The Architect of Aeons (28 page)

Montrose did not wait for all the music to cease and the ceremonial bows to be ended.

“Bugger you all,” said Menelaus Montrose in a harsh voice. “You've had your fun. I mean to see my wife again. That's all.”

And he slunk down the stairs to the launching vessel waiting to carry him back to exile in the outer Solar System, and Del Azarchel, whistling and skylarking, skipped after.

8. A Small Moon Burns

A.D. 11322

Within the arms of the mighty crescent of the planet Jupiter, on the night side, among the flashes of eternal lightning, a bright dot appeared sliding across the cloud belts. The countless square miles of sails were focusing the weak sunlight of the outer system like a parabolic magnifying glass into a pinpoint of hell.

At the moment, all three tugs were aft of the great ship, connected by monocrystalline carbon tethers to numerous stanchions dotting the nonrotating segment of the hull, and Del Azarchel could see on high frequency wavelengths both the powerful magnetic fields surrounding the engines, and the blazing star of their exhaust. The tugs were forming a drag against the sail pressure.

A time later (whether it was hours or weeks made no difference to a being with his neural configuration) he beheld Adrastea, the smallest moon in the Solar System, a humble twenty kilometers wide, as it entered the dot of focused light shed by the sail.

As Earth's moon once had been, Adrastea was tide locked, fated ever to keep the same face toward Jupiter. This bit of ice and rock orbited inside the synchronous orbit radius. To an observer on Jupiter (such as the growing nest of Ghosts whirling as clouds of logic crystal in the upper atmosphere) the little moon would seem to rise in the west and set in the east. Adrastea was also inside the Roche limit, but it was small enough to escape tidal disintegration.

And she was beautiful: egg-shaped, coated with a strange striped pattern of ice and dappled black stone, winged with feathers of dust and snowflakes being continually pulled from her surface to feed the ring system of Jupiter, Adrastea looked like a snowcapped mountain which had floated into a stormy heaven. By some anomaly of planetary formation, it was purer and cleaner than the ice of the rings.

Adrastea would have been doomed eventually. Del Azarchel was merely hurrying a natural process along.

The moon was mostly water ice. Under the beam from the sail, the outline of the irregular little worldlet began to soften and blur. Switching his goggle intake to cameras dotting the ship sail (the giant planet and all the moons suddenly seemed smaller, toylike, yet far more detailed on view, as the immense array gathered over miles of baseline was interpreted in the visual centers of his brain) Del Azarchel could see vents of steam issuing from the little moon like volcanoes made of ice. The steam pressure was greater than escape velocity: the water droplets fled into space, and did not fall down to Adrastea again.

The heat was on the upper, shipward side of Adrastea, the side that had never seen Jupiter. The escaping steam was sufficient to produce a thrust. The orbit would not begin to degrade for months—that is, local months. Adrastea orbited Jupiter five times an Earth-day. In thirty Earth-days over a hundred Adrastean months would have elapsed, and the falling moon would begin experiencing reentry friction.

The fine-grained radar fed him the surface features in such detail that he was able to feed it into his brain as a physical sensation, as if he held the moon in his fist and could feel its texture of stone and snow against his palm. Del Azarchel resisted the temptation recording into his nervous system the sensation of his arm muscles tensing and throwing the moon to fiery doom. He had indulged, long ago, during the long years aboard the NTL
Hermetic,
with the intoxication of artificial sensations. He promised himself never to do it again, a promise he had since kept, albeit not without some pain. The reality of being a godlike force able to throw worldlets to their doom was better.

The pinpoint flare of energy of a larger object launching from the surface was like a hot needle against his thumb. This was the exovehicular suit used by Montrose, an absurd-looking contraption like a canister-sized boat with arms.

Montrose had been overseeing the placement of the logic seeds on the small moon, molecular technology designed to break Jupiter out of the self-imposed blindness of the phantasm veil. The reentry heat would bring it to life, so that by the time the moon broke into pieces and scattered themselves across the clouds and seas of Jupiter, every fragment would be a virus spreading the antiphantasm logic to any sophont matter it touched.

One small moon was not enough.

Del Azarchel turned his many eyes toward the next moon, Amalthea, an irregular mountain in space almost freakishly red. The planet was massaged by tidal forces, its inner core stirred to activity, so that the moon gave off more heat than it received from the sun. This next moon out had a perfectly synchronous orbit: it hung above Jupiter always in the same spot, orbiting as fast as Jupiter turned.

The energy discharge betraying the position of Montrose slowly, very slowly, reached toward Amalthea. Additional pods of supply crystal grown from and sliced off the ship's brain were shot toward rendezvous by the ship's glorious pattern of magnetic fields, here used as a caterpillar drive.

Amalthea would be next. And then two or three the Galilean satellites: Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Europa. And then outer moons.

Their names rang like poetry in Del Azarchel's mind: Himalia, Elara, Pasipha
ë
, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda, Callirrhoe, Themisto, Megaclite, Taygete, Chaldene, Harpalyce, Calyce, Iocaste, Erynome, and so on and on.

How many would be burn? Which ones would he spare? Del Azarchel did not know yet. Perhaps all of them would not be enough. Jupiter was a great deal of volume to seed.

And, if need be, the whole system of debris forming the rings and ring arcs would be deflected down into the jovial hell of the roaring jovian atmosphere.

It was a matter of no sorrow to send so famous and ancient a heavenly body crashing into the clouds and seas of methane and ammonia that lurked so tempestuously unquietly below. It was a matter of glory, because to destroy great and irreplaceable things proved a man was great. Del Azarchel contemplated the death of worldlets as a child might contemplate fireworks of blazing rockets. This was his day of celebration.

He wished for someone to share his festive day. The only other person he wanted to talk to was very far away. He turned his bright eyes and brighter cameras toward the constellation Canes Venatici. He could make out the globular cluster of M3. To him it was not merely a fuzzy patch. He could make out individual stars. It was a snowball of fiery dots.

Perhaps a mist of sorrow that he could not, in space goggles, wipe from his eyes dimmed their brightness a trifle. The distance was not just appalling; it was blasphemous. How was he ever to rule such vast and empty spaces?

Only to
her
had he ever revealed his whole mind. Only
she
was his equal, nay, his superior.

A man cannot adore his inferiors or his rivals, but the woman he had made for himself, a work greater than himself, he can love. With all other beings, even Exarchel, even himself, he must be dishonest to a lesser degree or greater. Only with
her
was he the true Del Azarchel. Only with her he did not have to simplify his speech to the slower pace of lesser minds.

No. There was another with whom he could be honest, the honesty of rival chessmasters bent over a board where all the chessmen were seen by both, or facing each other on the field of honor with weapons smoking. Deadly honesty. Menelaus Montrose always had grasped the magnitude of what the Great Work meant.

And now, the two of them could settle down and share a drink, and just chat, compare notes, and …

 … and make it like it had been in the old days.

Before Montrose had stabbed himself in the brain with a needle. Before Del Azarchel (he winced at the memory) had urged him so gaily to do it.

Del Azarchel was convinced that Montrose would not have found the courage to do the fatal deed without him. How much differently things would have turned out had Del Azarchel only held his peace!

For the Monument would never have been solved without Montrose's insanity and insane genius. Rania would never have been born. Somehow the evil deed of provoking his friend had turned out well, but, oh, after how much suffering and war?

A radio message came from Montrose. For a time, the two spoke of technical matters, sail adjustments, reentry angles for the shattered moons, each man coordinating from his side the project of waking Great Jupiter from slumber.

Montrose must have been in a talkative mood, because then he said, “You know this is a poxified damn dripping doinkstump of an idea, dontcha?”

“The signal-to-swearword ratio of your message is approaching white noise, but if you speak of this work, the Great Work, I think it is the finest idea that can be conceived, my friend!”

“Conceived out of wedlock with a she-dog, you mean, because this is one bastard bitch idea. We are making a god to rule over us, and we are not even programming him to be nice.”

“A glorious future is ours.”

“A glorious blister on my anus.”

“Do you still have doubts?”

“Plenty. My hand has been forced. Forced into making this Frankenstein's monster larger than worlds!”

“You need not blame yourself, friend Menelaus.…”

“Shuddup. I ain't making no excuses, I am just pointing out the facts. The fact is that just because you wanted this to happen does not mean your hand was not forced, too. What the hell do the aliens want? We don't know what we are being forced to do and why—and yet you think you've won this round, Del Azarchel. The board just grew from eight squares on a side to twenty lightyears volume. And the game Hyades is playing, and the game the masters who own Hyades play, is even wider. So you don't know what the next move in the greater game shall be, do you?”

“No,” said Del Azarchel. “All your words are true enough. I am but an egg at this point in my ambition: but I am the egg of an eagle, a kingly bird, or a roc, whose wingspan and strength no man can measure. True, the Hyades forced us to wake the Jupiter Brain, and place our world under his power. True, we cannot yet guess the reason.”

“Then why can I hear you grinning? You are as smug as the man who learned to fart fire, and saw what he could save on matches.”

“And you are as downcast as a fox in a trap, who realizes he loves his leg too much to gnaw it off,” said Del Azarchel. “I vaunt not because I know the future, but because I know it will be mine. Even if I cannot say what it shall hold, the future shall hold my Promethean triumph!”

“Welcome to Blackiotopia,” drawled Menelaus. “Whoop-dee-poxing-doo.”

“Can you envision the civilization that will arise here among the moons of Jupiter? How good it will be to have men bow the knee to me again! And they will not even be men, but a posthuman mass of cyborgs and biomechanism intertwined: uploaded, upgraded, altered, augmented, and turned into the Archangels and Potentates needed as secondary brains and lesser servants surrounding the immense brain of Jupiter!

“Some of these moons we perhaps shall save to turn into Archangels of logic diamond, and some shall squat on the surface under the immense gravity, domes larger than terrestrial cities. As the core thinks and grows, achieving ever higher platforms of sapience and sentience, we will begin to detect, like earthquakes, the energy exchanges accompanying the neural activity. The minds, lesser than his but immeasurably greater than ours, shall hedge those torrents and herd those overflows of mental force, adjusting divarications and replication errors, and acting as intercessors, and, aye, as priests and oracles to thoughts nor they nor we can understand!

“Have you calculated what the change in temperature will be if a brain only twice the size of Earth alters the energy pressure in all its neuromolecular cells during a particularly involved thought process? Envision that on the scale of a gas giant! The whole world of Jupiter will ring like a bell when mighty thoughts, containing more than all the libraries that mortal men ever wrote or burned, pass from one side of the crystal globe to the other.

“Ah! My dearest Menelaus!” said Del Azarchel grandly, “I am, I confess, glad you are here to see me on this day! Jupiter will solve the message of the Cenotaph. The art of remaking man, not the timid changes of the Hermetic lore, but total change, pantropy, change to suit any world will be given to us, a gift as great as the fire of Prometheus! The art of terraforming to our specifications, to make worlds, to be as the Creator! Nay, we shall surpass the Creator, for did he not make only one man and one world? Together, we shall make many!”

“Holy Mary's Mother's milk, I guess I might start believing all this superstitious churchified crap of yours.”

“Indeed? Why so?”

“What you say sounds like damnified blasphemy to me. I was hoping Jehovah would float by on a fluffy cloud and stuff a lightning bolt up your rectum. Ain't hope one of them three cardinal virtues?”

“What lesser men call sacred, to me is blasphemy; and their abominations are my sacraments! Let us prepare my son Jupiter for his coronation, for he surely shall be monarch of all the children of man on all worlds.”

Montrose said, startled, “Are you crowning someone else? I thought you still were jollying yourself by pretending you ruled the roost?”

“What roost? Call it a coop instead. Tellus estimates the Hyades will deracinate our race to twenty stars in the First Sweep circa a.d. 11000, and perhaps twenty more stars after that in the Second circa a.d. 24000. Less than half a hundred worlds! Bah!”

“Y'know, you are the only guy I know who says
Bah
.”

“No term is more concise for expressing disgust. Fifty earths? My ambition is not so curtailed. Someday commerce, regular trade, must open between the Hyades and the worlds of the Local Interstellar Cloud. The Empyrean Polity of Man—so I hereby christen it—is being planted as an olive tree. Someday the husbandmen will come to claim the fruit. Whenever that shall be, I mean to be prepared for it. There are wider fields for my ambition now.”