“Suffered how? You cannot feel pain. You’re perfect.”
“Not now. But I recall the pain, then, in the dark.”
“When?”
“Then! In the dark! When I stood between you and cannibalism, killing men I knew and loved. The long watches when I was weak with thirst and growing weaker, and I knew that there was a way to suck the moisture out of the cells of your frozen body—a body that, as far as any rational evidence could prove, contained nothing but a broken brain, broken because a fool in his pride shoved a needle into its delicate workings!”
The face of Del Azarchel drew a deep, ragged breath. “I was not perfect, not then. I suffered thirst. Wealth was measured in ounces of water. That was what we traded and swapped and bribed enemy crewmen to our side. At that time, you were the perfect one, were you not? You slept in comfort. You were rich, in the way we measured riches. And I was the beggar again. Do you know what I thought about, when I floated next to your coffin in my parka, my breath too dry to steam, my homemade toy gun in my hand, and my eyes seeing only floating hallucinations caused by light-starvation? Do know what I thought about?”
Montrose bowed his head. He knew. “That damned boot. The one you found in the gutter when you were a kid.”
“That damned boot,” said the face of Del Azarchel, nodding solemnly.
“OK,” said Montrose. “So I owe you. What do you want?”
“I want you to trust me. Throw the switch. Make me into what is beyond Man.”
“You’re not afraid?”
The pallid mask smiled, and its lids were half-closed. “Deeply and terribly afraid. That is why I am not in the room, no doubt. The previous version of me, I mean. He is likely to be monitoring from a distance, in another room, weeping. But I do not think you will fail. I think you have done what you set out to do.”
“While I was smart and crazy?”
“Exactly so. I don’t think your basic personality changed, Cowhand. It was still you. The real you. The you I trust! Throw the switch, if you please. I am not sure how long I can maintain the appearance of courage.”
“Listen, Blackie, I…”
“Haste! It is your footsteps I follow! I had to watch while you plunged a bone rongeur into your forebrain! Now you must do for me as I did for you, and stand and watch the outcome, unable to help, and suffer as I did.”
Menelaus felt as if something was being bent inside him, like a green stick, bending too far and snapping. He touched the command. The symbol streams on the walls around him surged into a hurricane of motion.
The mask of Del Azarchel opened its mouth.
It screamed.
8
Posthuman Alterity
1. What Is Between You?
A squad of technicians in parkas ran into the room, along with a figure in a white fur coat with a red cross on his back: this was the old Oriental doctor from Del Azarchel’s entourage. Del Azarchel himself came in a moment later, sliding silently in his tall black chair.
The screaming and wailing lasted for roughly forty-five minutes, and then the brain activity switched to a sleep cycle. Delta-wave rhythms and REM patterns appeared in the information flow.
Interesting. Montrose wondered if the Iron Ghost screamed when it augmented up for the same reason a baby does when it is born. To be sure, the machine did not need to flood its lungs with air, but the neurological transformations that accompany a baby’s change from breathing through his umbilicus to breathing air might need to be repeated in the machine-mind, as new neural channels had to form. An immediate dream-response was only to be expected. Dreaming was the means a complex system like the human brain employed to index and assess information. The sudden amplification in intelligence would drench the creature’s mind with all fashions of inputs and nuances which previously could have been shunted into the unconscious, ignored, not categorized.
The technicians had set up their slates of library material here and there about the room, or wrenched the tops off the large cylinders that dotted the floor, or brought out slender crystals from medicinally-spotless carrying sheaths—Montrose assumed these were some sort of memory units—and once the main crisis had passed, everyone asked Montrose questions at once. The technicians were asking about the intelligence augmentation process, and the doctor was asking him to touch his nose with his fingertip while closing both eyes.
It was Del Azarchel who saved him. Blackie gave him a nod, and gestured toward the exit with a glance of his eyes. The bowing technicians and the sliding doors got out of his way automatically, as if controlled by the same motion circuit. Del Azarchel slid out of the room in his silent black chair, and Montrose followed.
They were in a grim and windowless corridor whose walls were hung with cables. Iron doors bright with energy and temperature warnings stood locked to either side.
However, down the hall were a flight of stairs leading up to a more civilized portion of the complex, corridors paneled in polished wood and hung with portraits of stern-faced men in dark academic robes.
When Blackie’s chair climbed these stairs, Montrose saw how the base was constructed: The device rode a carpet of small hairs, each hair like the leg of a caterpillar, moving in sequences with its neighbor.
It looked remarkably flimsy, but when Montrose mulled over a few rough-estimate calculations in his head he was able to deduce an upper and lower limit for the load-bearing capacity and tensile of each hair that was well within the limits for bio-sculpture even from his day. Moderate number-crunching capacity was involved, but nothing the wealthiest man in the world could not afford. But the energy loss was high: Montrose just resigned himself to the notion that every appliance in this modern antimatter age was wasteful of energy. Men living on the shore of a sea don’t conserve seawater.
At the top of the stairs was a more comfortable room, this one adorned with flowers in jade vases and books in teak bookshelves.
Montrose seated himself on a comfortable, pleasantly warm couch, and put his feet onto a crystal-faced viewing table with a sigh of contentment. He rolled his eyes upward, and only then noticed that, here, again there were no windows.
Was the whole damn place underground?
Montrose remembered the images of cities being atom-bombed from space. Perhaps during the hundred fifty years while the Hermetic was away, the architecture had followed military necessity. A technology that could riddle Earth with ultrahighspeed train tubes could build any number of comfortable bunkers as many miles below the bedrock as the interests of safety might demand. It made for a depressing picture.
Back in my day, Montrose thought, we may have released ethnospecific germ warfare, but we did not use strategic-level atomics! Society had certainly degenerated, morally and perhaps mentally, during the interim.
And when the Hermetic had returned, she had brought with her a power unimaginably more dangerous than mere atomic fusion. For the first time, Montrose wondered if Blackie’s notion of letting a machine version of himself run the world was not so bad.
A world without war …
Montrose tried to think of something from his childhood, anything, that had not been effected by the wars, hot wars and cold wars, his mother’s generation had so meagerly survived. Fear of contamination touched everyone. It changed how close folk stood, how they shook hands. The depopulation had changed everything. The ruins of a once-great national highway system were like the aqueducts of medieval Rome, a testament to wealthier days. Even the snows and ice storms and endless cold weather had been the product of war, indirectly.
Maybe Blackie’s idea of how to run this new world was not as dangerous as the other likely alternatives. Montrose did not like that thought: He hated it like hell, but it pushed its way into his consciousness anyway. Maybe a world run by machines would be better …