Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

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