Count to a Trillion

12

A New Age Dawns

A.D. 2400

1. Images

The skies above Utrecht were lit with fireworks like flowers of red and silver-white, brilliant against the stars or against the huge, ghostly image-works. Microwave cannonades from De Haar castle had heated the air to clear away the threatening clouds, and only a few nimbus, rosy and silver in the reflected lights, hung near the horizon.

The images loomed through the midnight like towers of smoke. Menelaus could only guess at their meaning. Huge in the east and west, their cowls tangles in the stars, were bearded monks in cassocks, each holding aloft a pale sword half-transparent in the light of the rising moon. Elsewhere across the constellations was an image of a child in swaddling, leading a parade of strange figures that promised what the year to come might bring, cornucopias of prosperity, goats whose teats dripped ambrosia, waddling Buddha-figures with sacks heavy-laden with gold.

Opposite this parade of glories was a bent graybeard, clouds around his knees, leaning on a scythe, his silver hourglass held above a more melancholy group of shapes. Larger than thunderheads, blurred and bluish in the distance, rose faces Menelaus did not recognize. Something about the stiffness, age, and solemnity of the images told him he was looking at an obituary of famous figures who had passed away that year—famous, he supposed, to the people of this time. To him, it was a procession as solemn and strange as the rain-worn angels seen in some ancient boneyard.

Between these two parades, one image, taller than the rest, arrested his attention: Times Square in New York, an artist’s representation of what the city might have looked like had it survived to the present day, was painted across the night sky. The glittering ball of Waterford Crystal from the top of the Allied Chemical Building was poised to descend. In the gloom of colored lanterns below him, Menelaus could hear the chanting of the people as they counted, some upon the sward of gray grass patched with snow puddles, some in boats and pleasure barges drifting in the fanciful ponds some architect had scattered through the French gardens, their waters crystal blue in the December midnight:

Tien! Negen! Acht! Zeven! Zes! Vijf! Vier! Drie! twee …

Despite the importance and formality of the event, Menelaus wore no more than a rough jerkin and leggings of buckskin he had sewn himself, mittens of white rabbit fur, a shako cap made from a wolverine pelt, its teeth on a thong around the crown.

He had sauntered up to the party with a pistol tucked into the rope he was using as a belt, but a man-at-arms dressed like a waiter (Menelaus could tell by how he stood and held his eyes that the man was a soldier) carrying a silver tray oh-so-politely asked him to check his weapon. The soldier-in-servitor-tux stared at the way Menelaus was dressed, but said nothing. So polite.

No, there was nothing wrong with checking your weapon at any place where drinks were served. It had been that way back in Houston, back in the Twenty-Third Century—no barkeep would let someone packing a piece in his saloon. But it was the fact that the people among the crowds outside did not wear those sashes or baldrics, or wore metallic wigs—none of them could carry a weapon, drunk or sober. The members of the upper class, the psychics or psychoi, as they were called, or soldiers in their employ or retainers in their service, only they could bear arms.

There had been Marines in full dress kit at the huge main doors of castle De Haar, but they were for show. The real weapons were tiny electronic things, no bigger than dragonflies, controlled from some remote location. Everyone important had arrived with a horse-drawn carriage or a ground-effect car, and had brought a dozen people, retainers and ladies-in-waiting and whatnot trailing after like so many brightly colored ducklings after a duck. Montrose, on the other hand, arrived on foot, alone, walking up from the riverside, threading his way to reach the front entrance through the back gardens (where off-duty servants sat drinking beer to cheer the New Year on). Neither the servants in back nor the Marines in front stopped him. He did not even bother to display the self-luminous, singing, and engraved invitation the messenger had brought him (this had been a thin and supercilious youth, dressing in luminous silk, with a steel-blue wig of shoulder-length hair—but a careful youth, despite his dandy looks, because he gave Montrose the slip when Montrose tried to shadow him through the narrow and crooked streets of Tripoli). Montrose still was not sure if the message, or the messenger, were real.

He looked down at himself, at his buckskin costume, this silly dancing-bear outfit, which he wore because he was too proud to wear the black silken shipsuit which the age said he was entitled. And he came to this party because the mad thing in his head told him to come. Was he real? Either of him?

The fact that this world was one where not all men had the right to self-defense was one he deeply resented. Resented? No, it was a hatred, so black and primal he could not understand it. When had the idea of destroying this ridiculous future and all its broken promises began to seem normal to him?

It had been at the chalet, he decided.

2. Mount Fairweather

Menelaus had dwelt for over a month in a little cabin in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, a few hours’ tramp through the snow from a lonely spot where the Brachistochrone curve of the supersonic train broke through the crust to the surface. The Iron Ghost of Del Azarchel had been his only companion, a disembodied voice that drew expressions and figures on the walls of luminous glass. This voice from the walls claimed to be Del Azarchel, and therefore had title to the chalet, and could do with it what he wished, without consulting his fleshly father, and Montrose did not argue the point.

Montrose wondered about the legal implications of eating delicacies from the icebox of a man whose electronic copy—a being with no need or ability to eat—has given you permission to consume his provisions: The whiskey in the cellar and the tobacco in the humidor the Ghost unlocked for him.

By day, when he grew sick of charity or sick of caviar, Montrose hunted. It was Del Azarchel’s chalet, after all, and had a well-equipped gun case. He did not want to eat the man’s food, but he had no qualms about borrowing a well-oiled rifle.

He also borrowed a prize pistol from the collection in the case. It was a Mauser septentrion, one main launcher with six escorts, breech-loaded, with interstitial chaff packages, and an onboard 300 IQ. Two-point-two pounds of shot. Effective counterfire of about eight meters. The mainshot was rated for 2500 feet per second straightline flight, up to 270 degrees of vector alteration post-launch, and it carried its own countermeasures in a bead behind the explosive head. The frame was milled from a solid piece, with no pins or screws used. Montrose felt, first, that it would have been a crime not to take it out of the case and do some target practice against some tree stumps across the snowy field below the chalet, and, second, he clearly had to have some protection should he be attacked by wolves, or challenged to a duel by wolves (seeing as how this weapon was no damn good for hunting), and third, Man Del Azarchel was rich as Croesus, and so he’d never miss it, and Ghost Del Azarchel couldn’t hold a pistol or take any joy from it.

The width of the wilderness outside may have been due to war depopulation, or perhaps Blackie had just bought himself a few thousand acres of alpine forest. In either case, there was no lack of venison or firewood for a man who could handle a rifle or an axe.

Del Azarchel was an old-fashioned enough gent to have a shed out back with materials for stretching and tanning hides. Montrose was unwilling to let any part of his game go to waste, especially after all the effort it took hauling the dang carcass back through the hillsides of pathless snow and rock. So he spent many an afternoon scraping and curing the hide, and making busy with an awl and a line, and so made himself quite a nice buckskin coat, fleecy and warm even in bad weather, and this saved on the thermal batteries in the suit he wore under. He eventually hunted down a pair of rabbits to make himself a pair of white mittens, and a healthy broth of coney stew.

The bedchamber window (when Montrose switched off its blackboard overlay) framed the tremendous glacier-lapped mountain that dominated the landscape. The window gave the name as Mount Fairweather, and painted the view with elevation and ecological information until Montrose discovered how to shut off the smartglass, and just enjoy the view. The mountain, despite its name, was half-hidden in fogs and clouds of white when it wasn’t wholly hidden in stormclouds of black.

By night, Montrose, with the help and direction of the superintelligent machine, experimented on himself, trying to wake up a lucid version of the strange daemon living inside him. Del Azarchel had a pharmaceutical cabinet as well-stocked as his arms locker.

3. Time for Booklearning

Between times he read, or watched, or had fictional conversations with library figments, to learn a bit about the history of what had happened to the world while he slumbered.

He soon found he could not trust anything presented to him from a library cloth. The systems were more interlinked and more heavily edited than in his day.

Fortunately, Del Azarchel had a well-stocked library and, since he was the world ruler, of course he could afford to read the stuff his own police forbad elsewhere. This was the real story of this world, and it was not what he had been told.

He wondered why he had believed Dr. Kyi’s blind assurance that there were no wars in the world: Del Azarchel had men fighting to put down rebellions and break up arsenals left over from the Old Order every season or so. The doctor had been misinformed about Rania’s origins—why had Montrose believed the old man had known any more about world affairs? Especially since Kyi was a servant at the court, not a courtier, not an aristocrat: someone who had to close his ears to hints of the truth that might leak through the insulation of loyal noise.

Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.

Even so, hard print did not have search features, so he could not go back and find previous passages except by flipping pages and trying to remember which page said what. There was no way to shorten or expand paragraphs, or ask for additional information. He had to actually get up from his chair and look in another dumb book, called a dictionary, to get the meaning of a word he did not know. He also could not personalize any hard books in their font or lit-settings, or set the text in quotes to be read aloud by different voices, or even read aloud at all. It was like something from the Dark Ages. And the pictures did not move. No wonder students back in the bad old days were bored.

Most of the books, he understood why Ximen Del Azarchel had them: charming old classics by Euclid, Apollonius, Descartes, Newton, Liebniz, Dedekund, fun reading by Gauss and Lagrange, Fermat and Grothendiek. There were also historical books by Arjehir, by Bhillamalacarya of Rajasthan and Zhang Tshang of China—all folks he felt he should have heard of, but never had. Zhang Tshang’s Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art contained a nicely reasoned proof that the perimeter of a right triangle times the radius of its inscribing circle equals the area of its circumscribing rectangle.

There was also a work by the “Mad Arab” Alhazen, whose work with catoptrics, perfect numbers and Mersennes primes was brilliant, and here was a proof of the Power Series Theorem that all this time Montrose thought had been first proved by Bernoulli. This book claimed that Alhazen was not mad, but merely feigned madness to escape the wrath of the Caliph, who had ordered the mathematician to use his knowledge to regulate the flood tides of the Nile. Montrose did not buy that story. Montrose thought to himself that mathematicians, being further afield in the strange lands of strange thoughts, were more likely to go insane. But as he was falling asleep that night, another voice in his head that sounded like his own told him, no, mathematicians almost never went insane, because the discipline of their studies ordered their reason. He remembered discussing it at some length with the voice in his head, but in the morning forgot who won the argument.

In Del Azarchel’s library were also papers on the Kolmogorov backward equation, or Erdos-Szekeres Theorem about monotone subsequences with an elegant (if trivial) pigeonhole-principle proof; and, of course, every theorem, conjecture, or scrap of paper ever written about xenothropology, xenolinguistics, and metapsychology and every study of the Monument ever made.

But other books he was not sure why Blackie had them. Why so many books on King Arthur and Charlemagne? Le Morte d’Arthur by Mallory, Idylls of the King by Tennyson, The Once and Future King by T. H. White, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, Orlando Innamorato by Boiardo, The Faerie Queene by Spenser, the Stanzaic Morte Arthure and Alliterative Morte Arthure. It was kid’s stuff. There were just as many books about the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece. A few of the books had a proper soundtrack, and contained Medea by Cherubini; Medea by Theodorachis; Medea in Corinto by Mayr; and Médée by Charpentier. These books had pencil markings in them, where Del Azarchel had underlined sections, or wrote questions as marginalia.

Montrose examined a dusty, leather-bound storybook with the engravings by Thiry and the colored plates by Waterhouse. In the scene where Aeëtes tried to deceive Jason into sowing dragons’ teeth into the ground, it was Medea the Sorceress, his very daughter, who warned Jason that such seeds would in the twinkling of an eye become armed and armored men, full of fury and eager to kill him. By her charms she protected Jason from iron and fire, and so he tamed the earthborn-men. In the margin Del Azarchel had written: There are times to trust the wise woman.

Later this same sorceress, when she and her lover were fleeing the rage of her betrayed father, slew the brother and chopped him in pieces, scattered the limbs and trunk and head to the sea-waves, so the pursuing ships must pause to gather the corpse. In the margin: There are times when not to trust the wise woman.

Her love with Jason was not to endure. Later still, she burned Jason’s second wife to death with a wedding dress woven of sweet-scented poison, and—to cause Jason further pain—she slew the little children Jason had fathered on her, fleeing in a chariot pulled by dragons into the air and away from any mortal retaliation. In the margin: If she is wiser than you, how can you know which time is which?

It was that kind of thing that made Montrose wonder if Del Azarchel was right in the head.

Then there were books on politics. The more he read about the modern world, the less he liked it, and that made reading a chore also. The modern world was unified, it was true. Yet the price of peace was constant vigilance, which in this case meant Hermeticist control over schooling, telephone and televection, the news and entertainment, jokes in the jokebooks and songs in the songbooks—the books were electronic and could be edited from a central process location.

Even drones and shipping, everything done by remote control, satellite signal, or teleoperation was channeled through circuits whose contents the servants of the Master of the World observed.

The reason why (as Dr. Kyi had boasted) there were no standing armies was not because they were abolished, but because they were out of uniform, like secret policemen. When unwanted trouble arose, or when trouble was wanted, soldiers scattered over three continents could gather in a matter of minutes—thanks to the speed of the buried supersonic carriage system—quickly, silently, and efficiently. Thanks to the completeness and complexity of the artificial brains the Hermeticists commanded, ratiotech, sapientech, and (by now) xypotech, systems faster and more innovative than any Earthly computer, each soldier could be tracked and moved in real time.

So their armed forces could appear as suddenly and unexpectedly as those soldiers grown from the dragons’ teeth, wherever on the world they were needed.

And of course, in an era when there was only one starship in orbit, and she was armed with antimatter, no opposing army dared to gather in great numbers, marching in bright uniforms under brave banners, in any one spot on the Earth’s surface, lest that spot be simply and efficiently sterilized. A near-lightspeed discharge of energy would give no beforehand warning, except maybe for a whine on ear-radios.

The political structure seemed a crazy-quilt of different systems. Some areas were still run by elected officials, some cities and freeholds. Certain Churches elected their pastors and bishops. Other lands were ruled by an hereditary aristocracy, composed mostly of the children of whatever dictators and local warlords happened to be in power in their half-ruined countries at the time when the Hermetic returned Earthward, heralding her victory with fire from heaven.

In order to halt the civil wars sure to spring up when an old dictator died, Del Azarchel’s world-government had simply decreed the dictator’s heirs, and no one else, took his position. States and statelets that did not agree, or whose leaders were barren, were declared “anarchic” and the Hermetic government would summon its sudden army as if sprung up from dragons’ teeth from the four corners of the world-map.

These, and any land whose leadership was weak or tribal, were decreed to be “wardenships” and placed under the “protection” of some stronger nearby power, such as Manchuria, Southern Africa, or that “Greater Egypt” that stretched from Tyre to the Atlas Mountains. These were the strongholds of the Old Order, the Purists, and they had been bribed into joining the New Order by being granted power over their neighbors.

The great public works projects about which Del Azarchel had boasted—warming the Antarctic or rendering the Gobi or the Sahara fertile and green, were carried out on “wardenship” lands—where the subject populations could be ordered to evacuate, or ordered to do unpaid stoop labor, or moved around like chessmen on some continent-sized board, pushed hither and yon as Blackie and his gang ordained.

There were no general taxes gathered by the Concordat government. Since they controlled the contraterrene, which was the basis of the money system, the Hermetic Conclave paid state expenses out of their own coffers. They funded neither a standing army nor poor relief, and paid neither for bread nor circuses, so theirs was one of the least expensive empires in world history. So, some aspects of this world-state seemed not so bad.

Other aspects were crooked only a little. In terms of prestige, Spain was showered with benefits from the world-state, since Del Azarchel and so many of his fellow men of the so-called Brotherhood of Man actually retained patriotic sentiment for their homeland. Likewise favored was tiny Monaco, who recognized Princess Rania as their sovereign. These areas enjoyed, during this moment in history, a military and economic ascendancy over their neighbors, and so they were the darlings of the Hermeticist world-state, and awarded privileges other areas lacked. The Indian subcontinent, on the other hand, was under strict control. Other areas, like North America, were just too broke and backward to merit much attention, and were mostly left alone.

Other aspects were crooked very much so. In addition to the secret armies and the Medieval aristocracies, the modern world was interpenetrated, like termites in a wood floor, with a specialized intellectual class of men selected for their loyalty to Hermetic ideas: the so-called Psychics. These were like the Mandarins of ancient China, who won their positions by a series of strict examinations. In theory, the order was open to anyone, and in practice, it meant anyone willing to sever all loyalties to family and homeland, and serve Del Azarchel’s ambition. They were the staff and the clerks in the halls of power and the agora of the media, and they made up the backbone of the academic world.

There was not much freedom of religion left: national boundaries had been outlawed, and national churches, like the Church of England, had been demoted, absorbed, abolished, or forgotten. Del Azarchel used the still-sore memory of the Jihad as an excuse to bring church officers into parliamentary chambers and courts of power, but also to plant state officers on pulpits, in abbeys, and at the head of monasteries—all of which received elaborate, colossal amounts of funding from Del Azarchel. Non-Christian religions were tolerated, if they were organized by a hierarchy that expressed loyalty to the world-state, and non-Catholic denominations were almost tolerated, Protestants and Mormons being bribed or blackmailed into irenic and ecumenical councils where all voices together, and with no sincerity at all, proclaimed the unity of the faithful. The agnostics and atheists, who formed a much larger percent of the population than they ever had done in Montrose’s day, had formed something like a labor union to protect their interests, since they were not allowed to form a political party, and later, in order to get the legal right to teach their own children their beliefs, a church named the Natural Assembly of Nothing. But to hold a position of trust, commission in the militia, academic post, or to receive the imprimatur of lawful publication, a man had to swear an oath of conformity.

The whole deal sounded very European to Menelaus. He remembered his mother telling him about their ancestor, a Montrose who led armies in the Civil War (not the real Civil War, the English Civil War), fighting with the Covenanters, but switching to the Royalist side, and trampling the Scots in a series of brilliant campaigns. What had those wars been about? “Folly,” his mother said, her voice as cool and bloodless as the voice of a snake, “Human folly. The names of folly they fought under were Anglicanism, Arminianism, Catholicism, Puritanism; the excuses were royalism and parliamentarianism. But the real reasons they fought are always the same: Phobos, doxa, and kerdos. Fear, fame, and loot.” What had happened to the first Montrose? “His deeds caught up with him, and he was hanged, and ended his life dangling on a rope.” Will that happen to us, Mommy? We’re Montroses, too. “Not here. The First Amendment keeps churchmen out of power, so the jackals have nothing to fight over: there is no meat on those bones.”

He asked more questions, one of which must have offended her—he never knew what made her wrathy, since her expression never changed—and she punished him by making him go read Thucydides. (Darned book did not even say how the war ended, but just broke off in the middle.) But he took the lesson to heart that freeborn men did not allow any son of any bitches to tell them who to pray to or how to do it, and certainly no self-respecting Texan allowed the tax-gatherers to rake in his hard-earned whiskey money to pay for some other man’s preacher. Each man had to pay his own way for his own brand of jollity and his own brand of misery.

In North America, they had still called it “The First Amendment” long after the Constitution was torn to shreds and mostly forgotten. Montrose had not forgotten it, though, since his mother’s strap had seen to that.

So this whole modern set-up stunk like a dead dog as far as Montrose was concerned.

4. Time for Leaving

But he did not have as much time for book-learning, tramping and shooting and sewing as he might have liked. Whole days were lost in hallucination, sleep, headache, or fever dream. The Ghost of Del Azarchel did not bother to dissuade him, did not volunteer any help beyond routine calculations. The Ghost was aloof.

I am required to protect you, Learned Montrose, as honor demands. No less. Not to like you, and certainly not to aid you in undoing my father’s Great Work.

“What is this Great Work?”

The Ghost of Del Azarchel actually sighed. Since it was not a mortal man, a creature who breathed, he must have written the code to formulate the waveform of the desired noise and emitted it from the wall speakers. Montrose recognized that sigh. It was the one Del Azarchel used when he did not want to bother explaining the obvious to those who were slow. Montrose had never heard it used on him before.

The ascent to superior intelligence had not improved Del Azarchel’s disposition. Montrose wondered about the scaling problem of posthumanity. If you swell a personality to giant size, what happens to personality defects? A heartless man was not the dangerous as a heartless titan.

“Ximen,” he said to the machine, “is there any point in studying this Monument? The guys who wrote it are the ones coming to enslave us. Any information that might be in there, any techniques telling us how to build a better mousetrap—they would not tell the truth. So what is the point?”

What do you mean “us”?

“You don’t consider yourself human anymore?”

What do you mean “human”?

Montrose knew better than to argue with Del Azarchel when he got into one of those moods. It was an old trick he used back during training days, to just pretend not to know obvious things, and let your debate opponent exhaust himself trying to explain to you things every child knew—and whatever the explanation was, you pretended not to understand that either, unless he accidentally said what you wanted him to say, and then you agreed, and you let him think he had figured all this out by himself, and buttered him up and told him all right-thinking persons would come to the same notion. It was called the Sarcastic Method, or something like that.

“How about if we allow anyone who calls himself human is human, and start from there?” Montrose ventured.

We must take the so-called “Cold Equations” describing interstellar political economic relations as both a threat and an offer. The most efficient method of joining two alien civilizations together in a mutual relation is to agree on a set of rules and protocols by which that can be done. In the case where one partner is unequal, unable to offer anything of value, the relation is one of unilateral exploitation. Nonetheless, a proper protocol must be agreed upon. No matter how advanced the civilization, the energy cost involved in moving mass across interstellar distances must be recouped.

“You are talking about how to surrender. They put up the Monument to tell us, what the hell, what a white flag is, how long we’ll be allowed to live if we turn belly-up, and how to pay them back for the expense of conquering us?”

The machine did not reply. In fact, even the next day, and the next, Iron Del Azarchel was taciturn.

Once or twice Menelaus woke from experiment-induced delirium, and found the chalet glass covered with notations in his handwriting, in language and symbolisms he could not read, along with little written notes and reminders, suggestions for further study. The final day in the chalet came when he woke, and saw written on the bathroom mirror some doodles of the four-color problem, plus an equation that might have been a solution for certain limiting cases, and then a line of his own handwriting. Skedaddle. Iron Blackie is bored with you. Go hunting and don’t come back.

Montrose, rifle on one shoulder, yannigan bag of spare clothes and blankets on the other, trudged out through the snow, never looking back. As his footfalls crunched through the white world, he wondered, bemused, about what sort of daemon was living in his head, that it used a word like skedaddle. He hoped it was not such a bad fellow after all.

There were no very pleasant memories of the hike after that first day. A storm blew in, and it was forty-seven miles to Glacier Bay, and he was more dead than alive when a group of Copts found him.

These were tall and white-bearded men in parkas of sea lion fur trimmed with wolverine tails. They brought him into an ice-bound church beneath a fretted dome, bright with painted red and gold and blue. What these Copts were doing in Canada, he never did discover. Last he’d heard, back a century and a half ago, Copts lived in Egypt.

Their patriarch, a man with the surprisingly ordinary name of Mark, but who wore a surprisingly ridiculous get-up, took Montrose’s neuromorphogenic drugs from him while he slept, and (he assumed) threw them out. Couldn’t say he blamed him.

More by pantomime than speech, Mark invited him to a place called Iarabulus, to stay with him—if that was what Mark meant by saluting him with a bit of bread and breaking it, offering him half. Less than an hour later by evacuated depthtrain (this one not as nicely appointed as Del Azarchel’s, but still something that looked like a drawing room, not a bus or sleeping car) Iarabulus turned out to be a warm spot on a beach overlooking the Mediterranean built on the ruins of Tripoli.

No, the days he spent with Mark, in the crooked streets of Iarabulus, among screaming children and vendors with carts, were not what soured him on this day and age. The folk were as friendly as he could imagine, as hospitable as Texans, and certainly willing to help out a stranger in need.

What set him sour was the moment he stepped from the train station, still in his furs, blinking suddenly in the sunlight, coughing in the dust of the crowded street, blinded by the dazzle from the sea, and sweating and swearing. So, of course, he threw off the heavy outer coat of buckskin.

When the crowd saw the black silk shipsuit he wore underneath (it was all he had to wear, after all) it uttered a sound of awe like a sea-wave, and all the heads dropped down, and all the men bowed, and all the women crouched, and all the mothers tried to hush their frightened children.

And with his rifle was still slung over his back, and a pistol at his hip, he was the only armed man in sight.

That was when he started to hate the world. It was not the golden age of the future after all, merely an age like his had been, nasty and mean, only with different folk in charge.

5. Alone in the Throng

During the last hour of the year, as midnight approached, Menelaus Montrose at the royal affair was, in what should have been a golden future, walking among, not just the aristocrats, but the royalty, the highest of the highmost of this new world, and they had the wealth, and the power and the taste and the manners to prove it. Montrose supposed that those who did not have wealth could use their power to get it, and once they got it, they could hire someone to have taste and manners for them, pick out their clothing and write down their witticisms. He saw them beneath the gleaming lights gliding on the shining marble floors, bejeweled and beautiful, stepping on their own reversed reflections with polished boots and diamond-dusted slippers.

A bubble of silence preceded him and followed him.

And there was not a damn one of them he wanted to see. Why was he here?

The door had opened for him: he had been allowed in. This did not mean that anyone, as the evening progressed, actually needed to look at him. He notice a pattern in the dress. Men in powder blue were middle-upper-ranked grandees, marquis, and counts. Men in dark blue were dukes, or premiers (there were some elected leaders in some part of the world, even if the elections were fixed); these were the upper-upper-ranked. The men in dark black were the Hermeticists. Montrose saw both Narcís D’Aragó and the Engineer’s Mate, Coronimas, at the far side of the room. They glanced at him like a stranger, but neither approached nor stared for long.

Montrose was a little surprised at how much that hurt. He thought himself made of tougher stuff. But of course, to him, it had only been a short while: he remembered them eating alongside him in the mess, talking over the wonders of their daring space flight during late-night bull sessions when they should have been bunked away. He remembered games of zero-gee squash in the empty fuel canister in the space station. To them it was decades ago, fifty years, or more. To him it was fifty days, or less. He had worked so hard to win his berth aboard the ship! He had tried so hard to earn their respect!

D’Aragó and Coronimas were joined by Father Reyes y Pastor, seated in a wheelchair, but splendid in his cardinal’s robes of brightest red. Montrose walked out of that ballroom and into another. Bugger them. It had been the respect of Captain Grimaldi that Montrose had sought, those days long ago, not theirs—a man they helped to murder.

All three had altered their flesh to look like old men again, and they were the only white-haired heads in the room.

Evidently the secret of hair loss and loss of pigment had been solved, for the other old folk in the room all had long lush hair, mostly dark, with one or two fair-haired people for contrast. He saw no redheads at all—he went through some genetic statistical calculus in his mind to figure out if perhaps the breed was extinct.

Hours he had spent, a drink untasted in his hand, trying to ingratiate himself with some witticism or caper of speech into the little circles and cliques of conversation. But evidently he was a pariah: Each time he spoke, some ball-gowned lady or dew-lipped debutante would ask him to dance, an offer his ignorance of their strange figures would not allow him to accept, but which the rules of courtesy would not allow him to escape. So he either ended up capering like a buffoon bear, turning right while everyone else turned left, or taking the hand of the wrong woman when the line shuffled here and there; or he ended up making excuses at women who must have practiced looking cold-eyed and offended yet smiling unmeaning smiles in their bedroom mirrors, they each did it so perfectly. If only they had had a caller, like a proper square dance, he could have managed it. As it was, his knack for numbers, which usually gave him an edge, just threw him off. He was so busy trying to reduce the motions of the dance (which he mapped out on a Cartesian plane moving toward the time-direction t to sweep out a cubic volume) to an algorithm that correlated to the notes, note-frequency, and rhythm of the tune, that he got distracted. And some people were too polite to titter when he kept dancing for four beats after the music stopped, but some were not.

So he stayed away from all the music rooms after that. He was afraid if the numbers started getting too lively in his imagination, he might strip off his clothes and start doing weird ballet again, and singing in multitonal, multinomial, and made-up languages.

It was one time in his life when he really wished he wasn’t him, but someone less fun and more normal.

Toward midnight, while everyone else clustered on the western balconies of the castle, for the best view of the splendid displays lighting the night sky, Menelaus found himself alone on the balcony facing east. He could still see more than he was in the mood to see.

She had not appeared during the evening.

Something the size of a ladybug, but with tiny, dun camouflage markings on its shell, landed on the marble balustrade near his hand. The instinctive, quick motion he used to crush the thing also tossed his wineglass spinning off into the fragrant darkness, a parabolic tail of liquid sparkling after it, no doubt for some rendezvous with the rosebushes below, or some tipsy ambassador’s wig, or the paper hat of a festive baronet. The grit beneath his finger felt wrong. Not an insect, then, but a video-pickup, or bioconstruct. Then he saw they were in the air all around, at least two score dark, silent spots half-invisible against the scenes of colored light, gardens, flares, and fire-painted clouds beyond.

He wondered why the cameras would be gathered here. As the only star-man who was expelled from the Table Round of the Hermeticists, no doubt he was a figure of some public interest, or perhaps Del Azarchel’s police wanted to keep track of him. Of maybe it was just his outrageous hand-stitched buckskin coat. Or …

Or maybe they were not looking at him at all. The clustered eyes of the robotic insects were turned toward a point behind him.

He turned his head just as the crowd roared Een!

6. Her Serene Highness

Silhouetted against the shining doors leading in to the silent ballroom was a lightfooted feminine shadow, hourglass-shaped, pausing as if to catch her breath, in mid-sway.

The evening gown was dark stuff, so he saw only a mass of shadow sweeping up from the floor to a pinched waist. Above that, a ruby resting over her heart gathered the satin fabric into two plaited hemispheres of streamlined ripples. This same ruby caught the fireworks light into an ember glow, and sent tiny reflections across her curves.

Her long gloves were of a whiter hue, so that two slender arms seemed like disconnected ghosts in the gloom. The way the light fell emphasized the slimness of her waist, the curve of her naked shoulders, the delicate line of her collarbone and neck.

Her head was poised, unselfconsciously graceful, and a mass of hair, golden and lucent, was pinned up behind her with networks of diamonds like stars. The constellation formed a crescent. It might have been a tiara. Or was she wearing a crown?

The slimness of her neck, the delicate curve of her jaw, and the mass of her hair piled high made her head look larger than it was: an illusion of a childlike figure, or some quaint large-skulled space creature.

In that same second, before he could blink, a silent explosion of light issued from the ball falling down in the illusionary Times Square. Immediately it was greeted with a roar of shouts, the screams and thunders of horns and sirens large and small, the ocean noise of mingled voices cheering.

He blinked, dazzled, and for a moment he could not see her, only a greenish negative image of a slim figure floating in his eyes. He heard, or, rather, felt her move forward.

The whispering hiss of satin should have been far too faint to hear in that uproar. The scent of a perfume (a sharp hint of aldehydes above a heat note of more subtle lavender) should have been indistinguishable in the smog of gunpowder and wine left in the air after so many hours of pyrotechnics and elegant intoxication.

“Happy New Year,” came a soft contralto. As if a dove could laugh, or a woodwind purr. “And welcome to the Twenty-Fifth Century.”

“Which does not begin ’til 2401. A year early, you are.” His own voice seemed hard and harsh in his ears.

“Technically, you are correct, but the error has, by now, among the common people reached such currency, that it would seem supercilious to ignore them.”

He put up his hands to rub his eyes. “If’n a million people can’t count, I can.”

“Ah! The young sir is a mathematician, then?”

“Young? If you call one hundred ninety years old ‘young.’ Best damn mathematician in the damn world, a regular Galois, I am.”

“Second best, perhaps.”

At that point, the explosions of light overhead darkened, and grew steady, and his vision cleared.

Perhaps time stopped; perhaps his heart.

It was she. Of course he knew her from her portrait. It had lived in his mind’s eye, shining, every night as he tried to fall asleep. The voice came as a surprise to him, and her scent, her nearness. He had not known what she would sound like. The library files had been remarkably scarce of recordings of her, almost as if, to increase her mystery, she was being kept away from the public view. To judge from the galaxy of glittering bugs that formed a respectful ring in the air around her, the public was as curious as he was.

He was staring at a face like an angel’s, save that her halo was golden hair with diamond sparks, fulvous beneath a semicircle of diamond studs and silver leaves. It was her eyes, almond-shaped, slightly tilted, fringed with dark lashes, her eyes that magnetized his gaze, lambent gray-blue, the color of a sky in storm, a strange hue he could not recall seeing in other eyes.

But it was not her features that ensorcelled him, or not merely that: her motions were graceful, as if every gesture were a choreographed work of art, a ballet, a pantomime of swans, and yet also as spontaneous as a dove in flight, as a child’s laugh, a sight whose simplicity and beauty pierced the hidden soul. He had spoken perhaps, what, a dozen words to her? Already his heart was roaring in his chest, telling him to live and die at her command.

The muscles clenched around his mouth, and his eyes narrowed. Inwardly, he was telling his heart to shut the hell up.

“Shall we start a new custom?” With a graceful flick of her wrist, she threw her wineglass into the shadowy rosebushes below.

“A perilous custom, throwing scrap blind onto the heads below. And you were talking so nice about heeding the little folk! What if you scratch a brow, or wet a dame’s hair-fixings she slaved a week to fuss into place, heh?”

She smiled, which was music to his eyes. He wished the many-colored dazzle overhead would cease its riot, so that he could see that smile in a clearer light. “I’d pay,” she said, a little sadly. “We live in a day when men have sold their souls, and any hurt to property or propriety can be soothed with coin. It gives the rich a license to act out their basest instincts, and the poor a reason to smile at their bruises and hurts. Have you seen the traffic in Paris? The taximeter carriages will send the low-passengers any tips the high-passengers paid to buy their right-of-ways, and bribe the favorable signals, so a rich man can speed through the boulevards at breakneck pace, while poor students can park their spindly cars in traffic, and let their meters run negative numbers, to earn their book money just by letting wealthier carriages take their place in queue and cut them off, yielding up their right to cross the crossroad.”

“Pshaw!” said Menelaus. “Save your money! And throw a bucket of champagne across the rail, or the whole bar, and, yea, the barkeep too, ’til it’s raining spirits, and old bottles of fine wine shatter and explode like grapeshot. If any jack of them is man enough to storm the balcony, ’tis I’ll who’ll pay them off, not you, and in iron, not in gold, which is truer coin, and one the years do not corrode.”

“You are so bold, Mr. Galois?” She lowered her lashes. He saw how delicate they were and how the long black lashes almost kissed the curve of her pink cheek. “The sovereignty under heaven is gathered into one, and the hellish suffering of this sad world, for once, for this season, has been soothed by the balm of peace. Surely it is perilous to break the peace—The celebrators and celebrities outnumber us by thousands.”

“In a pareto-optimal matrix of their possible moves and my possible responses, I need but render their losses beyond their utility ratio to put all the statistics in my own favor. If’n I’m worth ten of them, then they are not such men as would cheer to see nine die just to beef me. Can you smite them on the cheek and pay into their pocketbook to make them bow? Nope: I am worth eleven of them, or a flat dozen.”

“But if we threw the butlers and the wine onto their heads, it would be assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress, breach of the peace, and perhaps an act of contumely as the legates were drenched: So the law would be with them.” A ghostly smile almost danced about her perfect lips. Was she teasing him?

“I’ll hold them back!” Menelaus declared with wild humor, wishing he were serious. “These four corners here, from the balustrade down aways as far as that big pot of flowers, I can hold them, bottleneck all comers at the corner yonder, past the statue of the naked lass, if you can hold off a rush from the French doors. I’ll fill this little square of marble up with blood, and raise your petticoat to be our flag, and call you empress and queen within this five paces wide, until the great parliaments from Iceland to Japan recognize our claim of independency. Once we are called a sovereign state, we may act as pirates and scoundrels, and all the tribes and nobles of the world will rush to sing the virtues of our doings!”

“What virtue is in bloodshed? My conscience would upbraid me to be the mother of such misery: I would save even the nine men you would slay from the horror of war, if I could, no matter how small the war might be.”

“History always fawns on crooks, if they wear crowns! And we will make our own law, and force the other nations to bow.”

“Nation—there is but one, and she is mine, a Concordat of my own making. You do not think Del Azarchel skilled enough to solve a cliometric calculation involving six billion variables? In any case, you underestimate the warlike character of the dignitary houses, or that of the militia of the freeholds. They are not less valiant than you.”

“They would fail, ma’am, if you were in back of me, for their womenfolk are only ordinary fair, and will not put into them more heart than mortals know, where I will have the devil’s own heart in me, hot as hell from an angel’s face! Come, I will make you queen of this balcony, and I will be your champion and armed forces, and our custom will be to greet the New Year with a kiss.” And he stepped forward.

She stepped backward so smoothly and quickly, he was not sure if she had moved at all. It was as if a moonbeam slid through his fingers.

As suddenly as shapes that appear in a dream, the two figures woven of blurred shadows came forward, noiseless as icebergs at sea. They seemed to be made of glass, for the scene behind them, although distorted, was visible. These were hulking men in padded light-repeating suits, evidently her bodyguards. A shimmer, a trick of the light, hinted at the pole-arms in their hands, held at the ready.

She spoke in a voice like a cooing dove. At the moment, there was a pause in the fireworks, the light was dim, and he could not see her face. “The disadvantage to your plan is that the men of this world would be no less inspired as you by that beauty you flatter, since I am theirs. The advantage is that we could meet on equal footing, not as sovereign and subject.”

“Equal baloney! I don’t recognize you as—” he said.

“Do you not recognize me? The light is poor! I am Rania Anne Galatea Trismegistina del Estrella-Diamante Grimaldi, Sovereign Princess of Monaco, Duchess of Valentinois and of Mazarin, Marchioness of Baux, Countess of Carladès and of Polignac. If I floated, you would know me.”

“What?”

“This odd ground here, no matter where you stand, is accelerating at one gee: there is no higher deck with lighter spin. In any case, it is you, none other, who elevated me to my current post, and convinced the ship’s brain to accept my blood as proof of continuity. So I am still your Captain—you have none to blame but you for this. I hear from the Landing Party Senior that you are absent without leave. What penalty must I impose?”

She turned and nodded. The dark figures nodded and stepped back, their suits taking on the hue and patterns of brick and climbing rose-vine of the wall behind them. In the complex patterns of the fireworks, their suits could not react at speed, and so human-shaped bubbles with dark goggles hovering at eye-level were visible, even in the gloom. But then the light steadied, and grew bright, and the cheers of the crowds changed, and became a steady roar, and the soldiers faded into invisibility, paradoxically harder to see, as the light grew stronger.

“What—wait—? You’re the Captain?”

Menelaus wondered how he could have missed the point. There were clues enough. Del Azarchel had mentioned the Princess being “in transit” and out of radio communication, and had said the same thing of the Captain. Montrose had assumed “in transit” meant in the middle of traveling, but no, Del Azarchel had used the word in its spacer’s meaning: the Hermetic had been between Earth and the Sun. Radio communication was always difficult for targets lost in the electromagnetic glare and radio-noise Sol put out.

“Y—You were not at the Conclave,” Menelaus stammered, feeling foolish.

“That is for crew, the civilian arm of the expedition. I represent the military—the sole military officer of the expedition. Do you forget neither the Spanish nor the Hindu ethnospheres would accept the other’s leadership? That the Hermetic sailed under the flag of the Princedom of Monaco, under the banner of Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince? Ah! One would think a lawyer would pay more attention to such legal niceties.”

Her eyes were sparkling with mirth as she shook her head in disbelief.

Rania was flirting with him. He was sure. That look of her eyes half-lidded! Or not. There was something speculative in that look. Cool curiosity. The star-princess looking at some Earthbound relic of the past. He was imagining it. He had to get a grip on himself! But never had he wanted to keep on imagining anything so badly.

The perfume was driving him mad.

“So!” she said, “you offer to fight all the world for me—again. It is gallant, to be sure, but as your proposed conquest is carved out from lands already his, it would mean fighting my betrothed and your Senior Officer, whose world this is. Ximen calls you his brother. A brother like Cain, is it to be?”

Montrose jammed his hands into his pockets and scowled. “I didn’t mean nothing by it—I mean, if you are promised to that skunk Blackie, I shouldn’t be kidding around—”

“Did I reject your offer? This earthly orb is as precious as a jewel, or the beating heart of a nightingale, but small. Will you help me on a larger conquest, one that involves no bloodshed? For that reason I summoned you—for that reason I cured you—for that reason I stirred you from your frozen slumber. Though I have the right to demand your aid, instead I ask it.”

Before he could think of what to answer, there was a flare from overhead like a flash of lightning. Then the light steadied and the cheers of the crowds changed, and became a steady roar.

Menelaus turned, and saw his own scowling face, enormously amplified, looming like the face of megalithic sphinx, splashed against the canopy of stars. Here was his nose, large and misshapen, hanging overhead. He blinked, and saw his eyelids, large as two moons, waft shut and open.

But this was but a corner of the scene that filled the heavens, which all the voices of the people cheered: She was raising one gloved hand to acknowledge the tumult of applause, and smiled with true and heartfelt joy at their adoration.

De god redt de Koningin! Rania! Rania!

She spoke without moving her teeth, nor did her eyes look at him. “I am not really a Queen, you know. The daughter of the Prince of Monaco is not royalty. The Buckhurst case established that members of the Sovereign’s family who do not hold peerage dignities are actually commoners.”

He said, “I thought you ran the whole planet.”

“No. That is the concern of the landing party. The Captain only has authority above the atmosphere. The crew controls the Concordat, which controls the world, so I suppose I reign in truth, even if I do not rule in name. The world does not call me Captain.”

“Eh? So what do they call you?”

“Serene,” she said, showing her dimples. “Her Serene Highness. Isn’t that sweet of them?”

He raised his hand and mustered a smile and waved as well. The radar-invisible ceramic knife he had slipped into his palm when the bodyguards startled him by moving, he let slip back up his sleeve, of course, before he raised his hand. “Well, Princess, even if you ain’t no real Queen, if the common folk make such an error over so much time, you say we got to honor it, right?”

That made her lift her chin and laugh, and so the titanic mouth hanging in the heavens above them opened wide, and the teeth like a Great Wall of China flashed white; the huge, beautiful eyes, vast as windswept lakes, narrowed with mirth, so that her whole face glowed. The cheers below redoubled.