Count to a Trillion

6

Intellect Emulation Mechanism

1. A Golden Future

“So. You’re Master of the World. Sounds mighty nice. But … Only one?”

Del Azarchel blinked. “How many do you prefer?”

“How many can I get? What do we have by way of colonies on the Moon yet?”

“Nothing.”

“Damnation and pustules! Sounds like you’re marching slipshod. Colonized Mars?”

“It’s colder than Antarctica, the oxygen is locked into surface rust, and the microatmosphere is only thick enough to carry hypersonic sandstorms able to disintegrate the metal hull of any lander unfortunate enough to survive hard-down. So, no, I am not the Lord of Mars or the Moon.”

“No Mars bases! Prickly hat of Jesus! What kind of crappy future is this?”

Del Azarchel smiled an urbane smile. “One that avoided global holocaust, despite the weapons of absolute war in our arsenals.”

Montrose plopped himself down on the bed, slouching, his eyes glittering with a weird mix of disappointment, puzzlement, and wonder. “You see,” he said finally, “I dreamed about Mars when I was young. That was one of the things I dreamed about. Also, I wanted a car that flew. Rocketpack. Raygun.”

“What have we not dreamt, we dreamers? We dreamt of power, energy in abundance to accommodate our dreams; we dreamt of expanded consciousness, intelligence augmentation, nerve regeneration, organ rejuvenation, and artificial life, extended life, intensified life! We dreamt of minds created according to design, techniques to cure insanity and sin, sciences to create new forms of life, beasts and birds to be our serfs and playthings and companions, and then to work the great work of creation! To make the Man beyond Man, the next step of evolution, as far above us as we above the ape. And even this would be merely the first step in the cosmic dance!”

Montrose gave him a hard look. “You ain’t translated the Monument yet, have you?”

“Not so! We translated the whole of the Alpha Segment.”

“That all?” The Alpha Segment was less than one percent of the surface area. “It’s been, what, a century? Almost two? I was thinking maybe y’all got up through the Beta, Gamma, and Delta segments, and maybe part of Eta?”

Del Azarchel looked surprised. “How the devil did you—that is a good guess. Really good. We have made major inroads into just those segments, and nowhere else.”

“Don’t look so impressed. This room: I don’t see any force fields in the lamp or tractor-presser beams shooting out the sink or anything other gee-whiz-wow-wonder gizmos that I should see, if Earth science had a working unified field theory. Pictures here on the walls show wars on Earth and wars in space, but I don’t see anything that looks like a fundamentally new weapon system—the kind of new that comes from a new model of the universe. The Beta Segment of Monument symbols we knew were a particle menagerie and periodical table, and Gamma Segment was pretty sure to be the linguistic calculus, and I know that part contained the key to translating the higher sections. Eta Segment—you all mocked me when I said it, but Eta looked to me like game theory, perhaps an introduction into something more basic, like a really rigorous mathematical analysis of economics and politics. If you actually have the Earth under one rule these days, you must know a damn sight more about political economy than anyone of my generation. But you don’t seem to have more physics. So—No great guess involved.”

He shrugged, then continued: “The Monument Builders were trying to tell us all the secrets of the universe just because science is the universal language. No way else you prove to a stranger from a strange world you are intelligent, I reckon—But we didn’t get all the secrets they wrote down: ’cause, where are your flying cars, Blackie? If you had translated the Monument, a good big chunk of it, I mean, surely we’d have working antigravity by now, and a castle floating in the clouds, up on high, just where God and storybook illustrators always meant castles to be.”

“Well, parts of the Monument have been translated,” said Del Azarchel, “including enough of a not-quite Unified Field Theorem from the Beta Segment to know that antigravity cannot operate in a universe as curved as ours is curved, not over anything less than intergalactic distances and aeons of time. And as you deduced, the symbols contained in Gamma Segment include a system for quantifying concepts into a grammar of formal signs: a complete set, and self-defining. It was the very thing Goedel long ago proved could not be done—or thought he did.”

“That’s all?”

“All?” Del Azarchel seemed taken aback. “It was so revolutionary that radio messages from Earth accused us of fraud! No expert believed it! This notation is the Philosophical Language, a universal grammar, that Leibniz and others so long ago for so long sought. In theory, any language system, any method of encoding meaning, speech, or writing, or flashes of a heliograph, any method, including human brainwaves or genetically determined behaviors, can be translated into any other! In theory, a complex enough expression could encompass all the variables of human society.”

“But the Monument did not contain an instruction book on how to build a faster-than-light drive?”

Del Azarchel looked impatient. “Oh, yes, we have all that. But it requires a blue fairy riding the back of a unicorn on the thirty-first day of February to make it work.”

“Oh, Goedel is wrong, but Einstein is gospel! And you’re poking fun of me for that. What about the aliens? Did the Monument give us a map, tell us where they hail from? Any contact with them yet? We sell them Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars or anything? Can I see one?”

“If you live long enough.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The Monument provided us a clue. Astronomers studying the open cluster in Hyades, a mere one hundred fifty lightyears away, hypothesize that the high helium-carbon content of those stars is due to large-scale engineering, not to natural effects. Macroscale engineering. There may be an intelligence of some description within hailing distance. Well, that is to say, the descendants ten generations after the present generation would hear the response to a hail we send out.”

“Three hundred years between call and reply, huh?”

“Plus turnaround time, yes. Time to make the decision to respond, gather the money, gather the will.”

“You reckon they have money?”

“They must have some means of economizing their expenditures. No matter what system of prioritizing benefits and expenses they use, sending a coherent beam of radio across one hundred fifty lightyears costs energy.”

The magnitude of time made the idea of contact absurd: as if Queen Victoria might hear the replies to messages sent out by Queen Elizabeth.

“This Hyades Cluster: they the ones who built the Monument?”

“Unknown. At the moment we don’t know if ‘they’ are really there.”

“So no voluptuous green-skinned spacewomen in silvery space-bikinis?” Montrose was thinking wryly that his childhood comics had been wrong about everything.

Del Azarchel looked amused. He said, “In that respect, the world is much as you left it. But in others, ah! You are wrong, I tell you, to mock this era. You have much to see! We may not have flying cars, but we have built an evacuated underground rail system which follows hypoclyoid curves deep through the molten mantle of Earth, allowing us to fling bullet-carriages, accelerated by induction coil guns, from continent to continent faster than even military jets can fly. It is amazing the public works projects one can perform if your energy budget is practically unlimited. We have melted Antarctic ice, opening vast tracts on that continent to cultivation, and used the water to turn the Gobi Desert green, and clothe the interior of Australia with fruit trees. Mega-evaporation, moving moisture, moving clouds, gathering sunlight, deflecting sunlight: everything that is technically possible is now technically feasible, because we have power enough.”

“Energy power or political power?”

“Both! We want for nothing. And, yes, the Hermetic Conclave has some advantages that previous rulers never enjoyed, thanks to the study of the Eta Segment, it is true. We can calculate some social trends to a nicety. The science is called Cliometry. You deserve credit for that. Not to mention that the Princess seems to have an analytical method, or a divine gift … well, no matter. The power is in our palm. The treasure trove is ours. You have the key. We need but turn the lock and listen as it all clicks into place.”

“What clicks into place?”

“The future! Don’t you recall what we stayed up all night discussing, that last night on Earth, before the liftoff? It has been years of time for me, and I recall it. It has been days only for you. Have you forgotten?”

“Talked about girls, as I recollect. All the pretty girls you knew were going to be long dead while we slumbered. You had quite the list, Blackie. We talked about leaving Earth forever…”

“And about returning in triumph with the lore of the universe! We talked of the future!”

“So why haven’t y’all translated more of the Monument while I was out?”

“Because the Monument was not meant for us. Man is a microscopic biological infestation clinging to the dry surface irregularities of the crust-folds of one small iron-cored rocky planet circling a medium-sized yellow star in the outskirts of the galaxy. We are like simple-minded monkeys who found an encyclopedia one savant wrote down for another. It was meant to be read by something far more intelligent than man.”

“You must have them by now.”

“Who?”

“Posthumans. Augmented Intellects. Odd Johns. Nexts. People who did right what I did wrong to my brain. What research in intelligence augmentation was done while I was in cold storage?”

“Almost none.”

Montrose could not express his disgust: He merely made a noise halfway between a groan and the noise you make to clear your throat before you spit.

Del Azarchel spread his hands. “Experimentation on human subjects was illegal in the year we sailed, remember? And your example discouraged further investigation.”

“Example? One hundred and fifty years! In that amount of time, we went from Ben Franklin pulling electricity down from the sky, to the Wright Brothers putting a man up into it! You are telling me one bad experiment set back the whole globe for two centuries? I don’t believe it!”

“Ah, but the New World between the day of Benjamin Franklin and the day of the Brothers Wright suffered no tyrannies, plagues, or famines, and their small wars were fought only with gunpowder, not lingering germs. Anglo-American laws and customs were especially friendly to innovators and inventors. Whereas Earth, while we were gone, was not so friendly. First it was overpopulated, and then it was underpopulated, ruled alternately by Xi Mandarins from the Peking, or by Bio-Warlords from Pretoria.”

Montrose followed his gaze to where Del Azarchel was staring thoughtfully at a painting of skeletal buildings toppling in the red shadows of a mushroom cloud.

“Well,” he muttered, “they should have been following up on my work, instead of messing around.”

“Now we can set things right.”

“We, meaning the human race?”

“We, meaning you and I. Your method, your Prometheus Formula, is the only technique, even after a century, that shows promise of evolving us to the intellectual plateau needed to unriddle the Monument. But your method proved too dangerous to use on a live human subject—ah! But what about a ghost? An iron ghost? What about a marriage of my methods and yours?”

Montrose recalled that his work in ultra-long-term neurohibernation had won him a berth aboard the starship. But Del Azarchel’s work had been just as crucial: The ship’s brain had been based on Del Azarchel’s work in Automated Intelligence. At the time, there had been powerful political factions who had not wanted the Spaniard or the Texan aboard. They were the wrong kind of people; it sent the wrong kind of message. They were troublemakers. But Captain Grimaldi, a prince in more ways than one, had pulled them aboard. There were some natural overlaps to the two fields, but how did they apply here?

“I don’t get it,” said Montrose. “What are you driving at?”

But the excitement of Del Azarchel’s words, the enthusiasm blazing in his eyes, was contagious. Montrose jumped to his feet and began pacing up and down the thick, richly-patterned carpet as if from an excess of energy.

“Just this!” Del Azarchel’s voice rang out. “We are about to create our future, the one mankind has more than deserved.”

“What’ch’ya got in mind?”

“Are you feeling healthy enough to take a short trip around the globe? Or, rather, under it? I have a project I have been working on, and out of the whole human race, out of the last fifteen decades of history, you are the only one qualified to help me. Forgive my impatience, but I have been waiting years, biological time, and over a century, calendar time, to show this to you. I call it The X Machine.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“The key to flinging aside the chains of that prisonhouse called being merely human. The key to the gates opening into … beyond!”

Menelaus Montrose felt a sense of restlessness. The chamber suddenly seemed too small, and the world beyond these walls full of mysteries and wonders. “I reckon I equal up to anything. Show me this beyond of yours. But get me the hell something to wear besides a bathrobe, cant’ch’ya?”

2. Xypotechnology

A man and two boys—wardrobe master, valet, body servant—came in the chamber to help him dress, but Montrose kicked up a row, and the trio retreated in disorder, bowing and kowtowing. Montrose was almost sorry he had kicked them out, because now he had to puzzle out the garments for himself, and they seemed to have no buttons or zippers.

The clothes laid out for him were more comfortable than what he’d seen the shiny courtiers wearing: a white tunic with a black kimono-like over-garment, loose hakama-style pants beneath. The only foolery was the red and white sashes: one around his waist and the other running from shoulder to hip. He left them off.

While he dressed, Del Azarchel started to describe the political and economic setup of the new world to him, but Montrose interrupted and asked about the Monument translation efforts. The amount of surface area which had yielded to human investigation was disappointingly small, but still larger than it had been when Montrose slumbered: Montrose whooped whenever some pet theory of his own had been vindicated, and groaned at himself for his muleheadedness for the conclusions he had overlooked or gotten wrong.

He looked around for paper to jot down figures, but Del Azarchel, with a gesture like a magician, made the windows leading to the balcony darken. The glass was smart material, and could detect the motions of Montrose’s fingernail, or interpret simple words spoken slowly. The two men covered the glass doors with minuscule mathematical notation as they talked, Montrose jumping from one side of the doors to the other, scribbling furiously while he spoke, Del Azarchel, seated in his wheelchair, merely making small gestures with a forefinger, as if to command invisible chalk to script his writing for him.

Del Azarchel spoke of the recent mathematical attempts to model the human brain down to a quantum granular level.

“Come on, Blackie,” replied Montrose. “Don’t kid a kidder. That’s my field. The Montrose Neuro-cellular Divarication function established a means of modeling human brain information behavior.… I had to solve how the nervous system worked, at least on a crude level, to get it to keep working when it was in suspended animation.… But you cannot model it below that…”

“Not with human math, no. But applying expressions from the Eta Segment to a cellular automata model allows us to use Morse Theory to approximate the quantum uncertainties we associate with free will.”

He paused for a moment to let that sink in.

Del Azarchel said, “The X Machine is a self-reprogramming, self-evolving machine. A machine not just like the Mälzels and automated intellectual processors as the ship’s brain aboard the Croesus, or the Little Big Brother security brains we have aboard the Hermetic.”

“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.

ECLIPSE 2369-2399

HAVANA 2372-2395

DIOMED 2366-2385

SARK 2361-2383

BYERLEY’S GREEK 2360-2379

AGNER 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!”

Montrose said nothing.

Del Azarchel leaned back in his chair, looking saddened. “But even so, I would not have allowed the Conclave to relieve him of command, had I known how despondent he was, or what would follow.”

Montrose did not like the sound of that. “What followed?”

“He took his own life. I do not have your admiration for the heathen religion he joined: They are prone to burning themselves, these Brahmins, when they crave their fabled return on the wheel of reincarnation.”

“But he was a Frenchy.”

“Monegasque. And yet ideas have no race: He was Brahmin because he thought as Brahmins do. Captain Grimaldi dressed himself in splendid garb, adorned with liquid-crystals as with jewels, turned up the oxygen gain in his chamber, and sealed the hatch. He was thoughtful enough to evacuate the surrounding chambers of air, so the blaze could not spread. It was a gaseous fire, since there was nothing else to burn except lightweight plastic cabin-fixtures, and so smothered itself as quickly as it flared up—almost more like an explosion than a fire, burning in all directions at once in a confined, perfectly insulated space. I sorrow to think that he condemned himself to a more eternal fire, and have said more than one mass for his soul. I may say another tomorrow, before dawn. You are welcomed to join me. I have the Pope on my staff.”

Montrose was about to say no thanks, that he was no sort of praying man, but then again, he remembered how he once thought it was not right to have a man not buried proper with no words said over him, as if he was a dead dog or something. “Yeah. I think I will join you.”