“Well, shucks and thanks and all, but you got in the last and best move,” said Montrose. “You have been winning our chess game (or fencing match, or whatever you call it) by impersonating my moves, forcing me, one at a time, to reveal the seven parts of Rania’s work on how to reconstruct a human mind—my broken mind—and now you have used it not to reconstruct, but to construct. And so you’ve made a last step! You’ve built this King of Machines, haven’t you?”
Del Azarchel smiled a smile of real pleasure. It was like the smile of a schoolteacher Menelaus dated once. She enjoyed talking grown-up talk after work. The Master of the World had nothing but servants around him, and certainly no one with whom the moves of the chess game for the fate of mankind could be discussed. No grown ups.
Del Azarchel nodded. “Yes, my last parry and thrust in our fencing match in the fog. Your blade is out of line, nay, out of your hand, and on the deck. Now to strike home! You know by now that my attempt to find where you were hiding in your Tombs was a feint. You moved to parry by not just entering the golden burial chamber of the Cryonarchs, but by blockading the door. I feint right and strike left. You are trapped in the chamber, and I have Aanwen deliver a supply of invasion crystal to deep in your crust. The nanotechnology cells spread over the walls of the evacuated tube in an instant, and begin to pull your Von Neumanns out from the walls. A simple manipulation of the linear accelerator, an override of the braking system, satchel charges to blow all the airlocks open at once, and Voila! I have my own launch rail, endless miles of acceleration line, already loaded with the Von Neumann crystals I need.
“The seed I have been preparing for eight thousand years is floating through space, light as a thistledown. The soil is prepared. The advantage of nanotechnology, is, of course, that anything made of matter, if your Von Neumanns are properly programmed with the proper pseudochemistry, can be torn apart and put back together again as other compounds. Anything, anywhere, can be soil. What you call the King of Machines had been launched!”
“To where? I saw your launch. You did not have the oomph to make low Earth orbit. That nodule of iron brain crystal is going to follow a suborbital path and fall back down. When the crystals reenter the atmosphere, they will break down instantly into inert carbon compound. I designed them that way. Your flightpath is suborbital.”
“Suborbital? You forget I have a skyhook. My Tower rendezvoused with the iron crystal nodule in low orbit early this morning, and only using the surrounding fields, not touching the dangerous nanomaterial, the Tower aura boosted the nodule by means of magnetic linear acceleration. Amazing how much velocity one can impart with an accelerator over eleven thousand miles long, and a payload that hundreds of g-forces of acceleration will not mar … I do not even need to use an energy-efficient Hohmann transfer orbit: I can shoot the nodule like a bullet, with an orbital leading-angle of months rather than years to hit the target.”
“Why not just use the skyhook for your launch mechanism?”
Del Azarchel waved the question away. “Public relations—it was better to have the episode concluded quickly. My government wishes no public debate to mar the smooth progress of the issue…”
“Meaning you are still mendaciously and falsiferously lying to your poxy mooks like a venereal and meretricious buckskank boasting of how minty-clean her fur-lined wormsocket is?”
“Gaaugh. I am assuming that is not a real word, Cowhand?”
“I am assuming that the target is Mars. It has a nickel-iron core like Earth, and the Von Neumanns will make planetfall, and begin burrowing. The Day of Gold you had your Savants try, that was crude, because there were Giants, creatures just as smart as you, also on this planet and ready to stop you. But Mars is empty. No one will stop you. Mars! I’ve always daydreamed about that planet. It is not a bad place to start! It is a dry land of rust and sand. Sort of like Texas.”
Blackie smiled. “You underestimate me again. Keep the magnitudes of difference in mind.”
“Magnitudes?”
“In the naming scheme Rania devised, a Kardashev One level civilization that coats and converts all the usable surface layer of a world to cognitive matter is called an ‘Angel’—such is the mind occupying the snow and glacier around us now. A mind who occupies a volume the size of an asteroid, such as 1036 Ganymed, is an ‘Archangel.’ Exarchel now occupies a volume the size of Earth’s core!”
“Inner core,” said Montrose.
“Inner core. Even so, by Rania’s nomenclature, Exarchel is a Potentate. He is, by himself, a Kardashev One level civilization!”
Montrose looked at him carefully. “So you are not going to pick Mars as the place to terraform from an inanimate rock into a living self-aware volume of cognitive matter—Mary’s virginal size-A training bra! There has got to be an easier way to say that idea. Turning dead matter into gray matter.”
Del Azarchel scowled. “You should not take the name of Our Lord in vain.”
“I was taking Our Lady’s name in vain. Or the name of her bra. Not the same thing at all.”
“The word you seek is sophotransmogrification. That was Rania’s translation of the Monument hieroglyph group depicting a pantomime of the act of turning inanimate molecules into self-aware calculation engines.”
“Is it Venus?”
Del Azarchel grinned. “Am I not the Master of the World? Do I think small? Rightly do you call my brainchild the King of Machines. For his destination is the King of Planets.”
“Then—”
“Jupiter.”
At that name, silence hung in the air like the shiver of a gong.
5. Jovial World
Del Azarchel said, “Just the core of Jupiter is twenty times the size of Earth. The predictive models I have had the Melusine run for me show that hydrogen-helium at those temperatures and pressures form a substance nanomachines can manipulate. Carbon, which is heavier, sinks, and becomes diamond—a substance already in a lattice, and easier for Von Neumann machines to work with. Jupiter will be the next order of being above mere Potentate of the Earth. He will be a Power.”
Montrose listened with wide eyes.
“Within four hundred years,” Del Azarchel continued, “before the Hyades arrive, more than half the total mass of the Jovian core will be converted to a self-aware entity ten times the mass of Earth, greater than all the inner planets combined! We may indeed see an acceleration rather than a slowing of the transmogrification processes since the amount of Von Neumann molecular assembly-disassembly performed in a material-dense environment is directly proportional to surface area as it expands, and inversely to waste heat above the critical resilience temperature of the crystal—”
“—Wow!” said Montrose, childish with awe despite himself. “A brain the size of Jupiter! With that kind of calculation power at our command, seated on our solar system with all the mass-energy as a raw material to make any weapon a brain that size can devise, the Hyades World Armada—which is only the mass of Uranus—could be driven back, or even destroyed!”
There was nothing different in their faces. Del Azarchel still wore the same expression: jovial, lighthearted, bold. His smile and the tilt of his head still radiated charm. Montrose had not moved.
But, without a word, the hate between them hung in the air like a charge of static electricity, building in potential and building. Montrose looked carefully in the countenance of Del Azarchel, and it was as if the weight in the air Montrose felt in his lungs had just increased.
Montrose said, “So Jupiter will be the taskmaster for the slaves of Earth for all time to come.”
“Not so,” replied Del Azarchel. “It is as I said. Earth is nothing. The Hyades will overlook the Earth if Jupiter is ready, and is intelligent enough to prove itself useful to that immense, transuperbiological civilization. On Rania’s scale, a collection of stars every atom of whose solar systems has been reduced to sophont matter is called a Domination. Even the brain the size of Jupiter is almost nothing to those scales: I will be lucky
to be a galley slave or a cabin boy in their ship of civilization. Earth will be overlooked.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I have studied the Cold Equations of power and authority between the stars. It is a possible solution. I give you the Earth as Dives might bestow on starving Lazarus a smallest crumb fallen from his table. Take it and serve me. Earth will not join the collaboration of constellations; she will grow old, go extinct, be forgotten, and pass away, while I will still be expanding and learning.”
“And what if Earth decides it don’t want no neighbor as dangerous as your Jupiter Machine? It ain’t been born yet. You can still stop the seed from landing.”
Del Azarchel spoke in a voice as soft as the rustle of a serpent in the tall grass. “The nodule of Von Neumann crystal that forms the seed for the Jupiter Brain in twelve days will pass the moon’s orbit. In two years, it will reach Jupiter. Even if I now, this moment, repented the deed and bent all my genius and all the resources of this world to the task, and yes, launched into higher orbit and then into interstellar space the great Tour de Oro”—Montrose knew he meant the skyhook—“even so, I could not stop the birth of the Jupiter Mind. What would happen if we sent the Tower after the seedling to recover it?”
Montrose did not answer. The Tower, towed very slowly through space by its pitifully inadequate ion drive, even assuming a fuel-efficient Hohmann transfer orbit, would take five years to reach the target. Once there, the skyhook would be able to do exactly nothing. The distance between Jupiter’s deep layers and that planet’s geosynchronous orbit altitude was much greater than the corresponding distances for Earth. Maintaining geosynchrony on a world that spins on its axis once every ten hours was that much more difficult. The gravity gradient was much steeper, and so the sheering forces much stronger, when compared to those of a Tower spanning the relatively modest height needed to bridge the gap between Earth’s surface and Earth’s geosynchronous point. A Jupiter skyhook would need to be that much taller, the and force of the weight pulling it apart would be unthinkable.
Even assuming all those problems solved, the skyhook mouth, even if it could be lowered into the miles-deep eternal storms of Jupiter, could not find the solid core of the planet, and any machines or devices sent out would be blinded in the dark, boiled in the heat, and crushed by pressures that made the bottom of the Mariana Trench seem nearly a vacuum. The skyhook certainly could not somehow find the scattered and busily self-replicating molecule-sized engines.
And that was calculating without the lateral force of the unceasing supersonic winds of storms larger than the entire surface area of Earth. This Tower, so impressive here on Earth, as mighty as the stronghold of warring titans and gods, would be of no more use against the sheer, blind, colossal magnitudes of the planet Jupiter than if it were a reed straw.
Menelaus frowned glumly. It almost seemed unfair that the word “planet” was used both for cute little blue Earth and for the gas giant swathed in storms, of a monster almost large enough to be a small sun. It was like saying the elephant and the shrew were both “mammals.” While true enough, they were very different sorts of critters.
“Earth could build a longer skyhook…,” Montrose began.
“This one took a century to build, and consumed a substantial segment of the resources of Earth. To build a taller one would cost more and take longer. How much of Jupiter’s mass would be converted before that?” Del Azarchel said.
Montrose was silent, glum.
Del Azarchel smiled a sharp and cold smile. “And suppose there was some way to halt the birth. Is it not the pinnacle of insanity to halt one’s own birth, and abort one’s own self? The Jupiter Brain is another Exarchel. I and I alone shall be the base and standard of all posthuman and postbiological life. It will all be me—and I shall be called the Master of the World no longer, but the Master of Worlds.”
“You mean Master of All, don’t you? I mean, once you get around to conquering stars, constellations, star clusters, the Orion Arm, the Upper Left One Quarter of the Milky Way Galaxy, to be known thereafter as the Great Pizza Slice.”
“I see no reason to curtail unrealistically my ambition,” said Del Azarchel coolly, his eyes narrow.
The two merely stared at each other for a moment. Montrose wrestled with the temptation to paste Blackie with an uppercut. Blackie was hefting the dirk in his hand thoughtfully.
Eventually, Del Azarchel said, “Do you see now why I offer you this Earth and all she contains? She is mine to give, and out of all my treasures, she is merely a trifle. But she is much to you, is she not? Foreswear the duel, kneel, serve me.”
Montrose said, “While I am thinking over your kindly meant offer, let me make a counteroffer.”
“I am listening.”
“You agree to fight, and I mean fight like the devil with every bursting brain cell in that dark whirlpool you call a brain, and I mean with every atom of hate in your entire hate-riddled heart, all your soul and all your strength against the Hyades, using all your toys, your powers, the core of the Earth, and the whole mass of Jupiter, and whatever else we—you and me together—can come up with in four hundred years. One condition is that you leave the human beings alone. You stop trying to evolve them, to domesticate them, or absorb them into savant circuits or Locust mass minds or whatever. Just leave them be. And I will kneel and serve you.
“Ponder on that one, friend. Consider that I ain’t never actually been under your command. I was mad as a March Hare during the Expedition. You ain’t never given me Order One. I’ve never obeyed you, but I will now, if you take up the fight to protect mankind.
“And we can share a smoke and a glass of hooch, and tour the moons of Jupiter that look so much like gems and geodes and goddam bright-colored Easter eggs. And I will shine your shoes and call you “Master” nice and respectful-like. Can’t you fight these star monsters, these living machines from Epsilon Tauri, with even half the spirit you waste fighting me?! They are the real damn enemy!”
Del Azarchel said, “Agreed. But one condition. You divorce Rania.”
Menelaus Montrose drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let me, ah, think that one through carefully … I mean, there are angles to consider … there is this and that and that other thing … talk it over with my guys … try on a new pair of socks and see if that changes my perspective on things…”
“Cowhand! Just say ‘no’ and we can continue with the brutal killing of each other and of those around us. It seems to be all that we are suited for.”
Montrose had nothing to say.
Del Azarchel smiled thinly. “Do you know that I have had four of my closest associates and friends shot to death by you, all with that exact same weapon your Second over yonder is holding?”
Montrose turned his eyes back toward the others. They were all standing so still, he wondered if perhaps Preceptor Illiance, or whatever he was calling himself this hour, had accidentally petrified them. But no. Mickey the Witch blinked a moment after the decoration eyes in his hat did.
Del Azarchel said, “They will wait forever. Neither your men nor mine want to see this duel. They do not understand why we do this, you and I. Do you know that Melchor de Ulloa does not even own a firearm?”
Montrose looked at him warily. “That can’t be right. What does he do for hunting? Bow hunting? Throw a boomerang?”
“I think he is a vegetarian.”
“So is your old pal and my new friend Mictlanagualzin of the Dark Sciences, but that does not stop him from being a cool hand and a sharp eye with the twin fifty-calibers mounted on a little girl’s coffin. Maybe Mulchie just owns a small gun, and only uses it on Sunday to do clay pigeons.”
“No. Nothing at all.”
“Wow. I mean. Wow. I have met some folk in my life who never touch alcohol, called teetotalers; and I know nuns or men of the cloth who took the vow never to wed, called celibacy. But someone who doesn’t own a shooting iron? There ain’t no word for that. If there is no word for
it, it never happens. What does he do if some big guy swaggers up to take his stuff or kiss his girl? And I know De Ulloa’s had a passel of girls. He’s a regular Whoremonger Harry.”
Del Azarchel, but not at first, realized that Montrose meant very little of what he was saying, and started to laugh. It was loud, happy, uncalculating laughter, such as he never had done in a very long time and certainly not before men he considered servants and underlings.
Del Azarchel wiped his eyes, and said, “You know I despise De Ulloa.”
“So do I. So does everyone.”
Del Azarchel said, “It’s funny that you know my Witch. You know that all that flab is not really flab, but biological material he can shape by means of enzymes he controls through a meditative technique? His comment about the Princess, though, most uncalled-for…”
“Oh. You heard that.”
“It is easier if you think of Exarchel and myself as the left and right hands of one soul. Even when there are different thoughts in my head or his, our goals and ideals are the same. And what truly shapes the thoughts of a man like me? An experience, which might change from time to time? Or an ideal, which is the star by which he steers, and which I will never permit to change? Lesser men would be two souls if housed in two brains. Not men like I am. Like we are. No experience of yours would deter you from Rania, would it?”