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 speak 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!”
“Welcome to Blackiotopia,” drawled Menelaus. “Whoop-dee-poxing-doo.”
“Can you envision the civilization that will arise here among the moons of Jupiter? How good it will be to have men bow the knee to me again! And they will not even be men, but a posthuman mass of cyborgs and biomechanism intertwined: uploaded, upgraded, altered, augmented, and turned into the Archangels and Potentates needed as secondary brains and lesser servants surrounding the immense brain of Jupiter!
“Some of these moons we perhaps shall save to turn into Archangels of logic diamond, and some shall squat on the surface under the immense gravity, domes larger than terrestrial cities. As the core thinks and grows, achieving ever higher platforms of sapience and sentience, we will begin to detect, like earthquakes, the energy exchanges accompanying the neural activity. The minds, lesser than his but immeasurably greater than ours, shall hedge those torrents and herd those overflows of mental force, adjusting divarications and replication errors, and acting as intercessors, and, aye, as priests and oracles to thoughts nor they nor we can understand!