He was disappointed that the future people, having gone to the trouble of resurrecting the long-dead airs and fashions of knighthood, did not actually dress up in metal longjohns and whack at each other with meat-cleavers, as they ought. None of the “sirs” he met acted anything like the knights in the stories he’d read in childhood: not a one of them was fit to drive the Paynim out of Spain or go fetch the Holy Grail.
But they did have nice horses, many of these Aristos. That art they kept alive. He did a lot of riding during the days after his recovery from the infirmary, and argued with his doctors in the meanwhile. He named his beast Res Ipsa Nova, in honor of a sorrel from a hundred years ago.
He made few friends. The difference in intelligence gradient was too great: he could make more than an ordinary number of the normal humans, the Hylics, to like him, because it was easy to think of what to say to set them at ease.
One friend he did make, a friendship where brains just didn’t matter, was with one of Rania’s men, a chubby smiling little horse groom named Yorvel. His first name was Jesus, but Menelaus thought it sounded too much like swearing to call him that, and he couldn’t manage to pronounce it Hey Zeus, which also sounded like swearing, but in a different religion, so he called him by his last name.
They talked about horses, particularly the biologically augmented new breeds and neo-equines. The groom knew his stuff and more, had hands-on experience no books held. Menelaus found out it did not matter how smart you were on the uptake; if a dumb teacher knows more than you, it still pays to listen and learn.
6. Chessplaying Machine
There was not much anyone else to talk to, aside from Rania, and she was busy playing some planetary chessgame with princes and parliaments with Del Azarchel and his Hermeticists. The terms of the game were simple in the basics: she was trying to pressure him into abdication, as this was the only way to defuse the growing threat of war. And he was playing brinksmanship. Whether he was confident that he, or the human race, or both, could survive a world war with antimatter weapons was another matter, but he acted as if he were.
Now, it was not that Montrose, freshly-minted posthuman with a fine new brain and all, could not follow the intricate moves and feints of the game, and read the lies and half-truths and half-lies and threats that splashed all over the text files and documentaries of the infosphere—it was that politics bored him.
The Psychics (or, as they were also called, the “Psychoi”) actually were smarter, by fifty to one hundred points on the standard intelligence quotient scale, than the Hylics—because, despite what Del Azarchel had said, certain intelligence augmentation methods and processes, based on Montrose’s work, had been tried over the last fifteen decades. The results were cautious, and the intellectuals were not outside what was possible for humans. Montrose could have interesting conversations with them, as an adult with a bright child, especially about matters concerning Monument translation and the eventual destiny of Mankind, the threat of the Hyades Armada, and what it would mean when that force arrived.
As predicted, no Hylics had anything interesting to say on the matter. Those who were angry with Del Azarchel for inviting this attack talked as if the Armada would land within the next fifty to one hundred years. To them it was an almost religious image, an Armageddon, a Twilight of the Gods, a prophecy that merely floated somewhere in the distant yet-to-be, not a real event to occur at a real yet remote date.
Montrose realized with dismay that he had fallen into the habit of dismissing ordinary humans as “Hylics”—an Hermeticist term of contempt. On the one hand, it was simply a fact that he was smarter now than normal people. On the other hand, a superior intellect did not seem to change his personality, or make him a saint, or even a sage. It did not improve his bad temper, or even change his bad grammar.
Heck, if anything, greater intelligence put him under greater temptation to do greater evil. He saw how easy it would be to treat people like puppets: thinking back, he did not much like the way he had bought up the Endymion corporations. It was necessary for his plans, to be sure, but the people squeezed out of their companies and stocks had plans, too, didn’t they?
A bad man was much more a threat to the world than a bad dog; and a bad titan was worse than a bad man. Maybe his extra smarts would help he see and avoid the extra temptation the smarts brought with them.
At least the Hylics (or—he brought himself up short—the normal, decent people) who thought the coming of the Hyades Armada merely a prophecy thought on it. The average man would more likely complain about a stone in his shoe than some unthinkably remote eventuality destined for some unrecognizable descendant race of Mankind—assuming any lived so long.
The Psychoi would discuss the matter intelligently. But these metal-haired intellectuals made him nervous. They were smart enough that they could fool his reading of their tells and body language, and some of them worked for Del Azarchel—who was in hiding somewhere, no doubt experimenting on his own brain, trying to bring himself up to Montrose’s level.
The Del Azarchel who appeared on the library file-casts, and made speeches over the radio, was an electronic image, of course. The Xypotech, Ghost Del Azarchel, was now Master of the World, and no one outside his immediate circle knew it.
7. Picnic with the Princess
“Why not tell everyone?” Montrose asked Rania one noon at their picnic. The two of them had ridden out to a sunny glade in the park north of Beausoliel in Monaco. They were “alone” except for a squad from the Corps des Sapeurs-Pompiers in camouflage armor, and a flotilla of two-man rotor-craft gunships shaped like freakish four-leaf clovers floating silently overhead, their cannons like scorpion tails. The troopers were visible only as blurry man-shaped bubbles if the leaves and branches behind them shook in the wind. Montrose did not mind the aircraft: with their four huge hoop-shaped lifting ducts, they looked properly futuristic to him.
“In due time,” she answered, allowing herself a small smile. Rania had noticed the switch over from Man Del Azarchel to Ghost Del Azarchel based on the playing style of their planetary chessgame. Ghost Del Azarchel did not sweat the small stuff: he played for the long-range endgame.
That small smile told him she planned to stir public opinion against the machine. A general church council had been called to debate the matter of artificial intelligence, and its theological and legal implications. Also, Frankenstein themes were appearing in several plays, operas, and interactives on New Bollywood channels, and in smart books, dumb books, and a Parisian musical play. She would play the information that the world government was no longer in human hands as a trump card.
“How is your work coming?” she asked.
Montrose’s latest project, at the moment, was a drawerful of Van Neumann diamonds. These were carbon crystals containing self-replicating software, each “bearded diamond” edged with nano-tube hairs able to pull carbon out of a surrounding environment, and build another of itself, and then link and talk to it. Each diamond sensed pressure differentials on its super-hard refractory skin, and could determine which direction to grow.
As the diamonds grew, the software would build an ever-more complex computer mind, and the upper limits on its growth depended on its mass-to-surface ratio. Its smallest possible shape was a sphere of a few miles wide, but if it grew with a convoluted coral growth according to a fractal pattern, there was no upper limit. A simple calculation showed that this self-replicating machine should, in theory, produce a larger Xypotech logic crystal that the entire production capacity of every nation Del Azarchel could bring to bear. At the moment, Montrose had no idea what software or artificial mind could be stored in the emulation such a robust logic crystal could maintain.