Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  ECLIPSE 2369-2399

  HAVANA 2372-2395

  DIOMED 2366-2385

  SARK 2361-2383

  BYERLEY’S GREEK 2360-2379

  AGNER 2360-2386

  “So people here in the future don’t live past thirty?” said Menelaus. “Also, y’all got some funny names.”

  “This is a pet cemetery.” Del Azarchel was trying not to peer into the face of Menelaus, evidently unable to discern whether the other man was kidding him. “You stand above the bones of some of my best beloved quarterhorses. The next row over holds two of my jockeys, who asked to be buried alongside.”

  “Hope they died first. If not, that’d take the sport a bit far, but I can’t say as I blame ’em. I had a three-year-old named Bothersome once.”

  “Hm. That is rather young for a jockey; but toddlers are light in the saddle, I grant you.”

  Del Azarchel said this so smoothly, that now it was Montrose’s turn to peer.

  “So what is with the bronze ape, Blackie?”

  Surrounded by a circle of ferns was a statue of a great ape. The creature was in a posture of sorrow, one clumsy hand raised up as if to beg. The other clutched a talking-plate of the type used by the deaf and dumb. The eyes were mournful, looking upward, vacant.

  “That is a monument to Baker’s Dozen, the thirteenth and last in a series of Great Apes at Oxford, who learned to speak using the somatic pattern method. She was only about as intelligent as a three-year-old—a dull three-year-old at that—and spent her last days in a quarantine hospital, playing with toys and trying not complain or cry. They did not have the heart, the two scientists who raised her, to tell her she was dying.”

  “Cassimere and Morrow. We studied their work extensively, since they are the only people ever (’sides us, natch!) to try to map human symbols to a nonhuman mind.”

  “She was the last of her species. Dozen the Ape died of the Juedenvirus the very same day I was born. She has always haunted me. Had it not been for the war—who knows? Man might not be alone. What might your drug have done for them? There could have been a second human race, younger brothers, to work alongside us.”

  The bronze face was frozen in a look of almost human suffering, tragic, dignified, silent, futile. “Quite an imagination, whoever made this. Almost looks sad.”

  “The sculptor worked from photographic models. That face, that poor subhuman face, wears the expression of those who, unlike you, meet fate, and cannot master it.”

  “Why this statue next to your horse boneyard?”

  “For contrast. Ah! I keep her here, my iron ape, to remind me how life works.”

  “Oh? And how is that?”

  “Life cares nothing for justice. The Great Apes were a more evolved form of life, more intelligent, more adaptable, more like us. Stupid beasts, horses, easily spooked, and without enough sense to come in out of a cold rain. Yet why are they alive, whereas the apes died?”

  “The Jihad Plague was easier to cure in horses than in apes.” Menelaus shrugged. “Or ’swhat I heard, anyway.”

  “No. The answer was that the stupider creatures were more valuable to men, their masters, and we spent more time, effort, energy, and attention to save them. It was in our self-interest, since, during those years, everyone in South America and Africa was turning from petrol-based back to horse-based transport. The horse was more useful.”

  4. Brachistochrone Curve

  By that point they had left the garden behind. When Menelaus realized they were headed toward one of those buried vacuum-pipeline magnetic-levitation train stations Del Azarchel had boasted of, he expected to see some stainless-steel platform, zooming cars shaped like pneumatic cylinders, or to hear the humming of vast solenoids.

  Instead, they merely entered a chamber that looked, at first glance, like any other, windowless, but adorned with the flowers and ferns spacemen have always loved. Here were shelves of old-fashioned leather-bound books, and there was a chessboard. Perhaps it was a library. Then he noticed that all the chairs in the room were padded and could swivel to face the same direction. He glanced back at the door: or rather, doors. He had been fooled because they folded into the walls, but he could see the inner threshold did not quite touch the outer. This chamber was nested inside some sort of shell, and presumably the long axis of the chamber pointed in the direction of motion. Library? A private depthtrain car, with material to read during longer trips.

  He seated himself in one of the comfortable chairs while a wine steward passed out wine. A young food taster in a blue skirt and white apron sipped it before passing it to him, and Menelaus scowled at the girl, wondering if she’d brushed her teeth. A medical readout on her apron monitored blood chemistry and nerve conditions. “Couldn’t you get a guinea pig or a chemistry set to take your job?”

  He was sorry he said anything, because, during the moment while he spoke, and before Menelaus could raise the drink to his lips, the sawbones, that Oriental doctor in white, had snatched the drink out of his reach, and gave him a cold and unsmiling nod.

  Menelaus leaned forward. “Blackie, can you send these guys out?”

  Del Azarchel made the slightest of nods, and the crowd of the entourage, without any further words, made their elaborate bows and backed out or marched out of the chamber.

  Montrose snatched the wineglass back out of the doctor’s hand as the man was bowing out. He favored the other with a wink and a grin as the doors slid shut between them. Then he tossed down the drink without tasting it: a waste of fine wine, to be sure, but he needed the fortitude.

  Del Azarchel was smiling his dazzling smile, and had one eyebrow raised, as if on the edge of asking a question.

  Montrose spoke first. “What happened to Grimaldi?”

  Del Azarchel’s face fell. “Ah. Prince Ranier suffered terribly from the confinement, the loneliness of space, and the frustration, the maddening, eternal puzzle of the Monument. The sense that there were infinite secrets just beyond his grasp, written in a code the human brain was not well formed enough to understand—the sheer frustration was like a miserly debtor, and exacted its levy with interest.”

  “You saying he went nuts? Pestilence! I don’t believe you. He was more stable than you. Or me.”

  Del Azarchel said, “I am not a psychiatrist: I only know the strain and pressure were terrible. His judgment was affected. Captain Grimaldi came to increasingly strange and outlandish conclusions about the Diamond Star, and the Monument, and what the signs and symbols meant. He was trying to see the patterns in it, you see, all the crooked alien hieroglyphs, all the rippling, eye-confounding cursives. Who knows what he saw? When the Conclave judged him unfit for command, he refused to step down. We were not a military expedition. Didn’t we have the right to vote on it?”

  “Actually, no. If I recall the governing Articles aright, the Conclave can’t do more than advise him to step down. It cannot force him. Only the ship’s doctor, for medical grounds, had the right.”

  Del Azarchel waved his hand as if to brush away Montrose’s comment like so much smoke. “These events, to me, are long past, and I am not a lawyer. You will forgive me if I skip certain details. Even after so many years, the memory is nightmarish to me. I am not proud of what happened.”

  Montrose was aghast. “Not proud! I ’spect not! You were supposed to obey the Captain, even if he ordered you to die.”

  Del Azarchel spoke softly, reluctantly. “He did.”

  “He did what?”

  “He ordered our deaths.”

  “Pox on that! Not Grimaldi, he was not like that kind of man!”

  “Years and decades fled while you slumbered. You know nothing of what he was like.”

  “I know Grimaldi was the finest officer alive.”

  “So I knew as well, for so he was—when you knew him. Those days were past. I told you, he was under pressure. It affected his judgment.”

  “Insane? The ship’s doctor could have made a ruling.”

  “Dr. Yajnavalkya was
a malnutrition victim. During the hunger watches. The quarter-rations could not sustain him, not at his age. I do not say the Captain went mad. But he did order us to halt the star lifting.”

  “What? But that means—”

  He saw from the look in Del Azarchel’s eyes that there was no need to finish the sentence. They both knew the facts.

  There was no return trip without the antimatter to use as fuel. The whole expedition plan turned on the idea that the robotic mining ship Croesus could power a braking laser to stop the incoming Hermetic, and power up that laser to accelerate her to interstellar velocities again.

  Space near the Diamond Star had been swept clear of normal matter, of course. There was one superjovian in a far orbit, farther from V 886 Centauri than Pluto was from Sol, a terrene-matter body called Thrymheim. That was all. There was nothing else in the system. No uranium-bearing asteroids. Nothing for the Croesus to use as a power source for the launching laser to propel the Hermetic on her silvery sails back across the widest abyss—over a light-century—mankind had ever crossed.

  And even that would not have been enough. The expedition plan included making up the marginal loss in sailing efficiency with onboard fuel: The dangerous contraterrene was to be carried in a double-zoned magnetic “nozzle” generated well to the aft of the hull, and bombarded with pellets to produce reaction thrust.

  Del Azarchel shook his head, this time with wonder and sorrow. “Had we obeyed, the whole expedition, all for which we had sacrificed, would have been for naught. Without the antimatter, we could not even have powered the radio-laser to narrowcast our findings back to Earth, and so no history would remain to tell of us, or what had become of us. Without the antimatter, without the promise that we were carrying antimatter, the ungrateful generation that ruled the strange Earth to which we had returned would not have been convinced to shoulder the expense of orbiting a braking laser of their own. The Golden Age we ushered in, a time of unimaginable plenty, wealth, and abundant energy, all would have been stillborn. The tribes and nations of the world would still be consuming each other in wars: instead, at long last, at long and long last indeed, the universal dream of man has come to fruition, carried in on the wings of the Hermetic! The world is one: and all the princes, republics, parliaments, and wardenships are under our feet. At long last: peace! Peace on Earth. Surely that was worth it!”

  Montrose said nothing.

  Del Azarchel leaned back in his chair, looking saddened. “But even so, I would not have allowed the Conclave to relieve him of command, had I known how despondent he was, or what would follow.”

  Montrose did not like the sound of that. “What followed?”

  “He took his own life. I do not have your admiration for the heathen religion he joined: They are prone to burning themselves, these Brahmins, when they crave their fabled return on the wheel of reincarnation.”

  “But he was a Frenchy.”

  “Monegasque. And yet ideas have no race: He was Brahmin because he thought as Brahmins do. Captain Grimaldi dressed himself in splendid garb, adorned with liquid-crystals as with jewels, turned up the oxygen gain in his chamber, and sealed the hatch. He was thoughtful enough to evacuate the surrounding chambers of air, so the blaze could not spread. It was a gaseous fire, since there was nothing else to burn except lightweight plastic cabin-fixtures, and so smothered itself as quickly as it flared up—almost more like an explosion than a fire, burning in all directions at once in a confined, perfectly insulated space. I sorrow to think that he condemned himself to a more eternal fire, and have said more than one mass for his soul. I may say another tomorrow, before dawn. You are welcomed to join me. I have the Pope on my staff.”

  Montrose was about to say no thanks, that he was no sort of praying man, but then again, he remembered how he once thought it was not right to have a man not buried proper with no words said over him, as if he was a dead dog or something. “Yeah. I think I will join you.”

  7

  Posthuman Technology

  1. The Cold Gray Room

  Technicians in parkas were trooping out of the chamber as they entered. More than a few minutes were spent in introductions, explanations of the procedures, and some consultations with Del Azarchel over technical matters meaningless to Montrose.

  The chamber was hollowed out of the middle of a molecular rod-logic diamond the size of a warehouse: The walls, ceiling, and floor were paneled in absorptive fabric the color of a pigeon’s wing. Out from the walls came bundles of colored fibers, which where stapled to black cylinders occupying the center of the room. The whole thing had a surprisingly clumsy, half-finished look.

  Menelaus stood in his parka, his breath a cloud of steam before him, aching. Del Azarchel sat impassively behind him, his hands tucked into a muff, his legs covered with a white coverlet.

  “Where’s the brain?”

  “We’re inside it.”

  “Not as tidily packed-up as a human brain, then. Where’s the controls?”

  Del Azarchel wheeled over to the nearest wall, and tapped on the surface, to bring up an image of a standard key-screen and scratch pad. “The wall surface is motion-sensitive and follows standard finger-gestures. You can extend the range from contact to the middle of the room. Make fists to null the monkey-see-monkey-do. Otherwise you will flip the view each time your scratch your nose. If you rub your thumb against your index finger, the walls-sensors interpret that as a trackball. Draw your fingers apart to expand the view. If you’d like a stool, the technicians keep them piled in a corner, along with elbow-rests.”

  “I’ll stand. Before I start it, how do I stop it?”

  “Spoken like an astronaut. Salute with two fingers for the Halt gesture. Clasp your hands palm to palm to crash out of the program.”

  Montrose made the standard library-gesture for Open, which was to touch all four fingers to his thumb, making a circle. Immediately the four walls, and the ceiling, vanished into a pearly gray void. The floor was like a raft on an endless ocean of dizzying fog. Montrose realized all four walls, plus the ceiling, were coated with library cloth.

  “Neutral setting is giving me a headache,” said Montrose.

  “Cross your fingers for R. That gives you the Review command.”

  Suddenly one part of the ocean of nothingness was painted with a system of diagrams.

  It was a diagram of a neural process. Menelaus found he could finger-snap through the views and magnifications, or slide the screens left and right with a handwave. At highest magnification, he could see the specific equations generating the lines of code that were compiling into a symbolic matrix. There were hundreds of matrices, thousands, millions, intertwined like some vast tree, or, rather, like the circulatory system of some irregular cloud.

  At the lowest magnification was … a mask. It was a crystalline face, made of hard planes of light, with dots and crosshairs to indicate eyeball directions and motions.

  Del Azarchel’s face. It was a simplified version, smooth-shaven, with skin like plastic. There was no skull, nothing above the hairline and nothing behind the ears.

  It was staring at him. It raised its eyebrow in that typical way of Del Azarchel’s and gave him a polite, if aloof, nod of recognition.

  Menelaus said, “It’s—the damn thing is looking at me. I mean, heh, it looks like it is looking at me. Damnification! Almost looks alive.”

  The pale lips moved. Speakers in walls carried the voice stereophonically. “Alive? Ah, my friend, you could say that. And such a life!”

  The pinpoint eyes looked past Menelaus’s shoulder, turned toward the seated Del Azarchel. The gaze was sardonic. “A happy life, I suppose, for I exist without pain or hunger or want—without lust or love—but, alas, a life that is too brief. Ironic, if you consider the point of this exercise is to grasp for life, endless life.”

  Menelaus yanked his hands together as if he were swatting a fly, a loud clap. As if banished by the noise, the cold and superhuman face was gone, and the walls of the room
were once more a dull gray void.

  “You copied yourself?”

  Del Azarchel said, “The seed system modeled my every braincell, down to the molecular level. Whatever my brain did, it did. The thing we humans do not understand, the way the immaterial mind is connected to the matter in the brain, I simply copied it. Ah! And to elevate my copied self to posthumanity, I also copied this.”

  Del Azarchel tapped the red amulet on his wrist, and streams of patterned data flowed along the walls.

  Montrose said, “I know that part of the Monument well. Delta 81 through 117. It is what I used to make the Zurich computer runs.”

  Del Azarchel smiled and inclined his head. “I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Yes, I copied not only your work but your approach. I copied segments of the Monument math, treating as algebraic unknowns the values I could not translate. Due to your work, I was able to make a perfect copy of myself—as myself. To augment the copy into posthumanity, ah! There I had the simulated molecules introduced into the simulated braincells of the simulated brain, to do just what you had done to you. Your Prometheus Formula: I imitated the effects electronically. Unlike you, however, I had more than one try.”

  To Montrose’s surprise, grim sorrow clouded Del Azarchel’s face.

  He continued: “I was each and every one of them. Closer than any twin brother could be: starting from a perfect replica, thought for thought like me, developing into areas I could not follow! And each time, one at a time, knowing it might end in madness and death, they asked, no, they demanded the experiment proceed. Such brave brothers I lost!” Now he laughed, and turned away, wiping his cheek brusquely to hide a tear. “I suppose it is mere arrogance of me to admire a copy of myself, is it not? But I felt I died each time one trial run had to be shut down.”

  Montrose looked at the equipment around him. “I don’t understand.”

  “Shutdown is death.”

  “Can’t you just restore any copy from tape back-up, or whatever it is called? Don’t you make daily snapshots?”