Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  The Croesus achieved orbit around V 886 Centauri in A.D. 2112, and laboriously constructed a radio-laser larger than itself to beam back to Sol news of its successful first pass at mining the antimatter star.

  The message consisted of tediously correct, robot-compiled reports of loads, processes, and outputs, and only in the final section, under anomalies, did the Croesus brain, without any particular emphasis, report that Man was not the only creature who had placed an artifact near the Diamond Star. First Contact had been made fifty lightyears away, with no living human aware of the event. The robotic mining ship had discovered an object, an artifact, a black sphere the size of a small moon, left by intelligent nonhumans.

  But by the time the signal reached Sol, the generation that had sent out the NTL Croesus had passed away. There were no orbital dishes open to receive its message. The broadcasts that passed through the Solar system in 2162 and 2166 were lost. The Wars of Religion of the late Twenty-First Century were more brutal and more reckless than the Wars of Economic Theory from the Twentieth, because the main purpose of the belligerents (first on one, but eventually on both sides of the conflict) was not to preserve honor, gain terrain, or win political concessions, or for any rational reason, but to wipe out as many infidels as possible, as cruelly as possible, in order to please a particularly cruel conception of God.

  Croesus was programmed to repeat its broadcasts every four years, and the signal took half a century to cross the void to Sol. In its thoughtless, patient, automatic way, it did. It was not until A.D. 2170 that the Kshatriya battle-satellites received the message that man was not alone in the universe.

  2. The Hermetic Expedition

  A.D. 2215–2235

  After decades of delay, the second expedition to the Diamond Star was organized. The waning Indosphere, in an act of conspicuous consumption meant to awe the world, and the up-and-coming Hispanosphere, eager to show her new-found strength, for the same motive, though rivals, joined each other in the venture.

  The amount of resources consumed in this expedition was almost beyond calculation; but the odd mixture of semi-religious zeal and cultural pride prevented either of the partners from flinching away from the massive public debt and private ruin the ostentatious project absorbed.

  To be sure, public figures solemnly intoned pieties concerning the long-term usefulness of this scientific wonder to the future generation of man: but it was on their haughty contemporaries their eyes were fixed.

  Not so the officers and crew. Ion drive allowed them to leave the world lightyears behind, and Montrosian biosuspension technique allowed them to leave the years behind. Each crewman of the complement aboard had his eyes fixed on the future; each was assured that history would make him immortal.

  The Earth would be strangely changed ere the errant travelers returned, the generation that sent them out long gone, their once-loved homes now foreign.

  And the travelers would be changed even more strangely.

  3. Thaw

  A.D. 2399

  Menelaus Montrose woke to a sensation of floating serenity. His thoughts seemed focused and sharp, but his head ached as if it had been filled with helium. Had he been drugged?

  He sat up in bed. That was the first surprise: because it was a bed, an old-fashioned four-poster, big enough to hold a family of bounders, their first cousins, and their dogs. It was hung with heavy drapes, with sheets and coverlets around him like a snowfield, and a real down pillow where his head had lain.

  Vaguely, he remembered a previous room—a white, empty place with padded walls—A hospital of some sort, albeit not smelling of blood, puke, and feces like the field-hospitals he knew back in Texas. But now where was he?

  Menelaus spit up into the air, and watched the spittle as it fell, making a ugly yellow splatter on the nice silk sheets. It seemed to fall in a parabola, and not curve left or right. No visible Coriolis force, as someone in a carousel might see: but he was clearly under one gravity of acceleration.

  Earth, then. He was on Earth.

  Del Azarchel must have turned the punt around. That would have been no easy task. Decelerating just to come to a rest relative to Earth … then to expend the fuel to accelerate toward Earth again, doing a screw-turn halfway, decelerating again … How far had the Hermetic traveled in that amount of time? Past Pluto? If she was past the heliopause, no craft of Earth could ever rendezvous with her …

  A sense of crushing defeat was in him, like water in the lungs of a drowning man. All nine men aboard the punt would have missed the expedition, thanks to him. He had missed the stars. The future had been ripped from his hand like some old but cherished comic, and torn to bits.

  Menelaus threw open the bed curtains, and recoiled, blinking. The sunlight poured in from French doors leading to a balcony. Outside was dizzying scenery: majestic mountains, crowned and ermined with snow and, gathered between crevasses, like emeralds sown into the silvery-white garments of emperors, were narrow valleys of pine and spruce. Above, a sky so pale and clear it was as glass, and there on motionless wing, an eagle, highest flown of all the fowls of Earth.

  He stepped closer to the window. He looked out through the French doors to a balcony of marble. Beyond was air, and a sheer drop. Fog, or perhaps it was cloud, was underfoot, and he blinked in the dazzle, half-blinded.

  This room he was in seemed to be burrowed into near-vertical cliff wall. To either side of his room he could see the cliff was punctured with other balconies and windows, as well as larger portals, which may have been landing perches for aircraft. The balconies were an odd mixture: tropic flowers and drooping vines hung over the sides, but driving snow blenched the rock walls to either side, and icicles gleamed.

  Menelaus saw a shelf below him that was cut deeply into the rock wall, large as an amphitheater. Atop this shelf gardeners had carefully constructed a flower maze, green tennis lawns, and fountains with silver basins. Two airy stairways, graceful as waterfalls, reached down toward it. The pure beauty of the architecture, the refinement of the decoration, impressed him, and he was not a man normally who took note of such things.

  The cliff wall curved left and right in bays and protuberances. His astonished eye followed the cliff farther and farther. In the distance the mighty curves met, and light twinkled from the shadows of the far cliff wall opposite. He was in a palace: the place must have miles of halls and corridors.

  It looked like someone had taken a museum, or one of those old French palaces, and stuck it in the middle of a gigantic crater in the middle of the mountains. But did they heat the whole estate, merely to grow a rose garden and grape arbor in the midst of snow? Menelaus wondered at the energy expended.

  Palace? Or fortress? He saw, folded almost invisibly into the rock, immense shutters of metal; clamshell armor thicker than bank vault doors. Several acres of steel were poised to fall over these windows and gardens and airy walkways, and he also saw pillboxes, hatches, and turrets which implied a healthy antiaircraft battery was also buried in the rock, only its many snouts poking above the surface.

  There was nothing like this on Earth, and no blueprints for anything like it. Which meant he had been asleep for longer than merely the trip in the punt back to Earth. How far had the Hermetic traveled in this time? Was it twenty-five years later? Fifty? Had the first starship of Man reached her destination? Perhaps even now Blackie Del Azarchel was walking on the surface of the Monument in a pressure suit, bending down to study the alien glyphs. Menelaus gritted his teeth and ignored a boiling knot in his stomach.

  Abruptly, he flung wide the French doors, and strode onto the balcony. A rushing blanket of warm air hovered near him. He did not hear any fan roaring, or see any vents whence the air came, but Menelaus stood without a coat on in sub-freezing mountain winterscape, unscathed. He could smell the snow, and if he put out his hand, he could feel cold air on his fingers. His hand felt queer, as if he had disturbed the surface of an invisible, vertical pond.

  Menelaus only then noticed what he
was wearing: silk pajamas. They rustled in the warm winds. There was a monogram on the pocket, a combination of the letters D and X and A.

  At least there were Latin letters still in use here in the future.

  He wondered where he was. Not a hospital, that was sure. Maybe the palace was owned by the Alliance of Deneb X? (That sounded promising.) Xylophone Anti-music Department? The Algophilists of the Xipetotec Desolation? (Given a vote, he’d prefer disgruntled percussion musicians to votaries of a old Injun blood-god.)

  Beneath his hand was a little sphinx with the cherub-head of a child, smiling. “What’re you grinnin’ at, kid?” he grunted. Then he jerked his hand in surprise. The carven haircurls of stone embracing the wee face were warm under his touch: the marble balustrade was heated.

  Now he looked out. Underfoot, through the openings in the fog, was a vast crater. Each time Menelaus estimated its size, he saw some other feature, such as a pine tree which he had mistaken for a weed, and had to revise his estimate upward. The crater was many miles across.

  The clouds all hung at the same level, so looking down was like peering through the surface of a lake at a hidden lakebed. A particularly wide gap in the cloud was open at his feet, and opening slowly as if the winds were unseen hands parting a stage curtain. Menelaus leaned forward, eager for a glimpse of the future world.

  The bottom of the crater was a broken field of glassy splatters, looking almost like volcanic rock. In the center of the crater, a lake had gathered. From the color of the water, he guessed it was newly made, a decade old or less, and nothing much lived in it. In the very middle of the water rose a cone-shaped island of rock.

  Island? An uplift peak. He knew what he would have seen if he had been standing on it: chevron-shaped striations in the rock called shatter cones, all radiating out from the impact point, or laminated and welded blocks of sand.

  He was not worried about radiation. This was not a nuke: It was a meteor strike. A big one.

  There were ruins crumbling at the edge of the crater walls above: broken walls in burial shrouds of ice, blind with unglassed windows and doorless thresholds, or stumps of chimneys helmeted in snow. Now Menelaus saw a regularity in the cracks and discolorations in the crater floor: squares and rectangles. Old streets, old foundations, something had been here once.

  This had been a large installation. Not a city: Some of the ruins were shaped like pillboxes or hemi-cylinders. A military installation. A fortress built high in the mountains? There was a break in the treeline, and all the trees in a row, for over a mile, were younger than those surrounding. He guessed that this was where the launchrail once rested, and broken lumps regularly spaced along the path may have been the energy system. That square break in the treeline was where the vehicle building might have stood: That broken eggshell in the distance, if it were not a mosque, was the remnant of a reactor dome. Of the acceleration rings there was no sign.

  So—not just any fortress. A fortified spaceport. There had been no such installations anywhere on Earth in his day.

  And now a second fortress had been built atop the first, no doubt replacing the old one when it was pasted. That implied even more years had passed. Seventy-five? A hundred? How long had it been? More importantly, had any radio messages been received from the Hermetic? The original expedition provisions would have allowed the vessel to stay at the Diamond Star for seven years, before powering up to begin the astronomical voyage back, with another possible two years if crewmen died, or very strict rationing were practiced. The results would arrive before the ship. If all went as planned, if there were results to send. If the Monument had been translated …

  Back inside the chamber, there were images of fire painted on the ceilings, images of birds and beasts and maidens and conquering kings on the walls. Everything was deep red, dark blue, blue-black, with tints of gold and mahogany to bring a richness out of the textures. Framing the doors and windows and arches of dark wood carved in pattern of Celtic dragons coiled in knots. Underfoot were Persian carpets like nothing he’d ever seen. On either hand, and every which way he turned his eyes, everything was either gold, or crystal, or polished wood, or fine china, or substances he could not put a name to. There was a black paneled bowl of red roses on the nightstand, and some sort of candelabra in the ceiling, surrounded by painted babies with pink wings.

  It all looked like something from an old European mansion. He had been expecting something else. Rooms made of force fields and streamlined steel with tailfins. Sliding doors that opened by themselves and made a shush-shush noise or something. Moving walkways. Atom-powered lightbulbs. Talking sinks, preferably that had a third tap for beer.

  It was damn pretty, though, he had to give them that. The place even smelled nice, applewood logs burning on the fire.

  He craned his head back and looked at the ceiling again. Images of fire? These were battle scenes.

  4. Portrait of War

  High up on the wall, his eye first fell upon 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. There was a tiny silver dot high up in the corner of the image: no doubt this was the aircraft spotting for the incoming missile strike. So the fools had actually done it. The Burning of New York the Beautiful had not been enough to warn the world. World War, this time with atomics. Or some weapon even more deadly: if the artist’s design was accurate, the bolt was wider at the top than at the bottom, unlike a detonation or mass-driver strike.

  The cityscape was photographically accurate. Montrose recognized some of the buildings. The Temple Mount; the Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The artist had even included part of the Wailing Wall, and showed a mother with her arms across her face twisting in agony as she fell across the two screaming children she protected with her body even as she died.

  To either side were more images of fire: skeletons of skyscrapers toppling; sleek semi-wingless ultrahigh-atmosphere craft being scattered in a whirlwind of flame, like the finger of the Wrath of God; a submarine in the midst of a tidal wave being flung out of the sea by the violence of some unimaginable force, like a salmon leaping to its death.

  No wonder they had not woke him up when he returned. War had broken out.

  Painted on the ceiling were other images. Ships in space were exchanging directed-energy fire, shown here as fanciful threads of gold wire. No beams would be actually visible in real vacuum, of course. And the burning ships were drawn with yellow fire flowers with red petals, long licking tongues. The artist had obviously never seen a fire in zero-gee, which looked like a ball of half-invisible indigo gas, because in microgravity the hottest part of the flame tended to spread outward evenly in all directions, as a sphere, or rush along ruptured oxygen lines. The teardrop shape of candle flame was something gravity produced.

  One war, or two? There was no way to tell.

  Below them, at eye level, were stiff and ceremonial images: A figure with shoulder-length silver hair in a sleek black silk uniform was stepping on sabers dashed under his feet by half a dozen bowing figures; a kneeling president in the sober coat-and-tie uniform no one but presidents since the First Space Age had worn; a king in ermine cloak with medieval crown in hand; a military man in a high-necked Chinese jacket with pistol presented butt-foremost; a supine chieftain in a gaudy feather bonnet; and, oddly enough, a Pharaoh in a gold and blue pshent. The man in black held up an olive branch. At a guess, this picture was about the peace that followed the war. The figures perhaps represented the continents.

  On one wall was a full-sized portrait showing a bishop lowering a coronet onto the head of the conqueror. The coronation of the white-haired figure in black showed his face more clearly. It was Ximen Del Azarchel. He looked to be about sixty years of age. No telling when these paintings had been done.

  The monogram on the robe was his initials.

  Menelaus looked overhead again. The ships on fire were all linked cylindric
al punts, with maneuvering nozzles fore and aft. Interplanetary ships; space vessels. Tin cans cocooned in iron skeletons: functional, ugly, utilitarian. Their enemy ship was a work of art, a combination of ion drive and light-pressuresail. The sail tissue was like a second sky, holding crescent moons, and the blazing disk of the sun, in its reflections. The slender hull gleamed like a silvery sword. An interstellar ship; a vessel of stars.

  The NTL Hermetic.

  Montrose stepped around the bed on which he’d woke, and studied the paintings on the opposite wall.

  One portrait particularly well done showed a European countryside, perhaps in Germany or France, with old-fashioned solar-paneled cottages with high-peaked roofs, and green fields under quaint hothouse tarp. The cottages dated from the time of the Japanese Winter. In the foreground were four maidens bending a spear into a ploughshare.

  The sunset behind them was red, and rising above it, not far from the evening star, was the gleam of the starship Hermetic. The artist had merely suggested the ship’s slender silhouette with a stroke of the brush, adumbrated with miles-wide sail with an oval of silver. The silver silhouette looked like a scepter, or perhaps a flower.

  The ship was rising in the east like the morning star, and beneath her sails, was peace.

  Montrose thought: The starship had returned, and found a world burned and torn with war, fighting a war in space, and somehow put a stop to it.

  The date in Roman numerals was printed on one of the images: Astromachia MMCCCXCIX.

  One hundred and sixty-four years had passed since last he woke. He paused to let that figure sink in. It was roughly the amount of time between when the Constitution of the Old Union was written, and when it was abolished by Roosevelt the Usurper. Another century and a half or so years after that, and the last president, Jefferson Dayles, was gone, and the Pentagon had declared Martial Law “for the duration of the emergency” that was to last, as it turned out, at least a century and a half again.