“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 Gödel 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.
(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.