Count to a Trillion (2 page)

Silently, close-faced, his mother watched while he deleted the music of his life.

It was harder than chores. When he was done with his personal music files, all she said was: “Now the rest of it.”

He knew, he knew, he should not argue with his mother. His elder brother Agamemnon had warned him just the day before, “She wore out all patience and love on us first six boys. Like she’s scraped thin now. She ain’t got nothing left for seven of ten. ’Sides, if she had any left, sure she’d be saving up her carin’ for the young’uns” (meaning his three younger brothers, Socrates, Leonidas, and Pericles, born posthumously from Father’s sperm records at the Army Health Clinic in Lubbock).

Agamemnon had been fated to be named Aristotle, as Mom liked naming her boys after long-dead servicemen, but she turned up her nose when she found out Aristotle ran away where Socrates stood his ground and died in his tracks. Despite having lost out on being named after such a famed thinker, Agamemnon still was held to be pretty cunning among his brothers, and Menelaus thought he should listen.

But he found it was too hard to hold his tongue. He had to argue.

Menelaus was careful to make it sound like he was talking about someone else’s life, someone else’s files, some boy who gave a tinker’s damn about his education, not him. And he picked his battles, defending only what seemed might have some high-class to it.

It seemed to work. Certain music files had been included in the scholastic programming. She relented on
Beethoven’s Ninth
, on the grounds that it would “serve to better him”; but she would not let him keep
The Death of Siegfried,
on the grounds that it was “European, dismal, and pagan.”

The picture files all had to go, even famous paintings. Some things he thought would escape, being half and half, but the comic book version of
Moby-Dick
had to go, as did the 1956 Gregory Peck movie.

“But Mom! This file is flat and deaf!” (Flat, meaning it was non-stereoscopic, and deaf, meaning that the acting styles, music track, and plot ending did not alter according to audience reaction or preference.) “It’s just gotta be educational! It so
old
!”

He knew he would never actually finish the text version. Some hacker had corrupted the file, and added a lot of boring stuff about cutting up whales.

“Books are education.” She was adamant. “Pictures are entertainment. Education evolves your faculties, and makes the mind like an épée; supple as steel, yet sharp. Entertainment devolves, deadens the wit, and coarsens the taste. Natural selection favors the evolved. Do you understand me? There are in this life the men who make reality, and the men who live in the reality other men make. And what is this? This trash?”

Then the worst had happened. She was pointing at the little icon representing his comic book files.
Asymptote
. The future. The animated files of his dreams.

They were closer than friends: bold Captain Buck Sterling, the ever-dispassionate half-robot half-human Cyrano Widget, the ever-passionate planet-doctor Erasmus Hume (but one and all called him “Sawbones”), the artificially intelligent ship’s cat C’Pur, the pretty switchboard operator Nubelle. And then there was Alpha, the lovely blue-skinned alien, who sacrificed her life to save the Science Council from the attack of the Atom Monster of Mercury …

To see them wiped out, to see all their adventures gone, all the moments of tragedy and drama, all the little jokes and mannerisms, never to see the eye-startling designs of the great golden World-Ship
Emancipation
again, her wings of flame, her thousand shining decks … to have them all erased would be to kill them, which was something even the Mastermind of the Moon had been unable to do.

He would never know if the Forbidden Library of Betelgeuse, containing the billion-year-old secrets of the Star-Lords, would ever be found again; or if the crippled cyborg girl Nell would ever learn to speak; or if Malvolio Scoff, Laughing Pirate from the Tarantula Nebula, would ever be brought to justice; or if the noble but evil Phantom of Alpha Centuri, who wrongly blamed Mankind for the destruction of his whole race, would ever learn to live in peace with Earthmen.…

… the story was not going to have a happy ending or a sad, because he would never get a chance to find the combination of character choices that opened up the end-file. The story was simply, horribly,
gone,
as if it had never been.

Captain Sterling would be as dead as his real father. Menelaus would be an orphan all over again.

So his anger burst out. “That’s important! That’s all about science! There won’t be no tomorrow if you erase that!”

“This is predigested piffle for children.” The scorn in her voice burned like ice. “Colored gleam. Castles on dream clouds. Neverneverland and Shangri-La and Utopia.”

He did not know what the word
Utopia
meant. He thought maybe it was a place in Arizona, or maybe a part of a woman’s body he was not supposed to know about. He resolved to ask Hector later.

“You can’t erase the future, Ma! It’s real! Science will solve everything!”

“This is an opium dream. There will always be wars and rumors of wars. Darwin will see to it, even if Malthus does not: aggression is built into human nature at the base level.”

“
Asymptote
says that someday we will live forever!”

“Then it lies. A shameful lie to tell to children, who know no better.”

“They got a machine. Like a brain machine. I can show you the episode. Just take a look!”

“Show me nothing, my child. Men must die so that the race grows stronger. So Darwin says. Would you have us fall into corruption? This is not real.”

“Not yet, but it will be! It will for sure be real! Just take a look!”

“Delete it. Need I repeat myself?”

She took the library cloth from his hand, and stood regarding it with cold, pale eyes.

“No! No! It’s for real! It’s science!” Menelaus was screaming now. “Dad would let me keep it! Let me talk to Dad’s picture! He’ll back me! You ask him!”

That earned him an open-handed blow on the cheek. While it hurt less than a strap on the back, it shocked him more, being unexpected. It was not a light slap, either, for his mother was not a weak woman, but rocked his head back on his neck. His eyes were out of focus, and the whole left side of his face was as if on fire. No one talked to Dad’s picture but Mom, and she only did it when the young ones were abed.

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
.