Count to a Trillion (31 page)

He asked more questions, one of which must have offended her—he never knew what made her wrathy, since her expression never changed—and she punished him by making him go read Thucydides. (Darned book did not even say how the war ended, but just broke off in the middle.) But he took the lesson to heart that freeborn men did not allow any son of any bitches to tell them who to pray to or how to do it, and certainly no self-respecting Texan allowed the tax-gatherers to rake in his hard-earned whiskey money to pay for some other man’s preacher. Each man had to pay his own way for his own brand of jollity and his own brand of misery.

In North America, they had still called it “The First Amendment” long after the Constitution was torn to shreds and mostly forgotten. Montrose had not forgotten it, though, since his mother’s strap had seen to that.

So this whole modern set-up stunk like a dead dog as far as Montrose was concerned.

4. Time for Leaving

But he did not have as much time for book-learning, tramping and shooting and sewing as he might have liked. Whole days were lost in hallucination, sleep, headache, or fever dream. The Ghost of Del Azarchel did not bother to dissuade him, did not volunteer any help beyond routine calculations. The Ghost was aloof.

I am required to protect you, Learned Montrose, as honor demands. No less. Not to like you, and certainly not to aid you in undoing my father’s Great Work.

“What is this Great Work?”

The Ghost of Del Azarchel actually sighed. Since it was not a mortal man, a creature who breathed, he must have written the code to formulate the waveform of the desired noise and emitted it from the wall speakers. Montrose recognized that sigh. It was the one Del Azarchel used when he did not want to bother explaining the obvious to those who were slow. Montrose had never heard it used on
him
before.

The ascent to superior intelligence had not improved Del Azarchel’s disposition. Montrose wondered about the scaling problem of posthumanity. If you swell a personality to giant size, what happens to personality defects? A heartless man was not the dangerous as a heartless titan.

“Ximen,” he said to the machine, “is there any point in studying this Monument? The guys who wrote it are the ones coming to enslave us. Any information that might be in there, any techniques telling us how to build a better mousetrap—they would not tell the truth. So what is the point?”

What do you mean “us”?

“You don’t consider yourself human anymore?”

What do you mean “human”?

Montrose knew better than to argue with Del Azarchel when he got into one of those moods. It was an old trick he used back during training days, to just pretend not to know obvious things, and let your debate opponent exhaust himself trying to explain to you things every child knew—and whatever the explanation was, you pretended not to understand that either, unless he accidentally said what you wanted him to say, and then you agreed, and you let him think he had figured all this out by himself, and buttered him up and told him all right-thinking persons would come to the same notion. It was called the Sarcastic Method, or something like that.

“How about if we allow anyone who calls himself human is human, and start from there?” Montrose ventured.

We must take the so-called “Cold Equations” describing interstellar political economic relations as both a threat and an offer. The most efficient method of joining two alien civilizations together in a mutual relation is to agree on a set of rules and protocols by which that can be done. In the case where one partner is unequal, unable to offer anything of value, the relation is one of unilateral exploitation. Nonetheless, a proper protocol must be agreed upon. No matter how advanced the civilization, the energy cost involved in moving mass across interstellar distances must be recouped.

“You are talking about how to surrender. They put up the Monument to tell us, what the hell, what a white flag is, how long we’ll be allowed to live if we turn belly-up, and how to pay them back for the expense of conquering us?”

The machine did not reply. In fact, even the next day, and the next, Iron Del Azarchel was taciturn.

Once or twice Menelaus woke from experiment-induced delirium, and found the chalet glass covered with notations in his handwriting, in language and symbolisms he could not read, along with little written notes and reminders, suggestions for further study. The final day in the chalet came when he woke, and saw written on the bathroom mirror some doodles of the four-color problem, plus an equation that might have been a solution for certain limiting cases, and then a line of his own handwriting.
Skedaddle. Iron Blackie is bored with you. Go hunting and don’t come back.

Montrose, rifle on one shoulder, yannigan bag of spare clothes and blankets on the other, trudged out through the snow, never looking back. As his footfalls crunched through the white world, he wondered, bemused, about what sort of daemon was living in his head, that it used a word like
skedaddle
. He hoped it was not such a bad fellow after all.

There were no very pleasant memories of the hike after that first day. A storm blew in, and it was forty-seven miles to Glacier Bay, and he was more dead than alive when a group of Copts found him.

These were tall and white-bearded men in parkas of sea lion fur trimmed with wolverine tails. They brought him into an ice-bound church beneath a fretted dome, bright with painted red and gold and blue. What these Copts were doing in Canada, he never did discover. Last he’d heard, back a century and a half ago, Copts lived in Egypt.

Their patriarch, a man with the surprisingly ordinary name of Mark, but who wore a surprisingly ridiculous get-up, took Montrose’s neuromorphogenic drugs from him while he slept, and (he assumed) threw them out. Couldn’t say he blamed him.

More by pantomime than speech, Mark invited him to a place called Iarabulus, to stay with him—if that was what Mark meant by saluting him with a bit of bread and breaking it, offering him half. Less than an hour later by evacuated depthtrain (this one not as nicely appointed as Del Azarchel’s, but still something that looked like a drawing room, not a bus or sleeping car) Iarabulus turned out to be a warm spot on a beach overlooking the Mediterranean built on the ruins of Tripoli.

No, the days he spent with Mark, in the crooked streets of Iarabulus, among screaming children and vendors with carts, were not what soured him on this day and age. The folk were as friendly as he could imagine, as hospitable as Texans, and certainly willing to help out a stranger in need.

What set him sour was the moment he stepped from the train station, still in his furs, blinking suddenly in the sunlight, coughing in the dust of the crowded street, blinded by the dazzle from the sea, and sweating and swearing. So, of course, he threw off the heavy outer coat of buckskin.

When the crowd saw the black silk shipsuit he wore underneath (it was all he had to wear, after all) it uttered a sound of awe like a sea-wave, and all the heads dropped down, and all the men bowed, and all the women crouched, and all the mothers tried to hush their frightened children.

And with his rifle was still slung over his back, and a pistol at his hip, he was the only armed man in sight.

That was when he started to hate the world. It was not the golden age of the future after all, merely an age like his had been, nasty and mean, only with different folk in charge.

5. Alone in the Throng

During the last hour of the year, as midnight approached, Menelaus Montrose at the royal affair was, in what should have been a golden future, walking among, not just the aristocrats, but the royalty, the highest of the highmost of this new world, and they had the wealth, and the power and the taste and the manners to prove it. Montrose supposed that those who did not have wealth could use their power to get it, and once they got it, they could hire someone to have taste and manners for them, pick out their clothing and write down their witticisms. He saw them beneath the gleaming lights gliding on the shining marble floors, bejeweled and beautiful, stepping on their own reversed reflections with polished boots and diamond-dusted slippers.

A bubble of silence preceded him and followed him.

And there was not a damn one of them he wanted to see. Why was he here?

The door had opened for him: he had been allowed in. This did not mean that anyone, as the evening progressed, actually needed to look at him. He notice a pattern in the dress. Men in powder blue were middle-upper-ranked grandees, marquis, and counts. Men in dark blue were dukes, or premiers (there were some elected leaders in some part of the world, even if the elections were fixed); these were the upper-upper-ranked. The men in dark black were the Hermeticists. Montrose saw both Narcís D’Aragó and the Engineer’s Mate, Coronimas, at the far side of the room. They glanced at him like a stranger, but neither approached nor stared for long.

Montrose was a little surprised at how much that hurt. He thought himself made of tougher stuff. But of course, to him, it had only been a short while: he remembered them eating alongside him in the mess, talking over the wonders of their daring space flight during late-night bull sessions when they should have been bunked away. He remembered games of zero-gee squash in the empty fuel canister in the space station. To them it was decades ago, fifty years, or more. To him it was fifty days, or less. He had worked so hard to win his berth aboard the ship! He had tried so hard to earn their respect!

D’Aragó and Coronimas were joined by Father Reyes y Pastor, seated in a wheelchair, but splendid in his cardinal’s robes of brightest red. Montrose walked out of that ballroom and into another. Bugger them. It had been the respect of Captain Grimaldi that Montrose had sought, those days long ago, not theirs—a man they helped to murder.

All three had altered their flesh to look like old men again, and they were the only white-haired heads in the room.

Evidently the secret of hair loss and loss of pigment had been solved, for the other old folk in the room all had long lush hair, mostly dark, with one or two fair-haired people for contrast. He saw no redheads at all—he went through some genetic statistical calculus in his mind to figure out if perhaps the breed was extinct.

Hours he had spent, a drink untasted in his hand, trying to ingratiate himself with some witticism or caper of speech into the little circles and cliques of conversation. But evidently he was a pariah: Each time he spoke, some ball-gowned lady or dew-lipped debutante would ask him to dance, an offer his ignorance of their strange figures would not allow him to accept, but which the rules of courtesy would not allow him to escape. So he either ended up capering like a buffoon bear, turning right while everyone else turned left, or taking the hand of the wrong woman when the line shuffled here and there; or he ended up making excuses at women who must have practiced looking cold-eyed and offended yet smiling unmeaning smiles in their bedroom mirrors, they each did it so perfectly. If only they had had a caller, like a proper square dance, he could have managed it. As it was, his knack for numbers, which usually gave him an edge, just threw him off. He was so busy trying to reduce the motions of the dance (which he mapped out on a Cartesian plane moving toward the time-direction
t
to sweep out a cubic volume) to an algorithm that correlated to the notes, note-frequency, and rhythm of the tune, that he got distracted. And some people were too polite to titter when he kept dancing for four beats after the music stopped, but some were not.

So he stayed away from all the music rooms after that. He was afraid if the numbers started getting too lively in his imagination, he might strip off his clothes and start doing weird ballet again, and singing in multitonal, multinomial, and made-up languages.

It was one time in his life when he really wished he wasn’t him, but someone less fun and more normal.

Toward midnight, while everyone else clustered on the western balconies of the castle, for the best view of the splendid displays lighting the night sky, Menelaus found himself alone on the balcony facing east. He could still see more than he was in the mood to see.

She had not appeared during the evening.

Something the size of a ladybug, but with tiny, dun camouflage markings on its shell, landed on the marble balustrade near his hand. The instinctive, quick motion he used to crush the thing also tossed his wineglass spinning off into the fragrant darkness, a parabolic tail of liquid sparkling after it, no doubt for some rendezvous with the rosebushes below, or some tipsy ambassador’s wig, or the paper hat of a festive baronet. The grit beneath his finger felt wrong. Not an insect, then, but a video-pickup, or bioconstruct. Then he saw they were in the air all around, at least two score dark, silent spots half-invisible against the scenes of colored light, gardens, flares, and fire-painted clouds beyond.

He wondered why the cameras would be gathered here. As the only star-man who was expelled from the Table Round of the Hermeticists, no doubt he was a figure of some public interest, or perhaps Del Azarchel’s police wanted to keep track of him. Of maybe it was just his outrageous hand-stitched buckskin coat. Or …

Or maybe they were not looking at him at all. The clustered eyes of the robotic insects were turned toward a point behind him.

He turned his head just as the crowd roared
Een!

6. Her Serene Highness

Silhouetted against the shining doors leading in to the silent ballroom was a lightfooted feminine shadow, hourglass-shaped, pausing as if to catch her breath, in mid-sway.

The evening gown was dark stuff, so he saw only a mass of shadow sweeping up from the floor to a pinched waist. Above that, a ruby resting over her heart gathered the satin fabric into two plaited hemispheres of streamlined ripples. This same ruby caught the fireworks light into an ember glow, and sent tiny reflections across her curves.

Her long gloves were of a whiter hue, so that two slender arms seemed like disconnected ghosts in the gloom. The way the light fell emphasized the slimness of her waist, the curve of her naked shoulders, the delicate line of her collarbone and neck.