Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  M3 was distant. It was farther away from Sol than the center of the galaxy was. If the galactic disk were laid out like a dinner plate, M3 would be like a dandelion puff floating almost directly above it. The Monument script gave figures (expressed in terms of the unit of the energy liberated from the fission of one hydrogen atom with an antihydrogen atom) for the power use of the civilization at M3, and the symbols hinted at some aspects of their technology.

  Menelaus reminded himself that, in the language of astronomers, a star cluster was nothing like a globular cluster. Hyades and Praesepe were clusters: Hyades held perhaps four hundred stars, and in Praesepe, three hundred fifty were visible. Whereas a globular cluster was an immensity, typically holding half a million to a million stars. Globular clusters were scattered like flying sparks ranging far above and below the main disk of the galaxy. The zone where globular clusters were found occupied a sphere centered on the galactic core, composed of older stars of low metallic properties.

  In a globular cluster, the stars were packed close. On average, one would be next to its neighbor no farther away than perhaps six times the radius of Neptune’s orbit, so the skies of any worlds in that crowded space would be densely filled with stars brighter than Venus at sunset, glowing clouds of light rather than scattered constellations. To the human eye, it would be a star dazzle too bright to stare at for long.

  M3 had more variable stars than every other globular cluster in the galactic halo. The cluster included a large number of so-called Blue Stragglers, main sequence stars apparently much younger than the rest of the cluster: but only apparently. Macroscale Engineering had meddled with the core processes of the stars, throwing them out of their normal evolution.

  The whole cluster of M3 stars was itself on an eccentric orbit around the galactic core, moving from 22,000 lightyears at galactic perigee, to 66,000 at galactic apogee. The orbit was canted oddly, to dip 44,000 lightyears above and below the main galactic plane.

  Certain orbital elements and epochs given in the Monument revealed that the original orbit had been far more conservative, coplanar with the main disk of the galaxy. The reason for the massive orbital adjustment of this group of half a million stars was not revealed in the relatively crude mathematical sign-language being used.

  The idea of a race that could casually sweep a globular cluster into a new orbit around the core of the galaxy left Menelaus awed and horrified.

  The imagination of Menelaus for a moment was filled with a menagerie of cat-faced men, or centaurs, three-eyed people, hawk-men and crab-people and zebra-men, worm-creatures or intelligent trees, or dwarfish things with glowing eyes and ballooned skulls. But no: these were merely images from his childhood toon-tales. All that was revealed in the Monument hieroglyphs were energy levels, expressed in terms of multiples of the output of the Diamond Star, and additional mathematical expressions showing the composition of megascale engineering structures.

  He told himself these beings could be something much stranger than his simple imaginings. Or even creatures to whom the question of form was meaningless: beings with a science to reshape their bodies and minds at will, to fit any task confronting them. Creatures of pure information.

  But what tasks? What was this conquest for?

  Montrose muttered, “These are beings of pure mind. Creatures beyond life. Something incomprehensible, someone from beyond the Asymptote. Beyond the event horizon of what we can ever understand. That’s the enemy.”

  Rania surprised him by saying, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

  In the moment before he recognized the source, he thought it might be Shakespeare, perhaps from some play where bold Scottish kings drew swords in defiance against tyrannical angels. He frowned when it dawned on him that it might be preacher-talk. But Menelaus noticed that hearing it in her dovelike voice, the Good Book seemed not to have that harsh tone, a weird combination of ghostly terror and dusty-hearted killjoy platitudes, it carried back in the days when his mother quoted it to him, or that lying no-account Parson Goodwin from Carl’s Corner in Hill County. It almost sounded like poetry.

  “Quoting the scriptures?” he said. “And here I though you were raised by scientists.”

  She was too ladylike to snort, but she did made a noise of disdain in her nose, softer than the sigh of a nightingale. “Scientists including the Franciscan-trained Father Reyes y Pastor, who made sure we had onboard the same Bible Mendel, Copernicus and Lemaître studied.”

  “Mass limits were tight,” said Montrose. “I was not even allowed to bring socks.”

  “You think it an unnecessary luxury? I agree, the scriptures might have been no good for settling issues of astrophysics, but when I was told how my mother passed away, I read the Book of Job, and I looked down at the stars. This book asked me who laid the cornerstone of the cosmos when the morning stars sang together and what made the Sons of Light all shout for joy? It asked if I could bind the influence of the clustered Pleiades or free the bands of Orion?”

  He saw a hint of sorrow in the shake of her silhouetted head. Rania continued, “Those questions comforted me in my grieving, even though I could not answer them; and the answers of science, firm and certain, could not. Through science I deduced, as you did, how I was born, but science, the mere study of matter in motion, will never tell me why.”

  “Down at the stars?”

  “Stars were never ‘up’ until I reached Earth; the ship carousel, spun for gravity, puts the portholes under your feet, and all the universe is a void to fall into.”

  “You know your mom weren’t real.”

  “Do mothers not love their stillborn child? I mourned her loss, even if she never lived.”

  “You are strange girl.”

  “Since you and I, and perhaps by now Ximen, are the only members of our new species, homo sapiens posthomonid, by any rational basis of comparison, not only am I average, I form the only data point.”

  Montrose, rather than argue the point, bent his head over the bookpad and read her translation of line 2311 and 2312 of the Xi Segment.

  THE MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS LIFE … WHEN FOUND AMONG STARS IN THE ORION ARM BETWEEN THE FOLLOWING EONS AND LOCATIONS [measurements were given in terms of multiples of plank lengths and fractions of proton-decay periods. The volume thus defined included Sol] … NECESSARY FOR SOPHOTRANSMOGRIFICATION [meaning uncertain] … DONE AT THE BEHEST OF AUTHORITY OF M3 GLOBULAR CLUSTER, WHOSE [SERVANTS] DOMINION AT PRAESEPE CLUSTER ORIENT FINAL CAUSATION TO CONFORM TO THIS DIRECTIVE; WHOSE [PETS] DOMINATION AT HYADES CLUSTER PERFORM THE [INSIGNIFICANT] MANUAL LABOR INVOLVED.

  “Let me get this straight. On Earth, ten thousand years go by before the little green men even show up. Then another Brazilian vermilion cotillion years go by before we get back from M3 with the court’s verdict. And we don’t know if the court will rule in our favor, because who’s to say their laws and whatnot will stay the same for so long?”

  “They are starfarers: they must honor thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past a thousand lightyears. They must honor ten-thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past ten thousand lightyears. What is the upper radius value for the ambition of M3? We cannot say. But look: their name in this concept-writing means they extend in all directions without limit.”

  He shook his head. “Let’s stick with our original plan. We go to the Diamond Star, no farther, gather up as much contraterrene as we can mine via star-lifting, return here, overthrow whatever stupid machine civilization Blackie has tried to set up—if it still exists, which I doubt—and start the long, slow process of building up the human race, and any posthuman races we might have the fancy to create, to fight the Hyades Armada. These equations are not only their advertisement of their intentions, they are also their marching orders—all we hav
e to do is make the human resistance more expensive than it is worth to conquer us. Once there is no hope of profit, they’ll quit. I mean, aren’t we deciding everything on the assumption that these are machine civilizations, electronic brains that are forced to make judgments by these same calculations?”

  Rania said, “If we make the human resistance more expensive, all they will do is extend the term of the indenture.”

  “The Monument itself is millions of years old. The civilization at M3 could be long dead, or changed its laws, or fallen to war or—anything!”

  “Nonetheless, in my capacity as Captain, this concerns matters beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and therefore falls into my jurisdiction.”

  “I am not questioning the legality, but the judgment! Are you just acting on blind faith? What makes you think the monsters at M3 (a cloud of stars not even in this damn galaxy!) will respect what is written on that lump of rock circling the Diamond Star, or even be alive? Aren’t they changing and growing and dying, even if they are machine-things? What is your evidence?”

  “The Monument expresses something never seen on Earth, a calculus of history, a science of which our economics and politics are mere unsystematic gropings, based on guesswork and sentiment. Their laws are deductions, not proscriptions, of how their future generations will and must behave, or, since they may long ago have solved the technical problems of decay and death, the future generations may be the selfsame individuals who wrote this promise.”

  “But it could be a lie!”

  “To what end? Why tell us the means of manumission if they meant us not to use it?”

  “Hellfire! D’you expect me to understand how the bug-men living in pools of methane who eat their parents for lunch might think with their nine brains? What if it is fiction? A joke? Graffiti? A psalm in their religion that they only mean on Sunday? What if it is some emotion or custom or nerve-malfunction humans just don’t have that prompted them to write something for a reason we don’t and can’t understand?”

  “The fact that the Monument itself is the product of a rational intelligence, a message deliberately set to be seen and read by all comers, allows us to suppose it means what it means until proven otherwise. Why do you assume the Armada from Hyades is real but deny that the Authority who can free us from the domination of the Armada is also real? Your skepticism seems to be unidirectional.”

  “But that does not prove it!”

  “Life is not a bench of law, nor a scientist’s workbench. We have partial information. A hint. A clue. Life allows us see a shadow in the darkness, and we must guess its true shape. But life forces us to decide, before we know with perfect knowledge, how we shall confront the unknown. Who gave you this foolish idea that evidence must be certain before it can be affirmed? Before us is the unknown. The universe is black and wide. The option to be all-knowing is not open to us. Our options are to act as if the unknown will bring us evil, which is the response called fear; or to act as if the unknown will bring us good, which is the response called hope. The first response is certainly self-fulfilling; the second may be.”

  Montrose had no good answer for that, so he said, “It still sounds like blind faith.”

  “Blind compared to what? All real life is decided by guesswork, intuition, judgment, determination, and not established by omniscience. Did you examine the future before you married me? Where is your evidence that our love will endure?”

  “I fell in love. And I gave my oath. I will make it endure.”

  “Well, I took an oath also, to find and carry out my purpose in life. Here I have found it. I will make the Authority at M3 to manumit the human race; I will make us starfarers. We will have the future, brilliant with glory, the human race has always dreamed of, and may yet deserve!”

  He had no good answer for that, either, so he turned off the book and kissed her. He did not know if that would be the right thing to do, but he hoped it was.

  17

  Postwarfare Society

  1. Called Out

  He woke in the dark, disoriented, unable for a moment to remember where he was. Menelaus was aware of the emotion before he was awake enough to remember its reason: the fragrant warmth in his arms, the soft curvaceous body slowly breathing, the sensation of nude flesh cuddled against him. He remembered his joy before he remembered its cause.

  I am a married man. I will never go to sleep alone, never wake up alone, not ever again. It was almost enough to make him believe in his stern old mother’s stern old God, just to have someone to thank.

  A sensation of needles walking along his skin told him his arm, on which she was pillowed, had fallen asleep. He did not move his arm. He would have preferred to cut it off, rather than disturb her. In the dim light, he could see no more than the curve of her cheek near him, a hint of gold from the halo of mussed hair framing her head. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  What had wakened him? The pillow under his head seemed to be playing music.

  No, not the pillow. He crumpled the pillow (awkwardly with his free hand) and saw beneath it, next to his ceramic knife, the red amulet of the Hermeticists, the one Vardanov had forced him to wear. A little ruby light, no brighter than a firefly, shined and winked in the metal, and three notes of music—the same notes that once had summoned Blackie to the Table Round—was playing insistently. That was a bad sign: he had set the refusal tolerance to nine, higher even than a police override or incoming subpoena could match.

  Holding it in his teeth, he snapped it onto his wrist, and with his tongue he tapped the surface. Then Montrose blinked at a sudden illusion opening like a white window in space before him. The circuits in the metal wristband were firing pinpoint magnetics to activate specific phosphenes lining the rear of his eyeballs. The sensitivity and control was accurate enough to paint a blurry but recognizable image of a screen. Montrose thought the thing was damn creepy, shooting energy into his eyes, but it did not show any light or wake his wife.

  An image formed like a ghost. It was Blackie Del Azarchel.

  The crisis is here, old friend, and I regret to say I can think of but one way to stop it. Montrose had turned the sound off, so these words were being printed in Braille along the inside surface of the bracelet, the smart metal dimpling and flexing against the sensitive skin of his inner wrist.

  He made sure the lip-reading application was running, so he could answer without talking aloud. His tongue and lips formed the words, “Blackie! You got some nerve, calling me now!”

  He realized that Blackie—if this was a true image and not some jinx—was dressed in the heavy lobster-shell-like armor of a duelist. Only the helmet was off, and the long hair of Del Azarchel fell to his shoulders. It was a young face, with eyes burning, and the hair was black as ink.

  Strangely enough, the armored image looked old, even archaic, a figure stepped from a musty history book, as if Menelaus, in a buried part of his brain, truly knew all the years that had passed since he last saw a foe adorned in such grim panoply.

  The eyes of Del Azarchel—Menelaus saw them vibrate, as if absorbing every photon of information from the image Menelaus was sending through the pinpoint lens in his amulet, and then fix his stare on Menelaus with such intensity that he felt it almost like a blow, entering the optic nerve to jar the back of his skull.

  Del Azarchel had solved his own version of the Zurich Run and the divarication sequencing. He had concocted and taken the Prometheus Formula, as Rania had not long ago deduced. He was Posthuman.

  War is coming. The discontent of the factions among the great and despair among the small has reached a critical mass. I gather my troopers even as we speak, and will spread a cloak of fire over the skies of any lands that rise in rebellion against me. And yet, even at the last, I yearn for peace.

  Menelaus was aware once more of the annoyance he felt hearing aristocrats, who were basically successful thugs, called great, and hearing honest workingmen called small. It added to the horror and hate he felt hearing Del Aza
rchel so calmly bragging of his plan to preserve his dominion over the planet by burning it.

  Menelaus said, “I’ve seen the equations. The solution is that you abdicate. You and your poxy crew of mutineers who killed the first Captain ever to sail the stars, and the finest man I ever knew—you give up your stranglehold on power to the Advocacy. That will ease things up.” His tone of voice, had he been speaking aloud, would have been sharp, and so he hoped the lip-reading gear on Del Azarchel’s side was picking up the nuances.

  The figure did not even bother to shake his head. Menelaus could almost feel the pride radiating like arctic wind from the dark-eyed Master of the World. The Princess could stop this war if she wished it. I have seen her work miracles of Cliometry ere now. She could do it again.

  “She has solved it. You won’t accept the solution.”

  If she does not abandon the world, if the dream of star-travel for men of flesh and blood is killed now in the unsteady public imagination, events will find an unwarlike resolution. It is Rania’s departure that brings this war; I command her to stop it! She shall not sail, nor you!

  Menelaus said, “And I’d command you to bugger yourself, Blackie, ’scept your male member ain’t long enough to snake around to your own backdoor, and, unlike some folk in this conversation, I don’t give orders I got no right to give, and are plumb stupid impossible to carry out, nohow.”

  The stern, cold face of Del Azarchel seemed to relax. History will show then that this is by your will, yours alone. Appoint a second and have him call to mine. The Learned D’Aragó shall answer for me.

  “Plague! You calling me out? On my wedding night, you calling me out?”

  The very wedding night that you despoiled from me? With the bride rightfully mine, that you have soiled with your seed in an act of seduction, if not rape? She is so far above you on the scale of evolution, you are like a monkey coupling with her! It would serve you well not to mention her.