Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  Only on the punt was a pilot needed. The great ship herself would face no navigation problems Isaac Newton could not have solved: the simple act of accelerating in a featureless vacuum for twenty-five years, rotating aft-to-prow, and decelerating in a featureless vacuum for twenty-five years required no more piloting skills than a railroad engineer. Nonetheless, the honor would still be attached to his name: for the next century, even while he was in slumber, Del Azarchel would be the Ship’s Pilot.

  He and Menelaus had been something of a pair of troublemakers together in space training camp, the facility in Northern Africa where the crew first met. It was not that the Hindus had deliberately shunned anyone; but somehow it was always these two, a Spaniard and a Texan, who found each other sneaking under the camp shock-wire during late nights off to go find a stiff drink or a pliant girl in the shantytown not far away, when the other astronauts-in-training were lawfully in their bunks.

  Del Azarchel, with his droll smile, dark good looks, and silvery guitar could always sweet-talk the local girls into compromising positions, and Menelaus, gaunt and ugly as a scarecrow, could not. But Del Azarchel lacked a certain drive and boldness when it came to climbing electrical fences and breaking into Hindu pleasure houses where “Franks” were not allowed, and Del Azarchel needed Menelaus to inspire him to that extra level of gumption, the level where sheer cussed-mindedness outweighs common sense. They were a mixmatched pair, and Menelaus had not known him long, but he knew he could count on him.

  So he whispered into the helmet pickup. “Amigo, I’m running a wild risk. Turn off the cameras! I don’t want no record of this.…”

  “Off it is. My good friend, what the hot perdition’s fire are you up to, eh?”

  “This is something I got to do. You behind me?”

  “You must ask?” the dark, musical laugh came over the mike. “I stand behind you. Always.” Del Azarchel did not even bother to ask the details. But he had to add: “Always. Except when I am far in front.”

  This conversation was still on the private channel. But at that same time, the shared suit channel came on. Another voice, this time of Dr. S. Ramananda, said in amazement: “What is this? Look! Montrose has an automatic bone rongeur in his hand! Are you going to perform surgery on yourself, Sensai Montrose?”

  All the passengers were strapped to cots that could be tilted to various axes, depending where the combination of carousel rotation or engine thrust put the gravity-vertical. Only older models of punts still used seats. Under microgravity, there is no weariness in standing for hours on end, and cots were easier to fold or inflate than seats in any case.

  Dr. Ramananda was overhead to the upper left, from Menelaus’s viewpoint, upside down. His helmet was not far from Menelaus’s helmet, but even if he had entertained the impulse to try to wrest the medical appliance out of Menelaus’s hand by force, the shoulder-harness and helmet of his suit were not built for stretching one’s hands overhead. Indeed, Ramananda had not (and could not) crane his neck to look “up” at Menelaus directly, but instead lifted a gauntlet, and pointed a fingertip camera-dot at him.

  Ramananda said tensely, “What is in that needle, Sensai?”

  The radio channel was silent. Ramananda was a high-caste Brahmin. Caste was not all-important on an expedition like this. Ramananda was here because of his work proving the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture relating to general cases of rank greater than one. But caste was not unimportant either. Respect for Ramananda’s status kept the others silent.

  Menelaus could not take his eyes from the bore of the needle. It was like looking down a well. But the alert light shone green: It had selected the path through bone and brain calculated to cause the least damage. A flick of the thumb, the circuits in the needle would engage, and the needle would find the right spot and move of its own accord, and puncture his skull, and pump his brain full of neuro-pharmaceuticals.

  “Intelligence.” Menelaus grinned wickedly. “Superhuman intelligence. The next rung up on Darwin’s ladder. I aim to be the first to hoist my buttocks up yonder, gentlemen. Easy as shimmying up a tree.”

  But his fingers, five little traitors, trembled.

  The ampoule contained a cocktail of totipotent cells, taken from his own gene template, with artificial ribosomes programmed to turn into neural tissue. The molecular cues had already been established, one cell cluster at a time over a series of months, here and there within his cortex and midbrain tissue, to act as anchor points for the new growth.

  A second group of ribosomes would begin the manufacture of certain chemicals in his brain out of raw materials in his bloodstream: intelligence-augmenting agents. Here were the molecular codes to create phosphotidyl serine, which increased learning speed by improving special cells receptors; vinpoticene to increase blood flow to the brain; and phenytoin to improve concentration.

  Here also were proteins to affect the brain’s ability to remodel its synapses. Other proteins to prevent calcium overloads would be released by reactions from his pituitary gland and medulla oblongata, as needed. The artificial proteins would produce other neurochemicals, whose functions were less well understood, but which had been found in the brains of geniuses—and also in schizophrenics.

  A third group would rewire certain nerve-paths, linking cell to cell with strands of material more sensitive and conductive than natural nerve cells, but grown out of his own brain-material. Protected by redacted RNA messengers, the new material was part of what his body would think was his gene code. Even if wounded, the new pseudo-nervous cells would grow back.

  But this was only what the ampoule contained physically. What it contained in reality was the unknown, an inexpressibly alien otherness. What lay beyond man, was in this needle.

  And so he hesitated.

  Ramananda said, “So. It has come to this. You will not abide by what was decided; you will not abide by what you agreed. Did you not read the articles before you signed?”

  There was no surprise in the voice of Ramananda. No one in the cabin failed to grasp what Menelaus meant to do. During training camp Menelaus had argued that such a thing as this should be tried, had to be tried: all had heard him say, or, at times, had heard him rant, that more than human intellect was needed to decipher the Monument.

  “I read the articles, sure enough,” said Menelaus. “Read ’em over and over. And if my recollecting is fair, what they say is this: Any member of the scientific arm of the expedition may perform experiments or investigations of his own devising, and at any time. Well, I pick right now for my time. Nothing in the articles said I had to wait til we reached the Diamond Star to start. And since I am not aboard the ship yet, not reported for duty there, I am not officially under Captain Grimaldi’s command: so even if you radio him, he could not tell me to stand down. I am square within my rights. This here is my first experiment.”

  A soft voice murmured. “Ah. That’s what we deserve for inviting a lawyer aboard.” He was not sure, over the helmet radio, if it had come from before or behind, but it sounded like the voice of a Spaniard named de Ulloa.

  Melchor de Ulloa was something of a lady’s man in his youth. The rumor that he and Montrose had a running bet to see who could get into more trouble with the Mission Commander during training was false, but the mere fact that the rumor spread showed how alike they were, how they had egged each other on. Melchor de Ulloa won fame for his solution of Hilbert’s Sixteenth Problem, dealing with the upper bound of the number of limit cycles in polynomial vector fields.

  Menelaus was shocked to hear the scoffing voice of handsome young de Ulloa. It had been de Ulloa, during that last night when the six younger astronauts—Del Azarchel’s clique—had stolen out of camp together, who had practically begged Menelaus to smuggle some form of Prometheus Formula aboard.

  Ramananda was saying, “This is a useless experiment! An illegal experiment! Are you attempting to revive the nightmares of Shanghai—those horrible children in vats the Chinese kept alive for so long, gargoyles w
ith bloated heads? You have not separated your skull plates.”

  Menelaus did not have a high opinion of Chinese neural science in any case. He said, “Phooey. The Zi Mandarins discovered ninety-nine ways how not to augment intelligence. This uses path redaction, not merely adding cell mass.”

  “The Ephrin Topography Hypothesis? That method, used on pigs, resulted in severe nerve-tissue degradation.”

  “Then I will be too plumb stupid to care about what I have done, eh, gentlemen? Any how, ’tis my brain to risk, that’s all.”

  “But that is not all, sir,” said Ramananda solemnly. “Your course is recklessly selfish. You have been selected because the mission needs you! All mankind needs you! Do you think your aptitudes, your guna, were delivered to you merely for your own amusement and pleasure, to waste? We are engaged in a sacred quest for the ultimate knowledge! Circling V 886 Centauri is the library that holds, perhaps, all the secrets of a civilization thousands, or millions, or billions of years in advance of our own. If this expedition solves the major problems of translation, it will mean the future, an unimaginable future, a science so far in advance of our own…”

  “An asymptote,” said Menelaus softly. “A change so powerful strange that no man can see beyond it. An event horizon.” More loudly, he continued: “Well, what if we are not smart enough to jump that ditch? Not bright enough to understand the invitation written out for us? The estimate worked out by Dr. Chandrapur.…”

  “Nonsense! The established authorities have dismissed his work!”

  Menelaus was not surprised by this reaction. He had seen Chandrapur’s estimate of the complexity of the Monument, and it was a fairly simple calculus to show the number of possible combinations of untranslated symbols, and to compare that to the known statistics on human brain use.

  There was too much math, a whole little world of it, miles upon miles covering the surface of the Monument, and so little had been cracked: less than thirty square feet of it. If the Mandelbrot fractal structure of the alien glyphs extended, as the primitive tests carried out by Croesus seemed to hint, down into the microscopic, molecular, or even atomic level, the calculus was even more daunting. The number of years estimated even to read the thing, at the human civilization’s current level of computer information storage and cross-referencing ability … and supposing the library of symbols continued inside the volume of the black sphere, not merely a surface inscription … the estimated values fell outside of the likely lifespan of human life on Earth.

  Chandrapur was only stating the obvious—but the scientific community did not like an idea so unflattering that their minds would prove unequal to the task, so Chandrapur was ignored, even though he could not be answered.

  Dr. Ram Vidura, who was of the Vaisyas caste, descended from craftsmen and commoners, spoke. His work was in the Poincaré Conjecture. Even his brilliance in mathematics could not expunge the shame of his inferior birth. By long habit, his voice was diffident, soothing, placatory. “Sir, let us speak of practicality. I assume you are using a cascade of multireceptors with combinations of binding patches or epitopes that will transport, sort, and bind the lipoproteins to their target areas?”

  “Correct,” said Montrose.

  “The number of possible interconnections between the neurons in the brain is ten to the eleventh power, or ten to the twelfth. What are the odds that you happened to hit upon the correct combination of nerve paths to augment?”

  “I used the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum computer in Zurich, their famous Denkmalsymbollogik Mainframe, to do the pattern-solving,” Menelaus said. “We may not know what all the alien symbols mean, but we know some of the grammar rules for manipulating them. Well, sir, I assume the logic is just as sound for conclusions the alien grammar laws allow, even if our math cannot confirm the result. Ancient Greeks who did not cotton to the concept of the ‘zero’ would still have reached a correct answer if they multiplied ten times ten using Arabic numerals, wouldn’t they just?”

  There was no murmur among the eight men in the punt, but in his helmet, Menelaus could see the text channels light up, as the mathematicians asked each other in silent finger-type about the ramifications of what they were hearing.

  Menelaus continued: “Countless millions of designs were filtered through Zurich computer analysis, until the near-infinite possibilities had been narrowed to one. In other words, here in my hand is the output of the Monument’s own math.”

  There was a moment of silence. Finally, one voice said, “It is not really a math, but a symbol-system that can apply to any logic set.” This was Dr. Bhuti, the only scholar older than Dr. Ramananda aboard the punt. His caste was the lowest in the caste system: he was a Sudra. His long-dead ancestors had been serfs, and so had his grandparents, when serfdom was reintroduced under theories of genetic work differentiation. Despite that his caste rendered him fit only for manual labor, his work in the extrapolation of Kronecker’s theorem on abelian extensions to base number fields beyond the rational had won him coveted manumission. His findings also had applications in the topology of algebraic surfaces.

  He and Menelaus had played long games of chess in the early morning cool, before Reveille, the only two men who woke before cockcrow, back in Africa, where there weren’t any cocks. Bhuti was gentle-souled, thoughtful, the very opposite of Menelaus, and so they had become close.

  “Fine. I used the alien’s own symbol-system.”

  Dr. Bhuti nodded slowly. The white hair clustered above his ears had been shaved for his helmet, which he unchocked and removed, to allow him to turn his neck and look thoughtfully at Menelaus. His skull was as wrinkled and brown as an apple left out in the sun, and his eyes twinkled like garnets.

  Bhuti said carefully, “Please, I urge you to delay your experiment. Wait! Wait until we reach the target star. By that time, new methods of analysis might be discovered back on Earth. They might build the Xypotech, the self-reprogramming artificial mind whose coming has been for so long imagined. Perhaps we do not need a posthuman to translate the Monument for us, no? Let us not explore this avenue unless it becomes needed.”

  Montrose had no ready answer for that. He had been planning for so long to augment his intelligence at the first possible opportunity, the idea of waiting had never occurred to him. Menelaus blinked in hesitation.

  Father Venture Reyes y Pastor raised his gauntlet. He was the ship’s chaplain for the seventy or so men in the Hispanosphere complement. He and Menelaus had spent many an evening engaging in disputes on every topic under the sun, and Menelaus was surprised to find the man was absolutely wrong on absolutely everything, from politics to religion to art to war. He was an entertaining and thought-provoking debater nonetheless, a ruthlessly logical thinker. His work was in the Poincaré Conjecture.

  “This is an incautious dream you cherish, Dr. Montrose,” he said in his somewhat soft and breathless voice. “Consider: If the Monument is too complex for our race, then we are not meant to read it. This must be left for whatever race will walk the earth after mankind is extinct: all in the fullness of time. We are the products of evolution, therefore by definition we cannot be in a position to regard evolution objectively, reflect on it, or question its wisdom.”

  Menelaus said, “Says who?”

  The young priest answered, “That is what we must assume the Monument says—if it were meant to be read, it would be legible to us. To us as we are, I mean. It is wrong to meddle with nature.”

  “I figure that without some amount of meddling, I never would’ve learned to read. Sure as hell that ain’t natural, squinting at squiggly lines on a piece of cloth and all. That Monument holds all the secrets of our future, gentlemen! And if a man h’ain’t got the right to take a few risks with his own brain—a brain I trained into shape without no help from any man in this vessel, I warrant—than what rights has he got?”

  Sarmento i Illa d’Or spoke next. He was from the Hispanosphere, and, by the agreed-upon conventions governing in-cabin speech, he had wa
ited until each of the Indosphere members had spoken. He had been a wrestler, a weightlifter, the only person other than Menelaus willing to use the Camp ring in the gym. It was only because Menelaus fought dirty, using illegal blows and holds, that the gym circuits had halted their matches. He and Menelaus, grimacing, smiling, and growling at each other, had privately agreed to finish the match some day, but that day never came. Sarmento i Illa d’Or won his berth for his work in the topology of algebraic curves and surfaces, particularly valuable since topology and knot-theory was the main avenue of approach of most of the Monument symbolism so far translated.

  “Anglo, you go too far!”

  “Ain’t I got the right to go as far as I can take me?” answered Menelaus.

  “What is ‘right’? What is ‘wrong’? These are but airy words for pleasant and unpleasant. What you are attempting may well make life more difficult for us. You might be willing to risk, but we are not! We are mountain-climbers are roped together in one rope, and you might want to topple into the cold, but not I. With your brain damaged, you will be a burden to the expedition, to our cause.”

  The voice of Sarmento i Illa d’Or held a strange note of relish. It was almost as if he were trying to say the exact thing to urge Montrose onward, while seeming to say the opposite.

  He was also one of the younger men, a member of Del Azarchel’s clique. He had also been there, at that wild night of drinking and dancing and laughing, before the launch. He was the one, in fact, who had brought up Chandrapur’s analysis while they sat in a circle, drinking toasts and talking long into the night. When Menelaus proposed a toast to the intelligence augmentation—“we all know some poor bastard will have to risk afore we can read the Monument”—it had been Sarmento who had slapped him on the back (a little harder than strictly friendly) and said, “It will not be you! I will be the first to take the Promethean Formula! You Anglos do not have the cojones, eh?” Menelaus had pushed the cork back into his bottle, and hefted it upside down in his fist for a little glass bludgeon, and stood, but Del Azarchel pulled him back down into his chair, laughing, and told him it was just a joke.