Count to a Trillion (30 page)

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.”