Count to a Trillion

5

The Brotherhood of Man

1. A Toast

“Well, hell, Blackie! Stand up and let me take a gander at you—! I been wondering—”

He had been fooled by the lack of wheels. The tall black chair slid forward over the floor, silent as a ghost, and Menelaus could not see the mechanism beneath the chair base that moved it. But it was a wheelchair.

“Uh—sorry—uh … Jesus nailed up a tree! How’d it happen?”

“My staff of doctors say it was spinal trauma, when I was thrown from a stallion, my beloved Eclipse. I think they have misdiagnosed the permanency of the affliction, and do not know its real cause.”

“Damnation and plague! I know what a horseman you are. Were. Damn!”

“Worry not,” said the old man with a twinkle in his eye. “Did I not say that our tomorrow had arrived? Petty problems as this one can be solved: the secret of youth, the creation of life, the conquest of the human nature, the maturation of man from upright ape to soaring angel! The time of Man beyond Man is about to dawn, and you, now revenant from your coffin, restored beyond hope from madness, you shall be in the audacious vanguard. Come! Let us storm the crystal ramparts of the unimagined future, brass trumps blaring, and banners streaming! Welcome to life!”

No sorrow could endure the onslaught of Del Azarchel’s ringing words, his charming smile, his joy.

“It is good to be here,” said Montrose. And he threw back his head, and uttered a whoop of pure delight.

“The event calls for wine!” said Del Azarchel. His eyes were shining. At his gesture, a wine-steward in powder blue brought in an ice bucket, and a parlor maid in a black uniform and frilly cap brought a pair of glasses on a tray.

Menelaus noticed the posture and costumes of the folk in the room. It took him a moment to realize what was missing. Perhaps in his great-grandfather’s time, it had been the habit of non-Europeans of high rank to dress in European fashions, coats and ties and so on. But when Menelaus was young, only lawyers and bankers still affected that old costume. High-ranking non-Indians dressed as much like Brahmins or Kshatriya as they dared, sporting dhoti or pancha, even when not allowed to wear yagnopavita or choti. But no one here was wearing Indian trousers, sacred thread, or brow-paint. This would seem to indicate that the fashions of the world, following the powers of the world, had changed again.

There were three distinct groups: the first wore bright hues and glittered, and the second wore dark uniforms, who bowed and hung back. Peacocks and crows. The third group were pikemen, who stood at attention. Hawks.

The brightly dressed were tall and dark-eyed men with shoulder-length hair of silver. They seemed to be wearing wigs of fine metallic threads, or perhaps some odd gene-engineering allowed them to grow strangely lambent fibers of zinc-hued strands from their scalp. Their tunics and long-coats were patterned with gems and threaded with wires and status lights.

The cut and ornamentation of the tunics, the rings at the collars or the ankle-clasps sealed to boot-tops, looked like the fashion elements were borrowed from spacer uniforms or pressure suits. Certainly the bright heraldic designs and emblems the tunics flaunted looked like the easy-to-discern patterns of graffiti Montrose and his fellow spacemen had stenciled on their spacesuits during idle hours between training at the space station.

The courtiers wore phones on one wrist, or on both wrists, muted but scintillating with text. Perhaps it was a symbol of social status, a sign that they were continuously monitoring important events elsewhere. It was surely symbolic, because not once did any courtier actually look down at his phone to read the messages and reports blinking there.

The second group were servants including nurses, clerks, footmen, and pretty chambermaids. Their hair was natural hair, and it was worn short. Even the girls had pageboy bobs. Apparently only the superiors had the privilege of wearing the strange-looking silver-white wigs.

Menelaus had once mapped changes in fashion into his divarication function, with the cuts of clothing expressed in the form of bytes of information, and compared to the rate of linguistic or political-economic changes. There were a number of factors controlling the rate of fashion mutation, including things like the volume of money in circulation, the average family income, and the number and death-toll of wars in the interim. Looking over the two groups, he frowned: because a rough calculation implied a century of massive wars and frequent economic depression. His first impression was that a privileged class had emerged, and the glittering aristocrats were dressed to copy the fashion of their space-traveling royalty.

Then he smiled. He realized that the long white wigs were all an impersonation of the way Del Azarchel wore his hair. Since all spacemen shave their skulls bald (or at least to a very tight crew-cut), wearing his hair as long as a woman’s must have come as a great comfort and relief to Del Azarchel, a way of letting his shirttails hang out. If the courtiers were bald under those wigs, that might be a sign of something else—maybe a symbol to show that they were ready to return to space at any moment. This hinted that the future might hold an active space program, something Menelaus could not contemplate without a toothy grin of pleasure.

“Fancy digs you got here. Much better than where you came from, seems to me.” Menelaus accepted the delicate glass with a grin of thanks. “Only two glasses? What about them?” He gestured at the throng of soldiers and servants. “Ain’t they included?”

Del Azarchel looked lost for a moment, as if he did not know to whom Montrose referred, but then his face lit up. “Of course! Thoughtless of me. All of you, drink to the health of Menelaus Montrose, the man closer than a brother to me! Get glasses—Tirado, can you see to it? Captain, perhaps your men can be off-duty only for the moment it takes to drink a toast with me?”

An old Oriental in white (either a doctor or a fencing instructor, to judge by his garments) bent his head and began arguing in whispers with Del Azarchel. Del Azarchel waved the man’s objections away. “Please, Doctor! I value your advice more than I treasure the sight of the stars themselves, but surely, surely one small drink will do no harm to such a man as Menelaus Montrose. He is made of rawhide and whalebone, enjoys more lives than a cat, and has a tougher constitution than that of a maddened boar! The brain of an Einstein, of Newton, hides beneath that thick skull. He is harder to kill than a cockroach! A sip of wine will not do him in!”

The old doctor straightened up, a look of skepticism in the arch of his eyebrow. “Just as you say, sir, but it seems your Newton had enough brainpower to scramble his brain like an egg, which we have only now found how to separate white and yolk and put them back into the shell.”

Menelaus examined the soldiers as they drank. Comic-Opera Spanish seemed to be in style. Either these were Halloween costumes, or morion-style helmets were back in fashion. The helmets were peaked fore and aft and bore a steel rooster comb aloft. The men looked like Conquistadores: armor, lace collars, puffy sleeves and all.

Their breastplates were a substance Menelaus did not recognize. Metal? Plastic? Something in the way the light glinted into rainbows along the inky plates—he visualized the deviation of photonic through-paths needed to produce those shades, and turned the picture into numbers in his mind, and then into a set of graphs—convinced him that the substance was meant to break up coherent light, and scatter incoming energy-fire.

He ran through an equation or five in his mind to get an upper and lower value for the energy delivery system, given this type of defense. The result surprised him, because such weapons, if they existed, were absurdly wasteful. Of course, just out the window were roofless gardens heated in the midst of a frozen mountainscape. Absurdly wasteful. Menelaus was sure his mother would not have approved. This was a more luxurious time than he was used to, that was sure.

Del Azarchel said with a small laugh, “Did I ever tell you of the time I drank stagnant rainwater from the heel of boot I found in a gutter? I had to drive away the most enormous rat one might envision: large as a housecat. My only weapon was—”

Montrose laughed. “Yeah, the broken spike from an organlegger’s monkey cart, with the snark-juice still inside it, and stinking like hell. But the rat was a different time, remember?”

“Wait? Are you certain? No, my friend, that boot—every time I drink, I think on it—it was when I was in pre-Kali Andalusia. I was twelve.…”

He noticed the other people in the chamber, footman and steward and doctor and nurse, the soldiers in Conquistador get-up, all stiffened, and hid looks of surprise. Evidently it was out of style to correct Del Azarchel, even when he made a mistake. Montrose assumed the man was of pretty high rank, however this society measured rank.

“Yup. I know, cause I was there everytime you sat down to drink, and you tell the damn story every time,” sighed Montrose. He sat himself down on the big four-poster bed, and the sheets crinkled under his weight. Once again the courtiers in the room were holding their breath, while trying not to stare. Evidently it was also not in style to sit down in Del Azarchel’s presence.

He raised the estimate of Del Azarchel’s rank. Of course, he had no baseline to plot it against, and no clear way to digitize an abstraction like the degree of deference being shown a boss. Maybe if he used degrees of deviation of the spinal column from upright, he could compare other submission behaviors to that …

Montrose (with the mental equivalent of a shrug) decided the styles of this time didn’t apply to him. He said, “The big rat—it was smaller last time you told it, only as big as a kitten—you were fighting that big rat over a hambone a drunk Jihadi had dropped. When you got it up to your lips, turned out to be a baby’s arm, all fried in grease, on account of the Mogadorians was eating on you Spaniards during the last days of the siege. I heard the yarn. The boot thing was a different time, before when you met that guy that turned your life all right-side out, made you learn how to salute and whatnot, even though you are a whatcha call it, a pilluelo, a gutter skunk. What was his name? That guy? ‘Trashcan?’ Something like that.”

“Trajano Villaamil,” the older man said, nodding his snowy head. “Ah! Truly a name of glory! Even though his army was nothing but a group of half-starved youths, he made us his true and loyal followers, like knights-errant. Every theft and crime to serve the cause, the poor no more to be preyed upon, the widow to be shown respect, and the media to witness every theft, so the honor, and not just the supplies, of the haughty conqueror would be stolen! Such were the rules he beat into us. Within the confines of the street from the dead Cathedral to the dry Canal, he was king. He was the master of the beggar’s quarter, where the patrols dared not go. I would have wished him to see me now, now that I am Master of the World. I never knew him to break his word, not once.” Del Azarchel sighed in mingled nostalgia and wonder. “Not once! And to think—it was for his sake that I stayed with you.”

“Stayed with me?” Montrose had been sitting in a slouch, but now he straightened up.

“In the darkness, during the hunger watches … Ah! The old times are not always the best times, are they? Let us speak of happier things.…”

Del Azarchel must have noticed the stiffness with which his servants and retainers were regarding Montrose, for he smiled and asked them to step from the room.

The officer in charge of the Conquistadores gave Montrose a thoughtful look. He turned toward Del Azarchel, who gave the officer a smile. Del Azarchel raised his left wrist, displaying the crudely fashioned red wristband Menelaus had noticed earlier, a wristband not at all in keeping with the fineness of ornament that otherwise adorned the elegant, white-haired figure of Del Azarchel. The officer nodded, saluted sharply, and departed.

That exchange of looks was not lost on Montrose. The captain of the guard had not wanted to leave his boss unarmed in a room with a man whose brain may or may not be fully healthy. The red metal armband Del Azarchel wore was something that reassured the Captain. But what was it?

He looked at the wristband carefully. In his mind’s eye, Montrose converted the surface irregularities into a mathematical expression, and calculated the standard deviation. The resulting figures were consistent with something machine-lathed in zero-gee, using old equipment. Not an ornament, then. And not something he trusted any of his men to refashion.

2. Memory Lapse

When all the minions were gone, Del Azarchel had his tall black thronelike chair slide itself closer to Menelaus, and touched wineglasses with him, so that a crystal note hung in the air.

“To old times,” said Del Azarchel. “May they never come again…”

“Old times past and better times to come!”

“Salud y amor dinero y el y tiempo para disfrutarlo!”

“Kampai, bottoms high, spittle and mud in a blind man’s eye!”

“I promised you this drink long ago. You recall? Perhaps—I suppose not. But I was hoping you might recall it. It was not long ago for you, of course. Not long by your biological time.”

“Um. Remind me. You and me—we used to sneak off to go drinking in Space Camp.”

“This was somewhat after. In the sick bay. Ah. Perhaps we should not speak of it…”

“No. Tell me. Maybe something will come back.”

“You had attacked yet another crewman, and pulled the catheter of your suit in the fray, so your legs were covered with, ah, recoverable material, and your mouth was full of blood. His blood. No one was willing to sponge you off but me, and I had to brush your teeth. When I told you we would drink once again, once we were aground again, once you were better, you stopped screaming and started giggling, so I thought, you know, that somewhere in your mind, some buried part, you heard me. This is that drink. Am I not a man of my word?”

“Nothing is coming back. Where did this happen? Before launch? Aboard the space station? Aboard the punt?”

“After launch, of course. Aboard the star-vessel. On the Hermetic.”

“What the hell do you mean? I was aboard? I was aboard?!”

“Of course. What is the last you remember?”

“Aboard the punt. I jammed the needle in my brain.”

Del Azarchel seemed taken aback. “Ah! That is—ah. Unexpected.” Then, to himself, he muttered, “I will have to take this up with my better half.” And he ran the fingers of his right hand across the metallic face of the massy red-gold armband clasping his left wrist.

The surface was clearly touch-sensitive or motion-aware, like library cloth. Since before Montrose was born, all telephones, visuals, games, texts, audios, and control surfaces could be built into any tool or article of clothing, practically any object, that need or whim dictated: but only weapons, or medical appliances were built with their screens and virtual keypads invisible to non-users. Montrose guessed the armband would ignore any finger but Del Azarchel’s.

Montrose said, “I figured you returned me to Earth and sailed without me? Didn’t you?”

“Oh, Cowhand, you still make me to laugh! Come! Did you actually think I had the fuel and time to decelerate the punt to rest relative to Earth, recelerate back, screw-turn and decelerate, reach Earth at her new point in her orbit, take the time to refuel, launch again from yet another point farther along Earth’s orbit, accelerate toward a farther downrange halfway point, and decelerate to a rendezvous even farther yet downrange—and all this while the Hermetic was adding velocity geometrically? Of course I took you aboard. At that time, we were merely waiting for your drug to wear off. It was not until Dr. Yajnavalkya examined you—you remember him?”

“The expedition surgeon. Also, he did work in the Hodge Conjecture.” He remembered the fellow’s work, his discussions. The theorem named after Yajnavalkya proved that topological spaces defined by the human brain cell interaction nets were actually rational linear combinations of algebraic cycles. Montrose did not actually remember any details about the man himself.

“Not until he examined you did anyone realize the extent of the modification, and even then no one was perfectly certain what you had done, since you invented the technique yourself, and did not keep notes like a professional scientist, you fool.”

“But I told you what I was up to before I did it.”

“Yes—a few cryptic words no one could recall clearly.”

“Didn’t you play back the cabin record…?—Oh.”

“Aptly put! ‘Oh’ indeed. My friend had asked me to shut off the cabin recording circuit before he stabbed himself, remember?”

“What was wrong with me?”

“Divarication.”

Montrose looked a little sick, but said nothing.

3. Divarication

Every information function in the universe suffered from what was called divarication. Fact became legend as it was passed from generation to generation; bureaucracies grew ossified as their rules evolved to be self-serving; and even computer programs or nerve cells passing information to the next generation of nerve cells lost information, modifying it by a self-selection process into forms easier to pass along. Lines of data diverged, became unrecognizable to each other. Even processes like check-digits and data insulation suffered their own form of degradation. Entropy always took its tithe.

Divarication in neural processes meant thought lost ability to be preserved. Senility, Alzheimer’s disease, and autism were manifestations of what could be described, mathematically, as a one function describing signal degradation.

“I was trying to increase my brain processing speed.”

“You did. But you increased the speed of brain degradation even faster.”

“Pox! Was it a self-destructive feedback cascade?”

“The opposite. You over-corrected. It was a self-reinforcing feedback.”

“What was the tau parameter?”

“The tau approached unity: You were in a mental stasis. As best we could tell,” said Del Azarchel, “the medulla oblongata was affected. The part of your brain that prioritizes brain attention flows placed your own self-awareness at a level below what was needed to maintain the holographic illusion of self-awareness. You forgot yourself so completely that there was no way to wake you to your own awareness again. While you forgot yourself, your brainpaths entered a logic loop.”

“But I built in a self-correction cycle, or tried to.”

“You had artificially sculpted out new nerve-paths, new engrams, not one created by your own information-flow patterns, but adapted to the mathematical flow model your Zurich computer run had formulated. That pattern was … alive. Self-correcting. Your epiphytes re-established any nerve-paths Dr. Yajnavalkya interrupted when he operated, or constructed new pathways around any block he established.” Del Azarchel shrugged, spread his hands. “He could not figure out what you had done: We transmitted medical records back to Earth, but the doctors and specialists there did not have you ready at hand to examine.”

“Damn. I’d like to see the records.”

“I will send them to your amulet as soon as you get one. In the meanwhile, let me sum them up: Our best guess is that your new brain thought its new format was proper and healthy, and every time you slept, your delta-wave sleep would put you back to your damaged brain-arrangement again. How did you do it?”

“Not sure. The RNA correction template, ah—that was one of the things I copied straight out of the Monument Math.”

“Copying something you did not actually know what it meant or how it worked?”

“Well, I figured it was worth the risk.”

Del Azarchel snorted, then chortled, then laughed aloud. “A breath of springtime air from a long-vanished world! Now I recall my wild youth, and why I liked you. By the devil, you are rash as a corsair! Are you sure you have no Spanish blood in you?”

“How did you fix me?”

“With very special help. That main, ah, expert, I called into to handle your case, she happens to be molecular neurosurgeon of remarkable skill, as skilled as she is with that as with everything she undertakes.”

“But you know what she did?”

“The same thing Dr. Yajnavalkya tried, putting up nerve blocks to hinder the extra brain tissue you grew in yourself, but without stopping the essential functions the new tissue usurped. We have divined enough of the pattern, the algorithm, of what you did with your Zurich computer runs, to set up a block that will last.”

“But how do I make it work?”

Del Azarchel looked puzzled. “Make what work? The cure is permanent.”

“Make the cocktail work! I want the experiment to work. It might seem like years ago to you, but to me, I was just now in the middle of the test. Do you have a way to augment my intelligence without the side-effect of wiping out my self-awareness? Why are you grinning?”

“Because I had forgotten what you are like. Because I believe the answer to your brain augmentation theory is in the Monument. And I believe the answer to how to read the Monument correctly is in your brain! You might not remember, but when we reached our destination, we brought you out of suspension. We managed to, ah, wrestle you into your suit. When we took you to the surface, you had a reaction to it…”

“Reaction?”

“You calmed down. You were drawn to certain parts of the Beta and Omicron groups from the first radial area. You seemed happy—even awed. Like a child again. We thought maybe you would return to yourself. I hoped … well…”

“I remember that! The horizon was right close, like a stone’s throw away, and I could see Dr. Velasquez and Dr. Ramananda standing off a ways. Their feet were below the horizon, and their heads were pointing away from me, so they seemed to be leaning backward. The surface was like black glass. And I saw a dim bright star overhead. And it was too late … for something … I was afraid … afraid not for myself, but…” His voice trailed off.

Del Azarchel was staring at him carefully. In a neutral voice he said, “Do you remember anything else? Who you feared?”

Montrose shook his head. “Catching fog in a pail. I can’t bring it back. I really buggered up my brain something awful, didn’t I?”

“The basic theory was sound.”

“So I flew to the damn Diamond Star.” Montrose spoke in a tone of awe. “I was there. I was there! I flew all the way there and don’t remember a damned thing about the damned voyage!”

“Well, to be fair, there was not much to remember, not for you. When you were not tied up, we kept you in cryonic biosuspension. We feared further nerve degeneration. And as for what you forget: well, to call it ‘damned’ is not so wrong-tongued a word to use.”

Montrose shook his head, and his face was haggard with misery. All the work on the Monument had gone on without him. He was the kid who missed Christmas. Everyone else got a present.

“Years. Decades. Half a century there and half a century back again,” he muttered. “I slept—I slept through it—”

“And you are still young!”

4. Sadder Things of Long Ago

“Well, where is everyone else? Where is Ramayana, Bhuti, or that jackass Narcís? Where is the Captain? I want to see Captain Grimaldi.”

“She is in transit.”

“She? She who?”

“Ha! Sorry, my friend. Forgive a slip of an old man’s tongue. Captain Grimaldi is no longer with us. He did not return from the Diamond Star. The expedition ended in disaster, in tragedy. More than half the crew perished.”

Montrose turned his face away. On the walls he saw images of cities and ships burning. He should have known. Grimaldi had been a Brahmin, and practiced ahimsa, sacred respect for all life. He would not have opened fire on his fellow human beings, not even to stop a war, or bring peace to the world. Grimaldi could not have been in command of the ship shown in these pictures.

Montrose had a strange, dreamlike sensation, as if he had touched a corpse, but only now remembered the feel of the cold flesh against his hand. As if the corpse had rotated in zero gee, and he saw dead eyes staring blindly, wall-eyed, at nothing, the dry mouth hanging open, the motionless and shriveled tongue like a worm. The sensation made Montrose’s eyes sting, and he raised his arm to wipe tears against the back of his hand, at which he stared in surprise.

“The Captain is dead? How did he die?”

Del Azarchel leaned forward and touched his arm. “He was like a second father to you, was he not?”

“My life weren’t nowise hard as yours, Blackie, but life didn’t kiss my rump much neither, if you take my meaning. Grimaldi crow-barred me out of a pretty tight spot, and…” Montrose suddenly could see in his mind’s eye the barrel of the pistol of the last man he’d ever faced. What was his name? Mike Nails. He’d lost almost a year to hospital-induced slumber that time. Montrose had been slow on the trigger then, because he wanted to delope and walk away. Because he’d lost his nerve. “… and, by the Plague, I am sure to have died and been planted in the ground had Grimaldi not given me a new deal from a fresh deck. So I owe him everything.”

“We will have time later to speak of the sadder things of long ago.”

“It’s not long ago to me!”

“The Captain, he did not perish in a praiseworthy fashion. I did not wish to mar his memory by telling tales.”

“I got a right to know!”

Del Azarchel smiled and leaned back. “Why this talk of rights? What you ask of me is yours. We never would have made it to the Diamond Star had you not solved the difficulties surrounding neuro-memory Divarication in long-term suspension. All of us are in your debt.”

“All of us? Which us?”

“The Hermeticists. The crew.”

“Who made it back?”

“There are only seventy-two of us left.”

Montrose was silent, shocked. Two-thirds of the expedition had perished.

Del Azarchel said, “We did not return to our old homes and our old nations when we returned, for all those things were gone, or changed beyond recognition into crooked mockeries of what we knew.” He gave a moue of distaste. “I will not disgust you by repeating the conditions of Spain. She was not my country any longer; those occupying her were not my countrymen. The officers and crew of the Hermetic, the greatest ship ever aloft, they were my countrymen! The stars were my nation! We are the Conclave of the Learned, but we should be called the Brotherhood of Man, for we are loyal to no country, no tribe, no sect, no faction. We are the Men of the Mind, serving only the abstract ideals of the pure reason, and devoted to nothing less than the entirety of the human race.”

This reminded Montrose so strongly of the make-believe Science Councils that peopled the cartoons he read in his youth, and ruled the make-believe future world, that at first he grinned. Maybe it was high time experts, folk who knew what to do, were telling people what to do, rather than folk lucky enough to be born rich enough to buy, photogenic enough to win, or crooked enough to steal a bag of votes?

But a frown drew his eyebrows together even before the grin left his mouth. No self-respecting Texas mob would let anyone tell them what to do, and that went double for experts, and twice double for some high-pockets breed of anyone that couldn’t be voted out of office when he got caught.

“Sounds like all-you-all is running the show. I ain’t sure what to make of that.”

“Not all you. All we. You are of our number. You may make of it anything you wish! Did I not say this future was ours, our own?”

“And you? You look like you ain’t done so badly for yourself. What’s your part?”

“My official title is Nobilissimus ‘the most distinguished,’ but my roles include various presidencies, tribunates, and ministerial positions awarded by certain electors from Concordat members that still maintain democratic forms, and titles of royalty granted when I became regent for those ruling royal families from members that do not. Privately, I am the owner-in-chief of the World Power Corporation, a cartel that controls how and where the antimatter we brought back from the Diamond Star is employed—my private position gives me much more influence over world affairs than my public, which is occupied by a nonsensical amount of ceremony. But between us, my only title is Senior.”

Montrose realized he had not said “Señor,” the Spanish honorific—but “Senior,” the name of the Expedition member in charge of coordinating extra-vehicular teams: the chief of the landing party.

Montrose looked toward the window, and saw the snowy peaks and clefts rearing above ruins. Night was falling, and soft yellow lights now dotted the sheer walls of the far craters. Other lights gleamed on glass-roofed gardens like emeralds or glanced dancing through waterfalls like threads, the polished silver dashing into the crater depths, making them shimmer with rainbows in the gathering gloom. He wondered if that was another set of mansions, or part of this one.

The spread was bigger than most towns he’d been in.

“How much is yours?”

“All of it.”

“What, the castle, the crater, the mountain range?”

“Everything on the globe. Everything under the sky. I am the Imperator Mundi, the Master of the World.”

He smiled and there was a glitter in his eye.

“I am master not just of Earth, but of the destiny of Earth. Not just these lands surrounding, but the years and centuries to come, I can shape. We will share the glories of royalty and the luxuries of wealth, you with me. Let us command the future to be a golden one, and to bring forth everything we have dreamed!”