“Fires?” Montrose felt a sensation like the cold finger of a corpse trailing down his spine.
“An explosion, just the same size and same stuff as would be if a vessel the size and velocity of the Hermetic struck a meteor no larger than a pebble at lightspeed. Ask your stick. Some of Chloe’s parts still linger there, eh?” Then she spoke some command in a language unknown to him.
Montrose dropped the stick when it spoke, an emotionless voice giving details of distance and direction, time, magnitudes of various energies detected in a cosmic discharge.
The stick unevenly lay amid the rocks. Montrose stamped on the stick and broke it in half to silence the cool, dispassionate voice.
Thokk uttered a sound like a dry hiccough that served her for a chuckle. “I would have cleaned a burial cloth for her, for Rania, but she will never have a grave to fill.”
Montrose clutched his head. “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it! That could have been—something else. Anything else. A meteor with the same ratio of iron and other elements, traveling the same speed—a fragment of the planet Thrymheim—she would not give up so easily. She would keep going even in a pinnace boat.”
The old woman laughed again, and chanted. “The world rolls round for ever like a mill; it grinds out death and life and good and ill; it has no purpose, heart or mind or will. While air of Space and Time’s full river flow the mill must blindly whirl unresting so: It may be wearing out, but who can know?”
“Who are you, really? Some puppet of Blackie’s?”
“Man might know one thing were his sight less dim; That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, that it is quite indifferent to him. Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, then grinds him back into eternal death.”
“You are trying to get me to take down the phantasm barrier, aren’t you?”
The old lady stared at him, her one eye like a dull stone in the shadows of her cloak hood. She said nothing, and Montrose realized that Blackie would at all costs keep from him any hint, any evidence, that might suggest Rania was dead, because this was the only thing making Montrose pliant to Blackie’s plans. If Montrose knew Rania were no more, he would shoot Blackie without even the formality of a duel: just walk up and blow the head off the man who cheated him of the chance of dying on her voyage with her, the man who provoked the alien invasion which forced Rania to her quest.
Thokk said, “I am soon to die: the doings of men in a year mean nothing to me, much less their doings in times so remote none can see.
“But all the great ones who sent the world to weep on your knees, they are as I am, except that they endure a longer time. To them, the period when they will be slaves to Jupiter are all they see. They do not see what lies in the aeon after this, any more than I see next year. What do they care if the Children of Men go extinct?
“And greatest Jupiter, he is also as I am, but merely enduring longer and looking longer. He sees his maker’s vision of a galactic empire, or some such nonsense.
“And the monsters in the Hyades, what of them? Longer still. And their masters beyond the galaxy, where your lady flew in vain, what of them? Longer and longer still, and still they are as I am, looking to themselves, concerned with this life, nothing beyond. For what is beyond? Death, nakedness, dust, emptiness, nothingness. Entropy wins all.”
Montrose was feeling less pity for this crooked figure. The bitterness, the helpless hatred in her words, disgusted him. “If everything is futile, old woman, why talk to me? There is the river. Drown yourself and be done with it.”
“Why? Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles to show the bitter old and wrinkled truth stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles; false dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth!”
“Are you quoting someone?”
She held up her cold and crooked hands. “Look at me. If Tellus could see me, I would be saved and cured. If Jupiter could see us all, he could set things to right, and save us all.”
“Every tyrant promises that. They lie.”
“Oh? If we are all to die in any case, what does it matter if we die in a short time, free as birds, free as uncaught criminals! Or die in a long time, enjoying eons of greatness after long eons of servitude? It is a rite of passage, a payment the young always make to join their elders, a payment of worth. You want to be a starfarer, do you? To sail the endless dark, and see all the mysteries! Well, pay the fare. Pay the fare.”
“And if the fare is the freedom of mankind? Won’t you shed a tear for that?”
She spat. “I will not weep, save with those dry tears shed by skulls who do not live. What has man and his vaunted freedom ever done for me? To me what joy does it give?”
And she turned her back on him, and began to slap her washing against the stones.
His mind was a whirl of thoughts. Rania dead? He decided not to believe it, not for an instant. It would be too much like treason. If he believed it, he was certain that she would return, alive after all, and upbraid him for his lack of faith. You did not trust me to outsmart a simple starship disaster?
But the image in his mind which the old woman’s words had placed there: a man who thinks about a few decades, and does not care about the centuries, or of a machine that cares about centuries, but ignores the millennia; or of posthumans who care about millennia, or Potentates who care about tens of millennia, or Powers who care about hundreds, and yet above them like a black sky were Virtues big as solar systems, Principalities large as stars, and Dominations filling whole star clusters … and to them, the concerns of the gas giants and the living planets were like the tantrums of children, the tempest of an hour, or the lives of mayflies.
The sheer immensity appalled him. He had always somehow thought that a wise man, a moral man, looked to the long term, and sacrificed, when need be, his short-term desires. But what did that become when inflated to a planetary scale, to an interstellar scale, to a cosmic scale?
Live free or die was always the motto he lived by. And now the whole world, all save one desolate and penniless crone, wept for their lost freedom, and were willing to die—
Again, he felt the cold sensation in his spine. No, they were not willing to die. Not to die their own deaths. They were willing that mankind, in some remote eon many millennia from now, should go extinct, or people on far planets condemned to starve amid the cratered salt flats or by shores of seas of boiling ink beneath strange and moonless skies.
7. Verdict
By the time he hiked back over field and flood, forest and plain to the riverside where all the representatives of man had gathered, they were ready to receive him. As before, figures looked down from columns and stepped pyramids, and the fields were filled with Swans and Men, and many races and sub-races of Man. Music played from the whole environment, bird and insect, leaves and lapping waters joining in the refrain to welcome him. Stately thin-faced Swans folded their wings, and bowed, and in the river the whales and lesser cetaceans of the Melusine order sported and wallowed in his honor.
And here also was Blackie, dressed in new clothing, who had a hat with a feather in it. He was spinning the hat on his finger, tossing it in the air and catching it, over and over. He stood near the stairs that led down to a launching vessel.
Montrose did not wait for all the music to cease and the ceremonial bows to be ended.
“Bugger you all,” said Menelaus Montrose in a harsh voice. “You’ve had your fun. I mean to see my wife again. That’s all.”
And he slunk down the stairs to the launching vessel waiting to carry him back to exile in the outer Solar System, and Del Azarchel, whistling and skylarking, skipped after.
8. A Small Moon Burns
A.D. 11322
Within the arms of the mighty crescent of the planet Jupiter, on the night side, among the flashes of eternal lightning, a bright dot appeared sliding across the cloud belts. The countless square miles of sails were focusing the weak sunlight of the outer system lik
e a parabolic magnifying glass into a pinpoint of hell.
At the moment, all three tugs were aft of the great ship, connected by monocrystalline carbon tethers to numerous stanchions dotting the nonrotating segment of the hull, and Del Azarchel could see on high frequency wavelengths both the powerful magnetic fields surrounding the engines, and the blazing star of their exhaust. The tugs were forming a drag against the sail pressure.
A time later (whether it was hours or weeks made no difference to a being with his neural configuration) he beheld Adrastea, the smallest moon in the Solar System, a humble twenty kilometers wide, as it entered the dot of focused light shed by the sail.
As Earth’s moon once had been, Adrastea was tide locked, fated ever to keep the same face toward Jupiter. This bit of ice and rock orbited inside the synchronous orbit radius. To an observer on Jupiter (such as the growing nest of Ghosts whirling as clouds of logic crystal in the upper atmosphere) the little moon would seem to rise in the west and set in the east. Adrastea was also inside the Roche limit, but it was small enough to escape tidal disintegration.
And she was beautiful: egg-shaped, coated with a strange striped pattern of ice and dappled black stone, winged with feathers of dust and snowflakes being continually pulled from her surface to feed the ring system of Jupiter, Adrastea looked like a snowcapped mountain which had floated into a stormy heaven. By some anomaly of planetary formation, it was purer and cleaner than the ice of the rings.
Adrastea would have been doomed eventually. Del Azarchel was merely hurrying a natural process along.
The moon was mostly water ice. Under the beam from the sail, the outline of the irregular little worldlet began to soften and blur. Switching his goggle intake to cameras dotting the ship sail (the giant planet and all the moons suddenly seemed smaller, toylike, yet far more detailed on view, as the immense array gathered over miles of baseline was interpreted in the visual centers of his brain) Del Azarchel could see vents of steam issuing from the little moon like volcanoes made of ice. The steam pressure was greater than escape velocity: the water droplets fled into space, and did not fall down to Adrastea again.
The heat was on the upper, shipward side of Adrastea, the side that had never seen Jupiter. The escaping steam was sufficient to produce a thrust. The orbit would not begin to degrade for months—that is, local months. Adrastea orbited Jupiter five times an Earth-day. In thirty Earth-days over a hundred Adrastean months would have elapsed, and the falling moon would begin experiencing reentry friction.
The fine-grained radar fed him the surface features in such detail that he was able to feed it into his brain as a physical sensation, as if he held the moon in his fist and could feel its texture of stone and snow against his palm. Del Azarchel resisted the temptation recording into his nervous system the sensation of his arm muscles tensing and throwing the moon to fiery doom. He had indulged, long ago, during the long years aboard the NTL Hermetic, with the intoxication of artificial sensations. He promised himself never to do it again, a promise he had since kept, albeit not without some pain. The reality of being a godlike force able to throw worldlets to their doom was better.
The pinpoint flare of energy of a larger object launching from the surface was like a hot needle against his thumb. This was the exovehicular suit used by Montrose, an absurd-looking contraption like a canister-sized boat with arms.
Montrose had been overseeing the placement of the logic seeds on the small moon, molecular technology designed to break Jupiter out of the self-imposed blindness of the phantasm veil. The reentry heat would bring it to life, so that by the time the moon broke into pieces and scattered themselves across the clouds and seas of Jupiter, every fragment would be a virus spreading the antiphantasm logic to any sophont matter it touched.
One small moon was not enough.
Del Azarchel turned his many eyes toward the next moon, Amalthea, an irregular mountain in space almost freakishly red. The planet was massaged by tidal forces, its inner core stirred to activity, so that the moon gave off more heat than it received from the sun. This next moon out had a perfectly synchronous orbit: it hung above Jupiter always in the same spot, orbiting as fast as Jupiter turned.
The energy discharge betraying the position of Montrose slowly, very slowly, reached toward Amalthea. Additional pods of supply crystal grown from and sliced off the ship’s brain were shot toward rendezvous by the ship’s glorious pattern of magnetic fields, here used as a caterpillar drive.
Amalthea would be next. And then two or three the Galilean satellites: Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Europa. And then outer moons.
Their names rang like poetry in Del Azarchel’s mind: Himalia, Elara, Pasiphaë, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda, Callirrhoe, Themisto, Megaclite, Taygete, Chaldene, Harpalyce, Calyce, Iocaste, Erynome, and so on and on.
How many would be burn? Which ones would he spare? Del Azarchel did not know yet. Perhaps all of them would not be enough. Jupiter was a great deal of volume to seed.
And, if need be, the whole system of debris forming the rings and ring arcs would be deflected down into the jovial hell of the roaring jovian atmosphere.
It was a matter of no sorrow to send so famous and ancient a heavenly body crashing into the clouds and seas of methane and ammonia that lurked so tempestuously unquietly below. It was a matter of glory, because to destroy great and irreplaceable things proved a man was great. Del Azarchel contemplated the death of worldlets as a child might contemplate fireworks of blazing rockets. This was his day of celebration.
He wished for someone to share his festive day. The only other person he wanted to talk to was very far away. He turned his bright eyes and brighter cameras toward the constellation Canes Venatici. He could make out the globular cluster of M3. To him it was not merely a fuzzy patch. He could make out individual stars. It was a snowball of fiery dots.
Perhaps a mist of sorrow that he could not, in space goggles, wipe from his eyes dimmed their brightness a trifle. The distance was not just appalling; it was blasphemous. How was he ever to rule such vast and empty spaces?
Only to her had he ever revealed his whole mind. Only she was his equal, nay, his superior.
A man cannot adore his inferiors or his rivals, but the woman he had made for himself, a work greater than himself, he can love. With all other beings, even Exarchel, even himself, he must be dishonest to a lesser degree or greater. Only with her was he the true Del Azarchel. Only with her he did not have to simplify his speech to the slower pace of lesser minds.
No. There was another with whom he could be honest, the honesty of rival chessmasters bent over a board where all the chessmen were seen by both, or facing each other on the field of honor with weapons smoking. Deadly honesty. Menelaus Montrose always had grasped the magnitude of what the Great Work meant.
And now, the two of them could settle down and share a drink, and just chat, compare notes, and …
… and make it like it had been in the old days.
Before Montrose had stabbed himself in the brain with a needle. Before Del Azarchel (he winced at the memory) had urged him so gaily to do it.
Del Azarchel was convinced that Montrose would not have found the courage to do the fatal deed without him. How much differently things would have turned out had Del Azarchel only held his peace!
For the Monument would never have been solved without Montrose’s insanity and insane genius. Rania would never have been born. Somehow the evil deed of provoking his friend had turned out well, but, oh, after how much suffering and war?
A radio message came from Montrose. For a time, the two spoke of technical matters, sail adjustments, reentry angles for the shattered moons, each man coordinating from his side the project of waking Great Jupiter from slumber.
Montrose must have been in a talkative mood, because then he said, “You know this is a poxified damn dripping doinkstump of an idea, dontcha?”
“The signal-to-swearword ratio of your message is approaching white noise, but if you sp
eak of this work, the Great Work, I think it is the finest idea that can be conceived, my friend!”
“Conceived out of wedlock with a she-dog, you mean, because this is one bastard bitch idea. We are making a god to rule over us, and we are not even programming him to be nice.”
“A glorious future is ours.”
“A glorious blister on my anus.”
“Do you still have doubts?”
“Plenty. My hand has been forced. Forced into making this Frankenstein’s monster larger than worlds!”
“You need not blame yourself, friend Menelaus.…”
“Shuddup. I ain’t making no excuses, I am just pointing out the facts. The fact is that just because you wanted this to happen does not mean your hand was not forced, too. What the hell do the aliens want? We don’t know what we are being forced to do and why—and yet you think you’ve won this round, Del Azarchel. The board just grew from eight squares on a side to twenty lightyears volume. And the game Hyades is playing, and the game the masters who own Hyades play, is even wider. So you don’t know what the next move in the greater game shall be, do you?”
“No,” said Del Azarchel. “All your words are true enough. I am but an egg at this point in my ambition: but I am the egg of an eagle, a kingly bird, or a roc, whose wingspan and strength no man can measure. True, the Hyades forced us to wake the Jupiter Brain, and place our world under his power. True, we cannot yet guess the reason.”
“Then why can I hear you grinning? You are as smug as the man who learned to fart fire, and saw what he could save on matches.”
“And you are as downcast as a fox in a trap, who realizes he loves his leg too much to gnaw it off,” said Del Azarchel. “I vaunt not because I know the future, but because I know it will be mine. Even if I cannot say what it shall hold, the future shall hold my Promethean triumph!”