Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  Menelaus normally shot straight-line and corrected: swift, direct, bloody. This time he was not. Why did he give his opponent one last clear chance to walk away, both of them unbloodied, unashamed? Nails must have thought it was weakness.

  Thought? There was no time, really, to think through the options once the scarf dropped. These things are decided on instant and instinctive levels. Perhaps Nails sensed Menelaus had no more nerve. Perhaps he just wanted to get in the shot first.

  So Nails fired from the hip, not taking the extra eighth-second to raise his arm. Perhaps he sprained his wrist; certainly the kick threw him back, off balance, as if a hammer struck his shooting arm. His heavy armor clanged like a bell around him. Jets of black chaff erupted in eight directions from his barrel, making the man vanish in an opaque cloud, from which only radar aiming beams emerged. A smoke-ring. He had guessed Menelaus was firing on an indirect path.

  Menelaus had the swifter reflexes, and had fired an instant before his foe, sensing by the tilt of the shoulder-armor that Nails had committed himself. So he was also hidden in a cloud, but this one was a cone reaching straight overhead, like a black tornado. His own aiming beam was pointed straight up.

  It was only an instant, but that instant was long enough, because the leading edge of Nails’s chaff cloud, approaching faster than the speed of sound, sensed the aiming beam of Menelaus’s pistol, and flew upward, following it. This distorted the cloud directly between the two, thinning Nails’s defense.

  Menelaus brought his arm down like Zeus calling a lightning bolt down from heaven, like a samurai chopping with an immense but unseen blade. This was purely theatric motion, of course. His main shot, which had been loaded in his escort-bullet’s lower Six O’clock launcher, had already found and piled through the thin cloud. The bullet had been programmed to pull the tightest possible angle, so its flightpath was as near to straight as a man with his gun pointed away from his target could manage.

  Menelaus, by this stunt, of course, had almost none of his cloud around him. It was all streaming up overhead. Even so, his pistol computers with casual genius located and deflected the enemy main shot.

  Nails’s head exploded, for Menelaus’s bullet entered his helmet, but did not have enough velocity to exit, and so ricocheted like a bead in a baby’s rattle, a momentary pentagram of burning metal.

  And because Menelaus was a serious man when he fought, he had programmed his escort bullets to follow the wake, and so Nails was struck again and again and again as slug after slug hit his skull, collar, shoulder, neck.

  A serious man. When he saw his headless opponent fall, Menelaus, who was covered with sweat, his heartbeat hot in his face, not consciously believing that the corpse might get up again, nonetheless drew his Bowie knife and started forward. (The picture in his mind was of plunging the knife again and again into a metal-hard torso, into bloodless plastic limbs, to make sure they would not keep moving.)

  He did not even know he was seriously wounded until he took that step. It was not even an escort bullet that had traveled through his leg and shattered his kneecap. It had been a splinter of granite, half-buried in the dry winter grass, some stray escort bullet struck. His leggings were red, and his boot was already full of blood, for a major vein had been severed. Then the sky turned a funny metallic black, lit with flashes of colorless light, and he had the sensation of stepping into an elevator whose cable was cut.

  Hitting the ground woke him for a moment. He saw the scarf flutter to the grass and lie still.

  4. The Harvest Is Great

  He woke to the smell of mown hay, the sound of bees buzzing. Out the window, brothers in brown cassocks were bent over, a line of men with sickles, working in devout silence, piling the harvest in bundles along the parallel paths they made in the standing wheat. In the silence, one voice spoke: et dicebat illis messis quidem multa operarii autem pauci rogate ergo Dominum messis ut mittat operarios in messem. Menelaus did not understand the words, but there was a lilt of humor there.

  Leonidas was slouched, perhaps asleep, balancing on a stool near his bed, tilted back so not all the stool legs were on the floorstones, his crossed boots making the only mark on an otherwise clean and white wall. Perhaps he was awake, for a thin blue trail of smoke was spilling slowly upward from beneath his hat brim.

  “Little brother,” said Menelaus.

  A low chuckle answered him. “Not no more. I’m older than you, now.”

  “You froze me?”

  “The bone-grower messed up, started your ribs and stuff getting all crinkly. Had to bring in a Jap to redo your skeleton, and that cost. Specialist from Osaka.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Year and a half.”

  “Why so long?” Menelaus asked.

  “We had to keep you stiff until Nelson could raise the money.”

  “Nelson? He even got a job?”

  “In Newer Orleans. Some scratch he got gambling, some he got diving for treasure in the sunk part of the city. Some he got from some Anglo pumpkin with dollar signs in his eyes, just for drawing a map and making sweet talk.”

  “Damn stupid of him, going into hot water.”

  “He says its clean these days, the water.”

  “If there’s no fish, it’s not clean. Don’t care what the Geiger counter says. Fish know.” Menelaus shook his head. “Hope he’s planning to be a monk. No women’ll marry a man with nuked-up stones.”

  “Maybe Nelson wore a lead jockstrap. But funny you should mention…”

  Menelaus looked around the room. The crucifix on the wall was Spanish-style, with the figure of the torture all carved and painted in grotesque and vivid likeness, and adorned with gold leaf. “You didn’t. You surely didn’t.”

  “We did. We surely did.”

  “Can’t baptize a man without his say-so. They got rules. A catechism.”

  “We told ’em it was your last words, dying wish, all that.”

  “I ain’t joining no beaneater church.”

  “Been done. The Governor’s brother came by and put oil on your face and everything. Washed all your sins away, prettied up your soul to go meet St. Peter. But I guess you’ll call him San Pedro now, eh? Got to go to Rome and kiss the toe of the Pope.”

  “Preacher Brown says the Pope got horns and a split hoof like a goat.”

  Leonidas grinned, which made his cigarette tilt up at a jaunty angle. “Preacher Brown will take a strap to you, he finds out you say your prayers in Latin.”

  “I don’t say prayers.”

  “You do. Before your meals. I heard you.”

  “Saying “thank God, its time to eat” ain’t saying grace. Saying the blessing don’t do nothing.”

  “Well, cussing a man to hell don’t do nothing, neither, but I heard you do that, too.”

  “Well, go get the brother or whoever. Tell ’em I changed my mind, and I’m going back to … what is Preacher Brown? Whatever the hell he is, tell ’em I had a vision or something calling me back to, uh…”

  “Mormon. Preacher Brown’s a Mormon.”

  “He ain’t no Mormon. In the first case, Mormons got two wives, and in the second, we hang them when we catch them, like they do us. Utah’s enemy ground. It just ain’t possible! Umm—is it? He’s not really a Mormon, is he?”

  “Just ain’t possible you can be born and raised from a pup and don’t even know what Church you are.”

  “Which is the one that believes in hellfire?”

  “All of ’em. How many years you been a-going to Meeting? You didn’t pay not the least attention in all that time?”

  “I was thinking of something else.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe we could make a promised land by our own lone selves, asking no help and bowing to none. Maybe the Garden of Eden weren’t at the beginning of time, but at the end, a garden we can make as soon as we figure how to make it. That’s what I was thinking. Old Preacher Brown’s spook stories didn’t seem like much to me, held up against that
. Call the brother.”

  “Don’t be a mule, Meany. The Governor’s brother, the Bishop, came by and tended to you while you were sick, and he didn’t turn you over to the Regulators.”

  “Bishop? Ain’t no bishops in Texas.”

  “So is. Bishop of the Diocese of Galveston-Houston. He’s shielding you. You step off of sanctuary ground, you might as well put your head in a bucket of boiling pork-lard. Mike Nails was setting to get married, did you know that?”

  “No. Who is the girl?”

  “Lil Palmer. Josiah Palmer’s girl, the man who owns half the county. See? Might have been okay if you had killed him clean, but word got out that you drilled Mike over and over.”

  “Because his gun was stupid and his chaff was packed like crap.”

  “Blew his head clean off, you did. If you’d’ve drilled him in the heart and left a good-looking corpse…”

  “Bugger that. Gunfighting ain’t a game. Besides, it’s not my fault I win.”

  “Win? You shoot like the devil’s in you, little brother. Lookit this. Got you a memento.”

  Leonidas pulled out a slug of metal. It was two bullets, melted into one shape, curled like a question-mark. The payload of Mike Nails’s main shot had been fused by the heat of impact to one of Menelaus’s escort bullets—a rare, perfect interception.

  Looking at the shape, Menelaus could see it in his head: the patterns, the pretty patterns of vortices. He could see the math needed to describe how that impact had been done, and he could guess at a way to solve for simultaneous partial differentials, more elegant than what he’d been doing before.

  “Shoot like the devil is in you,” Leonidas said again, this time more softly.

  “I just got a knack, is all,” muttered Menelaus.

  “That’s not what Rainier says.”

  “Who?”

  “Your Prince. The Prince of Monaco.”

  “Captain Grimaldi. Ain’t no titles in space.”

  “Ship ain’t done a-building yet. Most likely never will be.”

  “The Hermetic. He’s still the Captain,” said Menelaus. And in his heart, he wanted the words to be: my Captain.

  Leonidas shrugged. “Whatever his name is, His Serene Highness helped pay for some of your fixup. He was talking about a scholarship. They’ll pay your way to go to Oddifornia and study math.” Leonidas shook his head in wonder, as if baffled by rich foreigners and their lunatic ways. “Guess when it takes you more’n ten years to build a ship, you might as well put the kids through schooling what might grow up to be your crew. Train ’em up to the job, like.”

  For a moment, Menelaus had the strangest feeling, as if time itself had forgotten how to let the seconds pass. Pay? To study?

  It was the future. A doorway to the future had just become unlocked for him.

  In one part of his mind, he noticed how much joy was like horror: The same horripilation tingled his skin electrically, the same faintness of breath, the same prickling of the scalp, the same sensation that something too enormous to grasp was upon him.

  His gunfighter’s nerve knew how to deal with horror, and so he could master this wild bucking-bronco feeling, too. Menelaus controlled his voice and spoke nonchalantly.

  “So … pay my way outta here. He said that?”

  “He did indeed. And seeing as how pretty Lil Palmer will kiss any man who shoots you in the back, and her dad will give him a thousand acres of prime land, this might be a good time to pack up and go study. Pox, I’d beef you myself to get a lip-dicker from sweet Lilly: just as fine as cream gravy and easy on the eyes, she is.”

  “Did the brothers say how soon I’d be fit to travel?”

  “Your body’s got to flush out the cellular machinery used to hold you in life-suspension: so you’ll be crapping black ink for a while. Aside from that, we can leave as soon as…”

  “We?”

  Leonidas looked shy, and pulled his hatbrim down, but eventually said: “Well, I’m your brother, Meany Louse. Older brother now. Can’t let you go off by your lonesome. Lookit what all kinds of trouble you make.”

  Menelaus was not in the mind to argue the point. “You got a cigarette?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Old or new?”

  “New. This is newbacco. You don’t think I touch that poison stuff, do you?”

  So Menelaus leaned back comfortably in his bed, watching the blue plume of cigarette smoke drift toward the ceiling. The two brothers shared the silence, neither feeling much need to talk, not yet. The smoke trickled up.

  Up. The direction the stars were in.

  4

  Life Extension

  1. Mining the Diamond Star

  A.D. 2004–2045

  The Diamond Star V 886 Centauri, known informally as “Lucy” and more officially as BPM 37093, was a variable white dwarf star about fifty lightyears from Sol.

  In the middle of the First Space Age, astroseismological analysis of its pulsation rhythms indicated that the core had solidified into one huge crystal of carbon ash. This core was a ten-decillion-caret diamond of degenerate matter, some 2500 miles in diameter, a single teaspoon of which would have weighed five tons on Earth. The discovery was mentioned as a curiosity in even some popular press.

  This curio became a celebrity that fascinated the world many years later when gamma-ray spectrography suggested that the astronomical diamond was not matter at all, but antimatter. High-energy radiation activity from the star was consistent with micrometeorite or dust particles encountering a star-sized furnace burning antihydrogen into anticarbon, and disappearing in a total-conversion flash of mutual annihilation. The plasma atmosphere of the star maintained the proportions of positrons to antiprotons expected from an “anti-star”—a kind of body, until then, entirely hypothetical.

  That this invalidated the standard model of astronomical evolution was merely one of the tremendous implications.

  Criswell mining, also called “Star-Lifting,” was a process that theoretically could be used to create artificial mass-ejections from a star. A flotilla of equatorial satellites, each pair exchanging two counterdirectional beams of oppositely charged ions with its neighbors, could form a complete circuit around the star, to initiate a ring current. The magnetic field thus generated would deflect the solar wind, and channel prominences from the star into a pair of ejection streams at the north and south poles. Next, artificial solar storms could be created by a sufficiently powerful particle beam. The stellar atmosphere of even a cool star was hellishly hot; but anything, no matter how hot, boiled more fiercely when energy was added to it. If enough energy were added, the plasma could, in spots, be set to boiling savagely enough to throw its inner substance into space for easy retrieval.

  The physics of Criswell mining was simple, but the economics less so. It had never been attempted on Sol. Mankind simply had no current need for a cloud of hydrogen plasma so pressing as to justify the astronomical energy costs involved. But economics of mining V 886 Centauri, a star both smaller and cooler than Sol, were different. The gravity well was less steep.

  And the ejected material was infinitely more precious, even if infinitely more dangerous.

  The plasma of V 886 Centauri, ejected into orbit and stratified into its elements by using extremely large-scale mass spectrometry, could then be condensed by laser cooling into antimatter.

  The antihydrogen would prove too fugitive and fine to collect. But a beam of positrons would turn anticarbon-12 into anticarbon-14, and the ions could then be painstakingly captured by a magnetic funnel. The chemical properties of anticarbon were the same as carbon, of course, so that sufficient magnetically induced temperatures and pressures could be used to compress the material into anticarbon crystal: a snow-white diamond no one and nothing made of matter could touch.

  These last two operations would be expensive only at first, because the gathered antimatter could then be used to power ever-larger arrangements of ionization screens and magnetic bottles, which would gather more of
the cloud, so the arrangement could generate a larger magnetic field, and so on. The snowball would simply grow.

  The Diamond Star was a fountain of wealth, for all practical purposes, infinitely rich.

  The only problem was that the fountain of wealth was fifty lightyears away. Is it worth it to climb a mountain to get a pot of gold? The taller the mountain is, the bigger the pot must be, and the more precious the gold.

  How precious was this gold? Unlike other forms of energy, antimatter has the most efficient transportation cost versus its mass, since every particle was annihilated to liberate energy. Pound for pound, it was the cheapest form of power there could ever be. It required very little by way of refinement or processing: drop anything, anything made of matter into it, and the equal mass was converted spectacularly to energy. No waste; no pollution. A perfect fuel source. The problem? To make antimatter out of matter was preposterously costly, absurdly energy-inefficient, and cost far more than it was worth.

  But what if a big chunk of the stuff, a mother lode, was merely sitting idly up in the starry heavens, waiting?

  How big? V 886 Centauri was 2 × 1027 kilograms in mass. One gram of anticarbon would liberate 9 × 1013 joules of energy when annihilated with a gram of carbon, meaning that the Diamond Star was worth roughly 1040 joules of energy. For comparison, the annual energy consumption of the whole world in the days of the Second Space Age was less than 1018 joules. In other words, every man, woman, and child on the globe, and all his cats and dogs, could have more power at his disposal than the whole world had used in a century—if only there was a way to go get it.

  And the will and the wealth. By a providential accident of history, Earth in A.D. 2050 happened to be at the apex of a period its friends called the “Age of the Sovereign Individual”; its foes called it “The Plutocracy.” Nine men, no more, controlled 90 percent of the world’s wealth. They estimated that an unmanned starship returning in a century would ensure the perpetual power of their international system of banks and industries. Their power collapsed amid hyperinflation—but not until after a vessel was launched that only they could afford to send.