“Stayed with me?” Montrose had been sitting in a slouch, but now he straightened up.
“In the darkness, during the hunger watches … Ah! The old times are not always the best times, are they? Let us speak of happier things.…”
Del Azarchel must have noticed the stiffness with which his servants and retainers were regarding Montrose, for he smiled and asked them to step from the room.
The officer in charge of the Conquistadores gave Montrose a thoughtful look. He turned toward Del Azarchel, who gave the officer a smile. Del Azarchel raised his left wrist, displaying the crudely fashioned red wristband Menelaus had noticed earlier, a wristband not at all in keeping with the fineness of ornament that otherwise adorned the elegant, white-haired figure of Del Azarchel. The officer nodded, saluted sharply, and departed.
That exchange of looks was not lost on Montrose. The captain of the guard had not wanted to leave his boss unarmed in a room with a man whose brain may or may not be fully healthy. The red metal armband Del Azarchel wore was something that reassured the Captain. But what was it?
He looked at the wristband carefully. In his mind’s eye, Montrose converted the surface irregularities into a mathematical expression, and calculated the standard deviation. The resulting figures were consistent with something machine-lathed in zero-gee, using old equipment. Not an ornament, then. And not something he trusted any of his men to refashion.
2. Memory Lapse
When all the minions were gone, Del Azarchel had his tall black thronelike chair slide itself closer to Menelaus, and touched wineglasses with him, so that a crystal note hung in the air.
“To old times,” said Del Azarchel. “May they never come again…”
“Old times past and better times to come!”
“Salud y amor dinero y el y tiempo para disfrutarlo!”
“Kampai, bottoms high, spittle and mud in a blind man’s eye!”
“I promised you this drink long ago. You recall? Perhaps—I suppose not. But I was hoping you might recall it. It was not long ago for you, of course. Not long by your biological time.”
“Um. Remind me. You and me—we used to sneak off to go drinking in Space Camp.”
“This was somewhat after. In the sick bay. Ah. Perhaps we should not speak of it…”
“No. Tell me. Maybe something will come back.”
“You had attacked yet another crewman, and pulled the catheter of your suit in the fray, so your legs were covered with, ah, recoverable material, and your mouth was full of blood. His blood. No one was willing to sponge you off but me, and I had to brush your teeth. When I told you we would drink once again, once we were aground again, once you were better, you stopped screaming and started giggling, so I thought, you know, that somewhere in your mind, some buried part, you heard me. This is that drink. Am I not a man of my word?”
“Nothing is coming back. Where did this happen? Before launch? Aboard the space station? Aboard the punt?”
“After launch, of course. Aboard the star-vessel. On the Hermetic.”
“What the hell do you mean? I was aboard? I was aboard?!”
“Of course. What is the last you remember?”
“Aboard the punt. I jammed the needle in my brain.”
Del Azarchel seemed taken aback. “Ah! That is—ah. Unexpected.” Then, to himself, he muttered, “I will have to take this up with my better half.” And he ran the fingers of his right hand across the metallic face of the massy red-gold armband clasping his left wrist.
The surface was clearly touch-sensitive or motion-aware, like library cloth. Since before Montrose was born, all telephones, visuals, games, texts, audios, and control surfaces could be built into any tool or article of clothing, practically any object, that need or whim dictated: but only weapons, or medical appliances were built with their screens and virtual keypads invisible to non-users. Montrose guessed the armband would ignore any finger but Del Azarchel’s.
Montrose said, “I figured you returned me to Earth and sailed without me? Didn’t you?”
“Oh, Cowhand, you still make me to laugh! Come! Did you actually think I had the fuel and time to decelerate the punt to rest relative to Earth, recelerate back, screw-turn and decelerate, reach Earth at her new point in her orbit, take the time to refuel, launch again from yet another point farther along Earth’s orbit, accelerate toward a farther downrange halfway point, and decelerate to a rendezvous even farther yet downrange—and all this while the Hermetic was adding velocity geometrically? Of course I took you aboard. At that time, we were merely waiting for your drug to wear off. It was not until Dr. Yajnavalkya examined you—you remember him?”
“The expedition surgeon. Also, he did work in the Hodge Conjecture.” He remembered the fellow’s work, his discussions. The theorem named after Yajnavalkya proved that topological spaces defined by the human brain cell interaction nets were actually rational linear combinations of algebraic cycles. Montrose did not actually remember any details about the man himself.
“Not until he examined you did anyone realize the extent of the modification, and even then no one was perfectly certain what you had done, since you invented the technique yourself, and did not keep notes like a professional scientist, you fool.”
“But I told you what I was up to before I did it.”
“Yes—a few cryptic words no one could recall clearly.”
“Didn’t you play back the cabin record…?—Oh.”
“Aptly put! ‘Oh’ indeed. My friend had asked me to shut off the cabin recording circuit before he stabbed himself, remember?”
“What was wrong with me?”
“Divarication.”
Montrose looked a little sick, but said nothing.
3. Divarication
Every information function in the universe suffered from what was called divarication. Fact became legend as it was passed from generation to generation; bureaucracies grew ossified as their rules evolved to be self-serving; and even computer programs or nerve cells passing information to the next generation of nerve cells lost information, modifying it by a self-selection process into forms easier to pass along. Lines of data diverged, became unrecognizable to each other. Even processes like check-digits and data insulation suffered their own form of degradation. Entropy always took its tithe.
Divarication in neural processes meant thought lost ability to be preserved. Senility, Alzheimer’s disease, and autism were manifestations of what could be described, mathematically, as a one function describing signal degradation.
“I was trying to increase my brain processing speed.”
“You did. But you increased the speed of brain degradation even faster.”
“Pox! Was it a self-destructive feedback cascade?”
“The opposite. You over-corrected. It was a self-reinforcing feedback.”
“What was the tau parameter?”
“The tau approached unity: You were in a mental stasis. As best we could tell,” said Del Azarchel, “the medulla oblongata was affected. The part of your brain that prioritizes brain attention flows placed your own self-awareness at a level below what was needed to maintain the holographic illusion of self-awareness. You forgot yourself so completely that there was no way to wake you to your own awareness again. While you forgot yourself, your brainpaths entered a logic loop.”
“But I built in a self-correction cycle, or tried to.”
“You had artificially sculpted out new nerve-paths, new engrams, not one created by your own information-flow patterns, but adapted to the mathematical flow model your Zurich computer run had formulated. That pattern was … alive. Self-correcting. Your epiphytes re-established any nerve-paths Dr. Yajnavalkya interrupted when he operated, or constructed new pathways around any block he established.” Del Azarchel shrugged, spread his hands. “He could not figure out what you had done: We transmitted medical records back to Earth, but the doctors and specialists there did not have you ready at hand to examine.”