Count to a Trillion (10 page)

These last two operations would be expensive only at first, because the gathered antimatter could then be used to power ever-larger arrangements of ionization screens and magnetic bottles, which would gather more of the cloud, so the arrangement could generate a larger magnetic field, and so on. The snowball would simply grow.

The Diamond Star was a fountain of wealth, for all practical purposes, infinitely rich.

The only problem was that the fountain of wealth was fifty lightyears away. Is it worth it to climb a mountain to get a pot of gold? The taller the mountain is, the bigger the pot must be, and the more precious the gold.

How precious was this gold? Unlike other forms of energy, antimatter has the most efficient transportation cost versus its mass, since every particle was annihilated to liberate energy. Pound for pound, it was the cheapest form of power there could ever be. It required very little by way of refinement or processing: drop anything, anything made of matter into it, and the equal mass was converted spectacularly to energy. No waste; no pollution. A perfect fuel source. The problem? To make antimatter out of matter was preposterously costly, absurdly energy-inefficient, and cost far more than it was worth.

But what if a big chunk of the stuff, a mother lode, was merely sitting idly up in the starry heavens, waiting?

How big? V 886 Centauri was 2
×
10
27
kilograms in mass. One gram of anticarbon would liberate 9
×
10
13
joules of energy when annihilated with a gram of carbon, meaning that the Diamond Star was worth roughly 10
40
joules of energy. For comparison, the annual energy consumption of the whole world in the days of the Second Space Age was less than 10
18
joules. In other words, every man, woman, and child on the globe, and all his cats and dogs, could have more power at his disposal than the whole world had used in a century—if only there was a way to go get it.

And the will and the wealth. By a providential accident of history, Earth in
A.D.
2050 happened to be at the apex of a period its friends called the “Age of the Sovereign Individual”; its foes called it “The Plutocracy.” Nine men, no more, controlled 90 percent of the world’s wealth. They estimated that an unmanned starship returning in a century would ensure the perpetual power of their international system of banks and industries. Their power collapsed amid hyperinflation—but not until after a vessel was launched that only they could afford to send.

The
Croesus
achieved orbit around V 886 Centauri in
A.D.
2112, and laboriously constructed a radio-laser larger than itself to beam back to Sol news of its successful first pass at mining the antimatter star.

The message consisted of tediously correct, robot-compiled reports of loads, processes, and outputs, and only in the final section, under anomalies, did the Croesus brain, without any particular emphasis, report that Man was not the only creature who had placed an artifact near the Diamond Star. First Contact had been made fifty lightyears away, with no living human aware of the event. The robotic mining ship had discovered an object, an artifact, a black sphere the size of a small moon, left by intelligent nonhumans.

But by the time the signal reached Sol, the generation that had sent out the NTL
Croesus
had passed away. There were no orbital dishes open to receive its message. The broadcasts that passed through the Solar system in 2162 and 2166 were lost. The Wars of Religion of the late Twenty-First Century were more brutal and more reckless than the Wars of Economic Theory from the Twentieth, because the main purpose of the belligerents (first on one, but eventually on both sides of the conflict) was not to preserve honor, gain terrain, or win political concessions, or for any rational reason, but to wipe out as many infidels as possible, as cruelly as possible, in order to please a particularly cruel conception of God.

Croesus
was programmed to repeat its broadcasts every four years, and the signal took half a century to cross the void to Sol. In its thoughtless, patient, automatic way, it did. It was not until
A.D.
2170 that the Kshatriya battle-satellites received the message that man was not alone in the universe.

2. The
Hermetic
Expedition

A.D. 2215–2235

After decades of delay, the second expedition to the Diamond Star was organized. The waning Indosphere, in an act of conspicuous consumption meant to awe the world, and the up-and-coming Hispanosphere, eager to show her new-found strength, for the same motive, though rivals, joined each other in the venture.

The amount of resources consumed in this expedition was almost beyond calculation; but the odd mixture of semi-religious zeal and cultural pride prevented either of the partners from flinching away from the massive public debt and private ruin the ostentatious project absorbed.

To be sure, public figures solemnly intoned pieties concerning the long-term usefulness of this scientific wonder to the future generation of man: but it was on their haughty contemporaries their eyes were fixed.

Not so the officers and crew. Ion drive allowed them to leave the world lightyears behind, and Montrosian biosuspension technique allowed them to leave the years behind. Each crewman of the complement aboard had his eyes fixed on the future; each was assured that history would make him immortal.

The Earth would be strangely changed ere the errant travelers returned, the generation that sent them out long gone, their once-loved homes now foreign.

And the travelers would be changed even more strangely.

3. Thaw

A.D. 2399

Menelaus Montrose woke to a sensation of floating serenity. His thoughts seemed focused and sharp, but his head ached as if it had been filled with helium. Had he been drugged?

He sat up in bed. That was the first surprise: because it was a bed, an old-fashioned four-poster, big enough to hold a family of bounders, their first cousins, and their dogs. It was hung with heavy drapes, with sheets and coverlets around him like a snowfield, and a real down pillow where his head had lain.

Vaguely, he remembered a previous room—a white, empty place with padded walls—A hospital of some sort, albeit not smelling of blood, puke, and feces like the field-hospitals he knew back in Texas. But now where was he?

Menelaus spit up into the air, and watched the spittle as it fell, making a ugly yellow splatter on the nice silk sheets. It seemed to fall in a parabola, and not curve left or right. No visible Coriolis force, as someone in a carousel might see: but he was clearly under one gravity of acceleration.

Earth, then. He was on Earth.

Del Azarchel must have turned the punt around. That would have been no easy task. Decelerating just to come to a rest relative to Earth … then to expend the fuel to accelerate toward Earth again, doing a screw-turn halfway, decelerating again … How far had the
Hermetic
traveled in that amount of time? Past Pluto? If she was past the heliopause, no craft of Earth could ever rendezvous with her …

A sense of crushing defeat was in him, like water in the lungs of a drowning man. All nine men aboard the punt would have missed the expedition, thanks to him. He had missed the stars. The future had been ripped from his hand like some old but cherished comic, and torn to bits.

Menelaus threw open the bed curtains, and recoiled, blinking. The sunlight poured in from French doors leading to a balcony. Outside was dizzying scenery: majestic mountains, crowned and ermined with snow and, gathered between crevasses, like emeralds sown into the silvery-white garments of emperors, were narrow valleys of pine and spruce. Above, a sky so pale and clear it was as glass, and there on motionless wing, an eagle, highest flown of all the fowls of Earth.

He stepped closer to the window. He looked out through the French doors to a balcony of marble. Beyond was air, and a sheer drop. Fog, or perhaps it was cloud, was underfoot, and he blinked in the dazzle, half-blinded.

This room he was in seemed to be burrowed into near-vertical cliff wall. To either side of his room he could see the cliff was punctured with other balconies and windows, as well as larger portals, which may have been landing perches for aircraft. The balconies were an odd mixture: tropic flowers and drooping vines hung over the sides, but driving snow blenched the rock walls to either side, and icicles gleamed.

Menelaus saw a shelf below him that was cut deeply into the rock wall, large as an amphitheater. Atop this shelf gardeners had carefully constructed a flower maze, green tennis lawns, and fountains with silver basins. Two airy stairways, graceful as waterfalls, reached down toward it. The pure beauty of the architecture, the refinement of the decoration, impressed him, and he was not a man normally who took note of such things.

The cliff wall curved left and right in bays and protuberances. His astonished eye followed the cliff farther and farther. In the distance the mighty curves met, and light twinkled from the shadows of the far cliff wall opposite. He was in a palace: the place must have miles of halls and corridors.

It looked like someone had taken a museum, or one of those old French palaces, and stuck it in the middle of a gigantic crater in the middle of the mountains. But did they heat the whole estate, merely to grow a rose garden and grape arbor in the midst of snow? Menelaus wondered at the energy expended.

Palace? Or fortress? He saw, folded almost invisibly into the rock, immense shutters of metal; clamshell armor thicker than bank vault doors. Several acres of steel were poised to fall over these windows and gardens and airy walkways, and he also saw pillboxes, hatches, and turrets which implied a healthy antiaircraft battery was also buried in the rock, only its many snouts poking above the surface.

There was nothing like this on Earth, and no blueprints for anything like it. Which meant he had been asleep for longer than merely the trip in the punt back to Earth. How far had the
Hermetic
traveled in this time? Was it twenty-five years later? Fifty? Had the first starship of Man reached her destination? Perhaps even now Blackie Del Azarchel was walking on the surface of the Monument in a pressure suit, bending down to study the alien glyphs. Menelaus gritted his teeth and ignored a boiling knot in his stomach.

Abruptly, he flung wide the French doors, and strode onto the balcony. A rushing blanket of warm air hovered near him. He did not hear any fan roaring, or see any vents whence the air came, but Menelaus stood without a coat on in sub-freezing mountain winterscape, unscathed. He could smell the snow, and if he put out his hand, he could feel cold air on his fingers. His hand felt queer, as if he had disturbed the surface of an invisible, vertical pond.

Menelaus only then noticed what he was wearing: silk pajamas. They rustled in the warm winds. There was a monogram on the pocket, a combination of the letters D and X and A.

At least there were Latin letters still in use here in the future.

He wondered where he was. Not a hospital, that was sure. Maybe the palace was owned by the Alliance of Deneb X? (That sounded promising.) Xylophone Anti-music Department? The Algophilists of the Xipetotec Desolation? (Given a vote, he’d prefer disgruntled percussion musicians to votaries of a old Injun blood-god.)

Beneath his hand was a little sphinx with the cherub-head of a child, smiling. “What’re you grinnin’ at, kid?” he grunted. Then he jerked his hand in surprise. The carven haircurls of stone embracing the wee face were warm under his touch: the marble balustrade was heated.

Now he looked out. Underfoot, through the openings in the fog, was a vast crater. Each time Menelaus estimated its size, he saw some other feature, such as a pine tree which he had mistaken for a weed, and had to revise his estimate upward. The crater was many miles across.

The clouds all hung at the same level, so looking down was like peering through the surface of a lake at a hidden lakebed. A particularly wide gap in the cloud was open at his feet, and opening slowly as if the winds were unseen hands parting a stage curtain. Menelaus leaned forward, eager for a glimpse of the future world.

The bottom of the crater was a broken field of glassy splatters, looking almost like volcanic rock. In the center of the crater, a lake had gathered. From the color of the water, he guessed it was newly made, a decade old or less, and nothing much lived in it. In the very middle of the water rose a cone-shaped island of rock.

Island? An uplift peak. He knew what he would have seen if he had been standing on it: chevron-shaped striations in the rock called shatter cones, all radiating out from the impact point, or laminated and welded blocks of sand.

He was not worried about radiation. This was not a nuke: It was a meteor strike. A big one.

There were ruins crumbling at the edge of the crater walls above: broken walls in burial shrouds of ice, blind with unglassed windows and doorless thresholds, or stumps of chimneys helmeted in snow. Now Menelaus saw a regularity in the cracks and discolorations in the crater floor: squares and rectangles. Old streets, old foundations, something had been here once.

This had been a large installation. Not a city: Some of the ruins were shaped like pillboxes or hemi-cylinders. A military installation. A fortress built high in the mountains? There was a break in the treeline, and all the trees in a row, for over a mile, were younger than those surrounding. He guessed that this was where the launchrail once rested, and broken lumps regularly spaced along the path may have been the energy system. That square break in the treeline was where the vehicle building might have stood: That broken eggshell in the distance, if it were not a mosque, was the remnant of a reactor dome. Of the acceleration rings there was no sign.

So—not just any fortress. A fortified spaceport. There had been no such installations anywhere on Earth in his day.

And now a second fortress had been built atop the first, no doubt replacing the old one when it was pasted. That implied even more years had passed. Seventy-five? A hundred? How long had it been? More importantly, had any radio messages been received from the
Hermetic
? The original expedition provisions would have allowed the vessel to stay at the Diamond Star for seven years, before powering up to begin the astronomical voyage back, with another possible two years if crewmen died, or very strict rationing were practiced. The results would arrive before the ship. If all went as planned, if there were results to send. If the Monument had been translated …