Count to a Trillion Read online

  Worse, those tears he’d been so proud to hold back, now they burst forth like some miller’s dam overtopped by a stream all muddied up and swollen with rain.

  At that, she stepped back, balled up the library, and threw it down. It clattered to the floor, and unrolled, which must have jarred the touch-sensitive fabric, because Schiller’s Ode to Joy began pouring into the room. When her boys cried, she stopped: that was her rule. But the look of cold contempt on her face cut Menelaus harsher than any lash.

  “Girls weep,” she said. (Menelaus, years after, could still recall the look on Mom’s thin features when she said those words, her lined face, her pale eyes, almost yellow: eyes as dry as stones. Eyes that never wept.)

  “Girls are made for weeping,” she said. “Darwinian selection favors weaknesses in women; for the ones who were strong enough to fight back against their rough husbands, captors, and ravishers in the Paleolithic days, those would not have reproduced, would they have?”

  He brushed at his wet cheeks, ashamed, swallowing his pain and misery. He knew she would never beat him as long as he cried. All he had to do to avoid the blows was to be weak. An anger burned in his throat like vomit at the temptation, and maybe hatred at his mother, for so tempting him.

  “What’re boys built for, then? What did Darwin select them to do?” He spoke, not because he wanted to know, but because he wanted to show her he could make his voice steady, tears or no.

  She turned her face away, and said something in a bitter whisper, and the words were drowned by the heavenly German choir, singing in a strange language of supernal joy. Freude, schoener Goetterfunken Tochter aus Elysium … (Joy! Flaring spark divine, daughter of Elysium!)

  “What did you say, Mother?”

  “For war.” She return her cold, yellow eyes to his, and her words were crisp and clear above the winged voices. Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum! (Enter we, fire-imbibed, Heavenly, thy sanctum high!)

  “Boys are made for war. It has always been. Skulls of cave-dwellers betray the cracks from truncheons made of the thighbones of antelopes. The murder rate among aborigines is higher than even the bloodiest days of our modern wars, yes, even if you factor in the millions who died in a single hour during the burning of New York the Beautiful. The world has not changed, and never will.”

  This last sentence was so bitter: for a moment Menelaus was dumbfounded. Not changed. Never will.

  That was not the message in Asymptote. Hate and poverty and war, and even death itself, would be conquered when tomorrow came. Who had stopped tomorrow from coming?

  Mother was talking in her acidic, emotionless voice: “The world has not changed, and never will. That flimsy fold of library fabric you hold is your stone knife, your hand axe, your flint-head arrow; the only weapon you have, my little cave boy, to see to it our particular tribe, the name of Montrose, your father’s name, does not go extinct. Expunge from your weapon any flaws or weaknesses, including the weakness of false hope.”

  So she stood there as he destroyed the rest of his dreams. Whole worlds vanished into deletion. With his own hands he did it, and she checked to make sure he had no back-ups or garbage shunts, or hidden regeneration files.

  In his imagination, he thought he could hear, over and over, the three ringing trumpet-notes that heralded the opening song of the introduction file. Onward! For the future!… Is!… A voyage!… Without end!

  Then it was done.

  Upward! That is the vow of the Science Patrol!

  All was gone, and Captain Sterling was dead.

  3. Darwin’s Curse

  But after she was gone, he unrolled his library, and yes, discovered that the audience register had been running along with the music, a program that noted listener reaction and comment, to personalize the conductor’s performance. He replayed his mother’s captured image through the deaf-and-dumb application, which could read lips, and even with her face turned half away, it could resolve most of the words.

  He could fill in the rest of the sentence: Boys are made to war and die and to make their girls weep.

  He was old enough to know his father had not died deliberately, but young enough still to feel hate toward the treason involved: Father, by dying, had abandoned them.

  4. The Vow

  Menelaus Illation Montrose lay awake his bed that night, listening to his brothers’ snores and ignoring his own bruises, comforted by the golden knowledge that now he knew the name of the enemy.

  This Darwin, whoever he was, who had designed mankind for no better fate than to wail and weep and war and die, obviously was a villain, an enemy, someone as evil as the Venom Queen of Venus, who poisoned all her lovers. He was the one who stopped the future from coming.

  Some of his friends said you had to prick your finger with a pin to make the oath valid; and boys of particular boldness used a rusty pin, as if daring the Jihad plague to strike. Menelaus knew that was all nonsense: it was the willpower that decided oaths, nothing else. No pin would be as sharp as what he felt beating in his angry young heart.

  This Darwin pretty sure had clout, if he could do all this stuff. Could be, he was some bigwig from Houston. Mom had also mentioned Malthus. Obviously his henchman.

  Or maybe he was a guy long dead, since it sounded like he did his dirt long ago, and meddled with the gene-stuff, like those tragic transhumanist experiments the library had told him about. But it did not matter if Darwin was alive, or dead, or long dead.

  Didn’t matter: because he vowed to defeat Darwin, somehow. Some-day.

  PART ONE

  The Swan Princess

  1

  Intelligence Augmentation

  A.D. 2235

  1. Bone Rongeur

  Menelaus could not help but pause to inspect the bore of the bone-needle as he was raising it to a point slightly above and between his eyes. It was like looking down the muzzle of a loaded pistol.

  He found that thought comforting.

  2. Sailing Vessel

  Menelaus I. Montrose was a young, brilliant, angry man of calendar age twenty-five, biological twenty-four, having previously spent more than half a year in suspension, while his family raised money for a surgeon. Menelaus was taller than average, with pale eyes and dark red hair that he wore cropped short, navy-style.

  He had scars on his right hand from knife-fights, he had scars on his chest from gun-fights, slugs that failed to kill him, and shrapnel from near-misses. The muscles in his right arm were more developed than his left, from endless hours of pistol practice with the absurdly massive weapons of his day, giving his shoulders a tilted, crooked look. His cheek was lean, and his jaw was a jut, his nose a preposterous hook of crooked flesh, but his mouth was long and flexible, and the lines of tension that surrounded it hinted at the overlarge grin that sometimes usurped his otherwise deadpan face. His eyes were deep set into their sockets, giving him a strange, staring expression. The mirror convinced him no lady would ever find him handsome.

  No one in the cabin of the nuclear-electric propulsion vehicle P024 was looking at him. The seven other men aboard wore helmets that restricted vision; and surely most had their visors down and tuned to the outside view, so that they could see the Earth falling away behind them, or the slim needle of the expedition hybrid ship growing slowly closer ahead, the Nigh-to-Lightspeed vessel Hermetic.

  The inner view was nothing to look at. The punt’s cabin was a cylinder, with a pole of avionic boxes, hydraulic lines and fiber linkages running down the central axis. The men were positioned with their heads pointed inward toward this axis, their feet outward toward the “down,” three fore, three amidships, and three aft, like the snowflake of a flock of parachutists.

  The three fore were Indosphere men, and aft of them were the non-Hindus, the Firangi: Menelaus and five men from the Hispanosphere. There was no advantage or comfort in sitting fore as opposed to aft, but the famous Hindu respect for caste required it.

  Menelaus’s mother once told him that when the U
SA was strong, the rest of the world followed their ideals, and adopted a spirit of democracy. That spirit sank when the English-speaking world sank. Seeing the technological marvel of the vessel, something greater than any American space program had ever done, Menelaus doubted the great and ancient civilizations of Spain and India had ever looked to Texas, or the other, less important states in the Old Union, for inspiration.

  Whether his mother was right or not about the past, these days, the low-caste and the Farangi sat in the back. Even the pilot sat in the back.

  There was no designated cockpit or helm station, since the piloting controls were firmware carried in the pilot’s glove unit, and his readouts played over the inside of his helmet. The carousel was spinning, but centrifugal force was so slight as to be unnoticeable: it was more for the convenience of drawing dropped crumbs or styluses to the deck for the maintenance-crabs, than for the comfort of the passengers.

  There were no windows, no portholes, marring the hull of the punt, of course. Such things were radiation hazards. Hull cameras could bring in a better view from outside, especially if the image was enhanced and labeled by cunningly designed software.

  An enhanced view, for example, might show the drive of the NTL Hermetic as a streak of fire across the stars. Fictional, of course: The trail of ions ejected from the ship was invisible.

  The ship had started her acceleration burn two months before, but her velocity had only accumulated to 8000 kilometers per hour. By spaceflight standards, this was a crawl, and high-thrust nuclear-chemical punts were still able to rendezvous and unload passengers and supplies for as long as the equations covering fuel economies might allow.

  The virtue of the Hermetic was not her acceleration, but her specific impulse. For continuous years and decades, the ion drive need not be shut down. Her very tiny delta-vee could, for minimum fuel-mass, be snowballed into an end velocity rightly called astronomical.

  The expedition was an all-male crew of two hundred ten hands and six officers. This was to be the last of twenty-four punts, each carrying nine men each: and the fuel cost of the rendezvous made this final flight the most expensive.

  The nine men aboard this final punt were Earth’s acknowledged geniuses, the old sages and young prodigies of mathematics and linguistics. Earlier punts, over the last two months, had carried crewmen who also had experience as astronauts, technicians, and (since the ship assembly did not need to be complete before her long, slow drive began launch) zero-gee heavy-construction workers.

  He knew that had he cared to look through his visor-view, Menelaus would have seen tiny sparks of light from oxy-acetylene torches flickering here and there along the hull of the Hermetic. He did not look for fear that he would be unable to look away. Menelaus was infatuated with the ship.

  Fore was the armored sphere where the expedition would sleep. The cryonic materials would help stop incoming heavy particles, and medical coffins were programmed to repair continually cell damage from radiation.

  Amidships was the wheel-shaped crew carousel to quarter those who would stand watch and age during the voyage. The watch duty rotated among the sleepers, each crewman slumbering for ten years, and standing watch for one. The officers had a different schedule.

  Behind the carousel was the shroud-control house. Aft of this extended the many folded spars. The spars and members would, during deceleration, deploy the light-sail package that presently formed the main bulk of the vessel, gossamer-thin fabric wrapping the xenon propellant cells. Behind this was the folded silver of the mirrored parasol meant to shield the forward parts of the ship from laser radiation.

  Farther aft, on a long and fragile spindle, were the many rings of the ion accelerator.

  The NTL Hermetic was a bastard of sail and motor, launching under her own power, but carrying a breaking sail in anticipation that Croesus, receiving the millions of code-lines of radio-programmed instructions, would have constructed a working deceleration laser by the time the halfway point was passed. Since lasers do not disperse in a vacuum, the source and the endpoint would impart the same degree of counterthrust. Once in the braking beam, Hermetic could decrease the rate of her deceleration merely by adjusting the light-permeability of her canvass.

  Behind the hybrid design was a political, not an engineering consideration. The world might trust Croesus-brain, fifty lightyears away, to build and fire an antimatter-powered super-laser potent enough in output to boil a planet like a poached egg. No one on Earth trusted his neighbor enough to have such a monster nearby. For that matter, no ship could trust any government, any institution, to shoulder such a huge drain of power, such an expense, for the quarter-century acceleration would last, without being interrupted by wars, depressions, disasters, or changes of policy. Unlike the Croesus-brain, men are fickle.

  The NTL Hermetic was a beautiful ship, graceful as a work of art.

  The hour was one that would never come in history again, an hour so many had predicted for so long would never come: Earth’s first manned expedition to another star.

  The robotic probe Croesus had been sent seven generations ago, during the First Age of Star Flight. Had it not been for the Little Dark Age, the follow-up expedition would have departed fifty years later. Instead, it had had to wait until now.

  Generations of dreamers had anticipated a time like this. The moment was indeed pregnant with all the hopes of Earthbound mankind. Why should anyone look at Menelaus Montrose?

  His visor had been down, tuned to half-gain, so that the cabin around him was overlaid with ghostly images. One image showed him, not the famous ship he approached, but an inset displaying the distance from Earth. The little red line turned blue, indicating that the punt was in International Space. Unclaimed. As far as he was concerned, an experiment illegal on Earth was legal now.

  Menelaus was sure no one had seen him break the Red Cross seal and slide the illegal needle out from the medical kit riding the thigh of his pressure suit.

  But then he hesitated. For a crucial second, he stared down the bore of the needle.

  Thinking of it as a pistol barrel was less frightening. More than once in his short life he had found himself looking down the muzzle of a pistol, and those events had not ended as badly as might be. He was still here, was he not?

  He knew what to do when looking down a pistol-bore. Shoot first. Don’t miss. Don’t hesitate, don’t flinch, don’t regret. Call his doctors to come to the fallen man, whether the Regulators come or no. Amazing what they can mend these days. If the other man dies bravely, be sure to say so. If the Regulators come, say nothing. Even if they haul you before the dock for it, or put you on the gallows, say nothing. No gloating, no vaunting, no apologies, no explanations. If the Regulators don’t come, and the doctors don’t come, let the man have an ampoule of morphine, if he needs it, and cover his face with his jacket, if he doesn’t. Most men are thoughtful enough to wear a diaper under their trousers when they go to settle disputes Out of Court, because you never can be sure of walking away, and you never can be sure your bowels and bladder are empty, and someone will always take a picture with his phone, even if everyone swore not to (the little phones could be hidden in a ring, a pistol stud, a thumbnail, a molar). In a case like that, doff your own jacket, and cover his legs. Only polite. He’d do it for you. You can take his weapon, but you cannot touch his widow, even if she was the one who asked you to meet him. Those were rules he knew, and knew how to live by. Or die by.

  This? This needle was the event horizon. An event horizon was a boundary where no information about the events beyond can ever reach, in the same way light can never escape a supermassive dark star. No one knew what was on the far side.

  He had waited a second too long. Like a cricket chirp in his ear, he heard the punt pilot say, “My friend, what is this I see? Are you hurt? I have a ‘suit open’ light here on my board, and your medical kit is pinging a query. What are you doing?”

  Damn.

  3. A Question of Intelligence

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bsp; There had been no way to check beforehand, of course. Menelaus had relied on the black-market software package he’d bought in New Silicon Valley, the smuggler’s paradise. The Hindi security programs, as usual, had been more subtle than what Western science could match, more intrusive than what Western notions of privacy would allow. Everyone who talked about the “new global agora” or who said the Little Dark Ages were over still could not explain the gap between Indosphere and Anglosphere craftsmanship.

  Menelaus’s internal suit status showed his helmet and medical kit still shut. But apparently he had fooled no one’s monitors but his own.

  The pilot was a Spaniard named Del Azarchel. His first name was Ximen, which Menelaus could not pronounce, so Menelaus called him “Blackie,” a nickname that suited him in more ways than one. He was a mathematician of some fame from his studies of the Navier-Stokes equations, especially their application to logic-flows within analog computing structures. His work on the underlying mathematics of the Ship’s Brain was as important to the expedition as Montrose’s work on suspended animation.

  The dashing young Spaniard had won all the tests in simulation back at Space Camp, humiliating older and more experienced Hindu candidates, and so he won the coveted duty of chief pilot. Piloting was the most delicate and demanding of shipboard tasks, requiring not only an ability rapidly to organize mathematical calculations, and perfect spatial visualization skills, but also the ability to do so under stress, in a short time, and in high and low gravity. Automatic computers could make possible, but could not replace, the human pilot; and the task was akin to shooting a bullet precisely enough to strike the face of a nickel spinning in the air without striking the buffalo.