Count to a Trillion (21 page)

“Uh—When the final report to the Joint Commission gets filed.”

“It is not our fault the Commission disbanded while we were away, is it? You are also summoned. You are now awake and fit for duty. No longer on the sick roster.”

There came a clatter of many booted feet. Down the corridor toward them came Del Azarchel’s coterie of ministers and secretaries, footmen and officers, and a squad of Conquistadores in morion helmets, breastplates, and pikes.

The group also had a wardrobe master and a valet. Montrose stared goggle-eyed when the valet started stripping the tunic and trousers off of Del Azarchel, whose throne did not stop moving during this whole, awkward operation. The back of the throne folded down, changing it into something like a gurney, and assistants in blue uniforms with deft motions pushed the naked body of the Master of the World this way and that, in order to wriggle him into his clothing. It was done as nonchalantly as a nurse diapering a baby. The other courtiers and soldiers marched alongside, looking at nothing, noticing nothing.

One or two of the valets attempted a similar deal on him, but Montrose shrugged them away, grabbed the clothing out of their hands, and ran around a convenient corner with the bundle.

He unfolded it. The garment was a spacer’s uniform of ultra-lightweight black silk, with fittings at the wrists and neckline to accept gauntlets and helmet. The fabric looked almost like an organism, because countless tiny tubules for air and coolant ran through the cloth, like the branching veins in a leaf.

But the garb was clearly ceremonial: instead of painting his feet with insulator, for example, he was given a pair of black toe-socks decorated with clips of silver. A scarlet and sable oxygen hood hung down his back, obviously meant for show, not use, and a square of bright-cloth, mirror with its patterns of solar cells, was hung from one epaulette. It was not plugged into a battery, nor was there a parasol wand, so it was also for show, not to protect him from radiant solar heat in a vacuum.

Oddly, the gauntlets were not real gauntlets, there was no lining of pressure-reactive control material: They were just made of soft fabric, not vacuum-proof, and just tucked into his belt at a jaunty angle. Even more oddly, the left sleeve of the uniform was shorter than the right, leaving one forearm bare. Even if he had donned the left gauntlet, it would not have mated with the wrist fittings.

A valet came looking for him. Montrose was willing to let the other man dress him, for the simple reason that one could not fasten up a shipsuit properly by oneself, and Montrose did not know how closely this simpler copy mimicked the original.

He jogged back, finding Del Azarchel waiting in a garden-space beneath a blue dome, and a fountain and pool of water splashed on the tiled floor not far away. The throng had grown. Del Azarchel was now surrounded by a crowd of retainers and courtiers larger than what had been there before. He was telling them about the coming Armada from Epsilon Tauri. Montrose heard a tense question or two, and then a breath of relief swept through the garden-chamber. The courtiers were chuckling. “Eight thousand years,” said one, a handsome youth in a metallic wig. “It is further in our future than all recorded history rests in our past—”

Del Azarchel raised his hand, and the courtiers, all of them, fell silent as if a switch had been thrown. Del Azarchel was now dressed in a black shipsuit like Montrose wore, except that there were silver fittings at his throat and shoulders.

Montrose came forward, caught sight of himself in the glass on the wall behind Del Azarchel, and smiled. “We’re not going to shave our heads? The suit officer won’t let us board if we don’t have clean skull fits.”

Del Azarchel smiled with the left half of his mouth, raising one eyebrow. “You think this is not real? It is very real, I assure you. Hylics are not allowed to wear these fabrics. Only us.”

“Who-lacks?” Montrose recalled that the Iron Ghost version of Del Azarchel had also used the word.

Del Azarchel made a rueful smile. “Hylics. An unfortunate term, perhaps, coined in more contentious times—it refers to the common people, the mundane ones, those who trod the earth.”

“Whad’ya mean
only us
? Us who?”

“The Men of the Stars. The Learned. We who possess the secret knowledge. You remember the perfume of outer space? That smell, the strange ozone smell of the outer darkness? You remember what it is like to step into the airlock, and hear the ringing in your ears as pressure returns, and catch a whiff of that strange odor, it tingles in the nose like dark smoke, long after the valve is shut and the atmosphere is pumped in. You recall? Those who wish to depart the Earth and smell that scent, they are our servants here, and students. They are called by a nobler name: Psychics.”

From the looks of pride that stiffened on the faces of the men around him, Montrose understood this referred to the dandies in jeweled coats, wearing their odd wigs of white wire.

“I thought they were your roughhouse boys. Knights and bishops and, and, uh, rooks or whatever you call them. Count Dracula and Duke Ellington and so on.”

“Think of them as a Mandarin class. They have the power to rule, it is true, but it is due to the merit of their several attainments, the exemplary nature of their service to human destiny.” The men stood taller at these words, proud as petted hounds. “The elite of this new age are the acolytes and familiars of the Highest Order; students of the hidden truth; men who have moved beyond the Hylic stage of pure selfish materialism. It is a meritocracy of the mind, the rule by philosopher-kings. And so we call them Psychics.”

“Not people with way-cool mind powers? Damn. You got to pick a better word. That’s just misleading. I was sure folk in the future world would be able to focus their brainwaves, and blow folks’ skulls off, phlegm like that. What do you call the highest order, if these guys are just the students?”

“Pneumatics.”

“Jesus up a tree, you gotta talk to someone about picking better names for stuff, Blackie.”

Del Azarchel beckoned to a figure in white. The man stepped forward. It was the old Oriental doctor who had first examined Montrose when he awoke. This man did not wear one of those metallic wigs. Did that mean he was a servant, a Hylic, rather than a boss?

Del Azarchel said to Montrose: “I am sending you ahead of me, to the Conclave, because of this business I must here conclude. My court does not seem to be taking the matter very soberly—which is to be expected. Large numbers can stagger the mind, and large numbers of years dull the imagination. I will come rapidly. Meanwhile, the ride will give you an opportunity to be examined, since you just had another episode of your, ah, other self. If you would, please.”

Montrose had been pushed around a bit too much of late, especially with Del Azarchel playing a swift trick with that drink, and then accusing him of poaching his old lady. He thought it was about time to dig in his heels.

“
Sending
me? I’ll be damned first. You can
ask
. You seem to forget that I don’t work for you.”

“And you seem to forget that you are still a member of the crew, and I am in charge of the landing party.”

“What? That means landings on the Monument surface! Or some other alien body we might encounter. You are talking as if we never came home.…”

“This Earth is not the one we left. To us, it is an alien body. The ship is still aloft, and her weapons are all that hold the globe in check. Did you resign your commission?”

He thought, but did not say,
There are no weapons mounted aboard the ship
. That had been one of the conditions permitting her to launch. Instead he said, “But the Captain is dead.”

“A new Captain was appointed, as per our articles. Did you resign your commission?”

“No, I reckon not.”

“Then you are still a member of the crew. As soon as the doctor discharges you officially from the sick roster, you must report for duty. The carriage is yonder. Please move briskly. Time is short.”

“Short!” snorted Montrose. “Eighty centuries! What do you consider a long time?”

“A man might not have the patience to count to a trillion,” answered Del Azarchel coldly, “but the number is real whether he counts it or not. A man might not think he will live to see the future. But it will come, with him, or without him, by his effort, or by the effort of others. I am asking you to report to the Conclave not as a penalty, but as an honor, that you might be one of those men who will shape the future and make it come as it ought.”

Montrose had nothing to say back to that.

2. The Buried Carriage

Then the double doors slid shut, and Montrose found himself alone with the doctor.

“Please sit,” said the doctor in a voice that brooked no disagreement. “I will not have all my work on your skull undone merely because of a fall.”

Montrose realized that he could argue with the Master of the World, but not with a sawbones. He sat. He felt lightheaded as soon as he did, and this scared him a moment. Maybe his head was not back to normal after all. “Doc, I am feeling a little dizzy.…”

“That’s normal,” the doctor snapped.

“Normal for what? You didn’t give me any pills or anything.”

“Normal during descent.” The old man’s eyes crinkled as he stared at Montrose, with what seemed a rather impatient look. “This leg is a gravity train. After we leave the peninsula, there is a drop-off as we descend beneath the continental shelf. We have to descend to reach the main line, which follows the curve of the mantle of the Earth in a suborbital arc.”

“How do you maintain the tube walls against the pressure of the magma?”

The doctor shook his head. “Something called magnetic capillaries inflate a pipeline, which is composed of something else, a heat-resistant substance called openwork carbon nanofiber. Ovenwork? Something like that. I’m not an engineer. It uses up a great deal of energy to maintain pipeline integrity, but these days—” His shrug was eloquent. Energy was so inexpensive, that it was not even worth finishing a sentence to explain it.

“What peninsula?”

“The Florida peninsula. That was a complex buried beneath the old spaceport called Canaveral. It is the primary point for maintaining radio-link with the
Hermetic
.”

Montrose had notice no lightheadedness the first time he’d ridden this rail system, with Del Azarchel. Of course, he had been deep in talk with his friend, and had not just had a recent episode of unconsciousness, or superconciousness, or possession, or whatever it was. Also, he did not know if this branch of the evacuated depthtrain passed through the mantle of the Earth at the same angle as where he had been previously.

The smoothness had deceived him, and the lack of noise. The engines in his day always lost some energy through heat, noise, and vibration. Maybe here in the future, they had found a way to machine-tool their engines to more perfect specifications. More precise fits meant less vibration. Montrose realized the titanic energy supply the Hermeticists had brought back from the Diamond Star meant not just more raw power to level mountains and burn fortresses, but more energy, and hence more time, effort, and precision, were free to be spent on a wide variety of tasks. What was the major difference between a savage caveman and a civilized Texan, after all? Not just tools and organization, but the magnitude of power at his fingertips.

His mother once had said that the difference from a caveman was education. That may be. But what, ultimately, was education? Something to increase the efficiency of brainpower. What was brainpower? What was a brain, really, except for an engine that turned the noise into signal—an engine that took a chaos of raw sense data and turned it into organized patterns of pretty electroneural charges holding meaningful conclusions about the universe? The more energy a civilization controlled, the more brainpower it could bring to bear on a wider range of non-routine tasks.

The thought cheered him. Maybe the future that Del Azarchel had made was not so bad. It sure sounded like some sort of renaissance or industrial revolution was ongoing, if Blackie’s boasts were true.

Ah, but that was the stone in the shoe, wasn’t it?

“Hey, Doc. I was wondering about the fighting.”

“What fighting?”

“You know—brush wars, proxy wars, border disputes, Mormon lynching. That sort of thing. I mean, it seems quiet now, but you know how these things go.”

Nothing could have convinced Montrose more rapidly than the look of surprise on the old doctor’s face that perhaps he had misjudged Del Azarchel. Could there really be, for once in human history, no fighting going on? Montrose did not think it possible; and yet the shock of the doc was perfectly sincere.

The man said with a tinge of exasperation in his voice, “What are you talking about? Warfare was all abolished by the Concordats. The police are all locally controlled, each by their parish. There are unpaid volunteer militias in some areas, but they are armed with nonlethal weapons, pain-induction rays, and gumthrowers, for they face rioters and malcontents, not armed forces. There is no need to heed rogue stations—the accredited press maintains accurate reports.”

“Pox! No one has guns?”

The doctor turned his eyes upward, as if in thought. “The ruling houses in each area will keep retainers and men-at-arms, of course, or employ ignoble horse troopers to run down poachers or wiremen trying to set up pirate powercast rectennae. Most regional Parliaments maintain honor squads, as a symbol of their sovereignty. Protectorate areas are patrolled by Landkeepers, and they are armed. The Holy Father has the Swiss Guard. Of course, with contraterrene weapons, you do not need an army to depopulate a city, merely one civic assassin.” The doctor’s face was stern, and his shrug was short. He was clearly a man who did not think well of firearms.

“What is this Concordat?”

“The social covenant. The Princess has ordained peace throughout the world.” The old man’s face softened into a mass of wrinkles when he smiled. “We have no external enemies, and hence no wars. Peace has smiled on the human race at last!”