Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  “Oh, hell! Princess, I am yours to command!”

  “Then take your medicine,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Marry me. We will depart the Earth, and return in the Hermetic to the Diamond Star, leaving this unhappy world to its fate.”

  Montrose listened, rapt, breathless and unable to speak.

  “Over Del Azarchel’s opposition, I have been outfitting, repairing, and restoring my beautiful ship, my world, my home,” said Rania in tones of silver. “I have selected cadets from among the psychoi order to serve aboard her. I am within my rights: The Landing Party cannot bind me to this world, merely because it wishes to conquer, rule, and live here. The future of the human race is at the Diamond Star, and written into the Monument that circles it! Will you obey my orders? I command you to reach with me for the stars!”

  “Uh-h … Did you say marry?”

  5. The Arrest

  Her expression did not change, but her pupils did. Her saw the dark part of her eyes expand suddenly, her eyes move left and right so quickly that they seemed to vibrate. At the same time, a blush of red began to spread, delicate as a rose, through her face, cheeks, and neck. He was holding Miss Hyde. At no time did she show surprise or shock on her face, albeit she must have been shocked. Her eyes were focused behind him. They had been overheard.

  Montrose spun. There, on his silent, sliding throne of black, was Ximen Del Azarchel, Master of the World, his face (old again, silver-haired, lined and weathered and kingly) in such pain and sorrow that he seemed on the verge of fainting, or of tears. His eyes were hollow.

  “You liar!” croaked Del Azarchel in a voice as weak as a mummy’s. “Gusano! You lying worm! You said there was nothing between you! Is this how you repay me!”

  There were six Conquistadores with him, dark against the festive lights shining through the open door behind them. Despite their comic-opera costumes, they had the calm, hard look of professional veterans; men who had seen combat, seen friends die, and were willing to see it again.

  So when Del Azarchel said in a hoarse voice, “Arrest him! Arrest that traitor!” the soldiers did not hesitate, but brought their pikes to the ready, and came forward at a quickstep, moving to flank him left and right.

  Princess Rania stepped in the way, small as a golden doll, blazing with majestic ire. “He is my crewman! Space claims him, and you Earthmen have no authority. Miguel! Raum! Raeul! Do not step forward! Where is your warrant?”

  The tall and warlike men hesitated. Perhaps they were shocked she knew their names. Menelaus Montrose drew his ceramic knife with one hand, and with the other picked up the nearest candlestand, which was the heaviest object in reach, and the candles fluttered and blew, so that the shadows swooped and swerved along the walls.

  Later, wearing only a transparent pair of plastic overalls, sitting in a cold, white, featureless cube of a jail cell, and not answering any of the questions that spoke to him from the blank wall, Montrose truly and desperately wished he had thrown the knife through Del Azarchel’s damnified skull, and not listened to Rania.

  He closed his eyes. He might have been able to hit the target, from that distance, in that light, and the blade might have flown point-first. It wasn’t impossible. It could have happened. The blade would have landed right between Blackie’s cursed eyes, hilt vibrating, and trickles of blood and brain-goo would have slid down over the look of astonishment frozen forever on his damned face.

  It wasn’t impossible. Captain Sterling from the Science Patrol superspaceship Emancipation could have done it.

  He raised his hand to the pad of sterile gauze taped to his head. The guards on the other side of the door in the armored depthtrain carriage bringing him here (wherever here was) had not acted quickly enough to stop him from dosing himself with the Princess’s version of the neuronanological cocktail. He was not suffering any mania, no disorientation, no delirium. He did not know if that meant it was working, or that it was not. It had not actually put him in agony: she had been joking about that. He wondered what else Rania said had been a joke, and what had been in earnest.

  Eventually the jailors shut off the light. He lay in the dark, waiting, wondering if he were getting any smarter. He certainly didn’t feel any smarter.

  15

  Equality of the Sexes

  1. No Particular Effect

  The only effect, at first, the intelligence augmentation cocktail seemed to have on him was that he required more sleep. Over the next three days in his jail cell, he slept upward of eighteen hours a day. Dreaming seemed to be a waste of time, and so, on the third night, once he was done with the minor corrections and emotional association image-grafts that formed the basic business of the dream-cycle, he used that part of his mind to set up a little imaginary schoolhouse with a blackboard, so he could write out and examine some of the equations and Monument symbols he was curious about. He could program himself to dream certain things, and solve particular kinds of problems, so that the answers would be clearer when he woke. But Montrose was disappointed: if he was on the threshold of a breakthrough into another and richer state of human intelligence, there did not seem to be any real change. He was still the same cranky bastard as when he fell asleep.

  Also while asleep he reviewed certain memories, but instead of the confused mixture of chimerical images that haunted normal sleep, he decided to index these memories both by association and time-value, peg each scene to a particular mnemonic, and play them as a set of perfectly sharp eidetic images.

  The books he had read in Del Azarchel’s chalet in Alaska he found dull now that he had time to reread them—Montrose was pleased that he could summon up perfectly detailed pictures even of pages he had been flipping past without reading, and, as if looking at a photograph, read them normally. He found his reading speed increased when he invented (since this was a dream, after all) a cartoon character named Cyrano Widget to do the reading for him, and just give him a summary. Cyrano was human from the face down, but had a clear dome for a skull, in which an electronic brain could be seen winking and sparkling furiously.

  Cyrano, sitting in the imaginary schoolhouse, shook its absurd cyborg head, and said, “Boss, Blackie Del Azarchel does not know what he is dealing with here.” Onto the blackboard the cyborg chalked an equation. It was a divarication function, showing the change in prices of various goods, the crime rate, and the frequency of the use of certain emotion-laden terms in the popular media. All this raw information had been in Del Azarchel’s books, but he had never put two and two together.

  “Boss, look at these graphs, these tendencies. The cost of railgun components does not go up unless someone is buying and building a filthload of them.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “War.”

  Montrose looked at the graphs in wonder. “But I thought Blackie had the whole world figured out. He said he had a science, called Cliometry, that could forecast political and economic changes. He can’t see a war coming?”

  The cartoon character leaned back on his imaginary school desk. “He sees it coming, and he is trying to avoid it.”

  “What’s causing the problem?”

  “Two problems. One is political. Lowering the price of travel to zero means that whole populations are within elbow-rubbing distance of each other. There are no national boundaries anymore.”

  “Isn’t that good for the economy? Lowers the cost of shipping workers to where the work is, right? Free trade, free movement of goods, all that.”

  “Right. And it creates cultural friction. The workingmen can sleep in the tropics on warm nights and commute to the arctic where the mines and aquaculture rigs are during the day. Meanwhile the Australians (who now live in the middle of the Great Victoria Gardenlands) don’t want floods of travelers to overturn their few remaining Democratic institutions. The Chinese (who now live in the midst of the Gobi Gardenlands) don’t want floods of travelers overturning their few remaining Confucian institutions.”

  “What about the other countries
?”

  “Bridesmaids. They just follow after the buttocks of one of these brides or the other, holding their trains. India and Iberia, even South Africa and her millions of automated factories, are nothing more than flower girls in this century.”

  “You got marrying on the brain, pal. So what’s the second problem?”

  “The second is a problem of economics. It’s the same as happened to Spain when the Spanish Empire flooded itself with gold and silver from the New World, mined from the Andes or robbed from the Aztecs. Drove down the price of gold and drove up the price of goods. In this case, the Hermetic came back with contraterrene carbon around 1020 kg—my guess, based on ship performance values.”

  Montrose nodded. It was a chunk the size of the Ceres asteroid, and represented the tally of both all the decades of Hermetic star-lifting, and of the decades of Croesus. “Endless wealth. Energy enough to do anything.”

  “And what did happen to Spain? She did not invest the money. The Dons used it to buy Arabian stallions and fancy mansions and saddles with silver folderol, and the King of Spain used it to build an Armada. The gold flowed out of Spain to manufacturers in Italy, France, and England. Eventually the price stabilized at a higher level. Spain went broke. The richest country in Europe went broke. Because Spain did not use the wealth to get more wealth.”

  “Pox, I hear they melt Antarctica and somehow get the winds to carry all the vapor up to rain in the Gobi Desert, or the Great Victoria Desert in Australia. Earth ain’t broke.”

  “You measure bankruptcy by comparing your income to your liabilities. In this case, one of your liabilities, one of your costs, is the cost of mounting a Third Expedition to the Diamond Star, and the return-on-investment time is one hundred years. If you are going to travel even to nearby stars, you have to start thinking on those time scales.”

  “Power won’t run out for a hundred years. Blackie knows that.”

  “Even so, there are world leaders who are alert enough to think in those time scales. The power might last a century, but even now the globe knows it cannot maintain a free-energy regime. The world, now that it is addicted to free energy, has to be switched to a rationed-energy regime. The question is, when does the switch come? And who does the rationing?”

  Cyrano showed him a simple but chilling set of propositions from game-theory. The decision of two prisoners both accused of a crime, when clemency was offered to whomever would first rat out the other, either to trust each other and remain silent or to betray each other was described with a few gamelike rules: if they both trusted, both would break even; if both betrayed, both lost; if one trusted and the other betrayed, the betrayer would win big.

  It could be shown mathematically that the winning strategy in a game of repeated moves was to betray only in retaliation to betrayal, and otherwise to trust. But when there was a time limit, a final move, both players had a powerful incentive to betray, because the final move was one that by definition invited no possible retaliation. But each player, knowing the other was under an incentive to betray him on the final move, therefore had an incentive to betray on the penultimate move. Likewise, each player, knowing the other was under an incentive to betray him on the penultimate move, therefore had an incentive to betray on the antepenultimate move; and so on.

  This remorseless logic operated for any game of a known and finite number of moves, even if the number of moves was immense.

  In this case, even if the switch from a free-energy regime to a rationed-energy regime was not to happen for a hundred years, the incentive to betray future potential rivals before they became rivals operated now.

  Montrose was not convinced. “When the switch does come, the free market will adjust. The price goes up as the goods get scarce. So then they go back to burning wood, coal, and oil, like God intended. Big deal.”

  “And they go back to the barter system.”

  “What?”

  “Snow grams edged out other currencies as the store of value. They use certificates representing measured masses of anticarbon for their money.”

  Montrose checked the graphs, and checked the math behind them. “So the money gets expensive, too, and the interest rate goes up. Big deal. Why should that cause a war?”

  “Because politics is not driven by free-market rules. Your mother, Mrs. Montrose, told you what rules drive politics. Phobos, doxa, and kerdos. Fear, fame, and gain. I’ll rephrase the question. Both the deserts in China and the deserts in Australia have been turned, by a ridiculous and profligate public works project, into farmlands and fruit-tree groves. Now imagine you are one of them. The newly-fertile croplands opened an internal frontier, allowing both for wages to rise and population. As this century’s breadbasket, you have political clout and world attention, because you control the food supply. Sure, there might be more contraterrene coming in one hundred years, but there might be a delay. Watering the desert is not something you can just turn on again after you turn it off. Five years, or three, or one, is too great a hiatus. If the greenery dies, it will stay dead, and the desert ecology will re-assert itself. The land will no longer support the population figures you currently enjoy. You are China. Australia is your hated rival. Or vice versa. What do you do? You cannot keep melting the glaciers to water the deserts if you run out of antimatter. You have to make sure the antimatter that they might get years from now for their irrigation will come to you instead.”

  “Make sure how? By war? Blackie won’t let a war erupt. He can just shoot whoever shoots first, and so no one will dare shoot first. He’s got contraterrene weapons. He’s the only one who does. It is a self-contained system.”

  “Spoken like an engineer! But this problem is not an engineering problem. It is political and economic. And the free market cannot adjust. Antimatter is a non-market good, since Blackie has been giving at away free of cost for political gain. He cannot let the price go up.”

  “So Blackie rations it.”

  “Which means, that in the rivalry between China and Australia, whichever faction has more influence over Del Azarchel will use the world-government and the energy market to destroy the other by lawful means; and when the other has nothing to lose, it will embrace unlawful means, and go to war. Del Azarchel picks the winner. At that point, Del Azarchel opens the fiery gates of heaven, and bombards the loser from space.”

  “You saying he can’t maintain control without killing thousands and millions of folk?”

  Cyrano pointed at the sudden jag in the graph. “Maybe if Del Azarchel did not interfere, and he let the cost of contraterrene rise—then speculators anticipating the coming lean years would buy up shares now, and this would force other uses to economize. Maybe then we can avoid the coming war. China and Australia could maintain as much cropland as they could afford, and there is not one winner and one loser. It is still a delicate compromise, but it could be done.”

  “He must see these same equations. If it can be done, why hasn’t he done it?”

  “Because Del Azarchel would be undermining his own authority. The monopoly of the World Power Syndicate would have to be dissolved. Many ships, some in private hands, and not just the Hermetic, would have to be allowed to range the strategic high ground of outer space, or otherwise ownership on paper of antimatter grams in transplutonian orbit is meaningless. That has military implications. Del Azarchel would have to step aside as political leader, because otherwise no investor would believe he would keep his hands to himself, and not simply undo what the market did. Basically, he would have to abdicate, and let the Princess solve the problem.”

  “But he is afraid of the Princess. Kept her in slumber all those years. Me, too.” Montrose shook his head. “Even if he steps down, he’s not stepping down, not the other him. That’s why he built the Iron Ghost. And he does not need to send the Hermetic to the Diamond Star, that is what the Bellerophon is for. I am not sure he can dare let us leave.”

  “He cannot let you stay. Do you think he can dare let two Posthumans of less than ce
rtain loyalty to his regime run around on his world?”

  “Then why not let us leave?”

  “The Hermetic hangs above the world like a sword. The common people are restless; they know she must sail away, if the wealth of the world is to be maintained in the next century; they know the world will fall into war the moment the sword is removed.”

  Montrose looked at the graphs. “I don’t understand this. This does look like people are gearing up for a war. But, damn, it makes no sense! I mean, some areas of the world still vote. There is food enough for everyone, since huge areas of land that were barren are now croplands. And look at how wealthy the world is! There is no money wasted on vast military budgets, and no burning cities, no streams of refugees, no rivers black with war chemicals, no fogs rolling wherever the wind blows. Isn’t it enough?”

  “Your mother told you what causes war. It is not the lack of votes, or of food or of money. It is fear, honor, and powerlust. The people are afraid now that the antimatter will run out two generations from now, and they don’t have faith that the Bellerophon will return in time with the wealth the world needs.”

  “How can they be worried about something so far away in tomorrow?”

  “Because they are well fed, and have the leisure to fret.”

  “How do we avoid a war fought with total conversion weapons? I mean, even if Blackie is the only one who has them now, I don’t want him to use them. The burning of New York the Beautiful is enough. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Jerusalem, Mecca, all enough. Enough! Human history does not need more.”

  “I see only two options. Let him marry the Princess, and launch the Third Expedition without you, and she might be able to restore the faith of the people that another lode of endless energy is coming.”

  “Pox on that. I’d rather see the world catch fire. What’s the other option?”

  “Put the genie back in the bottle. Remove all the antimatter, every gram.”