Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  She said, “To eliminate all diseases was the dream of the Pure Order. They were well on their way to making the race too hygienic to resist the next disease: and there was a next one, and many next ones. No pathogens of this century are entirely natural. Those not caused nor encouraged by bad medical practice of the last generation, are descended from non-self-eliminating biotic weapons from the generation before.”

  Menelaus just grunted. “Darwin’s curse.”

  “Curse? If so, we must take care with our own curses. The secret of second youth we released to the public I fear will also result in the same dieback cycle, as pathogens robust enough to survive the molecular-level scrubbing the second youth process involves will find themselves alone in a rich and newly-virginal environment, without competition, and without natural defenses against them.”

  “Agh! That’s pessimistic talk. You got to have faith that our children will be able to invent the means to fight whatever comes up. We could not just sit on the secret of youth and let everyone’s grammy up and die.”

  Rania smiled, as she always did when the talk turned to children.

  Menelaus said, “Hellfire, and I ain’t just talking about disease: disease did not cause the Human Torch parades in Utah. One day science will fix things, so this part of us, this vicious part, will be caged up. The Beast. Maybe we can make a child without the gene for sorrow and rage, maybe we can make a thinking machine without the subroutine for hate. Maybe.”

  “We have the genes and routines now,” she said. “The cure for hate is forgiveness. The cure for outrage is humility. The cure for sorrow is thankfulness. Even a child can learn these three: no grand scheme of human eugenics to produce the transhuman is needed.”

  He gave her a long look. “I wonder if the Hermeticists who made you left out all the flaws of this old, sad, all-too-human race. You should be the mother of new people.”

  “Oh my! Such a responsibility. And when should we get started on that project?”

  She smiled, then, and the towerlight was as bright as moonlight, so he could see her smiling, a dim gold shadow in the night, and so he kissed her.

  When they paused to breathe, she asked, “Where are you going to stable your horse? We cannot bring him up on the spider car.”

  3. Limits

  Menelaus Montrose, when he should have been the happiest man on Earth on the happiest day of his life, was aware of an ache in his throat, a bitterness—no, it was a resentment, a feeling that he had been betrayed. It reminded him of the time his mother had thrown his birthday cake to the hogs, because he had not done his chores (it had been his birthday that day, after all, and Leonidas told him it was okay to sleep late). With one part of his mind, he told himself that Del Azarchel was the source of this feeling. Blackie was a cold bastard, no doubt.

  Another part of his mind told him it was the future that had betrayed him, the human race itself. Filthy, stupid poop-flinging tool-using monkeys not smart enough to use their tools to better themselves, and live like men, not monkeys.

  During the ride up the side of the cable, his mood grew more and more elated the higher they rose. The scattered lights of the city fell away. The ocean was a dark seething mass, still tinted rose-red by the sunset receding westward, but more and more of it came into view as they rose higher, outpacing the dusk.

  The car was a bubble affixed to a contraption of legs that were pulled along by induction currents in the cable itself, and the legs were hinged to grow wider as the cable grew wider.

  He spoke about the wealth his marriage had put into his hands; he spoke about rebuilding. Why couldn’t the Celestial Tower be restored to its old glory? Why not establish a moonbase, mine the asteroids, put men in space instead of just satellites? And why not colonize Titan?

  “And flying cars,” he added. “We’re in the future. There are supposed to be flying cars.”

  She said, “And what about Del Azarchel? He will prohibit it. Titan is outside of spy bee range.”

  “He cannot really be against a space program! When we were young—well, spittle, colonizing habitats both spaceborne and planetary, ’smostly all we talked on. Besides, the news that the Hermetic is making a second expedition to the Diamond Star might quell the discontent gripping the—uh, the masses.” (He had almost said the Hylics but he caught himself.)

  “He woke you because he was desperate to wake Xypotech Del Azarchel—I weary of saying the phrase—I hereby dub him ‘X’-Archel.” (She pronounced it Exarchel.) “By this means he hoped to send to the Diamond Star the only person he trusted not to overthrow him when he returned. Himself. One immortal version of his mind would rule the world while the other—the first of an endlessly self-replicating multitude of Van Neumann ships—would conquer the stars. He has no more need of the human race, for the posthuman starfaring race he intends to be is merely himself, multiplied to infinity.”

  “And the rest of Mankind?”

  “The myriads of the human race suffer the fate of those spermatozoa who fail to penetrate the egg.”

  “Fine. We get to the Diamond Star first, come back, and make his worst nightmare come true, overthrow his damned tyranny, set up something where everyone gets a vote!”

  She shook her head. “While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution, perhaps self-defeating. I suggest that only a plan even more far-sighted and ambitious than his will prevail.”

  “Har! Or is it just that you helped designed this worldwide tyranny, so you don’t want to see it blasted?”

  She said, “The world we found when the Hermetic descended was not as culturally coherent as some English colony like your America with two hundred years of experience ruling themselves. I had to work with the people who were as I found them, people more fearful of bioterror and plague and poverty than they were of servitude. They have their limitations. And I, my husband, even I have mine. I hope you are not like Ximen, and think of me as some fairy-being with a magic wand?”

  “You’re on a first-name basis with him?”

  “What? With my ex-fiancée, who raised me from a child, and I lived in a starship within shouting distance of him my whole young life? It would be odd if I were not.”

  “So what are your limitations? Can’t hit a piñata while hoodwinked?”

  “I don’t know what that is. My limit is that while I can inspire a social and political system for humans to maximize personal liberty within the context of minimizing external conflict, I simply cannot reduce the how and the when and the why to adjust the system to a simple algorithm. There must be a posthuman to make adjustments, personal authority on several levels, wise judges, statesmen who transcend the mere hedonistic calculus of power and politics. You see the problem?”

  “The problem is you were raised on a ship, so you think everyone obeying one captain is the norm. The problem is you did not set up a Democracy.”

  She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Democracy on a worldwide scale? The Chinese outnumber the Australians, and would have voted to abolish international corporate structures. The Azanians would have merely bribed Africa to vote their way on matters of public import. The Copts would have voted the Jews out of Babylon.”

  “I mean a limited Democracy.”

  “Oh, but I did limit it! The aristocratic class forms a bulwark against overreaching by the commoners. I encouraged an irenic but established sacerdotal order to create legal sanctuary against overreaching aristocrats. I encouraged a formal system of intelligence-augmented bureaucrats to check the fervor of religious zeal, and also to give a harmless outlet to the morbid impulses of academics. I encouraged the arrogance of the plutocracy to check the warlike desperation of the common man, who otherwise would elevate a despot to check the aristocrats: the plutocrats can only maintain their precarious positions by serving rather than commanding their customers. And so on. The parts are all balanced against each other.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Intelligent I may be, but not experienced. Book lear
ning is not the same. I am younger than you are, biologically. I am just a girl.”

  “That don’t sound like a mistake to me. You being a girl and all.”

  “Yet I underestimated the bull-headed blindness of the male of the species. I put too much faith in incentives, and too little faith in the original sin. You see? The Hermeticists are as a ship in a storm, and I have left them only one safe landing zone: namely, they must organize an expedition to the Diamond Star to replenish the energy of civilization, or else the whole structure will collapse. This means they must abdicate power, and decentralize their Conclave to another structure I have prepared to receive it, the Special Advocate Executive of the Concordat. There are several legal mechanisms in place to do this, including an appointment by agency, or invoking a general convention of the Parliament. The Advocacy includes agents of mine, men I have intermittently trained and cultivated over decades. They have so often acted for the Conclave that the Commons would accept them as legitimate. But…”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “… But the Hermeticists are too stupid.” He finished the sentence for her.

  She nodded sadly. “You speak ill of the men who raised me. They are my fathers.”

  “I speak ill, but I speak the damn truth, don’t I? They’d rather hang on to power and ride the wild tiger with its tail afire, risking war and world destruction, rather than go home and live on the farm like Washington did.”

  “It’s a male trait, this lust for potency, I think,” she said.

  “Weren’t Washington a male? Anyhow, Princess, I ain’t convinced you have the best set-up here, and I ain’t convinced seeing it shatter is so much more to cry over than seeing it kept.”

  She shrugged her soft shoulders, ghostly in the light from the city underfoot, and the stars above. “This is not a gunpowder age. What if the world shatters also? You have not studied the problem, so how could you be convinced?”

  “It’s still a damnified tyranny, and free men shouldn’t stand it.”

  “Places on the globe where that is so, such places enjoy a greater liberty under our Concordat. Your North America is controlled only by alliances, media monopolies, and power stations. They still meet in their town meetings and have votes: but they cannot vote for war. Nor for anything that leads to war. Do you understand the limits of liberty? There are antimatter weapons in the hands of men like Del Azarchel and Narcís D’Aragó, men who like to see skyscrapers and farmlands on fire. The more power is in human hands to destroy human life, the more carefully limits must be placed on that liberty—why do you look askance! What I say is as much common sense as drawing in shrouds during a storm of sunspots, or walking more slowly when near a brink! If you would have me restore your precious liberties to the common men, I will have to take the antimatter away, and leave them in the dark.…”

  At that moment the car wobbled in the high-altitude wind, and the couple found themselves in each other’s arms, looking into each other’s eyes, and talk of these disagreeable matters was interrupted, not without laughter, by divertissement more fascinating to them.

  4. Reception

  There was a reception awaiting them at twenty-five thousand feet. Even this was below the level of the Honeymoon Suite of the long-closed hotel. The staff were not concierges and maids, but instead were astronauts and engineers, Rania’s picked men, who had recently reopened the facilities, with much fanfare, and many announcements that another Space Age was soon to begin. Many of these men were Psychoi, the intelligence-augmented Mandarin class—but here in the tower they doffed their silver wigs and proudly displayed their spacer’s crewcuts, or wore the tight, uncomfortable bonnets meant to serve as padding for space helmets. Montrose spoke only to one or two, and he was not sure he trusted them, but they did seem to share his enthusiasm for a new space program, and there was champagne, and colored lights floating in the upper atmosphere beyond the pressurized windows, and many a toast and a cheer to the happy couple, and so Montrose decided to smother his suspicions. Perhaps he was finally home at last, in the future he had always dreamed. The bubbles in his glass twinkled like stars as he raised it to his bride, who blushed and smiled just like any girl, princess or not.

  But Menelaus was impatient, full of laughter and lust, and would not stay for more. He seized upon his young bride, all wrapped in white satin and white silk, and hoisted her in his arms, amid calls and shouts and sprays of wine. Up they went again in the spider car, this one tied with ribbons and scrawled with well wishes. All fell silent as the atmosphere thinned outside.

  There was no one else in the structure, which was not yet ready for civilian traffic: Rania and Menelaus went here partly for privacy, partly for publicity.

  At last they were alone.

  5. Honeymoon Suite

  At midnight, she woke him, but when he turned on the sleeping mat to take her in his arms, she seemed oddly stiff and distracted. He felt something cold and rectangular, the size of a small book, in her hands. It felt slightly warm, as if circuits were active.

  The deck of the suite was pressurized nano-diamond, transparent and practically invisible; the lights of the city beneath the clouds below could be glimpsed. It looked to Menelaus like a galaxy underfoot. Here and there were dim reddish glows from the teeth of active volcanoes, looking like nebulae where stars were born. To one side, the full moon hung above her twin sister gleaming in the sea. He looked for but did not see a line of golden glitter dancing like a restless road across the waters; this was the light reflected from the tower, and it had been visible when he went to sleep. At this hour the whole length of the tower was in night, and even Quito Alto high above them was occluded by Earth’s shadow.

  It was the stars that were so bright, so beautiful. They seemed almost within reach.

  The moonlight illumed the suite, picking out the white walls, the bird-painted paper screens, the lightweight fixtures of clear ceramic or diamond crystal. The tatami mats on the transparent floor were spread wide, so that little fulvous squares seemed to hang against the abyss of night air.

  No fancy gold or marble here. It turns out that Rania, when alone, preferred something along the lines of the spartan space-habitat furnishings she’d been raised with.

  Except the shower, of course. No spacer had a shower like this: it occupied most of the suite. The crystal walls were only slightly dimmed—what need had young honeymooners for privacy?—by showerheads, soap servers, and massage fingers, as well as waterproof speakers for bathing-music coordinated to the water play. One could swim in the glass basin with the Earth floating beneath. The moonlight from the sea below shined through the pond that Rania had left in the basin of her shower, and so a web of silver light, crisscrossed by ripples, breathed and fluttered on a chamber ceiling.

  An imaginary picture of her stark naked and reading a book (not to mention the non-imaginary real girl, warm and girl-scented, supple limbs and clinging hairs of gold and all) for some reason was arousing to him. The girls back in his hometown, even ones he had been sweet on and too shy to court, had not had much use for book learning.

  He rubbed his eyes and slapped himself in the cheek to wake himself up. Sternly, he told himself to pay attention to what was going on.

  “I’ve read the Monument, up to the Xi Segment.” Her voice was haunted, strange.

  “You haven’t been sleeping,” he said.

  “What need have I for sleep? There are sections of my brain of which I was hitherto unaware.”

  A sensation of terror overcome Menelaus. The changes he had introduced to her nervous system, his attempt to correct the errors in her base gene pattern, perhaps they had waited until she entered REM sleep to reorganize her consciousness.

  “Are you still the same person?” he asked.

  “More than I was,” she laughed, “but I have lost nothing.”

  “What is it? Why are you awake?”

  “You were snoring, you rude swine, falling asleep like that! And I could not sleep—I wondered at t
he joy and pain—”

  “Jesus Christ! I didn’t hurt you!”

  She giggled. “You are blushing!” Now she seemed normal again.

  “Am not! And you shouldn’t talk of such things!”

  “I am your wife. If you cannot discuss the mechanics of rutting with me, then with whom?”

  “Gah! My mother would box my ears.”

  “She is absent. I am the woman of your life hereafter.”

  “That suits me.”

  There was an intermission of kissing, and so forth. When she put her arms around him, he could feel the cold corner of the square in her hand, digging into his back.

  They parted for air. He said, “How could you tell I was blushing? You can’t see me in this gloom.”

  From the way her hair moved in the dark, he could sense the triumphant cock of her head. “I don’t need to see. I am your wife. I am yours. Yours. Nothing else you think you own, no wealth, no steed, no knowledge, no accomplishment will ever truly be yours as I am yours, your very own, for only I give myself wholly and fully, with all free will.”

  “Now you’re blushing.”

  “I don’t blush. I glow. And you cannot see me.”

  “Pox. I don’t need to see. I’m your man.”

  “Not just my man, my crewman.”

  “Pox on that! I wear the pants in this family.”

  “You are not wearing pants now.”

  “I am still chief. You squaw. Got it?”

  “Yes, milord, my husband, and my master. What are your orders?”

  “I order you to tell me what you want me to do. It ain’t like I ain’t wrapped around that wee little finger of yours.”

  “For my part, I swore to love, honor, and obey. I will honor you now. You alone can I trust with what I discovered.” And she pressed the square into his hands.