Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  Grim example. Think of another: One and a half centuries was exactly the amount of time between the first lift of the Wright heavier-than-air flying machine and the launch of the first unmanned nigh-to-lightspeed interstellar vessel, NTL Croesus.

  Long enough for the NTL Hermetic to have sailed to V 886 Centauri and returned—bearing all the wealth of the antimatter star, all the treasure of scientific wonders gleaned from deciphering the Monument—to end war and usher in a lasting peace.

  He found himself grinning. And Blackie had evidently ended up on the top of the heap.

  Menelaus turned.

  And then he forgot everything, the old white-haired picture of Del Azarchel, the sinister silvery silhouette of Earth’s only manned starship, now returned as Earth’s only interstellar warship; he forgot it all.

  He was looking at the princess. It took his breath away.

  5. Portrait of Royalty

  Her hair was gold as a summer noon sun. The artist had captured the girl’s serene face but also a haunting twinkle in her eye, on her cheeks a hint of a suppressed dimple of laughter. Her gown was the gown of a fairytale princess. She seemed like a mischievous little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes; but as if her mother were a queen.

  A coronet of diamond blazed in her hair, and white ermine hid one shoulder, leaving the other shoulder nude. Her bodice was white and set with small pearls. Her upper arms were naked, but elegant opera-gloves clung to hands as slender and shapely as branching coral. A ribbon of red and silver circled her trim waist, a regal gleaming medallion dangling below, pulling the ribbon into a Y-shape that curved along her hips. Her trains fell in smooth folds from her dress, like acres of snow descending in ripples from the curve of a hill. Only the toe of a diamond slipper could be glimpsed beneath the hems, like the glass slipper from a fairy-story, and her pose was elfin, a ballerina caught in mid-step, as if she were from a world not as weighty as Earth.

  Behind and to either side were Doric columns holding ermine robes and shields of red and white diamonds. For some reason, there were two tonsured monks in the picture, standing to either side of the pillars, brandishing swords. A mantle decorated with stars was over her head; a map of Earth was under her gleaming toes.

  Menelaus envied the painter his imagination. No real-life girl could be that pretty.

  There came a noise behind him.

  The door opened a crack, and someone knocked politely.

  “C’mon in!” shouted Menelaus. “Tell me where the hell I am and what the hell the date is!”

  Opening a door here in the future was evidently an elaborate affair: A wigged footman in a bright red coat backed into the room, bowing, giving Menelaus a better view of the man’s buttocks than he would have liked. Then a small throng of other people, doctors and soldiers and folks in odd costumes, all shining with strange fabrics and glinting with gems.

  A voice of quiet command spoke a soft word, and the throng parted. Here was a dignified old man in sable who sat in the moving throne with a scarlet coverlet on his lap. He wore white gloves whose hue contrasted with his black garments. On his right wrist was a heavy armband of dull red metal, crudely made when compared to the shining rings he wore over his gloves, or his chain of office. The old man’s jacket and coverlet were embroidered with the same monogram: XDA.

  He said, “Menelaus Montrose, you are in the best of places in a better world than we ever dreamed—and the date? It is our time. Our hour has come, and all we have desired with it.”

  Menelaus squinted. “You in charge around here?”

  The old man had a dazzling smile. He had been a handsome man once, and some of that glamour still clung to him. “Ah, my friend, you could say that.”

  The old man’s hair, though hoary with age, was thick, and he wore it long, almost to his shoulders, like some ancient statue of a king, and he sported a moustache as white. Perhaps the moustache was what delayed Montrose from recognizing him.

  But he surely knew that smile.

  “Blackie—! Blackie Del Azarchel! Is that you?”

  “The same. Welcome back to life. And such a life!”

  5

  The Brotherhood of Man

  1. A Toast

  “Well, hell, Blackie! Stand up and let me take a gander at you—! I been wondering—”

  He had been fooled by the lack of wheels. The tall black chair slid forward over the floor, silent as a ghost, and Menelaus could not see the mechanism beneath the chair base that moved it. But it was a wheelchair.

  “Uh—sorry—uh … Jesus nailed up a tree! How’d it happen?”

  “My staff of doctors say it was spinal trauma, when I was thrown from a stallion, my beloved Eclipse. I think they have misdiagnosed the permanency of the affliction, and do not know its real cause.”

  “Damnation and plague! I know what a horseman you are. Were. Damn!”

  “Worry not,” said the old man with a twinkle in his eye. “Did I not say that our tomorrow had arrived? Petty problems as this one can be solved: the secret of youth, the creation of life, the conquest of the human nature, the maturation of man from upright ape to soaring angel! The time of Man beyond Man is about to dawn, and you, now revenant from your coffin, restored beyond hope from madness, you shall be in the audacious vanguard. Come! Let us storm the crystal ramparts of the unimagined future, brass trumps blaring, and banners streaming! Welcome to life!”

  No sorrow could endure the onslaught of Del Azarchel’s ringing words, his charming smile, his joy.

  “It is good to be here,” said Montrose. And he threw back his head, and uttered a whoop of pure delight.

  “The event calls for wine!” said Del Azarchel. His eyes were shining. At his gesture, a wine-steward in powder blue brought in an ice bucket, and a parlor maid in a black uniform and frilly cap brought a pair of glasses on a tray.

  Menelaus noticed the posture and costumes of the folk in the room. It took him a moment to realize what was missing. Perhaps in his great-grandfather’s time, it had been the habit of non-Europeans of high rank to dress in European fashions, coats and ties and so on. But when Menelaus was young, only lawyers and bankers still affected that old costume. High-ranking non-Indians dressed as much like Brahmins or Kshatriya as they dared, sporting dhoti or pancha, even when not allowed to wear yagnopavita or choti. But no one here was wearing Indian trousers, sacred thread, or brow-paint. This would seem to indicate that the fashions of the world, following the powers of the world, had changed again.

  There were three distinct groups: the first wore bright hues and glittered, and the second wore dark uniforms, who bowed and hung back. Peacocks and crows. The third group were pikemen, who stood at attention. Hawks.

  The brightly dressed were tall and dark-eyed men with shoulder-length hair of silver. They seemed to be wearing wigs of fine metallic threads, or perhaps some odd gene-engineering allowed them to grow strangely lambent fibers of zinc-hued strands from their scalp. Their tunics and long-coats were patterned with gems and threaded with wires and status lights.

  The cut and ornamentation of the tunics, the rings at the collars or the ankle-clasps sealed to boot-tops, looked like the fashion elements were borrowed from spacer uniforms or pressure suits. Certainly the bright heraldic designs and emblems the tunics flaunted looked like the easy-to-discern patterns of graffiti Montrose and his fellow spacemen had stenciled on their spacesuits during idle hours between training at the space station.

  The courtiers wore phones on one wrist, or on both wrists, muted but scintillating with text. Perhaps it was a symbol of social status, a sign that they were continuously monitoring important events elsewhere. It was surely symbolic, because not once did any courtier actually look down at his phone to read the messages and reports blinking there.

  The second group were servants including nurses, clerks, footmen, and pretty chambermaids. Their hair was natural hair, and it was worn short. Even the girls had pageboy bobs. Apparently only the superiors had the privilege of w
earing the strange-looking silver-white wigs.

  Menelaus had once mapped changes in fashion into his divarication function, with the cuts of clothing expressed in the form of bytes of information, and compared to the rate of linguistic or political-economic changes. There were a number of factors controlling the rate of fashion mutation, including things like the volume of money in circulation, the average family income, and the number and death-toll of wars in the interim. Looking over the two groups, he frowned: because a rough calculation implied a century of massive wars and frequent economic depression. His first impression was that a privileged class had emerged, and the glittering aristocrats were dressed to copy the fashion of their space-traveling royalty.

  Then he smiled. He realized that the long white wigs were all an impersonation of the way Del Azarchel wore his hair. Since all spacemen shave their skulls bald (or at least to a very tight crew-cut), wearing his hair as long as a woman’s must have come as a great comfort and relief to Del Azarchel, a way of letting his shirttails hang out. If the courtiers were bald under those wigs, that might be a sign of something else—maybe a symbol to show that they were ready to return to space at any moment. This hinted that the future might hold an active space program, something Menelaus could not contemplate without a toothy grin of pleasure.

  “Fancy digs you got here. Much better than where you came from, seems to me.” Menelaus accepted the delicate glass with a grin of thanks. “Only two glasses? What about them?” He gestured at the throng of soldiers and servants. “Ain’t they included?”

  Del Azarchel looked lost for a moment, as if he did not know to whom Montrose referred, but then his face lit up. “Of course! Thoughtless of me. All of you, drink to the health of Menelaus Montrose, the man closer than a brother to me! Get glasses—Tirado, can you see to it? Captain, perhaps your men can be off-duty only for the moment it takes to drink a toast with me?”

  An old Oriental in white (either a doctor or a fencing instructor, to judge by his garments) bent his head and began arguing in whispers with Del Azarchel. Del Azarchel waved the man’s objections away. “Please, Doctor! I value your advice more than I treasure the sight of the stars themselves, but surely, surely one small drink will do no harm to such a man as Menelaus Montrose. He is made of rawhide and whalebone, enjoys more lives than a cat, and has a tougher constitution than that of a maddened boar! The brain of an Einstein, of Newton, hides beneath that thick skull. He is harder to kill than a cockroach! A sip of wine will not do him in!”

  The old doctor straightened up, a look of skepticism in the arch of his eyebrow. “Just as you say, sir, but it seems your Newton had enough brainpower to scramble his brain like an egg, which we have only now found how to separate white and yolk and put them back into the shell.”

  Menelaus examined the soldiers as they drank. Comic-Opera Spanish seemed to be in style. Either these were Halloween costumes, or morion-style helmets were back in fashion. The helmets were peaked fore and aft and bore a steel rooster comb aloft. The men looked like Conquistadores: armor, lace collars, puffy sleeves and all.

  Their breastplates were a substance Menelaus did not recognize. Metal? Plastic? Something in the way the light glinted into rainbows along the inky plates—he visualized the deviation of photonic through-paths needed to produce those shades, and turned the picture into numbers in his mind, and then into a set of graphs—convinced him that the substance was meant to break up coherent light, and scatter incoming energy-fire.

  He ran through an equation or five in his mind to get an upper and lower value for the energy delivery system, given this type of defense. The result surprised him, because such weapons, if they existed, were absurdly wasteful. Of course, just out the window were roofless gardens heated in the midst of a frozen mountainscape. Absurdly wasteful. Menelaus was sure his mother would not have approved. This was a more luxurious time than he was used to, that was sure.

  Del Azarchel said with a small laugh, “Did I ever tell you of the time I drank stagnant rainwater from the heel of boot I found in a gutter? I had to drive away the most enormous rat one might envision: large as a housecat. My only weapon was—”

  Montrose laughed. “Yeah, the broken spike from an organlegger’s monkey cart, with the snark-juice still inside it, and stinking like hell. But the rat was a different time, remember?”

  “Wait? Are you certain? No, my friend, that boot—every time I drink, I think on it—it was when I was in pre-Kali Andalusia. I was twelve.…”

  He noticed the other people in the chamber, footman and steward and doctor and nurse, the soldiers in Conquistador get-up, all stiffened, and hid looks of surprise. Evidently it was out of style to correct Del Azarchel, even when he made a mistake. Montrose assumed the man was of pretty high rank, however this society measured rank.

  “Yup. I know, cause I was there everytime you sat down to drink, and you tell the damn story every time,” sighed Montrose. He sat himself down on the big four-poster bed, and the sheets crinkled under his weight. Once again the courtiers in the room were holding their breath, while trying not to stare. Evidently it was also not in style to sit down in Del Azarchel’s presence.

  He raised the estimate of Del Azarchel’s rank. Of course, he had no baseline to plot it against, and no clear way to digitize an abstraction like the degree of deference being shown a boss. Maybe if he used degrees of deviation of the spinal column from upright, he could compare other submission behaviors to that …

  Montrose (with the mental equivalent of a shrug) decided the styles of this time didn’t apply to him. He said, “The big rat—it was smaller last time you told it, only as big as a kitten—you were fighting that big rat over a hambone a drunk Jihadi had dropped. When you got it up to your lips, turned out to be a baby’s arm, all fried in grease, on account of the Mogadorians was eating on you Spaniards during the last days of the siege. I heard the yarn. The boot thing was a different time, before when you met that guy that turned your life all right-side out, made you learn how to salute and whatnot, even though you are a whatcha call it, a pilluelo, a gutter skunk. What was his name? That guy? ‘Trashcan?’ Something like that.”

  “Trajano Villaamil,” the older man said, nodding his snowy head. “Ah! Truly a name of glory! Even though his army was nothing but a group of half-starved youths, he made us his true and loyal followers, like knights-errant. Every theft and crime to serve the cause, the poor no more to be preyed upon, the widow to be shown respect, and the media to witness every theft, so the honor, and not just the supplies, of the haughty conqueror would be stolen! Such were the rules he beat into us. Within the confines of the street from the dead Cathedral to the dry Canal, he was king. He was the master of the beggar’s quarter, where the patrols dared not go. I would have wished him to see me now, now that I am Master of the World. I never knew him to break his word, not once.” Del Azarchel sighed in mingled nostalgia and wonder. “Not once! And to think—it was for his sake that I stayed with you.”

  “Stayed with me?” Montrose had been sitting in a slouch, but now he straightened up.

  “In the darkness, during the hunger watches … Ah! The old times are not always the best times, are they? Let us speak of happier things.…”

  Del Azarchel must have noticed the stiffness with which his servants and retainers were regarding Montrose, for he smiled and asked them to step from the room.

  The officer in charge of the Conquistadores gave Montrose a thoughtful look. He turned toward Del Azarchel, who gave the officer a smile. Del Azarchel raised his left wrist, displaying the crudely fashioned red wristband Menelaus had noticed earlier, a wristband not at all in keeping with the fineness of ornament that otherwise adorned the elegant, white-haired figure of Del Azarchel. The officer nodded, saluted sharply, and departed.

  That exchange of looks was not lost on Montrose. The captain of the guard had not wanted to leave his boss unarmed in a room with a man whose brain may or may not be fully healthy. The red metal armband Del Azarchel
wore was something that reassured the Captain. But what was it?

  He looked at the wristband carefully. In his mind’s eye, Montrose converted the surface irregularities into a mathematical expression, and calculated the standard deviation. The resulting figures were consistent with something machine-lathed in zero-gee, using old equipment. Not an ornament, then. And not something he trusted any of his men to refashion.

  2. Memory Lapse

  When all the minions were gone, Del Azarchel had his tall black thronelike chair slide itself closer to Menelaus, and touched wineglasses with him, so that a crystal note hung in the air.

  “To old times,” said Del Azarchel. “May they never come again…”

  “Old times past and better times to come!”

  “Salud y amor dinero y el y tiempo para disfrutarlo!”

  “Kampai, bottoms high, spittle and mud in a blind man’s eye!”

  “I promised you this drink long ago. You recall? Perhaps—I suppose not. But I was hoping you might recall it. It was not long ago for you, of course. Not long by your biological time.”

  “Um. Remind me. You and me—we used to sneak off to go drinking in Space Camp.”

  “This was somewhat after. In the sick bay. Ah. Perhaps we should not speak of it…”

  “No. Tell me. Maybe something will come back.”

  “You had attacked yet another crewman, and pulled the catheter of your suit in the fray, so your legs were covered with, ah, recoverable material, and your mouth was full of blood. His blood. No one was willing to sponge you off but me, and I had to brush your teeth. When I told you we would drink once again, once we were aground again, once you were better, you stopped screaming and started giggling, so I thought, you know, that somewhere in your mind, some buried part, you heard me. This is that drink. Am I not a man of my word?”

  “Nothing is coming back. Where did this happen? Before launch? Aboard the space station? Aboard the punt?”