The tall and warlike men hesitated. Perhaps they were shocked she knew their names. Menelaus Montrose drew his ceramic knife with one hand, and with the other picked up the nearest candlestand, which was the heaviest object in reach, and the candles fluttered and blew, so that the shadows swooped and swerved along the walls.

Later, wearing only a transparent pair of plastic overalls, sitting in a cold, white, featureless cube of a jail cell, and not answering any of the questions that spoke to him from the blank wall, Montrose truly and desperately wished he had thrown the knife through Del Azarchel’s damnified skull, and not listened to Rania.

He closed his eyes. He might have been able to hit the target, from that distance, in that light, and the blade might have flown point-first. It wasn’t impossible. It could have happened. The blade would have landed right between Blackie’s cursed eyes, hilt vibrating, and trickles of blood and brain-goo would have slid down over the look of astonishment frozen forever on his damned face.

It wasn’t impossible. Captain Sterling from the Science Patrol superspaceship Emancipation could have done it.

He raised his hand to the pad of sterile gauze taped to his head. The guards on the other side of the door in the armored depthtrain carriage bringing him here (wherever here was) had not acted quickly enough to stop him from dosing himself with the Princess’s version of the neuronanological cocktail. He was not suffering any mania, no disorientation, no delirium. He did not know if that meant it was working, or that it was not. It had not actually put him in agony: she had been joking about that. He wondered what else Rania said had been a joke, and what had been in earnest.

Eventually the jailors shut off the light. He lay in the dark, waiting, wondering if he were getting any smarter. He certainly didn’t feel any smarter.

15

Equality of the Sexes

1. No Particular Effect

The only effect, at first, the intelligence augmentation cocktail seemed to have on him was that he required more sleep. Over the next three days in his jail cell, he slept upward of eighteen hours a day. Dreaming seemed to be a waste of time, and so, on the third night, once he was done with the minor corrections and emotional association image-grafts that formed the basic business of the dream-cycle, he used that part of his mind to set up a little imaginary schoolhouse with a blackboard, so he could write out and examine some of the equations and Monument symbols he was curious about. He could program himself to dream certain things, and solve particular kinds of problems, so that the answers would be clearer when he woke. But Montrose was disappointed: if he was on the threshold of a breakthrough into another and richer state of human intelligence, there did not seem to be any real change. He was still the same cranky bastard as when he fell asleep.

Also while asleep he reviewed certain memories, but instead of the confused mixture of chimerical images that haunted normal sleep, he decided to index these memories both by association and time-value, peg each scene to a particular mnemonic, and play them as a set of perfectly sharp eidetic images.

The books he had read in Del Azarchel’s chalet in Alaska he found dull now that he had time to reread them—Montrose was pleased that he could summon up perfectly detailed pictures even of pages he had been flipping past without reading, and, as if looking at a photograph, read them normally. He found his reading speed increased when he invented (since this was a dream, after all) a cartoon character named Cyrano Widget to do the reading for him, and just give him a summary. Cyrano was human from the face down, but had a clear dome for a skull, in which an electronic brain could be seen winking and sparkling furiously.

Cyrano, sitting in the imaginary schoolhouse, shook its absurd cyborg head, and said, “Boss, Blackie Del Azarchel does not know what he is dealing with here.” Onto the blackboard the cyborg chalked an equation. It was a divarication function, showing the change in prices of various goods, the crime rate, and the frequency of the use of certain emotion-laden terms in the popular media. All this raw information had been in Del Azarchel’s books, but he had never put two and two together.

“Boss, look at these graphs, these tendencies. The cost of railgun components does not go up unless someone is buying and building a filthload of them.”

“What’s it mean?”

“War.”

Montrose looked at the graphs in wonder. “But I thought Blackie had the whole world figured out. He said he had a science, called Cliometry, that could forecast political and economic changes. He can’t see a war coming?”

The cartoon character leaned back on his imaginary school desk. “He sees it coming, and he is trying to avoid it.”

“What’s causing the problem?”

“Two problems. One is political. Lowering the price of travel to zero means that whole populations are within elbow-rubbing distance of each other. There are no national boundaries anymore.”

“Isn’t that good for the economy? Lowers the cost of shipping workers to where the work is, right? Free trade, free movement of goods, all that.”

“Right. And it creates cultural friction. The workingmen can sleep in the tropics on warm nights and commute to the arctic where the mines and aquaculture rigs are during the day. Meanwhile the Australians (who now live in the middle of the Great Victoria Gardenlands) don’t want floods of travelers to overturn their few remaining Democratic institutions. The Chinese (who now live in the midst of the Gobi Gardenlands) don’t want floods of travelers overturning their few remaining Confucian institutions.”

“What about the other countries?”

“Bridesmaids. They just follow after the buttocks of one of these brides or the other, holding their trains. India and Iberia, even South Africa and her millions of automated factories, are nothing more than flower girls in this century.”

“You got marrying on the brain, pal. So what’s the second problem?”

“The second is a problem of economics. It’s the same as happened to Spain when the Spanish Empire flooded itself with gold and silver from the New World, mined from the Andes or robbed from the Aztecs. Drove down the price of gold and drove up the price of goods. In this case, the Hermetic came back with contraterrene carbon around 1020 kg—my guess, based on ship performance values.”

Montrose nodded. It was a chunk the size of the Ceres asteroid, and represented the tally of both all the decades of Hermetic star-lifting, and of the decades of Croesus. “Endless wealth. Energy enough to do anything.”

“And what did happen to Spain? She did not invest the money. The Dons used it to buy Arabian stallions and fancy mansions and saddles with silver folderol, and the King of Spain used it to build an Armada. The gold flowed out of Spain to manufacturers in Italy, France, and England. Eventually the price stabilized at a higher level. Spain went broke. The richest country in Europe went broke. Because Spain did not use the wealth to get more wealth.”

“Pox, I hear they melt Antarctica and somehow get the winds to carry all the vapor up to rain in the Gobi Desert, or the Great Victoria Desert in Australia. Earth ain’t broke.”

“You measure bankruptcy by comparing your income to your liabilities. In this case, one of your liabilities, one of your costs, is the cost of mounting a Third Expedition to the Diamond Star, and the return-on-investment time is one hundred years. If you are going to travel even to nearby stars, you have to start thinking on those time scales.”