Count to a Trillion (15 page)

“I don’t recollect Little Big Brother able to do anything approaching human creative thinking.”

“We improved them during the trip. We call it Ratiotech—thinking machines. By the time of the Space War, the Ratiotech-type electronic brains could perform deductions, and even, through large-scale trial and error, make a fair copy of inductive and value-judgment thinking. That second step was called Sapientech: judgment engines. But they were sleepwalker brains, merely machines, despite all their raw power. But we are on the brink of a true breakthrough. History will turn a corner. We are working on a version of a truly awake, truly self-aware, truly alive, artificial intellectual creature: a Xypotech, a machine that is awake.”

3. Spagyric Garden

Del Azarchel called his entourage. There they were again: Conquistadores in armor, footmen in dark coats, long-wigged courtiers in shining silk jackets, and of course, the doctor in white. Apparently in the future it took a score of men to walk down a hallway.

It was a magnificent hallway. They walked or rolled past endless lines of ornate doors, rose-abundant vases, strange statues made of liquid light. Montrose noticed how many mirrors and archways and trompe l’oeil illusions adorned the hall, which was wider than the nave of a cathedral. The architecture and décor fooled the eye to make it seem all the larger.

They walked down steps of marble and through doors of crystal into an indoor garden whose far walls held convincing green hills, and the dome was painted in an eye-deceiving illusion of early twilight skies: a western sky tainted red by hidden lanterns, with Venus bright and low, and the eastern sky twinkling with diamonds in the constellations of early stars. The clouds above looked real: Montrose could not tell if they were painted or projections or real wisps of dry ice fog blown in for the occasion. He wondered if all those years in cramped quarters aboard the
Hermetic
had given Del Azarchel a hunger for open spaces.

The high dome painting was embellished with one long-tailed star brighter than the rest, flying on silvery wings, like a sword hanging over the world. The
Hermetic
.

The garden was bright with things he did not recognize: purple flowers with black centers, and tiger-striped orchids, and a red flower that looked like lace, draped like long tattered strands of some defeated but miniature army. Here was a bush with leaves so white they seemed like mirrors; there an organism he did not recognize at all: something was a set of funnels like trumpets made of what looked like green glass. And mingled among them were what seemed to be large-scale versions of microscopic organisms: things like translucent whips, puffballs of purple dotted with tawny spots, mushrooms as brightly colored as the skins of poisonous frogs.

Del Azarchel’s chair seemed able to glide across the grassy lawn with no difficulty. He made an expansive gesture. “Our grove of wonders. We use it for spagyrics, fermentation of neuro-active chemicals, or the extraction of rare compounds or ores from the ashes of plants whose roots gather trace elements from the soil. Mostly we train the fungus to grow a particular type of submicroscopic superconductive strand we use in our Xypotech circuits, strands not available anywhere else. It seems living things can spin to a finer set of specifications than any machine shop.”

“Its underground. You have to pipe in sunlight.”

“We can control cross-pollination. And, no we do not want any of these spores or experiments to fall into the hands of a well-equipped modern university, or else they would be able to reverse-engineer the mathematical model we used for our gene coding, and any fairly bright grad student might be able to figure out what we mean to do.”

Montrose gave him a hard look. “Most scientists are eager to share their results. What do you mean to do?”

“Change fate,” said Del Azarchel with a sad and thoughtful smile.

“Fate? I never heard of such a beastie,” said Montrose. “Fate don’t grow in Texas, so there we make our own.”

“Since you do not know what a cruel beast it is, I must pause to show you,” and he turned aside, and glided down a short, crooked path to where a ring of cypress trees stood solemnly.

There were slabs of marble and figurines of angels set among the flowerbeds or beneath the shades of potted weeping willows. The figures were equestrian statues.

Montrose suddenly halted. “Are we in a graveyard, Blackie?” He looked down, feet tingling, and wondered on what or whom he was stepping. Not far from his toes were stones. They were headstones.

E
CLIPSE 2369-2399

H
AVANA 2372-2395

D
IOMED 2366-2385

S
ARK 2361-2383

B
YERLEY’S
G
REEK 2360-2379

A
GNER 2360-2386

“So people here in the future don’t live past thirty?” said Menelaus. “Also, y’all got some funny names.”

“This is a pet cemetery.” Del Azarchel was trying not to peer into the face of Menelaus, evidently unable to discern whether the other man was kidding him. “You stand above the bones of some of my best beloved quarterhorses. The next row over holds two of my jockeys, who asked to be buried alongside.”

“Hope they died first. If not, that’d take the sport a bit far, but I can’t say as I blame ’em. I had a three-year-old named Bothersome once.”

“Hm. That is rather young for a jockey; but toddlers are light in the saddle, I grant you.”

Del Azarchel said this so smoothly, that now it was Montrose’s turn to peer.

“So what is with the bronze ape, Blackie?”

Surrounded by a circle of ferns was a statue of a great ape. The creature was in a posture of sorrow, one clumsy hand raised up as if to beg. The other clutched a talking-plate of the type used by the deaf and dumb. The eyes were mournful, looking upward, vacant.

“That is a monument to Baker’s Dozen, the thirteenth and last in a series of Great Apes at Oxford, who learned to speak using the somatic pattern method. She was only about as intelligent as a three-year-old—a dull three-year-old at that—and spent her last days in a quarantine hospital, playing with toys and trying not complain or cry. They did not have the heart, the two scientists who raised her, to tell her she was dying.”

“Cassimere and Morrow. We studied their work extensively, since they are the only people ever (’sides us, natch!) to try to map human symbols to a nonhuman mind.”

“She was the last of her species. Dozen the Ape died of the Juedenvirus the very same day I was born. She has always haunted me. Had it not been for the war—who knows? Man might not be alone. What might your drug have done for them? There could have been a second human race, younger brothers, to work alongside us.”

The bronze face was frozen in a look of almost human suffering, tragic, dignified, silent, futile. “Quite an imagination, whoever made this. Almost looks sad.”

“The sculptor worked from photographic models. That face, that poor subhuman face, wears the expression of those who, unlike you, meet fate, and cannot master it.”

“Why this statue next to your horse boneyard?”

“For contrast. Ah! I keep her here, my iron ape, to remind me how life works.”

“Oh? And how is that?”

“Life cares nothing for justice. The Great Apes were a more evolved form of life, more intelligent, more adaptable, more like us. Stupid beasts, horses, easily spooked, and without enough sense to come in out of a cold rain. Yet why are they alive, whereas the apes died?”

“The Jihad Plague was easier to cure in horses than in apes.” Menelaus shrugged. “Or ’swhat I heard, anyway.”

“No. The answer was that the stupider creatures were more valuable to men, their masters, and we spent more time, effort, energy, and attention to save them. It was in our self-interest, since, during those years, everyone in South America and Africa was turning from petrol-based back to horse-based transport. The horse was more useful.”

4. Brachistochrone Curve

By that point they had left the garden behind. When Menelaus realized they were headed toward one of those buried vacuum-pipeline magnetic-levitation train stations Del Azarchel had boasted of, he expected to see some stainless-steel platform, zooming cars shaped like pneumatic cylinders, or to hear the humming of vast solenoids.

Instead, they merely entered a chamber that looked, at first glance, like any other, windowless, but adorned with the flowers and ferns spacemen have always loved. Here were shelves of old-fashioned leather-bound books, and there was a chessboard. Perhaps it was a library. Then he noticed that all the chairs in the room were padded and could swivel to face the same direction. He glanced back at the door: or rather, doors. He had been fooled because they folded into the walls, but he could see the inner threshold did not quite touch the outer. This chamber was nested inside some sort of shell, and presumably the long axis of the chamber pointed in the direction of motion. Library? A private depthtrain car, with material to read during longer trips.

He seated himself in one of the comfortable chairs while a wine steward passed out wine. A young food taster in a blue skirt and white apron sipped it before passing it to him, and Menelaus scowled at the girl, wondering if she’d brushed her teeth. A medical readout on her apron monitored blood chemistry and nerve conditions. “Couldn’t you get a guinea pig or a chemistry set to take your job?”

He was sorry he said anything, because, during the moment while he spoke, and before Menelaus could raise the drink to his lips, the sawbones, that Oriental doctor in white, had snatched the drink out of his reach, and gave him a cold and unsmiling nod.

Menelaus leaned forward. “Blackie, can you send these guys out?”

Del Azarchel made the slightest of nods, and the crowd of the entourage, without any further words, made their elaborate bows and backed out or marched out of the chamber.

Montrose snatched the wineglass back out of the doctor’s hand as the man was bowing out. He favored the other with a wink and a grin as the doors slid shut between them. Then he tossed down the drink without tasting it: a waste of fine wine, to be sure, but he needed the fortitude.

Del Azarchel was smiling his dazzling smile, and had one eyebrow raised, as if on the edge of asking a question.

Montrose spoke first. “What happened to Grimaldi?”

Del Azarchel’s face fell. “Ah. Prince Ranier suffered terribly from the confinement, the loneliness of space, and the frustration, the maddening, eternal puzzle of the Monument. The sense that there were infinite secrets just beyond his grasp, written in a code the human brain was not well formed enough to understand—the sheer frustration was like a miserly debtor, and exacted its levy with interest.”

“You saying he went nuts? Pestilence! I don’t believe you. He was more stable than you. Or me.”

Del Azarchel said, “I am not a psychiatrist: I only know the strain and pressure were terrible. His judgment was affected. Captain Grimaldi came to increasingly strange and outlandish conclusions about the Diamond Star, and the Monument, and what the signs and symbols meant. He was trying to see the patterns in it, you see, all the crooked alien hieroglyphs, all the rippling, eye-confounding cursives. Who knows what he saw? When the Conclave judged him unfit for command, he refused to step down. We were not a military expedition. Didn’t we have the right to vote on it?”

“Actually, no. If I recall the governing Articles aright, the Conclave can’t do more than advise him to step down. It cannot force him. Only the ship’s doctor, for medical grounds, had the right.”

Del Azarchel waved his hand as if to brush away Montrose’s comment like so much smoke. “These events, to me, are long past, and I am not a lawyer. You will forgive me if I skip certain details. Even after so many years, the memory is nightmarish to me. I am not proud of what happened.”

Montrose was aghast. “Not proud! I ’spect not! You were supposed to
obey
the Captain, even if he ordered you to die.”

Del Azarchel spoke softly, reluctantly. “He did.”

“He did what?”

“He ordered our deaths.”

“Pox on that! Not Grimaldi, he was not like that kind of man!”

“Years and decades fled while you slumbered. You know nothing of what he was like.”

“I know Grimaldi was the finest officer alive.”

“So I knew as well, for so he was—when you knew him. Those days were past. I told you, he was under pressure. It affected his judgment.”

“Insane? The ship’s doctor could have made a ruling.”

“Dr. Yajnavalkya was a malnutrition victim. During the hunger watches. The quarter-rations could not sustain him, not at his age. I do not say the Captain went mad. But he did order us to halt the star lifting.”

“What? But that means—”

He saw from the look in Del Azarchel’s eyes that there was no need to finish the sentence. They both knew the facts.

There was no return trip without the antimatter to use as fuel. The whole expedition plan turned on the idea that the robotic mining ship
Croesus
could power a braking laser to stop the incoming
Hermetic,
and power up that laser to accelerate her to interstellar velocities again.

Space near the Diamond Star had been swept clear of normal matter, of course. There was one superjovian in a far orbit, farther from V 886 Centauri than Pluto was from Sol, a terrene-matter body called Thrymheim. That was all. There was nothing else in the system. No uranium-bearing asteroids. Nothing for the
Croesus
to use as a power source for the launching laser to propel the
Hermetic
on her silvery sails back across the widest abyss—over a light-century—mankind had ever crossed.

And even that would not have been enough. The expedition plan included making up the marginal loss in sailing efficiency with onboard fuel: The dangerous contraterrene was to be carried in a double-zoned magnetic “nozzle” generated well to the aft of the hull, and bombarded with pellets to produce reaction thrust.

Del Azarchel shook his head, this time with wonder and sorrow. “Had we obeyed, the whole expedition, all for which we had sacrificed, would have been for naught. Without the antimatter, we could not even have powered the radio-laser to narrowcast our findings back to Earth, and so no history would remain to tell of us, or what had become of us. Without the antimatter, without the promise that we were carrying antimatter, the ungrateful generation that ruled the strange Earth to which we had returned would not have been convinced to shoulder the expense of orbiting a braking laser of their own. The Golden Age we ushered in, a time of unimaginable plenty, wealth, and abundant energy, all would have been stillborn. The tribes and nations of the world would still be consuming each other in wars: instead, at long last, at long and long last indeed, the universal dream of man has come to fruition, carried in on the wings of the
Hermetic
! The world is one: and all the princes, republics, parliaments, and wardenships are under our feet. At long last: peace! Peace on Earth. Surely that was worth it!”