“I did not lose, Blackie.”
“You lost last night, at four bells of the First Dog Watch.”
Which was eighteen hundred hours. Menelaus thought it odd that Blackie still every now and again, as if by slip, spoke in nautical terms; as if his life outside the hull of the Hermetic had no meaning. This was the hour that the white-hot iron mass had been shot into orbit from the depthtrain rail.
Blackie said, “Shall we discuss our game? Just the last two moves.”
Menelaus opened his mouth to say something sarcastic, but then he snapped it shut again. Fact of the matter was that he did want to discuss it. Very much so.
“Go on,” he said.
2. End Game
“Back in the Eightieth Century,” Blackie began, “and not long after you had your disgusting creature Elton Linder release the Inquiline Code into the Noösphere, I used a simple terraforming technique to lower the temperature of the world disastrously.
“You thought I meant to raise population levels in order to have the Locusts outbreed their competitors, since population growth correlates to a longer growing season, which correlates to raising rather than lowering world temperature.
“But ah, no. All a feint. I intended that you should attempt volcanic technology—an area where you excel—to counter-terraform. Not because I cared about the temperature. I knew you would release into the plate tectonic stress areas your Von Neumann crystals that only you know how to make and which only Rania knew how to describe mathematically. You took only the normal precautions to protect your depthtrain stations where you built you remaining Tombs. I made assaults at Mount Misery, Wright-Patterson, and here, at Devil’s Den. The crystals were near the surface, where I could get them. I found a nodule, in a shaft over six thousand feet long, of crystals in perfect condition.” Del Azarchel sighed with satisfaction. “That was my true purpose. The main dish of the main feast, so to speak! Killing you is merely the port and cigar after.”
“God, you make me want a smoke. Don’t talk that way.”
“The tobacco leaf is extinct only on Earth. It grows remarkably well under lighter gravity, even given the limitations of hydroponic gardening.”
The idea that Blackie had been to Mars or Titan, or other moons and worlds of this solar system walking the alien soil, while he, Montrose, had been spending countless years under the damn ground, buried alive, almost made him dizzy, he was so sick with envy.
Menelaus said stubbornly, “It ain’t over. I’ve still got one chessman to move.”
Blackie smiled and said expansively, “Not over, you say? I have struck you through the heart; your planetary core Xypotech is mine, or if you like, I have captured the rook behind which you castled. Do you really think there is any more game to play between us? Ah! But which game were we playing? When you were telling your loyal men about the chess game, and they understood that they were all pawns, I wager you did not tell them the truth. The whole truth. No, you told them it was a game between darkness and light, machine and man, tyranny and liberty, with myself cast into the role of the dark machine of tyranny. Do I guess wrong? I see from your face that I do not.”
“No…,” Montrose said slowly. “You guess aright. Looking back over all the centuries of our chess game, I realized you had made the same move over and over. One of your men builds a civilization. Then there is something that goes wrong, really wrong. And I wake up and step in to fix it. Just like I always did back when I was Crewman Fifty-One, your handy dandy little handyman madman.”
Del Azarchel spread his hands. “And did you see what it is I made go wrong with every civilization? There is only one pattern to civilization, but infinite ways to fall into barbarism.”
Montrose grunted. “You kept destroying your Church, over and over again. You kept undermining monotheism and monogamy.”
Del Azarchel nodded. “The first is the basis for the belief in a rational cosmos; the second is the only basis for a rational civilization. Niceties like the belief in the rule of law rather than the rule of men are side-effects of these deep truths. Even the highest-born Chimera was bred like a showdog. There is no deeper degradation imaginable than to turn a man’s most intimate and sacred relation with the opposite sex into something trivial, or man-made, or an article of commerce, or a pastime. Hah! The degradation of the Nymphs was even deeper. The Hormagaunts I convinced to eat their own children to expand their lives; the Locusts I convinced to eat their own souls—what could I have done that in a world wise enough to forbid divorce, contraception, or whatever else desecrates and trivializes the marital and maternal bond? Do you think a child raised by a loving mother could even dream of selling himself into Locust communion?”
“And even knowing what was going on,” Montrose sighed, “you knew I was fool enough that I could not stand by and let a civilization, even a bad one, collapse, because then in the great chess game of fate, you would have just moved your queen Exarchel onto the board to pick up the broken pieces. I used to have nightmares about watching a bunch of barbarians dressed in animal skins tinkering with some old internal combustion engine or grinding gunpowder in a handmill while a tidal wave of that damn self-replicating gold goo the Savants worshipped was piling up on the horizon, too big for them to stop. So I could not permit a collapse. And I had to act.”
Del Azarchel smiled and nodded, like a good sportsman acknowledging a polite compliment from a defeated foe. “Yes, you had to act. And you had only one weapon that I did not have. I had more men, more resources, and more time—I could stay awake for twice your years while you slumbered, and age biologically at half your rate. But you had one thing I lacked. Rania’s solution. The seven-part Divarication solution.”
Montrose said, “So, as it turns out, this whole thing, all of history, was about me giving it to you, one little part at a time. I worked on the Giants, and you used that to create your emulations and Ghosts, your long-lived Witches. I tried to save the Witches. That was the first time, and you almost overplayed your hand; the Witch society is too obviously designed to fail. But I fell for it anyway, because, hey, I am a problem solver, and I love to solve problems. So, next time, you sacrificed a major piece, D’Aragó, just to draw me up to the surface, have a chance to see the state of misery of the Chimerae, misery I saw would be alleviated if they were just a little longer-lived. Men who live to see the future think about it, and men who think about the future think of war as a violent means to achieve political ends, not as a way to avenge insults against your king’s wife. And so on.
“But you really did fool me, Blackie, and I give you credit. Because every time I used another one of the seven solutions, you had one of your dupes—I guess I cannot call them your men, can I?—pervert my work to make some new problem appear, some new race of man, some new evil empire.
“But not you.
“You would take the solution, a few lines of code, whatever it was I did, and you went off by your lonesome, not telling your dupes what the real plan was.
“And because your dupes always did something with the code you rooked out of me, for the longest time, I thought that was what you meant to do, and all you meant to do.
“I thought you wanted to steal the cooperation gene to get the mathematical tools needed to make the Chimerae. But then you exterminated the Chimerae. Or I thought you wanted the Greencloak technology to create the addiction-world of the Nymphs. But then you interfered with their weather control, and drove the Nymphs out of existence.
“By the time the Hormagaunts appeared, and they were monsters out of a psychology textbook on sociopathic egomania, I knew theirs and the others could not be real civilizations, not something you actually meant to catapult into the next evolutionary stage of man. They were too simplistic. A science experiment. So I had seen through the first level of deception. You were not just fencing me to make the next mankind follow your dream rather than my dream. It was never about the dream of a superhuman liberty versus the dream of superhuman tyranny. There was no dre
am, only the seven solutions.
“Even then, I did not see through the second level of deception.
“I thought the whole point of the Hormagaunts was to winkle the Clade Code system out of me for use on some project on Earth, a blueprint for the Locusts. And next I thought the point of your move was to steal the Inquiline Code which I made to save the Locusts and pervert it to make the Melusine. But that was not it, was it? Like you said. Earth is nothing.”
“Exactly so. Feint low, disengage, strike high.” Del Azarchel was grinning broadly now. “How much have you guessed?”
3. The Seven Secrets
“I think I’ve guessed everything but one thing. Let’s get back to that later.
“The Hermetic Problem is how to make the Man Beyond Man, a mind that stands to us as we to beasts. Merely enlarging brain mass does not work. A macroscale machine, let’s say, the size of the Pacific Ocean or the polar ice caps, if it is just one big centralized brain, works about as handily as one big centralized bureaucracy. It takes weeks for a thought to get from one side to another of a brain so big.
“If you double and redouble the size of an ant until it is as large as an elephant, the ant would need stubby elephant legs to haul its mass, which is squared and re-squared; in just the same way, the mental architecture of a planet-sized man’s brain does not scale up. If you double the size of the cortex you have to square the size of the midbrain and cube the size of the hindbrain. Likewise, merely ramping up calculation speed does not work. That is what happened to you and me, Blackie. We think faster than men, but we make mistakes faster, too. You are looking for better thought procedures, not just faster ones.
“You decided to redesign the mind from the ground up, layer by layer. It was easy enough to anticipate that this is what you did—I can’t see any other path. I would have done the same. And you did it in seven steps—thanks to me.
“First. The basic Promethean Formula I released to make the Giants, you used to make your posthumans. Exulloa, Exillador, and so on; and De Ulloa used the same formula on elephants and dolphins, boars and horses and dogs to make his Moreau critters.
“But that was all smoke screen. Hidden far from prying eyes somewhere, you put together a much larger and more ambitious project. You used the Promethean Formula to make a King of Machines.
“Second. The Serpentine Code was a means to make a machine-mind effectively immortal, but it only worked on the limited scale. So you built a brain made up of countless tiny brains, the same way a man’s brain is made of countless individually living brain cells; so at least the physical substrate was immortal. These tiny and immortal brains were as countless as snowflakes. This was your platform, your foundation of stone. You built the King of Machines on top of this.
“Third. My genetic solution to allow the various Moreaus and Witches to learn to live together, you used to make these thousands of simple brains in the foundation of the King of Machines learn to cooperate. And all the other more complicated brains that were going to be swimming around in this fishbowl of thought, lesser minds inside greater minds like so many Russian dolls: fishbowl the size of the seven seas, an ocean of thought.
“Fourth. The Greencloak tech has an obvious application. Your King of Machines can do with electrons what the Nymphs do with molecules. It serves as the pleasure and pain centers of this emulated brain, or, if you like, as the rewards and punishments of a legal or economic system. You don’t care about the physical sensation of pain: you just follow the form with the math. Every lesser mind inside the mind of the King of Machines can be addicted or memory-dithered to suit his majesty’s fancy. All the little angels love the big bad archangel. I assume he is big and bad? I assume he is based on your template?
“Ditto for the Wintermind techniques, which act as a check against the addiction technology. An emulation of a man could use them just like a man with a flesh and blood brain, to shake off exoneurogenic addiction. There is no reason Exarchel cannot meditate and shake free of subconscious manipulation. In fact, he was hot to get my phantasm out of his head, weren’t he? You tell me how that is working out for you.
“Six. The Clade system I introduced into the Hormagaunts to stop their disgusting Hobbesian war of all against all—and Exarchel lives in that same Hormagaunt pattern: he has no incentive not to eat and absorb any machine he meets, since he can get all the powers and abilities of that machine without having to beg or bargain, hire or swap. You wanted better for your King of Machines, so it can have all the lesser angels living in his head occupy the same mental ecology without flocks of vampire-Xypotechs like Exarchel preying on each other.
“Seven. And the Inquiline Code prevents the opposite problem of too much cooperation. You found that in a brain that size, you needed helper minds to do routine tasks in and among the main streams and rivers of the thought hierarchy which aren’t part of that hierarchy themselves: benevolent parasites or inquilines. You need the extra viewpoints, the competition, diverse thought.
“You see, what had me baffled was that I kept thinking you were building a thinking machine. You are not. You are not even building a race of thinking machines, are you? You are really building a whole ecology of thinking machines: Many minds of many different natures and formulae of behavior all knit into a cooperative and competitive balance, and all parts of a larger mind. An ecology of angels.
“But they have to be encoded along these lines: augmentation of intellect; immortality; a cooperation format; incentives to control them; and the discipline to overcome that control when need be; and then you need love, some reason not to treat every other organism as a prey; and, most of all, you need the altruism of Locusts and the independence of Inquilines tied together, a selfless love combined with an idea that the individual self is sacred.
“Without these last two, all the angels form just one mind with just one viewpoint, and it turns into a combination of Leviathan and Juggernaut, something too big and slow and stupid to stop or turn aside. Not an ocean of thought, but a slow and stupid glacier.”
4. Total Defeat
Del Azarchel looked impressed. “That is more, and, to be frank, more insightful than I expected you to know. I know how you guessed the outlines, but the details…”
Montrose said, “You are kidding, right? The details were the obvious part. You kept using Earth as the experiment to show me the problems you were facing, so that I would be dumb enough to offer a solution. You fit each part of the various psychologies into your overall structure, so that each weakness is checked by the corresponding strength of the other races: the Locust altruism formula defines the conscience of your system, the Chimera psychology defines the passions, the Nymphs the appetites, and so on. You are building a gigantic system of minds and ecologies of minds, empires of thousands and tens of thousands of emulations. Honestly, that is amazing.
“And meanwhile your dupes are dithering, trying to rule the Earth with five emulations, all told. Honestly, that is amazing, too. Amazingly cruel.”
Del Azarchel said, “Five? Not true! In addition to my Hermeticists, there are eighty-nine more. The Cetaceans have the computer capacity for that, now that the world is covered with—oh. Someone told you. I was hoping to awe you with that one.”
“Ctesibius figured it out and told me. You embedded a copy of Exarchel in the snow.”
“It is not quite snow. It is mites suspended in water droplets by van der Waals forces, but near enough. Plants and animals can drink it in and urinate or sweat it out, without ill effect, without knowing that an insubstantial genius mind was occupying the same physical location. As you say, with angels, physical location does not matter, only the data address.”
Montrose tried not to be impressed, but could not help it. “Damn, that is elegant. Do you know how many layers of awkward safety systems I had to put into Pellucid so that self-replicating nanotechnology could not possibly eat the whole damn world if it escaped into the human environment? I never thought of just making it—harmless.”
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Del Azarchel smiled archly. “Actually, I do know. When Exarchel captured and absorbed Core Anomaly One, I got all your Xypotech records, memories, files.”
“‘Core Anomaly One’? Gah! Terrible name.”
“‘Pellucid’? Sounds like the name of a syrup used to sooth stomach ulcers.”
“Listen, if a Chimera can name his weapon, I can name mine.”
“Whatever it is called, I salute your weapon and compliment you, my worthy opponent. I will not hide that it was hundreds of years—no, let me be honest, it was thousands of years—before I ever thought of the idea that you simply had a bigger emulation system than I did, which was why you were consistently out-calculating me. Because everything you did showed such hatred of machine-based life: the Giants were antimachinists, and the Witches had to pretend to be for the sake of appearances; the Chimerae actually were, and actually did, at one point, successfully remove every single copy of me from the planet; the Nymphs and Hormagaunts did not have the technology to build computers of any kind—and so on. The idea that you secretly had a Xypotech, one hidden even from your knights and employees—it simply never occurred to me. Such cold-blooded hypocrisy! The most ferocious witch-hunter of all, secretly saying the Black Mass!”
“Hypocr—? Shut your hole, Blackie. I never once said I had an objection to emulating the mind of a beast. Killing a man’s dog may be the worst thing ever, but it ain’t homicide. Men are different from beasts, and even using the Moreau process on a dog might make it intelligent enough to talk, but it won’t give it a conscience. That takes more.”
“Well, whatever the reason,” smiled Del Azarchel, “I was not able to out-calculate anything toward which the core of the world turned its extremely vast but strangely limited intellect. An animal? No wonder it did not react to any of my feints and false trails. It thinks concretely, focused in the moment. Better than a man, in some ways. Harder to distract with ideals or abstractions. Ah, but I was behind you, far behind, for so long! It was not until the Locusts that we were able to reintroduce Exarchel into the human world. The Locust brains have a radically different cellular arrangement, and so my soul could be written directly into their brainspace, whatever percent of the brain was not actively in use. By the time of the Melusine, Exarchel and I, we finally had civilization under control, and could build arcologies, a cube a mile on a side, entirely filled with logic crystal. But even that was nothing compared to the brainspace capacity, the sheer volume, of your invention. I salute you.”