For if Montrose had known how unnaturally happy Del Azarchel was, surely he would be suspicious.

The glowing coal of joy that warmed him was the knowledge (and he knew not whence it came) that when Rania returned, she would look at Montrose and then look at Del Azarchel.

She would see in Montrose a man who sacrificed his morals and his integrity to save her. Because she was too good for him. It was simply a fact. And she was hyperintelligent, so she could not misunderstand that fact.

She would see in Del Azarchel a man who sacrificed not one iota of his truth, a man whose honor, while very cruel, had never been very unjust, and whose crimes were all justified by the high and noble and necessary ends to which his crooked means had led.

When she returned, he could hand her an empire of worlds of his making, and Powers and Potentates larger than worlds, Virtues and Principalities and hosts. What could the Cowhand on that day give her?

Del Azarchel was to have all. Not just everything he’d craved, but more that he had dreamed to crave.

He knew she would turn to him. His creation.

Jupiter was not the only divinity Del Azarchel had created: for he had made a goddess as well, a creature finer than any human.

His princess.

PART SIX

Time of the Third Humans

1

Man Creates Myrmidon

1. Exile in Ixion

A.D. 22196

Menelaus Illation Montrose woke in his segmented fashion, first with lower and outer personalities on the human level, passing from dreamstate to hypnogogic state to self-awareness and assessing the situation.

Radar waves had been bouncing off his little hidey-hole here for about half a year: Half a Neptunian year, that is, eighty-two Earth years.

Considering how far away this frozen little dwarf planet was from Sol, and how cleverly he had hidden every external trace of his approach and presence when he moved here ten millennia ago, the first assessment was one of astonishment and annoyance. Given the last known state of Telluric technology after the Endarkening of Man, and the cliometric chains of events extrapolated from it, it should have been impossible for anyone to find him. What did a man have to do to get a little damned peace and quiet?

After the Montroses in their various human-sized bodies consulted with records and sensed surrounding energy signals from the inner and outer Solar System, the lower personalities integrated and woke a higher level awareness.

His higher-level mind was now the central mass of the remote plutino maintaining orbital resonance with Neptune. It was named 28978 Ixion. Montrose liked the name; Ixion was a character from myth who won the love of the queen of the heavenly goddesses.

Except for an outer layer of rust-colored tholin and water ice maintained as camouflage, the volume of the four-hundred-mile-diameter worldlet—the distance from Dallas to San Antonio—had been converted to logic diamond. It was all him, all brain. In chambers and tombs and capillaries honeycombed through his crystal brain cells he kept the smaller and outer personalities. Each had been assigned a human-shaped body, modified in the fashion of the Hermeticists to be spaceworthy.

This variation had an intelligence of two thousand, about what Exarchel enjoyed in his heyday covering the entire surface of the Earth. This Montrose brought more and more miles of his crystal self into awareness, heat, and motion, as he puzzled over the information of his ingathered lesser selves. He watched through several sophisticated instruments covering several bands of the spectrum with a sardonic expression deepening on the completely imaginary face he maintained in his proprioception emulator.

Yes, he had expressions. Montrose long ago had found that if his electronic brain could not feel the slide and tension of facial muscles, his emotional changes did not synchronize with his biological versions and emulations.

So he kept his face running even while he slept, and this allowed him to pry open one disbelieving eye and sigh a majestic sigh, and feel his lips draw back in an angry smile, displaying his large, square, equine teeth, even though, in reality, the eye and eyelid, the breath, the sensation of lips and teeth and tongue and the rest was just a flow of numbers through a sensorium which was itself an emulation. So what? In reality the atoms of his real flesh and blood body were clouds of subatomic particles, which were, in turn, nothing more than a flow of numbers through the foam of timespace.

And so the ghost grimaced and grunted, because a vehicle was approaching from Jupiter. That meant it was Blackie’s people. Maybe Blackie himself.

He focused a radio laser and narrowcast a warning to stay away, repeating the message in Latin, Anglatino, Virginian, Intertextual, Melusine Verbal, and Glyphic, and the base introduction pattern for developing a Swan dyad language. There was no response.

Montrose watched them for one hundred fifty days, decided they were not a threat, merely an annoyance, and let the vessel land—or, to be precise, considering the small size of the asteroid he filled, let the vessel lay alongside.

But who and what were they?

He combed through the records collected over the millennia by his lesser selves who had watched and slumbered century by century.

2. Enigma in Sagittarius

The records showed a number of anomalies, ranging from the astonishing to the inexplicable.

In the Sixteenth Millennium there had been a fluctuation in the solar photosphere, and the annihilation of a geometrically straight line of particles beyond the heliopause. Someone had activated one of the mile-wide neutronium rings which the Asmodel Virtue had left floating in the convective zone of the sun.

Any of these seventeen rings, when rotated at near-lightspeed, created a Einsteinian effect called frame-dragging, which acted as a gravitomagnetic Penrose energy extraction mechanism, very similar to that produced by the accretion disk of a microquasar, and emitted a relativistic jet, powered by the ultradense solar plasma. Some unknown (and to earthly science, impossible) side effect of the frame-dragging polarized and aligned the wave-particles in the jet, forcing the energy into a coherent beam.

Montrose examined in awe the record of a nameless rogue ice giant world, a lump of frozen gas larger than Jupiter, the orphan of some failed solar dust-disk that never formed a star, who wandered into the path of the beam hundreds of lightyears away, being evaporated into brightly colored mist.

The reflections of the interstellar laserlight off the mist particles gave Montrose enough information to deduce the precise beam path. It was not pointed at any of the colonies of man, but at the Omega Nebula in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, five thousand lightyears away. What had been launched there and why? The only other thing Montrose could see in that region of space worth investigating was a blue hypergiant and variable star, V4030 Sagittarius, over seven thousand lightyears away, emitting one solar mass per day in its solar wind.

In the Seventeenth Millennium, Earth had lost her magnetic field, and unmodified human life walked abroad only at night. There had not been a drop in industrial activity during the day, but it did not follow the spacing patterns or diurnal rhythms of any First Human race, or of the Swans. This implied some new and third race of man, not a mere subspecies, now ruled Earth.