Sgaire, his eyes sad and his face expressionless, raised his slender hand, and Montrose and Jupiter came to life again.
Norbert said, “Fire at will, gentlemen.”
A simultaneous report rang out. The first bullet from Montrose struck the bullet from Jupiter a glancing blow, but enough to send it tumbling, so that it struck Montrose offcenter, striking his armor with a noise like iron thunder, knocking him from his feet. Jupiter was also flung up and back as if kicked by a horse to fall supine when struck by the second bullet from Montrose’s gun, which he had no bullet left to parry.
He fell and did not rise again.
Sgaire ran over, tore open the chest plate of the fallen figure’s armor, and immediately applied a biosuspension technique. They could all see only half his body turn white. The rest remained red, and grew redder. Jupiter was so damaged that even the machines in his bloodstream were malfunctioning. Before Sgaire could do more, an arm and a leg and a large segment of the chest cavity bubbled strangely, turned dark in the unmistakable color of a nanomachine malfunction. Half the body slumped into steaming dark sludge and spreading red blood. Totitpotent cells, now without central control, gathered into clumps in the pool of blood, forming lumps or writhing tendrils like foetal organs, trying to make shapes, but then dispersing again.
The scroll hung in the sky. An hour later, they saw the King of Planets begin to die.
White streaks and stabs of light like sunlight seen through storm shined upward through the cloud. Jupiter’s thought processes had been forced into a pattern of positive interference, and the heat energy associated with his planetary thought was prevented from dispersing correctly. The great being was literally thinking itself to death, destroying itself in the waste heat of its own unimaginable wrath, frustration, and hate.
In the first hours, clouds boiled upward like geysers made of air, and venting gas, powerful enough to exceed the huge escape velocity of that massive planet, began spilling into outer space in streams. Ripples crossed and crisscrossed the cloud layers, disturbing the pattern of bands that had existed for all human history.
Then some internal power supply, bright as miniature suns, ignited deep within the atmosphere. In six separate places, the vast atomic and subatomic and quantum-vacuum extraction power stations, each one larger than Earth, hidden below the outer layer of the diamond brain surface of Jupiter, had ignited.
The hydrogen and methane layers had ignited from the internal heat, and now every third or fourth band of cloud was afire. The atmosphere roiled with what, had the cloud been water, would be tidal waves, as areas of discoloration wider than a dozen Earths opened up across the endless fields of storm.
The core of Jupiter had cracked and was subsiding in places in immeasurable landslips and collapses, opening canyons wider and deeper than oceans, pits into which lesser worlds could have congregated without crowding.
The broken lips of these vast chasms were ringed on each side with endless brightly colored clouds of poison. The super-dense gaseous layers poured down like waterfalls in the titanic gravity. Elsewhere the cloudscape erupted when sudden continent-sized mountains of logic crystal, red with internal heat, reared impossibly high, peaks towering above the cloud.
Some layer of dense atmosphere or ultra-dense hydrosphere, sinking into the gaping wounds of diamond, struck a superheated layer of what had once been Jupiter’s high-speed thought processes, vast bands of molten substance like rivers wider than worlds. The ignition was vast, and the oblate shape of Jupiter began to lose its contour. A ring of debris was beginning to form around the equator from the ejected material.
But all this was mere overture. For a signal had been sent, hours ago, to stations in the sun. The solar beam that Jupiter had been using to copy his brain information to 20 Arietis became visible when it struck the layer of debris swirling like a death shroud high above disintegrating Jupiter. Where the beam struck all matter was instantly evaporated into plasma. The miles-deep atmosphere opened like the bloom of a flower as the non-ignited material was flung upward for hundreds of miles in every direction away from the point of beam impact. The dark chemical substances of the oceans swirled in an immense circular tsunami.
A continuous explosion occurred while the beam head passed through all the layers of atmosphere and hydrosphere to touch the floor of the ocean, which was the outer diamond armor of the brain of Jupiter. The oceans were surrounding an empty cylinder formed by the vapor pressure, a momentary gap of nothingness, into which a hundred Earths could have been plunged. Against the silvery white surface of logic diamond, the reflection of the sun could be seen like the eye of an avenging god, growing brighter and brighter.
The beam cut through the core of the planet. Before ten hours had passed, the planetary rotation had brought the beam over every part of Jupiter’s equator and out the other side. Such was the violence of the sunbeam, to which chemical and atomic explosions were as nothing, that fully one-tenth of the mass of Jupiter was flung into space, forming a vast, multicolored cloud like twinkling ice and black pellets, a nebula painted with all the peacock hues of the rainbow, and two dozen new moons and two new rings of asteroids.
The core was now red hot, and emitting more energy than it took in. The central mass was a ball of seething plasma, as if a sun, smaller than any sun could be, had replaced the heart of Jupiter. It was not large enough to ignite into a star; but for now, it was lit.
But the vast gravity of Jupiter was not so easily dismissed. The nebula was already detectably collapsing, and the newly created moon-sized chunks were spiraling back down, following the broken parabolas of the two new asteroid rivers back toward the blazing core of Jupiter. The blazing plasma of the miniature sun at the core was darkening as more and more matter collapsed onto it, smothering it even as it fed it.
It might be months or years or centuries of time before all of the ejected material was once more claimed and brought back down into a new and white-hot version of Jupiter.
A flaming finger seemed to wander across the colored clouds and torrents of rock and ice of the immense volume of destruction. It was the starbeam, swinging like a searchlight away from Jupiter, now visible as it reflected off the vast nebular mass of the newborn cloud. The starbeam was moving away from 20 Arietis in the constellation Ares and aiming toward the constellation Canes Venatici.
Norbert looked up, shocked. Even with the sun above the horizon, there was a high white point in the sky, brighter than Venus seen at dawn. It was Jupiter, burning. It was a small, pathetic, secondary sun that painted their shadows clear and dark upon the grass.
Norbert saw that everyone was looking at him.
It took him a moment to remember himself. He straightened up and said, “Jupiter has honorably carried out to the last particular all the terms agreed in the covenant. The duel is ended.”
Montrose, bleeding, looked over at where Del Azarchel stood, munching popcorn. “Well, what do you say, Blackie?”
Del Azarchel favored him with a supercilious look. “And what do I say about what?”
“Ever since you fooled me into solving Exarchel’s divarication problem for you, everything you have done has been in order to create that monster brain to be the god of man and rule the human race. All the Hermeticists you deceived, all the work you stole, everything we did to nurse that huge freak to a level far, far above human intelligence, posthuman intelligence, or the intelligence of living moons and worlds. You achieved it. Now you saw it blow itself to bits.”
Del Azarchel nodded, looking pleased with himself. “I think the experiment was a great success.”
“Are you satisfied? Can I sleep now, without any further interruptions? It is only seventeen thousand, five hundred years and change before she returns. Will you leave me the hell alone? Is our duel over?”
Del Azarchel nodded. “Mankind has achieved a stable starfaring form of polity. It will degenerate without Jupiter to lead it, of course, and interstellar trade and commerce will come to an end a f
ew years before Rania returns, but by then she will be moving slowly enough and be close enough that Hyades will not bother to interfere, if I read the Cold Equations correctly. We will win our manumission, and mankind will be elevated to equality with Hyades and the other serfs of the Authority M3.”
“You mean we will be free and independent!”
Del Azarchel shrugged. “Free in name only. My vision will rule here, a vision of monarchy, authority, glory, and power, and your vision of liberty will fail. You have already shown yourself willing to compromise. I think she will cleave to me, and not you, when she comes.”
“You lie. You don’t know her. You don’t know her, and you lie.”
“Normally, such words would call for a passage at arms, but right now I am not in the mood, and you are a mess. I want you to see her on my arm, as my bride, before I kill you, Cowhand. And so our duel is over for now. I suggest a hiatus, a respite, a holiday, to last for seventeen thousand, five hundred years and change. Then we can take up against the disputes that separate us. Agreed?”
Without waiting for an answer Del Azarchel saluted Menelaus Montrose, smiled a wicked smile, handed the unfinished bag of popcorn to Norbert, and turned and marched off. Montrose attempted to rise and go after him, but Sgaire pushed him down and beckoned for his surgical trees.
5. Fox Maiden, Man Wife
Del Azarchel was surprised when he found Cazi sitting on a gravestone at a turning of the white walkway weaving through the graveyard. He looked back toward the hill, seeing what looked like two versions of Montrose, one in armor, one in the sober garments of a second.
He jerked his thumb back toward the Cazi who had been acting as the second during the duel. “Which one of you is fake, my dear?”
Cazi was dressed in a simple red dress with a wide black belt, cinched tightly to show off her figure, and she wore black gloves to her elbows and black stockings to her knees, and about her ankles were bangles and charms. Her hair was a wild red cloud, and her eyes yellow sparks.
“All of us, I think.” She shrugged, which emphasized her cleavage. “I lost track centuries ago. So are you going to resign as Lord of Evil?”
“Resign? No. Retire? Yes. For I’ve won,” said Blackie.
Cazi crossed her legs and kicked them back and forth, idly. “You always seem confident, even when you fib. My next lover will be an honest man.”
“I have a right to be confident.”
“You think you do, do you?” she said archly.
“You see, I was able to study the Second Monument of the Omega Nebula for years. It was redacted the same way as the First Monument of the Diamond Star, so it contained the same message. All the information for how to build Rania was there, and I know the genetic codes for Captain Grimaldi backward and forward. If Rania is as the Monument says a Monument emulation creature must be, then I have won her heart during these years.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“The Monument was created for a higher purpose. What purpose that is, I do not know. Rania is designed to serve that purpose. Even if I do not know what it is, I know this: if all my work and all my wars and all my striving here in the First Empyrean Polity of Man fulfills some part of that grand plan, her designers would have rendered her unable not to favor me.”
Cazi said, “Montrose told me that the Monument was redacted—rewritten—by someone else, some other race, also for some purpose he thinks must be at odds with the first. And all your plans are all based on this cliometric calculus you learned from the Monument, right? But your blueprints included the redacted segments of the Monument. What if her purpose is grander than that? What if she is loyal to the older purpose, whatever it is? There is so much no one knows.”
“One day I will know all.”
“One day, so you say.”
“For now, I have preserved the human race, lifted it from its childhood on Earth to its maturity among the stars. Nothing can be greater than that.”
“Oh, really?” Her look of superciliousness was even more supercilious than his, for she could arch her eyebrow higher and wrinkle her mouth more deeply.
“You think he has won? The Cowhand? He will never win!”
“I think if you loved Rania, you’d talk about her, and not about him.”
“I had my doubts, but if it were not my love of Rania that made Jupiter hesitate to shoot, what did? I watched the duel carefully. The copy of my body was better, faster, more accurate. I cannot lose.”
“He lives for love. You live for hate. You will destroy yourself. That is what hate is.”
“What do you know of love and hate?”
She hopped to her feet. “I know that love is sacrifice. I am going to give up being a Fox Maiden, turn into a real woman, be fertile and have babies, and grow old and die, and I will never see the end of your duel with Meany. I have come to ask you to be the best man!”
“What? Me? We did not exactly part, my dear, on the best of terms.…”
“Men are always so freaked out by a little unexpected castration! I gave it back! You went to a shop and had it stitched back on! Besides, it will do me good to see you at my wedding, because you will be defeated by another man.”
“I can also lend him my dirty socks, and give him a toothbrush that I used to use.”
“So will you come?”
“Who is so insane that he would marry you?”
She looked scandalized. She pouted. “You are kidding, right? It is not obvious? Norbert. You know those Rosicrucians do not think like baseline men.”
“So you will be Mrs. Unpronounceable Name That Starts With an M. And you are going to give up shape-changing and politics and intrigue and toying with the destinies of lesser men? For what?”
“For babies!”
“To eat, knowing you. You will regret it. You will wake up at midnight, wishing you could grow wings, and go eat some politician you wish you could replace.…”
She shook her head. “Not if the Patricians are running everything. We made a race our own tricks would not work on. And if I regret it, I will have another baby!”
“Some women have higher ambitions.”
“Higher than life? I’ve been a queen and the mother of a race and a mistress of intrigue, and I’ve arranged a duel between an immortal man and a tyrant power of heaven. Isn’t that enough for one life? Ambition is lonely. Even a fox deserves a den of her own.”
“You are too good for him.”
“Too wicked, you mean! Norbert thinks he can tame me. I intend to struggle and scratch, and drive him crazy if I can, and break him if he is weak like you. But I want him to win.”
“You are a mad thing,” said Del Azarchel. “But I will be your bridegroom’s best man, if he will ask me, and be honored that you want to have me present. When is the happy occasion?”
She pointed. “There is the cathedral yonder. I will be baptized and alter my cells so that I can never alter them again; and this same day is the solemn wedding mass, and tomorrow we enter the lifting vessel to reach the Sky Island, and then the star port. The Interdict was artificial, a trick, and with Jupiter dead it must be lifted, and the next sailing vessel will depart for Proxima Centauri in a few months, a voyage of only four years at near-lightspeed. He will see the trees of which he dreams, and settle on his little farm, and we will have snow every Sunday and springtide every Monday. I will be his forever, and he will be mine. And…”
“I know. Babies.”
“Lots of them! Life serves life, right? Your Hyades monster friends would approve. What else is life for?”
“I want more,” said Del Azarchel. “I want the stars.”
“And do what with them? Without love, they mean nothing.”
“I will change the constellations to make them mean whatever I see fit that they should mean.”
“Poor, unhappy, doomed man! I pity you! But come and see me wed. I might let you kiss the bride.”
“But why wed him? Be my lover again. You will be dead long before R
ania returns, and you are quite right that there are nights when I grow lonely.”
“For you, the story goes on and ever on to the end of the Eschaton, the end of evolution, until you count to infinity. Norbert may only be playing a bit walk-on part in the great drama of human history, but he has something you haven’t got.”
“And that is?”
“A happy ending. For us, the story comes to rest. I can give him a happy ending.”
He nodded in defeat, smiling, and offered her the crook of his elbow. While Jupiter burned overhead, a freakish and unexpected second sun, brighter than the morning star, they walked together into the shadow of the nave, beneath the tall and richly carven doors that stood wide open, and into dark and solemn silence.
APPENDIX A
Dramatis Personae
Persons named but not present are listed in italics.
Tellurians
FIRST HUMANITY [Intelligence = 100 to 650]
Elders, also called Early Posthumans
Menelaus Illation Montrose—the Judge of Ages
Ximen del Azarchel—Master of the World
Nymphs
Amphithöe—their Conscript Mother (of the First Comprehension)
Witches
Zoraida—an Intercessor (of the Second Comprehension)
Giants
Sancristobal—Friar Sancristobal of the Remnant Order of the Post-Final Stipulation, and a Brother of Penance of the Third Order of St. Frances, called Greyfriars
Melusine
Isonadey, the Ship’s Voice—Captain of the Hysterical Blindness
Manitra, Angatra, Ranavalon—Judicial, Military, and Royal Cliometric leaders of the Remnant Order of the Post-Final Stipulation, which is a Second Comprehension polity
Rosicrucians of Proxima
Norbert the Assassin—Norbert Brash Noesis Mynyddrhodian mab Nwyfre of Rosycross
Exobert—his emulation
Svartvestra—his paramour
Rose—his beloved
Yngbert—Yngbert Perpension Mynyddrhodian; his father
The Architect of Aeons Page 47