Th is is a work of fiction.

All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this

novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

COUNT TO A TRILLION

Copyright © 2011 by John C. Wright

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wright, John C. (John Charles), 1961–

Count to a trillion / John C. Wright.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2927-1 (hardback)
I. Title.
PS3623.R54C68 2011
813'.6—dc22
2011024212

First Edition: December 2011

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 1
Intelligence Augmentation

A.D. 2235

1. Bone Rongeur

Menelaus could not help but pause to inspect the bore of the bone-needle
as he was raising it to a point slightly above and between his eyes. It was
like looking down the muzzle of a loaded pistol.
He found that thought comforting.

2. Sailing Vessel

Menelaus I. Montrose was a young, brilliant, angry man of calendar age

twenty-five, biological twenty-four, having previously spent more than half
a year in suspension, while his family raised money for a surgeon. Mene-
laus was taller than average, with pale eyes and dark red hair that he wore
cropped short, navy-style.
He had scars on his right hand from knife-fights, he had scars on his
chest from gun-fights, slugs that failed to kill him, and shrapnel from near-
misses. The muscles in his right arm were more developed than his left,
26 JOHN C. WRIGHT

from endless hours of pistol practice with the absurdly massive weapons of
his day, giving his shoulders a tilted, crooked look. His cheek was lean,
and his jaw was a jut, his nose a preposterous hook of crooked flesh, but
his mouth was long and flexible, and the lines of tension that surrounded
it hinted at the overlarge grin that sometimes usurped his otherwise dead-
pan face. His eyes were deep set into their sockets, giving him a strange,
staring expression. The mirror convinced him no lady would ever find him
handsome.
No one in the cabin of the nuclear-electric propulsion vehicle P024 was
looking at him. The seven other men aboard wore helmets that restricted
vision; and surely most had their visors down and tuned to the outside view,
so that they could see the Earth falling away behind them, or the slim nee-
dle of the expedition hybrid ship growing slowly closer ahead, the Nigh-
to-Lightspeed vessel Hermetic.
The inner view was nothing to look at. The punt’s cabin was a cylin-
der, with a pole of avionic boxes, hydraulic lines and fiber linkages run-
ning down the central axis. The men were positioned with their heads
pointed inward toward this axis, their feet outward toward the “down,”
three fore, three amidships, and three aft, like the snowflake of a flock
of parachutists.
The three fore were Indosphere men, and aft of them were the non-
Hindus, the Firangi: Menelaus and five men from the Hispanosphere.
There was no advantage or comfort in sitting fore as opposed to aft, but
the famous Hindu respect for caste required it.
Menelaus’s mother once told him that when the USA was strong, the
rest of the world followed their ideals, and adopted a spirit of democracy.
That spirit sank when the English-speaking world sank. Seeing the tech-
nological marvel of the vessel, something greater than any American space
program had ever done, Menelaus doubted the great and ancient civiliza-
tions of Spain and India had ever looked to Texas, or the other, less im-
portant states in the Old Union, for inspiration.
Whether his mother was right or not about the past, these days, the low-
caste and the Farangi sat in the back. Even the pilot sat in the back.
There was no designated cockpit or helm station, since the piloting con-
trols were firmware carried in the pilot’s glove unit, and his readouts played
over the inside of his helmet. The carousel was spinning, but centrifugal
COUNT TO A TRILLION 27

force was so slight as to be unnoticeable: it was more for the convenience

of drawing dropped crumbs or styluses to the deck for the maintenance-
crabs, than for the comfort of the passengers.
There were no windows, no portholes, marring the hull of the punt, of
course. Such things were radiation hazards. Hull cameras could bring in
a better view from outside, especially if the image was enhanced and la-
beled by cunningly designed software.
An enhanced view, for example, might show the drive of the NTL
Hermetic as a streak of fire across the stars. Fictional, of course: The trail
of ions ejected from the ship was invisible.
The ship had started her acceleration burn two months before, but her
velocity had only accumulated to 8000 kilometers per hour. By spacefl ight
standards, this was a crawl, and high-thrust nuclear-chemical punts were
still able to rendezvous and unload passengers and supplies for as long as
the equations covering fuel economies might allow.
The virtue of the Hermetic was not her acceleration, but her specific
impulse. For continuous years and decades, the ion drive need not be shut
down. Her very tiny delta-vee could, for minimum fuel-mass, be snow-
balled into an end velocity rightly called astronomical.
The expedition was an all-male crew of two hundred ten hands and six
officers. This was to be the last of twenty-four punts, each carry ing nine
men each: and the fuel cost of the rendezvous made this final fl ight the
most expensive.
The nine men aboard this final punt were Earth’s acknowledged ge-
niuses, the old sages and young prodigies of mathematics and linguistics.
Earlier punts, over the last two months, had carried crewmen who also
had experience as astronauts, technicians, and (since the ship assembly
did not need to be complete before her long, slow drive began launch)
zero-gee heavy-construction workers.
He knew that had he cared to look through his visor-view, Menelaus
would have seen tiny sparks of light from oxy-acetylene torches fl ickering
here and there along the hull of the Hermetic. He did not look for fear that
he would be unable to look away. Menelaus was infatuated with the ship.
Fore was the armored sphere where the expedition would sleep. The cry-
onic materials would help stop incoming heavy particles, and medical cof-
fins were programmed to repair continually cell damage from radiation.
28 JOHN C. WRIGHT

Amidships was the wheel-shaped crew carousel to quarter those who

would stand watch and age during the voyage. The watch duty rotated
among the sleepers, each crewman slumbering for ten years, and standing
watch for one. The officers had a different schedule.
Behind the carousel was the shroud-control house. Aft of this extended
the many folded spars. The spars and members would, during deceleration,
deploy the light-sail package that presently formed the main bulk of the
vessel, gossamer-thin fabric wrapping the xenon propellant cells. Behind
this was the folded silver of the mirrored parasol meant to shield the for-
ward parts of the ship from laser radiation.
Farther aft, on a long and fragile spindle, were the many rings of the ion
accelerator.
The NTL Hermetic was a bastard of sail and motor, launching under
her own power, but carry ing a breaking sail in anticipation that Croesus,
receiving the millions of code-lines of radio-programmed instructions,
would have constructed a working deceleration laser by the time the half-
way point was passed. Since lasers do not disperse in a vacuum, the source
and the endpoint would impart the same degree of counterthrust. Once
in the braking beam, Hermetic could decrease the rate of her deceleration
merely by adjusting the light-permeability of her canvass.
Behind the hybrid design was a political, not an engineering consider-
ation. The world might trust Croesus-brain, fifty lightyears away, to build
and fire an antimatter-powered super-laser potent enough in output to boil
a planet like a poached egg. No one on Earth trusted his neighbor enough
to have such a monster nearby. For that matter, no ship could trust any gov-
ernment, any institution, to shoulder such a huge drain of power, such an
expense, for the quarter-century acceleration would last, without being in-
terrupted by wars, depressions, disasters, or changes of policy. Unlike the
Croesus-brain, men are fickle.
The NTL Hermetic was a beautiful ship, graceful as a work of art.
The hour was one that would never come in history again, an hour so
many had predicted for so long would never come: Earth’s first manned
expedition to another star.
The robotic probe Croesus had been sent seven generations ago, during
the First Age of Star Flight. Had it not been for the Little Dark Age, the
COUNT TO A TRILLION 29

follow-up expedition would have departed fifty years later. Instead, it had
had to wait until now.
Generations of dreamers had anticipated a time like this. The moment
was indeed pregnant with all the hopes of Earthbound mankind. Why
should anyone look at Menelaus Montrose?
His visor had been down, tuned to half-gain, so that the cabin around
him was overlaid with ghostly images. One image showed him, not the fa-
mous ship he approached, but an inset displaying the distance from Earth.
The little red line turned blue, indicating that the punt was in International
Space. Unclaimed. As far as he was concerned, an experiment illegal on
Earth was legal now.
Menelaus was sure no one had seen him break the Red Cross seal and
slide the illegal needle out from the medical kit riding the thigh of his
pressure suit.
But then he hesitated. For a crucial second, he stared down the bore of
the needle.
Thinking of it as a pistol barrel was less frightening. More than once in
his short life he had found himself looking down the muzzle of a pistol,
and those events had not ended as badly as might be. He was still here,
was he not?
He knew what to do when looking down a pistol-bore. Shoot first.
Don’t miss. Don’t hesitate, don’t fl inch, don’t regret. Call his doctors to
come to the fallen man, whether the Regulators come or no. Amazing
what they can mend these days. If the other man dies bravely, be sure to
say so. If the Regulators come, say nothing. Even if they haul you before
the dock for it, or put you on the gallows, say nothing. No gloating, no
vaunting, no apologies, no explanations. If the Regulators don’t come, and
the doctors don’t come, let the man have an ampoule of morphine, if he
needs it, and cover his face with his jacket, if he doesn’t. Most men are
thoughtful enough to wear a diaper under their trousers when they go to
settle disputes Out of Court, because you never can be sure of walking
away, and you never can be sure your bowels and bladder are empty, and
someone will always take a picture with his phone, even if everyone swore
not to (the little phones could be hidden in a ring, a pistol stud, a thumb-
nail, a molar). In a case like that, doff your own jacket, and cover his legs.
30 JOHN C. WRIGHT

Only polite. He’d do it for you. You can take his weapon, but you cannot
touch his widow, even if she was the one who asked you to meet him. Those
were rules he knew, and knew how to live by. Or die by.
This? This needle was the event horizon. An event horizon was a bound-
ary where no information about the events beyond can ever reach, in the
same way light can never escape a supermassive dark star. No one knew
what was on the far side.
He had waited a second too long. Like a cricket chirp in his ear, he heard
the punt pilot say, “My friend, what is this I see? Are you hurt? I have a ‘suit
open’ light here on my board, and your medical kit is pinging a query. What
are you doing?”
Damn.

3. A Question of Intelligence

There had been no way to check beforehand, of course. Menelaus had

relied on the black-market software package he’d bought in New Silicon
Valley, the smuggler’s paradise. The Hindi security programs, as usual, had
been more subtle than what Western science could match, more intrusive
than what Western notions of privacy would allow. Everyone who talked
about the “new global agora” or who said the Little Dark Ages were over
still could not explain the gap between Indosphere and Anglosphere crafts-
manship.
Menelaus’s internal suit status showed his helmet and medical kit still
shut. But apparently he had fooled no one’s monitors but his own.
The pi lot was a Spaniard named Del Azarchel. His fi rst name was
Ximen, which Menelaus could not pronounce, so Menelaus called him
“Blackie,” a nickname that suited him in more ways than one. He was a
mathematician of some fame from his studies of the Navier-Stokes equa-
tions, especially their application to logic-flows within analog computing
structures. His work on the underlying mathematics of the Ship’s Brain
was as important to the expedition as Montrose’s work on suspended ani-
mation.
The dashing young Spaniard had won all the tests in simulation back at
COUNT TO A TRILLION 31

Space Camp, humiliating older and more experienced Hindu candidates,

and so he won the coveted duty of chief pilot. Piloting was the most deli-
cate and demanding of shipboard tasks, requiring not only an ability rap-
idly to organize mathematical calculations, and perfect spatial visualization
skills, but also the ability to do so under stress, in a short time, and in high
and low gravity. Automatic computers could make possible, but could not
replace, the human pilot; and the task was akin to shooting a bullet pre-
cisely enough to strike the face of a nickel spinning in the air without
striking the buffalo.
Only on the punt was a pilot needed. The great ship herself would face
no navigation problems Isaac Newton could not have solved: the simple
act of accelerating in a featureless vacuum for twenty-five years, rotating
aft-to-prow, and decelerating in a featureless vacuum for twenty-five years
required no more piloting skills than a railroad engineer. Nonetheless, the
honor would still be attached to his name: for the next century, even while
he was in slumber, Del Azarchel would be the Ship’s Pilot.
He and Menelaus had been something of a pair of troublemakers to-
gether in space training camp, the facility in Northern Africa where the
crew first met. It was not that the Hindus had deliberately shunned any-
one; but somehow it was always these two, a Spaniard and a Texan, who
found each other sneaking under the camp shock-wire during late nights
off to go find a stiff drink or a pliant girl in the shantytown not far away,
when the other astronauts-in-training were lawfully in their bunks.
Del Azarchel, with his droll smile, dark good looks, and silvery gui-
tar could always sweet-talk the local girls into compromising positions,
and Menelaus, gaunt and ugly as a scarecrow, could not. But Del Azarchel
lacked a certain drive and boldness when it came to climbing electrical
fences and breaking into Hindu pleasure houses where “Franks” were not
allowed, and Del Azarchel needed Menelaus to inspire him to that extra
level of gumption, the level where sheer cussed-mindedness outweighs
common sense. They were a mixmatched pair, and Menelaus had not known
him long, but he knew he could count on him.
So he whispered into the helmet pickup. “Amigo, I’m running a wild
risk. Turn off the cameras! I don’t want no record of this. . . .”
“Off it is. My good friend, what the hot perdition’s fi re are you up to,
eh?”
32 JOHN C. WRIGHT

“This is something I got to do. You behind me?”

“You must ask?” the dark, musical laugh came over the mike. “I stand
behind you. Always.” Del Azarchel did not even bother to ask the details.
But he had to add: “Always. Except when I am far in front.”
This conversation was still on the private channel. But at that same
time, the shared suit channel came on. Another voice, this time of Dr. S.
Ramananda, said in amazement: “What is this? Look! Montrose has an
automatic bone rongeur in his hand! Are you going to perform surgery on
yourself, Sensai Montrose?”
All the passengers were strapped to cots that could be tilted to various
axes, depending where the combination of carousel rotation or engine
thrust put the gravity-vertical. Only older models of punts still used seats.
Under microgravity, there is no weariness in standing for hours on end,
and cots were easier to fold or inflate than seats in any case.
Dr. Ramananda was overhead to the upper left, from Menelaus’s view-
point, upside down. His helmet was not far from Menelaus’s helmet, but
even if he had entertained the impulse to try to wrest the medical appli-
ance out of Menelaus’s hand by force, the shoulder-harness and helmet
of  his suit were not built for stretching one’s hands overhead. Indeed,
Ramananda had not (and could not) crane his neck to look “up” at Menelaus
directly, but instead lifted a gauntlet, and pointed a fingertip camera-dot
at him.
Ramananda said tensely, “What is in that needle, Sensai?”
The radio channel was silent. Ramananda was a high-caste Brahmin.
Caste was not all-important on an expedition like this. Ramananda was
here because of his work proving the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer con-
jecture relating to general cases of rank greater than one. But caste was
not unimportant either. Respect for Ramananda’s status kept the others
silent.
Menelaus could not take his eyes from the bore of the needle. It was
like looking down a well. But the alert light shone green: It had selected
the path through bone and brain calculated to cause the least damage. A
flick of the thumb, the circuits in the needle would engage, and the needle
would find the right spot and move of its own accord, and puncture his
skull, and pump his brain full of neuro-pharmaceuticals.
“Intelligence.” Menelaus grinned wickedly. “Superhuman intelligence.
COUNT TO A TRILLION 33

The next rung up on Darwin’s ladder. I aim to be the first to hoist my but-
tocks up yonder, gentlemen. Easy as shimmying up a tree.”
But his fingers, five little traitors, trembled.
The ampoule contained a cocktail of totipotent cells, taken from his
own gene template, with artificial ribosomes programmed to turn into neu-
ral tissue. The molecular cues had already been established, one cell clus-
ter at a time over a series of months, here and there within his cortex and
midbrain tissue, to act as anchor points for the new growth.
A second group of ribosomes would begin the manufacture of certain
chemicals in his brain out of raw materials in his bloodstream: intelligence-
augmenting agents. Here were the molecular codes to create phosphotidyl
serine, which increased learning speed by improving special cells recep-
tors; vinpoticene to increase blood flow to the brain; and phenytoin to
improve concentration.
Here also were proteins to affect the brain’s ability to remodel its syn-
apses. Other proteins to prevent calcium overloads would be released by
reactions from his pituitary gland and medulla oblongata, as needed. The
artificial proteins would produce other neurochemicals, whose functions
were less well understood, but which had been found in the brains of
geniuses—and also in schizophrenics.
A third group would rewire certain nerve-paths, linking cell to cell with
strands of material more sensitive and conductive than natural nerve cells,
but grown out of his own brain-material. Protected by redacted RNA
messengers, the new material was part of what his body would think was
his gene code. Even if wounded, the new pseudo-nervous cells would grow
back.
But this was only what the ampoule contained physically. What it con-
tained in reality was the unknown, an inexpressibly alien otherness. What
lay beyond man, was in this needle.
And so he hesitated.
Ramananda said, “So. It has come to this. You will not abide by what
was decided; you will not abide by what you agreed. Did you not read the
articles before you signed?”
There was no surprise in the voice of Ramananda. No one in the cabin
failed to grasp what Menelaus meant to do. During training camp Mene-
laus had argued that such a thing as this should be tried, had to be tried: all
34 JOHN C. WRIGHT

had heard him say, or, at times, had heard him rant, that more than hu-
man intellect was needed to decipher the Monument.
“I read the articles, sure enough,” said Menelaus. “Read ’em over and
over. And if my recollecting is fair, what they say is this: Any member of
the scientific arm of the expedition may perform experiments or investi-
gations of his own devising, and at any time. Well, I pick right now for my
time. Nothing in the articles said I had to wait til we reached the Dia-
mond Star to start. And since I am not aboard the ship yet, not reported
for duty there, I am not officially under Captain Grimaldi’s command: so
even if you radio him, he could not tell me to stand down. I am square
within my rights. This here is my first experiment.”
A soft voice murmured. “Ah. That’s what we deserve for inviting a
lawyer aboard.” He was not sure, over the helmet radio, if it had come
from before or behind, but it sounded like the voice of a Spaniard
named de Ulloa.
Melchor de Ulloa was something of a lady’s man in his youth. The ru-
mor that he and Montrose had a running bet to see who could get into
more trouble with the Mission Commander during training was false, but
the mere fact that the rumor spread showed how alike they were, how
they had egged each other on. Melchor de Ulloa won fame for his solution
of Hilbert’s Sixteenth Problem, dealing with the upper bound of the
number of limit cycles in polynomial vector fields.
Menelaus was shocked to hear the scoffing voice of handsome young de
Ulloa. It had been de Ulloa, during that last night when the six younger
astronauts—Del Azarchel’s clique—had stolen out of camp together, who
had practically begged Menelaus to smuggle some form of Prometheus
Formula aboard.
Ramananda was saying, “This is a useless experiment! An illegal experi-
ment! Are you attempting to revive the nightmares of Shanghai—those
horrible children in vats the Chinese kept alive for so long, gargoyles with
bloated heads? You have not separated your skull plates.”
Menelaus did not have a high opinion of Chinese neural science in any
case. He said, “Phooey. The Zi Mandarins discovered ninety-nine ways
how not to augment intelligence. This uses path redaction, not merely add-
ing cell mass.”
COUNT TO A TRILLION

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