Count to a Trillion (32 page)

Her head was poised, unselfconsciously graceful, and a mass of hair, golden and lucent, was pinned up behind her with networks of diamonds like stars. The constellation formed a crescent. It might have been a tiara. Or was she wearing a crown?

The slimness of her neck, the delicate curve of her jaw, and the mass of her hair piled high made her head look larger than it was: an illusion of a childlike figure, or some quaint large-skulled space creature.

In that same second, before he could blink, a silent explosion of light issued from the ball falling down in the illusionary Times Square. Immediately it was greeted with a roar of shouts, the screams and thunders of horns and sirens large and small, the ocean noise of mingled voices cheering.

He blinked, dazzled, and for a moment he could not see her, only a greenish negative image of a slim figure floating in his eyes. He heard, or, rather, felt her move forward.

The whispering hiss of satin should have been far too faint to hear in that uproar. The scent of a perfume (a sharp hint of aldehydes above a heat note of more subtle lavender) should have been indistinguishable in the smog of gunpowder and wine left in the air after so many hours of pyrotechnics and elegant intoxication.

“Happy New Year,” came a soft contralto. As if a dove could laugh, or a woodwind purr. “And welcome to the Twenty-Fifth Century.”

“Which does not begin ’til 2401. A year early, you are.” His own voice seemed hard and harsh in his ears.

“Technically, you are correct, but the error has, by now, among the common people reached such currency, that it would seem supercilious to ignore them.”

He put up his hands to rub his eyes. “If’n a million people can’t count, I can.”

“Ah! The young sir is a mathematician, then?”

“Young? If you call one hundred ninety years old ‘young.’ Best damn mathematician in the damn world, a regular Galois, I am.”

“Second best, perhaps.”

At that point, the explosions of light overhead darkened, and grew steady, and his vision cleared.

Perhaps time stopped; perhaps his heart.

It was she. Of course he knew her from her portrait. It had lived in his mind’s eye, shining, every night as he tried to fall asleep. The voice came as a surprise to him, and her scent, her nearness. He had not known what she would sound like. The library files had been remarkably scarce of recordings of her, almost as if, to increase her mystery, she was being kept away from the public view. To judge from the galaxy of glittering bugs that formed a respectful ring in the air around her, the public was as curious as he was.

He was staring at a face like an angel’s, save that her halo was golden hair with diamond sparks, fulvous beneath a semicircle of diamond studs and silver leaves. It was her eyes, almond-shaped, slightly tilted, fringed with dark lashes, her eyes that magnetized his gaze, lambent gray-blue, the color of a sky in storm, a strange hue he could not recall seeing in other eyes.

But it was not her features that ensorcelled him, or not merely that: her motions were graceful, as if every gesture were a choreographed work of art, a ballet, a pantomime of swans, and yet also as spontaneous as a dove in flight, as a child’s laugh, a sight whose simplicity and beauty pierced the hidden soul. He had spoken perhaps, what, a dozen words to her? Already his heart was roaring in his chest, telling him to live and die at her command.

The muscles clenched around his mouth, and his eyes narrowed. Inwardly, he was telling his heart to shut the hell up.

“Shall we start a new custom?” With a graceful flick of her wrist, she threw her wineglass into the shadowy rosebushes below.

“A perilous custom, throwing scrap blind onto the heads below. And you were talking so nice about heeding the little folk! What if you scratch a brow, or wet a dame’s hair-fixings she slaved a week to fuss into place, heh?”

She smiled, which was music to his eyes. He wished the many-colored dazzle overhead would cease its riot, so that he could see that smile in a clearer light. “I’d pay,” she said, a little sadly. “We live in a day when men have sold their souls, and any hurt to property or propriety can be soothed with coin. It gives the rich a license to act out their basest instincts, and the poor a reason to smile at their bruises and hurts. Have you seen the traffic in Paris? The taximeter carriages will send the low-passengers any tips the high-passengers paid to buy their right-of-ways, and bribe the favorable signals, so a rich man can speed through the boulevards at breakneck pace, while poor students can park their spindly cars in traffic, and let their meters run negative numbers, to earn their book money just by letting wealthier carriages take their place in queue and cut them off, yielding up their right to cross the crossroad.”

“Pshaw!” said Menelaus. “Save your money! And throw a bucket of champagne across the rail, or the whole bar, and, yea, the barkeep too, ’til it’s raining spirits, and old bottles of fine wine shatter and explode like grapeshot. If any jack of them is man enough to storm the balcony, ’tis I’ll who’ll pay them off, not you, and in iron, not in gold, which is truer coin, and one the years do not corrode.”

“You are so bold, Mr. Galois?” She lowered her lashes. He saw how delicate they were and how the long black lashes almost kissed the curve of her pink cheek. “The sovereignty under heaven is gathered into one, and the hellish suffering of this sad world, for once, for this season, has been soothed by the balm of peace. Surely it is perilous to break the peace—The celebrators and celebrities outnumber us by thousands.”

“In a pareto-optimal matrix of their possible moves and my possible responses, I need but render their losses beyond their utility ratio to put all the statistics in my own favor. If’n I’m worth ten of them, then they are not such men as would cheer to see nine die just to beef me. Can you smite them on the cheek and pay into their pocketbook to make them bow? Nope: I am worth eleven of them, or a flat dozen.”

“But if we threw the butlers and the wine onto their heads, it would be assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress, breach of the peace, and perhaps an act of contumely as the legates were drenched: So the law would be with them.” A ghostly smile almost danced about her perfect lips. Was she teasing him?

“I’ll hold them back!” Menelaus declared with wild humor, wishing he were serious. “These four corners here, from the balustrade down aways as far as that big pot of flowers, I can hold them, bottleneck all comers at the corner yonder, past the statue of the naked lass, if you can hold off a rush from the French doors. I’ll fill this little square of marble up with blood, and raise your petticoat to be our flag, and call you empress and queen within this five paces wide, until the great parliaments from Iceland to Japan recognize our claim of independency. Once we are called a sovereign state, we may act as pirates and scoundrels, and all the tribes and nobles of the world will rush to sing the virtues of our doings!”

“What virtue is in bloodshed? My conscience would upbraid me to be the mother of such misery: I would save even the nine men you would slay from the horror of war, if I could, no matter how small the war might be.”

“History always fawns on crooks, if they wear crowns! And we will make our own law, and force the other nations to bow.”

“Nation—there is but one, and she is mine, a Concordat of my own making. You do not think Del Azarchel skilled enough to solve a cliometric calculation involving six billion variables? In any case, you underestimate the warlike character of the dignitary houses, or that of the militia of the freeholds. They are not less valiant than you.”

“They would fail, ma’am, if you were in back of me, for their womenfolk are only ordinary fair, and will not put into them more heart than mortals know, where I will have the devil’s own heart in me, hot as hell from an angel’s face! Come, I will make you queen of this balcony, and I will be your champion and armed forces, and our custom will be to greet the New Year with a kiss.” And he stepped forward.

She stepped backward so smoothly and quickly, he was not sure if she had moved at all. It was as if a moonbeam slid through his fingers.

As suddenly as shapes that appear in a dream, the two figures woven of blurred shadows came forward, noiseless as icebergs at sea. They seemed to be made of glass, for the scene behind them, although distorted, was visible. These were hulking men in padded light-repeating suits, evidently her bodyguards. A shimmer, a trick of the light, hinted at the pole-arms in their hands, held at the ready.

She spoke in a voice like a cooing dove. At the moment, there was a pause in the fireworks, the light was dim, and he could not see her face. “The disadvantage to your plan is that the men of this world would be no less inspired as you by that beauty you flatter, since I am theirs. The advantage is that we could meet on equal footing, not as sovereign and subject.”

“Equal baloney! I don’t recognize you as—” he said.

“Do you not recognize me? The light is poor! I am Rania Anne Galatea Trismegistina del Estrella-Diamante Grimaldi, Sovereign Princess of Monaco, Duchess of Valentinois and of Mazarin, Marchioness of Baux, Countess of Carladès and of Polignac. If I floated, you would know me.”

“What?”

“This odd ground here, no matter where you stand, is accelerating at one gee: there is no higher deck with lighter spin. In any case, it is you, none other, who elevated me to my current post, and convinced the ship’s brain to accept my blood as proof of continuity. So I am still your Captain—you have none to blame but you for this. I hear from the Landing Party Senior that you are absent without leave. What penalty must I impose?”

She turned and nodded. The dark figures nodded and stepped back, their suits taking on the hue and patterns of brick and climbing rose-vine of the wall behind them. In the complex patterns of the fireworks, their suits could not react at speed, and so human-shaped bubbles with dark goggles hovering at eye-level were visible, even in the gloom. But then the light steadied, and grew bright, and the cheers of the crowds changed, and became a steady roar, and the soldiers faded into invisibility, paradoxically harder to see, as the light grew stronger.

“What—wait—?
You’re
the Captain?”

Menelaus wondered how he could have missed the point. There were clues enough. Del Azarchel had mentioned the Princess being “in transit” and out of radio communication, and had said the same thing of the Captain. Montrose had assumed “in transit” meant in the middle of traveling, but no, Del Azarchel had used the word in its spacer’s meaning: the
Hermetic
had been between Earth and the Sun. Radio communication was always difficult for targets lost in the electromagnetic glare and radio-noise Sol put out.

“Y—You were not at the Conclave,” Menelaus stammered, feeling foolish.

“That is for crew, the civilian arm of the expedition. I represent the military—the sole military officer of the expedition. Do you forget neither the Spanish nor the Hindu ethnospheres would accept the other’s leadership? That the
Hermetic
sailed under the flag of the Princedom of Monaco, under the banner of
Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince
? Ah! One would think a lawyer would pay more attention to such legal niceties.”

Her eyes were sparkling with mirth as she shook her head in disbelief.

Rania was flirting with him. He was sure. That look of her eyes half-lidded! Or not. There was something speculative in that look. Cool curiosity. The star-princess looking at some Earthbound relic of the past. He was imagining it. He had to get a grip on himself! But never had he wanted to keep on imagining anything so badly.

The perfume was driving him mad.

“So!” she said, “you offer to fight all the world for me—again. It is gallant, to be sure, but as your proposed conquest is carved out from lands already his, it would mean fighting my betrothed and your Senior Officer, whose world this is. Ximen calls you his brother. A brother like Cain, is it to be?”

Montrose jammed his hands into his pockets and scowled. “I didn’t mean nothing by it—I mean, if you are promised to that skunk Blackie, I shouldn’t be kidding around—”

“Did I reject your offer? This earthly orb is as precious as a jewel, or the beating heart of a nightingale, but small. Will you help me on a larger conquest, one that involves no bloodshed? For that reason I summoned you—for that reason I cured you—for that reason I stirred you from your frozen slumber. Though I have the right to demand your aid, instead I ask it.”

Before he could think of what to answer, there was a flare from overhead like a flash of lightning. Then the light steadied and the cheers of the crowds changed, and became a steady roar.

Menelaus turned, and saw his own scowling face, enormously amplified, looming like the face of megalithic sphinx, splashed against the canopy of stars. Here was his nose, large and misshapen, hanging overhead. He blinked, and saw his eyelids, large as two moons, waft shut and open.

But this was but a corner of the scene that filled the heavens, which all the voices of the people cheered: She was raising one gloved hand to acknowledge the tumult of applause, and smiled with true and heartfelt joy at their adoration.

De god redt de Koningin! Rania! Rania!

She spoke without moving her teeth, nor did her eyes look at him. “I am not really a Queen, you know. The daughter of the Prince of Monaco is not royalty. The Buckhurst case established that members of the Sovereign’s family who do not hold peerage dignities are actually commoners.”

He said, “I thought you ran the whole planet.”

“No. That is the concern of the landing party. The Captain only has authority above the atmosphere. The crew controls the Concordat, which controls the world, so I suppose I reign in truth, even if I do not rule in name. The world does not call me Captain.”

“Eh? So what do they call you?”

“Serene,”
she said, showing her dimples. “Her Serene Highness. Isn’t that sweet of them?”

He raised his hand and mustered a smile and waved as well. The radar-invisible ceramic knife he had slipped into his palm when the bodyguards startled him by moving, he let slip back up his sleeve, of course, before he raised his hand. “Well, Princess, even if you ain’t no real Queen, if the common folk make such an error over so much time, you say we got to honor it, right?”