To the slake-moths it was invisible, thought without subconscious. It was meat stripped of all taste or smell, empty thought-calories inconceivable as nutrition. Like ashes.

The Council’s mind poured into the machine—and there was a moment of fraught activity as commands were sent down the copper connections from the dump, as the Council sought to suck back information and control of the engine. But the circuit-breaker was solid. The flow of particles was one way.

It was assimilated, passing through the analytical engine.

A set of parameters was reached. Complex instructions pattered through the valves.

Within a seventh of a second, a rapid sequence of processing activity had begun.

The machine examined the form of the first input x, Andrej’s mental signature.

Two subsidiary orders rattled down pipes and wiring simultaneously. Model form of input y one said, and the engines mapped the extraordinary mental current from the Weaver; Model form of input z, and they did the same job on the Construct Council’s vast and powerful brainwaves. The analytical engines factored out the scale of the output and concentrated on the paradigms, the shapes.

The two lines of programming coalesced again into a tertiary order: Duplicate waveform of input x with inputs y and z.

The commands were extraordinarily complex. They relied on the advanced calculating machines the Construct Council had provided, and the intricacy of its programme cards.

The mathematico-analytical maps of mentality—even simplified and imperfect, flawed as they inevitably were—became templates. The three were compared.

Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s, any sane vodyanoi’s or khepri’s or cactacae’s or other sentient being’s, was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.

Andrej’s mind was not like the cold ratiocination of the Council, nor the poetic dream-consciousness of the Weaver.

x, recorded the engines, was unlike y and unlike z.

But with underlying structure and subconscious flow, with calculating rationality and impulsive fancy, self-maximizing analysis and emotional charge, x, the analytical engines calculated, was equal to y plus z.

The thaumaturgo-psychic motors followed orders. They combined y and z. They created a duplicate waveform to that of x and routed it through the output on Andrej’s helmet.

The flows of charged particles pouring into the helmet from the Council and the Weaver were added together into a single vast slew. The Weaver’s dreams, the Council’s calculations, were blended to mimic subconscious and conscious, the working human mind. The new ingredients were more powerful than Andrej’s feeble emanations by a factor of enormous magnitude. The vastness of this power was unabated as the new, huge current surged towards the flared trumpet pointing up into the sky.