The Architect of Aeons (22 page)

He had three choices. First, he could sever the connection between himself and his ghost in the computer. The drawback to that was the divarication which drove so many Hermeticists mad. The biological brain acted as a governor or correcting censor. Second, he could maintain the connection through the nerve jack and brain umbilicus. This would limit him to this chamber, and, with extension cords, to other locations on the carousel. Third, he could try to maintain contact between his selves by means of signals sent to and from the living helmet grown into his skull. The drawback to that was waste heat: too much signal concentration would fry his biological brain. It would get hot wherever he went.

Then the thought came again.
How could I have been so stupid?

He saw a thousand clues of a thousand memories.

The mind of Montrose was differently organized than it had been. The subconscious activity was clear to him, at least down to a certain level. He saw what the dreams meant. The image of Del Azarchel and Tellus straightening up from their talk in the gentleman's lounge was merely a visualization of the thousand clues from computer logs and waste heat patterns in the ship's logic crystal showing that the two had been talking while he slept, occupying a mind-to-mind communion for the months while the
Emancipation
sailed from Earth to the outer system and Jupiter. Talking behind his back.

He saw what his memories meant. The reason why his mother would never play the soundtrack connected to his father's portrait was simple and silly. Father had a thick hillbilly accent. She did not want her children to pick up that low-class no-account way of talking. It should have been obvious to Montrose even back when he was a man. Now that he was a Ghost, only now that she was dead and lost as the Pharaohs of antiquity, did he see and understand the old woman's fears. Only now did he see how fiercely she had loved, and defied her family and lost her inheritance to marry a proud Texan wintergardener. It was a whole lifetime of unspoken tragedy, and he had missed all the clues. That brought tears to his eyes.

He saw a dozen times Rania had outsmarted or manipulated him, drawing him subtly to the conclusions she had planned him to have and planted in his path. That brought a pang of doubt to his heart.

And that pang of doubt brought a stronger pang of shame: hadn't his mother been smarter than his father, smart enough not to get herself killed by the same duelist who killed his father? Smart enough to avenge her husband's murder without getting caught?

So what right did he have to doubt Rania even for a tenth of a second at any point in the tens of thousand of years separating her from him? To doubt her love? Was not love greater than any span of years?

He saw now that there had been no chance of overcoming the Hyades by military means, no matter whether biological life was joined into the No
ö
sphere of Earth or not. If the Virtue men called Asmodel had for any reason failed, the cost of that failure would have been added to the debt of Earthly life, and a second expedition, larger and more well-equipped, would have followed before another ten millennia had turned. Certain clues in the mathematics spelled it out.

He saw also that he could have befriended the Hermeticists, the minions of Del Azarchel, and won their loyalty away from him—merely by augmenting their intelligence. Del Azarchel had deceived and manipulated them, played on their weaknesses, even back when he had been a mere mortal in Space Camp with them.

And more than that, Montrose also saw how Del Azarchel had paid back the men who had followed, loved, and obeyed him. Now it was blindingly clear.

Between
A
.
D
. 2410 and
A
.
D
. 2510, during the Cryonarch and the Ecclesiarch periods, all but five of the Hermeticists had died in augmentation experiments, destroying their own minds in one vain attempt after another to do to themselves what Montrose had done to himself.

Now he saw from countless tiny clues leaping together into a pattern in his mind how Del Azarchel had caused those experiments to fail. Del Azarchel through Exarchel had corrupted data runs, caused impurities to be introduced into neurochemicals, and had hidden crucial clues from the Hermeticists that might have saved their sanity and lives.

How could the sixty-seventh Hermeticist step over the corpses of sixty-six others to jam the same needle in his brain which had killed all his predecessors? How could he be so proud and blind, so hungry for the superhuman intellect they so worshiped? There was the example of Montrose before them, cured of his insanity by Rania. Then they saw Del Azarchel successfully achieve augmented intelligence, through Exarchel. And Del Azarchel beckoned them on, encouraging them, whispering that the errors made by inferior and bungling predecessors would not be made by them, no, not by them. Their brains and theirs alone were stable and sane enough to survive the shock. Were not the Hermetic Order superior to a mere Texas Cowboy with bad grammar?

With those lies and whispers, Del Azarchel had murdered them all. He had spared only the five whom he trusted to oversee the creation of the five races which were to be used in the creation of the Jupiter Brain.

Montrose could have saved all seventy-two, turned them against Del Azarchel, and spared the world all the pain of the last nine millennia, if only he had known then, if only he had seen.

It was too far in the past for the anger to be anything but dull and remote. It was too late for anything but regret.

How could he have been so stupid?

5. Epiphany

“What is the matter, Cowhand?”

“I saw what you really are like, Blackie. Worse than I thought.”

Del Azarchel shrugged. “What is that to me? We have been about more important things. We translated the Cenotaph while you were sleeping.”

“We?”

“The three of us. Crewman Fifty-one helped me. Yes, you lapsed back into your old habits. Folding a paper makes it weaker along the seam; it tends to fold again there, you know. Ah! It brought back memories! We had a year to work out the problem, and your brain was unoccupied by conscious thoughts, so, why not? I assumed you would not mind, not to save my princess, and if you did mind, what could you do? Shoot me? Challenge me to a duel?”

“My princess,” snarled Montrose.

“She will not be yours if no civilization is here to greet her when she returns. To be a starfaring civilization, we must do what starfarers do: establish colonies; maintain communication and commerce; adapt the human race to new environments; reengineer worlds to suit ourselves. It will take millennia, or hundreds of millennia.

“Yet, to them”—Del Azarchel was grinning, and his eyes glinted like agates—“such spans of time are merely as the passing hours of a day, all these nearby stars merely a handful of sand. What are twenty grains out of a beach? What are threescore stars out of a galaxy one hundred twenty thousand lightyears wide, holding two hundred billion?”

“What the hell is so funny? What are you smiling at?”

“Checkmate, Cowhand. I finally understand what Selene was telling me to resign myself to do.”

“What is it?” Montrose could not suppress rage and hate like boiling darkness in his mind. He was seeing this man, clearly, with the crystal clarity of Potentate level thinking, for the first time. “What is so hard for you?”

“To ask forgiveness!”

Montrose was caught entirely by surprise, and found nothing to say.

Del Azarchel spoke in the same strangled tone of voice, as if smothering hysterical laughter. “After all this time, I and all my dreams are at your mercy, and yet I know you will not sacrifice your queen to stop my king. Didn't you once tell me our match was a chess game and not a fencing duel? It seems you were right. I cannot but smile, seeing your struggle not to let the unthinkable thought seep into your brain. Tellus and I spoke while you slept. We translated the Cenotaph. It had instructions on how to…”

Montrose saw it. “Tellus spoke. That means you cured him.”

Del Azarchel nodded, grinning. “He cured himself. I merely downloaded a copy of myself into him in an advisory capacity. Something like an advocate for human affairs.”

“In less than a year? And that means that the aliens do not take twenty thousand years to grow their Jupiter Brains. Asmodel detected your work at Jupiter's core. So the Cenotaph describes a method of how to wake up Jupiter in a reasonable time. Asmodel wants us to wake him up, doesn't he? That cannot be good for us.”

“You mourn the birth of Jupiter, our man-made god?” Del Azarchel said malignantly, “You should bow the knee in worship!”

“What? You expect me to lick the buttocks of your huge shrine to yourself? Even Jupiter is not big enough for your ego, Blackie! You are darker and warpered than I thought. Warpeder. More warped.”

“Even now you try to resist what the light of intellect makes plain! If you believe me not, ask him.”

“Ask him what?”

“How to be a starfaring polity. How to maintain a civilization across an expanse of colonies scattered by twenty and thirty and sixty lightyears of separation. Ask him—”

The far wall of the cabin where the two men floated suddenly turned glassy, and an image formed in the thin layer of logic crystal coating it. The image displayed a heraldry of a centaur with the Earth under his hoof, and in his hand a sword bound into its scabbard by a trefoil or endless knot of olive branches. The other hand held a round Greek shield whose emblem was a horned circle standing on a cross. On the centaur's head was the Iron Crown of Lombardy. His face was swarthy and handsome, and the black goatee emphasized the wry quirk of his charming smile.

Del Azarchel said, “Here is Tellus, the mind of all the Earth! Ask him how a monarch can rule so wide an empire if he cannot see his subjects?”

Tellus did not speak. As Montrose went into the final pangs of labor, and felt his thoughts grow lucid, free and wild, exploding rather than expanding, the image of the centaur was replaced by an image of the Moon, and the message written all across the seas and craters surrounding Tycho.

To Montrose it seemed a rush of music rather than words, because the message was primordial, a matter of emotions and moods and dark, soaring chords. But he saw, or, rather, heard the meaning.

If it had been translated into words and simplified, it would have read:

FAILURE: THE BIOLOGICAL DISTORTION KNOWN AS EARTHLIFE AND ITS NANOTECHNOLOGICAL ADJUNCTS HAS FAILED TO PROVE MINIMALLY SUFFICIENT TO SERVE THE DOMINATION.

RESPONSE: TWO RECIPROCAL AND INTERRELATED PRAXES ARE HEREBY ENCODED FOR THE BIOLOGICAL DISTORTION KNOWN AS EARTHLIFE AND ITS NANOTECHNOLOGICAL ADJUNCTS TO ACHIEVE SOPHOTRANSMOGRIFICATION ESTIMATED TO BE MINIMALLY SUFFICIENT.

TERRAFORMATION: LARGE-SCALE TECHNIQUES TO ENGINEER SUBHABITAL ENVIRONMENTS TO TOLERABLE NORMS ARE HERE ENCODED …

PANTROPY: SMALL-SCALE TECHNIQUES TO SELF-ENGINEER SUBADAPTIVE BIOLOGICAL AGENCIES TO EXPAND THE SAME TOLERATION RANGE ARE HERE ENCODED …

STARBEAM: GRAVITIC-NUCLEONIC DISTORTION POOLS AT THE FOLLOWING POINTS IN THE SOLAR PHOTOSPHERE, TECHNIQUE FOR FOCUSING AND MAINTAINING EMISSIONS FOR SAIL LAUNCH IS HERE ENCODED …

TO DEFRAY EXPENSE, ADDITIONAL BURDENS ARE HEREBY PLACED ON YOUR POSTERITY UNTO THE FINAL GENERATION TO THE ENERGY-BUDGET EQUIVALENT OF …

CALCULATION POWER NEEDED TO COMPREHEND PRAXES …

Montrose noticed that, despite the fact that nine-tenths of his mind occupied a series of submolecular logic gates distributed throughout a space vessel two thousand feet nose armor to aft chasing-sail array, anger still made his vision go red. It could not be due to blood pressure in capillaries in his eyesockets. It must be psychological, or psychosomatic. Unless perhaps the emulation was detailed enough to imitate every nuance of the cells surrounding his eyes in the imaginary electronic version?

“Purulence! Pus! Ulcer-ATION! They are
billing
us? We have to
pay
for our own
chains
?”

Del Azarchel said sardonically, “It is a day for rejoicing. We are higher in the estimation of the Hyades than Selene knew. She said we were livestock. But no swineherd charges his hogs for their slops. We are indentured servants.”

6. Tellus Shows

A channel from Tellus opened, displaying additional layers of meaning from the Cenotaph.

The prefix to the square miles of hieroglyphs describing the two new sciences was given the G
ö
del number of calculations needed to work a solution. The number of terms, variables, and constants present in the complex calculations was astronomical. Neither praxis was workable without an engine of sufficient power to use them.

The general principles of both sciences had been tailored by the Asmodel entity to operate with human DNA-based ecology and semiterrestrial-type planets. Even so, the number of factors working in an environment, the number of possible combinations of molecular elements in all possible designs for a body and brain, was beyond calculation even of an engine the size of Tellus.

The math needed to save the scattered worlds of man could not be calculated by a smaller housing. The Jupiter Brain had to deduce for each new world the methods to make the world Earth-like, or make a race to suit that world's conditions, or some combination of both, before the doomed deracination ships with their slumbering millions, and with their thawed generations born aboard ship and raised with no memory of earthly life, found their far destinations.

It was hoped that, out of all the men and thinking machines carried aloft in the cubic miles of the vast sailing ships which once had been skyhooks, the alien machinery might allow some of the men to be awake, and that there were resources or tools which would permit the tranportees some chance of receiving and returning signals. Nothing else was known of the conditions within the deracination armadas, but these things had to be true, if the Cenotaph message had been left for a reason, if the Hyades actions were sane.