Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  Even with the confident prediction that Montrose would be unable to interfere in the long term plans of the Hermeticists, that prediction became more likely the longer Montrose was away from Earth.

  Second, and more important, Montrose realized that Blackie was not creating a new race to supplant Mankind in order to fight off the Armada from Hyades when it came. That had been Montrose’s idea, his alone. Blackie had not said a thing about fighting.

  Everything in Ximen Del Azarchel’s personality, everything in the way he talked (Why had Montrose not seen it before? How could he have missed it?) betrayed that Blackie was a man who valued life more than liberty, safety to freedom. He esteemed hierarchy, rule, order, and dominion and eschewed that wildness that comes of exploring the wilderness, including the wilderness of stars. The dream of world peace, of an utter end to war, Blackie thought he was close to achieving it, and settling Mankind forever into a peace without end. He thought the world needed rulership, not democracy, not men settling their own messes; the world needed a Caesar. An eternal, iron Caesar.

  But Ximen Del Azarchel was not merely a power-hungry dictator. No. He was something far more dangerous: a man with an ideal. Even a selfless ideal.

  Why had his mind been able to survive the mind war in the virtual world, when all the Hermeticists made copies of their minds and pitted them, like Gladiators in the Coliseum, against each other? Montrose did not know, but he knew that someone fighting for something greater than himself took more daring risks, and could draw allies and followers to him. No … there must be more than that. The other Hermeticists also had ideals, at least, of a twisted sort. There was something more beneath Del Azarchel’s drive. But what?

  Montrose set aside that question for later. At the moment, he meditated on one thing: the plans that the Hermeticists were making for the remotest future, eight thousand years from now when the alien machines arrive to claim the Earth as their property—the Hermeticists did, just as they said, intend to force human evolution to its next step. But the Hermeticists did not mean to fight to survive. They meant to collaborate; to cooperate; to surrender. A live horse is better than a dead ape.

  The design for the next human race was meant to be creatures smart enough to be useful to the Hyades, but docile enough not to create any problems.

  The asymptote was not meant to produce superhuman free men, but superhuman slaves.

  All that talk of a golden future was a lie. Servitude was all that the destiny of Mankind held, and the transhuman race beyond humanity was to be held in subhuman subjugation.

  Montrose raised his hands out of the gelatin and clutched his head. It was his best friend that was planning to sell Mankind and the children of men to the Hyades. Del Azarchel, of all people!

  The hatred in his heart seemed sharper, purer, clearer than the muddy emotions he had known back when he was a merely human. He missed those days already.

  The nurses came in, called by the monitors, or else by the gulping hiccups of Montrose’s sobs. He wanted to turn over, to turn his face away, but the bed of gel would not permit it.

  It is embarrassing when superhumans cry.

  3. Prenuptial Considerations

  Before he even was fully recovered, Montrose found himself introduced to the Rulers and Sovereigns and Magnates of the world. He met Pnumatics dressed like peacocks, Psychics dressed like spacers in wigs, elected Bishops wielding political power, and elected Administrators from those cities or parishes with Republican forms of government dressed in simple drabs—and not a man jack of them he much cared for. He did not like the ceremony, the courtesy, the courtliness, the fawning. His Lone Star State spirit rankled at the inequality.

  His disliking did not change when he was elevated to the highest ranks of this ranked society. But three things changed immediately.

  First, it was to be a Morganitic marriage, meaning neither he nor his heirs would inherit his wife’s royal titles and noble rights; but she ennobled him and enfeoffed him with lands and rents in a recently-acquired county in Gascony, quite beautiful now that the bacteriological infection from the last war was dying off, the fungi dotting the hedges and trees like leprosy was vanishing, and both grapevines and vintners were returning to the wilderness area. Antiquarians were felling stalks of yeasty growth and burning spore-fields to uncover the abandoned relics the previous generations had mummified before evacuation: a miraculous number of cathedrals, famous houses, and fortresses were intact. Montrose congratulated himself on being from the same province as Cyrano de Bergerac. His title was Count of Armagnac.

  Second, he was also given a red bracelet, heavy as a manacle, to wear on his wrist, and Rania’s servants told him he could not appear in public save in the black shipsuit to which he, as a man of outer space, alone was entitled. He kicked up a row and was a little surprised when he got kicked back.

  A man named Vardanov, her security officer, was a dark-skinned Slav from Azania: one of those people from the “Old Order” who had been bribed into supporting the Concordat with a title and a heraldic escutcheon. The blond man kept his skin tuned as dark as ivory, and had used the recently-released RNA-spoofing techniques of the Hermeticists to add three feet and a hundred pounds of muscle to his frame. He dressed, like all the court soldiers of this ridiculous time period, in the peaked helmet and metal breastplate of a Spanish Conquistador. He was polite enough to remove his helmet and tuck it in his elbow, and give Montrose a stiff bow, before calling him a fool. The two stood in a small solarium of Montrose’s delightful little mansion in Gascony, looking out on the trellises of vines.

  “Come again?” said Montrose, doubting his ears.

  Vardanov had a melancholy face and large, sad eyes, so it was hard to tell how angry he was. He spoke in a thick, slow voice, like the voice of a thoughtful elephant. Menelaus could not place the accent: perhaps a combination of Russian and Dutch. “Fool!” he said again, “and why is it you are making my job more difficult, yes?”

  The windows opaqued, putting the little richly-furnished chamber into twilight. The dark window also prevented anyone outside from looking in. The man’s big hand dropped casually to the hilt of his bayonet, which was sheathed in his web-belt.

  Montrose resolved the man’s stance into a fractal pattern of vector motions, position of limbs and their kinetic values, and compared it with his own. Oddly, there did not seem to be a solution. With his greater mass and reach, if the two of them fought, Montrose (barring unforeseen factors entering the field) would lose.

  So stepping forward and breaking the guy’s nose was, at the moment, not an optimal strategy.

  Montrose decided that a diplomatic response was needed. “So why should I give a pair of donkey’s swollen black testicles what the hell your job is, or how difficult it is?”

  Well, that was diplomatic for him. These things should be judged on a sliding scale.

  The man showed no anger on his face, although with his new and heightened perceptions, Montrose could analyze the man’s blush response and microscopic pupil dilations. Here was a creature whose unsleeping anger, frustration, and paranoia, kept him in dangerous psychological balance by a sense of honor, an iron self-control.

  “With all due respect, Your Excellency,” Vardanov said in his sad, slow voice, “my duty is to protect the person of Her Serene Highness. Do you understand that this is a matter of warfare on a personal level, yes? Yes. Supreme excellence in war, it is to destroy the enemy will to fight, not in striking his body.”

  Montrose was impressed, not just because the man could quote Sun Tsu on the art of war, but because it occurred to him that Vardanov had done exactly that to him. When he did not see a feasible max-min vector-solution for an engagement, Montrose hadn’t struck a blow.

  Vardanov said, “It falls to me to say what all know, and no one will say: you are an embarrassment to Her Serene Highness. Yes? Yes.” He nodded, as if happy to hear himself agreeing with himself. “In other years, other places, this means nothing. Alone in barn, y
ou are a braying jackass, and no one hears your voice, no one is disturbed. But here! But now! You are in palace. It is time of tumult, maybe war. Esprit de corps is weighty thing, yes? Yes. The mystique, the awe, the love, the fear commoners behold Her Serene Highness, this is Her Highness’s first line of the defense. They say you have done something to that brain of yours, yes, to make you more than man. You can see without me to explain of it, yes?”

  “Explain it anyway.” Montrose casually put his hands behind his back.

  Vardanov gave a massive, slow shrug, and spread his hands. He casually dropped his hand behind a vase standing on a pillar near the door, which meant Montrose could not see if he had drawn a weapon from his wrist-holster. Since Montrose was reaching up his own sleeve for the hilt of the ceramic knife he kept in a forearm sheath, he decided not to draw it.

  Vardanov spoke while shrugging. “Two things. One.” He held up a think forefinger. (Montrose recognized the trick involved and kept his attention on the other hand, the one hidden behind the vase.) “While you wear the uniform of the great starship Hermetic, you are protected by the weapons of the Hermetic, and the common people are in awe of fire from heaven. In the eyes of the law, no one can arrest you, no one can take and question you, because you are not of this Earth.”

  “What’s two?”

  Vardanov held up two fingers, but this time pointed them at Montrose. “The great and the small alike are unhappy that you, not Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, have taken the hand of the Star Maiden, yes? Oh, yes. But if you are star-man…” He shrugged. “Then discontent, it is not so much.”

  “They can go jack themselves. What do I care?”

  “You care for her? Then you care for her people, for they are hers and she is theirs. To be royalty is to keep the people happy, to keep all parts of the world in balance, nobles and merchants, military and clergy, workers and shopkeepers. Royalty is mystique in the mind of people. It is magic. To be a princess, it is to stare at the snake and force the snake not to strike. Yes? Yes. Do not break the spell.”

  Montrose scowled. “I don’t cotton to wearing that damn suit. Traitors wear it. I ain’t one of them.”

  “Cotton is what?”

  “I mean I don’t take to it.”

  “Is not for you to take, yes? Copernicus changed the world. After him, Man was not center of all things. You, you are still in world before Copernicus. You think the sun revolves around you. No? No. You revolve around sun. She is the sun; you are not the only one who orbits her. You have married all of her. Whole solar system, not just sunshine.”

  And the tall man’s eyes narrowed with pleasure, because he saw that he had won.

  After that, Montrose took to wearing the black silk shipsuit in public, and the red metal armband of the Hermeticists.

  4. Rich as Croesus

  The third thing that changed was his wealth. Before the marriage, Montrose was vested with a healthy share of Rania’s stock in the World Power Syndicate.

  Like most men of modest means, Menelaus had assumed the difference between rich and poor in this time was merely something like the difference between Mr. Josiah Palmer back in his hometown, a respectably well-off rancher, and Chickenbone Jim, who had to beg at the Meeting House door to buy a coat. It was nothing like that. The difference was far deeper than he had imagined.

  Except for a few paupers who heated their cottages with wood they chopped themselves, or some eccentric branch of the neo-Amish that used no modern technology and burned only petroleum, the entire economy hung by the contraterrene, both power source and currency. The whole economy was owned by the World Power Syndicate. It was wealth almost beyond measure.

  He was not able merely to buy stuff. He could buy policies, loyalties, public opinion, and princes; he could buy a chunk of history, and force things to go his way. Beyond a certain critical mass, wealth became so concentrated that it exerted a warp on society like the gravity of a neutron star: whole sectors of the economy unrelated to you were thrown off their courses.

  The sheer number of people, a sizeable percent of the world’s population, that had bought into Del Azarchel’s way of doing things, his way of thinking, merely because they had been bought by this kind of dealing, was staggering. Menelaus now had that kind of wealth; the kind that could topple thrones.

  The first thing he bought was indeed an aspect of the future Menelaus wanted brought under his control. The second thing he bought was a stallion.

  For this first thing, he purchased suspended-animation companies and cartels: huge companies like Endymion and tiny ones like Welsh Bart’s Sleepaway.

  Not one or two. All of them.

  Hold-outs he sued, on the grounds that he should have been granted a patent for the discoveries, based on his work, that made long-term biosuspension possible. He had to buy legislators and guilds to make the laws allow for retroactive patents; and then he had to buy political parties, judges, and arbitrators, and fund monasteries to get canon law on his side. He had to fund election campaigns in Democratic parishes and buy mansions and museums as bribes for princes in monarchic parishes.

  The slumbering population was roughly eighty-five percent medical patients, enduring biosuspension in hope of cures to be developed in later years; ten percent were loyal spouses wanting to stay of the same age; the remainder were those who slumbered for reasons legal or illegal, rational or quixotic, to outwait the death of a hated relative or the downfall of a hated regime.

  It was effortless. He did not even need to dress for the meeting of the stockholders. The meeting was conducted over the newly-revised world communication net, in an entirely fictional boardroom equipped with cartoon tables and props, and his projected image was dressed in a somber knee-length suit of dark gray, while he in real life was rocking in a hammock wearing loose Chinese pajamas. His lawyers (and he had hired so many he had already forgotten their names) were a buzzing whisper in his right ear. His intellectual property manager, an Australian named Sweetwater, whispered in his left ear, keeping him abreast of changes in the news channels, and his publicity-value, as the markets and newsfeeds reacted to the moment-by-moment changes in the meeting. For himself, he merely read off a prompter the speech his staff had prepared.

  There were some procedural maneuvers raised to hinder him, so he logged off and turned his image over to his double (a young lady from Perth, who could do a passable impersonation of his word-patterns and wireframe mannerisms) to run him during the boring parts of the meeting while he ate his dinner. Once those delays ran their course, the votes were counted. It was no contest. It was like Josiah Palmer bidding against Chickenbone Jim at an auction. He was now the sole owner of every facility on Earth that used his method for biosuspension.

  5. Nova and Yorvel

  He was disappointed that the future people, having gone to the trouble of resurrecting the long-dead airs and fashions of knighthood, did not actually dress up in metal longjohns and whack at each other with meat-cleavers, as they ought. None of the “sirs” he met acted anything like the knights in the stories he’d read in childhood: not a one of them was fit to drive the Paynim out of Spain or go fetch the Holy Grail.

  But they did have nice horses, many of these Aristos. That art they kept alive. He did a lot of riding during the days after his recovery from the infirmary, and argued with his doctors in the meanwhile. He named his beast Res Ipsa Nova, in honor of a sorrel from a hundred years ago.

  He made few friends. The difference in intelligence gradient was too great: he could make more than an ordinary number of the normal humans, the Hylics, to like him, because it was easy to think of what to say to set them at ease.

  One friend he did make, a friendship where brains just didn’t matter, was with one of Rania’s men, a chubby smiling little horse groom named Yorvel. His first name was Jesus, but Menelaus thought it sounded too much like swearing to call him that, and he couldn’t manage to pronounce it Hey Zeus, which also sounded like swearing, but in a different religion, so he called him
by his last name.

  They talked about horses, particularly the biologically augmented new breeds and neo-equines. The groom knew his stuff and more, had hands-on experience no books held. Menelaus found out it did not matter how smart you were on the uptake; if a dumb teacher knows more than you, it still pays to listen and learn.

  6. Chessplaying Machine

  There was not much anyone else to talk to, aside from Rania, and she was busy playing some planetary chessgame with princes and parliaments with Del Azarchel and his Hermeticists. The terms of the game were simple in the basics: she was trying to pressure him into abdication, as this was the only way to defuse the growing threat of war. And he was playing brinksmanship. Whether he was confident that he, or the human race, or both, could survive a world war with antimatter weapons was another matter, but he acted as if he were.

  Now, it was not that Montrose, freshly-minted posthuman with a fine new brain and all, could not follow the intricate moves and feints of the game, and read the lies and half-truths and half-lies and threats that splashed all over the text files and documentaries of the infosphere—it was that politics bored him.

  The Psychics (or, as they were also called, the “Psychoi”) actually were smarter, by fifty to one hundred points on the standard intelligence quotient scale, than the Hylics—because, despite what Del Azarchel had said, certain intelligence augmentation methods and processes, based on Montrose’s work, had been tried over the last fifteen decades. The results were cautious, and the intellectuals were not outside what was possible for humans. Montrose could have interesting conversations with them, as an adult with a bright child, especially about matters concerning Monument translation and the eventual destiny of Mankind, the threat of the Hyades Armada, and what it would mean when that force arrived.