Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  “That’s impossible. Any third option?”

  “You could always ask him to abdicate. Let him at least give up his monopoly on the antimatter. Like you said, have the price rise to meet the market, and have a bidding war rather than a shooting war.”

  “I think he’d be afraid for his life if he stepped out of his office. He is not like Washington. He is like Napoleon. Even if they put him in exile on Elba, someone else would just haul him back in front of his cheering armies, and try to put him back in power.”

  “Elba? Take him with you. To the stars. And get him to destroy the machine version.”

  “But that also might cause a war.”

  Cyrano looked pensive. “It is like most things in life. The only way to forestall a war is to risk one. The only way to preserve his world-empire is to give up his imperial crown.”

  “I know him. He cannot do that. He won’t risk it. So…”

  “So?”

  “So, he is just trapped.”

  “Well, Boss, so are you. This is a dream, and you are still in a jail cell. Hey, wake up. Three guys are coming to take you to some secret medical cell of Del Azarchel’s, and I think he might prefer you back the way you were, when you were Crewman Fifty-One, crazy but someone he could almost control.”

  “Does that mean I am not crazy now? That is good to hear.”

  Of course, he was awake when he said that, and there was no one in the room but him.

  It was pitch-black in the room, and three men came in (he could tell by the change in the air motions when the cell door silently opened). They were wearing light amplification goggles, because presumably it is easier to deal with a prisoner who is unable to see his handlers.

  Montrose was wearing metal wrist-restraints, which was too bad, because he could not think of an easier way to do this. He smashed his hand against the floor hard enough to crack some of his left metacarpal bones, which allowed him to pull one hand free as he flung himself at knee-level across the room, his right fist using the still-locked ring as impromptu brass knuckles.

  In his mind’s eye, the men in the dark before him became tripartite fractal patterns of vector motions, with arcs of all his possible limb-movements, masses, and velocities printed in his imagination with crystal clarity. He saw his own constellations of counter-attacks, parries, and strikes. With casual thoroughness, he rotated the two four-dimensional motion-graphs in his mind until he found a way to set the two patterns together in a minimal–maximum configuration.

  Then he was sitting on his face on the cold, padded floor of the corridor outside with the first guard’s baton in his hand. He had landed atop it. From the heft of it, he could feel that one end of the baton was opened like a switch-blade, and hissing with a sinister electronic sort of hiss, fortunately not touching the conductive fabric of his gown (which was designed to assist shock weapons). But the blade was jammed into the floor-panels, and he could not pull it free. Montrose was bruised along his forearm, his knuckles were bleeding, and he felt like his foot was broken.

  He heard groans. There was a flare of electricity—in the absolute dark it looked dazzlingly bright. In the flash of light, he could see his first opponent face-down on the floor, a gloved hand crooked at a horrible angle: it looked as if Montrose had broken his fingers. The look of surprise on his face was greater than the look of pain.

  Unfortunately, he only saw one other opponent. This second man was off-balance, stumbling, but had projected an electric wire from his baton whose live head (glancing off a metal boot stud) was making the momentary flare of light.

  It was too good an opportunity to miss. Montrose spat, and the spittle passed through the live spark and struck the bare leg of that second man above his boot where his insulating legging had ripped free. The string of liquid was just enough to make a circuit. The man jerked in a spasm. Montrose knew he would not be awake long enough to actually see the man fall.

  (Montrose contemplated the shock on the toppling man’s lower face. It was clear enough that these guys did not know how Montrose knew they were fakes. To them it must seem miraculous, bizarre, unexpected. That was sort of disorienting to Montrose: were things so obvious to him, so opaque to them? The noises they had made while approaching the door did not match the standard noises, the pauses, the click of thumb keys, the sleeve-rustle as salutes were exchanged, of real guards. How could they be surprised? They were like children trying to fool a grown-up.)

  Since he did not see the third man, and since he did not have enough time to twist and bring the baton under him up to parry, all he could do was jerk his head forward, hoping the blow from behind would do less damage if the relative velocity were less.

  He had two last thoughts. First, Del Azarchel’s men, despite their orders, would not dare take him anywhere else but the prison infirmary. Once there, there would be too many official records, too many witnesses, for a second abduction attempt. By the time Del Azarchel organized his next moves, Princess Rania’s attorney should have him freed. Second, he wondered what Dr. Kyi would have said, had he known how reckless Montrose was being with the brain they both so admired.

  Then, a blunt impact to the base of his skull scattered his consciousness, just as if he had been of ordinary intelligence. It seemed somehow unfair.

  2. Recovery

  Montrose seemed to have more time to think things over, but his experience in the fight told him his nerve cells were not firing any faster than a normal man’s. It was a question of more efficient neural organization, not a fundamental change on the cellular level. A man’s brain is not that different from an ape’s, from a chemical and biological point of view: for that matter, a Winchester rifle was built along the same lines as a harquebus.

  Montrose was in a bed, or a bath—it was a gelatin of smart material that partly encased him, a simplified form of an open biosuspension capsule, leaving his head, shoulders, and hands free. There were no intravenous needles, no diapers or catheters, since the jelly was able both to force nutrients into his membranes through his skin, and carry away waste. He was almost eating solid food again: just that morning the nurse had spoon-fed him a poached egg and bread soaked in milk. He kept it down without nausea or vomiting, and he was as proud of that accomplishment as any in his life.

  Sunlight slanted through window of alternating dark and pale stripes, which he had deduced to be military glass, something that would deflect bullets and diffuse directed energy. He could not see, but he could hear traffic outside the window.

  The traffic was horse-drawn carts and electric ground-effects vehicles—even the passage of one hundred years had not returned petroleum production to pre-Jihad levels. Montrose calculated the logic loop involved, and could not find an answer. Even with the drop in motor cars after the post-Jihad petroleum shortages, one would not expect new roads not to be built. Then he factored in two other variables: first, the cost of energy was so miniscule that the inefficiencies of hover vehicles versus wheeled vehicles meant nothing; and second, the chance of bombardment from orbit (roads, rails, and aerodromes made large and tempting targets) was so great, and so recent, that no market and no public pressure was present. The depthtrain carriages were cheaper, and the Hermeticists might not want public roads controlled by local municipalities.

  He also knew he was in a private clinic, so when the door opened and Princess Rania glided in, he was not surprised.

  Unlike Del Azarchel, she had no retinue with her. From the echoes of footfalls outside, he knew she had an extensive staff of neurologists and specialists on retainer, not to mention (for he heard the jingle of a weapon harness) soldiers and spies.

  When he looked at her face, something clicked into place. He said, “You do not actually want there to be a war, do you? You are expecting Del Azarchel to step down. He won’t.”

  She was dressed in a peach morning suit of conservative cut. It was so old-fashioned that it looked almost normal to him. However, she also wore a coronet and a sash of royalty. It made her look li
ke a Beauty Queen. But of course—even with his new high-powered brain, Montrose found he could be surprised by little things—she was not a Beauty Queen, but a Queen Queen, the very thing beauty contest winners were using as a symbol, she was in truth.

  Rania opened her mouth and squawked at him. He knew it was some sort of high-speed communication code, with thousands of items of information compressed into her voicewaves, but it meant nothing to him. She cocked her head to one side. He could see she was surprised, perhaps disappointed.

  “State-related memory,” she said. She meant that his memory of the time aboard ship had not returned to him, no doubt because even with his newly-enhanced brain, the change from insane Posthuman to sane Posthuman had created a mnemonic lapse. The same reason why, in humans, a waking man cannot recall a dream well, or a man when happy finds his sad memories slipping aside, or why a tone of voice or childhood street will bring up recollections that written reminders might not, in this case did not allow Montrose to remember his days as Crewman Fifty-One. The two of them had agreed upon some high-density vocal code language, and she had been hoping he’d recall it.

  Montrose looked carefully around the room—he realized he was doing that thing with his eyes, the sudden vibration movements to gather in additional information he had found so disturbing to look at back in his sleepwalker days—but he did not see any bugging devices. Perhaps a laser focused on the window could pick up air-vibrations, but he had been assuming the striations in the glass (for he had stared at them for some time, seeing the molecular patterns implied in the macroscopic texture) was proof against that type of eavesdropping.

  Montrose drew in a surprised breath. He realized that Rania was fully expecting Man Del Azarchel to have augmented his own intelligence by now. The working copy of Ghost Del Azarchel could reproduce and solve everything Montrose had solved for himself. There could be multiple copies of Ghost Del Azarchel by now, Xypotechs of immense intellectual power and range and reach and imagination—and that meant minds equal to Rania’s, able to deduce new techniques or technologies for spying.

  And it meant she was still afraid of him. Why?

  “Even if we spoke in a secret language,” said Montrose, “Blackie could puzzle it out, sooner or later.”

  She sat down on the edge of the gelatin slab that served him for a bed. With soft fingers she ran a slender hand through his hair, across his brow. “I would ask you how you are feeling,” she said. Meaning that the medical read-outs probably told her more about him than he knew himself. The implication was that she wanted to know when he would be well enough to be moved, presumably to a safer location, where they could talk freely.

  Montrose let out a laugh. “I ain’t made of glass, missy!” and he started to climb free of the gel. It hardened around his limbs, and he thought he could calculate a system of muscular stresses to pull free. The gelatin was long-chain molecules that contracted or expanded under electrical current, and the computer-switching system controlling the current was operating by a certain set of reflex patterns. All he had to do was …

  Rania reached around his skull, and applied a tiny amount of pressure with her finger to one of the bruises on his skull. “Ow!” he complained.

  “Not made of glass, but still fractured,” she said, raising an eyebrow, and giving him a coy little pout. “Now you keep still.” Or she would call the anesthesiologist and have him sedated. Montrose was disappointed that having a more integrated nervous system did not give him immunity to chemicals injected into his bloodstream.

  He settled back down. “Ha! Give a gal a crown, a starship, a few armies, infinite wealth, and she starts thinking she can give orders.”

  “I am also your chief physician, Crewman.” She wore what could only be called a “Dr. Kyi” sort of look.

  “Aw, be fair! I had to get my skull broke in order to get away from Blackie! They were going to cart me off!” To some secret location.

  A quirk of her eyebrow said, louder than words: And you did not trust I would find you?

  “You may be bright,” he said. But you do not know how bright Ghost Del Azarchel is. (He did not say that aloud, but the implication was clear to both of them.)

  Why? Again, it was not words, just a change in her pupil dilation, but he knew what she meant.

  “The first time I heard Ghost Del Azarchel speak, he said he wanted you and me to get together. He said it in the clear, nice and slow, in English, so that Man Del Azarchel’s pick-ups would hear. He told me you were going to slip me an invitation to your New Year’s Party.”

  “Because of the number of people around,” she said, in answer to an unspoken question, “and he could not use the excuse of ‘Earthsickness’ to force me back into another decade or so of biosuspension. The last year of the old century was too important, symbolically—”

  “Oh pox!” said Montrose, alarmed. “You were going to announce your engagement!” No wonder Del Azarchel had been mad. He looked at her suspiciously. His accusation was clear: Del Azarchel is too smart to fool himself, unless you helped him—you led him on, didn’t you?

  She looked aloof, and her sea-green eyes seemed more stormy and mysterious than ever. “I appealed to his better nature; he answered with a baser nature. Do you think women were created just to watch men kill each other, and wear the widow’s veil, and weep beneath it? Women use the weapons nature gives us.” She said that aloud.

  Partly in words, partly in expressions, he answered, “You mean what Del Azarchel gave you—he was one of your primary designers.”

  Rania smiled cryptically, a smile not altogether pleasant. “Both Shelly’s Frankenstein and Shaw’s Pygmalion were in the ship’s library. Wasn’t that warning enough about infatuation with your own handiwork?” She shook her head sadly. “If you are going to play at God, divine love rather than romantic love might be in order—if he were willing to sacrifice himself, he would get everything he desired.”

  “Ghost Del Azarchel is not infatuated with you,” said Montrose. “Because Man Del Azarchel walking in on us—you are too smart to let that happen. If you didn’t arrange that ‘coincidence’—”

  She shook her head. Not I.

  “Then he did. The ghost, I mean. But why would the Ghost Blackie first send me to find you, then save me from Man Blackie, feed me caviar and books, but then trip us both up?”

  “Did he tell you which books to read?”

  He opened his mouth to say No, but, looking back with crystal clear thoughts into his confused half-sleepy fog of what had back then been his brain, he realized that the voice from the chalet walls had dropped a word here and there, which, even when consciously forgotten, had drawn his attention toward certain shelves.

  Which meant—what? What had the Iron Ghost been up to?

  “Did he tell you how to open the gun case?” she said lightly.

  Montrose nodded. “But I don’t see where this is leading.”

  Rania raised both eyebrows, slightly narrowing her eyes. (Menelaus thought she looked remarkably pretty when she did that, and he wondered what he could say to provoke that expression again.) She said, “Even the hawk cannot see his own eye color, not without some reflection.” One limit of intelligence augmentation is that we seem not to know ourselves any more clearly.

  Montrose looked puzzled: Ghost Del Azarchel wanted me to hate this world? But why?

  Rania stood up, smoothed her skirt. She obviously thought that last question was one he could answer with no further hint from her. Instead, she said, “My theory that you would regain your old memories has not been confirmed. Sad, for we have no time to spare for a courtship.”

  “Wait a minute, lady! I ain’t asked you yet!”

  “Again you demote me!” she tsk-tsked. “A bedridden man is in no condition to kneel. How can we not wed? Are we not the Adam and Eve of a new humanity?”

  He saw the look in her eyes, haunted with memory. Long ago they met, they spoke, they fell in love—Rania had to heal him, she not knowing if the supe
rintelligent yet sane version of him would recall the wild promises he made once the superintelligent yet insane version of him was cured.

  “Our smarts won’t breed true,” he said. “Unless you plan to inject our whelps with a brain-needle.”

  She curled a wisp of blond hair around her forefinger, gave it an admiring look, and had one of her little dragonfly-shaped vanity machines tuck it back under her coronet. “We can call our first daughter Madelina. I’ve always liked the name.”

  He remembered that her hair had been altered by RNA-substitution engineering. She also expected Menelaus to discover the genetic flaw in her own construction, and thus she was implying that she had altered her body to be able to receive and adapt to corrections and a genetic level rapidly. She had a system in place, a chemical network of totipotent cells drawn from her own matrix, floating in her bloodstream, already prepared.

  At the door, she turned, looking back over her shoulder. The doorframe made her seem a portrait, and the light behind her touched her cheek just where Menelaus wanted to touch it, and turned her hair to golden flame. “Did Del Azarchel show you his statue of the last Ape?”

  “Baker’s Dozen. Very sad-looking.”

  She nodded. “The same artist made one with an angrier pose—it looms in the Round Table chamber of the Hermetic Conclave.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  Rania gave him a skeptical look before she strode with her graceful lioness step out the door.

  By that look, he realized that he had not seen it, or, at least, not understood its meaning. But Blackie had told him in so many words. The horse was a stupid creature, but useful to its masters: and so it stayed alive when disaster struck. That was just how life worked. The ape was a superior creature, but not useful.

  Montrose discovered that primitive emotions like shock, surprise, and even hate had not disappeared from his nervous system; because two implications fitted into place in his mind.

  First, he knew why Ghost Del Azarchel had manipulated him into a fierce disgust for this world and this age. Rania planned to depart, taking the Hermetic with her. And what better way to make sure Montrose also went along, away into the dangers of outer space? Montrose would be out of harm’s way, which meant that the sense of honor that Del Azarchel lived by (both versions of Del Azarchel) would be satisfied. Montrose reminded himself that the machine version of Del Azarchel had no memory of being a murderer or a mutineer. Ghost Del Azarchel might honestly want to save Montrose from bloodshed at the hands of Man Del Azarchel.