Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright Page B

Montrose recognized some of the buildings. The Temple Mount; the Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The artist had even included part of the Wailing Wall, and showed a mother with her arms across her face twisting in agony as she fell across the two screaming children she protected with her body even as she died.
    To either side were more images of fire: skeletons of skyscrapers toppling; sleek semi-wingless ultrahigh-atmosphere craft being scattered in a whirlwind of flame, like the finger of the Wrath of God; a submarine in the midst of a tidal wave being flung out of the sea by the violence of some unimaginable force, like a salmon leaping to its death.
    No wonder they had not woke him up when he returned. War had broken out.
    Painted on the ceiling were other images. Ships in space were exchanging directed-energy fire, shown here as fanciful threads of gold wire. No beams would be actually visible in real vacuum, of course. And the burning ships were drawn with yellow fire flowers with red petals, long licking tongues. The artist had obviously never seen a fire in zero-gee, which looked like a ball of half-invisible indigo gas, because in microgravity the hottest part of the flame tended to spread outward evenly in all directions, as a sphere, or rush along ruptured oxygen lines. The teardrop shape of candle flame was something gravity produced.
    One war, or two? There was no way to tell.
    Below them, at eye level, were stiff and ceremonial images: A figure with shoulder-length silver hair in a sleek black silk uniform was stepping on sabers dashed under his feet by half a dozen bowing figures; a kneeling president in the sober coat-and-tie uniform no one but presidents since the First Space Age had worn; a king in ermine cloak with medieval crown in hand; a military man in a high-necked Chinese jacket with pistol presented butt-foremost; a supine chieftain in a gaudy feather bonnet; and, oddly enough, a Pharaoh in a gold and blue pshent. The man in black held up an olive branch. At a guess, this picture was about the peace that followed the war. The figures perhaps represented the continents.
    On one wall was a full-sized portrait showing a bishop lowering a coronet onto the head of the conqueror. The coronation of the white-haired figure in black showed his face more clearly. It was Ximen Del Azarchel. He looked to be about sixty years of age. No telling when these paintings had been done.
    The monogram on the robe was his initials.
    Menelaus looked overhead again. The ships on fire were all linked cylindrical punts, with maneuvering nozzles fore and aft. Interplanetary ships; space vessels. Tin cans cocooned in iron skeletons: functional, ugly, utilitarian. Their enemy ship was a work of art, a combination of ion drive and light-pressuresail. The sail tissue was like a second sky, holding crescent moons, and the blazing disk of the sun, in its reflections. The slender hull gleamed like a silvery sword. An interstellar ship; a vessel of stars.
    The NTL Hermetic .
    Montrose stepped around the bed on which he’d woke, and studied the paintings on the opposite wall.
    One portrait particularly well done showed a European countryside, perhaps in Germany or France, with old-fashioned solar-paneled cottages with high-peaked roofs, and green fields under quaint hothouse tarp. The cottages dated from the time of the Japanese Winter. In the foreground were four maidens bending a spear into a ploughshare.
    The sunset behind them was red, and rising above it, not far from the evening star, was the gleam of the starship Hermetic . The artist had merely suggested the ship’s slender silhouette with a stroke of the brush, adumbrated with miles-wide sail with an oval of silver. The silver silhouette looked like a scepter, or perhaps a flower.
    The ship was rising in the east like the morning star, and beneath her sails, was peace.
    Montrose thought: The starship had returned, and found a world burned and torn with