural organization, not a fundamental change on the cellular level. A man’s brain is not that different from an ape’s, from a chemical and biological point of view: for that matter, a Winchester rifle was built along the same lines as a harquebus.
Montrose was in a bed, or a bath—it was a gelatin of smart material that partly encased him, a simplified form of an open biosuspension capsule, leaving his head, shoulders, and hands free. There were no intravenous needles, no diapers or catheters, since the jelly was able both to force nutrients into his membranes through his skin, and carry away waste. He was almost eating solid food again: just that morning the nurse had spoon-fed him a poached egg and bread soaked in milk. He kept it down without nausea or vomiting, and he was as proud of that accomplishment as any in his life.
Sunlight slanted through window of alternating dark and pale stripes, which he had deduced to be military glass, something that would deflect bullets and diffuse directed energy. He could not see, but he could hear traffic outside the window.
The traffic was horse-drawn carts and electric ground-effects vehicles—even the passage of one hundred years had not returned petroleum production to pre-Jihad levels. Montrose calculated the logic loop involved, and could not find an answer. Even with the drop in motor cars after the post-Jihad petroleum shortages, one would not expect new roads not to be built. Then he factored in two other variables: first, the cost of energy was so miniscule that the inefficiencies of hover vehicles versus wheeled vehicles meant nothing; and second, the chance of bombardment from orbit (roads, rails, and aerodromes made large and tempting targets) was so great, and so recent, that no market and no public pressure was present. The depthtrain carriages were cheaper, and the Hermeticists might not want public roads controlled by local municipalities.
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.