Nine Billion Names of God– combinatorics question

Factual Questions
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Where was it originally published? I think it was an American publication…

>Star Science Fiction Stories No.1 is the first book in the anthology series Star Science Fiction Stories, edited by Frederik Pohl.[1] It was first published in 1953 by Ballantine Books, without numeration, and was reprinted in 1972 as “No. 1”. The book featured the first appearance of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God”. These books have been very critically acclaimed by critics around the world.

22

I still wish that a ~ 9 billion would emerge naturally from some sort of combinatorics. I’d wondered if the Fibonacci sequence might be an answer, but no such luck. The 49th Fibonacci number is about 7.7 billion and the 50th about 12.5 billion.