“Have you calculated what the change in temperature will be if a brain only twice the size of Earth alters the energy pressure in all its neuromolecular cells during a particularly involved thought process? Envision that on the scale of a gas giant! The whole world of Jupiter will ring like a bell when mighty thoughts, containing more than all the libraries that mortal men ever wrote or burned, pass from one side of the crystal globe to the other.
“Ah! My dearest Menelaus!” said Del Azarchel grandly, “I am, I confess, glad you are here to see me on this day! Jupiter will solve the message of the Cenotaph. The art of remaking man, not the timid changes of the Hermetic lore, but total change, pantropy, change to suit any world will be given to us, a gift as great as the fire of Prometheus! The art of terraforming to our specifications, to make worlds, to be as the Creator! Nay, we shall surpass the Creator, for did he not make only one man and one world? Together, we shall make many!”
“Holy Mary’s Mother’s milk, I guess I might start believing all this superstitious churchified crap of yours.”
“Indeed? Why so?”
“What you say sounds like damnified blasphemy to me. I was hoping Jehovah would float by on a fluffy cloud and stuff a lightning bolt up your rectum. Ain’t hope one of them three cardinal virtues?”
“What lesser men call sacred, to me is blasphemy; and their abominations are my sacraments! Let us prepare my son Jupiter for his coronation, for he surely shall be monarch of all the children of man on all worlds.”
Montrose said, startled, “Are you crowning someone else? I thought you still were jollying yourself by pretending you ruled the roost?”
“What roost? Call it a coop instead. Tellus estimates the Hyades will deracinate our race to twenty stars in the First Sweep circa a.d. 11000, and perhaps twenty more stars after that in the Second circa a.d. 24000. Less than half a hundred worlds! Bah!”
“Y’know, you are the only guy I know who says Bah.”
“No term is more concise for expressing disgust. Fifty earths? My ambition is not so curtailed. Someday commerce, regular trade, must open between the Hyades and the worlds of the Local Interstellar Cloud. The Empyrean Polity of Man—so I hereby christen it—is being planted as an olive tree. Someday the husbandmen will come to claim the fruit. Whenever that shall be, I mean to be prepared for it. There are wider fields for my ambition now.”
“What is bigger? You plan to rule the Galaxy? Twelve thousand lightyears in diameter. Takes a long time to send out orders or hear reports. Or did that slip your slippery little mind? You’re nuts.”
“You thought me sane enough when we two together vowed to reach the Diamond Star, and to do all else the world called impossible.”
“Except you didn’t achieve it. Rania did,” said Montrose.
“She will return in time. Then there will be peace.”
“I should set out after her,” Montrose muttered.
“Indeed? Do you have, convenient to hand, a dwarf star made of antimatter to use for fuel? I think you will find overcoming the difference in frame of reference in order to make an in-flight rendezvous will take the same amount of time, from her point of view, as waiting here to receive her. Or, did that slip your mind?”
“Pox! I gotta keep an eye on you. And shoot you dead. Then I can enjoy my wedding night in peace.”
“Admit it, my friend, you want more than just peace; admit it. You want to see the Heat Death of the Universe as much as I do, or grasp the farthest quasar in your hand, or hear the mysteries whispered beyond the curve of the universe. You want to be an architect of worlds and of destinies, and decree the fates of suns and constellations! You want the future, the shining future, the golden land of tomorrow! Confess it!”
“Blackie, sometimes I do … but sometimes…”
“Yes?”
“Damn, but sometimes I just want my wife back.…”
Hearing Montrose heave a sigh, Del Azarchel, somewhere in the dark romanticism of his heart, felt an unspoken breath of pity for this poor, foolish Texan, who was lonely. How poetical!
“… Just want her back, and hot in the sack. ’Cause, damnation, am I horny.”
Del Azarchel had quickly to make adjustments to his parasympathetic nervous system to suppress his gag reflex. “Bah! How you disgust me! You know you are not good enough to possess her, you swine.”
“Boy, don’t I know it. But swine or no, I am more man than you. Lucky me, eh?”
Del Azarchel uttered some insult from the lists he had long ago and lovingly contrived for such occasions, and Montrose responded with a less witty and more earthy rejoinder he invented on the spot, and the conversation soon degenerated into their normal bickering, and then silence.
Del Azarchel did not pay much attention. The exchange of slurs and sleights was perfunctory. He spoke the insults only because he did not want the filthy Cowhand to suspect.
For if Montrose had known how unnaturally happy Del Azarchel was, surely he would be suspicious.
The glowing coal of joy that warmed him was the knowledge (and he knew not whence it came) that when Rania returned, she would look at Montrose and then look at Del Azarchel.
She would see in Montrose a man who sacrificed his morals and his integrity to save her. Because she was too good for him. It was simply a fact. And she was hyperintelligent, so she could not misunderstand that fact.
She would see in Del Azarchel a man who sacrificed not one iota of his truth, a man whose honor, while very cruel, had never been very unjust, and whose crimes were all justified by the high and noble and necessary ends to which his crooked means had led.
When she returned, he could hand her an empire of worlds of his making, and Powers and Potentates larger than worlds, Virtues and Principalities and hosts. What could the Cowhand on that day give her?
Del Azarchel was to have all. Not just everything he’d craved, but more that he had dreamed to crave.
He knew she would turn to him. His creation.
Jupiter was not the only divinity Del Azarchel had created: for he had made a goddess as well, a creature finer than any human.
His princess.
PART SIX
Time of the Third Humans
1
Man Creates Myrmidon
1. Exile in Ixion
A.D. 22196
Menelaus Illation Montrose woke in his segmented fashion, first with lower and outer personalities on the human level, passing from dreamstate to hypnogogic state to self-awareness and assessing the situation.
Radar waves had been bouncing off his little hidey-hole here for about half a year: Half a Neptunian year, that is, eighty-two Earth years.
Considering how far away this frozen little dwarf planet was from Sol, and how cleverly he had hidden every external trace of his approach and presence when he moved here ten millennia ago, the first assessment was one of astonishment and annoyance. Given the last known state of Telluric technology after the Endarkening of Man, and the cliometric chains of events extrapolated from it, it should have been impossible for anyone to find him. What did a man have to do to get a little damned peace and quiet?
After the Montroses in their various human-sized bodies consulted with records and sensed surrounding energy signals from the inner and outer Solar System, the lower personalities integrated and woke a higher level awareness.