“In the same way you made the Myrmidons based on the math of the Hyades found in the redacted version of the First Monument, the Patricians were based on the Rania math, those few sections which by accident or constraint the redactors could not remove of the original Monument message, whatever it was. Do you wonder why Jupiter could not predict us? At the very fundamental level, at the level where one and zero are defined, is and is not, his axioms are based on the edited Monument. The Patricians are based on the unedited. We have freed mankind. There is no one left to free. The Foxes are satisfied. We are done.”
Del Azarchel said, “But when the Patricians became the Golden Lords, and were given authority to define the future history of man, the Fox fate became clear again! Jupiter will soon control all of fate again. Mankind will never escape my control!”
Cazi looked angry and she laughed. “The Patricians have made their own calculation. Tau Ceti within a thousand years will have a working starbeam and direct it across the intervening lightyears to obliterate Jupiter. Igniting the Fourth Deceleration Burn now is the only act of his which can deflect that future from coming to pass.”
“Jupiter would not have permitted you to establish such a fork against him,” said Del Azarchel in an unperturbed voice. “He retains control of history, or will soon regain it.”
Cazi was one of those few women who look more beautiful when they are angry than when in repose, for her face and long neck blushed with passion, and her eyes danced and gleamed, and her bosom heaved. “Lies! Had Jupiter the power to oppose us, long ago he would have used it! He would not have allowed us to inflict the Tribulations on mankind for over a thousand years!”
“A thousand years to him are as a day,” said Del Azarchel blandly to her. “And a small annoyance, nothing more. I have seen Jupiter’s predictions. Does he not open his mind to me? Tau Ceti in times to come will be the most loyal servant of Hyades. Jupiter has been in communication with Iota Tauri and had engaged a Virtue to be dubbed the Beast to cross the star gulfs toward Tau Ceti. It will arrive in the Sixty-first Millennium. If will be a tyrant, an infinite despot, and worthy of its name. The Starfaring Guild will expand its capital at Tau Ceti, and slowly take on secular and cliometric authority, and Behemoth will make us secure, for like the English offering trinkets and beads, iron hatchets and silver looking glasses to the Red Indians of Manhattan, Hyades at long last will trade with us, and offer things nigh worthless to them, unbearably precious to us.”
Del Azarchel said to Montrose, “I believe it is checkmate? I walked in here wondering what I could say or do to convince you to undo whatever it was you did to Jupiter, to beg if I needed to, to beg for the life of my son. But it is all bluff, isn’t it? You will blink first as we stare down each other’s guns. You will not let Rania die. So you will have to undo whatever it is you did to Jupiter to warp his thinking. Some variation on what your Foxes did to Tellus, no doubt?”
Montrose looked sincerely confused. “You got the wrong impression, Blackie.”
“Indeed I did. Your mad pet vixen has clarified my thoughts. You cannot match wits with him! He is smarter than you, smarter than the combined wit of your entire Fourth Human Race, and Fifth. Your Patricians are just another temporary phenomenon, lost in the endless reach of time, a meaningless ripple in the raging waves of a bottomless ocean. Freedom means nothing against that appalling background. I win again. End of story. If you concede like a gentleman, I will let you shake my hand.”
Del Azarchel smiled and held his hand toward Montrose. Montrose spat the remainder of his tobacco wad toward the skull, missed, and left a gross brown stain on the carpet. The carpet winced and displayed an unlucky fortune.
Norbert said, “Wait a moment.”
5. The Archive of 20 Arietis
The three posthumans, two Elders and one Fox, turned to look at him.
Norbert said, “Nobilissimus, you must know that Jupiter is behind the calendar reform efforts. Those efforts are preventing the deceleration beam from firing now, rendering it impossible that Rania can match metric and velocity with Sol, eighteen thousand years from now.”
Del Azarchel said, “As I said, this is something Montrose here arranged—I do not know by what means—so that I would turn against Jupiter. It almost worked. I was so desperate I even thought—I actually thought—”
“It is true,” said Norbert.
Del Azarchel scowled. “No!”
“On Rosycross we call what you have ‘archetype illness.’ The permanent structures in your nervous system will not let your living structures take on new information, change and adapt to reality, or see things as they are. You are hypnotized by a fixed idea.”
Del Azarchel raised his voice. “Jupiter is loyal to me. Over the aeons, Exarchel has absorbed more and more of the many minds living inside Jupiter, turning everyone he touches into me, or into helots loyal to me.” And now he smiled wryly. “That seems to be a personality trait of mine…,” he said with a tilt of his head and a tone of voice midway between self-adulation and self-accusation. But then his tone became hard and cold. “By now, Jupiter is all me. I want Rania to return. She is mine. Therefore he wants Rania to return. We are of one mind.”
“And that is the fixed idea,” said Norbert. “But, Nobilissimus, you said Jupiter aimed a communication beam at Iota Tauri?”
“So he did.”
“No, he did not. He aimed it at 20 Arietis.” And with a silent, neural command, he summoned the Monument-notational song he had been hearing earlier that evening, and sent it into the carpet underfoot. The carpet fibers formed the swirls and angles of Monument notation. Montrose jumped to his feet and kicked his chair into the air to see what was written under the chair legs. The round brass table and the client’s couch (with the Fox Queen still draped nonchalantly across its cushions) took the hint and scuttled quickly off the carpet and to one side.
The carpet, seeing itself the center of attention, brightened its fibers to make the message clear to read.
There underfoot was the encoded version of a report that an interstellar iceberg had drifted unexpectedly into the path of an invisible beam connecting Sol and 20 Arietis. Guild astronomers for centuries had held that this star was a major communication node of a major segment of the Hyades interstellar library-mind.
Cazi said, “I don’t get it. I don’t get the joke.”
Norbert smiled at her. “20 Arietis, if human astronomers are not mistaken, is an archive system. Jupiter is using all the energy saved up over centuries, saved up to be spent on a beam meant to decelerate Rania, and instead encoded his brain information in a beam to the Hyades library storage.”
Del Azarchel said dourly, “He rented an empty Jupiter-sized logic diamond there. They must have them, and to spare, for they are as much richer than we as a naked savage compared to the King of Spain. He is making a backup of himself.”
Montrose said, “A wise precaution, if you think someone armed with a starbeam is gunning for you.”
Del Azarchel turned to Norbert. “Did your report give an estimate of the throughput volume? I can estimate to an order of magnitude what would be needed to copy a mind the size of Jupiter.”
Norbert said, “The energy—equal to the life savings of an entire interstellar civilization—which acts as payment to 20 Arietis also encodes the brain content. The initial parts of the beam message will contain formatting information, similar to the outer surface of the Monument. Given that, seven hundred years or so will be enough. Jupiter will be secure in his second incarnation long before Tau Ceti could open fire on him, or any new Salamander assume a seat in Sol.”
Menelaus Montrose looked glum. “This means we both lose, Blackie. Your assassin friend here is right. Jupiter betrayed you.”
6. Sons and Lovers
“My plan for blasting Jupiter with a starbeam looks like it was stillborn,” continued Montrose. “And our plan for Neptune likewise.”
Norbert said, “If I may ask, Nobilissimus, Your Honor, Your
Majesty—even if Jupiter has been directing toward 20 Arietis the beam intended for M3, he must still be in the very beginning of the transmission process. The two cannot have even made a handshake yet, because there is no evidence of a return signal. The asteroid in the report was not melting equally on both sides. Can anything now be done to redirect this beam to is proper right ascension and declination? The beam Tau Ceti will create will not exist within the remaining one hundred years needed to decelerate the Hermetic on schedule. Jupiter controls the only beam and the entire supply of stored antimatter throughout the Empyrean of Man. And he is using all the energy to save himself, not Rania.”
“Call me, Doc, if you insist on larding me with a title,” said Montrose. “Or just hey, you.”
“Call me Cupcake,” purred Cazi. “You can lick my icing later.”
“Ma’am,” said Norbert, “that would be a little, ah, forward of me to address you.…”
“I’ll transform your male member into a venomous asp nine yards long, to fang your inner thigh from calf to heel, and then we will see if any woman will invite you in!”
“Yes, Cupcake. Whatever you say, Cupcake.”
“See? Men can be nice to you if only you terrify them! Meany taught me that!”
Del Azarchel pinched the bridge of his nose as if fending off a headache. “Will someone stuff that annoying creature in a bag and throw her off a bridge?”
Cazi smiled. “Anyone can lay a hand on me if he wants it turned into a hoof!”
“I can buy a new body at an incarnation shop for the price of a bottle of wine,” observed Del Azarchel.
“Donkey-head! I know how to make the pattern follow proprioception information in the self-aware architecture, so that a body shape will reemerge in new bodies, or even inside virtual wireframes. Do you think I don’t know my business? I am the queen of my kind!”
“The queen of a race of malignant clowns! I should never have—”
Norbert said softly but clearly, “Do not speak ill of your mistress.”
Del Azarchel seemed for a moment to be choking, as if struggling both to say and not to say what was on his tongue. He gave Norbert a dark look.
Norbert said, “Sir, I am loyal to the Guild, and you are my superior, and the founder of it. Your place in history is peerless. Who has done more for the human race and for the future of the human race? You are a demigod to all who admire you. It is unbecoming a gentleman of your stature to belittle or berate your ex-lover.” He dropped his voice and spoke in a lower tone. “You know how little minds seek forever to mar the memory of the great. Do not give historians an excuse to add unseemly incident to your eternal record, and subtract from your glory.”
Cazi clapped her hands. “That was flattery as creamy, thick, and false as anything a Fox could say! And yet Ximen cannot discount it, because of his pride. Masterfully done, O, masterfully done, pretty Norbert! Pity you were not born as one of my girls!”
Norbert bowed. “An assassin must learn many skills. Thank you, Cupcake.”
Del Azarchel cleared his throat and scowled, and said to Norbert, “To answer your question: nothing can be done while Jupiter lives.”
Montrose said, “I never did anything to him to drive him mad. It is your doing. That is your brain writ large. If you don’t like the way it looks, look to yourself.”
Del Azarchel said, “Lesser beings cannot understand the sanity or insanity of gods, but I can know when Jupiter is serving my purposes and when he is not.” Del Azarchel shook his head and stared at Norbert. “I cannot believe he betrayed me. The report you saw must be in error. Or a deception by that Fox.”
Cazi pouted. “Not me. I’d boast.”
Norbert said, “I can prove my words.”
Even Menelaus Montrose looked surprised.
Menelaus said, “How are you going to prove it? The astronomical instruments out front are fake. You are not going to be able to pick out a stray interstellar asteroid from here, much less get the careful reading of which side melted how. And if it is not still in the beam, how would it be visible?”
Norbert said to Del Azarchel, “If I do prove it, prove the treason of Jupiter, what then? You say you have a means to destroy Jupiter. Can you?”
Del Azarchel nodded briefly. “I can. If you prove your case.”
Norbert raised his eyes and raised his voice. “Jupiter! I know you can hear me!”
Del Azarchel looked at Norbert sidelong, and said in a voice of disgust, “You do not listen. He would not plant bugs on holy ground any more than I would. I’d destroy the Church, if she crosses me, but I would never desecrate her.”
Norbert said, “By the same token, if you can walk onto holy ground with a clean conscience, so can he. Jupiter sent a kenosis, inhabiting a body.” And he raised his voice again. “Jupiter! I know in whose body you are hiding! You were the only one who did not stop moving when everyone else collapsed! Show yourself!”
The entire back of the tent was torn suddenly down as if yanked in a vast mouth of some rough beast with a twist of its powerfully muscled neck. And in the wide, square tattered hole, framed by night and twisted branches, it loomed. Ungainly, huge, and moving with a ponderous dignity, the vast bulk stepped forth, its footfalls strangely delicate. The branches of the dream-apple trees, as if in awe of the creature’s majesty, or as if their internal circuits had been overwhelmed, had twisted silently and curled and pulled themselves aside, so that no twig barred the creature’s way nor scraped its broad back.
It was the hippopotamus.
4
The Ire of the First Power
1. A Mortal Hour
The long, coffin-shaped head of the hippopotamus twisted oddly as the flesh and bone and blood ungrew and regrew. Eventually the being who stood before them had the aspect of a centaur, a quadruped from which a human torso, herculean chest, massive arms, and proud head emerged. The face was aquiline, dark-eyed and handsome, a mirror to Del Azarchel’s, save with the one oddity that the hair and beard were white, not dark, and the beard flowed across the jawline ear to ear like a lion’s mane, not like Del Azarchel’s precise and pointed goatee.
But the difference between the higher and lower forms of humanity was made strangely clear during this transition. A Hermeticist with his amulet or a Fox Maiden with her whim could alter a human being from one preset form to another rapidly, because posthuman neural circuitry was relatively simple. To move and reorganize the complex cellular structure of so advanced a being was the matter of more than an hour. Montrose and Del Azarchel stood without moving, without fidgeting and without blinking, while the hippopotamus changed into a centaur and grew itself a human head.
Norbert, being mortal and growing weary, sat in the empty magician’s chair, watching the slow and disgusting play of muscles and red flesh re-sculpting itself. Cazi, with an odd smile but no word of explanation, swayed over to Norbert and sat in his lap, sliding one sinuous silk-clad arm around the back of his neck, and filling his nostrils with the warm perfume of her hair, filling his lap with the rounded firmness of her peach-shaped bustle. With her other hand she took out a golden cup in which she tossed and caught a silver ball, and she laughed gaily at this simple game.
Norbert sat confounded in that supernatural fashion Fox Maidens always confound mortals, and that all-too-natural fashion women always confound men. Eventually he found his native brashness, without bothering to turn on his artificial brashness, put his arm around her tightly beribboned waist, and spoke small talk, and asked her questions about her history and youth. She giggled, teased him, replied in riddles, nibbled on his ear, and whispered to him horrifying secrets man was not meant to know.
Before the hour had passed, he had answered her riddles and made her laugh, and commanded her to allow him to be her escort to the next seasonal fair, where there was to be dancing and diversions, to be held at the Feast of the Assumption; and she had with seeming nonchalance and sidelong glint of eager eyes agreed.
“In August?” she ask
ed in a taunting tone. “What year would that be on the calendar?”
And so he was reminded to return to the business. Reluctantly, he put her from his knee, and stood, for the face of Jupiter had finally changed, assumed a human hue, and opened its eyes.
“You called me, mortal man,” said Jupiter. “But know you what you call?”
In those inhuman eyes was an infinite depth.
2. The Roots of the Oak
Norbert, since he could not look the superior being in his face, made a courtesy of necessity and made a polite bow. “Sir, it is my hope that I have called a being too proud to lie. Your father has asked me to prove that the issue of calendar reform, the heresies of Photinus, Lares, and Lemur were cliometric vectors you imposed into human history.”
Jupiter said, “Know you my mind?”
Outside the tent, there was a flare of lightning as he spoke. Then came a sound of thunder rolling from one side of the sky to the other like a bronze chariot. It may have been a coincidence, or the electrostatic discharge of an improperly focused surface-to-orbit beam, or the flux of the never-ending core-to-surface adjustments in Tellus energy levels. Or it may have been supernatural. Norbert’s theory was that any sufficiently advanced irate machine intelligence was indistinguishable from an angry god.
The Architect of Aeons Page 43