“The seed I have been preparing for eight thousand years is floating through space, light as a thistledown. The soil is prepared. The advantage of nanotechnology, is, of course, that anything made of matter, if your Von Neumanns are properly programmed with the proper pseudochemistry, can be torn apart and put back together again as other compounds. Anything, anywhere, can be soil. What you call the King of Machines had been launched!”

“To where? I saw your launch. You did not have the oomph to make low Earth orbit. That nodule of iron brain crystal is going to follow a suborbital path and fall back down. When the crystals reenter the atmosphere, they will break down instantly into inert carbon compound. I designed them that way. Your flightpath is suborbital.”

“Suborbital? You forget I have a skyhook. My Tower rendezvoused with the iron crystal nodule in low orbit early this morning, and only using the surrounding fields, not touching the dangerous nanomaterial, the Tower aura boosted the nodule by means of magnetic linear acceleration. Amazing how much velocity one can impart with an accelerator over eleven thousand miles long, and a payload that hundreds of g-forces of acceleration will not mar … I do not even need to use an energy-efficient Hohmann transfer orbit: I can shoot the nodule like a bullet, with an orbital leading-angle of months rather than years to hit the target.”

“Why not just use the skyhook for your launch mechanism?”

Del Azarchel waved the question away. “Public relations—it was better to have the episode concluded quickly. My government wishes no public debate to mar the smooth progress of the issue…”

“Meaning you are still mendaciously and falsiferously lying to your poxy mooks like a venereal and meretricious buckskank boasting of how minty-clean her fur-lined wormsocket is?”

“Gaaugh. I am assuming that is not a real word, Cowhand?”

“I am assuming that the target is Mars. It has a nickel-iron core like Earth, and the Von Neumanns will make planetfall, and begin burrowing. The Day of Gold you had your Savants try, that was crude, because there were Giants, creatures just as smart as you, also on this planet and ready to stop you. But Mars is empty. No one will stop you. Mars! I’ve always daydreamed about that planet. It is not a bad place to start! It is a dry land of rust and sand. Sort of like Texas.”

Blackie smiled. “You underestimate me again. Keep the magnitudes of difference in mind.”

“Magnitudes?”

“In the naming scheme Rania devised, a Kardashev One level civilization that coats and converts all the usable surface layer of a world to cognitive matter is called an ‘Angel’—such is the mind occupying the snow and glacier around us now. A mind who occupies a volume the size of an asteroid, such as 1036 Ganymed, is an ‘Archangel.’ Exarchel now occupies a volume the size of Earth’s core!”

“Inner core,” said Montrose.

“Inner core. Even so, by Rania’s nomenclature, Exarchel is a Potentate. He is, by himself, a Kardashev One level civilization!”

Montrose looked at him carefully. “So you are not going to pick Mars as the place to terraform from an inanimate rock into a living self-aware volume of cognitive matter—Mary’s virginal size-A training bra! There has got to be an easier way to say that idea. Turning dead matter into gray matter.”

Del Azarchel scowled. “You should not take the name of Our Lord in vain.”

“I was taking Our Lady’s name in vain. Or the name of her bra. Not the same thing at all.”

“The word you seek is sophotransmogrification. That was Rania’s translation of the Monument hieroglyph group depicting a pantomime of the act of turning inanimate molecules into self-aware calculation engines.”

“Is it Venus?”

Del Azarchel grinned. “Am I not the Master of the World? Do I think small? Rightly do you call my brainchild the King of Machines. For his destination is the King of Planets.”

“Then—”

“Jupiter.”

At that name, silence hung in the air like the shiver of a gong.

5. Jovial World

Del Azarchel said, “Just the core of Jupiter is twenty times the size of Earth. The predictive models I have had the Melusine run for me show that hydrogen-helium at those temperatures and pressures form a substance nanomachines can manipulate. Carbon, which is heavier, sinks, and becomes diamond—a substance already in a lattice, and easier for Von Neumann machines to work with. Jupiter will be the next order of being above mere Potentate of the Earth. He will be a Power.”

Montrose listened with wide eyes.

“Within four hundred years,” Del Azarchel continued, “before the Hyades arrive, more than half the total mass of the Jovian core will be converted to a self-aware entity ten times the mass of Earth, greater than all the inner planets combined! We may indeed see an acceleration rather than a slowing of the transmogrification processes since the amount of Von Neumann molecular assembly-disassembly performed in a material-dense environment is directly proportional to surface area as it expands, and inversely to waste heat above the critical resilience temperature of the crystal—”

“—Wow!” said Montrose, childish with awe despite himself. “A brain the size of Jupiter! With that kind of calculation power at our command, seated on our solar system with all the mass-energy as a raw material to make any weapon a brain that size can devise, the Hyades World Armada—which is only the mass of Uranus—could be driven back, or even destroyed!”

There was nothing different in their faces. Del Azarchel still wore the same expression: jovial, lighthearted, bold. His smile and the tilt of his head still radiated charm. Montrose had not moved.

But, without a word, the hate between them hung in the air like a charge of static electricity, building in potential and building. Montrose looked carefully in the countenance of Del Azarchel, and it was as if the weight in the air Montrose felt in his lungs had just increased.

Montrose said, “So Jupiter will be the taskmaster for the slaves of Earth for all time to come.”

“Not so,” replied Del Azarchel. “It is as I said. Earth is nothing. The Hyades will overlook the Earth if Jupiter is ready, and is intelligent enough to prove itself useful to that immense, transuperbiological civilization. On Rania’s scale, a collection of stars every atom of whose solar systems has been reduced to sophont matter is called a Domination. Even the brain the size of Jupiter is almost nothing to those scales: I will be lucky to be a galley slave or a cabin boy in their ship of civilization. Earth will be overlooked.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I have studied the Cold Equations of power and authority between the stars. It is a possible solution. I give you the Earth as Dives might bestow on starving Lazarus a smallest crumb fallen from his table. Take it and serve me. Earth will not join the collaboration of constellations; she will grow old, go extinct, be forgotten, and pass away, while I will still be expanding and learning.”

“And what if Earth decides it don’t want no neighbor as dangerous as your Jupiter Machine? It ain’t been born yet. You can still stop the seed from landing.”

Del Azarchel spoke in a voice as soft as the rustle of a serpent in the tall grass. “The nodule of Von Neumann crystal that forms the seed for the Jupiter Brain in twelve days will pass the moon’s orbit. In two years, it will reach Jupiter. Even if I now, this moment, repented the deed and bent all my genius and all the resources of this world to the task, and yes, launched into higher orbit and then into interstellar space the great Tour de Oro”—Montrose knew he meant the skyhook—“even so, I could not stop the birth of the Jupiter Mind. What would happen if we sent the Tower after the seedling to recover it?”