Count to a Trillion (45 page)

She talked to the pad. The little fairy cursor brought up more screens.

More Monument hieroglyphs appeared on the screen, in a column with the pidgin translation. It was farther than Montrose had ever read; farther than (as best he knew) Del Azarchel had ever read.

Rania said, “Here is a vector sum in the time-relation I call the Concubine Vector. It is when the natural marriage of interests is between unequal partners. The Concubine Vector defines how much abuse and exploitation the inferior partner can be expected to suffer. The mathematics are quite elegant, even if the idea is horrid. One can define precisely, for example, how much shoplifting a shop can tolerate before losing either profit or customers, or how much criminal activity a town should stand before they create a police force, and how much police corruption to endure before creating checks on police power. And so on.”

“So what does the Concubine Vector say?”

“It does not say that the human race will be slaves forever to the machines of Hyades.”

“Good!”

“Only for many tens of millennia.”

“No good.”

“It is, strictly speaking, indentured servitude, not slavery outright, since the laws defined by the Cold Equations require they manumit the race as soon as we have paid back value equal to what it took to conquer us, plus a reasonable profit, of course.”

“Bugger them. They got no right to conquer us and make us pay for it. That’s just stupid. And why are they doing this? And why are they bragging about it? Why post their plans up on this Monument for all and sundry to see?”

“Because the Cold Equations require mutual communication for the natural marriage of interests to work, even within this ‘Concubine Vector’ of unilateral exploitation. The math itself shows things go more badly for both conqueror and conquered if both sides do not know exactly the rules and limits of the other.”

“Okay. So why were you crying with joy?”

“Because I can redeem us. Pay the price they ask. Isn’t it clear?”

“As mud at midnight, it is.”

She tapped two of the little lines of alien math, so that the image rotated, and slid over to another side of the Monument segment, and overlapped a different group of Celtic knots. The negative spaces formed glyphs in the same Monument notation.

“I am called away: and you, if you will come.”

“God himself could not stop me. Away to where?”

“Can’t you read it?” She seemed surprised.

“Not at a glance, when I’m sleep-fogged. What’s it say?”

“It defines our destination.”

In his imagination, he turned the Monument hieroglyphs into an emulation code that he ran in the back of his mind and formatted the results as a visual image: the mighty spiral of the galaxy, arms of billions of stars reaching through clouds and streamers of nebulae, through flocks of frozen planets, rivers of interstellar asteroids, and belts of dark matter, million-year-old storms of energy, gravity stress-points, and all the other minutia the Monument Builders tracked.

Overlaid was a spiderweb of lines representing divarication and information cascade functions, representing political lines of control.

“Do you see it?” she asked.

“I see something interesting. The Hyades Domination is just a collaboration of slave races themselves. They are janissaries; fighting slaves. They belong to a higher power.”

6. Star Map

The Hyades Cluster, at 151 lightyears away, was not the top of the system of lines representing the hierarchy. Functions connected it to the Praesepe Cluster in Cancer, some 550 lightyears away.

Praesepe was shown as the ascendant power in control of the local area of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. The Monument described traffic and control leading not just from Praesepe to the civilization in the Hyades Cluster, but also controls leading to Xi Persei in the California Nebula (1500 lightyears from Sol), the Pleiades (440 lightyears), M34 in Perseus (1400 lightyears), and the Orion Nebula (1600 lightyears) centered at the Trapezium Cluster. The notation showed this last location was the center of engineering activity, where the native civilization was making new stars. Praesepe also ruled the civilizations centered in the Coma Berenices Star Cluster, centered on the A-type binary 12 Comae Berenices: According to the Monument, one star of the pair had been artificially agitated to extreme stellar output.

Six interstellar polities of unimaginable immensity were under the control of whatever ruled the Praesepe Cluster. No human empire, until the rise of the Hermeticists, had learned how to control even so small a dustspeck as that third of the Earth which happened to be dry land, much less conquering and occupying other worlds, gas giants, stars, interstellar clouds of dust. These far-reaching supercivilizations seemed concentrated only in immense clusters of matter-energy, such as star-clusters where the stars were thick, nebula where new stars were being formed.

And yet there was something above and beyond even the Praesepe civilization and its half-dozen servitor civilizations: orbital elements described traffic between this and M3 in Canes Venatici, a globular cluster outside the rim of the galaxy, some 33,900 lightyears distant.

“How do you translate these three glyphs?”

“I think they are proper names, or, rather titles. The first one you translated—back when you were Baby Stinky—as referring to a superior power confronting an inferior, and you called it ‘Hegemony.’ Note the best translation, because it is not merely political superiority, but intellectual, a matter of further time-binding. I called it ‘Domination.’ The notation measuring information volume and matter-energy consumption says that they are so far above us that they can have only a master–servant relationship. A man who owns many flocks to a shepherd-boy.

“The next stands in like ratio with the first: a transcendent authority. I called it ‘Dominion.’ They are as far above us as a shepherd above a sheepdog, a creature that can serve its purposes in a limited way, and can have a reciprocal master–pet relationship, but not a contract. The Dominion is seated at the Praesepe Cluster, relatively near to us.

“But look. Even they are beholden to a power beyond. Whatever holds authority at M3, in Canes Venatici, is represented by the symbol reflected on itself twice, representing two orders of magnitude: it indicates the extension of influence in every direction. An absolute power, a form of being that never ceases to replicate and expand itself. An absolute Authority. It stands to us as a man stands to the benevolent or malevolent microbes or protozoa living in his sheepdog’s stomach, something of interest to the shepherd only insofar as it might prove useful or harmful.”

7. The Absolute Authority

“So we have to go to the bosses that own the Hyades, and get them to call it off. Five hundred fifty lightyears away!” he breathed, awed by the audacity of it. It would be a thousand years and more to go and return, even if the
Hermetic
could attain the night-to-lightspeed velocity her name boasted, and, more difficult, descend back into the metric of normal space at the destination.

Yet if the calculations were correct that the Armada approaching Earth from Hyades was loitering at one tenth of one percent of lightspeed, such a round trip was feasible. It could be made before the Solar System fell.

But Rania said, “The Dominion of Praesepe is of no significance.”

Montrose took a moment to adjust to that comment. The entities who controlled a large fraction of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. No significance.

“Then where are we going?”

“To the throne of the overlords of their overlords.”

“To M3? What then? We’re going to stoke the
Hermetic
to ramming speed, and blow the wogs to smithereens with a filthload of antimatter, right? Niven’s Law says that any ship with enough power to step on the toes of lightspeed, that ship has enough power to fry a planet like an egg. Yeah. That’d make a right shiny firework.”

She actually laughed. Rania threw back her head and laughed a silvery laugh, and her earrings sparkled in the darkness with the motion of her golden head. “Darling! You simply must read the decryption. This civilization … these godlike beings … they occupy a globular cluster.”

“Well, that don’t mean…”

“Messier Object Three is their seat. M3 is made up of several hundred thousand stars. The whole star cluster shifts like a variable even over the course of a single night: countless stars of the RR Lyrae type are crowded in the center, and they can double in brightness in a few hours. If you refer to the Zeta Segment, which contains star descriptions, the Monument says the output variation is a pollution or by-product of their stellar engineering efforts, Dyson spheres choking or releasing excess radiation. And what we see now is borne on lightwaves issued thirty-three thousand years ago. They may have achieved more by now.”

“What if we used Earth’s whole supply of contraterrene?”

“Earth? My husband, if the whole of the Diamond Star V 886 Centauri were flung like an anarchist’s bomb into the core of the cluster, the energy discharge would be less than what we see as differences of output in the cluster stars in a single evening. Blow up a planet? It would be like rushing into a country of several hundred thousand households and shooting one man.”

He opened his mouth to say that, in the cartoons, the Star Fleets were always rushing across to Lundmark’s Nebula or whereverthehell to blow up the enemy homeworld—but he realized how infantile that would sound, so he just said crossly: “So fine. Then there’s no point to going. It’s too far, anyway.”

“A gentler way is open to us.”

“What way?”

“To prove our case in the court of heaven for the freedom of Mankind.”

“Go to
them
? The ones who said in their message that they owned us?”

“I have read the message of the Monument, and seen the truth that it contains. Now you and I must go, armed only with that truth, and face the alien stars, the Archons of the Orion Arm, and demand of them we must be free.”

“Why would they free us?”

“Their own laws compel it. Look at the math: a method of determining, in the aggregate and in the long term, the efficient from the inefficient rules of behavior.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they will treat us like wolves if we are wolves to them, but like men if we prove ourselves their equals. These values allow us to escape their Concubine Vector. Their own sense of efficiency will not allow them to waste a valuable resource. Read! In the Cold Equations of the universe the balance scale weighs our utility to them as subjects, less the risk and cost of conquest, against our utility to them as partners, less the risk and cost of cooperation. They have reduced these complex matters, which so bedevil the governments of Earth, to an algorithm. If we act as their equals, they must recognize us.”

“And what does it mean to be their equals?”

“It means to be a starfaring race.”

8. Aren’t We Now?

“Well, hurrah! We made it! Uh—” He saw the look on her face. “Didn’t we?”

“No.”

“We went to V 886 Centauri and back.”

“No. The expedition was a failure. Can’t you see that? We were attacked—attacked as if by pirates, when the
Hermetic
returned—by our own world. Our arrival overturned the customs and governments, which should, by rights, have been waiting to protect us, to assure us of our property, and to encourage others to dream of like ventures. Men are not starfarers yet.”

Menelaus noticed the implication: that it would be a social change, an evolution in laws and traditions, which would make the human race starfarers. But what nation, what institution, could last so long?

He said only: “And what do we have to do?”

“Mankind has to learn to plan ahead a thousand years or ten thousand, and carry out our plans. To be a starfaring race means to think in the long-term. Space is too vast, the stars are too far, for small or selfish calculation! No race can starfare that cannot keep its purposes fixed and unchanging over long years of time; nor join the rulers of the stars who cannot keep contracts faithfully across long lightyears of space. The short-term races cannot be partners in covenants or voices in the galactic conversation, only serfs: for they have not the attention span.”

Menelaus was silent, wondering, turning over the figures in his mind.

M3 was 33,900 lightyears away. If a man who did not need to eat or sleep started counting the second he saw a ship traveling lightspeed depart for M3, and that tireless man uttered one number every second of the day and night, he would count to a trillion before that number would pass. Including leap years, it would be 31,688 years, 269 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds. He would still have over 3 millenniums to count. That was the one-way trip. Even at the theoretical maximum of nigh-to-lightspeed, assuming no turn-around time, the soonest a verdict could return from M3 to Earth would be 67,800 years from now.

Sixty-seven
thousand
eight hundred years.

The figure was stunning.
A.D.
70800. That is the earliest anyone on Earth would hear about the verdict. The Seven Hundred Ninth Century.

Montrose tried to think of a comparison. When did the Egyptians build the pyramids? No. That was roughly 2500
B.C.
: less than a twelfth of the span of time being completed here. The amount of time to go and return from M3 was equal to from now to the middle of the Paleolithic, circa 60000
B.C.
About when the first canoe was dug and arrowheads shaped into leaf points by flint napping were both still new-fangled things the old folk probably didn’t cotton to, but all the rage amoung the cave-boys.

“It is too damn far. Why not send a radio signal instead? Coherent light does not disperse or lose energy in a vacuum.”

“That would prove only that we are a signal-making race, not a starfaring race.”

He looked at the star-map notation again, revisualized it in another form. He was rather pleased with himself that he could picture more than a million discrete points, representing stars, and their relation to each other in time and space, in his eidetic memory. But he was also a little disappointed: he had been expecting a difference in the nature of his thought, not just in the speed and complexity.