Count to a Trillion (43 page)

“What happened?”

“War interrupted.”

“Which one?”

Rania just shrugged. “The Yellow War.”

“Which one was that? What was it about?”

Rania spoke in a soft, haunted voice. “You may ask the survivors for details. Inspect your coffins dated between 2333–2338. Both sides experimented on captured civilian populations with RNA-spoofing. The bloated monstrosities and boneless knots of flesh were biosuspended, because there was no way to keep them alive. They are now your wards.” She looked up.

Menelaus wore a puzzled frown, as if he had not realized that the fate of those slumbering souls was now his responsibility.

She said, “Work on the tower slowed. It was maintained by private subscriptions for a while.”

Menelaus gazed at the Celestial Tower. “And then?”

“And then what? There is no ‘and then.’”

“The tower is still there.”

“Worthless to Earth,” she said, sadly.

“The road to the stars!”

“The road to nowhere. The moonbase was abandoned due to bone-sickness. No colony on Ganymede was ever founded. It would have cost less, and been a friendlier environment, to build a greenhouse at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, and farm that. But since the Patagonian, African, and Gobi wastelands were blooming for the first time since the Triassic … so who would bother? After the war, first one institution then another maintained it, despite the volcano danger here. The Third Era of Space could begin at any moment, since launch costs are, even now, as long as that tower stands, merely the cost of a spider car, one going up, one coming down. Oh, look!”

He saw, high above, what seemed to be a meteor shower. For a moment or so, silver streaks of fire were falling to either side of the twilit, red-gold tower.

“What is it?”

“Decay. Fragments of ablative ceramic, from the upper structure, microscopic nano-tube fragments that have lost their Van der Waals adhesion. The tower is old, old, and its joints are stiff; its skin is peeling; upper sections suffer from sunburn and accumulated metal fatigue. It is a pendulum, you see, but the balancing governors are no longer in synch. I had been hoping your Pellucid would help us solve some of the calculation errors.”

Pellucid was the name for his Van Neumann diamond project. He had finally decided on an environment where the machines could be released with minimal danger to the human race. The depthtrain system had given him the idea.

Pellucid would be sent to govern a system for sensing and distributing pressures across the tectonics of Quito’s volcanic region. If it worked, Pellucid would be able to grow down the sides of old volcano vents, and spread as far and wide along the inner mantle of the Earth as need be, to gather valuable information about magma pressure systems as they formed. The more miles the diamond colony covered, the more calculating power it would have. Any single diamond, or any set of them, could be turned to any number of specialized functions as need dictated. The trick was to make them die on exposure to surface conditions.

Rania was speaking softly. “The tower is a living thing. It breathes, pumping air up to the station; its heart pumps hydraulics and coolants; it sweats, after a fashion, to distribute heat across its skin; it has nerves to carry energy and sensations of stress and wind-shear from one part of its structure to another; and it moves, shifting weight, flexing, maintaining balance. I have always felt its sorrow, rooted to this spot of rock, its upper head in space.”

“It is just standing there?”

“Standing, no. It sways like a dancer: these inhabited sections at the bottom, the malls and parking warehouses are an anchor point.”

“You know what I mean. It ain’t being used.”

“But it is. The
Torre Real
was recently bought by my people, and renamed the Celestial Tower. I wanted to call it the Golf Tee, because of its shape, but my publicity consultants insisted on a more dignified name: I should have followed my instinct and saved myself their fees, because these days everyone calls it the Folly Tower.”

Menelaus frowned when he heard that. “One of most ace-high bits of engineering this poxy race of man ever built, and they call it foolwork? Someone should make ’em regret that name. What if we set it to rights, put it back in business? We got the money.”

“A noble dream,” she said, almost dismissively, but smiling. “Del Azarchel would have allowed it, had I married him, because then any increase in my power and authority would have increased his also. But now?”

Montrose looked up. “I saw a flare.”

“It is a correction burn. There is a tourist hotel at the spot twelve miles up, clinging to the carbon nanotube tether proper. The cable swells from a one-centimeter diameter at the top of the anchor atop the base superscraper, to almost a hundred meters wide at the geostationary point. The tourist hotel is much lower than that, still inside the stratosphere. It was ordered closed many years ago.”

He opened his mouth to ask why, and snapped it shut again. He knew why. Del Azarchel did not want people being too curious about outer space.

He pointed at a cluster of lights, bright as a small city seen from orbit.

He said, “Is that it?”

“No, that is the spaceport itself, which is above the atmosphere. You cannot see from this angle, but the cable is bent to the west whenever a payload rides up, due to the differences in angular momentum of the spider car versus the various sections of cable—the horizontal increment of speed increases with altitude. The Hotel of Sorrow is not overhead, but hangs above the Pacific Ocean.”

“If I had had a tower like this, hanging up, all shining over my head, I would not have waited for Del Azarchel and his bully boys to give me permission to mount up and go into space. I would have stormed the damn place, and forced my way aboard any vessels the spaceport could support! What happened to these people these days? Spineless as squids, I call ’em.”

“Some cherish the long peace. Some fear a return of fire from heaven.”

“Man shouldn’t be afraid. Men were bolder, life was better, in my time.”

“Oho? Was it? So says a man who shot lawyers for a living, back in the good old days.” Her eyes twinkled with mirth.

“There are some that envy me that job. I’ve heard it called a public service, shooting lawyers.” He had to smile.

She did not let her smile show, but there was a lilt in her voice. “Let us excuse it on those grounds, then, and call it the practice of a more excitable era. But perhaps you will tell me more about why your people hanged Mormons?”

“When they stole our women. But who cares who shot first? War changes people, and biowar makes ’em crazy. I weren’t around when the rumors flew that the Mormons were tainted, infected with Spore, and wouldn’t take blood transfusions needed to clean them. I heard stories from my aunt what those rumors did. The Burnings. It must never happen again.”

She said, “To eliminate all diseases was the dream of the Pure Order. They were well on their way to making the race too hygienic to resist the next disease: and there was a next one, and many next ones. No pathogens of this century are entirely natural. Those not caused nor encouraged by bad medical practice of the last generation, are descended from non-self-eliminating biotic weapons from the generation before.”

Menelaus just grunted. “Darwin’s curse.”

“Curse? If so, we must take care with our own curses. The secret of second youth we released to the public I fear will also result in the same dieback cycle, as pathogens robust enough to survive the molecular-level scrubbing the second youth process involves will find themselves alone in a rich and newly-virginal environment, without competition, and without natural defenses against them.”

“Agh! That’s pessimistic talk. You got to have faith that our children will be able to invent the means to fight whatever comes up. We could not just sit on the secret of youth and let everyone’s grammy up and die.”

Rania smiled, as she always did when the talk turned to children.

Menelaus said, “Hellfire, and I ain’t just talking about disease: disease did not cause the Human Torch parades in Utah. One day science will fix things, so this part of us, this vicious part, will be caged up. The Beast. Maybe we can make a child without the gene for sorrow and rage, maybe we can make a thinking machine without the subroutine for hate. Maybe.”

“We have the genes and routines now,” she said. “The cure for hate is forgiveness. The cure for outrage is humility. The cure for sorrow is thankfulness. Even a child can learn these three: no grand scheme of human eugenics to produce the transhuman is needed.”

He gave her a long look. “I wonder if the Hermeticists who made you left out all the flaws of this old, sad, all-too-human race. You should be the mother of new people.”

“Oh my! Such a responsibility. And when should we get started on that project?”

She smiled, then, and the towerlight was as bright as moonlight, so he could see her smiling, a dim gold shadow in the night, and so he kissed her.

When they paused to breathe, she asked, “Where are you going to stable your horse? We cannot bring him up on the spider car.”

3. Limits

Menelaus Montrose, when he should have been the happiest man on Earth on the happiest day of his life, was aware of an ache in his throat, a bitterness—no, it was a
resentment,
a feeling that he had been betrayed. It reminded him of the time his mother had thrown his birthday cake to the hogs, because he had not done his chores (it had been his birthday that day, after all, and Leonidas told him it was okay to sleep late). With one part of his mind, he told himself that Del Azarchel was the source of this feeling. Blackie was a cold bastard, no doubt.

Another part of his mind told him it was the future that had betrayed him, the human race itself. Filthy, stupid poop-flinging tool-using monkeys not smart enough to use their tools to better themselves, and live like men, not monkeys.

During the ride up the side of the cable, his mood grew more and more elated the higher they rose. The scattered lights of the city fell away. The ocean was a dark seething mass, still tinted rose-red by the sunset receding westward, but more and more of it came into view as they rose higher, outpacing the dusk.

The car was a bubble affixed to a contraption of legs that were pulled along by induction currents in the cable itself, and the legs were hinged to grow wider as the cable grew wider.

He spoke about the wealth his marriage had put into his hands; he spoke about rebuilding. Why couldn’t the Celestial Tower be restored to its old glory? Why not establish a moonbase, mine the asteroids, put men in space instead of just satellites? And why not colonize Titan?

“And flying cars,” he added. “We’re in the future. There are supposed to be flying cars.”

She said, “And what about Del Azarchel? He will prohibit it. Titan is outside of spy bee range.”

“He cannot really be against a space program! When we were young—well, spittle, colonizing habitats both spaceborne and planetary, ’smostly all we talked on. Besides, the news that the
Hermetic
is making a second expedition to the Diamond Star might quell the discontent gripping the—uh, the masses.” (He had almost said
the Hylics
but he caught himself.)

“He woke you because he was desperate to wake Xypotech Del Azarchel—I weary of saying the phrase—I hereby dub him ‘X’-Archel.” (She pronounced it
Exarchel
.) “By this means he hoped to send to the Diamond Star the only person he trusted not to overthrow him when he returned. Himself. One immortal version of his mind would rule the world while the other—the first of an endlessly self-replicating multitude of Van Neumann ships—would conquer the stars. He has no more need of the human race, for the posthuman starfaring race he intends to be is merely himself, multiplied to infinity.”

“And the rest of Mankind?”

“The myriads of the human race suffer the fate of those spermatozoa who fail to penetrate the egg.”

“Fine. We get to the Diamond Star first, come back, and make his worst nightmare come true, overthrow his damned tyranny, set up something where everyone gets a vote!”

She shook her head. “While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution, perhaps self-defeating. I suggest that only a plan even more far-sighted and ambitious than his will prevail.”

“Har! Or is it just that
you
helped designed this worldwide tyranny, so you don’t want to see it blasted?”

She said, “The world we found when the
Hermetic
descended was not as culturally coherent as some English colony like your America with two hundred years of experience ruling themselves. I had to work with the people who were as I found them, people more fearful of bioterror and plague and poverty than they were of servitude. They have their limitations. And I, my husband, even I have mine. I hope you are not like Ximen, and think of me as some fairy-being with a magic wand?”

“You’re on a first-name basis with him?”

“What? With my ex-fiancée, who raised me from a child, and I lived in a starship within shouting distance of him my whole young life? It would be odd if I were not.”

“So what are your limitations? Can’t hit a piñata while hoodwinked?”

“I don’t know what that is. My limit is that while I can inspire a social and political system for humans to maximize personal liberty within the context of minimizing external conflict, I simply cannot reduce the
how
and the
when
and the
why
to adjust the system to a simple algorithm. There must be a posthuman to make adjustments, personal authority on several levels, wise judges, statesmen who transcend the mere hedonistic calculus of power and politics. You see the problem?”

“The problem is you were raised on a ship, so you think everyone obeying one captain is the norm. The problem is you did not set up a Democracy.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Democracy on a worldwide scale? The Chinese outnumber the Australians, and would have voted to abolish international corporate structures. The Azanians would have merely bribed Africa to vote their way on matters of public import. The Copts would have voted the Jews out of Babylon.”