Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  Narcís D’Aragó spoke. He was the only other military veteran at Space Camp. The man had fought in the North African campaigns, beneath the skies gray with deathclouds. Montrose and D’Aragó had shared the unspoken bond that men in uniform had even when out of uniform, even when among civilians. He had been included on the expedition for his breakthroughs in the Linear Programming problem, particularly regarding strongly polynomial time-performance in the number of constraints and variables.

  Menelaus was confident that this grim young soldier would back him.

  “On the one hand,” D’Aragó spoke in a voice as colorless as ice, “anyone brave enough to bollix his own brain does not need to listen to anyone less brave. If we are not willing to face his needle ourselves, we don’t have a say in how he spends or wastes his life.”

  But then Menelaus was disappointed to hear him continue, with no change of tone, “On the other hand, we are still a unit. Let us not waste a man whom the expedition needs. These things should be done in the proper order, controlling the variables, with a medical crew standing by. Captain Grimaldi is the senior expedition officer: He had not given permission.”

  Montrose said, “By the letter of the law, he ain’t got no jurisdiction until we rendezvous.”

  Narcís D’Aragó made an noise in his throat like someone tearing a handkerchief. “Then talk to Del Azarchel! He is the pilot here, and outranks you!”

  Now Del Azarchel had rotated his cot so he faced aft. He was about two meters away, and was staring at Menelaus: he had strong, dark features, eyes that flashed greenish-gray, and the stubble of his shaven cheek gave his jaw a wolfish look. From Menelaus’s point of view, he seemed to be hanging like a bat upside down (if that word had any meaning in microgravity). He looked like a lazy panther, perhaps ready to sleep, perhaps ready to strike. His eyes were cold, but a half-smile seemed to play around his lips, as if this whole drama had been organized for his personal amusement.

  The pilot said laughingly, “Gentlemen, why talk this little talk? We are involved in a great emprise, a bold expedition! Does Señor Montrose contemplate anything as dangerous as the great star voyage ahead, when we shall fling a two-thousand-meter-long space vessel at ninety-five percent of the speed of light into the pathless night? An asteroid the size of a small coin, striking us head on, would have the comparative velocity of a bullet from a supercollider: the energy would be like an atomic bomb. None of our odds are good. And when we reach there, what do we find? A puzzle box! A big dumb object! Ah, perhaps an intelligence test? Gentlemen, what happens if we fail that test? The universe is waiting outside the frail little walls of our bubble of air, indifferent stars in their billions, endless wastelands of empty vacuum. What if that cruel universe puts us to trial and we fail?”

  Melchor de Ulloa answered, “But what will Captain Grimaldi say? Montrose, he is your friend: You will listen to him! You cannot just throw a friendship like that out the window—we all know you only got aboard this expedition because of your pull with Grimaldi.”

  Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “Well, maybe he should jab himself, then. He comes from one of those Anglo lands, where for three hundred years nothing is done but to dream of past glories.”

  Melchor de Ulloa said back, “Discord is always caused by selfishness. We are a unit, like D’Aragó said. We have to act as one body. Captain Grimaldi is the head of that body. What can one member do if he does not consult the head?”

  Del Azarchel flashed his white teeth in his wolfish smile. “Montrose! Consult only your mad and fiery heart! We are the Paladins of Charlemagne, the Knights of the Table Round. Our King is that dream we share: that dream to which we proffer our very lives! What other loyalty is there? We are the new people, the new race: the first interstellar men. Would you have the first act of our newborn species be hesitation?” His eyes blazed with wild emotion, and he called out: “Montrose! Are we not closer than brothers? Do not flinch! I will protect you, no matter what sort of monster you become!”

  Montrose was staring with haunted eyes at his friend. Who had once likened the quest for the future to be like unto a knight-errantry? Montrose could not recall.

  Ramananda said urgently, “Anything could be in that needle! So you said, Montrose! When you turn into the superman, the man after man, here and now, how can we trust you? We would be Neanderthals to you … or apes. You might treat us as a man treats his hound, with love and care, or a man treats a wolf, as a beast to be killed.”

  Del Azarchel said triumphantly, “It is too late. See the look in his eye!”

  “I will remember,” said Montrose. “I will remember my humanity.”

  Sarmento said, “The Anglo will never do it. He is craven.”

  “I ain’t no Anglo. I’m from Texas!”

  Just like looking down the barrel of a pistol. Menelaus pulled the trigger.

  4. Dreams

  A.D. 2235–2306

  There were dreams like water, waves that lashed and lapped at him, pulling him from dizzying fear to disorienting pain, and his thoughts flicked like little fishes and vanished before he could capture them. He dreamed he was falling in an elevator whose cable had snapped. But no, it was not an elevator, but a nuclear-chemical punt. He was surrounded by friends, Del Azarchel was there, but Menelaus could focus on nothing.

  There were dreams of smoke, painted rose-hue clouds of ecstasy. In highest spirits, giddy with discovery, he was trying to explain Fermat’s Last Theorem to the people around him, and relating it to how the dust motes stirred by the airlock’s ventilation system glinted so prettily in the lights from the life support controls. The motions were not random, of course: He could see the wave functions involved in his head. But then he was distracted by his visualization of each particular motion of his tongue and throat, conceiving it as a fourth-dimensional tube function, merely a complex geometry.

  He realized the inefficiencies of the idiom he was using, and he saw how a universal language of verb-to-noun formations was merely one more application of the zeta function, distributed over complex planes of two related variables. A much simpler language was easy to devise, with the two variables for nouns and verb correlation related to pitch and amplitude, and he began yodeling in it, sure that his companions would quickly catch on to the nuances.

  Even this was not efficient enough: if he played with the airlock controls, he could get them to reflect and refract from the dust-motes to express even more channels of communication. Amazing how everything was so filled with meaning, so filled with mathematics. He saw a way of improving the efficiency of the airlock process. All he had to do was adjust the flow dynamics.…

  He was quite lucid and reasonable when they hauled him, screaming in the harmonic pitches of a new language he had invented, away from the lock controls.

  He was aware of being carried belowdeck, away from the axis. His weight increased, and he watched the stream of orange juice curve from a container to the cup meant for him, and the expression for the Coriolis forces acting on the stream glittered in his mind. Hands forced the nozzle of the cup in his mouth while he laughed and squirmed and broke their fingers between his teeth, and the molecular geometry of the medicines the orange juice hid he deduced from the sour taste on his tongue, and the complex expression for his tongue surface with all its intricate molecular niches.

  When the morphine hit, his dreams grew clear and distant, and he was standing with godlike beings outside the universe, timeless creatures of light, gazing gravely down into a dark well from which no signal would ever return.

  Other dreams were dull and gray as lead, and lingered on forever. He dreamed he was being buried alive, but no, it was not a coffin, but an icebox, for it was cold here, endlessly cold.

  There were also nightmares, things as dark as storm clouds, vortexes of uncontrolled emotion and images of terror: images of being strapped to a pallet while the ancient Dr. Yajnavalkya, the ship’s surgeon, brought the whining drill toward the back of his head, and Del Azarchel floated i
n the near distance, his features gray and drawn with fear.

  Then there were dreams like fog, where he could see, but could feel nothing, and he was merely an onlooker to the actions of some higher being that moved his thoughts for him.

  He dreamed of the corridors of the great ship Hermetic. The engine room, when the magnetic line of the drive core was misaligned; the pump room, when the crew was running out of water, and a recycler had to be jury-rigged; the computer room, where the system had to be unlocked, before the life support batteries failed, and he had to convince the computer that the little blond girl was the Captain.

  Other dreams, the best dreams, were clear as crystal, and his thoughts slid as effortlessly as a skater on black ice cut with white skate-strokes. Surely these were figure skaters, for the white marks on the dark lake surface were circles, sine-curves, angles, and triangles.

  But no, it was not black ice. It was the Monument. The complex concentric circles of the alien symbols beneath his boots suddenly grew lucid and sharp, and the meaning of the signs was obvious.

  He stood on or, rather, drifted with his feet pointing toward, the surface of a small moon, and the horizon was so close that the figures standing near him seemed to be leaning away. He meant to explain the layers of meaning to the suited men standing near, in clear and patient language, but something distracted him. For overhead was a blazing sun, too small and too dim, and stars shone unwinking, the vacuum to each side of it. The points of light representing the mining satellites were easy enough to distinguish (particularly now that he had mastered the knack of increasing the number of nerve-firings to his optic nerve), but the flare showed that his warning was too late.

  Too late. He was proud of how clear and precise his language was, how he was oriented to time, place, and location, when he explained about the relationship between higher brain functions and the analogous mathematical functions that described bureaucracies in failing political-economy systems, closed systems of feedback orders that led to disaster. He explained to Captain Grimaldi about the reinforcement effects of the wave-functions of crew discontent reaching a node point, but when he touched his shoulder, the Captain rotated stiffly in the zero gravity, and his eyes were like small black buttons pointing in two directions.

  Too late. He saw the little six-year-old girl writing out the orders. Her cursive writing was a small deviation from a single line: he could see the mathematical expression of it, and how it related to the Quantum Yang-Mills theory of the geometrical framework of elementary particle formation.

  The computer system known as Little Big Brother pointed an optic pickup at the document, and the old men looked on in mingled hope and misery, their eyes hollow, until the mechanical voice box announced in its soft, emotionless, feminine voice that the command was legitimate. There were snaps like gunshots echoing up and down the inner hull as the locks on the coffins clattered open, rainbow-shining, like oil slicks their rich, dark, newly made biononanotechnological fluids, and at the same time, the shining screens of the contraterrene manipulations fields, dull pearl for so long, shined and came to multicolored life.

  So often, so often, he dreamed of ice.

  There were dreams of burning: Perfect spheres of blue flame hung in space, expanding slowly, with metallic oblongs at their hearts. He stood before the plotting board with the teenage girl, slender and coltish, and examined the spread of acceleration umbrellas for possible fire and counterfire. There might have been danger had the enemy found a proper launch window, but Menelaus could see it was too late. Too late.

  But most of all, he dreamt of the Monument. It filled his thoughts. He was standing beneath the naked stars, the blazing sun above, on a worldlet not larger than a mile across; a world shining with meaning. THE MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS LIFE WHEN FOUND DISQUIETING THE MAGNETOSPHERE OF THE ANTIMATTER STAR … SUFFIENT UTILITY TO BE HELD IN INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE TO THE IMPERATIVES … ALL OTHER OPTIONS ARE SUBJECT TO RETALIATION … PAIN … DEATH …

  He tried to tell the slouching ape-creatures what it all meant, tried to warn them to stop the mining satellites, but they wrestled him down, and fed sedatives into his intravenous drip. Del Azarchel, bearded, unkempt, and lank from months of half-rations, and wearing the Captain’s uniform that in no way fit his frame, looked on with cold, tired, weary eyes, commanding his men to be careful.

  2

  Personal Sovereignty

  A.D. 2214–2217

  1. The Starvation Winter

  It was cold as he slept, ice cold to his bones, and he dreamed of winter.

  His earliest memories were of the cold.

  The Starvation Winter had gone on during all Menelaus’s early years, and it was not until he was six that he saw the springtime, a mysterious season, a hope and a promise even his eldest brother was not certain about. The half-decade of unbroken snow had killed the Pest, but also countless tens of millions of men.

  It was not until he was older, that he heard it called The Japanese Winter. When young men cursed the Tenno of Greater Japan, saying his mad experiment in climate modification was meant to kill everyone north of the Tropic of Cancer, the old men wheezed and upbraided them, and said the Paynim unleashed the plague (which at first only attached itself to genetic markers found in Ashkenazim Jews, but which mutated to seek all primates) it was only the cold that saved everyone: Winter is the friend of man! the saying went, Thank God for the Nippon Winter, or we would be as extinct as apes.

  It was for Menelaus the first spring in the world. The flowers and birds never before seen by him appeared. To him, the word “brook” meant a path of ice, and the word “fishing” meant chipping a hole in that ice. When all these icepaths which had been solid during all his short life turned to rippling water, just as his mother had promised they would, he was sure, in his heart, that everything would be different thereafter.

  It was so strange seeing green grass where there had only been white snow before; so odd to see runners removed from every sledge or cart and round wheels, like something from a toy, put in their place. It was pure joy to run outside in bare feet, rather than trudge and slip in his older brother’s hand-me-down snowshoes.

  It was odd to see men, those whose farms could not be tarped with greenhouse-cloth, the same listless men who had spent last year loitering or rioting at warehouses and depots, where grain from southern lands was stored, now set to tearing up the earth with strange instruments, furrowing the ground in long parallel rows, walking after antique traction motors or antique mules, and speaking boastfully about being men again. The whole world was new, and it was spring, the glorious season of light, and Menelaus was sure the Asymptote lay just around the next turn of the calendar.

  But at seven, Menelaus was apprenticed; and endless days of toil made his springtide winter again, no matter how bright the sun.

  2. Apprenticeship

  A.D. 2217–2219

  Barton Throwster was not a cruel master, but not a rich one either, and his fear of debtor’s prison made him drive his prentices exactingly, so that many a night by lamplight Menelaus and the other boys were still programming dart and fuses and shells, and packing chaff in various combinations, and finishing the magnetic rails for pistols until the acceleration line was flawless.

  Mr. Throwster was also a Cathar, which meant he must go through elaborate precautions of maintaining his bodily purity, cleaning his white clothes with sonic waves, and changing his skin-gloves and nose-filters at regular hours. His denomination had objections to the implanted antibodies that kept the Pest away from normal people, but it could not be denied that he was a careful Artificer, and the number of his customers or prentices who caught a disease from an improperly prepared weapon-load was the lowest in the parish.

  The same exacting care made the villagers elect Mr. Throwster to the post of Wellmaster, but he was not paid extra for the honor of being the officer watching the purity of the local water supply, and the loss of his daily hours to this task made him drive his prentices al
l the harder, to make up time. And because he was a Cathar, and friendless, the village elected him Bangbeggar and gave him a long staff, on the excuse that since the vagrants and tramps sometimes carried disease vectors, only a man of his careful habits would do.

  Throwster was too conscientious to turn down the position, and so he moved his shop into the Constable’s quarters halfway up the ramp of the broken cloverleaf, from which the village of Bridge-to-Nowhere took its name.

  This cloverleaf was a high and crumbling structure of concrete posts and elevated fragments of road. The ramps for traffic were all broken, so the top had to be reached by ladders. At this height, the villagers kept their lofty Meeting Hall, which doubled as a stockade in times of raid. Lesser buildings, like swallow’s nests, clung to road fragments lower down the titanic concrete pillars.

  The expense and trouble of these new quarters, especially the cost of hauling water up so high, was one Throwster lost from his own pocket. The theory was that public-spirited citizens should be eager to serve the town, and that patriots would scorn being paid from the parish coffers, but Throwster dared not collect the bribes Bangbeggars commonly used to make up the deficit, not where he was the only Cathar.

  This sour lesson was not lost on Menelaus. Men in groups could cheat you just as plain as highwaymen alone in the wild, and do it by the voting box. It was one more thing he saw that never would have been that way had Captain Sterling of the Science Patrol been in charge.

  At nine years old, the honor of being the Constable’s boy meant more work for young Menelaus, but it also meant Throwster taught him how to fight with a wand, or with his bare hands, while watching for needles or dirty nails, or mouth-weapons like hollow teeth or spit-shooters that a foe might use to infect you.