Count to a Trillion

2

Personal Sovereignty

A.D. 2214–2217

1. The Starvation Winter

It was cold as he slept, ice cold to his bones, and he dreamed of winter.

His earliest memories were of the cold.

The Starvation Winter had gone on during all Menelaus’s early years, and it was not until he was six that he saw the springtime, a mysterious season, a hope and a promise even his eldest brother was not certain about. The half-decade of unbroken snow had killed the Pest, but also countless tens of millions of men.

It was not until he was older, that he heard it called The Japanese Winter. When young men cursed the Tenno of Greater Japan, saying his mad experiment in climate modification was meant to kill everyone north of the Tropic of Cancer, the old men wheezed and upbraided them, and said the Paynim unleashed the plague (which at first only attached itself to genetic markers found in Ashkenazim Jews, but which mutated to seek all primates) it was only the cold that saved everyone: Winter is the friend of man! the saying went, Thank God for the Nippon Winter, or we would be as extinct as apes.

It was for Menelaus the first spring in the world. The flowers and birds never before seen by him appeared. To him, the word “brook” meant a path of ice, and the word “fishing” meant chipping a hole in that ice. When all these icepaths which had been solid during all his short life turned to rippling water, just as his mother had promised they would, he was sure, in his heart, that everything would be different thereafter.

It was so strange seeing green grass where there had only been white snow before; so odd to see runners removed from every sledge or cart and round wheels, like something from a toy, put in their place. It was pure joy to run outside in bare feet, rather than trudge and slip in his older brother’s hand-me-down snowshoes.

It was odd to see men, those whose farms could not be tarped with greenhouse-cloth, the same listless men who had spent last year loitering or rioting at warehouses and depots, where grain from southern lands was stored, now set to tearing up the earth with strange instruments, furrowing the ground in long parallel rows, walking after antique traction motors or antique mules, and speaking boastfully about being men again. The whole world was new, and it was spring, the glorious season of light, and Menelaus was sure the Asymptote lay just around the next turn of the calendar.

But at seven, Menelaus was apprenticed; and endless days of toil made his springtide winter again, no matter how bright the sun.

2. Apprenticeship

A.D. 2217–2219

Barton Throwster was not a cruel master, but not a rich one either, and his fear of debtor’s prison made him drive his prentices exactingly, so that many a night by lamplight Menelaus and the other boys were still programming dart and fuses and shells, and packing chaff in various combinations, and finishing the magnetic rails for pistols until the acceleration line was flawless.

Mr. Throwster was also a Cathar, which meant he must go through elaborate precautions of maintaining his bodily purity, cleaning his white clothes with sonic waves, and changing his skin-gloves and nose-filters at regular hours. His denomination had objections to the implanted antibodies that kept the Pest away from normal people, but it could not be denied that he was a careful Artificer, and the number of his customers or prentices who caught a disease from an improperly prepared weapon-load was the lowest in the parish.

The same exacting care made the villagers elect Mr. Throwster to the post of Wellmaster, but he was not paid extra for the honor of being the officer watching the purity of the local water supply, and the loss of his daily hours to this task made him drive his prentices all the harder, to make up time. And because he was a Cathar, and friendless, the village elected him Bangbeggar and gave him a long staff, on the excuse that since the vagrants and tramps sometimes carried disease vectors, only a man of his careful habits would do.

Throwster was too conscientious to turn down the position, and so he moved his shop into the Constable’s quarters halfway up the ramp of the broken cloverleaf, from which the village of Bridge-to-Nowhere took its name.

This cloverleaf was a high and crumbling structure of concrete posts and elevated fragments of road. The ramps for traffic were all broken, so the top had to be reached by ladders. At this height, the villagers kept their lofty Meeting Hall, which doubled as a stockade in times of raid. Lesser buildings, like swallow’s nests, clung to road fragments lower down the titanic concrete pillars.

The expense and trouble of these new quarters, especially the cost of hauling water up so high, was one Throwster lost from his own pocket. The theory was that public-spirited citizens should be eager to serve the town, and that patriots would scorn being paid from the parish coffers, but Throwster dared not collect the bribes Bangbeggars commonly used to make up the deficit, not where he was the only Cathar.

This sour lesson was not lost on Menelaus. Men in groups could cheat you just as plain as highwaymen alone in the wild, and do it by the voting box. It was one more thing he saw that never would have been that way had Captain Sterling of the Science Patrol been in charge.

At nine years old, the honor of being the Constable’s boy meant more work for young Menelaus, but it also meant Throwster taught him how to fight with a wand, or with his bare hands, while watching for needles or dirty nails, or mouth-weapons like hollow teeth or spit-shooters that a foe might use to infect you.

Thowster was too refined a man to touch another person’s flesh in match, of course, so he borrowed a practice dummy from the local Militia Accoutrementer, and Menelaus spent many hours being thrown and pummeled and punched and choked by the hard, rubbery hands of the dull, half-paralyzed manikin.

Menelaus learned instinctively to assume his enemies would have no weakness, and this gave him a rough sort of honor, because during a brawl he would not gouge eyes or groins or nerve-centers, merely because his reflexes were not trained for it. His reputation was one of maniacal cruelty, because he applied enough pressure to break an iron bar to break an arm or leg, nor would he stop or even slow, as if some panicky certainty was deep in his heart that a man, no matter how damaged, would still fight as full capacity with his remaining limbs.

He often had nightmares about the faceless, voiceless thing limping down the dark path to his house, and scraping at his door at night with its mittens.

3. Asymptote Revisited

A.D. 2219–2220

A year passed, then two.

The other Constable boys loved rousting blighters (as men escaping from blight zones were called) onto the broken, weed-overgrown paths still called federal highways. Because federal law was enforced on the highways, no law was, and so, to Menelaus, it looked like they were throwing these paupers to the wolves. If he came alone upon blighters, if they would promise to find honest work, he would tell them the name of a farm that was short-handed, let them escape into the fields instead. But the blighters were stickatnoughts, and always broke their word, and many of them were too lazy and stupid to keep themselves clean of enemy diseases, so they really had to be driven onto the highways, whether the highwaymen preyed on them or no. It was wicked to beat them away, and dangerous to let them stay.

He hardened his heart, but it sickened him.

Menelaus noticed that the vagrants of browner skin, the Aztlans and Mestizos, Mulattoes and Swarthies, were always beaten away with gusto by the other boys. The darker they were, the more jabs and blows of the stick they earned, or if they wore the strange medallions of the Spanish Church. Penniless Blondies and Grasseaters (as the Anglos were called, although most of the Noreasternmen ate meat when their womenfolk were not around) were equally as likely to be carrying a disease vector, but were merely treated gruffly. When rich Anglo merchants, who wore antiseptic jackets with polished brass buttons, folk so refined that they ate burritos with knife and fork, came into town, their contempt for the local townsfolk was just as great, just as unreasonable. Only the Jewish peddlers were polite to everyone, but everyone seemed to hate them, and called them sly.

Unlike some prentices, Menelaus still slept under his mother’s roof, which was one small blessing. Another was that his big brother Napoleon was prenticed out as an Apiarist, to learn the art of gene-splicing, breeding, and caring for the insects on which the village’s trade in silks and in pharmaceutical honey depended, and so came home covered with bee stings and spider bites.

Bug-bit Napoleon’s burning jealousy that Menelaus got to work with dangerous chemicals and energies all day was as cheery as a campfire to Menelaus.

There was a second moment of joy that year. For a long while, Menelaus had tried to find another copy of Asymptote, after his mother made him delete it. The other prentices suggested one thing and another, black market and offchannel, but there was nothing. The comic had been an antique, and not even recorded in the Federal Salvation Net, which attempted to recreate from surviving sources the books and files lost when the Library of Congress was firebombed by Speech Puritans in 2091. Antiquarians did not have resurrecting lost kid-lit as their highest priority.

He finally found a third-generation scrape in a Jewish peddler’s old back-up trashfile. The peddler sold it to him for a Spanish royal (he would not take Texan money, and Menelaus did not blame him), but warned him that all sales were final. It was far more than Menelaus could afford, but he had to have the file.

Brimming with excitement, he had kept the file strip tucked in his glove all afternoon, and snuck out back behind the woodshed after supper to feed it into his library cloth. There were formatting errors, and he had to try and retry his load, but finally the thing came to life.

The disappointment was crushing. It was only two chapters out of the middle, episodes he had seen and solved before, with the music track in mono. And it was in Spanish, badly lip-synched.

He noticed things he had not seen before, dozens of little errors. The textures were bland and uniform; the depth-perception was off. All the female crewmen were based on the same hourglass-shaped wireframe, just the same girl over and over with different heads. The hair was wrong. The dialog was stiff and stilted. And the backgrounds were simply the same graphic, used and reused.

But still, but still, somehow, it was still great. At the intro frame, the three horncalls rang out, brassy and brave, the clarion of triumph: ¡Hacia adelante! ¡Para el futuro! ¡ … es! ¡ … un viaje! ¡ … sin extremo!

It was so stupid and so fake looking. And yet, when the great ship Emancipation lifted off, surrounded by a surge of boiling flame, to stride roaring above the red-tinged clouds on her single bending leg of fire, his heart soared as well … and magical silence fell when the ship left atmosphere, and in the darkness the distant suns shined untwinkling like lanterns … lanterns beckoning.…

The end credit lyrics were still in Anglo:

Come now traveler, sail the stars!

Go boldly yonder, beyond th’ unknown

The secrets of space shall all be ours

Myriad worlds of tomorrow our own!

He read the fragment, then reread it, the second time with the party comments track running, so he could hear the wisecracks and applause of other audience members. With an eerie feeling, Menelaus realized all these commentators, their laughs and scoffs and foul-mouthed swearing, was like nothing folk these days spoke. He was hearing voices long dead, maybe over a century old.

Then the sun was setting, so the library shined brightly in the gloom. He folded it up. Menelaus did not want his brothers to see him reading. To them it would be kid’s stuff. And both his mom and his master had oversight rights into his viewing habits. His brothers would have tormented him with days or months of mockery, if they found he had spent a whole Spanish dollar on a scabby copy of a spaceman cartoon. Worse, if they told the other prentices, Menelaus would have to lick them in one fight after another, taking a lashing from his master each time. But he could not bring himself to delete it.

That night, after midnight, he put the counterpane over his head and fingered on the library one more time, hoping the light would not leak out under the covers.

With sleep-bleared eyes he studied the frames of the story. With one part of his mind, he could see the hammy acting, the jerky graphics, the ridiculous, predictable ending. He knew it was fake, badly drawn. But with his heart, he was a crewman again, and rode to the stars on wings of fire.

There was something else here, too.

He had not understood it when he was young. Now he saw that the people of the far future, Swarthies and Blondies, were talking as equals, no one noticing or giving a hot hoot about color or kin or any of that.

One character was clearly a Paynim, an enemy, wearing a rag on his head and everything: but he was just a respected member of the Science Council. In one scene, a Blondie captain kissed a cute Swarthy, right on her thick, red lips, like they were man and wife.

(She was really a cute goose, chocolate skin and all, but Menelaus told himself not to find out if this ratty copy could unlock that secret level Hector showed him. While he was curious about what she looked like in her underwear, he was just old enough to realize such titillations were for weaklings. If Captain Sterling were real, would he gawk at smut? If his father were alive, would he?)

In the future of the Asymptote, there was no talk of lynching Mormons or statue-worshipping Catholics, nothing like that: The future-people never mentioned Church at all. It just didn’t come up. Menelaus, when he thought on it, had never had much use for churchgoing anyway. Pray for sun on a rainy day, nothing happens; pray for rain on a sunny day, nothing happens. Any fool could see that. But on the other hand, if there were no Meetings and no preachers, what would widows have to say over the coffins of their menfolk? It didn’t seem right to throw a man into the ground like he was a dead dog or something, without saying words of some kind.

He reckoned these future people didn’t have that problem. Whenever one of them died, it did not take long for him to better up, as some cloning machine would be found, or a new fixup of the teleport ray would allow all and sundry to make back-up copies of themselves, just like a song file.

(’Course, half the time the clone copies came back evil, but that was just one more problem for the Cyrano Widget to solve with that glowing metal helmet-doohickey in his lab that solved problems. The gadget was supposed to be too dangerous to use, since it caused “Neuropositronic Brain Disruption!” but the bold Science Officer ended up using it every other episode anyway.)

To be sure, a world without death did not seem too much more unimaginable than a world without hate, without race-hate or church-hate.

Menelaus wondered for the first time if this comic had been meant just for kids. Maybe it was talking about something more important. Maybe these writers of these long-dead future dreams had been a companionship, like a sworn brotherhood of knights, sworn to the proposition that tomorrow could be better.

Menelaus crumpled up his library, stuffed it back under his pillow.

Where had that dream gone? How long before the future came, the real future, the way it had always been supposed to be?

It was a long time before he fell to sleep that night.

Being trapped as an apprentice gunsmith and a Constable’s roustabout was certainly not the future he’d ever wanted. If he was ever going to make it to the stars someday, he had to find his way out of Bridge-to-Nowhere.