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.”