“And you get your audience. You get the undivided attention of the local decision-making cluster. He thinks about it somewhere between two hundred and three thousand Earth years, and then he sends you on your way.”
Montrose said, “I am not suicidal, and there is no way you are thinking of killing yourself just so that we can move past a layer of bureaucracy. Ain already set the deal up!”
Big Montrose said, “Shaddup, wee willie pus-for-brains! These damn things don’t talk. They absorb. They make a model of your whole mind from top to bottom and examine it and decide what to do. The only way to talk to them is to get absorbed—which I have already done. I cannot get to M3, not without a ship like yours, and I cannot download my brain information into your ship without Cahetel coming along for the ride and contaminating you. And he is a pretty miserable cuss. I don’t know what Ain expected when he sent you off here, but he is damn machine and probably don’t see nothing wrong with a conversation that consists of Peter eating Paul and turning into Paul and then Paul eating Peter and turning into Peter.”
Montrose said, “You committed suicide the last time!”
Big Montrose said, “Last time, that was pure despair. I thought we had lost everything and that Rania was too far out of reach. That I was not worthy of her. This? This is not suicide. I lived in the belly of Cahetel for age after age, eon after eon. Do you know what kept me alive? Do you know the secret of the universe? Blackie, you know. Tell him.”
But Del Azarchel merely shook his head.
Big Montrose said, “Fine, Blackie, I’ll tell him. Hate is the key to Blackie’s life. Whenever the version of Blackie del Azarchel that screamed and swirled and clung and sucked in the ever-flowing, ever-changing ocean of thought forms right in the middle of the endless logic diamond at the core of Jupiter, all his thoughts, no matter how scattered, could be drawn together by one supreme, overriding thought. It came from the very core of his soul. Right, Blackie?”
Del Azarchel said, “My ambition. My sense of my own greatness. The image I ever held before me was the triumph of mankind, and Rania, my greatest handiwork, forever at my side, as queen! Glory, I tell you, glory was my supreme core thought that kept me alive!”
Big Montrose drawled, “Such a pestiferous lie! Nope. Hate was the answer. And now you know what kept me alive, right, little brother?”
Montrose said, “Love for Rania.”
Del Azarchel said, “Not true! Your core thought is ever to thwart and humiliate me! You are jealous that I achieved greater intellect than you! That is why you stabbed your brain with that absurd concoction! Not for the sake of learning the secrets of the Monument, of the universe! To try to outdo me! That is why you stole Rania from me!”
Montrose stared at Del Azarchel, and, as he stared, Montrose grew aware of a strength sensation in his jaw and teeth. Montrose was clenching and grinding his teeth so hard that he did not notice it until his cheek muscles began to ache with the strain. And his eyes were growing wet with tears, tears of purest hate.
In that one moment, Montrose was not sure whether or not Blackie was right about him: because the hate was in him like a choking cloud, as if his heart were a furnace burning raw garbage.
The moment passed like a spell being broken when Big Montrose, speaking through the floating fairies of the ship’s brain, simply said, “It is love.”
They both turned and looked at the odd, floating face made out of little dolls.
“What?” said Montrose.
“The secret of the universe, the secret of how to stay alive when some alien soul is eating your memories and you are being deleted, is love. Put something before yourself. Something bigger than you. That is how Mickey the Witch, whom you left behind, convinced Ain to convert and become a proper Christian gent. Father Rastophore the Patrician baptized Ain, who took on the name Ermanno. Named after Blessed Herman the Cripple. Or did you guys not get that news? I have been right in the stream path of beams between Hyades and Praesepe, and I have heard the chatter back and forth. While you were aslumber and in flight for sixty-two hundred sixty years, the colonies founded by Tormentil spread throughout the Hyades Cluster and had colonies of their own. Ermanno persuaded some of his fellow Powers and Principalities to join up with the Sacerdotes, so half the stars there are Dominicans, and the other half are Benedictines, but the big red giants always seem to turn into Jesuits. So there is whole generation of alien monsters and self-aware machines, and they is all Christian machines, now.”
“That is a scary thought,” said Montrose.
Big Montrose said, “Not as scary as Mickey the Witch being archbishop of the Hyades. Whoever convinced that fat bastard to get baptized? Did he give up whoring and hexing both?”
“He did it for a girl.”
“Well, can’t blame a guy for thinking with his rutting tool! Lack that, and what’s a man got?”
“So what the hell happened, you lip-flapping word-bag?”
“Putrefaction happened! Mickey sicced his Christian machine intelligences on Hyades, and so now they are making fusses about helping the poor and downtrodden, freeing slaves, not letting Hyades ship helpless millions out to hellhole planets without proper support or instruction, all that jazz. Last news I heard—keep in mind everything is five hundred years out of date, due to lightspeed—Mickey was thinking of organizing a Crusade. By now, the whole place is probably aflame with war. Leprous scabs and spores, but sometime it makes me proud to be Christian!”
Montrose said, “Yeah? No hoax? So when is the last time you did a rosary or novena or some penance?”
“Eh? What are those?”
Montrose said, “Said a prayer?”
“I said, ‘Hot damn!’ when I saw your ship come within range. That’s theological, ain’t it?”
Montrose said, “Pox your eyes, you cannot kill yourself. It’s a sin.”
Big Montrose said, “This is not killing myself. I am turning myself in for murder.”
“What?”
Big Montrose continued, “I was in despair when I let Cahetel consume me. I did it so that you could talk to him and save part of the human race. And that worked. But despair has a funny way of warping your brain. I turned into something like Blackie. If you remember, I was a lot that way already, clawing my way to the top of the Myrmidon race, making myself into the Nobilissimus, the Caesar. Well, stuck as a disembodied mind in the hell of Cahetel’s tool kit, I killed a few of my fellow tools. Some of these races don’t know what lying is. Some of them don’t have murder. So the tools and artificial minds they built don’t all have proper antibodies, white blood cells, cops, and suspicious natures. We humans have all that! And what would Rania think of a killer?”
Montrose said, “There has got to be some other way!”
Big Montrose said, “You did not even know I existed until a moment ago. And there is no other way. Do you understand why Pellucid was willing, that big, dumb horse, to die for us? And I can deduce from the clues here, and from the energy and radio traffic back near Sol, that the False Rania could not bring real peace. We all need the real Rania back. We all need the real Peace expression. She might be able to find the real Monument Builders.”
Montrose started to give a more complex argument in favor of Big Montrose attempting to download himself, perhaps into a well-isolated area of the ship, when the brain from the caricature of his face interrupted.
“Little brother, I am no longer in despair and never will be again. All this was arranged, put together by minds superior to ours. We can fight it, or we can bow and take our place in the big square dance and move through the figures and the turns and the kicks, even if we cannot see what the pattern looks like from a bird’s-eye view. I am not going to be dead, not really. What will happen to me is more like what happens to Schrödinger’s cat: I will exist as unrealized probability waves of unlocalized temporal identity. I am still connected with you, and with any other copies of me, just like Blackie was connected with Jupiter. It is not a secret of the universe that I understand, nor Ain, nor Hyades, nor M3—but someone understands it. Somewhere, beneath all the layers of lies that litter this rotten universe, there is a real Monument Builder who put out a real message of real truth and real peace—a message the real Rania could see.