Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  He stood with his nose pointed at the steel valves of the massive door to the chamber, his back to his executioners, waiting for them to get up the nerve to kill him. He waited, listening to the blood pounding in his ears, a sound so like the sea.

  It came as no surprise to hear the rustle of black silk as hands moved stealthily. Perhaps there were hidden holsters. Montrose did not turn his head, knowing any sudden movement would be his last.

  The surprise came when a voice rang out. It was the machine again, the Xypotech Del Azarchel.

  Do not harm him! He has been under my protection all these years, and I see no reason to alter. I value his life above your lives.

  The human Del Azarchel cried out, “But why? He threatens the Great Work! Why spare him?”

  The inhuman Del Azarchel replied: Because I have given my word—machine or not, alive or not, I am still the Nobilissimus Ximen Del Azarchel, Senior of the Landing Party!

  The next voices were as hushed and cowed as the tiny noises made by mice. “Chairman, I move that we release the hatch—” “Seconded” “—call the question?” “If there are no objections, the motion—”

  The next noise he heard was the very quietest click, and the sigh of the door-pistons.

  The big doors opened. Out he went.

  “Well,” he muttered to himself. “I hadn’t expected on that! Now what?”

  12

  A New Age Dawns

  A.D. 2400

  1. Images

  The skies above Utrecht were lit with fireworks like flowers of red and silver-white, brilliant against the stars or against the huge, ghostly image-works. Microwave cannonades from De Haar castle had heated the air to clear away the threatening clouds, and only a few nimbus, rosy and silver in the reflected lights, hung near the horizon.

  The images loomed through the midnight like towers of smoke. Menelaus could only guess at their meaning. Huge in the east and west, their cowls tangles in the stars, were bearded monks in cassocks, each holding aloft a pale sword half-transparent in the light of the rising moon. Elsewhere across the constellations was an image of a child in swaddling, leading a parade of strange figures that promised what the year to come might bring, cornucopias of prosperity, goats whose teats dripped ambrosia, waddling Buddha-figures with sacks heavy-laden with gold.

  Opposite this parade of glories was a bent graybeard, clouds around his knees, leaning on a scythe, his silver hourglass held above a more melancholy group of shapes. Larger than thunderheads, blurred and bluish in the distance, rose faces Menelaus did not recognize. Something about the stiffness, age, and solemnity of the images told him he was looking at an obituary of famous figures who had passed away that year—famous, he supposed, to the people of this time. To him, it was a procession as solemn and strange as the rain-worn angels seen in some ancient boneyard.

  Between these two parades, one image, taller than the rest, arrested his attention: Times Square in New York, an artist’s representation of what the city might have looked like had it survived to the present day, was painted across the night sky. The glittering ball of Waterford Crystal from the top of the Allied Chemical Building was poised to descend. In the gloom of colored lanterns below him, Menelaus could hear the chanting of the people as they counted, some upon the sward of gray grass patched with snow puddles, some in boats and pleasure barges drifting in the fanciful ponds some architect had scattered through the French gardens, their waters crystal blue in the December midnight:

  Tien! Negen! Acht! Zeven! Zes! Vijf! Vier! Drie! twee …

  Despite the importance and formality of the event, Menelaus wore no more than a rough jerkin and leggings of buckskin he had sewn himself, mittens of white rabbit fur, a shako cap made from a wolverine pelt, its teeth on a thong around the crown.

  He had sauntered up to the party with a pistol tucked into the rope he was using as a belt, but a man-at-arms dressed like a waiter (Menelaus could tell by how he stood and held his eyes that the man was a soldier) carrying a silver tray oh-so-politely asked him to check his weapon. The soldier-in-servitor-tux stared at the way Menelaus was dressed, but said nothing. So polite.

  No, there was nothing wrong with checking your weapon at any place where drinks were served. It had been that way back in Houston, back in the Twenty-Third Century—no barkeep would let someone packing a piece in his saloon. But it was the fact that the people among the crowds outside did not wear those sashes or baldrics, or wore metallic wigs—none of them could carry a weapon, drunk or sober. The members of the upper class, the psychics or psychoi, as they were called, or soldiers in their employ or retainers in their service, only they could bear arms.

  There had been Marines in full dress kit at the huge main doors of castle De Haar, but they were for show. The real weapons were tiny electronic things, no bigger than dragonflies, controlled from some remote location. Everyone important had arrived with a horse-drawn carriage or a ground-effect car, and had brought a dozen people, retainers and ladies-in-waiting and whatnot trailing after like so many brightly colored ducklings after a duck. Montrose, on the other hand, arrived on foot, alone, walking up from the riverside, threading his way to reach the front entrance through the back gardens (where off-duty servants sat drinking beer to cheer the New Year on). Neither the servants in back nor the Marines in front stopped him. He did not even bother to display the self-luminous, singing, and engraved invitation the messenger had brought him (this had been a thin and supercilious youth, dressing in luminous silk, with a steel-blue wig of shoulder-length hair—but a careful youth, despite his dandy looks, because he gave Montrose the slip when Montrose tried to shadow him through the narrow and crooked streets of Tripoli). Montrose still was not sure if the message, or the messenger, were real.

  He looked down at himself, at his buckskin costume, this silly dancing-bear outfit, which he wore because he was too proud to wear the black silken shipsuit which the age said he was entitled. And he came to this party because the mad thing in his head told him to come. Was he real? Either of him?

  The fact that this world was one where not all men had the right to self-defense was one he deeply resented. Resented? No, it was a hatred, so black and primal he could not understand it. When had the idea of destroying this ridiculous future and all its broken promises began to seem normal to him?

  It had been at the chalet, he decided.

  2. Mount Fairweather

  Menelaus had dwelt for over a month in a little cabin in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, a few hours’ tramp through the snow from a lonely spot where the Brachistochrone curve of the supersonic train broke through the crust to the surface. The Iron Ghost of Del Azarchel had been his only companion, a disembodied voice that drew expressions and figures on the walls of luminous glass. This voice from the walls claimed to be Del Azarchel, and therefore had title to the chalet, and could do with it what he wished, without consulting his fleshly father, and Montrose did not argue the point.

  Montrose wondered about the legal implications of eating delicacies from the icebox of a man whose electronic copy—a being with no need or ability to eat—has given you permission to consume his provisions: The whiskey in the cellar and the tobacco in the humidor the Ghost unlocked for him.

  By day, when he grew sick of charity or sick of caviar, Montrose hunted. It was Del Azarchel’s chalet, after all, and had a well-equipped gun case. He did not want to eat the man’s food, but he had no qualms about borrowing a well-oiled rifle.

  He also borrowed a prize pistol from the collection in the case. It was a Mauser septentrion, one main launcher with six escorts, breech-loaded, with interstitial chaff packages, and an onboard 300 IQ. Two-point-two pounds of shot. Effective counterfire of about eight meters. The mainshot was rated for 2500 feet per second straightline flight, up to 270 degrees of vector alteration post-launch, and it carried its own countermeasures in a bead behind the explosive head. The frame was milled from a solid piece, with no pins or screws used. Montrose felt, first, th
at it would have been a crime not to take it out of the case and do some target practice against some tree stumps across the snowy field below the chalet, and, second, he clearly had to have some protection should he be attacked by wolves, or challenged to a duel by wolves (seeing as how this weapon was no damn good for hunting), and third, Man Del Azarchel was rich as Croesus, and so he’d never miss it, and Ghost Del Azarchel couldn’t hold a pistol or take any joy from it.

  The width of the wilderness outside may have been due to war depopulation, or perhaps Blackie had just bought himself a few thousand acres of alpine forest. In either case, there was no lack of venison or firewood for a man who could handle a rifle or an axe.

  Del Azarchel was an old-fashioned enough gent to have a shed out back with materials for stretching and tanning hides. Montrose was unwilling to let any part of his game go to waste, especially after all the effort it took hauling the dang carcass back through the hillsides of pathless snow and rock. So he spent many an afternoon scraping and curing the hide, and making busy with an awl and a line, and so made himself quite a nice buckskin coat, fleecy and warm even in bad weather, and this saved on the thermal batteries in the suit he wore under. He eventually hunted down a pair of rabbits to make himself a pair of white mittens, and a healthy broth of coney stew.

  The bedchamber window (when Montrose switched off its blackboard overlay) framed the tremendous glacier-lapped mountain that dominated the landscape. The window gave the name as Mount Fairweather, and painted the view with elevation and ecological information until Montrose discovered how to shut off the smartglass, and just enjoy the view. The mountain, despite its name, was half-hidden in fogs and clouds of white when it wasn’t wholly hidden in stormclouds of black.

  By night, Montrose, with the help and direction of the superintelligent machine, experimented on himself, trying to wake up a lucid version of the strange daemon living inside him. Del Azarchel had a pharmaceutical cabinet as well-stocked as his arms locker.

  3. Time for Booklearning

  Between times he read, or watched, or had fictional conversations with library figments, to learn a bit about the history of what had happened to the world while he slumbered.

  He soon found he could not trust anything presented to him from a library cloth. The systems were more interlinked and more heavily edited than in his day.

  Fortunately, Del Azarchel had a well-stocked library and, since he was the world ruler, of course he could afford to read the stuff his own police forbad elsewhere. This was the real story of this world, and it was not what he had been told.

  He wondered why he had believed Dr. Kyi’s blind assurance that there were no wars in the world: Del Azarchel had men fighting to put down rebellions and break up arsenals left over from the Old Order every season or so. The doctor had been misinformed about Rania’s origins—why had Montrose believed the old man had known any more about world affairs? Especially since Kyi was a servant at the court, not a courtier, not an aristocrat: someone who had to close his ears to hints of the truth that might leak through the insulation of loyal noise.

  Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.

  Even so, hard print did not have search features, so he could not go back and find previous passages except by flipping pages and trying to remember which page said what. There was no way to shorten or expand paragraphs, or ask for additional information. He had to actually get up from his chair and look in another dumb book, called a dictionary, to get the meaning of a word he did not know. He also could not personalize any hard books in their font or lit-settings, or set the text in quotes to be read aloud by different voices, or even read aloud at all. It was like something from the Dark Ages. And the pictures did not move. No wonder students back in the bad old days were bored.

  Most of the books, he understood why Ximen Del Azarchel had them: charming old classics by Euclid, Apollonius, Descartes, Newton, Liebniz, Dedekund, fun reading by Gauss and Lagrange, Fermat and Grothendiek. There were also historical books by Arjehir, by Bhillamalacarya of Rajasthan and Zhang Tshang of China—all folks he felt he should have heard of, but never had. Zhang Tshang’s Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art contained a nicely reasoned proof that the perimeter of a right triangle times the radius of its inscribing circle equals the area of its circumscribing rectangle.

  There was also a work by the “Mad Arab” Alhazen, whose work with catoptrics, perfect numbers and Mersennes primes was brilliant, and here was a proof of the Power Series Theorem that all this time Montrose thought had been first proved by Bernoulli. This book claimed that Alhazen was not mad, but merely feigned madness to escape the wrath of the Caliph, who had ordered the mathematician to use his knowledge to regulate the flood tides of the Nile. Montrose did not buy that story. Montrose thought to himself that mathematicians, being further afield in the strange lands of strange thoughts, were more likely to go insane. But as he was falling asleep that night, another voice in his head that sounded like his own told him, no, mathematicians almost never went insane, because the discipline of their studies ordered their reason. He remembered discussing it at some length with the voice in his head, but in the morning forgot who won the argument.

  In Del Azarchel’s library were also papers on the Kolmogorov backward equation, or Erdos-Szekeres Theorem about monotone subsequences with an elegant (if trivial) pigeonhole-principle proof; and, of course, every theorem, conjecture, or scrap of paper ever written about xenothropology, xenolinguistics, and metapsychology and every study of the Monument ever made.

  But other books he was not sure why Blackie had them. Why so many books on King Arthur and Charlemagne? Le Morte d’Arthur by Mallory, Idylls of the King by Tennyson, The Once and Future King by T. H. White, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, Orlando Innamorato by Boiardo, The Faerie Queene by Spenser, the Stanzaic Morte Arthure and Alliterative Morte Arthure. It was kid’s stuff. There were just as many books about the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece. A few of the books had a proper soundtrack, and contained Medea by Cherubini; Medea by Theodorachis; Medea in Corinto by Mayr; and Médée by Charpentier. These books had pencil markings in them, where Del Azarchel had underlined sections, or wrote questions as marginalia.

  Montrose examined a dusty, leather-bound storybook with the engravings by Thiry and the colored plates by Waterhouse. In the scene where Aeëtes tried to deceive Jason into sowing dragons’ teeth into the ground, it was Medea the Sorceress, his very daughter, who warned Jason that such seeds would in the twinkling of an eye become armed and armored men, full of fury and eager to kill him. By her charms she protected Jason from iron and fire, and so he tamed the earthborn-men. In the margin Del Azarchel had written: There are times to trust the wise woman.

  Later this same sorceress, when she and her lover were fleeing the rage of her betrayed father, slew the brother and chopped him in pieces, scattered the limbs and trunk and head to the sea-waves, so the pursuing ships must pause to gather the corpse. In the margin: There are times when not to trust the wise woman.

  Her love with Jason was not to endure. Later still, she burned Jason’s second wife to death with a wedding dress woven of sweet-scented poison, and—to cause Jason further pain—she slew the little children Jason had fathered on her, fleeing in a chariot pulled by dragons into the air and away from any mortal retaliation. In the margin: If she is wiser than you, how can you know which time is which?

  It was that kind of thing that made Montrose wonder if Del Azarchel was right in the head.

  Then there were books on politics. The more he read about the modern world, the less he liked it, and that made reading a chore also. The modern world was unified, it was true. Yet the price of peace was constant vigilance, which in this case meant Hermeticist control over schooling, telephone and televection, the news and
entertainment, jokes in the jokebooks and songs in the songbooks—the books were electronic and could be edited from a central process location.

  Even drones and shipping, everything done by remote control, satellite signal, or teleoperation was channeled through circuits whose contents the servants of the Master of the World observed.

  The reason why (as Dr. Kyi had boasted) there were no standing armies was not because they were abolished, but because they were out of uniform, like secret policemen. When unwanted trouble arose, or when trouble was wanted, soldiers scattered over three continents could gather in a matter of minutes—thanks to the speed of the buried supersonic carriage system—quickly, silently, and efficiently. Thanks to the completeness and complexity of the artificial brains the Hermeticists commanded, ratiotech, sapientech, and (by now) xypotech, systems faster and more innovative than any Earthly computer, each soldier could be tracked and moved in real time.

  So their armed forces could appear as suddenly and unexpectedly as those soldiers grown from the dragons’ teeth, wherever on the world they were needed.

  And of course, in an era when there was only one starship in orbit, and she was armed with antimatter, no opposing army dared to gather in great numbers, marching in bright uniforms under brave banners, in any one spot on the Earth’s surface, lest that spot be simply and efficiently sterilized. A near-lightspeed discharge of energy would give no beforehand warning, except maybe for a whine on ear-radios.

  The political structure seemed a crazy-quilt of different systems. Some areas were still run by elected officials, some cities and freeholds. Certain Churches elected their pastors and bishops. Other lands were ruled by an hereditary aristocracy, composed mostly of the children of whatever dictators and local warlords happened to be in power in their half-ruined countries at the time when the Hermetic returned Earthward, heralding her victory with fire from heaven.