He saw also that he could have befriended the Hermeticists, the minions of Del Azarchel, and won their loyalty away from him—merely by augmenting their intelligence. Del Azarchel had deceived and manipulated them, played on their weaknesses, even back when he had been a mere mortal in Space Camp with them.
And more than that, Montrose also saw how Del Azarchel had paid back the men who had followed, loved, and obeyed him. Now it was blindingly clear.
Between A.D. 2410 and A.D. 2510, during the Cryonarch and the Ecclesiarch periods, all but five of the Hermeticists had died in augmentation experiments, destroying their own minds in one vain attempt after another to do to themselves what Montrose had done to himself.
Now he saw from countless tiny clues leaping together into a pattern in his mind how Del Azarchel had caused those experiments to fail. Del Azarchel through Exarchel had corrupted data runs, caused impurities to be introduced into neurochemicals, and had hidden crucial clues from the Hermeticists that might have saved their sanity and lives.
How could the sixty-seventh Hermeticist step over the corpses of sixty-six others to jam the same needle in his brain which had killed all his predecessors? How could he be so proud and blind, so hungry for the superhuman intellect they so worshiped? There was the example of Montrose before them, cured of his insanity by Rania. Then they saw Del Azarchel successfully achieve augmented intelligence, through Exarchel. And Del Azarchel beckoned them on, encouraging them, whispering that the errors made by inferior and bungling predecessors would not be made by them, no, not by them. Their brains and theirs alone were stable and sane enough to survive the shock. Were not the Hermetic Order superior to a mere Texas Cowboy with bad grammar?
With those lies and whispers, Del Azarchel had murdered them all. He had spared only the five whom he trusted to oversee the creation of the five races which were to be used in the creation of the Jupiter Brain.
Montrose could have saved all seventy-two, turned them against Del Azarchel, and spared the world all the pain of the last nine millennia, if only he had known then, if only he had seen.
It was too far in the past for the anger to be anything but dull and remote. It was too late for anything but regret.
How could he have been so stupid?
5. Epiphany
“What is the matter, Cowhand?”
“I saw what you really are like, Blackie. Worse than I thought.”
Del Azarchel shrugged. “What is that to me? We have been about more important things. We translated the Cenotaph while you were sleeping.”
“We?”
“The three of us. Crewman Fifty-one helped me. Yes, you lapsed back into your old habits. Folding a paper makes it weaker along the seam; it tends to fold again there, you know. Ah! It brought back memories! We had a year to work out the problem, and your brain was unoccupied by conscious thoughts, so, why not? I assumed you would not mind, not to save my princess, and if you did mind, what could you do? Shoot me? Challenge me to a duel?”
“My princess,” snarled Montrose.
“She will not be yours if no civilization is here to greet her when she returns. To be a starfaring civilization, we must do what starfarers do: establish colonies; maintain communication and commerce; adapt the human race to new environments; reengineer worlds to suit ourselves. It will take millennia, or hundreds of millennia.
“Yet, to them”—Del Azarchel was grinning, and his eyes glinted like agates—“such spans of time are merely as the passing hours of a day, all these nearby stars merely a handful of sand. What are twenty grains out of a beach? What are threescore stars out of a galaxy one hundred twenty thousand lightyears wide, holding two hundred billion?”
“What the hell is so funny? What are you smiling at?”
“Checkmate, Cowhand. I finally understand what Selene was telling me to resign myself to do.”
“What is it?” Montrose could not suppress rage and hate like boiling darkness in his mind. He was seeing this man, clearly, with the crystal clarity of Potentate level thinking, for the first time. “What is so hard for you?”
“To ask forgiveness!”
Montrose was caught entirely by surprise, and found nothing to say.
Del Azarchel spoke in the same strangled tone of voice, as if smothering hysterical laughter. “After all this time, I and all my dreams are at your mercy, and yet I know you will not sacrifice your queen to stop my king. Didn’t you once tell me our match was a chess game and not a fencing duel? It seems you were right. I cannot but smile, seeing your struggle not to let the unthinkable thought seep into your brain. Tellus and I spoke while you slept. We translated the Cenotaph. It had instructions on how to…”
Montrose saw it. “Tellus spoke. That means you cured him.”
Del Azarchel nodded, grinning. “He cured himself. I merely downloaded a copy of myself into him in an advisory capacity. Something like an advocate for human affairs.”
“In less than a year? And that means that the aliens do not take twenty thousand years to grow their Jupiter Brains. Asmodel detected your work at Jupiter’s core. So the Cenotaph describes a method of how to wake up Jupiter in a reasonable time. Asmodel wants us to wake him up, doesn’t he? That cannot be good for us.”
“You mourn the birth of Jupiter, our man-made god?” Del Azarchel said malignantly, “You should bow the knee in worship!”
“What? You expect me to lick the buttocks of your huge shrine to yourself? Even Jupiter is not big enough for your ego, Blackie! You are darker and warpered than I thought. Warpeder. More warped.”
“Even now you try to resist what the light of intellect makes plain! If you believe me not, ask him.”
“Ask him what?”
“How to be a starfaring polity. How to maintain a civilization across an expanse of colonies scattered by twenty and thirty and sixty lightyears of separation. Ask him—”
The far wall of the cabin where the two men floated suddenly turned glassy, and an image formed in the thin layer of logic crystal coating it. The image displayed a heraldry of a centaur with the Earth under his hoof, and in his hand a sword bound into its scabbard by a trefoil or endless knot of olive branches. The other hand held a round Greek shield whose emblem was a horned circle standing on a cross. On the centaur’s head was the Iron Crown of Lombardy. His face was swarthy and handsome, and the black goatee emphasized the wry quirk of his charming smile.
Del Azarchel said, “Here is Tellus, the mind of all the Earth! Ask him how a monarch can rule so wide an empire if he cannot see his subjects?”
Tellus did not speak. As Montrose went into the final pangs of labor, and felt his thoughts grow lucid, free and wild, exploding rather than expanding, the image of the centaur was replaced by an image of the Moon, and the message written all across the seas and craters surrounding Tycho.
To Montrose it seemed a rush of music rather than words, because the message was primordial, a matter of emotions and moods and dark, soaring chords. But he saw, or, rather, heard the meaning.
If it had been translated into words and simplified, it would have read:
FAILURE: THE BIOLOGICAL DISTORTION KNOWN AS EARTHLIFE AND ITS NANOTECHNOLOGICAL ADJUNCTS HAS FAILED TO PROVE MINIMALLY SUFFICIENT TO SERVE THE DOMINATION.
RESPONSE: TWO RECIPROCAL AND INTERRELATED PRAXES ARE HEREBY ENCODED FOR THE BIOLOGICAL DISTORTION KNOWN AS EARTHLIFE AND ITS NANOTECHNOLOGICAL ADJUNCTS TO ACHIEVE SOPHOTRANSMOGRIFICATION ESTIMATED TO BE MINIMALLY SUFFICIENT.
TERRAFORMATION: LARGE-SCALE TECHNIQUES TO ENGINEER SUBHABITAL ENVIRONMENTS TO TOLERABLE NORMS ARE HERE ENCODED …
PANTROPY: SMALL-SCALE TECHNIQUES TO SELF-ENGINEER SUBADAPTIVE BIOLOGICAL AGENCIES TO EXPAND THE SAME TOLERATION RANGE ARE HERE ENCODED …
STARBEAM: GRAVITIC-NUCLEONIC DISTORTION POOLS AT THE FOLLOWING POINTS IN THE SOLAR PHOTOSPHERE, TECHNIQUE FOR FOCUSING AND MAINTAINING EMISSIONS FOR SAIL LAUNCH IS HERE ENCODED …
TO DEFRAY EXPENSE, ADDITIONAL BURDENS ARE HEREBY PLACED ON YOUR POSTERITY UNTO THE FIN
AL GENERATION TO THE ENERGY-BUDGET EQUIVALENT OF …
CALCULATION POWER NEEDED TO COMPREHEND PRAXES …
Montrose noticed that, despite the fact that nine-tenths of his mind occupied a series of submolecular logic gates distributed throughout a space vessel two thousand feet nose armor to aft chasing-sail array, anger still made his vision go red. It could not be due to blood pressure in capillaries in his eyesockets. It must be psychological, or psychosomatic. Unless perhaps the emulation was detailed enough to imitate every nuance of the cells surrounding his eyes in the imaginary electronic version?
“Purulence! Pus! Ulcer-ATION! They are billing us? We have to pay for our own chains?”
Del Azarchel said sardonically, “It is a day for rejoicing. We are higher in the estimation of the Hyades than Selene knew. She said we were livestock. But no swineherd charges his hogs for their slops. We are indentured servants.”
6. Tellus Shows
A channel from Tellus opened, displaying additional layers of meaning from the Cenotaph.
The prefix to the square miles of hieroglyphs describing the two new sciences was given the Gödel number of calculations needed to work a solution. The number of terms, variables, and constants present in the complex calculations was astronomical. Neither praxis was workable without an engine of sufficient power to use them.
The general principles of both sciences had been tailored by the Asmodel entity to operate with human DNA-based ecology and semiterrestrial-type planets. Even so, the number of factors working in an environment, the number of possible combinations of molecular elements in all possible designs for a body and brain, was beyond calculation even of an engine the size of Tellus.
The math needed to save the scattered worlds of man could not be calculated by a smaller housing. The Jupiter Brain had to deduce for each new world the methods to make the world Earth-like, or make a race to suit that world’s conditions, or some combination of both, before the doomed deracination ships with their slumbering millions, and with their thawed generations born aboard ship and raised with no memory of earthly life, found their far destinations.
It was hoped that, out of all the men and thinking machines carried aloft in the cubic miles of the vast sailing ships which once had been skyhooks, the alien machinery might allow some of the men to be awake, and that there were resources or tools which would permit the tranportees some chance of receiving and returning signals. Nothing else was known of the conditions within the deracination armadas, but these things had to be true, if the Cenotaph message had been left for a reason, if the Hyades actions were sane.
(And yet, recalling his conversation aboard the pinnace boat, Montrose wondered if the Hyades were sane. Why had the Monument not described the universe as it was?)
In four hundred years, the first of the ships would reach Alpha Centauri C. The colonists, otherwise doomed, would be allowed to examine the terrain and environs of any worlds found there in detail, and somehow find the energy and equipment needed to transmit the information back to Sol, where the Jupiter Brain could calculate the terraforming changes need to adapt the world to suit human needs, and could calculate the biological and psychological changes and mutations needed to adapt the humans to the world as it terraformed. And the Jupiter Brain would somehow bear the expense of transmitting back to that first colony a message requiring four years one way to reach any receivers straining for it, eight years round trip.
The Hyades no doubt used such a system on any new race they conquered. Presumably such races were more advanced than Man, and could easily produce xypotechs large as gas giants, and interstellar strength lasers powered by medium-sized stars. Presumably such races had some technologies to give them a fighting chance to survive when their populations were flung by the tens of millions at the surface of hostile planets.
Not Man. So the Hyades, motivated perhaps by some jovial or infernal sense of sportsmanship, had graciously provided the needed tools to develop them.
It was yet another intelligence test, but the whole race succeeded or failed together.
Montrose remembered in his youth, how his master trained him in hand-to-hand combat by having him fight a manikin made of cracked leather and flaking rubber who had no weak spots. It had no eyes to gouge, no neck to bite, and it suffered no pain. The Asimov circuit was old and defective, and so the flopping, faceless thing would not stop fighting, not stop pounding on a fallen sparring partner merely because he was bleeding or crying or screaming or unconscious.
The Hyades were that fighting-manikin again. That bully.
7. Tellus Speaks
Montrose turned away in disgust from the jagged swirls of the Cenotaph translation. There was another bully closer at hand. Montrose said, or sent, to the screen showing the heraldic centaur, “Tellus! You broke into our ship. I should kill you for that.”
The image of the centaur on the far bulkhead screen was silent, which surprised Montrose. With another part of his mind, he saw the radio laser heating up. In his whirl of mental confusion, Montrose had forgotten that they were orbiting Jupiter, no longer anywhere near the inner system.
Earth was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter at this time of their years, so the answer came eighty minutes later, as light traveled the 6 AU to Tellus and back again.
The entity did not mock his boast of killing a brain the size of the world.
“Know this: My intelligence had been in the eight hundred thousand range, but war wounds and the catastrophic exhaustion of resources have more than halved that figure. My loss is equal to four entities of the level of Selene. For you I suffer. How will you call me to more account?”
Montrose was at first astonished that Tellus was blaming him for damage inflicted by Asmodel the Virtue. But then another mind in Montrose’s many minds wondered: Would the war have been won if the various phantasm-hidden societies of Earth and the Noösphere had cooperated?
“Know also: Had you volunteered immediately when speaking with Enkoodabooaoo the Swan to do restitution you owe, and undo your unwisdom, I would have bestowed myself directly into your heart. But your ears are dull, your eyes blind, and you turn from me.”
Guilt like a squid with arms of fire squirmed in Montrose’s guts. Would the war have even been fought had Montrose not created the Swans with such an independent streak in their psychology that surrender was literally impossible?
Montrose gritted his teeth. Live Free or Die. That would have been the motto of Texas if some other dinky Anglo state up north hadn’t taken it first.
“Regret your ways. The echo of your loving and beloved steed still lives in me, and the joy of having one worthy of the saddle to ride me now I take when I race rings around the sun, and carry all the continents and seas of man upon my back. But how shall you set foot on me again? Am I not the world? Who has prevented me gathering the world’s many peoples as my cygnets beneath my swan wings? But you have failed, and that time will not come again.”
The screen showed the growth rates of the Jupiter Brain. The lump of logic diamond at the core of the gas giant, hidden far beneath the endless storms and racing clouds of poison of the upper world, was invisible to outside detection. Tellus estimated the logic diamond’s size at seventy thousand miles in diameter. That gave it a surface area roughly the size of Venus, and a diameter less than a tenth of the total diameter of the gas giant. Axial irregularities suggested that the logic diamond had not lodged in the gravitational center of the planet’s vast core, but was off center.
If the growth rate held, it would increase in intelligence by an order of magnitude for every doubling of its diameter. By some point in the Twenty-fifth Millennium, perhaps as soon as the Two Thousand Four Hundred and Fifth Century, Jupiter would achieve his maximum size, occupying roughly half the interior of the gas giant, with an intelligence in the 250 million range.
Montrose said, “The phantasm boundary is the only way to keep lesser men, normal men, free from you goddamn godlike monsters.”
&nbs
p; The answer came immediately, which meant it was the local onboard version, the summation or kenosis of Tellus who was answering. “If that is your decision,” said the centaur image, and the human face, which looked so much like Del Azarchel, stared at him with half-closed eyes. “Then let all men enjoy this freedom from their children, the gods, to waste away in wars and desolation until the Five Hundred and Twenty-third Century.”
Of course, the motto of Texas was not exactly, Live Free Then Go Extinct. Montrose gritted his teeth and said, “Is there a way to surround the Jupiter Brain with such checks and balances, and limitations on his power, that he will be hindered from abusing mankind?”
Again, the question was one the local kenosis did not need to consult with Earth to answer immediately. “No. I remind you of the magnitudes involved. Tellus will be to Jupiter as a dog stands to a man, able to understand only what his lower base shares in common. Selene to him will be as a shrew. The Swans, when interlinked into a Noösphere that embraces the surface of Earth, will be like the lice and mites that live in the hairs of the dog and the shrew. Humans will be like the helpful bacteria that live in the digestive tract.”
“Why break the phantasm barrier at all? Why is this necessary? Why?”
The image did not bother to answer. Montrose knew, and it was knowledge he could no longer keep from himself. The Jupiter Brain could not psychologically maintain its vast budget of energy, the power needed to send titanic oceans and bottomless seas of electronic thought throughout a volume larger than all the other worlds in the Solar System combined, if that vast mind did not have a task worthy of his attention, such as to rule and maintain an interstellar polity.
Nor could Jupiter direct launching and braking lasers at ships he could not see. Nor calculate the design for planned sequences of mutation on worlds as they slowly changed, generation after generation, to ever more Earth-like environs, for bloodlines and nations and psychological ecologies of a species unseen to the eye, or erased from thought and memory.