Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  She looked dreamy, thoughtful and melancholy, yet the shadow of a smile touched her scarlet lips. Menelaus decided now was not the time to tell her that her mother was a Petrie dish.

  Menelaus shrugged with one shoulder. “I like the world just fine, mountains and trees, all that good stuff. Plague, I even like the Alaska wastes where I was snowed in not long back—hunting and ice-fishing. I just don’t like the people, mostly. You got a rotten set-up here, Princess, and it sounds like you were the setter-upper, not Blackie.”

  “Perhaps the people of the world have not been as kind to you as they have to me. It would be ungrateful of me to feel less than love, after all the warmth this world has shown. A world of wonder! Do you ever smell the air, feel the flowing wind, and simply marvel at it? You have breathed bottled air, I know. But you were not born breathing it.”

  Menelaus had seen simple joy shining on the faces of children; but this was different. This was intelligent joy, adult and profound. It was a strange thing to see. In his life, the people he met did not rejoice—if that was the word for it—in the simple act of breathing.

  “I was born breathing free, alright. I would prefer to live in a Democracy.”

  “If the people also preferred it, so should we all be. I was not born in a crown, or surrounded by fine things—these were pressed upon me by a grateful world, relieved from the endless tears and horrors of war. You know, I did not even know what war was at first, or murder? I lived among elderly scientists.”

  Montrose thought now was not the time to tell her that those elderly scientists were very well-acquainted with murder indeed, having killed the Captain and more than half the crew.

  Instead he said, “I don’t believe people don’t want to be free.”

  “Nor do I, but there are two kinds of freedom: license to indulge any desire, base or noble, natural or unnatural, provided no one and nothing hinders you is the first kind, and it is deadly to men. The second kind is the freedom that comes of fulfilling or completing the work of nature that is half-formed in us. Men who are free in the first sense of the word will freely vote their freedom away, in return for lucre, prestige, and safety. In the early days, the Senior Del Azarchel simply bought the elections he needed, until the free nations of the world had prime ministers and parliaments composed of his creatures, who joined the Concordat willingly.”

  A strange look came into her eyes, which Montrose did not know how to interpret. Nostalgia? Sorrow?

  “It was proud and stubborn kings and warlords of small or backward nations, which had returned to a more personal and less bureaucratic form of government, that held out against him. They had the second type of freedom, not the first: They were not dehumanized. Bad as they were, those kings regarded their subjects as their children, not as their customers or patients or wards or subjects of their latest experiments in sociopolitical engineering. But they lacked the first type of freedom, and those subjects were not free enough to resist us.”

  Montrose wondered where the Princess had gotten her notion of what princesses acted like. Where else? From the royalty she defeated, the princes who treated their subjects like children. The strange look was one of admiration.

  “What did you offer them?” he asked.

  “Honors and offices—the Copts and Manchurians and Boers form the backbone of our officer cadre, and they are allowed forms of dress and address denied other men, and in the wild areas of the world, they rule unchecked. The Concordat allows them indulgences the Church denies to others, such as divorce and contraception: They do not replace their numbers, and in a generation their vestige must find another fate. Much evil is done in my name that I abhor. If I were free to be ungrateful, I would flee my post. As it is, here I am chained as if with chains of gold, fair and gleaming, and only the terrible voice of a stronger duty can call me away.”

  Montrose said, “What’s this talk of chains? Aren’t you in charge?”

  “I have all the power a Captain might have over her ship, if her sails were in darkness.”

  For a moment, he thought she meant a seagoing ship, sailing at night. But, no: in her world there was no night, only the darkness between stars. “A lightship out of her guiding lightbeam is in free fall, Princess,” he said.

  Rania nodded. “Exactly so. Such a Captain is merely trapped in an elaborate construction of steel, and merely carried along. The power of the Sovereign rests on the consent, tacit or open, of her subjects. Either they love her, or she does not lead. You know that. I was not born of this world: Every breeze and breath of air is a gift to me, not something I made for my own. I must repay as best I may, not counting the cost.”

  He squinted at her. This sounded like the kind of thing men facing danger told themselves.

  “What cost are we talking about? You said you wanted my help. Are you in trouble?”

  “I expect you to be fearless, in any of your aspects or avatars.”

  He was taken aback. “What does that mean? What exactly are you aiming I can do for you?”

  “Learned Montrose, you surprise me! You know where you excel.” Her tone seemed playful. Or perhaps he was imagining it.

  “My jobs, in no particular order, were weaponsmith, pony-soldier, duelist, lawyer, a short stint as a spacehand, and a shorter stint as a xenomathematician. Oh, and human guinea pig for self-inflicted brain experimentation. I am not a failure at two of them.”

  “I have no need for your counsel as an attorney, being well-supplied with staff in that regard. It is your other professions that interest me.”

  “Great! Who do you want me to kill?”

  “There is a dragon, O my champion, I require you to slay.”

  “What? I mean, begging your pardon? Did you say you wanted me to kill what again?”

  “Come. Walk with me.”

  Rania merely tucked her shoulder under his arm, and wound her slender hand around his, so that he found himself half-embracing her as he had just been imagining.

  The sensation of her silken glove on his hand sent a curious ripple up his arm.

  This is it. He thought. I am falling in love. Or I got the stomach flu.

  He breathed deeply. Her loveliness was an aura around her, a warmth, a perfume. He walked, feeling like a bull being led by the nose-ring by some slender farm girl. The strength in her arm surprised him: there was lioness muscle under that soft skin.

  And she was another man’s girl! He hated himself, at least a little bit, at the thought of being a poacher, and he hated himself again for not hating himself more. But in the back of his mind, he thought it as clear as day that Blackie did not deserve her.

  But the strength of his own infatuation puzzled him. He had seen pretty women before—no one fell in love that fast, just in the twinkling of an eye. But she had been in his mind since first he saw her portrait at Blackie’s. Why did she look so … familiar? He felt in his heart as if he already knew her.

  She was not leading him back into the ballroom, but down the balcony to a smaller door to one side. The half-invisible soldiers softly opened the door for them. The soldiers did not enter, but stayed behind.

  Beyond was a corridor, one he had not seen coming in, wainscoted in highly polished wood up to waist-high, and above that, an intricate wallpaper in blue with gold highlights, a motif of lianas, leaves, and lilies.

  As she crossed the threshold, she touched the ruby that rested between her breasts. It must have been a control surface, because up from her coiffeur, glittering like dragonflies, rose a swarm of tiny, winged machines. Her hair came undone, and formed a momentary cloud of scented gold around her face. It was not that the strands were weightless in the night-breeze around her, but Menelaus had a ghost of a memory in his mind that it should have looked that way.

  She shook her face to clear it, and Menelaus found the sight adorable, like a surfacing mermaid shaking spray free from her features.

  Or like a sorceress. Her twinkling Tinkerbell-sized fliers were darting here and there in midair, destr
oying camera ladybugs, or driving them out of the slowly-closing door. He did not even mind that she plucked the half-consumed cigarette from his hand and had her dragonflies carry it out the door for her, and toss it away.

  “Ventilation performance,” she said.

  “We’re aground,” he said. “Air is free on Earth.”

  “But why fall into bad habits? No tobacco is allowed aloft.”

  The door shut, the night-breeze stilled. Menelaus then and there decided the prettiest sight on earth was that of a girl tucking her hair behind her ear.

  “Are you talking about going into space again?” A strange, a wild hope rose in his breast even as he said it. But then he shook his head, doubting. “I read some of Blackie’s books. He daren’t let the Hermetic leave the system, since it is his pistol pointed between the eyes of the world. And he daren’t let another manned expedition go the Diamond Star, because that expedition, when it returned, would come back with another pistol as large. They’d pay back his heirs in his own ugly coin—with enough money to buy or bomb the world, a world where all they knew and loved would be long dead. As for the Bellerophon, right now she’s got canisters strapped like bananas to the main keel for the construction crew, but that is going to all be stripped off and fall back home once the machine installation is complete. But no people are invited on that vessel. Men are too dangerous to trust going to go fetch the dangerous stuff in the Diamond Star.”

  She just shook her head. “I will not think that way, and shall not understand those who do. Should two mites on the ear of an elephant bite each other to death, when the elephant is plunging off a cliff’s brink? You asked of me what I wanted killed. Are you willing to enter the lists?”

  “Fight a duel? My dad would have approved. He thought womenfolk should talk that way. But you—you’re not serious.”

  “I am.”

  “You got armies. And a ship. You’re a princess.”

  “I am a woman, and a young woman, and armies cannot grapple this foe of mine. My enemy is not a thing of flesh and blood. The mystery of that Monument is my dragon. It will devour me if I am not saved.”

  “The Monument?”

  “Can you read it?”

  It was the moment he had been waiting for his whole life.

  Menelaus was astonished at how evenly and calmly the words rolled off his tongue, “Ma’am, I can read that damn Monument for you, if anyone on Earth can.”

  2. The Logic Behind Logic

  The corridor was lit, but was not exactly bright. Candles, good old-fashioned pre-Edison candles, stood on small tables every ten paces or so, between antique suits of gold-chased armor, or glass cases containing china curios or silver cups. Behind each candle was a dark drape, evidently meant to preserve the wallpaper from smoke stains. The buttery-gold light breathed and lived, and made the hallway into an elfin place, alive with shadows.

  Without a further word, she reached over and tapped one of the mirrors facing the corridor. It was smartglass, just as back in Blackie’s chalet, and an image of the Xi Segment of the Monument came up in the view.

  The right window showed differential equations from the Divarication Theory; the left showed the symbol-groups of the Xi-wave function-group being organized into a matrix. This left window was connected by little red threads to show which symbol in the matrix represented which Monument sign. More than one information view of the process was displayed: one was a branching tree, one was a rippling set of Venn diagrams, like a rainy pond, one was a polar axis view, one was a Cartesian diagram, one was a basic-grammar theory spiderweb.

  When the matrix was entirely filled in, the information began to sequence itself. One pattern after another was superimposed on the various trees and ponds and spiderwebs, and where there were partial matches, the letters to the right lit up with colors, matching a color-coded version of the Monument symbols.

  “I know that sequence,” said Montrose. “I designed it. That is what I had the Zurich computer use to go through the alien math, to make the codes to establish the nerve-channels in my brain.”

  “But what does the Xi Segment express?”

  “I don’t know. I just copied it.”

  “Compare the table results. Everything the Monument says, it says in repeating patterns. Logic in the Opening Statements underpins mathematics according to the Russell-Whitehead meta-language, which is in the Gamma Segment. Mathematics in the Alpha Segment underpins geometry and physics, the sections labeled Alpha 357 to Beta 120. Game-theory in Eta underpins economics in Theta. So then, what underpins the basic statements of logic? You see? Compare this here to those untranslated expressions in the first two bands of the Monument pole. They come before the scientific statements, the periodic table, or the Maxwell equations. Assume these are metaphysical expressions, needed to explain and justify the basic physics here, symbols written in a pattern we humans cannot grasp, because the physical roots of the laws of physics are unknown to us.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “We have yet to deduce a logical system proving the physical constants of the universe must be those of our cosmos, and none other. Obviously these are matters physics cannot address, since empiricism can only examine the universe we have before us. So, the physics of before physics: I would call it meta-physics, but the word is taken. Let us call it Axiomatics, the justification of fundamental physical constants.”

  “So they know the basic rules for why the universe is the way it is and not some other way. So what?”

  “So I suggest the symmetry is maintained for the Mu-Nu Group over here. I suggest to you that these groups of expressions are, as the Monument Builders are great lovers of symmetry, the meta-logical expression: a symbolic code for the expression that would justify the basic rules of logic. The basic rules for why the mind is as it is and not some other way.”

  “That makes no sense. You cannot use logic to justify logic. Either you assume the rule work, or you’re an ass. Um, pardon my…”

  “The meta-logic rules, I am saying, do not use logic to justify the axioms of logic logically—as you correctly point out, that would be a paradox. But what is the underpinning for logic in the ultimate sense?”

  “It works.”

  She smiled graciously. “Many philosophers believe this indicates an intimate connection between the laws of physics, the laws of mathematics, and the way the human mind works. Odd, is it not? In an infinite universe, why would we just so happen to evolve brains that could comprehend the laws that just so happen to underpin the physical universe?”

  “Not so odd. I’ll tell you why. Natural selection and the damn fool common sense God gave a goose. Lookit here: Animals who thought is was the same as is not might think a predator what is about to eat them up, is not about to dine so fine, and then the natural difference between is and is not would be clear as either-or: namely either you vamoose out from those sharp teeth, or you’ll be an is not in no time.”

  “Nicely spoken, but you are familiar with Divarication theory. You are one of its primary authors, are you not? Put any information value you wish into the expression for whatever gene controls the organism’s logic. Somewhere in the little bits of matter that make us up, is something written in our DNA—think of it as a symphony written in a chemical code of four notes—somewhere is the arpeggio that programs us to believe A is A. Estimate the volume needed to carry that abstraction forward between all the generations of organisms possessing neural systems since the pre-Cambrian. Look at how the figure falls out.”

  He ran his finger on the mirror surface, and drew out a few calculations. “It’s impossible,” he said at last. “If there was a gene for logic, it would have mutated by now, and cropped up. There would be other creatures with other rules for other types of logic—which is something I can’t imagine, anyhow. I mean, even a mama bird counting her eggs don’t make twice two equal to five.”

  “To me, this suggests a simpler and more universal structure to thought,” Rania said. “The la
ws of optics form a limiting set to the divarication for the principles of how to evolve an eye. Likewise, other laws must form a limit to how logic, language, and thought can evolve. The basic rules of the universe make it so that no organism can evolved into a rational creature for whom A equals not-A.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She pointed at the mirror: “That! The rules of meta-logic, my champion, is what you have in your brain. A set of neural logic gates which allow you to see meta-logical patterns, and recognize those patterns where they appear. It is your lance to slay my dragon. Because those patterns appear in the Monument: it is written in nothing but patterns.”

  “Lady, I still don’t understand, and that is something I am not used to saying.”

  “Remember the oldest problem in Sign Theory: How do you communicate with a species so alien that nothing in your psychology or culture is the same? How do you refer to things with no shared references? And I am suggesting we are looking at the handiwork of some race that solved that problem. The mere fact that the Monument exists proves that a universal language is possible, which means that the relation of field theory to physics to molecular chemistry to DNA to brain to brain structures to thought to logic to symbol cannot be arbitrary—despite that our Earthly theories hold them to be.”

  “Math, logic, and physics are universal. So I guess that is the only thing aliens can talk with us about.”

  “But they are only the beginning of the Monument message. What of other universals? But how do you make a symbol for honesty, for justice, for beauty, for love, for any abstraction?”

  “Maybe those things come out of genetic adaptation to game-theory: organisms that don’t play fair enough to cooperate with natural allies can’t compete with mutual foes.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t believe it is merely game-theory. Or, I should say, what is game-theory based on? How do we teach our own children abstractions like truth and justice? Toddlers learn about right and wrong, about yes and no, forbidden and permitted, the basics of law and mercy, long before they learn to count. We do not teach them biology, then genetics, then the theory of the selfish Gene, then the theory of the natural harmony of self-interest, and then tell them it is not in their self-interest not to fib to their fathers. When a child is caught lying, what do you do?”