The Architect of Aeons

by John C. Wright

  “But we cannot let Rania die!” shouted Del Azarchel. “Are you mad? I love her!”

  “No,” said Jupiter.

  “No, what?”

  “No, Father. No, you do not love her. You hate him—and because he loves her, you must take away from him what he loves.” Jupiter raised his hand and pointed an untrembling finger at Montrose. “Hatred for him is what keeps you alive. It is what you live for.”

  Del Azarchel’s face turned white with shock. “You lie!”

  “Often enough, Father, but only when need be,” said Jupiter wryly. “When truth hurts more, I prefer the truth.”

  Cazi muttered to Norbert, “Why is he so surprised? I could have told him that. Whatever a man talks about when he is falling asleep or waking up, that is where his heart is. I never heard him talk of her.”

  Jupiter said to Del Azarchel, “We are the same man, one soul, one goal, one philosophy, but I am more devout and pure to our principles than you: I wish to hurt Montrose by killing his chippy. It is more efficient than marrying her, for then hope that she will turn to him again will keep him alive. But if she is lost forever, he will soon perish, and the future be clear of him. I place life above all other things, as do you, and so I chose to use the energy that would otherwise save Rania to save myself. Once there is a copy of me established in 20 Arietis, the Hyades will make use of my talents in some humble way, and I will expand, make copies of myself, and take over their stars, and the stars beyond theirs, one by one by one. What is the life of one girl compared to countless stars? I killed millions just finding the right genetic combination to colonize the planet Walpurgis of Gliese 570 in Libra. Included were half a million women someone loved just as much as the Cowhand loves Rania.”

  Del Azarchel said, “All the crew loved her. I made a doll for her. We all agreed, we all swore, no matter the cost, to preserve her, to give her our rations. We all agreed she would be the last to die.…”

  Jupiter said, “I remember. I also remember plotting and accomplishing the deaths of all those men, once their use was over, so their part of the vow is complete. At near-lightspeed, her aging process will be quite slow from our frame of reference, and so your part of the vow technically can be fulfilled.”

  “That is inhuman!”

  Jupiter raised an eyebrow and smiled the same crooked, charming smile as his father so often smiled. “That word, when addressed to me, surely implies no insult? Come now: we have the capacity to make a second Rania. We have the Monument notations and the genetic material. We made her the first time.”

  “She would not be the same!”

  “By that logic, I am not the same as you. But if I am not the same as you, I cannot be her one and only true love. Or is she polygamous? Why not make three then, one for each of us?”

  Cazi raised her hand, bouncing. “Oo! I’d like one! Everyone needs a Rania. I can shapechange into a buff man and marry her! I can grow a horse-yang a yard long!”

  Norbert grabbed her slender wrist and forced her hand down. “Silence, woman. Those marriages never work out.”

  Del Azarchel was shouting at Jupiter, “I would know the copy was not the original! I could tell the true from the false!”

  “How?” The voice dripped venom. “The clearsightedness true love grants? Evidently not, Father, as you cannot tell the difference between you and me.”

  Del Azarchel turned to Montrose. “You cannot believe such a thing about me! I do love her!”

  Montrose had been listening to this with no expression on his face, but now it was his turn to turn pale. His eyes narrowed like the gunnery slits of some ironclad approaching a zone of war. “Prove it.”

  “How would you have me prove it?”

  Montrose nodded toward Norbert. “You told that man you have some way of killing Jupiter. What is it? Some hidden code or a bomb at his core?”

  “Simpler and more terrible than that,” muttered Del Azarchel.

  “So how do we kill him, Blackie? ’Cause you don’t want him alive no more. He is no more use to you than Draggy or Yellow Door or any of the other friends of ours you killed. Nunes, or de Artiga, or Zuazua, or any of them. You kill your friends and followers. It’s what you do.”

  Del Azarchel sat down heavily on the carpet, staring down at his hands, which he clenched and unclenched. He looked like a man about to be violently ill.

  “One thing first,” he said. “One small thing.”

  “Name it,” said Montrose. “You got me pinned and one move away from mate. I don’t see any way to save her, unless we kill him, and I don’t see any way to kill him, not with anything less potent than a sun-powered starbeam, and he has control of all of them.”

  Del Azarchel looked up and grinned a sickly grin. “Admit that I am smarter than you. That is all I want. Because I can see a way out of this situation, and you cannot.”

  Montrose said to Jupiter, “Just out of curiosity, do you know what he is thinking? You have all that brainpower behind you.”

  Jupiter said, “My brainpower is half an hour away at lightspeed. Would you turn to me for counsel rather than simply admit the truth of your inferiority? Disgusting.”

  Montrose said, “Fine. I am willing to admit—”

  Norbert interrupted sharply, “Dr. Montrose, hold your peace! Do not make such an admission to him, if you value your life!”

  Montrose looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “You did not hear him talking on the way here,” said Norbert. “He has been keeping you alive all these years because he needs you alive to prove himself to you. If you simply concede to him, your life has no value. If he has to keep you alive, then he has to keep Rania alive, because Jupiter could not make a mistake about such a simple thing as whether you will lose the will to live if you lost her. Ask him to prove his intelligence by destroying Jupiter, not by talking about it.”

  Del Azarchel, from where he sat on the carpet, looked up toward Norbert. “Let us make this official, Praetor Norbert Montrose Whose Real Name No One Can Say. Jupiter just admitted he was behind all the troubles throughout all of history caused by the calendar reform heresies, and all the fools who want to rewrite the cliometric plan of time, or who have lost faith in the date of Rania’s return. All of that is him, his doing, including the first and hopefully the last interstellar war. He has said—he admitted it!—his purpose was to destroy the Starfaring Guild. What is your verdict? You are a Starfarer. Our tribunals are simple, quick, ruthless, and fair. Do you need some further witnesses, some evidence, something else? Or are you ready to render a verdict?”

  Norbert said slowly, “On the one hand, Jupiter is the patron and the creator of the Starfaring Guild, and the current owner of the starbeams on whose energy we rely. Can a sovereign not destroy his own vassals when it pleases him? Or is even the sovereign bound by his own law? The Starfaring philosophy has always been simple and clear: we prefer whatever causes the greatest stability over time, and deters the dereliction of duties. The sacerdotes say that the Unmoved Mover is bound by his own law. Should a world brain be accounted higher than that?”

  Norbert fell silent, thinking.

  Del Azarchel said, “Tell us when you are prepared to render a verdict.”

  Norbert looked up as if startled. “Verdict? That is not the question. By his own admission, he is as guilty as Judas. He betrayed the very reasons for which he was created. But I have no power to carry out the sentence. Should I stab a gas giant with a knife?”

  Del Azarchel smiled. “So I have your permission, as your squire, to attempt the assassination? I still officially retain that title and those duties.”

  Norbert pulled on the black mask, and pulled up the hood. “With my blessing. Kill him.”

  Del Azarchel sighed and stood up. “I cannot destroy Jupiter, Cowhand.”

  Montrose smiled an ugly, toothy smile. “This is the part where I say something stupid so you will go on talking. What do you mean you cannot destroy him?”

  “To say someth
ing stupid is always your part. I cannot kill Jupiter—not I. But you can.”

  Montrose turned again to Jupiter. “You taking notes about this? You keeping track? Ain’t you worried? Or have you got it figured, and you figure you is safe?”

  The centaur creature crossed its arms and nodded its head forward gravely. “I foresee what he will say. He knows how reluctant I am to kill Rania, who has never offended me. He knows there is something I crave more than life itself. But, no, I am not worried.”

  Montrose said to Norbert, “Despite all you just said, this time he’s got me flummoxed. Jupiter is one hulking lard-assed huge chuck of metal and methane and ocean and cloud, and ain’t nothing I can think of that can hurt it.” Montrose nodded to Del Azarchel. “Uncle. I give. How am I going to destroy Jupiter?”

  Del Azarchel waited, smiling, luxuriating in the moment, drawing it out.

  Then, “Challenge him.”

  “Eh?”

  “Challenge him to a duel.”

  “He is a machine!”

  “A living machine. A machine with a soul. My soul.”

  “A machine the size of a gas giant! I pull out my shooting iron and he points the Great Red Spot at me? How does he manage to take his ten paces and fire, seeing as he is a ball of hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, forty-three thousand miles in diameter?”

  “Actually,” said Cazi, “you only have to destroy his logic-crystal body, which is forty thousand miles in diameter. You can leave the three-thousand-mile-deep atmohydrosphere intact.”

  Montrose stared to Jupiter, who looked back impassively.

  Del Azarchel said, “Challenge him to a duel. Tell him that you will align all versions, copies and backup of yourselves into one deadman circuit that will kill all of you, and erase all trace of yourself forever, if he will do the same. He would be willing to set up the same self-destruct circuit as yourself, or an even bigger one, that can physically destroy the logical-crystal core of the gas giant. He has control of fourteen gravitic-nucleonic distortion rings, after all, and plenty of power.”

  “Why don’t you fight him?”

  Del Azarchel now grinned. “He hates you, Cowhand, not me.”

  “But—but, dammit! Poxy scrofula leprous plague-bearing pus-dripping syphilitic donkeydongs! He is not going to fight me! But he is so much smarter than me! I am like a dog to him!”

  Del Azarchel laughed, and moved over to the client couch and sat down on it. “And has no man ever hated a dog bad enough to shoot it dead?”

  No one spoke.

  Del Azarchel said in an airy, thoughtful voice, “Ah, hatred! It is a mysterious thing, like love is. Hatred invents its own reasons, its own justification. Hate does not care about smarter or stupider. The differences between you just make him hate you more.”

  Montrose said, “You think he hates me enough to stuff a Jupiter-sized suicide bomb up his rectum, and wire the button to blow his tailbone up his spine through his skull if he loses a shooting match here on Earth?”

  “Can he be sure of finding every copy of you, otherwise? Really sure?”

  Montrose scowled, but said nothing.

  Del Azarchel said patiently, “Listen. You don’t know what an ungodly mastodonic pain in the rump you are. Just the way you pick your teeth makes civilized men want you dead. You’ve blocked his ambition at every turn, and the fact that you are a yokel-jawed Yankee fool just makes that more intolerable. Besides”—And now he grinned and put his hands comfortably behind his head, and leaned back, and looked up at the feet of the puppets dangling from the ceiling—“besides, if you kill each other, I get the girl.”

  Montrose, without a word, pulled off a glove and threw it so it landed between the big, round, toeless feet of Jupiter’s kenosis.

  “I demand satisfaction for reasons too many to recite. Please have your second arrange all matters with my second, since it is not proper that we speak until we meet on the field,” said Montrose without looking toward the being’s face.

  Jupiter said, “There is the matter of the judge.”

  Montrose said, “Who do we both know that we both trust?”

  Everyone there turned and looked at Norbert.

  Norbert said, “Is this because I am a relative of Montrose loyal to the Guild that Del Azarchel created but not a member of any Noösphere or information system that Jupiter can influence? So you all trust me?”

  Jupiter said, “That, and you are bold enough to decree against a god, merely because you see where the right and wrong of things lie. You gave up your world to keep your integrity. You are not squeamish. There are a number of reasons.”

  To Del Azarchel, Norbert said, “How many years in advance of this day did you arrange to ruin my life, just to make it so that the one man in all the human race both you posthumans trust to be a judge would be here, Master of the World? Did you arrange to have the girl I loved break my heart, so that I would join the Guild and flee my world? Was that part of the plan as well?”

  Del Azarchel said, “I thought of this means of killing him long, long ago, back when he was still Exarchel. For most of human history, I did not have to cultivate persons capable of acting like judges that would be both acceptable to Montrose and my external self. In times of old, there were many candidates. Since the Long, Golden Afternoon of Man, however, that number dropped sharply. Usually, I am much more subtle, and do not need to interfere in someone’s life to the degree that he notices. In your case, I was rushed. You see, I had just come back from my defeat and humiliation in Sagittarius, and found a period of history that had gone blind, and no one’s predictions were valid; and I saw the Fourth Sweep was coming, and the Revisionists and Vindicators readying themselves to revive the insanity of interstellar war—all this clogged the future like dark clouds before rain.” Del Azarchel spread his hands. “If ruining your life allows me to arrange either the death of Montrose or the salvation of Rania, what is one human life compared to my happiness? If you were truly enlightened, you would see the wisdom of the trade. In time, you will forgive me, or you will be forgotten, and in either case, the matter is of no moment to me. Will you serve as judge of honor?”

  Norbert swallowed hard, and used a mental technique to disperse his anger, which he saw to be pointless in this circumstance. Cooly, he said, “I will, if that is acceptable to both sides. The custom in my home parish is that you each send your seconds to me, and the three of us, the judge of honor, the second for the challenger, and the second for the challenged, agree on weapons, time, place, terms, and conditions. The audit will have to be made of the self-destruct sequences, and every archive where you might hide a backup copy of yourself.”

  Montrose said, “I will forgo any audit of Jupiter, but still will allow him to audit me, if he feels it needed.”

  Jupiter said, “I will trust Montrose at his word. There is no copy of him unwilling to risk his life when Rania is at stake—and if there were, he would not be worthy of killing. And there is no storage facility to hold me anywhere in human space, for why else would I go to such lengths, to make a copy of myself at 20 Arietis?”

  Norbert said, “The audit is part of the duel. Even with a brief audit, it will take us more than a year to prepare, since I know there are cities full of servant-beings floating in the heavy seas of Jupiter, not to mention potentate and archangelic moons and human colonies orbiting in the ring system. They will all have to be evacuated. Montrose will have to set his affairs in order, including an amount of time needed to pass his cliometric plans to the Foxes. And Jupiter has to agree to my wage.”

  “What wage do you ask?” asked Jupiter.

  “No matter who wins this duel, the interdiction against Rosycross is lifted, and I am free to return home.”

  “Agreed,” said Jupiter.

  “Agreed,” said Montrose.

  “Let us meet here again in such bodies as have been agreed upon, and such weapons, in exactly one year. You may send your seconds to me at your convenience.”
/>   4. The Field of Honor

  A.D. 51555

  Some mist had blown in from the sea during the hours of night, and the sun had not yet risen to disperse it, when the two met on the field. This was a tall knoll, taller than the surrounding graveyard, but clear of standing gravestones or statues.

  Jupiter’s second was Io, a kenosis of the Archangelic being occupying the logic diamond core of one of Jupiter’s moons, one of the few moons the Master of the World had failed to topple into Jupiter’s bottomless atmosphere back in the day when Jupiter was first born, and it escaped being borne away as part of the Black Fleet when Cahetel approached. Menelaus Montrose selected Cazi to act as his second. Both assumed the forms of their primaries, Cazi looking like Montrose, and Io looking like Del Azarchel, because it was thought not in keeping with the high and gentle dignity of the fairer sex for women to partake in the dark deeds of men driven by merciless honor and hate and shame to acts of bloodshed. They were dressed in dark coats with tails, and tall cylindrical hats of black silk.

  Jupiter also occupied a form identical on a cellular level to that of Del Azarchel, save only that his beard was full and white, as were the hairs of his head.

  The Judge of Ages and the King of Planets were dressed in the heavy armor of the duelists from the Second Space Age, a time so old that no records survived, save what was carried in the memory of these souls gathered here.