Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  “I don’t have a piece of paper, and I hardly think this is the time for you to be … you are about to meet with the Special Executive of the Concordat … and I am concerned that any thoughts along your habituated … Mister Montrose! What are you doing!” His voice rose to a sudden shriek of surprise.

  Montrose had taken a glass vase from the decorative shelf, thrown the flowers and water over his shoulder, studied the geometry to determine possible stress weaknesses, and shattered the thing on the marble chessboard.

  Now he had a sharp fragment of glass in his hand. With it, he was carving little Greek letters into the arm of his chair, which was varnished wood, so that the slightest scar showed up very nicely. He spoke without looking up from his figures. “What kind of barbaric society does not have paper around for back-of-the-envelope calculations? Lincoln never would’ve wrote the Gettysburg Address if it weren’t for scrap paper.”

  The doctor looked annoyed. “It was very much against my professional advice that you were wakened under uncontrolled conditions in a high-stimulation environment, especially since we have yet to confirm if the damage done to your nervous system is mitigated. How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Fifteen or so,” he said, still not looking up. Both chair arms were now covered, so he lurched to his feet, and plopped down into another chair. “I ain’t got room. Hey—what kind of surface does that chessboard have?”

  “Do you remember who you are?”

  He answered absentmindedly. “Menelaus Illation Montrose, J.D. and Ph.D., graduated Soko University in Nip Frisco, Class of ’34, before that, commissioned in ’25 as Lance-Corporal in the United State Imperial Calvary, the Tough-Ruttin’ Thirty-Fifth, decommissioned thank God, and after that, Monumentician and Semantic Logosymbolic Specialist, Joint Indosphere-Hispanosphere Scientific Xenothropological Expedition to Centauri V 866. Does that sound like I know who I am?”

  “What race are you?”

  “I am trying to work here.”

  “Please answer, Mister Montrose.”

  “Doctor. Purebred Tex-Mex. What’ya think?”

  “No, I mean, do you know what species you are? Do I look like a member of your own species to you, at the moment?”

  This made him look up. “What the hell kind of question is that? My what?”

  “Are we both human?”

  Montrose let out a laugh. “Rut me with a harpoon! You kidding? You ain’t kidding. What, is you aiming to rip off your mask and turn out to be a monster bug from Arcturus or something? Big clustery eyes and dripping sideways mouth and all? Damnation, go ahead! Let me see it. I dare ya! Do we have starships to Arcturus as yet?”

  “There is but one manned starship, and she keeps the peace of Earth and cannot depart.”

  “We’ll see about that one.”

  “Extend your hands to either side, and, while closing your eyes, touch your nose. Quickly, please.”

  “I will be damned if I will. You ain’t answering my queries, Doc.”

  “Hm. Insubordination is not a mental disorder, I suppose, but it is not exactly a healthy sign, either.”

  “I’ll show you a healthy sign.” He pointed at the chessboard. The surface was marble, and hence immune to his knifepoint, but the back was a thin layer of cork, and he had inscribed it with precise rows of little marks. “That’s where she was born.”

  “Who?”

  “Your Princess. I could have done it with the material in four coffins, and one dead body, of course, provided the flesh was burnt, because the carbon molecules were what the paramagnetic fields of the antimatter manipulators were designed to use. They can work on terrene matter just as easily. And the coffins were stuffed with nanomachinery. They were already like a womb for people like me to sleep in. And Grimaldi was nice and burnt to death, so he could serve as the raw material.”

  Montrose grinned his skull-like gargoylean grin, which seemed to startle the poor doctor more than it should have. He continued: “Your Princess is like a digger wasp: an egg laid inside a corpse, except the artificial placenta used molecular mechanisms stripped out of the ship’s recyclers, which I hear weren’t much working so well no-how, to convert the material to nutriments. All you would need is the code. No one on Earth could solve that expression. But if you had the math, you could do it. Very sly. This is a damn fine piece of work. Brilliant. Poxing brilliant. But why? Why make another human being, if you were so low on supplies? And why make a little baby girl? And—Oh, sweet Jesus up a tree! He’s not going to marry her, is he? That is practically incest!”

  “I do not understand what you mean. It would be incest only if Prince Rainier married his daughter, and he died shortly after she was born.”

  “Shortly before, you should say. I mean this here is the Princess’s mother, and it came out of Blackie’s head.”

  “But—that is a chessboard. You found it here in the coach, a few moments ago. It is an inanimate object.”

  “No, jackass, I mean the expression! This is how she was born! You recognize a Diophantine Equation, don’t you?”

  “I, ah, am not as familiar with that particular, um…”

  “They taught you about Fermat’s Last Theorem in school, right? This here is a special case of that theorem and so has no solutions for numbers less than or equal to three. Now, Hilbert posed the problem of defining an algorithm for finding out if an arbitrary Diophantine equation has a solution. For first-order equations, answer is yes. Matiyasevich proved no general solution was possible. Not in human math, anyway. This expression represents a closed spline ball. Basically, it is a line drawn through a permutation of the vertices of an icosahedron: in this case the line represents the growth relation between totipotent cells in a blastula and a developed nervous system. It cannot be solved because the number of Bezier curves would have to equal the number of nerve cells, and the vertices change for each nerve state: there are not enough computers on Earth to get the raw calculating power to do it. But suppose someone else had done it for you. But now suppose you had solved a high-order solution for the Diophantine Equation defining the underlying icosahedron giving rise to this expression here.”

  “I warn you, Mister Montrose, I have had the privilege of working with the Princess on your case for nine years now, and I will not have my work ruined, ruined, I say, because you are so uncooperative! If you do not care about your brain operations, I do! Do you know how much delicate molecular engineering went into just the path redaction? It’s a fragile and subtle piece of work—how dare you endanger it! My masterpiece! Her masterpiece! I don’t like these dopamine levels!”

  Montrose took all the lines running from the doctor’s bag to points on his own body in one fist and yanked them out, ignoring the pain where needleheads pried free. “Well, it is my own damn brain. I got a right to it.”

  “You don’t! Stop thinking so hard! We cannot build you another!”

  Montrose laughed aloud. “Well, Blackie’s gotten pretty close to growing a second brain. He has got a working model, self-aware, able to talk like a man and everything.…”

  The doctor snorted. “Impossible. Nobilissimus Del Azarchel himself spearheaded the effort to render research into artificial intelligence illegal. The scientific union declares the problem insolvable, and the Church condemns the creation of self-aware beings unable seek salvation to be an abomination. It is a slander for you to imply the Nobilissimus to be involved in such efforts.…”

  “Boy, are you in the dark! I’ve just come from working on it.”

  “Nonsense! I am the chief of the personal physician staff of the Nobilissimus—a member of the inner circle. I would know.”

  “Yeah, well, I am his drinking buddy, and I carried him back to barracks on my back while he puked in my ear, so I see your inner circle and raise you.”

  The doctor sat back, scowling. He regained his composure enough to muster a shrug. “The Princess says the development of artificial minds is both inevitable and beneficial, and this may be one reason
why the Nobilissimus keeps her out of the public eye for decades at a time.…”

  “He said she suffered from something called Earthsickness, and had to go into biosuspension?”

  “We in the inner circle know the Nobilissimus both loves and fears her.”

  “Wait. This magic Princess of yours, the one who wrote your Constitution and unified the planet. Are you saying she was the one who fixed my nerve damage? What is she, some sort of Jack of Trades, a female Tom Jefferson? A Renaissance Man Lady? Because if she is—I, hey, I … Doc! I think I dreamed about her when she was small…”

  Montrose was so surprised that he dropped the chessboard.

  “… When she was a little girl. I think I saw her on the ship. But how could I? I was in a coffin the whole time!”

  Then he yowled in pain, because the heavy chessboard struck his foot. The doctor insisted on giving him a second medical scan, and no other discussion was allowed after that.

  3. The Decorated Hall

  In theory, if the tunnel followed a Brachistochrone curve, then any spot on the globe could have been reached in forty-two minutes, traveling the whole way in freefall straight through the core. Practically, Montrose was pretty sure the tunnels did not go that deep, and the trains did not travel so fast. They had not been in freefall: the wineglasses in the wall cabinet had not even rattled. At a guess, he estimated a magnetic levitation train passing through an evacuated tunnel could reach speeds of 5000 miles per hour, topping Mach 6.

  This meant that when the carriage stopped and the door hissed open, and he stepped down a short corridor into the atrium of the Presence Chamber, he was sure he was nowhere near Florida: He could be anywhere from Alaska to Argentina, from Iceland to Europe to North Africa, or some island anywhere between Catalina to the Caribbean to Corsica. He did not even know which hemisphere he was in.

  The doctor would not step out of the rail car when it finally came to a silent halt.

  Montrose decided that he hated the buried railway system of the Twenty-Fourth Century. He wondered about the psychology of people who made superhighspeed trains without windows, and so smooth that there was well-nigh no sensation of motion. So far he had seen nothing like a platform. The experience was one of walking from one room to another, waiting a bit, and walking out.

  He had no sense of relative locations. It was like being in a sprawling mansion stretched out over the planet: the whole world was indoors.

  So far he had been nowhere but in Del Azarchel’s buried palace, his research campus, and here—and if this small sample was illustrative, that sprawling mansion that stretched over the world had darn few windows. Montrose wondered if everyone in the this century lived far underground, like gnomes.

  He walked alone. His footfalls echoed up and down the hallway. The corridor was adorned in a gaudy Old World fashion, with war trophies of flags and shields, busts of Minerva and Mars, beneath a vaulted ceiling of thrones and crowns.

  Montrose walked more and more slowly down this corridor, for he was studying the pictures here. Like the chamber he had first woken up in, this was decorated with pictures and portraits of the Space War, and the glorious return of the Hermetic.

  Unlike the chamber walls, where he had to guess which pictures went with which events, this seemed laid out like a drama. The images were in chronological order.

  Montrose’s footsteps grew slower. There was no image he had not seen before, but this artist had a more realistic style, and some of the images were photographs or stereophotographs rather than pigments.

  An image of the Hermetic approaching Earth, her sails spread to catch the light from the orbital braking laser was followed by an image of the ship approaching Jupiter.

  Hmm. That struck Montrose as odd. It looked like the great ship had left the deceleration beam before reaching Earth, and deliberately overshot the target. Why Jupiter? Montrose assumed the Captain was performing a gravity-sling, to let the giant planet’s gravity well curve the ship’s freefall into some new vector … no, wait. Not the Captain. Someone else was in charge of the ship during all this.

  And where were the warships that had been fighting? Had there not been a space war going on when the great ship returned? Those pictures were next down the corridor: canister-shaped craft lifting off from Earth, bulky with strap-on tanks in the first picture, and open frameworks of missile platforms in the later pictures.

  Then the pictures were of fire. This artist had drawn them correctly, as globes of blue-white expanding in zero-gee in all directions, following streams of oxygen issuing from cracked double-hulls.

  But Earth vessels were not fighting each other.

  One picture he thought was merely a symmetrical image of blazing light. But, no, he realized that it was a picture of the orbital braking laser opening fire on the Hermetic, and the great ship’s sails reflecting the energy back to the source, burning the laser and the crew in a frozen moment the artist had depicted as a field of white in which mere traces of skeletons and latticework from burning machinery could be glimpsed.

  Next, occupying both walls of the corridor, was an image of a burnt city under a mushroom cloud. The artist had painted streaks and streams of odd color, green and indigo, issuing like a lighting bolt high in the air. The bolt was wider at the top than at the bottom, which was unlike a detonation or mass-driver strike. There was a tiny silver dot high up in the corner of the image.

  Montrose stopped walking.

  It was an orbital antimatter bombardment.

  The magnetic launch-bottle could accelerate the particle to relativistic velocities, but the explosion, the total conversion, would happen at the outermost fringes of atmosphere, wherever contraterrene met terrene matter. The Hermetic’s mining aura, fired simultaneously, could focus a beam of magnetic influence to drive the resulting particle spray downward rather than in all directions, but it would spread. Only a fraction of the energy would touch the ground.

  As a weapon, it was absurdly wasteful. As an act of conspicuous consumption, meant to awe the enemy into surrender, it was not wasteful at all.

  Then came other images of cities dying in fire beneath the heavy canopies of mushroom-shaped clouds.

  Once when he was young and in the service, Montrose had been kicked by a mule. It was an old beast, and he had been wearing a heavy jacket, so the blow did not kill him, but it sent him to the infirmary with his ribs taped up. The sensation he felt then was like that.

  Back when he had first seen these pictures of mushroom clouds on the walls of the bedchamber where he woke, of course he assumed he was looking at a nuclear war. Of course he had not imagined the Hermetic at fault, because she carried no nuclear warheads.

  Stupid. Stupid, because he knew enough high-school physics to know what causes clouds of that shape. Heat, not radioactivity. The characteristic mushroom cloud shape was a byproduct of energy expenditure. You would get the same thing above a large-scale meteor strike, or …

  The next image showed the Hermetic and the open-framework cylinder-ships from Earth. It looked like the cylinders were making reentry. But no. The Hermetic had accepted the surrender of the crews (a string of suited figures was shown being drawn in the airlock) and was using the empty hulls as drop-energy weapons. A mass of metal that large, made of substances designed not to melt on re-entry, landing in a city, or atop a dam, would release as much kinetic energy as an atom bomb, but without the messy radioactivity.

  There had been no war for the Hermetic to stop. Why had he assumed that? Because that was what he wanted to assume, maybe?

  There was another portrait of the Princess here. In this one, she was crowned with the wreath of olive leaves, and held a dove on one wrist.

  He now knew the meaning of the peace so lovingly portrayed at the end of the corridor. It was what might be called a Caesar’s peace: The peace a conqueror brings to a trampled land once he’s won total victory, and his wrath is sated.

  He stared at the painted features of the lovely girl. The face was very
similar to the face of Grimaldi, as if the Captain’s features had been redrawn in more delicate lines.

  Montrose turned over in his head the Diophantine Equation he expected had been used to create her, the world’s first completely artificial being. Every gene must have been calculated through … this absurdly complex equation, not to mention medical tests and proofs-of-concept, would have had to have been performed before the corpse cooled.

  Or beforehand. There was a ghost of a memory in his head. Montrose was sure he had seen the Captain’s dead body, floating in the zero-gee axial chambers of the Hermetic, where the coffins were stored. The body was not burned at that time. The carbonization must have happened after, as part of the preparation process to prepare the body’s mass to act as raw material, to create an artificial womb in one of the body cavities where the girl, Rania, was to be grown.

  Which meant there had been no suicide. There had been a mutiny and a murder.

  The corridor ended in a semicircular atrium paved in shining lapis lazuli beneath a slanted ceiling of polished onyx set with stars, images of Olympian gods, coats of arms, lozenges, and tablatures. Along the walls were suits of armor from the past and suits of space-armor from the present, as well as pikes and swords and daggers hung up in patterns like steel flowers.