The Architect of Aeons (61 page)

The smoke of the chaff was pushed to one side by the wind, but the same wind stirred up the fog, so an eerie combination of black and white swirls hung over the scene. Cazi, in girlish fashion not in keeping with the rangy masculine body she wore, put her hands to her mouth and screamed.

Montrose was standing, his right arm coated with blood, his shoulder armor broken in pieces. Jupiter had attempted a difficult shot, concentrating fire on the foe's gun hand in hopes of igniting his powder magazine.

Jupiter was on two knees and one elbow. His helmet was cracked. Puking noises and a wash of blood and lung matter issued through the cracks in the face slit. There was a gaping hole in his chest armor, and blood poured out in spurts, the sign of a major vein severed. With a stiff, painful movement, Jupiter straightened his left arm, so now he was swaying on his knees. His gun hand still held the heavy pistol. His left fist he now shoved into the entry wound, applying pressure, trying to staunch the flow of blood.

Norbert called out, “Blood has been shed! Honor is satisfied! Gentlemen, will you withdraw?”

Montrose said something in curt tones to Cazi. Cazi called across the field, “Have him turn on the braking laser, and he can live! He can always make a backup copy of himself later, once civilization has gathered the energy to do it!”

Io stepped into the line of fire, rushing to aid Jupiter. She beckoned toward the Great Swan Sgaire, who thawed his legs and stepped forward. Both were halted by a sudden cry from Jupiter.

“I do not agree!” shouted the kneeling figure. “I have one bullet left. Clear the field!”

Io, looking troubled, called out, “But my lord! To die for such a frivolous reason! He is a lesser being, a mere animal!”

“Better to die than to admit defeat to an animal! Praetor Norbert! I demand the field be cleared! I fire again!”

Montrose waved Cazi back out of the way. Only Io was standing between the two men. Montrose said to Jupiter, “I've got two bullets left, you poxy dumb damn machine! One to parry your bullet and one to kill you. Our chaff is thinned out, and your armor is cracked. You are dead if you do not drop your pistol. I will extend you gentle right, and allow you to withdraw.”

Jupiter cried out, “Never! We fire again!”

Montrose spoke to Cazi. She turned and called, “Judge of honor! My principal demands that the duelist communicate to Jupiter himself, and let the planet decide his fate. This is suicidal. Planet Jupiter should not be forced to destroy himself because his dueling puppet malfunctioned!”

Jupiter said, “Not so! We all agreed the decision was mine!” And he coughed up more blood, which seeped through the cracks in his faceplate, and dripped to the grass.

Cazi shouted, “You were hit in the head and cannot think straight!”

Norbert said to Cazi, “I cannot call for the hour delay needed to send a signal to Jupiter and back after one party has been wounded. He would bleed severely, giving your principal the advantage.”

Io said in a voice of great reluctance, “My principal agrees that he could be placed in biosuspension, so that he does not bleed further, provided his body is returned to the exact condition it is in now, wounds and all, to continue if the Power of Jupiter so agrees.”

Montrose said, “I don't want to shoot a bleeding man on his knees! Blackie, talk to your crazy machine!”

Del Azarchel raised his hands. “And spoil the show? I am merely here to see that no one cheats.”

Cazi said, “Wait a minute! I think Jupiter is cheating! He has a hole wider than a church door and deeper than a well in him! How come he can still talk and keep himself upright? That is not a real human body like we agreed! He lowered his pain threshold!”

Sgaire stepped over to the kneeling Jupiter with long strides. He spoke for the first time, his voice like an oboe. “I attest the body is human, and the nervous system is within the defined parameters.”

Del Azarchel called out from the sidelines, “I am just a damned bit tougher than you imagine, Cowhand.”

Sgaire said, “I also object. It is a violation of my Hippocratic Oath to slumber a wound and then to revisit that same wound on a patient.”

“Overruled,” said Norbert. “You are in violation of your oath by agreeing to be here at all, Swan. We are all conspirators in death. Jupiter! Communicate with the seat of your soul back on the planet. No one will move. However, by that time, the sun will be risen, giving Montrose an untoward advantage, because you are facing east.”

“Advantage or no, I will fight on,” said Jupiter in a voice of ringing pride.

It was the last thing he said. The Swan paralyzed both duelists, and suspended their life processes, and an hour went by. No one moved, except that Del Azarchel brought out a small paper bag from under his cloak and ate the white puffs of corn it held.

There was nothing said aloud. A scroll some thirty yards high came floating over their position. In the middle of the scroll was no writing, but an image of the planet Jupiter, looking strangely nude without its rings and moons, which had withdrawn to a safe distance. The bands of cloud in the upper atmosphere were whirling and writhing. Some of the swirls to either side of the Great Red Spot formed themselves into the Monument curls and sine waves, spelling out an angry and abrupt sign for assent. The duel would continue.

“Madness,” whispered Cazi. “He's gone insane. How can he go insane if he is so smart?”

Del Azarchel, hearing her, said, “His passions grew to godlike stature as his intellect grew. The loves and hates of higher beings are incomprehensible to us.”

“No,” said Cazi. “No, they are not. That is what is so horrible. Fear in a man or a dog or an angel is all the same fear, or love, or hate, or rage.”

Sgaire, his eyes sad and his face expressionless, raised his slender hand, and Montrose and Jupiter came to life again.

Norbert said, “Fire at will, gentlemen.”

A simultaneous report rang out. The first bullet from Montrose struck the bullet from Jupiter a glancing blow, but enough to send it tumbling, so that it struck Montrose offcenter, striking his armor with a noise like iron thunder, knocking him from his feet. Jupiter was also flung up and back as if kicked by a horse to fall supine when struck by the second bullet from Montrose's gun, which he had no bullet left to parry.

He fell and did not rise again.

Sgaire ran over, tore open the chest plate of the fallen figure's armor, and immediately applied a biosuspension technique. They could all see only half his body turn white. The rest remained red, and grew redder. Jupiter was so damaged that even the machines in his bloodstream were malfunctioning. Before Sgaire could do more, an arm and a leg and a large segment of the chest cavity bubbled strangely, turned dark in the unmistakable color of a nanomachine malfunction. Half the body slumped into steaming dark sludge and spreading red blood. Totitpotent cells, now without central control, gathered into clumps in the pool of blood, forming lumps or writhing tendrils like foetal organs, trying to make shapes, but then dispersing again.

The scroll hung in the sky. An hour later, they saw the King of Planets begin to die.

White streaks and stabs of light like sunlight seen through storm shined upward through the cloud. Jupiter's thought processes had been forced into a pattern of positive interference, and the heat energy associated with his planetary thought was prevented from dispersing correctly. The great being was literally thinking itself to death, destroying itself in the waste heat of its own unimaginable wrath, frustration, and hate.

In the first hours, clouds boiled upward like geysers made of air, and venting gas, powerful enough to exceed the huge escape velocity of that massive planet, began spilling into outer space in streams. Ripples crossed and crisscrossed the cloud layers, disturbing the pattern of bands that had existed for all human history.

Then some internal power supply, bright as miniature suns, ignited deep within the atmosphere. In six separate places, the vast atomic and subatomic and quantum-vacuum extraction power stations, each one larger than Earth, hidden below the outer layer of the diamond brain surface of Jupiter, had ignited.

The hydrogen and methane layers had ignited from the internal heat, and now every third or fourth band of cloud was afire. The atmosphere roiled with what, had the cloud been water, would be tidal waves, as areas of discoloration wider than a dozen Earths opened up across the endless fields of storm.

The core of Jupiter had cracked and was subsiding in places in immeasurable landslips and collapses, opening canyons wider and deeper than oceans, pits into which lesser worlds could have congregated without crowding.

The broken lips of these vast chasms were ringed on each side with endless brightly colored clouds of poison. The super-dense gaseous layers poured down like waterfalls in the titanic gravity. Elsewhere the cloudscape erupted when sudden continent-sized mountains of logic crystal, red with internal heat, reared impossibly high, peaks towering above the cloud.

Some layer of dense atmosphere or ultra-dense hydrosphere, sinking into the gaping wounds of diamond, struck a superheated layer of what had once been Jupiter's high-speed thought processes, vast bands of molten substance like rivers wider than worlds. The ignition was vast, and the oblate shape of Jupiter began to lose its contour. A ring of debris was beginning to form around the equator from the ejected material.

But all this was mere overture. For a signal had been sent, hours ago, to stations in the sun. The solar beam that Jupiter had been using to copy his brain information to 20 Arietis became visible when it struck the layer of debris swirling like a death shroud high above disintegrating Jupiter. Where the beam struck all matter was instantly evaporated into plasma. The miles-deep atmosphere opened like the bloom of a flower as the non-ignited material was flung upward for hundreds of miles in every direction away from the point of beam impact. The dark chemical substances of the oceans swirled in an immense circular tsunami.

A continuous explosion occurred while the beam head passed through all the layers of atmosphere and hydrosphere to touch the floor of the ocean, which was the outer diamond armor of the brain of Jupiter. The oceans were surrounding an empty cylinder formed by the vapor pressure, a momentary gap of nothingness, into which a hundred Earths could have been plunged. Against the silvery white surface of logic diamond, the reflection of the sun could be seen like the eye of an avenging god, growing brighter and brighter.

The beam cut through the core of the planet. Before ten hours had passed, the planetary rotation had brought the beam over every part of Jupiter's equator and out the other side. Such was the violence of the sunbeam, to which chemical and atomic explosions were as nothing, that fully one-tenth of the mass of Jupiter was flung into space, forming a vast, multicolored cloud like twinkling ice and black pellets, a nebula painted with all the peacock hues of the rainbow, and two dozen new moons and two new rings of asteroids.

The core was now red hot, and emitting more energy than it took in. The central mass was a ball of seething plasma, as if a sun, smaller than any sun could be, had replaced the heart of Jupiter. It was not large enough to ignite into a star; but for now, it was lit.

But the vast gravity of Jupiter was not so easily dismissed. The nebula was already detectably collapsing, and the newly created moon-sized chunks were spiraling back down, following the broken parabolas of the two new asteroid rivers back toward the blazing core of Jupiter. The blazing plasma of the miniature sun at the core was darkening as more and more matter collapsed onto it, smothering it even as it fed it.

It might be months or years or centuries of time before all of the ejected material was once more claimed and brought back down into a new and white-hot version of Jupiter.

A flaming finger seemed to wander across the colored clouds and torrents of rock and ice of the immense volume of destruction. It was the starbeam, swinging like a searchlight away from Jupiter, now visible as it reflected off the vast nebular mass of the newborn cloud. The starbeam was moving away from 20 Arietis in the constellation Ares and aiming toward the constellation Canes Venatici.

Norbert looked up, shocked. Even with the sun above the horizon, there was a high white point in the sky, brighter than Venus seen at dawn. It was Jupiter, burning. It was a small, pathetic, secondary sun that painted their shadows clear and dark upon the grass.

Norbert saw that everyone was looking at him.

It took him a moment to remember himself. He straightened up and said, “Jupiter has honorably carried out to the last particular all the terms agreed in the covenant. The duel is ended.”

Montrose, bleeding, looked over at where Del Azarchel stood, munching popcorn. “Well, what do you say, Blackie?”

Del Azarchel favored him with a supercilious look. “And what do I say about what?”

“Ever since you fooled me into solving Exarchel's divarication problem for you, everything you have done has been in order to create that monster brain to be the god of man and rule the human race. All the Hermeticists you deceived, all the work you stole, everything we did to nurse that huge freak to a level far, far above human intelligence, posthuman intelligence, or the intelligence of living moons and worlds. You achieved it. Now you saw it blow itself to bits.”

Del Azarchel nodded, looking pleased with himself. “I think the experiment was a great success.”

“Are you satisfied? Can I sleep now, without any further interruptions? It is only seventeen thousand, five hundred years and change before she returns. Will you leave me the hell alone? Is our duel over?”

Del Azarchel nodded. “Mankind has achieved a stable starfaring form of polity. It will degenerate without Jupiter to lead it, of course, and interstellar trade and commerce will come to an end a few years before Rania returns, but by then she will be moving slowly enough and be close enough that Hyades will not bother to interfere, if I read the Cold Equations correctly. We will win our manumission, and mankind will be elevated to equality with Hyades and the other serfs of the Authority M3.”