A time later (whether it was hours or weeks made no difference to a being with his neural configuration) he beheld Adrastea, the smallest moon in the Solar System, a humble twenty kilometers wide, as it entered the dot of focused light shed by the sail.
As Earth’s moon once had been, Adrastea was tide locked, fated ever to keep the same face toward Jupiter. This bit of ice and rock orbited inside the synchronous orbit radius. To an observer on Jupiter (such as the growing nest of Ghosts whirling as clouds of logic crystal in the upper atmosphere) the little moon would seem to rise in the west and set in the east. Adrastea was also inside the Roche limit, but it was small enough to escape tidal disintegration.
And she was beautiful: egg-shaped, coated with a strange striped pattern of ice and dappled black stone, winged with feathers of dust and snowflakes being continually pulled from her surface to feed the ring system of Jupiter, Adrastea looked like a snowcapped mountain which had floated into a stormy heaven. By some anomaly of planetary formation, it was purer and cleaner than the ice of the rings.
Adrastea would have been doomed eventually. Del Azarchel was merely hurrying a natural process along.
The moon was mostly water ice. Under the beam from the sail, the outline of the irregular little worldlet began to soften and blur. Switching his goggle intake to cameras dotting the ship sail (the giant planet and all the moons suddenly seemed smaller, toylike, yet far more detailed on view, as the immense array gathered over miles of baseline was interpreted in the visual centers of his brain) Del Azarchel could see vents of steam issuing from the little moon like volcanoes made of ice. The steam pressure was greater than escape velocity: the water droplets fled into space, and did not fall down to Adrastea again.
The heat was on the upper, shipward side of Adrastea, the side that had never seen Jupiter. The escaping steam was sufficient to produce a thrust. The orbit would not begin to degrade for months—that is, local months. Adrastea orbited Jupiter five times an Earth-day. In thirty Earth-days over a hundred Adrastean months would have elapsed, and the falling moon would begin experiencing reentry friction.
The fine-grained radar fed him the surface features in such detail that he was able to feed it into his brain as a physical sensation, as if he held the moon in his fist and could feel its texture of stone and snow against his palm. Del Azarchel resisted the temptation recording into his nervous system the sensation of his arm muscles tensing and throwing the moon to fiery doom. He had indulged, long ago, during the long years aboard the NTL Hermetic, with the intoxication of artificial sensations. He promised himself never to do it again, a promise he had since kept, albeit not without some pain. The reality of being a godlike force able to throw worldlets to their doom was better.
The pinpoint flare of energy of a larger object launching from the surface was like a hot needle against his thumb. This was the exovehicular suit used by Montrose, an absurd-looking contraption like a canister-sized boat with arms.
Montrose had been overseeing the placement of the logic seeds on the small moon, molecular technology designed to break Jupiter out of the self-imposed blindness of the phantasm veil. The reentry heat would bring it to life, so that by the time the moon broke into pieces and scattered themselves across the clouds and seas of Jupiter, every fragment would be a virus spreading the antiphantasm logic to any sophont matter it touched.
One small moon was not enough.
Del Azarchel turned his many eyes toward the next moon, Amalthea, an irregular mountain in space almost freakishly red. The planet was massaged by tidal forces, its inner core stirred to activity, so that the moon gave off more heat than it received from the sun. This next moon out had a perfectly synchronous orbit: it hung above Jupiter always in the same spot, orbiting as fast as Jupiter turned.
The energy discharge betraying the position of Montrose slowly, very slowly, reached toward Amalthea. Additional pods of supply crystal grown from and sliced off the ship’s brain were shot toward rendezvous by the ship’s glorious pattern of magnetic fields, here used as a caterpillar drive.
Amalthea would be next. And then two or three the Galilean satellites: Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Europa. And then outer moons.
Their names rang like poetry in Del Azarchel’s mind: Himalia, Elara, Pasiphaë, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda, Callirrhoe, Themisto, Megaclite, Taygete, Chaldene, Harpalyce, Calyce, Iocaste, Erynome, and so on and on.
How many would be burn? Which ones would he spare? Del Azarchel did not know yet. Perhaps all of them would not be enough. Jupiter was a great deal of volume to seed.
And, if need be, the whole system of debris forming the rings and ring arcs would be deflected down into the jovial hell of the roaring jovian atmosphere.
It was a matter of no sorrow to send so famous and ancient a heavenly body crashing into the clouds and seas of methane and ammonia that lurked so tempestuously unquietly below. It was a matter of glory, because to destroy great and irreplaceable things proved a man was great. Del Azarchel contemplated the death of worldlets as a child might contemplate fireworks of blazing rockets. This was his day of celebration.
He wished for someone to share his festive day. The only other person he wanted to talk to was very far away. He turned his bright eyes and brighter cameras toward the constellation Canes Venatici. He could make out the globular cluster of M3. To him it was not merely a fuzzy patch. He could make out individual stars. It was a snowball of fiery dots.
Perhaps a mist of sorrow that he could not, in space goggles, wipe from his eyes dimmed their brightness a trifle. The distance was not just appalling; it was blasphemous. How was he ever to rule such vast and empty spaces?
Only to her had he ever revealed his whole mind. Only she was his equal, nay, his superior.
A man cannot adore his inferiors or his rivals, but the woman he had made for himself, a work greater than himself, he can love. With all other beings, even Exarchel, even himself, he must be dishonest to a lesser degree or greater. Only with her was he the true Del Azarchel. Only with her he did not have to simplify his speech to the slower pace of lesser minds.
No. There was another with whom he could be honest, the honesty of rival chessmasters bent over a board where all the chessmen were seen by both, or facing each other on the field of honor with weapons smoking. Deadly honesty. Menelaus Montrose always had grasped the magnitude of what the Great Work meant.
And now, the two of them could settle down and share a drink, and just chat, compare notes, and …
… and make it like it had been in the old days.
Before Montrose had stabbed himself in the brain with a needle. Before Del Azarchel (he winced at the memory) had urged him so gaily to do it.
Del Azarchel was convinced that Montrose would not have found the courage to do the fatal deed without him. How much differently things would have turned out had Del Azarchel only held his peace!
For the Monument would never have been solved without Montrose’s insanity and insane genius. Rania would never have been born. Somehow the evil deed of provoking his friend had turned out well, but, oh, after how much suffering and war?
A radio message came from Montrose. For a time, the two spoke of technical matters, sail adjustments, reentry angles for the shattered moons, each man coordinating from his side the project of waking Great Jupiter from slumber.
Montrose must have been in a talkative mood, because then he said, “You know this is a poxified damn dripping doinkstump of an idea, dontcha?”