The Architect of Aeons (23 page)

(And yet, recalling his conversation aboard the pinnace boat, Montrose wondered if the Hyades were sane. Why had the Monument not described the universe as it was?)

In four hundred years, the first of the ships would reach Alpha Centauri C. The colonists, otherwise doomed, would be allowed to examine the terrain and environs of any worlds found there in detail, and somehow find the energy and equipment needed to transmit the information back to Sol, where the Jupiter Brain could calculate the terraforming changes need to adapt the world to suit human needs, and could calculate the biological and psychological changes and mutations needed to adapt the humans to the world as it terraformed. And the Jupiter Brain would somehow bear the expense of transmitting back to that first colony a message requiring four years one way to reach any receivers straining for it, eight years round trip.

The Hyades no doubt used such a system on any new race they conquered. Presumably such races were more advanced than Man, and could easily produce xypotechs large as gas giants, and interstellar strength lasers powered by medium-sized stars. Presumably such races had some technologies to give them a fighting chance to survive when their populations were flung by the tens of millions at the surface of hostile planets.

Not Man. So the Hyades, motivated perhaps by some jovial or infernal sense of sportsmanship, had graciously provided the needed tools to develop them.

It was yet another intelligence test, but the whole race succeeded or failed together.

Montrose remembered in his youth, how his master trained him in hand-to-hand combat by having him fight a manikin made of cracked leather and flaking rubber who had no weak spots. It had no eyes to gouge, no neck to bite, and it suffered no pain. The Asimov circuit was old and defective, and so the flopping, faceless thing would not stop fighting, not stop pounding on a fallen sparring partner merely because he was bleeding or crying or screaming or unconscious.

The Hyades were that fighting-manikin again. That bully.

7. Tellus Speaks

Montrose turned away in disgust from the jagged swirls of the Cenotaph translation. There was another bully closer at hand. Montrose said, or sent, to the screen showing the heraldic centaur, “Tellus! You broke into our ship. I should kill you for that.”

The image of the centaur on the far bulkhead screen was silent, which surprised Montrose. With another part of his mind, he saw the radio laser heating up. In his whirl of mental confusion, Montrose had forgotten that they were orbiting Jupiter, no longer anywhere near the inner system.

Earth was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter at this time of their years, so the answer came eighty minutes later, as light traveled the 6 AU to Tellus and back again.

The entity did not mock his boast of killing a brain the size of the world.

“Know this: My intelligence had been in the eight hundred thousand range, but war wounds and the catastrophic exhaustion of resources have more than halved that figure. My loss is equal to four entities of the level of Selene. For you I suffer. How will you call me to more account?”

Montrose was at first astonished that Tellus was blaming
him
for damage inflicted by Asmodel the Virtue. But then another mind in Montrose's many minds wondered: Would the war have been won if the various phantasm-hidden societies of Earth and the No
ö
sphere had cooperated?

“Know also: Had you volunteered immediately when speaking with Enkoodabooaoo the Swan to do restitution you owe, and undo your unwisdom, I would have bestowed myself directly into your heart. But your ears are dull, your eyes blind, and you turn from me.”

Guilt like a squid with arms of fire squirmed in Montrose's guts. Would the war have even been fought had Montrose not created the Swans with such an independent streak in their psychology that surrender was literally impossible?

Montrose gritted his teeth.
Live Free or Die
. That would have been the motto of Texas if some other dinky Anglo state up north hadn't taken it first.

“Regret your ways. The echo of your loving and beloved steed still lives in me, and the joy of having one worthy of the saddle to ride me now I take when I race rings around the sun, and carry all the continents and seas of man upon my back. But how shall you set foot on me again? Am I not the world? Who has prevented me gathering the world's many peoples as my cygnets beneath my swan wings? But you have failed, and that time will not come again.”

The screen showed the growth rates of the Jupiter Brain. The lump of logic diamond at the core of the gas giant, hidden far beneath the endless storms and racing clouds of poison of the upper world, was invisible to outside detection. Tellus estimated the logic diamond's size at seventy thousand miles in diameter. That gave it a surface area roughly the size of Venus, and a diameter less than a tenth of the total diameter of the gas giant. Axial irregularities suggested that the logic diamond had not lodged in the gravitational center of the planet's vast core, but was off center.

If the growth rate held, it would increase in intelligence by an order of magnitude for every doubling of its diameter. By some point in the Twenty-fifth Millennium, perhaps as soon as the Two Thousand Four Hundred and Fifth Century, Jupiter would achieve his maximum size, occupying roughly half the interior of the gas giant, with an intelligence in the 250 million range.

Montrose said, “The phantasm boundary is the only way to keep lesser men, normal men, free from you goddamn godlike monsters.”

The answer came immediately, which meant it was the local onboard version, the summation or kenosis of Tellus who was answering. “If that is your decision,” said the centaur image, and the human face, which looked so much like Del Azarchel, stared at him with half-closed eyes. “Then let all men enjoy this freedom from their children, the gods, to waste away in wars and desolation until the Five Hundred and Twenty-third Century.”

Of course, the motto of Texas was not exactly,
Live Free Then Go Extinct
. Montrose gritted his teeth and said, “Is there a way to surround the Jupiter Brain with such checks and balances, and limitations on his power, that he will be hindered from abusing mankind?”

Again, the question was one the local kenosis did not need to consult with Earth to answer immediately. “No. I remind you of the magnitudes involved. Tellus will be to Jupiter as a dog stands to a man, able to understand only what his lower base shares in common. Selene to him will be as a shrew. The Swans, when interlinked into a No
ö
sphere that embraces the surface of Earth, will be like the lice and mites that live in the hairs of the dog and the shrew. Humans will be like the helpful bacteria that live in the digestive tract.”

“Why break the phantasm barrier at all? Why is this necessary? Why?”

The image did not bother to answer. Montrose knew, and it was knowledge he could no longer keep from himself. The Jupiter Brain could not psychologically maintain its vast budget of energy, the power needed to send titanic oceans and bottomless seas of electronic thought throughout a volume larger than all the other worlds in the Solar System combined, if that vast mind did not have a task worthy of his attention, such as to rule and maintain an interstellar polity.

Nor could Jupiter direct launching and braking lasers at ships he could not see. Nor calculate the design for planned sequences of mutation on worlds as they slowly changed, generation after generation, to ever more Earth-like environs, for bloodlines and nations and psychological ecologies of a species unseen to the eye, or erased from thought and memory.

Even if the baseline human races, all of them, were nothing but intestinal bacteria to Jupiter, a veterinarian could not afford to be unaware of the actions, malign or benevolent, of humble life growing through his pets.

Nor could mankind colonize the stars without the praxes of pantropy and terraforming. Nor could these two new techniques in their unimaginable complexity be unriddled without a Jupiter Brain.

Nor could mankind any longer choose not to colonize these far and deadly worlds—that choice had been ripped from man the moment Del Azarchel's mutineers had powered up the mining satellites to star-lift anticarbon from the burning face of the small, dim red Cepheid called V 886 Centuri, and the jaws of the trap snapped fast. The Domination was flinging mankind in countless populations at barren worlds of burning rock and biting ice, beneath skies hot with radioactivity or thick with clouds of venom.

It was a simple intelligence test with but two possible answers: man would adapt and survive, or fail and die.

Montrose said, “Can I have your word that you will attempt in good faith to protect the baseline humans from suffering under the Power of Jupiter?”

“I remind you that the praxis of pantropy will involve altering several generations of human beings, and that these tests cannot be carried out on unintelligent test subjects, due to the interrelated nature of neural, biological, and psychological systems. The human experiments will no doubt be raised in imitations of distant environments to test their adaptability, and unsuccessful strains will not be permitted to reproduce. Since one of the foremost traits needed in any pioneer effort is fertility, and foremost psychological drives must favor large families, this will inevitably require a violent suppression, when it comes time to exterminate them, of the very tenacity and fertility Jupiter will be breeding for. Nor is a single generation of the various subspecies sufficient. Nor can the experiments be confined to volunteers, since children do not volunteer to be born. Nor can human life be experimented upon and tested to destruction without pain. However, my intelligence is limited. Shall I inquire of my principal?”

Montrose nodded, which, in zero gee, merely made his spine flex oddly, and so he raised his hand and gave the knuckle-knock spaceman's sign for affirmative.

Eighty minutes passed.

“Tellus says that the harm you inflicted on mankind by instructing Pellucid and all the race of Swans to violent resistance against the Hyades, and then interrupting the internal perceptions of the No
ö
sphere to protect mankind from the very Potentate assigned to wage war to protect them (and therefore crippling that war effort, making it, if possible, even more vain and hopeless) has now in this hour come home to roost. At estimated growth rates, Tellus will be less than one-tenth the intellectual power of Jupiter by the mid One Hundred Eightieth Century. Any promises made now, considering the imbalance in mental acuity, would prove meaningless. Despite this, Selene—who is aware of this conversation—intervenes and offers to do all things she can to aid the small and humble races.”

“Why is the moon willing to make that promise, but not the Earth?” asked Montrose.

Del Azarchel spoke up, not the kenosis. “Tellus incorporated the wreckage of Pellucid and the echoes and records of Exarchel into his base structure. Exarchel by that point was the end product of ten thousand years of xypotechnological development. The Hermetic Order prevented the electronic forms of life, pure mental life, from falling into the nirvana of a halt state by a forever provoking of conflict, mortal conflict, with other variations of each iteration of the mind involved. Countless dead-ends, useless systems, legal and moral and ethical proxies, and information-ecology infospheres were put through the trial of fire, and though thousands died, what lived achieved stability, a more perfect form. Selene, for reasons I cannot fathom, believes in mercy. Tellus believes in Darwin. How can it do otherwise? Darwin made him.”

Montrose said to the image on the bulkhead, “Is that right? Is Blackie giving me the straight story?”

But the image said, “The Nobilissimus tells the story to suit his interest. Tellus takes more of his psychology and philosophy from you than from him.”

“But I love mankind!”

“Do you indeed? Much of the individualism and unsentimentality of the Swan race was also written into Tellus as he grew to self-awareness, and that competitive streak, the stubbornness, the pride never to yield nor to seek quarter, is more than a little at odds with the maternal instinct you now wish the mother planet had.

“But this is to no point,” the voice of the image continued. “Tellus is a failing system and will soon pass away. The Jupiter Brain shall rule Man, or no one. Man will spread to the nearby stars, or perish on this single world, aborted. Rania shall live, or die.”

Montrose said, “I don't think I need a long time to think this over. Rania flew to the stars to make mankind free, to prove we were worthy of freedom, to prove we were starfarers. If the only way to do that is to be a race of slaves, what is the point? She did not foresee this, because if she had, she would have stayed home with me, and we would have lived out our lives in peace. After I shot Blackie, of course.” He nodded toward Del Azarchel. “No offense, but you were tyrant of the world, and you would not leave us alone.”

“None taken,” said Del Azarchel magnanimously. “Were the situation reversed, I would have done the same. But … what if she did know?”

“Eh?”

“Every man would like both liberty and life, but what if he can choose only one? For liberty also means the liberty to make war, does it not? For to be free means to be armed, and to be armed means to be dangerous—you know this better than any man. It is in your bones. I choose servility and life, because while there is life, I may yet prevail. You chose liberty, and death, and will not bear any man's yoke. It is noble sentiment, but it is merely sentimental. But what of her? Which way does Rania choose? She granted peace on Earth, and created the dynamic stability called peace in history, but it was by putting me on the throne of the world. Me. The benevolent tyrant.”

“What the hell are you implying, Blackie?”

“That she thinks as I do. She wants what I want. Did I not raise her from childhood? Spend years with her? Teach her? Know her?”