The width of the wilderness outside may have been due to war depopulation, or perhaps Blackie had just bought himself a few thousand acres of alpine forest. In either case, there was no lack of venison or firewood for a man who could handle a rifle or an axe.
Del Azarchel was an old-fashioned enough gent to have a shed out back with materials for stretching and tanning hides. Montrose was unwilling to let any part of his game go to waste, especially after all the effort it took hauling the dang carcass back through the hillsides of pathless snow and rock. So he spent many an afternoon scraping and curing the hide, and making busy with an awl and a line, and so made himself quite a nice buckskin coat, fleecy and warm even in bad weather, and this saved on the thermal batteries in the suit he wore under. He eventually hunted down a pair of rabbits to make himself a pair of white mittens, and a healthy broth of coney stew.
The bedchamber window (when Montrose switched off its blackboard overlay) framed the tremendous glacier-lapped mountain that dominated the landscape. The window gave the name as Mount Fairweather, and painted the view with elevation and ecological information until Montrose discovered how to shut off the smartglass, and just enjoy the view. The mountain, despite its name, was half-hidden in fogs and clouds of white when it wasn’t wholly hidden in stormclouds of black.
By night, Montrose, with the help and direction of the superintelligent machine, experimented on himself, trying to wake up a lucid version of the strange daemon living inside him. Del Azarchel had a pharmaceutical cabinet as well-stocked as his arms locker.
3. Time for Booklearning
Between times he read, or watched, or had fictional conversations with library figments, to learn a bit about the history of what had happened to the world while he slumbered.
He soon found he could not trust anything presented to him from a library cloth. The systems were more interlinked and more heavily edited than in his day.
Fortunately, Del Azarchel had a well-stocked library and, since he was the world ruler, of course he could afford to read the stuff his own police forbad elsewhere. This was the real story of this world, and it was not what he had been told.
He wondered why he had believed Dr. Kyi’s blind assurance that there were no wars in the world: Del Azarchel had men fighting to put down rebellions and break up arsenals left over from the Old Order every season or so. The doctor had been misinformed about Rania’s origins—why had Montrose believed the old man had known any more about world affairs? Especially since Kyi was a servant at the court, not a courtier, not an aristocrat: someone who had to close his ears to hints of the truth that might leak through the insulation of loyal noise.
Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.
Even so, hard print did not have search features, so he could not go back and find previous passages except by flipping pages and trying to remember which page said what. There was no way to shorten or expand paragraphs, or ask for additional information. He had to actually get up from his chair and look in another dumb book, called a dictionary, to get the meaning of a word he did not know. He also could not personalize any hard books in their font or lit-settings, or set the text in quotes to be read aloud by different voices, or even read aloud at all. It was like something from the Dark Ages. And the pictures did not move. No wonder students back in the bad old days were bored.
Most of the books, he understood why Ximen Del Azarchel had them: charming old classics by Euclid, Apollonius, Descartes, Newton, Liebniz, Dedekund, fun reading by Gauss and Lagrange, Fermat and Grothendiek. There were also historical books by Arjehir, by Bhillamalacarya of Rajasthan and Zhang Tshang of China—all folks he felt he should have heard of, but never had. Zhang Tshang’s Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art contained a nicely reasoned proof that the perimeter of a right triangle times the radius of its inscribing circle equals the area of its circumscribing rectangle.
There was also a work by the “Mad Arab” Alhazen, whose work with catoptrics, perfect numbers and Mersennes primes was brilliant, and here was a proof of the Power Series Theorem that all this time Montrose thought had been first proved by Bernoulli. This book claimed that Alhazen was not mad, but merely feigned madness to escape the wrath of the Caliph, who had ordered the mathematician to use his knowledge to regulate the flood tides of the Nile. Montrose did not buy that story. Montrose thought to himself that mathematicians, being further afield in the strange lands of strange thoughts, were more likely to go insane. But as he was falling asleep that night, another voice in his head that sounded like his own told him, no, mathematicians almost never went insane, because the discipline of their studies ordered their reason. He remembered discussing it at some length with the voice in his head, but in the morning forgot who won the argument.
In Del Azarchel’s library were also papers on the Kolmogorov backward equation, or Erdos-Szekeres Theorem about monotone subsequences with an elegant (if trivial) pigeonhole-principle proof; and, of course, every theorem, conjecture, or scrap of paper ever written about xenothropology, xenolinguistics, and metapsychology and every study of the Monument ever made.
But other books he was not sure why Blackie had them. Why so many books on King Arthur and Charlemagne? Le Morte d’Arthur by Mallory, Idylls of the King by Tennyson, The Once and Future King by T. H. White, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, Orlando Innamorato by Boiardo, The Faerie Queene by Spenser, the Stanzaic Morte Arthure and Alliterative Morte Arthure. It was kid’s stuff. There were just as many books about the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece. A few of the books had a proper soundtrack, and contained Medea by Cherubini; Medea by Theodorachis; Medea in Corinto by Mayr; and Médée by Charpentier. These books had pencil markings in them, where Del Azarchel had underlined sections, or wrote questions as marginalia.
Montrose examined a dusty, leather-bound storybook with the engravings by Thiry and the colored plates by Waterhouse. In the scene where Aeëtes tried to deceive Jason into sowing dragons’ teeth into the ground, it was Medea the Sorceress, his very daughter, who warned Jason that such seeds would in the twinkling of an eye become armed and armored men, full of fury and eager to kill him. By her charms she protected Jason from iron and fire, and so he tamed the earthborn-men. In the margin Del Azarchel had written: There are times to trust the wise woman.
Later this same sorceress, when she and her lover were fleeing the rage of her betrayed father, slew the brother and chopped him in pieces, scattered the limbs and trunk and head to the sea-waves, so the pursuing ships must pause to gather the corpse. In the margin: There are times when not to trust the wise woman.
Her love with Jason was not to endure. Later still, she burned Jason’s second wife to death with a wedding dress woven of sweet-scented poison, and—to cause Jason further pain—she slew the little children Jason had fathered on her, fleeing in a chariot pulled by dragons into the air and away from any mortal retaliation. In the margin: If she is wiser than you, how can you know which time is which?