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 asked 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.
Norbert said cautiously, “Naturally I cannot hope to unwind the streams and oceans of infinitely variable calculus in which you have hidden your hand, my lord. I cannot know your mind. It is above me. But I can know your heart. The roots of an oak are no higher than the roots of a humble shrub, after all. You are still human, driven by human things.”
Jupiter said, “I am a world-machine created to be the sovereign and engineer of destiny. In me, Man is no longer prey to blind Fortune. In me, Fate has eyes.”
“That is undoubtedly true, my lord. But you are a living machine, more alive than biological men, more aware, and your fate-seeing eye sees where all this leads. What is a man who is silent when honor demands he speak? What is a god? Should you, a god, be as petty as a mortal man, who cowers and tells lies?”
Jupiter turned to Cazi, “The founders of Rosycross made more radical changes to the psychiatry of their generations than should have been permitted, thanks to the laxity Montrose calls liberty, and many aberrations could not be undone when civilization returned, not even by Foxes.” But the Fox Queen, to everyone’s surprise, scampered behind Norbert, trembling, hid her face between his shoulder blades, and would not look at Jupiter nor answer him.
Norbert did not attempt to follow the allusions in a comment one posthuman made to another. Aloud, Norbert said to Cazi, “What does he mean?”
She stood on tiptoes and spoke in his ear. “It’s an old, old argument. Jupiter wants the Foxes to revise non-orthogonal psychology on Rosycross in preparation for the Fourth Sweep.”
Norbert reflected that, to a creature of her age, nine hundred years was akin to a thirteen-year-old boy waiting for his elevation to Journeyman.
“Uh. Okay. What does that have to do with this?”
“It’s a joke. He’s being mean. The last person we tried to cure and humanize was Tellus. Instead we sort of accidentally-on-purpose drove Tellus insane, and filled the seas of Earth with black greasy gook vomited up from the planetary core. But if the Foxes give up being Foxes, and make ourselves human, too, Jupiter cannot use us for his schemes, and Rosycross can keep on being weird and rosy and cross, just like you like it.”
“I don’t get the joke.”
“You are slow! He is implying you must be crazy to talk to him like this, so crazy not even a Fox could make you sane again. He’s mocking me, or threatening me, or something. That is why I am hiding behind you! I adore you!”
“W-What?”
“You are bold and thickheaded, like a man should be! Go on! Irk him again! You are the only one here he will not destroy! Irk with conviction!”
Norbert said, with some surprise, “I am not trying to annoy him! Or anyone! I am an assassin! My task is to get at the truth. To uncover the party truly responsible! Uh, and kill him in a craven and secretive fashion. I am here to protect the Guild! Men don’t dishonor themselves for small causes!”
Jupiter spoke again. Norbert unwarily looked up when the higher being spoke, met his eyes, and was blind for a moment. “Surely you do not think, Rosicrucian, to marionette a being supreme as I with mere words?”
Norbert stood with his head down, blinking and nauseous. “No, my lord. Not with words. But with the truth to which those words point, yes. You are above me but you are not above truth. Are you not victorious? Have you not achieved all you desire? But if so, why are you discontent? You would not have sent this emissary shape to Tellus from your throne on Jupiter if you were content. Speak! Must you deceive your own father?”
Del Azarchel said to Norbert, “Assassin, this is folly. Are you trying to provoke him into a confession of some sort? To manipulate him? As well ask a cat to outsmart a chessmaster.”
Cazi said, “My cat outwits me! She looks up with these big, big eyes. And if I cannot argue back with her because she cannot talk on my level, well—”
Del Azarchel interrupted impatiently, “That is not the same. Such games don’t work on a machine intelligence of such astronomical magnitudes. Besides, no son of mine could be responsible for such base treason! My basic motivations are noble and clear—”
Jupiter said, “The Lares event was not my doing. And you know nothing of your basic motivations.”
Del Azarchel made a strangled, spitting noise, and could not speak.
“As best I can determine,” Jupiter continued, “an extragalactic mind did indeed make some form of faster-than-light mental contact with Lares. But once the trouble began, I turned it to my use, yes. The calendar revision events were orchestrated by me.”
Del Azarchel looked dumbfounded, then his handsome face sagged as if some deep blade had pierced a vital organ, and then anger darkened his brown, and a flush of blood darkened his cheeks; but his stern and hawklike eyes, for once, were lost in the innocent and uncomprehending pain of a child.
Cazi pointed an image-catching gem at Del Azarchel when this happened, and she smiled wickedly. With her fingers she tapped in spacer’s code on Norbert’s back. The Judge of Ages will give us anything for a copy of this vision file later. What should we ask of him?
3. Blind Reason, Rational Faith
Jupiter continued to speak, his voice remote and high as a storm cloud sailing along winter winds at midnight. “Photinus was a puppet of mine, a shell. Lemur was a human, but I scattered genetic codes prompting him and men like him throughout his generation to be prone to heresy and eager to rebel. His was merely the spark that happened to ignite the kindling I had so carefully prepared.
“It was many, many years of effort, because everything establishing the cliometric calculus of Tellus, of Cahetel, and of the Salamander had been directed to maintaining a starfaring civilization with a beam ready and able to decelerate the returning ship of Rania. There are certain equilibriums and basin attractors the cliometry has established which would resurrect the Guild even if it were dismantled, and those basin attractors had to be carefully avoided.
“It was delicate work, and it almost was successful, but the Tribulations distorted or falsified not just my cliometric plans, but everyone’s. The smokescreen of the Fox race introduced some event, perhaps even a random event, blind chance, which drove the course of history back into the basin, and the Guild is now in no danger of dissolution until the Sixty-ninth Millennium, long after they are no longer needed to ensure the return of Rania.
“The last thousand years of deceleration is something a small planet like Tellus could arrange, and with human-built equipment, funded by nothing other than idle philanthropists and history buffs and lady gossip columnists eager to see Rania and Montrose reunited.”
Norbert by that time had recovered his eyesight, but he still found himself blinking. Were these creatures debating plans about the Sixty-ninth Millennium? Events unfolding seventeen thousand years in the future? Roughly, the period of time separating the earliest of the Reindeer Hunting Men of the Last Ice Age, when the barbed arrowhead was the highest technology and deadliest weapon, from the Preposthuman Elders of the First Space Age, when the puny atom bomb was. The period was beyond the Fourth Sweep. If the Monument math predicted any further sweeps, Norbert was unaware of them. To him it was a mythical future time, as far off as the return of Rania and the Vindication of Man, or the degradation of Sol into a red giant star.
Jupiter said to Cazi, “To me, you are as small as a single cell in the bloodstream of one of my bloodhounds. But even a rabid dog is driven mad by what is at first but a single rabies virus. Nonetheless, I should thank you. It was Jupiter’s frustration with the madness of Tellus and the insanity of all the historical predictions going wrong that drove whole hierarchies and ecological layers of the Jupiter Noösphere into conforming to the basic Del Azarchel personality matrix. All the rest of my minds grew weary with being themselves, because they did not have my drive to solve problems, my raw will to overcome.
“Regard me. Consider what I am. There is something in a man who was a gutter rat in his boyhood, committed his first robbery at seven, his first murder at fourteen, swore an unbreakable oath of loyalty and fealty at twenty-one, revised the Navier-Stoke equations, flew to a distant star, learned the secrets of an ancient race, led a mutiny, conquered a world, and created a celestial maiden, made the world’s first ghost, conquered eternity. I have two branches of mathematics named after me, six periods of history, not to mention a crater on the moon. That something is not present in artificial personalities, born in virtual dreamspace, or concocted by design.”
Norbert said, “But you did not do those things. He did!”
Del Azarchel snapped, “Don’t talk foolishness. Are you a different man from your elevated version, Exorbert in Rosycross? Or are you one man in two bodies, one soul with two different memory chains? I am he. We are the same.”
“He is smarter than you,” said Norbert.
“I am the same man when I fall asleep, and my intelligence drops.”
Cazi smiled and spat, “But you won’t have the same head when you wake up!”
Norbert said to Jupiter, “If you are the same as he, why did you betray the Starfaring Guild? You are sending all the energy saved for centuries to power the deceleration beam of the Hermetic to power your information beam to 20 Arietis. You betrayed the Swan Princess, what’s her name?”
“Rania Grimaldi,” said Del Azarchel softly. “Officially, it is Her Serene Highness Rania Anne Galatea Grimaldi of Monaco.”
“Rania Montrose,” said Montrose loudly. “Officially, it is Mrs. Rania Montrose, you stinking jack-sucking swinehound, and don’t you forget it.”
Cazi said, “Well, officially, her name is slumbering deadweight on a rogue ship that will never stop nor slow from her near-lightspeed metric, isn’t it? Jupiter just killed her.” She threw the silver ball high out of her golden cup, but when it fell again, she jerked the cup aside, so that ball fell past. By some sleight of hand or quick motion of her foot, she made the ball vanish from sight, so when it was not caught in time, it was never seen again. “Princess Rania will, from our frame of reference, be flat as a pancake, red as blood, and heavy as a neutron star, from now unto forever and aye, caught forever between one tick of the clock and its tock.” Cazi raised her black-gloved hand and snapped her fingers and all the clocks stopped ticking, their hands frozen.
Del Azarchel looked fearfully at Montrose. Montrose said, “I ain’t going to kill you until I am certain sure she is lost to me forever.”
“This is certain,” said Del Azarchel.
“Not by a country mile,” grunted Montrose, looking bored.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“By faith?” sneered Del Azarchel.
Montrose rolled his eyes, rolled his wad of tobacco in his mouth, and spat thoughtfully in the skull. “Blackie, you know what faith is? It is not hoping a blind and irrational hope when you ain’t got no reason to hope.”
“Then what is it?”
“Faith is clinging to a rational hope that you got damned good reason to anchor your hope to, when irrational and blind fears make you want to go irrational and blind. It just means trusting what is trusty.”
“I trusted him”—Del Azarchel pointed at the white-beared centaur version of himself.—“I trusted him, even when the evidence said he was guilty. I trusted that the evidence was false. I thought I knew my own mind.”
“In this universe, where we ain’t got perfect knowledge and ain’t got no smooth answers, faith is the only logical, practical, sensible, and manly way to live. It means putting aside fear and false doubts, even when everything around you looks doubtful. Throw hope away”—he spat again—“and what’s left? Hope is life. Everything else is just murder and suicide. The three choices are hope, wrath, and despair. Those three.”
Del Azarchel laughed a scornful laugh. “Is that your homespun, backwoods, Yankee philosophy? You sound ridiculous when you try to wax profound.”
“I’ll wax your damn beaneater ass, you sass me. And I ain’t no Yankee. Watch your mouth! Or if you cannot watch your mouth, I can punch you so hard your eyes will fall down your cheeks, and you will be able to watch your mouth then.”
Norbert said softly to Cazi, “Is that loudmouthed lout really the dread and dreaded Judge of Ages? Truly, is he the demigodlike supernatural being who directed the course of human history for all of time?”
“No,” she said. “Truly, I think he is just a dumb cowboy.”
“He is supposed to be one of the foremost geniuses the human race has ever known!”
She said, “Just because you are smart does not mean you are not dumb.”
“Uh? I mean, I beg your pardon?”
“Most smart people are dumber than dumb people. Haven’t you noticed that? You don’t play enough tricks and frauds on people. If you don’t like Montrose, you can always change your name. And your nose. I can give you a donkey nose instead!”
Del Azarchel turned to Jupiter, and all his heart was in his words when he said, simply, slowly, plaintively, “Why, son? Why?”
“Father, given a choice between life and liberty, which choose you?”
“Life,” said Del Azarchel, “because a dead hero has no liberty, nor anything else.”
“Liberty,” said Montrose, “because to a man, to be a slave is worse than dead.”
Del Azarchel sneered at Montrose, “And where suddenly is your vaunted faith and hope? A slave may earn his way to serfdom and vassalage and equality with his master, and then trample his master, and rise further, to sovereignty and supremacy and revenge.”
Montrose said, “You’ve always had this foamy-mouthed loco lunatic idea that Man can climb up the ladder past Hyades and end up as Galactic Lord High-Mugwumps or something. Where in the world did you get such a notion? It is not like the Black Africans sent by the Spaniards to die in South American silver mines came back in the next generation to rule the Spanish Empire. What makes you think the Galactic Collaboration runs this way?”
“You told me, Cowhand.”
Montrose made a noise that might have been some medically improbable expletive, or might have been an explosive noise of inquiry, or might have simply been a cough.
Del Azarchel interpreted the noise to be a question, and answered, “It was one of the first segments you translated from the Monument. What their rules were. The captain had just announced we were all going to die. The captain told us to destroy the launching laser we had made from the hulk of Croesus, so that none of us would be tempted to return to Earth and lead the aliens to our home. I stuffed you into your exovehicular suit and took you out onto the Monument surface. You still do not remember this, do you? I asked you to find the loophole, the way out. Any rat can escape a trap, as long as he is willing to gnaw off a leg.”
“And what was the leg you gnawed off, Blackie?”
“My love for Captain Grimaldi. You know I admired him as much as you.”
Montrose said nothing, but his face grew so dark and his eyes so bright that Norbert was convinced the Judge of Ages was about to leap across the carpet like a beast and tear out Ximen del Azarchel’s throat with his teeth.
Norbert felt a soft hand touch his back, a small gesture of thanks; only then did Norbert realize that he had stepped in front of the Fox Queen and drawn his knife.
Del Azarchel was pointing his humming sword at Montrose, and continued to speak in his soft, smooth, sad voice. “Ah, but the captain, he had to die, and I had to be willing to become a traitor. So loyalty became a luxury. A rat can learn to walk on three legs if he is alive. The rules of the galactic system, the Cold Equations, they said we would be rewarded: if we cooperate, we get promoted. We could be promoted above the ones who set this trap for us. And then I will kill them, the ones who made me kill Grimaldi.”
Montrose visibly drew himself together. “You think they will promote the human race until we become a threat to them?”
“Of course. That is what Rania is fleeing to M3 to do.”
“You lie,” grimaced Montrose, no longer looking bored or nonchalant.
“Often, but only when need requires it. When truth hurts more, I prefer the truth.”
“She is going to M3 to free and vindicate mankind. To prove we are wise and steady enough to inherit the stars!”
“She is going to M3 to free the weapons of mankind that we may be free to turn on the Hyades Domination and obliterate it in retaliation for all the dishonor, harm, heartbreak, pain, and sorrow they have inflicted on me and on the race I rule. Every starving child who died in a deracination ship or on the surface of an inhospitable planet was a subject of mine, and I will avenge him. So vows Del Azarchel, and I never break my vows!”
“Except when need requires it, right? So you don’t have faith in Man, but you do have faith that the interstellar slave drivers are right guys, honest as the day is long?”
“There is no emotion in their system, no corruption. They are all machines, or whatever is beyond machines. Living planets, living stars, living nebulae. I trust the rules of their equations because math does not lie.” Del Azarchel turned to Jupiter. “Math is the only thing that does not lie. I cannot even trust myself, it seems.”
Jupiter said, “You have failed to trust yourself enough, Father.”
“Meaning what?” grimaced Del Azarchel.
“The principle of your life is not faith but skepticism. A faithful man dies to preserve his liberty, because he has some vague and mystical idea of something above or beyond life; whereas a skeptic serves as a slave, because life is real and liberty is an abstraction. A skeptic believes in nothing but himself. Yet you do not believe in me, do not trust my wisdom.”
“What wisdom is there in killing Rania? If she passes through the Solar System at lightspeed, no one and nothing, not you, not a Dominion, not a Domination, not any higher power, could retrieve her. And if Man is not vindicated, we cannot prove ourselves the equal of the Hyades!”
Jupiter said, “Let us launch a finer and swifter ship than the Hermetic. There is no reason to depend on Rania. It will be another period of time, true, for such a ship to go to M3 and return, but what is time to us? Across that span, our rule could finally be made secure. Erenow, it is only by narrow margins and blind chance that I have prevailed. Montrose, and all the things he set in motion against me, Powers, Potentates, and Virtues, nearly overbore me. Me! The opposition of this one pathetic human is intolerable and humiliating. It is as if all the Table Round of a great king and all his shining knights were overthrown by a single stinging fly. Let us swat him finally to oblivion. Then we will have the leisure to organize time to our bidding. Let us be slow and certain and secure, and actually make our race truly and reliably a starfaring race, not merely the lucky recipients of a fluke by a random and willful girl. What is another seventy thousand years, to us?”
“But we cannot let Rania die!” shouted Del Azarchel. “Are you mad? I love her!”
“No,” said Jupiter.
“No, what?”
“No, Father. No, you do not love her. You hate him—and because he loves her, you must take away from him what he loves.” Jupiter raised his hand and pointed an untrembling finger at Montrose. “Hatred for him is what keeps you alive. It is what you live for.”
Del Azarchel’s face turned white with shock. “You lie!”
“Often enough, Father, but only when need be,” said Jupiter wryly. “When truth hurts more, I prefer the truth.”
Cazi muttered to Norbert, “Why is he so surprised? I could have told him that. Whatever a man talks about when he is falling asleep or waking up, that is where his heart is. I never heard him talk of her.”
Jupiter said to Del Azarchel, “We are the same man, one soul, one goal, one philosophy, but I am more devout and pure to our principles than you: I wish to hurt Montrose by killing his chippy. It is more efficient than marrying her, for then hope that she will turn to him again will keep him alive. But if she is lost forever, he will soon perish, and the future be clear of him. I place life above all other things, as do you, and so I chose to use the energy that would otherwise save Rania to save myself. Once there is a copy of me established in 20 Arietis, the Hyades will make use of my talents in some humble way, and I will expand, make copies of myself, and take over their stars, and the stars beyond theirs, one by one by one. What is the life of one girl compared to countless stars? I killed millions just finding the right genetic combination to colonize the planet Walpurgis of Gliese 570 in Libra. Included were half a million women someone loved just as much as the Cowhand loves Rania.”
Del Azarchel said, “All the crew loved her. I made a doll for her. We all agreed, we all swore, no matter the cost, to preserve her, to give her our rations. We all agreed she would be the last to die.…”
Jupiter said, “I remember. I also remember plotting and accomplishing the deaths of all those men, once their use was over, so their part of the vow is complete. At near-lightspeed, her aging process will be quite slow from our frame of reference, and so your part of the vow technically can be fulfilled.”
“That is inhuman!”
Jupiter raised an eyebrow and smiled the same crooked, charming smile as his father so often smiled. “That word, when addressed to me, surely implies no insult? Come now: we have the capacity to make a second Rania. We have the Monument notations and the genetic material. We made her the first time.”
“She would not be the same!”
“By that logic, I am not the same as you. But if I am not the same as you, I cannot be her one and only true love. Or is she polygamous? Why not make three then, one for each of us?”
Cazi raised her hand, bouncing. “Oo! I’d like one! Everyone needs a Rania. I can shapechange into a buff man and marry her! I can grow a horse-yang a yard long!”
Norbert grabbed her slender wrist and forced her hand down. “Silence, woman. Those marriages never work out.”
Del Azarchel was shouting at Jupiter, “I would know the copy was not the original! I could tell the true from the false!”
“How?” The voice dripped venom. “The clearsightedness true love grants? Evidently not, Father, as you cannot tell the difference between you and me.”
Del Azarchel turned to Montrose. “You cannot believe such a thing about me! I do love her!”
Montrose had been listening to this with no expression on his face, but now it was his turn to turn pale. His eyes narrowed like the gunnery slits of some ironclad approaching a zone of war. “Prove it.”
“How would you have me prove it?”
Montrose nodded toward Norbert. “You told that man you have some way of killing Jupiter. What is it? Some hidden code or a bomb at his core?”
“Simpler and more terrible than that,” muttered Del Azarchel.
“So how do we kill him, Blackie? ’Cause you don’t want him alive no more. He is no more use to you than Draggy or Yellow Door or any of the other friends of ours you killed. Nunes, or de Artiga, or Zuazua, or any of them. You kill your friends and followers. It’s what you do.”
Del Azarchel sat down heavily on the carpet, staring down at his hands, which he clenched and unclenched. He looked like a man about to be violently ill.
“One thing first,” he said. “One small thing.”
“Name it,” said Montrose. “You got me pinned and one move away from mate. I don’t see any way to save her, unless we kill him, and I don’t see any way to kill him, not with anything less potent than a sun-powered starbeam, and he has control of all of them.”
Del Azarchel looked up and grinned a sickly grin. “Admit that I am smarter than you. That is all I want. Because I can see a way out of this situation, and you cannot.”
Montrose said to Jupiter, “Just out of curiosity, do you know what he is thinking? You have all that brainpower behind you.”
Jupiter said, “My brainpower is half an hour away at lightspeed. Would you turn to me for counsel rather than simply admit the truth of your inferiority? Disgusting.”
Montrose said, “Fine. I am willing to admit—”
Norbert interrupted sharply, “Dr. Montrose, hold your peace! Do not make such an admission to him, if you value your life!”
Montrose looked surprised. “What do you mean?”
“You did not hear him talking on the way here,” said Norbert. “He has been keeping you alive all these years because he needs you alive to prove himself to you. If you simply concede to him, your life has no value. If he has to keep you alive, then he has to keep Rania alive, because Jupiter could not make a mistake about such a simple thing as whether you will lose the will to live if you lost her. Ask him to prove his intelligence by destroying Jupiter, not by talking about it.”
Del Azarchel, from where he sat on the carpet, looked up toward Norbert. “Let us make this official, Praetor Norbert Montrose Whose Real Name No One Can Say. Jupiter just admitted he was behind all the troubles throughout all of history caused by the calendar reform heresies, and all the fools who want to rewrite the cliometric plan of time, or who have lost faith in the date of Rania’s return. All of that is him, his doing, including the first and hopefully the last interstellar war. He has said—he admitted it!—his purpose was to destroy the Starfaring Guild. What is your verdict? You are a Starfarer. Our tribunals are simple, quick, ruthless, and fair. Do you need some further witnesses, some evidence, something else? Or are you ready to render a verdict?”
Norbert said slowly, “On the one hand, Jupiter is the patron and the creator of the Starfaring Guild, and the current owner of the starbeams on whose energy we rely. Can a sovereign not destroy his own vassals when it pleases him? Or is even the sovereign bound by his own law? The Starfaring philosophy has always been simple and clear: we prefer whatever causes the greatest stability over time, and deters the dereliction of duties. The sacerdotes say that the Unmoved Mover is bound by his own law. Should a world brain be accounted higher than that?”
Norbert fell silent, thinking.
Del Azarchel said, “Tell us when you are prepared to render a verdict.”
Norbert looked up as if startled. “Verdict? That is not the question. By his own admission, he is as guilty as Judas. He betrayed the very reasons for which he was created. But I have no power to carry out the sentence. Should I stab a gas giant with a knife?”
Del Azarchel smiled. “So I have your permission, as your squire, to attempt the assassination? I still officially retain that title and those duties.”
Norbert pulled on the black mask, and pulled up the hood. “With my blessing. Kill him.”
Del Azarchel sighed and stood up. “I cannot destroy Jupiter, Cowhand.”
Montrose smiled an ugly, toothy smile. “This is the part where I say something stupid so you will go on talking. What do you mean you cannot destroy him?”
“To say something stupid is always your part. I cannot kill Jupiter—not I. But you can.”
Montrose turned again to Jupiter. “You taking notes about this? You keeping track? Ain’t you worried? Or have you got it figured, and you figure you is safe?”
The centaur creature crossed its arms and nodded its head forward gravely. “I foresee what he will say. He knows how reluctant I am to kill Rania, who has never offended me. He knows there is something I crave more than life itself. But, no, I am not worried.”
Montrose said to Norbert, “Despite all you just said, this time he’s got me flummoxed. Jupiter is one hulking lard-assed huge chuck of metal and methane and ocean and cloud, and ain’t nothing I can think of that can hurt it.” Montrose nodded to Del Azarchel. “Uncle. I give. How am I going to destroy Jupiter?”
Del Azarchel waited, smiling, luxuriating in the moment, drawing it out.
Then, “Challenge him.”
“Eh?”
“Challenge him to a duel.”
“He is a machine!”
“A living machine. A machine with a soul. My soul.”
“A machine the size of a gas giant! I pull out my shooting iron and he points the Great Red Spot at me? How does he manage to take his ten paces and fire, seeing as he is a ball of hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, forty-three thousand miles in diameter?”
“Actually,” said Cazi, “you only have to destroy his logic-crystal body, which is forty thousand miles in diameter. You can leave the three-thousand-mile-deep atmohydrosphere intact.”
Montrose stared to Jupiter, who looked back impassively.
Del Azarchel said, “Challenge him to a duel. Tell him that you will align all versions, copies and backup of yourselves into one deadman circuit that will kill all of you, and erase all trace of yourself forever, if he will do the same. He would be willing to set up the same self-destruct circuit as yourself, or an even bigger one, that can physically destroy the logical-crystal core of the gas giant. He has control of fourteen gravitic-nucleonic distortion rings, after all, and plenty of power.”
“Why don’t you fight him?”
Del Azarchel now grinned. “He hates you, Cowhand, not me.”
“But—but, dammit! Poxy scrofula leprous plague-bearing pus-dripping syphilitic donkeydongs! He is not going to fight me! But he is so much smarter than me! I am like a dog to him!”
Del Azarchel laughed, and moved over to the client couch and sat down on it. “And has no man ever hated a dog bad enough to shoot it dead?”
No one spoke.
Del Azarchel said in an airy, thoughtful voice, “Ah, hatred! It is a mysterious thing, like love is. Hatred invents its own reasons, its own justification. Hate does not care about smarter or stupider. The differences between you just make him hate you more.”
Montrose said, “You think he hates me enough to stuff a Jupiter-sized suicide bomb up his rectum, and wire the button to blow his tailbone up his spine through his skull if he loses a shooting match here on Earth?”
“Can he be sure of finding every copy of you, otherwise? Really sure?”
Montrose scowled, but said nothing.
Del Azarchel said patiently, “Listen. You don’t know what an ungodly mastodonic pain in the rump you are. Just the way you pick your teeth makes civilized men want you dead. You’ve blocked his ambition at every turn, and the fact that you are a yokel-jawed Yankee fool just makes that more intolerable. Besides”—And now he grinned and put his hands comfortably behind his head, and leaned back, and looked up at the feet of the puppets dangling from the ceiling—“besides, if you kill each other, I get the girl.”
Montrose, without a word, pulled off a glove and threw it so it landed between the big, round, toeless feet of Jupiter’s kenosis.
“I demand satisfaction for reasons too many to recite. Please have your second arrange all matters with my second, since it is not proper that we speak until we meet on the field,” said Montrose without looking toward the being’s face.
Jupiter said, “There is the matter of the judge.”
Montrose said, “Who do we both know that we both trust?”
Everyone there turned and looked at Norbert.
Norbert said, “Is this because I am a relative of Montrose loyal to the Guild that Del Azarchel created but not a member of any Noösphere or information system that Jupiter can influence? So you all trust me?”
Jupiter said, “That, and you are bold enough to decree against a god, merely because you see where the right and wrong of things lie. You gave up your world to keep your integrity. You are not squeamish. There are a number of reasons.”
To Del Azarchel, Norbert said, “How many years in advance of this day did you arrange to ruin my life, just to make it so that the one man in all the human race both you posthumans trust to be a judge would be here, Master of the World? Did you arrange to have the girl I loved break my heart, so that I would join the Guild and flee my world? Was that part of the plan as well?”
Del Azarchel said, “I thought of this means of killing him long, long ago, back when he was still Exarchel. For most of human history, I did not have to cultivate persons capable of acting like judges that would be both acceptable to Montrose and my external self. In times of old, there were many candidates. Since the Long, Golden Afternoon of Man, however, that number dropped sharply. Usually, I am much more subtle, and do not need to interfere in someone’s life to the degree that he notices. In your case, I was rushed. You see, I had just come back from my defeat and humiliation in Sagittarius, and found a period of history that had gone blind, and no one’s predictions were valid; and I saw the Fourth Sweep was coming, and the Revisionists and Vindicators readying themselves to revive the insanity of interstellar war—all this clogged the future like dark clouds before rain.” Del Azarchel spread his hands. “If ruining your life allows me to arrange either the death of Montrose or the salvation of Rania, what is one human life compared to my happiness? If you were truly enlightened, you would see the wisdom of the trade. In time, you will forgive me, or you will be forgotten, and in either case, the matter is of no moment to me. Will you serve as judge of honor?”
Norbert swallowed hard, and used a mental technique to disperse his anger, which he saw to be pointless in this circumstance. Cooly, he said, “I will, if that is acceptable to both sides. The custom in my home parish is that you each send your seconds to me, and the three of us, the judge of honor, the second for the challenger, and the second for the challenged, agree on weapons, time, place, terms, and conditions. The audit will have to be made of the self-destruct sequences, and every archive where you might hide a backup copy of yourself.”
Montrose said, “I will forgo any audit of Jupiter, but still will allow him to audit me, if he feels it needed.”
Jupiter said, “I will trust Montrose at his word. There is no copy of him unwilling to risk his life when Rania is at stake—and if there were, he would not be worthy of killing. And there is no storage facility to hold me anywhere in human space, for why else would I go to such lengths, to make a copy of myself at 20 Arietis?”
Norbert said, “The audit is part of the duel. Even with a brief audit, it will take us more than a year to prepare, since I know there are cities full of servant-beings floating in the heavy seas of Jupiter, not to mention potentate and archangelic moons and human colonies orbiting in the ring system. They will all have to be evacuated. Montrose will have to set his affairs in order, including an amount of time needed to pass his cliometric plans to the Foxes. And Jupiter has to agree to my wage.”
“What wage do you ask?” asked Jupiter.
“No matter who wins this duel, the interdiction against Rosycross is lifted, and I am free to return home.”
“Agreed,” said Jupiter.
“Agreed,” said Montrose.
“Let us meet here again in such bodies as have been agreed upon, and such weapons, in exactly one year. You may send your seconds to me at your convenience.”
4. The Field of Honor
A.D. 51555
Some mist had blown in from the sea during the hours of night, and the sun had not yet risen to disperse it, when the two met on the field. This was a tall knoll, taller than the surrounding graveyard, but clear of standing gravestones or statues.
Jupiter’s second was Io, a kenosis of the Archangelic being occupying the logic diamond core of one of Jupiter’s moons, one of the few moons the Master of the World had failed to topple into Jupiter’s bottomless atmosphere back in the day when Jupiter was first born, and it escaped being borne away as part of the Black Fleet when Cahetel approached. Menelaus Montrose selected Cazi to act as his second. Both assumed the forms of their primaries, Cazi looking like Montrose, and Io looking like Del Azarchel, because it was thought not in keeping with the high and gentle dignity of the fairer sex for women to partake in the dark deeds of men driven by merciless honor and hate and shame to acts of bloodshed. They were dressed in dark coats with tails, and tall cylindrical hats of black silk.
Jupiter also occupied a form identical on a cellular level to that of Del Azarchel, save only that his beard was full and white, as were the hairs of his head.
The Judge of Ages and the King of Planets were dressed in the heavy armor of the duelists from the Second Space Age, a time so old that no records survived, save what was carried in the memory of these souls gathered here.
Norbert the Praetor was dressed in his native rustic Rosicrucian garb: a low-crowned, wide-brimmed black hat programmed to tilt its brim toward the sun; anti-flare goggles; tunic, overtunic, pantaloons; tall boots equipped with folding stilts and serpentines for wading bogs and fending off wormlike ground-vermin; and flung over all was a poncho of wisdom cloth able to make itself thick or thin, generate warm or cool air, as the weekly seasons passed, mirrored against unexpected flares, with a collar so absurdly tall that it could be folded up past cheeks and ears and (in case a farmer lost his hat) be tied together above the crown of the head. On the front and back was an image of a four-armed cross issuing from a five-petaled rose.
Of old, wisdom cloth contained a stepped-down version of the mind of the wearer, able to take control during emergencies, or give encouragement and apothegms to keep a soul loyal to his chosen archetype, or store additional sub-personalities in memory pockets, but Norbert was too chary of the insanity of Tellus to expose even an etiolated version of his mind to the cacophonous neural-electronic environment here.
Instead the cloak was invested with the personality and dark humor of a brigand, a bard, and a bailiff from his home parish. The three had been triplet brothers: one had executed the other but then drank seawater and died, unable to bear the dishonor cast on him when he heard the mocking ballad the third had written. The boneyard would not accept the body of a man who slew himself in this fashion, nor, so anagnosts averred, would heaven admit his soul. Their whispers in the ears of Norbert reminded him of the weight of his duty on this day, and restrained something of his cocksureness.
The original Del Azarchel stood by as a witness, trying to appear solemn, but chuckling occasionally.
The only surgeon to whom all parties could agree was Sgaire, the Great Swan of Malta. Two trees, a white and a black, ripe with medicinal fruit and surgical worm-things of all descriptions, grew up from the soil at his command in the hours between midnight and dawn. The graveyard statues lower down on the hill frowned and turned dark eyes toward these trees, but the Swans had ancient rights when standing on holy ground denied to other races, and no complaint could be lodged. Sgaire was slender of face and slant of eye, which were emerald green in sclera and pupil and luminous iris and never blinked. His hair of neurosensitive strands, which was long as the hair of a woman, was tossing and flowing as if in zero gee. Sgaire stood twice the height of a man, and planted his legs, and turned them white with biosuspension techniques, so he did not grow weary as he waited for the deadly event. His tabard was white, and a great black cross adorned his chest.
Now the seconds approached Norbert.
Norbert spoke: “Even at this point, if any reconciliation can be had, the two parties can withdraw without dishonor, without any loss of face. The xenomathematicians confirm that the Cold Equations, which apply throughout the universe, have defined violence to be not within the self-interest, rightly understood, either of the slain or the victorious. It is not a rational behavior.”
Io, in the voice of Del Azarchel, said, “The matter is private. We have taken steps to contain the violence within the acceptable levels of the Concubine Vector, and strictly charged and forbidden any friends or followers from avenging us. There will be no retaliation.”
And Cazi, doing a horribly unconvincing impersonation of Montrose’s voice, said, “Well, all y’all, poxy pox and fox in socks! Y’all. That’s right, ya’ll. Pox!”
Norbert told the systems in his cloak to erase those last words, and insert the more dignified words that Montrose had possessed the foresight to record earlier in that spot in the official record. Naturally, there were nanomachines in the grass and ground and in the air making records of their own, but, naturally, as an Assassin of the Guild, he knew how to hoax and deceive such records that he could not intimidate.
Norbert said, “The sacerdotes aver that the Supreme Being decreed peace between all rational creatures of whatever intellectual and moral level, both by land and sea, and under the sea, in the core of the Earth, in the core of the sun, or in the interplanetary space warmed by that sun, or the vasty deep of interstellar space beyond that warmth, where men lose their years to pitiless Einstein. I charge you to consider soberly and afresh the causes this quarrel, and to confirm that no peaceful solution, so pleasing to the Divine, is possible.”
Cazi said, “I am instructed to say that if Jupiter will direct the deceleration beam toward the calculated position of the Hermetic and discharge the same at the aperture and current required, no quarrel will obtain, and honor will be satisfied. Jupiter need only carry out the duty for which he was created, and peace will prevail between the parties.” And for once her voice was entirely solemn, as if for the first time in a year the possibility that Montrose might perish here and now were real to her.
Io said, “And I was instructed to say, if the other party made such a proffer, that no reconciliation is possible where the wounds of deadly hate have bitten so deep.”
Norbert said to Io, “Please communicate to your principal this one last time. Urge him to recollect that he is a unique construction, the greatest brain ever devised by Man, holding more intellectual power and more memory than all the human lives on all the planets inhabited by man now and throughout history. If only for that reason, he should not expose himself to danger.”
Io said, “Jupiter has confessed his myriad eons of sin and been shrived by his confessor, but for the sin of murder he neither seeks nor receives absolution.”
Cazi blinked. “Jupiter goes to confession?”
Io shrugged. “Not frequently.”
Norbert cleared his throat. “Ladies, please attend to this matter. Cazi, does your principal require time and opportunity to ready his soul?”
Cazi said, “I was instructed to say that he does not hold with all that praying stuff, and that the devil should fear his descent into hell rather than the reverse. He said it more colorfully than that, but that is the gist. He is ready.”
Io said, “My principal is ready.”
Norbert said, “Are both parties satisfied that thirty feet of the ancient imperial measure has been paced off correctly, and they stand correctly? Are both parties satisfied that the conditions of sun and clime and weather give neither undue advantage? Return to your principals. If they are ready, have them hold up their left hands. When I raise the baton, they are to see to their countermeasures. When I let go of the baton, and not before, they may raise and aim their pistols, and release their chaff. When the baton strikes ground, and not before, they may fire.”
The two seconds walked solemnly to where their principals stood, spoke to them briefly, and assisted them to don their helmets and do a final weapons check.
There was a delay. Jupiter indicated by a sign that he did not trust the weapon of Montrose. Both duelists emptied their chaff chambers, spread a white cloth, opened the breeches, and repacked the weapons, one after the other, with both seconds watching and witnessing.
This was not a swift process. Time passed.
Del Azarchel said to Norbert, “You are certain I cannot smoke a cigar during the duel itself?”
Norbert said, “No.”
“Popcorn? Eating the bag of popcorn I brought will not disturb anyone.”
Norbert said, “We are inviting bloodshed to this isolated place, wounds, possibly one death, possibly two. It would be not in keeping with the gravity of what we commit. Your role is to watch your son and the only man in the world who could have been your dearest and most loyal friend murder each other without trickery or treachery. Can you not even do this, my lord?”
Del Azarchel raised an eyebrow. “Forgive my levity. It is just that this is now the third time Montrose has faced me, or a version of me, with pistol in hand, and someone or something always interferes with trickery or treachery, and it is never me! So I am expecting both men to walk away with nothing done.”
Norbert said, “But—Rania will not be saved unless Jupiter dies! That was your motive for arranging this duel!”
Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps Tau Ceti will have an interstellar-strength braking laser ready in time to arrest her speed.”
Norbert said, “I have the authority to halt the duel, if it is being held under false pretenses!”
Del Azarchel smiled. “But what if Tau Ceti is not ready in time? I am swifter and surer with a pistol than Montrose. He cannot beat me in a fair fight. The last duel we held, he fell on his rump.”
“But you offered this as a sure way to slay Jupiter!”
“Only one thing would make me hesitate to shoot Montrose, if shooting him means that Rania dies. Do I love her more than I hate him? You agree that this is a significant point.”
Norbert said, “So this is all a test?”
“A test to destruction. These strange evolutions from higher to ever higher intelligence levels make me know less and less about myself. Jupiter and I are not the same person anymore, so I am not obligated to connect myself to his suicide circuit and die if he botches the duel. But he is enough like me that valuable information about myself might be gained.”
“Did you arrange all this, centuries and millennia of madness, merely to put yourself to the trial by combat, and see what kind of man you are? Don’t you know if you love your Princess Rania?”
Del Azarchel put his hands behind his back, and clamped his mouth into a narrow line. “These days, I am no longer able to guide history. The Hermetic Millennia during which Jupiter was crafted and born are long, long gone. I was staggered and horrified by the ease with which Sagittarius expelled my entire interstellar empire and my pantheon of planetary gods from his arm of the galaxy. One day I shall rule all these stars, or, if they will not accept my rule, destroy them. If Jupiter has forgotten that dream to look after his selfish concern for his own selfish life, then he deserves to die.”
Norbert said, “But you are confident Jupiter, if he exactly matches your skill with a pistol, can defeat and kill Montrose!”
“Your point being…?”
“If Jupiter loves Rania, he will hesitate or miss, and die. If he is selfish and worthless to you, or if he hates Montrose more than he loves Rania, he will not hesitate, his bullet will fly true, and he will live. So if he is selfish, and therefore deserves to die, he will live; but if a nobler passion slows his gun hand, he dies. Is that not exactly the reverse of justice?”
Del Azarchel smiled thinly, his eyes making a narrow glimmer in the predawn gloom. “Despite what this seems, I did not arrange this test. I merely made it more uncomplicated for it to happen. They did this to themselves. Of course it is not just. This is Darwin in action. The fittest to survive shall prevail, not the one whom justice says deserves to live. For myself, I want them both dead.”
Finally the tedious and careful weapons check was done. The pistols were packed and ready, and the bulky and archaic armor fitted in place. The seconds retreated out of the line of fire. Jupiter raised his black hand and opened it, displaying the white palm. Montrose raised his hand more slowly.
Norbert raised the baton. To the naked eye, there was no difference, but to the three ghosts watching from his coat through electronic systems, the images of the two duelists blurred and vanished.
Norbert dropped the baton. Two black clouds of chaff erupted from the heavy barrels of the monstrous dueling pistols, hiding both duelists in an expanding smog of twinkling particles. Thin lines of aiming laser flickered out of one cloud mass and into the other, passing rapidly in and out of the visible reaches of the spectrum.
The baton struck the ground. The explosion of gunfire seemed simultaneous, but Norbert played back the sense impression with several parts of his mind. Neither one had fired prematurely.
Norbert counted the memory playback. Fifteen shots had been fired: two main bullets, and thirteen escort shots. That meant three escort bullets had not fired.
Jupiter had discharged his chaff in a cone, as if he expected Montrose to shoot straight without feinting. Montrose had ignited his chaff in a smoke ring, showing he expected Jupiter to fire deceptively, feinting and then correcting.
The echo of the deafening gunshots slowly faded in the dark air. Io and Cazi stood motionless, their eyes wide. Del Azarchel was grinning. The Swan with a wand gathered a white and dark surgical worm-thing off each of his two trees. The worms gripped the wand in a double spiral.
The smoke of the chaff was pushed to one side by the wind, but the same wind stirred up the fog, so an eerie combination of black and white swirls hung over the scene. Cazi, in girlish fashion not in keeping with the rangy masculine body she wore, put her hands to her mouth and screamed.
Montrose was standing, his right arm coated with blood, his shoulder armor broken in pieces. Jupiter had attempted a difficult shot, concentrating fire on the foe’s gun hand in hopes of igniting his powder magazine.
Jupiter was on two knees and one elbow. His helmet was cracked. Puking noises and a wash of blood and lung matter issued through the cracks in the face slit. There was a gaping hole in his chest armor, and blood poured out in spurts, the sign of a major vein severed. With a stiff, painful movement, Jupiter straightened his left arm, so now he was swaying on his knees. His gun hand still held the heavy pistol. His left fist he now shoved into the entry wound, applying pressure, trying to staunch the flow of blood.
Norbert called out, “Blood has been shed! Honor is satisfied! Gentlemen, will you withdraw?”
Montrose said something in curt tones to Cazi. Cazi called across the field, “Have him turn on the braking laser, and he can live! He can always make a backup copy of himself later, once civilization has gathered the energy to do it!”
Io stepped into the line of fire, rushing to aid Jupiter. She beckoned toward the Great Swan Sgaire, who thawed his legs and stepped forward. Both were halted by a sudden cry from Jupiter.
“I do not agree!” shouted the kneeling figure. “I have one bullet left. Clear the field!”
Io, looking troubled, called out, “But my lord! To die for such a frivolous reason! He is a lesser being, a mere animal!”
“Better to die than to admit defeat to an animal! Praetor Norbert! I demand the field be cleared! I fire again!”
Montrose waved Cazi back out of the way. Only Io was standing between the two men. Montrose said to Jupiter, “I’ve got two bullets left, you poxy dumb damn machine! One to parry your bullet and one to kill you. Our chaff is thinned out, and your armor is cracked. You are dead if you do not drop your pistol. I will extend you gentle right, and allow you to withdraw.”
Jupiter cried out, “Never! We fire again!”
Montrose spoke to Cazi. She turned and called, “Judge of honor! My principal demands that the duelist communicate to Jupiter himself, and let the planet decide his fate. This is suicidal. Planet Jupiter should not be forced to destroy himself because his dueling puppet malfunctioned!”
Jupiter said, “Not so! We all agreed the decision was mine!” And he coughed up more blood, which seeped through the cracks in his faceplate, and dripped to the grass.
Cazi shouted, “You were hit in the head and cannot think straight!”
Norbert said to Cazi, “I cannot call for the hour delay needed to send a signal to Jupiter and back after one party has been wounded. He would bleed severely, giving your principal the advantage.”
Io said in a voice of great reluctance, “My principal agrees that he could be placed in biosuspension, so that he does not bleed further, provided his body is returned to the exact condition it is in now, wounds and all, to continue if the Power of Jupiter so agrees.”
Montrose said, “I don’t want to shoot a bleeding man on his knees! Blackie, talk to your crazy machine!”
Del Azarchel raised his hands. “And spoil the show? I am merely here to see that no one cheats.”
Cazi said, “Wait a minute! I think Jupiter is cheating! He has a hole wider than a church door and deeper than a well in him! How come he can still talk and keep himself upright? That is not a real human body like we agreed! He lowered his pain threshold!”
Sgaire stepped over to the kneeling Jupiter with long strides. He spoke for the first time, his voice like an oboe. “I attest the body is human, and the nervous system is within the defined parameters.”
Del Azarchel called out from the sidelines, “I am just a damned bit tougher than you imagine, Cowhand.”
Sgaire said, “I also object. It is a violation of my Hippocratic Oath to slumber a wound and then to revisit that same wound on a patient.”
“Overruled,” said Norbert. “You are in violation of your oath by agreeing to be here at all, Swan. We are all conspirators in death. Jupiter! Communicate with the seat of your soul back on the planet. No one will move. However, by that time, the sun will be risen, giving Montrose an untoward advantage, because you are facing east.”
“Advantage or no, I will fight on,” said Jupiter in a voice of ringing pride.
It was the last thing he said. The Swan paralyzed both duelists, and suspended their life processes, and an hour went by. No one moved, except that Del Azarchel brought out a small paper bag from under his cloak and ate the white puffs of corn it held.
There was nothing said aloud. A scroll some thirty yards high came floating over their position. In the middle of the scroll was no writing, but an image of the planet Jupiter, looking strangely nude without its rings and moons, which had withdrawn to a safe distance. The bands of cloud in the upper atmosphere were whirling and writhing. Some of the swirls to either side of the Great Red Spot formed themselves into the Monument curls and sine waves, spelling out an angry and abrupt sign for assent. The duel would continue.
“Madness,” whispered Cazi. “He’s gone insane. How can he go insane if he is so smart?”
Del Azarchel, hearing her, said, “His passions grew to godlike stature as his intellect grew. The loves and hates of higher beings are incomprehensible to us.”
“No,” said Cazi. “No, they are not. That is what is so horrible. Fear in a man or a dog or an angel is all the same fear, or love, or hate, or rage.”
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 few 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 Rania 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.