“That is what sleep is for, I suppose,” Montrose answered himself using speakers built into the overhead. For a moment, he was confused, because again he was watching himself from the outside, through medical sensors and pinpoint cameras on the bulkhead.

Had he been talking to himself, or was this a case of the two halves of himself talking to each other?

Through the crystal floor of the imaginary mansion of his mind or minds, he could see the information feeds writing the subconscious and conscious memories from the point of view of the extended computer-self, Extrose, into his biological brain using the same nerve signals a normal human brain uses to modify itself, and also writing the memories of his biological point of view into the computerized cell-by-cell simulation of his brain occupying a locationless address inside the vast logic diamond now occupying the axis.

He had three choices. First, he could sever the connection between himself and his ghost in the computer. The drawback to that was the divarication which drove so many Hermeticists mad. The biological brain acted as a governor or correcting censor. Second, he could maintain the connection through the nerve jack and brain umbilicus. This would limit him to this chamber, and, with extension cords, to other locations on the carousel. Third, he could try to maintain contact between his selves by means of signals sent to and from the living helmet grown into his skull. The drawback to that was waste heat: too much signal concentration would fry his biological brain. It would get hot wherever he went.

Then the thought came again. How could I have been so stupid?

He saw a thousand clues of a thousand memories.

The mind of Montrose was differently organized than it had been. The subconscious activity was clear to him, at least down to a certain level. He saw what the dreams meant. The image of Del Azarchel and Tellus straightening up from their talk in the gentleman’s lounge was merely a visualization of the thousand clues from computer logs and waste heat patterns in the ship’s logic crystal showing that the two had been talking while he slept, occupying a mind-to-mind communion for the months while the Emancipation sailed from Earth to the outer system and Jupiter. Talking behind his back.

He saw what his memories meant. The reason why his mother would never play the soundtrack connected to his father’s portrait was simple and silly. Father had a thick hillbilly accent. She did not want her children to pick up that low-class no-account way of talking. It should have been obvious to Montrose even back when he was a man. Now that he was a Ghost, only now that she was dead and lost as the Pharaohs of antiquity, did he see and understand the old woman’s fears. Only now did he see how fiercely she had loved, and defied her family and lost her inheritance to marry a proud Texan wintergardener. It was a whole lifetime of unspoken tragedy, and he had missed all the clues. That brought tears to his eyes.

He saw a dozen times Rania had outsmarted or manipulated him, drawing him subtly to the conclusions she had planned him to have and planted in his path. That brought a pang of doubt to his heart.

And that pang of doubt brought a stronger pang of shame: hadn’t his mother been smarter than his father, smart enough not to get herself killed by the same duelist who killed his father? Smart enough to avenge her husband’s murder without getting caught?

So what right did he have to doubt Rania even for a tenth of a second at any point in the tens of thousand of years separating her from him? To doubt her love? Was not love greater than any span of years?

He saw now that there had been no chance of overcoming the Hyades by military means, no matter whether biological life was joined into the Noösphere of Earth or not. If the Virtue men called Asmodel had for any reason failed, the cost of that failure would have been added to the debt of Earthly life, and a second expedition, larger and more well-equipped, would have followed before another ten millennia had turned. Certain clues in the mathematics spelled it out.

He saw also that he could have befriended the Hermeticists, the minions of Del Azarchel, and won their loyalty away from him—merely by augmenting their intelligence. Del Azarchel had deceived and manipulated them, played on their weaknesses, even back when he had been a mere mortal in Space Camp with them.

And more than that, Montrose also saw how Del Azarchel had paid back the men who had followed, loved, and obeyed him. Now it was blindingly clear.

Between A.D. 2410 and A.D. 2510, during the Cryonarch and the Ecclesiarch periods, all but five of the Hermeticists had died in augmentation experiments, destroying their own minds in one vain attempt after another to do to themselves what Montrose had done to himself.

Now he saw from countless tiny clues leaping together into a pattern in his mind how Del Azarchel had caused those experiments to fail. Del Azarchel through Exarchel had corrupted data runs, caused impurities to be introduced into neurochemicals, and had hidden crucial clues from the Hermeticists that might have saved their sanity and lives.

How could the sixty-seventh Hermeticist step over the corpses of sixty-six others to jam the same needle in his brain which had killed all his predecessors? How could he be so proud and blind, so hungry for the superhuman intellect they so worshiped? There was the example of Montrose before them, cured of his insanity by Rania. Then they saw Del Azarchel successfully achieve augmented intelligence, through Exarchel. And Del Azarchel beckoned them on, encouraging them, whispering that the errors made by inferior and bungling predecessors would not be made by them, no, not by them. Their brains and theirs alone were stable and sane enough to survive the shock. Were not the Hermetic Order superior to a mere Texas Cowboy with bad grammar?

With those lies and whispers, Del Azarchel had murdered them all. He had spared only the five whom he trusted to oversee the creation of the five races which were to be used in the creation of the Jupiter Brain.

Montrose could have saved all seventy-two, turned them against Del Azarchel, and spared the world all the pain of the last nine millennia, if only he had known then, if only he had seen.

It was too far in the past for the anger to be anything but dull and remote. It was too late for anything but regret.

How could he have been so stupid?

5. Epiphany

“What is the matter, Cowhand?”

“I saw what you really are like, Blackie. Worse than I thought.”

Del Azarchel shrugged. “What is that to me? We have been about more important things. We translated the Cenotaph while you were sleeping.”

“We?”

“The three of us. Crewman Fifty-one helped me. Yes, you lapsed back into your old habits. Folding a paper makes it weaker along the seam; it tends to fold again there, you know. Ah! It brought back memories! We had a year to work out the problem, and your brain was unoccupied by conscious thoughts, so, why not? I assumed you would not mind, not to save my princess, and if you did mind, what could you do? Shoot me? Challenge me to a duel?”

“My princess,” snarled Montrose.

“She will not be yours if no civilization is here to greet her when she returns. To be a starfaring civilization, we must do what starfarers do: establish colonies; maintain communication and commerce; adapt the human race to new environments; reengineer worlds to suit ourselves. It will take millennia, or hundreds of millennia.

“Yet, to them”—Del Azarchel was grinning, and his eyes glinted like agates—“such spans of time are merely as the passing hours of a day, all these nearby stars merely a handful of sand. What are twenty grains out of a beach? What are threescore stars out of a galaxy one hundred twenty thousand lightyears wide, holding two hundred billion?”