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 like 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 beautifuclass="underline" 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.