Montrose let out a laugh. “I ain’t made of glass, missy!” and he started to climb free of the gel. It hardened around his limbs, and he thought he could calculate a system of muscular stresses to pull free. The gelatin was long-chain molecules that contracted or expanded under electrical current, and the computer-switching system controlling the current was operating by a certain set of reflex patterns. All he had to do was …
Rania reached around his skull, and applied a tiny amount of pressure with her finger to one of the bruises on his skull. “Ow!” he complained.
“Not made of glass, but still fractured,” she said, raising an eyebrow, and giving him a coy little pout. “Now you keep still.” Or she would call the anesthesiologist and have him sedated. Montrose was disappointed that having a more integrated nervous system did not give him immunity to chemicals injected into his bloodstream.
He settled back down. “Ha! Give a gal a crown, a starship, a few armies, infinite wealth, and she starts thinking she can give orders.”
“I am also your chief physician, Crewman.” She wore what could only be called a “Dr. Kyi” sort of look.
“Aw, be fair! I had to get my skull broke in order to get away from Blackie! They were going to cart me off!” To some secret location.
A quirk of her eyebrow said, louder than words: And you did not trust I would find you?
“You may be bright,” he said. But you do not know how bright Ghost Del Azarchel is. (He did not say that aloud, but the implication was clear to both of them.)
Why? Again, it was not words, just a change in her pupil dilation, but he knew what she meant.
“The first time I heard Ghost Del Azarchel speak, he said he wanted you and me to get together. He said it in the clear, nice and slow, in English, so that Man Del Azarchel’s pick-ups would hear. He told me you were going to slip me an invitation to your New Year’s Party.”
“Because of the number of people around,” she said, in answer to an unspoken question, “and he could not use the excuse of ‘Earthsickness’ to force me back into another decade or so of biosuspension. The last year of the old century was too important, symbolically—”
“Oh pox!” said Montrose, alarmed. “You were going to announce your engagement!” No wonder Del Azarchel had been mad. He looked at her suspiciously. His accusation was clear: Del Azarchel is too smart to fool himself, unless you helped him—you led him on, didn’t you?
She looked aloof, and her sea-green eyes seemed more stormy and mysterious than ever. “I appealed to his better nature; he answered with a baser nature. Do you think women were created just to watch men kill each other, and wear the widow’s veil, and weep beneath it? Women use the weapons nature gives us.” She said that aloud.
Partly in words, partly in expressions, he answered, “You mean what Del Azarchel gave you—he was one of your primary designers.”
Rania smiled cryptically, a smile not altogether pleasant. “Both Shelly’s Frankenstein and Shaw’s Pygmalion were in the ship’s library. Wasn’t that warning enough about infatuation with your own handiwork?” She shook her head sadly. “If you are going to play at God, divine love rather than romantic love might be in order—if he were willing to sacrifice himself, he would get everything he desired.”
“Ghost Del Azarchel is not infatuated with you,” said Montrose. “Because Man Del Azarchel walking in on us—you are too smart to let that happen. If you didn’t arrange that ‘coincidence’—”
She shook her head. Not I.
“Then he did. The ghost, I mean. But why would the Ghost Blackie first send me to find you, then save me from Man Blackie, feed me caviar and books, but then trip us both up?”
“Did he tell you which books to read?”
He opened his mouth to say No, but, looking back with crystal clear thoughts into his confused half-sleepy fog of what had back then been his brain, he realized that the voice from the chalet walls had dropped a word here and there, which, even when consciously forgotten, had drawn his attention toward certain shelves.
Which meant—what? What had the Iron Ghost been up to?
“Did he tell you how to open the gun case?” she said lightly.
Montrose nodded. “But I don’t see where this is leading.”
Rania raised both eyebrows, slightly narrowing her eyes. (Menelaus thought she looked remarkably pretty when she did that, and he wondered what he could say to provoke that expression again.) She said, “Even the hawk cannot see his own eye color, not without some reflection.” One limit of intelligence augmentation is that we seem not to know ourselves any more clearly.
Montrose looked puzzled: Ghost Del Azarchel wanted me to hate this world? But why?
Rania stood up, smoothed her skirt. She obviously thought that last question was one he could answer with no further hint from her. Instead, she said, “My theory that you would regain your old memories has not been confirmed. Sad, for we have no time to spare for a courtship.”
“Wait a minute, lady! I ain’t asked you yet!”
“Again you demote me!” she tsk-tsked. “A bedridden man is in no condition to kneel. How can we not wed? Are we not the Adam and Eve of a new humanity?”
He saw the look in her eyes, haunted with memory. Long ago they met, they spoke, they fell in love—Rania had to heal him, she not knowing if the superintelligent yet sane version of him would recall the wild promises he made once the superintelligent yet insane version of him was cured.
“Our smarts won’t breed true,” he said. “Unless you plan to inject our whelps with a brain-needle.”
She curled a wisp of blond hair around her forefinger, gave it an admiring look, and had one of her little dragonfly-shaped vanity machines tuck it back under her coronet. “We can call our first daughter Madelina. I’ve always liked the name.”
He remembered that her hair had been altered by RNA-substitution engineering. She also expected Menelaus to discover the genetic flaw in her own construction, and thus she was implying that she had altered her body to be able to receive and adapt to corrections and a genetic level rapidly. She had a system in place, a chemical network of totipotent cells drawn from her own matrix, floating in her bloodstream, already prepared.
At the door, she turned, looking back over her shoulder. The doorframe made her seem a portrait, and the light behind her touched her cheek just where Menelaus wanted to touch it, and turned her hair to golden flame. “Did Del Azarchel show you his statue of the last Ape?”
“Baker’s Dozen. Very sad-looking.”
She nodded. “The same artist made one with an angrier pose—it looms in the Round Table chamber of the Hermetic Conclave.”
“I’ve seen it.”
Rania gave him a skeptical look before she strode with her graceful lioness step out the door.
By that look, he realized that he had not seen it, or, at least, not understood its meaning. But Blackie had told him in so many words. The horse was a stupid creature, but useful to its masters: and so it stayed alive when disaster struck. That was just how life worked. The ape was a superior creature, but not useful.
Montrose discovered that primitive emotions like shock, surprise, and even hate had not disappeared from his nervous system; because two implications fitted into place in his mind.
First, he knew why Ghost Del Azarchel had manipulated him into a fierce disgust for this world and this age. Rania planned to depart, taking the Hermetic with her. And what better way to make sure Montrose also went along, away into the dangers of outer space? Montrose would be out of harm’s way, which meant that the sense of honor that Del Azarchel lived by (both versions of Del Azarchel) would be satisfied. Montrose reminded himself that the machine version of Del Azarchel had no memory of being a murderer or a mutineer. Ghost Del Azarchel might honestly want to save Montrose from bloodshed at the hands of Man Del Azarchel.