Count to a Trillion (11 page)

Back inside the chamber, there were images of fire painted on the ceilings, images of birds and beasts and maidens and conquering kings on the walls. Everything was deep red, dark blue, blue-black, with tints of gold and mahogany to bring a richness out of the textures. Framing the doors and windows and arches of dark wood carved in pattern of Celtic dragons coiled in knots. Underfoot were Persian carpets like nothing he’d ever seen. On either hand, and every which way he turned his eyes, everything was either gold, or crystal, or polished wood, or fine china, or substances he could not put a name to. There was a black paneled bowl of red roses on the nightstand, and some sort of candelabra in the ceiling, surrounded by painted babies with pink wings.

It all looked like something from an old European mansion. He had been expecting something else. Rooms made of force fields and streamlined steel with tailfins. Sliding doors that opened by themselves and made a
shush-shush
noise or something. Moving walkways. Atom-powered lightbulbs. Talking sinks, preferably that had a third tap for beer.

It was damn pretty, though, he had to give them that. The place even smelled nice, applewood logs burning on the fire.

He craned his head back and looked at the ceiling again. Images of fire? These were battle scenes.

4. Portrait of War

High up on the wall, his eye first fell upon an image of a burnt city under a mushroom cloud. The artist had painted streaks and streams of odd color, green and indigo, issuing like a lighting bolt high in the air. There was a tiny silver dot high up in the corner of the image: no doubt this was the aircraft spotting for the incoming missile strike. So the fools had actually done it. The Burning of New York the Beautiful had not been enough to warn the world. World War, this time with atomics. Or some weapon even more deadly: if the artist’s design was accurate, the bolt was wider at the top than at the bottom, unlike a detonation or mass-driver strike.

The cityscape was photographically accurate. Montrose recognized some of the buildings. The Temple Mount; the Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The artist had even included part of the Wailing Wall, and showed a mother with her arms across her face twisting in agony as she fell across the two screaming children she protected with her body even as she died.

To either side were more images of fire: skeletons of skyscrapers toppling; sleek semi-wingless ultrahigh-atmosphere craft being scattered in a whirlwind of flame, like the finger of the Wrath of God; a submarine in the midst of a tidal wave being flung out of the sea by the violence of some unimaginable force, like a salmon leaping to its death.

No wonder they had not woke him up when he returned. War had broken out.

Painted on the ceiling were other images. Ships in space were exchanging directed-energy fire, shown here as fanciful threads of gold wire. No beams would be actually visible in real vacuum, of course. And the burning ships were drawn with yellow fire flowers with red petals, long licking tongues. The artist had obviously never seen a fire in zero-gee, which looked like a ball of half-invisible indigo gas, because in microgravity the hottest part of the flame tended to spread outward evenly in all directions, as a sphere, or rush along ruptured oxygen lines. The teardrop shape of candle flame was something gravity produced.

One war, or two? There was no way to tell.

Below them, at eye level, were stiff and ceremonial images: A figure with shoulder-length silver hair in a sleek black silk uniform was stepping on sabers dashed under his feet by half a dozen bowing figures; a kneeling president in the sober coat-and-tie uniform no one but presidents since the First Space Age had worn; a king in ermine cloak with medieval crown in hand; a military man in a high-necked Chinese jacket with pistol presented butt-foremost; a supine chieftain in a gaudy feather bonnet; and, oddly enough, a Pharaoh in a gold and blue pshent. The man in black held up an olive branch. At a guess, this picture was about the peace that followed the war. The figures perhaps represented the continents.

On one wall was a full-sized portrait showing a bishop lowering a coronet onto the head of the conqueror. The coronation of the white-haired figure in black showed his face more clearly. It was Ximen Del Azarchel. He looked to be about sixty years of age. No telling when these paintings had been done.

The monogram on the robe was his initials.

Menelaus looked overhead again. The ships on fire were all linked cylindrical punts, with maneuvering nozzles fore and aft. Interplanetary ships; space vessels. Tin cans cocooned in iron skeletons: functional, ugly, utilitarian. Their enemy ship was a work of art, a combination of ion drive and light-pressuresail. The sail tissue was like a second sky, holding crescent moons, and the blazing disk of the sun, in its reflections. The slender hull gleamed like a silvery sword. An interstellar ship; a vessel of stars.

The NTL
Hermetic
.

Montrose stepped around the bed on which he’d woke, and studied the paintings on the opposite wall.

One portrait particularly well done showed a European countryside, perhaps in Germany or France, with old-fashioned solar-paneled cottages with high-peaked roofs, and green fields under quaint hothouse tarp. The cottages dated from the time of the Japanese Winter. In the foreground were four maidens bending a spear into a ploughshare.

The sunset behind them was red, and rising above it, not far from the evening star, was the gleam of the starship
Hermetic
. The artist had merely suggested the ship’s slender silhouette with a stroke of the brush, adumbrated with miles-wide sail with an oval of silver. The silver silhouette looked like a scepter, or perhaps a flower.

The ship was rising in the east like the morning star, and beneath her sails, was peace.

Montrose thought: The starship had returned, and found a world burned and torn with war, fighting a war in space, and somehow put a stop to it.

The date in Roman numerals was printed on one of the images: Astromachia MMCCCXCIX.

One hundred and sixty-four years had passed since last he woke. He paused to let that figure sink in. It was roughly the amount of time between when the Constitution of the Old Union was written, and when it was abolished by Roosevelt the Usurper. Another century and a half or so years after that, and the last president, Jefferson Dayles, was gone, and the Pentagon had declared Martial Law “for the duration of the emergency” that was to last, as it turned out, at least a century and a half again.

Grim example. Think of another: One and a half centuries was exactly the amount of time between the first lift of the Wright heavier-than-air flying machine and the launch of the first unmanned nigh-to-lightspeed interstellar vessel, NTL
Croesus
.

Long enough for the NTL
Hermetic
to have sailed to V 886 Centauri and returned—bearing all the wealth of the antimatter star, all the treasure of scientific wonders gleaned from deciphering the Monument—to end war and usher in a lasting peace.

He found himself grinning. And Blackie had evidently ended up on the top of the heap.

Menelaus turned.

And then he forgot everything, the old white-haired picture of Del Azarchel, the sinister silvery silhouette of Earth’s only manned starship, now returned as Earth’s only interstellar warship; he forgot it all.

He was looking at the princess. It took his breath away.

5. Portrait of Royalty

Her hair was gold as a summer noon sun. The artist had captured the girl’s serene face but also a haunting twinkle in her eye, on her cheeks a hint of a suppressed dimple of laughter. Her gown was the gown of a fairytale princess. She seemed like a mischievous little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes; but as if her mother were a queen.

A coronet of diamond blazed in her hair, and white ermine hid one shoulder, leaving the other shoulder nude. Her bodice was white and set with small pearls. Her upper arms were naked, but elegant opera-gloves clung to hands as slender and shapely as branching coral. A ribbon of red and silver circled her trim waist, a regal gleaming medallion dangling below, pulling the ribbon into a Y-shape that curved along her hips. Her trains fell in smooth folds from her dress, like acres of snow descending in ripples from the curve of a hill. Only the toe of a diamond slipper could be glimpsed beneath the hems, like the glass slipper from a fairy-story, and her pose was elfin, a ballerina caught in mid-step, as if she were from a world not as weighty as Earth.

Behind and to either side were Doric columns holding ermine robes and shields of red and white diamonds. For some reason, there were two tonsured monks in the picture, standing to either side of the pillars, brandishing swords. A mantle decorated with stars was over her head; a map of Earth was under her gleaming toes.

Menelaus envied the painter his imagination. No real-life girl could be that pretty.

There came a noise behind him.

The door opened a crack, and someone knocked politely.

“C’mon in!” shouted Menelaus. “Tell me where the hell I am and what the hell the date is!”

Opening a door here in the future was evidently an elaborate affair: A wigged footman in a bright red coat backed into the room, bowing, giving Menelaus a better view of the man’s buttocks than he would have liked. Then a small throng of other people, doctors and soldiers and folks in odd costumes, all shining with strange fabrics and glinting with gems.

A voice of quiet command spoke a soft word, and the throng parted. Here was a dignified old man in sable who sat in the moving throne with a scarlet coverlet on his lap. He wore white gloves whose hue contrasted with his black garments. On his right wrist was a heavy armband of dull red metal, crudely made when compared to the shining rings he wore over his gloves, or his chain of office. The old man’s jacket and coverlet were embroidered with the same monogram: XDA.

He said, “Menelaus Montrose, you are in the best of places in a better world than we ever dreamed—and the date? It is our time. Our hour has come, and all we have desired with it.”

Menelaus squinted. “You in charge around here?”

The old man had a dazzling smile. He had been a handsome man once, and some of that glamour still clung to him. “Ah, my friend, you could say that.”

The old man’s hair, though hoary with age, was thick, and he wore it long, almost to his shoulders, like some ancient statue of a king, and he sported a moustache as white. Perhaps the moustache was what delayed Montrose from recognizing him.

But he surely knew that smile.

“Blackie—! Blackie Del Azarchel! Is that you?”

“The same. Welcome back to life. And such a life!”

5

The Brotherhood of Man

1. A Toast

“Well, hell, Blackie! Stand up and let me take a gander at you—! I been wondering—”

He had been fooled by the lack of wheels. The tall black chair slid forward over the floor, silent as a ghost, and Menelaus could not see the mechanism beneath the chair base that moved it. But it was a wheelchair.

“Uh—sorry—uh … Jesus nailed up a tree! How’d it happen?”

“My staff of doctors say it was spinal trauma, when I was thrown from a stallion, my beloved Eclipse. I think they have misdiagnosed the permanency of the affliction, and do not know its real cause.”

“Damnation and plague! I know what a horseman you are. Were. Damn!”

“Worry not,” said the old man with a twinkle in his eye. “Did I not say that our tomorrow had arrived? Petty problems as this one can be solved: the secret of youth, the creation of life, the conquest of the human nature, the maturation of man from upright ape to soaring angel! The time of Man beyond Man is about to dawn, and you, now revenant from your coffin, restored beyond hope from madness, you shall be in the audacious vanguard. Come! Let us storm the crystal ramparts of the unimagined future, brass trumps blaring, and banners streaming! Welcome to life!”

No sorrow could endure the onslaught of Del Azarchel’s ringing words, his charming smile, his joy.

“It is good to be here,” said Montrose. And he threw back his head, and uttered a whoop of pure delight.

“The event calls for wine!” said Del Azarchel. His eyes were shining. At his gesture, a wine-steward in powder blue brought in an ice bucket, and a parlor maid in a black uniform and frilly cap brought a pair of glasses on a tray.

Menelaus noticed the posture and costumes of the folk in the room. It took him a moment to realize what was missing. Perhaps in his great-grandfather’s time, it had been the habit of non-Europeans of high rank to dress in European fashions, coats and ties and so on. But when Menelaus was young, only lawyers and bankers still affected that old costume. High-ranking non-Indians dressed as much like Brahmins or Kshatriya as they dared, sporting
dhoti
or
pancha
, even when not allowed to wear
yagnopavita
or
choti
. But no one here was wearing Indian trousers, sacred thread, or brow-paint. This would seem to indicate that the fashions of the world, following the powers of the world, had changed again.

There were three distinct groups: the first wore bright hues and glittered, and the second wore dark uniforms, who bowed and hung back. Peacocks and crows. The third group were pikemen, who stood at attention. Hawks.

The brightly dressed were tall and dark-eyed men with shoulder-length hair of silver. They seemed to be wearing wigs of fine metallic threads, or perhaps some odd gene-engineering allowed them to grow strangely lambent fibers of zinc-hued strands from their scalp. Their tunics and long-coats were patterned with gems and threaded with wires and status lights.

The cut and ornamentation of the tunics, the rings at the collars or the ankle-clasps sealed to boot-tops, looked like the fashion elements were borrowed from spacer uniforms or pressure suits. Certainly the bright heraldic designs and emblems the tunics flaunted looked like the easy-to-discern patterns of graffiti Montrose and his fellow spacemen had stenciled on their spacesuits during idle hours between training at the space station.