“The signal-to-swearword ratio of your message is approaching white noise, but if you speak of this work, the Great Work, I think it is the finest idea that can be conceived, my friend!”

“Conceived out of wedlock with a she-dog, you mean, because this is one bastard bitch idea. We are making a god to rule over us, and we are not even programming him to be nice.”

“A glorious future is ours.”

“A glorious blister on my anus.”

“Do you still have doubts?”

“Plenty. My hand has been forced. Forced into making this Frankenstein’s monster larger than worlds!”

“You need not blame yourself, friend Menelaus.…”

“Shuddup. I ain’t making no excuses, I am just pointing out the facts. The fact is that just because you wanted this to happen does not mean your hand was not forced, too. What the hell do the aliens want? We don’t know what we are being forced to do and why—and yet you think you’ve won this round, Del Azarchel. The board just grew from eight squares on a side to twenty lightyears volume. And the game Hyades is playing, and the game the masters who own Hyades play, is even wider. So you don’t know what the next move in the greater game shall be, do you?”

“No,” said Del Azarchel. “All your words are true enough. I am but an egg at this point in my ambition: but I am the egg of an eagle, a kingly bird, or a roc, whose wingspan and strength no man can measure. True, the Hyades forced us to wake the Jupiter Brain, and place our world under his power. True, we cannot yet guess the reason.”

“Then why can I hear you grinning? You are as smug as the man who learned to fart fire, and saw what he could save on matches.”

“And you are as downcast as a fox in a trap, who realizes he loves his leg too much to gnaw it off,” said Del Azarchel. “I vaunt not because I know the future, but because I know it will be mine. Even if I cannot say what it shall hold, the future shall hold my Promethean triumph!”

“Welcome to Blackiotopia,” drawled Menelaus. “Whoop-dee-poxing-doo.”

“Can you envision the civilization that will arise here among the moons of Jupiter? How good it will be to have men bow the knee to me again! And they will not even be men, but a posthuman mass of cyborgs and biomechanism intertwined: uploaded, upgraded, altered, augmented, and turned into the Archangels and Potentates needed as secondary brains and lesser servants surrounding the immense brain of Jupiter!

“Some of these moons we perhaps shall save to turn into Archangels of logic diamond, and some shall squat on the surface under the immense gravity, domes larger than terrestrial cities. As the core thinks and grows, achieving ever higher platforms of sapience and sentience, we will begin to detect, like earthquakes, the energy exchanges accompanying the neural activity. The minds, lesser than his but immeasurably greater than ours, shall hedge those torrents and herd those overflows of mental force, adjusting divarications and replication errors, and acting as intercessors, and, aye, as priests and oracles to thoughts nor they nor we can understand!

“Have you calculated what the change in temperature will be if a brain only twice the size of Earth alters the energy pressure in all its neuromolecular cells during a particularly involved thought process? Envision that on the scale of a gas giant! The whole world of Jupiter will ring like a bell when mighty thoughts, containing more than all the libraries that mortal men ever wrote or burned, pass from one side of the crystal globe to the other.

“Ah! My dearest Menelaus!” said Del Azarchel grandly, “I am, I confess, glad you are here to see me on this day! Jupiter will solve the message of the Cenotaph. The art of remaking man, not the timid changes of the Hermetic lore, but total change, pantropy, change to suit any world will be given to us, a gift as great as the fire of Prometheus! The art of terraforming to our specifications, to make worlds, to be as the Creator! Nay, we shall surpass the Creator, for did he not make only one man and one world? Together, we shall make many!”

“Holy Mary’s Mother’s milk, I guess I might start believing all this superstitious churchified crap of yours.”

“Indeed? Why so?”

“What you say sounds like damnified blasphemy to me. I was hoping Jehovah would float by on a fluffy cloud and stuff a lightning bolt up your rectum. Ain’t hope one of them three cardinal virtues?”

“What lesser men call sacred, to me is blasphemy; and their abominations are my sacraments! Let us prepare my son Jupiter for his coronation, for he surely shall be monarch of all the children of man on all worlds.”

Montrose said, startled, “Are you crowning someone else? I thought you still were jollying yourself by pretending you ruled the roost?”

“What roost? Call it a coop instead. Tellus estimates the Hyades will deracinate our race to twenty stars in the First Sweep circa a.d. 11000, and perhaps twenty more stars after that in the Second circa a.d. 24000. Less than half a hundred worlds! Bah!”

“Y’know, you are the only guy I know who says Bah.”

“No term is more concise for expressing disgust. Fifty earths? My ambition is not so curtailed. Someday commerce, regular trade, must open between the Hyades and the worlds of the Local Interstellar Cloud. The Empyrean Polity of Man—so I hereby christen it—is being planted as an olive tree. Someday the husbandmen will come to claim the fruit. Whenever that shall be, I mean to be prepared for it. There are wider fields for my ambition now.”

“What is bigger? You plan to rule the Galaxy? Twelve thousand lightyears in diameter. Takes a long time to send out orders or hear reports. Or did that slip your slippery little mind? You’re nuts.”

“You thought me sane enough when we two together vowed to reach the Diamond Star, and to do all else the world called impossible.”

“Except you didn’t achieve it. Rania did,” said Montrose.

“She will return in time. Then there will be peace.”

“I should set out after her,” Montrose muttered.

“Indeed? Do you have, convenient to hand, a dwarf star made of antimatter to use for fuel? I think you will find overcoming the difference in frame of reference in order to make an in-flight rendezvous will take the same amount of time, from her point of view, as waiting here to receive her. Or, did that slip your mind?”

“Pox! I gotta keep an eye on you. And shoot you dead. Then I can enjoy my wedding night in peace.”

“Admit it, my friend, you want more than just peace; admit it. You want to see the Heat Death of the Universe as much as I do, or grasp the farthest quasar in your hand, or hear the mysteries whispered beyond the curve of the universe. You want to be an architect of worlds and of destinies, and decree the fates of suns and constellations! You want the future, the shining future, the golden land of tomorrow! Confess it!”

“Blackie, sometimes I do … but sometimes…”

“Yes?”

“Damn, but sometimes I just want my wife back.…”

Hearing Montrose heave a sigh, Del Azarchel, somewhere in the dark romanticism of his heart, felt an unspoken breath of pity for this poor, foolish Texan, who was lonely. How poetical!

“… Just want her back, and hot in the sack. ’Cause, damnation, am I horny.”

Del Azarchel had quickly to make adjustments to his parasympathetic nervous system to suppress his gag reflex. “Bah! How you disgust me! You know you are not good enough to possess her, you swine.”

“Boy, don’t I know it. But swine or no, I am more man than you. Lucky me, eh?”

Del Azarchel uttered some insult from the lists he had long ago and lovingly contrived for such occasions, and Montrose responded with a less witty and more earthy rejoinder he invented on the spot, and the conversation soon degenerated into their normal bickering, and then silence.

Del Azarchel did not pay much attention. The exchange of slurs and sleights was perfunctory. He spoke the insults only because he did not want the filthy Cowhand to suspect.