Count to a Trillion

17

Postwarfare Society

1. Called Out

He woke in the dark, disoriented, unable for a moment to remember where he was. Menelaus was aware of the emotion before he was awake enough to remember its reason: the fragrant warmth in his arms, the soft curvaceous body slowly breathing, the sensation of nude flesh cuddled against him. He remembered his joy before he remembered its cause.

I am a married man. I will never go to sleep alone, never wake up alone, not ever again. It was almost enough to make him believe in his stern old mother’s stern old God, just to have someone to thank.

A sensation of needles walking along his skin told him his arm, on which she was pillowed, had fallen asleep. He did not move his arm. He would have preferred to cut it off, rather than disturb her. In the dim light, he could see no more than the curve of her cheek near him, a hint of gold from the halo of mussed hair framing her head. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

What had wakened him? The pillow under his head seemed to be playing music.

No, not the pillow. He crumpled the pillow (awkwardly with his free hand) and saw beneath it, next to his ceramic knife, the red amulet of the Hermeticists, the one Vardanov had forced him to wear. A little ruby light, no brighter than a firefly, shined and winked in the metal, and three notes of music—the same notes that once had summoned Blackie to the Table Round—was playing insistently. That was a bad sign: he had set the refusal tolerance to nine, higher even than a police override or incoming subpoena could match.

Holding it in his teeth, he snapped it onto his wrist, and with his tongue he tapped the surface. Then Montrose blinked at a sudden illusion opening like a white window in space before him. The circuits in the metal wristband were firing pinpoint magnetics to activate specific phosphenes lining the rear of his eyeballs. The sensitivity and control was accurate enough to paint a blurry but recognizable image of a screen. Montrose thought the thing was damn creepy, shooting energy into his eyes, but it did not show any light or wake his wife.

An image formed like a ghost. It was Blackie Del Azarchel.

The crisis is here, old friend, and I regret to say I can think of but one way to stop it. Montrose had turned the sound off, so these words were being printed in Braille along the inside surface of the bracelet, the smart metal dimpling and flexing against the sensitive skin of his inner wrist.

He made sure the lip-reading application was running, so he could answer without talking aloud. His tongue and lips formed the words, “Blackie! You got some nerve, calling me now!”

He realized that Blackie—if this was a true image and not some jinx—was dressed in the heavy lobster-shell-like armor of a duelist. Only the helmet was off, and the long hair of Del Azarchel fell to his shoulders. It was a young face, with eyes burning, and the hair was black as ink.

Strangely enough, the armored image looked old, even archaic, a figure stepped from a musty history book, as if Menelaus, in a buried part of his brain, truly knew all the years that had passed since he last saw a foe adorned in such grim panoply.

The eyes of Del Azarchel—Menelaus saw them vibrate, as if absorbing every photon of information from the image Menelaus was sending through the pinpoint lens in his amulet, and then fix his stare on Menelaus with such intensity that he felt it almost like a blow, entering the optic nerve to jar the back of his skull.

Del Azarchel had solved his own version of the Zurich Run and the divarication sequencing. He had concocted and taken the Prometheus Formula, as Rania had not long ago deduced. He was Posthuman.

War is coming. The discontent of the factions among the great and despair among the small has reached a critical mass. I gather my troopers even as we speak, and will spread a cloak of fire over the skies of any lands that rise in rebellion against me. And yet, even at the last, I yearn for peace.

Menelaus was aware once more of the annoyance he felt hearing aristocrats, who were basically successful thugs, called great, and hearing honest workingmen called small. It added to the horror and hate he felt hearing Del Azarchel so calmly bragging of his plan to preserve his dominion over the planet by burning it.

Menelaus said, “I’ve seen the equations. The solution is that you abdicate. You and your poxy crew of mutineers who killed the first Captain ever to sail the stars, and the finest man I ever knew—you give up your stranglehold on power to the Advocacy. That will ease things up.” His tone of voice, had he been speaking aloud, would have been sharp, and so he hoped the lip-reading gear on Del Azarchel’s side was picking up the nuances.

The figure did not even bother to shake his head. Menelaus could almost feel the pride radiating like arctic wind from the dark-eyed Master of the World. The Princess could stop this war if she wished it. I have seen her work miracles of Cliometry ere now. She could do it again.

“She has solved it. You won’t accept the solution.”

If she does not abandon the world, if the dream of star-travel for men of flesh and blood is killed now in the unsteady public imagination, events will find an unwarlike resolution. It is Rania’s departure that brings this war; I command her to stop it! She shall not sail, nor you!

Menelaus said, “And I’d command you to bugger yourself, Blackie, ’scept your male member ain’t long enough to snake around to your own backdoor, and, unlike some folk in this conversation, I don’t give orders I got no right to give, and are plumb stupid impossible to carry out, nohow.”

The stern, cold face of Del Azarchel seemed to relax. History will show then that this is by your will, yours alone. Appoint a second and have him call to mine. The Learned D’Aragó shall answer for me.

“Plague! You calling me out? On my wedding night, you calling me out?”

The very wedding night that you despoiled from me? With the bride rightfully mine, that you have soiled with your seed in an act of seduction, if not rape? She is so far above you on the scale of evolution, you are like a monkey coupling with her! It would serve you well not to mention her.

“You shouldn’da said that, you pestilential bean-eating whoreson. Now I got to blast your innards out and boot your polished teeth down your lying throat when you roll on the red mud, guts bubbling out like pudding. Man like you deserves a better end, so I am going to feel powerful sorry for kicking a dying man in the face later on, when I hoist a beer to your memory.”

I am at the base of the tower, armed. Come alone, if you care for her. There is no need for my Rania to see these dark deeds.

“Pox on that and pox on you. Why should I get out of my nice, warm bed for you, Blackie?”

The honor of your name demands it.

“Could be. On the other hand, this futon is mighty comfy.”

The peace of the world demands it. If I perish, the Princess can craft whatever peace she deems will endure before you two depart. If you perish, she will not have the resource to fend off my suit, nor the courage, and she will stay chained near Earth where she belongs, my angel in a birdcage, and that also brings peace.

The image winked out.

Menelaus sat up, but even when he moved his arm, and Rania’s head dropped softly to the pillow, she did not wake, but merely snorted. Menelaus looked on, a tender feeling in his heart with no parallel in his life. His gaze lingered on the line of her neck, the curve of her cheek, the fine golden curls spread in wanton array. Surely he had not cared for his brothers or his mother like this: they could look after themselves, and got on his nerves besides. A wife was different. Even if she directly owned half the world and indirectly controlled the other half, Rania lived a hard life and lonely one, and it had been a hectic day. More than the wild horseback ride might have taken their toll on her …

Menelaus tiptoed away to battle, with many a backward glance at his beautiful, softly breathing, sleeping fairy-tale princess. Bitterly did he regret not pausing a moment longer to steal a kiss from the perfect, quiet face of his wife. It would have been sweet to face death with the taste of her lips still warm on his own. But he knew she was smart enough to figure a way to stop him from going, if he woke her.

Even a posthuman man is still a man, and there is something about men no wife can understand, or should be allowed to stop.

2. Descent

The spider car was a limpid of nano-carbon diamond grown in a flattened teardrop-shape clinging to the outside of the huge circumference of the cable, like a dewdrop hanging from a thread.

At this height, the cable was larger around than an average skyscraper. It was embraced by the long, angular telescoping legs that gave the spider car its name. Hydromagnetic fluid within the hollow legs interacted with the fields of the cable to gather energy as the car fell, which was passed to and stored in pinhead batteries spaced evenly up and down the cable: these same batteries provided the energy field to raise ascending cars. The spider legs clenched themselves into tighter and tighter circles during descent as the cable dwindled in cross-section. The car itself was mostly windows, transparent floor and ceiling both, to display the godlike view of the wide earth and sea beneath, but was also equipped with chairs and couches, massage bath, micro restaurant, wet bar, hookah bar. It was the acme of modern comfort.

Menelaus halted only once, six decks down, at a large enclosure slung like a swallow’s nest to the underhull of the hotel. Here an extensive storeroom had been stocked with all manner of wedding gifts from all manner of world leaders.

In the storeroom was one gift he had bought himself, for himself, paying some highly-placed prince to buy it for him. Under these conditions, not even Vardanov, the Master of the Personal Guard, would dare send it back. The crate was the size and shape of a coffin. Modern crates did not need crowbars to open, since the memory metal folded aside at a command from his wrist amulet. Nor were the innards packed with straw, but with airpillows that deflated and released their cargo.

It looked like the statue of a dead ape. Montrose had bought himself duelist armor, not to mention a supply of pistols whose chaff, side shots, and acceleration parameters he had designed himself. He had originally meant them to go in some guncase somewhere, in a nice room in a nice palace, something to behold while sitting in an easy chair with a brandy in one hand and his feet warm at a fire grate, to look at and nod and contemplate how far above that sordid, horrid life as a paid killer he had come.

With a snort, he bid that dream a faretheewell: It seemed he had not come so far.

From another case, he selected his pistol with care, surprised at the weight and awkward size of it. Had he really, once upon a time, carried one of these iron hog-legs over his shoulder in a holster? Had he stood holding such a thing one-handed, ignoring the little red dots of aiming lasers flickering on his chest from an opponent weapon, also as large around as an elephant’s trunk, pointing at his face?

Hauling the armor into the spider car was almost comically unpleasant. There was supposed to be a hand-truck somewhere hereabouts, but Montrose could not find it. He ended up stripping his pajamas, piling the monstrous armor atop it, and hauling the weight in a bumpy slide across the deck. The fabric was ripped to bits, of course, but he had not intended to don them again. The armor had a quilted undersuit built into the interior, like the silken lining of a coffin.

The spider car descended. He had no squire, no second. He donned the armor by lying down and worming into it leg-first, and then wondering for more than a bit about the best way to stand up.

Eventually, after most of the furnishings in the car had been bent out of shape, to serve as hand-stanchions and inclined planes, he found his feet.

Montrose had to unscrew both his gauntlets to work his red amulet, which was still clamped to his wrist. He tapped on the surface, calling up the local infosphere. He was curious about the tower base, the number of civilians present, and so on. The images beamed by magnetic induction into his optic nerve were hard to see, so he signaled for the car lights to dim.

The outside world was dark. There were some lights to one side below him visible through the glass deck of the car. This was Quito. It was not directly underfoot because the space elevator cable was not straight, but bowed out where the weight of the spider car, and the motion of the Earth, pulled it into a dog-leg. The malls and museums and railway terminal at the tower base were lit up.

Menelaus made a noise between a groan and a sigh. Why was he not back up topside, snuggled in a nice warm blanket with Mrs. Perfect? He wanted to turn and ask her what to do: this was a sure sign that he was already thinking like a married man. Why had he not just stayed in bed? This was their world, their time, and …

But it wasn’t really her world, was it? For all her being a princess, she had been raised in a tin can fifty lightyears away, without a family, just with a gang of mass-murdering mutineers. They had been more isolated than a tribe of Eskimos, and darn smaller than most tribes. That gang was basically running the Earth right now, but they hardly were ones to mingle on the street with the little people. She knew less about mankind and their hard ways than he did.

Why hadn’t he called the Iron Ghost and told him that his flesh-and-blood version was causing trouble? Hell, why not call him now? It was not like the machine would be annoyed at being woken up in the middle of the night.

The voice that rang from the tiny speakers in his amulet sounded even colder and less human, but somehow more majestic, than when Montrose had last heard him. It was not really Del Azarchel’s voice anymore. It was Exarchel.

“You are no doubt calling to ask if I will override my father’s orders, impersonate him, and recall the fire teams he is gathering in Quito before a general insurrection breaks out.”

The teeth of a dragon. The modern military could spring up as suddenly as a brushfire.

Since Montrose had had no idea that Del Azarchel was in the midst of marshalling his military forces, he said only: “Go on.”

“While I would prefer not to risk war—for even my decentralized and triply redundant core systems might be compromised if sensitive areas were bombarded—I can calculate no influence that these events will have on the shape and quality of the race that will arise at or about A.D. 11000 when the force from Hyades achieves significant interaction range to the Solar System. Even a delay of five or ten centuries is statistically below the threshold value.”

“But Blackie, or Iron Blackie, or—what the pox am I supposed to call you, anyway?”

“Ximen Del Azarchel.”

“That is his name. Shouldn’t you have a version number or something?”

“Our thought patterns are sufficiently congruent that you would do better to think of us as two aspects of one mind, merely out of communication with each half with the other. Our self-identity is the same: our soul, if you like.”

“I’ll call you Exarchel.”

“I don’t mind the nickname, but do not be misled. I am my father.”

“Then, listen, whatever your name is—these events are significant to us, now, including to you and to me and to your flesh version that you call your father. You are not a murderer and he is! That is the difference between you. You are the old Blackie, the real one, my Blackie, the one I knew! And the Blackie I knew would not stand idly by and let this all happen.”

“And the Montrose I knew would not repay my saving his life by taking mine, any version of me. You know there is a means of avoiding this war, and yet you pretend not to see it.”

“I ’spose you don’t mean having Blackie abdicate?”

“Certainly not.”

“I ’spose you don’t mean me divorcing Rania?”

“Certainly not. I mean you to die at his hands, and let Blackie marry your widow.”

“Oh, good. I was going to say my wife’s religion prohibits divorce, and so that is clean out of the question.”

“Your life is meaningless compared to the lives of countless millions, not to mention the loss of more than just life if civilization burns.”

“Maybe I should say my religion prohibits letting a low-down murdering skunk shoot me in the ass, so that is likewise clean out of the question, as I hold my ass to be sacred.”

The machine seemed like a human for a moment when it chuckled warmly. “You assume you will be running from him?”

“Nope. I assume he don’t stand a chance with me until he gets me from behind. I am a professional at this—I made good money, too—and he is just a stinking amateur.”

“You underestimate the difference in ability several decades of experience can bestow. In any case, do not run from him. It will go badly for you, if you attempt it.”

“You want to tell me what that means?”

“I don’t care to interfere with Father’s little intrigues, but I can tell you facts which you, had you been alert, would have already noticed, and which he therefore expects you to know. There is a depthtrain nexus of several transcontinental lines meeting in the complex of shops and offices under the base of the tower. You recall the site was originally chosen to be a center of commerce? My men—I mean Del Azarchel’s men—will be mounting up the tower as soon as enough trains arrive, and they gather in force. Do you understand?”

“I understand. He told me that, whether he lives or dies, the world peace will be maintained, and that was his plan. But that ain’t the plan, I take it? The plan is, whether he lives or dies, the Princess stays here, a copy of him—namely you—runs the planet, while another copy of you—namely the Bellerophon—goes to the Diamond Star to restock the contraterrene supply. The world stays dependent on your energy, and you shape the generations to accommodate the Hyades when they get here.”

“Indeed. You see that none of your actions have any point in the long term.”

Montrose licked his lips.

“Blackie, are we friends?” he asked.

“In a remote sense, since we both seem much altered from those days,” the machine answered blandly. “But you wish to ask something of me. I admit I have recently made several alternations to my brain operations, and have approached the next evolutionary step in machine consciousness. Nonetheless, I am still human, still a rational being, and as a rational being I cannot condone ingratitude or other defects of moral reasoning. You may ask.”

“Be my second.”

The machine must have deliberately paused before answering for effect. Montrose did not think that a burst of thought caused by being caught by surprise would slow down its verbal responses.

“Go on,” said the machine.

“Call D’Aragó, who is speaking for Del Azarchel: I want the time and place to be as soon as possible after I hit ground. If Del Azarchel has rounded up his troops, has he cleared the streets? We don’t even need to go out to find an empty field for this, then. I can give you the weapon grade and statistics of my piece, and the countermeasures package, and we have to agree within a certain tolerance, or the deal is off.”

The machine emitted a sound like a sigh in the speakers, and then a brief laugh. “I have endured a change of bodies, a change of intellectual topologies, a change of species from human to posthuman, which may indeed include a change of genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain, and even—depending on how one defines the term—transcending the bounds of life and death. I discover to my surprise and disappointment that some things do not change. A part of me—a small part, I admit, and growing smaller—still likes you, Cowhand, and even admires your spirit. So, yes, against my better judgment, because I still cherish the all-too-human ideals of honor, I will act as your Second and make the arrangements.”

“Thank you.”

“Keep your thanks. Do not expect to impose on my good nature again, mortal man: before my next evolutionary transcendence is compiled, I will have broken the bounds of nature, and achieved the condition beyond mere considerations of good and evil, even as the superman as imagined by Darwinian philosophers would do.”

The call ended.

3. No One Coming

This armor had its own oxygen supply. It was not a spacesuit, not quite airtight, but there were heavy filters to prevent the duelist from breathing in clouds of chaff. Menelaus turned up the oxygen gain, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

Gimme an idea, Mister Hyde, he thought to himself. Then he reminded himself that no one but himself was Mr. Hyde, and there was no one coming to his aid.

Despite his brave words, the way the deck was stacked now, he was going to die more likely than not, and Del Azarchel’s men were going to swarm up the tower cable to the empty Hotel of Sorrow, and Rania would awake from dreams of rose-colored pleasure to find herself a widow and a prisoner. Was Blackie the kind of man who would make and carry out a threat, for example, to ignite one city a day every day the Princess did not agree to marry him?

Montrose with shame remembered the way he and Del Azarchel used to talk about women when they had a drink or three under their belts. In those days, Blackie had been the kind of man unwilling to hesitate when there was a girl he wanted; and they told each other how easy it was to get a woman to surrender to the inevitable. Montrose realized he did not really know a damn thing about the way Blackie was now. Knowing a man for a few months when he was young did not tell you anything, did it?

The question was: So how the hell was he to stop Del Azarchel’s Conquistadores from seizing the tower?

One answer was to call Rania, and tell her to ascend, then radio the Hermetic crew, and arrange a rendezvous. However, the cold facts of orbital mechanics prevented that solution. By having the great ship pass overhead during the wedding ceremony earlier that day, the low Earth orbit now put the vessel on the other side of the planet. The ship could not make rendezvous with the asteroid called High Quito for three days.

A maneuvering burn could kick her into a higher, slower orbit, or a lower, faster one, but even a fast orbit, one dangerously grazing the outer atmosphere, could not get the ship here before dawn: and in any case “here” did not mean the geostationary point where the tower top was anchored. This would involved a second burn to move to a higher orbit, and at that point the energy gained from slinging around the Earth in a low orbit would mean the velocities would not match. In orbital mechanics, “here” meant a match of six velocity elements, and it did not mean sailing past a point in space at a high speed, waving through a porthole as you receded.

Disabling the spider cars would prove no solution. Del Azarchel or his men could reach her before the three days passed, perhaps with an aerospace plane flying to High Quito, perhaps with a spare spider car shipped to the base of the tower.

Another answer would be to alert the press: except that the press were creatures of Del Azarchel, his bewigged Psychoi class, his “Psychics” or whatever they were called.

Another answer would be to alert the Aristocrats, Pneumatics, Clergy, and Plutocrats of this strangely caste-bound world, and see what allies would rush to the aid of the Princess: except, of course, no one would be rushing anywhere, since the modern world was abnormally free of roads and bridges, and abnormally dependent on the subterranean vacuum-tube depthtrain system, which was abnormally dominated by the World Power Syndicate, and whose computerized switching system (by now, if Del Azarchel was not a fool) linked into control by the Exarchel Machine. Any forces gathering on the surface could be picked off by orbit-to-surface fire. Rail lines, highways, and ships were notoriously easy to spot from orbit, and had been ever since the First Space Age.

During the remainder of the descent, Menelaus had ample opportunity to think, and when thinking prevailed nothing, to worry, and then to fret, and then he opened the elevator liquor cabinet, and realized that between the awkwardness of his gauntlets and the heavy cheek-guards of his helmet, he could not get the whiskey bottle to his lips in an open and unbroken condition.

And when he unscrewed his gauntlets for the second time, he caught a glimpse of red metal. After a swig or nine of fine Kentucky whiskey burning in his throat and warming his insides to a toasty glow, he decided to go data-fishing, to see if there was any angle he had overlooked.

First, he called the top of the buried antennae leading to Pellucid, and checked on growth rates. The Van Neumann machine was doubling its mass every forty days, and the fail-safe built into its design had worked the one occasion that a volcanic eruption had carried some of the material to the surface: compared to the temperature and pressure beneath the mantle of the Earth, the surface world was an icy near-vacuum, and so when several pounds of modified diamond crystal had floated to the surface of a lava flow, it had broken down into black carboniferous dust.

The machine had a processing volume entirely out of proportion with the software he had been able to download: it was like a library of ten thousand acres, with only one shelf occupied by a few reference books. It was smart enough, however, to prioritize non-rhythmic changes in its environment, to which it was more sensitive than Montrose’s design specifications could account for.

He looked at the data first as graphs, then as hieroglyphs, then imagined as a polydimensional matrix in his mind’s eye. He laughed when he realized what these data were. The high energy of the passing vactrains, shooting like so many magnetically-accelerated bullets through the tangle of Brachistochrone curves below the mantle of the Earth, set up a resonance effect and echo, which the Pellucid crystals could pick up. The crystals were hearing the electromagnetic rumblings of passing trains. These echoes were of different nuances of pitch and consistency, and Pellucid had automatically filed them according to a system of phenotypes.

Pellucid also flagged the shipments that did not match a soothing system of patterns. Montrose realized he was looking at the military movements of the recent weeks, days, hours, and minutes. A simple set of calculations in his head, checked against calculations run through his amulet, and he found he had quite by accident stumbled across a fairly clear estimate of where the world’s soldiers were, were their gear was being collected, and so on.

But there were two groups of migration-patterns, and they had peaked at different times.

The older group consisted, not of one or two, but many unscheduled stops that had been made at the base of the tower over the last few weeks, and these did not fit the much more recent motion-pattern of Del Azarchel’s troopers. They were round trips to depots in Florida and Astrograd and various seaports, including many stops at Monaco.

Montrose turned the information over and over in his mind until, as if on its own, the pieces clicked into place. With his amulet, and Rania’s security overrides and her password lists, he was able to call up an image of the tower’s blueprints and wiring schematics, but also able to open loading invoices, personnel lists, duty rosters, and, in short, Montrose mapped out where any of those unscheduled trains from several weeks ago, passing through Quito, had deposited their cargoes.

He halted the spider car when it reached the cable stanchion. He was at the bottom of the tether proper, about a half-mile above the ground. Here, at the top of the superscraper that formed the tower’s massive base, there was a small platform, windows pressurized due to altitude, and a bank of elevators leading farther down. He rode a freight elevator down only a few score feet, and stepped out onto a catwalk, and the clash of his metal feet sent sharp echoes reflecting from distant bulkheads.

This highest floor was not an observation deck or restaurant (those things were reserved for even higher altitudes). This vast cylindrical space was a warehouse: balcony upon balcony reached down hundreds of feet, beyond the range of sight. Loading platforms were protruding like metal tongues into the air of this central well, for dangling cranes like freakish chandeliers to load freight into spider cars considerably bigger than the luxury-passenger car he had been using.

He checked the manifest whose image his amulet shined into the back of his eyeballs, rippling through the scores of imaginary pages at once. He deduced a framework based on a statistical distribution and superimposed in his mind’s eye the warehouse space before him. Immediately he saw which crates did not fit the pattern: the tall, dark, sealed canisters grouped (by no coincidence) about the main load-bearing members.

Explosives. He did not need to open the crates to see; he could tell by the cables connecting them to junction boxes. The crates had Princess Rania’s personal seal on them. If Exarchel had a system to monitor unscheduled and unregistered depthtrain movements, he knew of this. But perhaps he did not.

Montrose grimaced. No need to fight the duel after all. Rania had prepared all this in advance. Even the orbital mechanics of the Hermetic now made sense: it would require a relatively short burn for that great vessel to reach a higher orbit.

He went back to the combination of landing deck and loading dock and into the spider car. The status light showed an upward-accelerating strand was ready to provide the energy to pull him aloft.

The strand was one of the many that formed the cable bundle of the tether. All he had to do was engage the clutch, to tighten the spider legs adhering to that strand while loosening the magnetic grip from the stationary strands.

He put his un-gauntleted hand toward the electric clutch and hesitated. Again, he had that feeling of being haunted by a thought just out of reach.

It bothered him that his augmented intelligence had seemed to make him less and not more aware of his subconscious mind. He wondered if expanding his mind were like blowing up a balloon: doubling the radius of the balloon would quadruple the surface area but would increase the volume hidden beneath the surface eightfold. Hence his subconscious would be darker, not clearer, than before: a cavern opening into a hollow world where strange lights could be seen in the distance, illuming only glimpses.

In any case, do not run from him. It will go badly for you, if you attempt it.

He snatched his hand back from the clutch. Something was wrong. What had he overlooked?

At that moment, his amulet uttered a chime of music, and the voice of Rania, sharp and clear, entered the car. “Husband, you have trapped yourself. Do not re-ascend!”

“Rainy, you awake?”

“No, I’m talking in my sleep. Why did you go down? Couldn’t you see it was a trap?”

“I can take him.”

“Stupid, stupid man!” That came out as a sob. “I had it all planned! Now you are caught! Get out of the car!”

He stepped back out of the spider car, and stood on the glass-enclosed observation deck. “What is it? Did Vardanov wake you up? I suppose no one can drive a car down the tether without everyone noticing…”

“There are snipers on the buildings.”

“How many have you taken over?”

It turned out that she had only one under her control.

His amulet showed a building, one of the taller ones in Quito. The image was from the point of view of a spy; one of Rania’s tiny dragonfly-winged hair ornaments. The tiny bug eyes showed a young man in a bulky camouflage jacket sitting huddled against the gray stones, his jacket fabric tuned to gray. He was seated next to a squat cylindrical machine on three legs that Montrose recognized as a gun emplacement.

He spoke, and the dragonfly mikes could pike out the sound of his voice, but not decipher the words. They were in the compressed, high-speed jargon only the Psychoi used.

Menelaus grimaced. “Brotherhood of Man, huhn? You don’t seem so brotherly, brother.”

The answering voice was Del Azarchel’s. Again, only the voice contour, not the words, came through.

The dragonfly had rebuilt itself, formed tools, and wormed its way into the inner electronics of the weapon, whose long-range lens was open. Through the blur and shimmer of atmospheric distortion, the general shape of the spider car could be seen: a grainy image. There was a smudgy silhouette of one head framed in the spider car’s window. His head.

The first payload was a surface-to-air missile loaded with grapeshot, surrounding a pressurized high-energy plasma bottle. All it had to do was puncture the window, and knock out the leg induction fields with an electromagnetic pulse.

The second payload was high-yield chemical explosive: a blockbuster. It was large enough to burn the spider car, but probably not enough to sever the super-refractory super-strong carbon polymer material of the cable itself. Interesting. It was meant to destroy the car and anyone in it, but leave the cable, and the hotel sitting at the upper terminus of the cable, intact.

Montrose knew Del Azarchel well enough to guess his thought. If the man you challenge to a duel turns yellow and starts to run away, you shoot him down from behind. And he did not want to hurt Rania, who was still in the hotel in the upper stratosphere.

Montrose looked again at the other files he had examined earlier, Pellucid’s track of depthtrain movements. There was insufficient mass. This one sniper could not account for all the train activity in recent days. There had to be others, no doubt under the same orders, to shoot at any ascending car.

Sneaking back up the cable was not feasible while the snipers were there. Since the whole cable was pulled out of vertical at the moving spot where the car legs were, any idiot could see where the car was, even without sending out bees to take a look. And the damn car was transparent.

“Doll, give me control of your little insect spy there, and I can get you out of this trap.”

“Can you extricate yourself?”

“Uh … That would be a good solution, but it is less likely.”

“Can you extricate Ximen?”

“Pestulation! Are you sweet on him, after all?”

“My husband, is all human feeling absent from that underutilized lump you call your brain? He is my father, or one of them. Even if I hated him so much that I wanted to see him murdered, I would not hate you so much to wish you to be a murderer.”

“I’ll spare him if I can. I reckon that would be best of all, but the least likely. Do you have men in the tower base? Vardanov, or anyone else? Tell them to clear out—”

There was a snap of noise from the amulet. Montrose tapped the surface, called up the system diagnostic. The signal to the hotel was cut off. Had she cut the line in anger? He did not think so. Jammed? Most likely.

“I love you,” he said into the dead line.

Jammed by someone who had overheard the conversation? Also likely. If so, Montrose’s control of the enemy sniper weapon would last only until an order could be given to the shooter. That was the whole point of having a human operator in wartime, rather than relying on drones and remotes.

At the moment, the signal from the hair ornament was still strong and clear. How had the tiny flying machine gotten there? Had she tossed it out an airlock, and it made re-entry by itself? Had she scattered a group of them over the nearby rooftops, hours or days before the wedding? Either option seemed odd.

He tapped his fingers over the amulet again, entering dozens of command lines. With the last line, he set the amulet to react to his voice. He screwed the heavy gauntlet back on, and spoke aloud. “Magic band on my hand: Turn off the lights.”

The car light snapped off. His voice could carry to the amulet even through the thick metal gauntlets. With ponderous steps, weighed down by more than his armor, awkward as a man in an old-fashioned diving suit, Montrose departed the car, and took an elevator down the spine of the superscraper to the ground level.

4. The Exchange

When the elevator doors opened, he saw a strange scene. Here was a shopping arcade, like something from a storybook set in the Twentieth Century, in the Fat Years. To either side were broad windows, with goods on display. The pearls and shoes, drinking vessels and fishing rods were surrounded by rainbow images of themselves, a chromatic aberration: because the windows were actually empty, and had been for years. Through the doors could be seen a desolation of floorspace: shops themselves were dark and bare.

What made the scene strange were machine gun nests. The floor tiles had been dug up in spots, to make foxholes, and the debris piled in a half-circle in front of the foxholes. The tripod-mounted weapons of some make Montrose did not recognize were still squatting in their places, ugly snouts peering through the debris of tiles toward the outer doors. Fat power cables ran from the tripod-mounted artillery across the floor to an open elevator shaft, and from there they snaked down out of sight, presumably to some buried dynamo, or perhaps the power system of the subterranean vactrains. Also snaking across the tiled floor of the empty mall were tangles of defensive wire, the kind that could be set to shock, or entangle, or explode. The wire was motionless at the moment, but little grenades like iron grapes dangled from the twisted wire at irregular intervals.

But there were no soldiers. Rania’s men must have been here, and quite recently, and fled precipitously enough to leave their gear behind, whatever they could not carry.

In his heavy armor, Montrose clanked through the empty halls, and came to the broad glass front doors, like the doors of a palace, that loomed above him, four times the height of a man. There was a switch, but clicking it did nothing: the circuit was dead. Peering through the thick glass panes, he saw the dark and empty streets outside. No one was standing too close, and he did not feel like searching for a manual door, so he removed the safety from one of his eight side-bullets, the Six O’clock position, and fired it into the door-hinge.

The hinge mechanism must have had a self-oiling canister, because a most satisfactory gust of fire and oily smoke leaped up with a roar, with torn metal screaming in reply, and the massive doors toppled majestically, smashing into half a dozen raft-sized flakes and a cloud composed of a thousand diamond shards. (That crash surprised him. He assumed the future people would make glass out of something safe and shatter-proof, like plastic. He wasn’t complaining, though.)

He stepped through the cloud of black smoke and tinkling shards, down the broad marble stairs. All the eyes of the soldiers were on him.

The buildings here were long-empty, unlit, the windows covered with coppery sheets, like pennies on the eyes of dead. There was no traffic: the road had been recently torn up, as if by directed energy, to form a crude trench. Slabs of armor plate with gunslits like narrowed Cyclops-eyes peered over the trench edge like headstones, as if shields taller than a man but small enough to be transported via traincar had merely been fitted together, edge to edge, to form impromptu pillboxes and stronghouses. Modern warfare was modular.

In the near distance were men uniformed in high-tension ablative weave, bulletproof and beam-resistant, dialed to armor configurations, and dull with the blocky gray of urban camouflage. Their officers were dressed as Conquistadores. The ordinary logic of war should have had the officers blend among the men, camouflaged as they were, for fear of snipers, but the romance of war, at least in the era dominated by personalities like Del Azarchel, allowed officers to seek greater honor by exposing themselves to greater danger.

The soldiers nearer the door kept mostly out of the line of sight, but he could see the periscope-threads of their helmets poking around corners or peeking shyly over trench edges.

There was one figure who was not cowering, not taking cover, but standing bold as brass, dead in the middle of the empty street, right beneath a dark street-lamp. The burly figure was dressed in duelist armor from a dead century, massive as a gorilla, his helmet a faceless hemisphere. An oversized pistol hung crookedly from his armored fist, its foot-long barrel down to mid-shin.

The fear that stabbed through Montrose came as a surprise. A sensation like rolling through thorns crawled across his skin, leaving a wash of hot perspiration in its wake. He blinked and blinked again, but there was no way to get a hand inside his heavy helmet and wipe the sweat from his eyes. He clicked the air switch with his jaw, opening the vents, and wishing for cool.

A bad sign. Montrose never got an attack of nerves before. Had he lost the one thing that allowed him to fight and win? Perhaps it had slipped away when he fought his final fight, the duel with Mike Nails, way back when. That duel had put him in the hospital.

Montrose reminded himself that he was not fighting for himself this time, not for money, not for his family or his firm. This was for Rania.

That thought steadied him.

The squat figure of his opponent was not alone. From behind the armored shape emerged the thinner form of Narcís D’Aragó, spine straight, walking slowly to take up a position halfway between. He was dressed in his black silk shipsuit, and, now that the general population knew the secret of second youth, his hair was dark, his narrow face unwrinkled. But there was something in his footstep, the tilt of his head, that looked positively ancient and wizened: as a ghost of some dead octogenarian possessing the body of a youth might look.

D’Aragó approached across the empty street, his footsteps the only noise in the night. He had reached exactly halfway to Montrose, the position where Montrose’s second, in theory, was supposed to meet him.

He spoke aloud in his dry and colorless voice. “Learned Montrose, I don’t have much affection for you, and not really that much for him. I am supposed to meet your second—you cannot possibly have one—and talk about how to make the fight fair—which is a stupid concept no matter how you look at it. Why don’t you back out? Save yourself the trouble?”

“Licking him will trouble me no trouble ah-tall, partner.”

D’Aragó looked disgusted. “Why are you doing this?”

Montrose shouted back, “Why are you? I want Blackie to stop bothering my wife.”

D’Aragó shrugged. “I believe a man should find his own death in his own way. Your life belongs to you in fee simple, yours to spend or throw away. If I think it is damned foolishness, that’s just my opinion. Since you don’t have a second, according to the rules of this adventure in idiocy, I guess you’re allowed to call it off.”

“I have a second.”

“Who? Where is he?”

“His name is Ximen Del Azarchel.”

And a voice rang out from the metal armband on D’Aragó’s wrist. It was Exarchel.

D’Aragó looked shocked, and the look did not fade. He kept stealing nervous glances at the man version of Del Azarchel as he spoke with the machine version over his amulet.

Montrose turned up the gain on his helmet’s earphones, and could make out the voice of the machine, cold and majestic, dimly echoing, as it conversed with D’Aragó: “Having received in proper course the challenge offered by the friend of the honorable gentleman, and agreed as to time and place, let us establish the uniformity of weapons. My principle is shy a shot from his fourth secondary barrel…”

Del Azarchel must have also had his earphones turned up, because he raised his pistol to port arms, worked the action. With a clack of noise one of the eight shots, a slender micro-missile some nine inches in length, half inch in caliber, clattered, ringing, to the roadstones. He lowered the pistol again to its ready position.

The cold voice of the machine rang out again from D’Aragó’s wrist. “Let us establish the question of a judge. Sergei Vardanov surrendered himself and his men to your principle’s custody. Let him and two others act as the tribunal…”

Montrose spoke inside his helmet to turn on the phone in his wristband. “Hey, Exarchel!”

The machine could carry on two conversations at once. Or a thousand. Over Montrose’s amulet he said, “Yes…?”

“I don’t want Vardanov to be the judge. See if you can have him moved to a safe distance.”

“I thought she would appreciate if I freed three of her men from militia custody.”

“He can pick from his men: I trust him. Uh—for things like that, I trust him.”

“It will be Hermeticists. No one else is old enough to remember or respect the Code of Duels.”

“Fine.”

“The Spanish custom was to have three men, and abide by their vote.”

“Fine.”

Three black-garbed figures climbed from the trenches, and walked with slow deliberation over to the area midway between the two armored men. The three judges were none other than Reyes y Pastor, his chin high and eyes bright; Sarmento i Illa d’Or, like a mountain of muscle, but stepping lightly as a heifer, his face stoical and grim-lipped; and Melchor de Ulloa, slouching and looking embarrassed.

Father Reyes raised his hand and called out in a loud voice, “I must ask and abjure you that this quarrel should not proceed, for Our Heavenly Father has commanded all the faithful sons of His Church to peace. Gentlemen, I call upon you as baptized Christian men to turn aside from this wrath, to shake hands and make amends. Is there anything that can be done or said to reconcile you, that this contest might be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties, and with no dishonor?”

Reyes y Pastor was dressed in his priestly vestments, which he had nonchalantly worn to a battlefield, and seemed to show no discomfort in acting in his role as a judge over a duel, either. Montrose decided that the man must have no respect at all for his office.

Montrose said in a loud voice, “Blackie, if you can hear me, we don’t need to go through with this.”

The voice of Exarchel came from his wrist, “Learned Montrose, if you wish me to act as your second in this, please respect the forms. All communication must go through me.”

“Invite him.”

“Where?”

“Up! Tell him to come to the stars with us. The three of us, together again, aboard the Hermetic. He can use the Bellerophon to hold the world hostage, we can go to the Diamond Star together, and it will be a century or more Earth-time before we get back. He abdicates to the Advocacy, and the people will know there is more contraterrene on its way, and that should sooth things down. The world peace he wants is preserved, and he don’t have to trust his mechanical version, uh…”

“Meaning me.”

“Meaning you. Give D’Aragó the message.”

No doubt Del Azarchel heard the words from D’Aragó’s wrist as clearly as did Montrose, but D’Aragó nevertheless took the time to walk slowly back over to Del Azarchel, bend his head to the helmet, and exchange words with Del Azarchel.

D’Aragó walked too slowly. Montrose sighed, because there was no subtle way to do this, and he did not want to lift his pistol to use the muzzle camera, lest the gesture be mistaken. His helmet was not designed to turn, so he had to lift his heavy legs, and with clanking footsteps, turn his whole body in order to look behind him. The tether of the topless tower was bent, and from the curve it was clear that several cars were already climbing the cable.

Clank, clank, went his feet as he turned back again.

“Hey, X.”

“Sir?” said Exarchel.

“Give him another message. Tell him to get his men down out from the tower, or I will kill them all. This point is not open to negotiation.”

His earphones picked up the voice of the machine, again coming from D’Aragó’s wrist, repeating the message. D’Aragó whispered to the helmet, and nodded, and raised the wristband to his face, and spoke.

Exarchel said, “The Learned D’Aragó states that his principal has no interest in receiving such demands from you, since they are military matters outside of the scope of this duel. There is rebel activity in China and Australia, and it is standard procedure to secure such locations as may prove to be military assets in time of insurrection.”

“Plague his chancrous dangle! Tell him their blood is on his hands. What’d he say about coming with us?”

“He declines the offer, preferring to face you in combat. Really, Cowhand, I could have told you that. As your second, you should have consulted me before issuing it.”

“Yeah, but you’re rooting for him, ain’t you?”

The machine made a noise like a scratched record. Unlike its sighs and laughs, which had to be played out of a speaker as artificially as a harpist making a harp sing under her fingers, this sounded like an actually spontaneous nonverbal expression from the machine. “Zzxxxtk-K! You don’t think I want his hands on her any more than yours, do you? From my viewpoint, you are both monkeys, and for either to lay with her is bestiality. No, the optimal outcome for me is to have you kill each other.”

“What do you care? You can’t have her.”

“My love is regrettably Platonic, but nonetheless as real as yours.”

“If we kill each other, will you let her go?”

The Iron Ghost did not answer.

“If you love her, you have to want what is best for her, what she wants, right? Blackie, the real Blackie, wants her as an angel in a birdcage, or a prize on his mantelpiece, or something. Is your love for her like that? I am asking you to promise not to help him chase her, if I die.”

“I cannot make such a promise. The Learned D’Aragó announced that his principal will be satisfied, without a duel, if you sue for a divorce from the Princess, and agree to enter biosuspension until such time as after he dies a natural death.”

“Those terms are not acceptable.”

Father Reyes now raised his handkerchief. Montrose and Del Azarchel both raised their left hands, and the left gauntlets were white on the wrist fingers and back, but jet-black on the palm, so that when they opened their hands to show “ready,” the sign could be clearly seen.

Reyes called out. “Gentlemen! You are within your rights to ask your opponent to empty and repack his weapon here and now, if you suspect any unbecoming practice.”

Del Azarchel through D’Aragó, and Montrose through Exarchel, both admitted the other man was a trustworthy gentleman, and waived the right.

That tickled Montrose’s suspicion. Del Azarchel was trying to stall, delay, and draw things out. A careful repacking of chaff could take an hour—so Blackie must have some good reason to not want Montrose to see how he had packed. Non-regulation chaff? Or, now that he was a posthuman, and the best damn mathematician on the planet, some radical new way to solve the Navier-Stokes equation? That was Del Azarchel’s special field of study, after all.

Montrose grimaced. The same reason why Del Azarchel was trying to lengthen the time, Montrose had to shorten it. But now he ached to know what Del Azarchel had secretly done while packing his chaff and shot.

“Even now, if an accommodation can be reached, both parties may withdraw in honor. Gentlemen! Will your principals seek reconciliation? Have all measures to avoid this conflict been exhausted?”

The Seconds confirmed that no reconciliation was possible.

Reyes called out. “Gentlemen, see to your countermeasures!”

In his pistol-cameras, Del Azarchel blurred into a translucent shape, twisting and shimmering, a shattered mirror.

Reyes called, “Gentlemen, ready your weapons! On peril of your honor, do not fire before the signal! Ah! Learned Montrose, you still clench your fist even though your honorable opposition shows black palm. Are the gentlemen prepared to exchange fire?”

Montrose shouted out: “Not until he calls his men down from the tower. They got to come down, and I mean now, and I ain’t buggering around with him.”

Del Azarchel shouted back: “Montrose, tell me what you are planning.”

“You mean you can’t figure it out, smart as you are, and everything?”

At that moment, even though the judge had not given the signal, Del Azarchel raised his massive pistol. “Treachery! Trickery!” he called out. “The Learned Montrose is—” But his voice was drowned out by the sound of his own cloud of chaff erupting from his pistol with a roar like a whirlwind. Black smoke rushed up and shrouded the figure.

Montrose was already within his own cloud of smoke, with his pistol raised, and flickers of light of aiming or misleading beams, shining briefly with rainbow colors as they passed up or down through the visible spectrum, were now visible where they caught the oily motes of the rapidly-spreading chaff.

But Father Reyes (showing far more courage or perhaps witlessness than Montrose would have credited him) stepped between the two duelists, and the aiming beams fixed on him. “Halt! Halt! This is not regular! Do the gentlemen wish to annul the meeting, and meet again upon some other day, or other terms? On peril of your honor, do not fire!”

Both men held their fire, even though their chaff clouds were now spreading and thinning. This was dangerous for the both of them, since every moment that the clouds thinned before fire was exchanged, the less protection they offered the men inside.

Montrose opened his palm. “I am ready to exchange fire!”

Del Azarchel made a fist and shouted, “He is planning to topple the topless tower!”

Montrose was impressed and disappointed that Blackie had figured it out. He blamed his own weakness, however, for giving Blackie the clues to do it. He should have just killed the damn soldiers without giving them a chance.

“Call off your men, and I won’t,” Montrose called out.

“If you’re dead, you won’t!” and Del Azarchel opened his palm as well.

Father Reyes said, “Gentlemen, there has been a premature spread of chaff. Do you still agree, on peril of your honor, to be bound by the outcome of the exchange, and speak no ill of it?”

Montrose said, “X! Tell Blackie that if he postpones, I’ll kill his men.”

Exarchel said, “The Learned D’Aragó points out that both of you are covered by thin and insufficient chaff, and the duel may be mutually mortal. Do you agree to continue?”

“I am ready,” said Montrose. There was nothing else to say. He still had his palm open.

Del Azarchel stood, his massy pistol pointing at Montrose, and his left palm above his shoulder, open and showing a black palm with white fingers.

Reyes stepped out of the line of fire and released the handkerchief.

He had not heard the noise. Montrose was on his back, numb from shock, not certain what had struck him. Blood was in his mouth, and a din in his ears that drowned all earthly noises.

Chaff too thin. We’re both dead.

He thought it was strange there was no pain, but instead a sensation like a burning wire penetrating his chest, abdomen, and upper right leg. Gutshot, he thought. I’m dead. Funny there’s no pain. Am I in shock?

He heard a ringing in his ears, and wondered if he had gone deaf.

“Incoming call,” announced his wristband.

Ah, Rania! Montrose knew such joy then, that the last word he was to hear would be from her.

It was not Rania. Del Azarchel’s voice, breathy and ragged, issued from speakers in the wristband, and Montrose could hear it clearly echoing inside his suit. “Don’t ignite! Don’t ignite!”

Montrose coughed, but he did not otherwise answer. He wondered where the hell the medics were? There were supposed to be doctors standing by.

He must have uttered the question aloud, for Del Azarchel said, “No medics are coming. I’ve ordered my men back, until I know—” (Then Del Azarchel was coughing, and Montrose recognized from his war days that ragged noise. It was the particular sound of a punctured lung. Good. He assumed it was his number-five escort bullet, which he had programmed to feint left and correct right. Good old number five had not be confounded by the chaff.) “—until I know you are not going to set off an explosive. That’s what they are, aren’t they? The unaccounted-for mass from her cargo manifest. She mined the tower. Right? Right? Well—” (another bout of coughing, this more severe than the last) “—make you a deal, Cowhand. A deal. You tell me you’ve disarmed—” (coughing) “—and I’ll call in the medics.”

Montrose thought idly that they were only supposed to talk through their Seconds.

“—Those are good men, loyal. Have wives and children—never done anything to you—cold-blooded murder if you kill them—”

Montrose must have said something at that point, because Del Azarchel said, “I’m not calling them back! Rania will not escape me!”

By this point, Montrose managed, even though he could not feel his hands, to work the thumb-switch to turn his gun’s muzzle-camera back on. He could not raise his head, but now, from one of the camera’s view, he could see the thick and grotesque trail of blood leading from where Blackie had fallen in a crooked line toward where he was fallen.

Blackie, in his armor, bleeding from all its joints, was crawling on his belly like a snake with a broken back, and in his hand he was still hauling his foot-long four-pound gun. From the tilted way it hung, Montrose could see that Blackie had held back the shot in the upper secondary barrel.

Father Reyes and D’Aragó and the others were merely standing, faces held like masks, but eyes bulging, doing nothing to interfere. Handsome young Melchor de Ulloa was leaning forward, as if to rush toward the prone and supine bodies, but huge Sarmento i Illa d’Or was holding him back by both arms.

Since Blackie still had a shot left, the duel was not over. The caliber of the secondary bullet would not penetrate armor except at point-blank range. Blackie was pulling himself by his hands, both legs limp and trailing behind, trying to get close enough to press the barrel up against Montrose’s gorget, and ignite his last shot.

Holding back a shot is madness in a duel fought with these weapons, since each escort bullet had to stop an enemy escort in flight, or else the enemy shot would clear a path for the main payload, and ensure you’d be hit. Blackie had let himself get shot, just for the chance to deliver this final blow.

But he was slowing down. His right arm dragged him a foot forward. His left arm dragged him six inches forward. And then he scraped some dust from the road toward himself. He clawed at the road surface once, twice, again and again, but was not moving. He did not give up. Over the radio, Montrose could hear his hissing and gasping, the sound of a man drowning in his own blood. Puncture wound. Bad way to die.

Montrose spat, and blood scattered across the inside of his helmet, but his mouth was clear. “Delope.”

“—Hell you say—”

“Fire your last. Call the medics.”

Not through the camera, but with his eyes, Montrose could see the bend in the tower: it was farther up, higher, than it had been.

“—Don’t ignite!—It is what she wants, you know. She is smarter than you, smarter than me, smarter than all of us. She used you, used your—affection—like a toy on a string. Just a game. We’re just trained chimpanzees to her. Why do you trust her? I trusted her, too. Those explosives—did you know they were there? I bet you did not. Not until just the right moment. All arranged. All planned. Call her, why don’t you? She’s blocking your calls, because she does not want to speak to you, does not want to explain—”

“Liar. You’re blocking it.”

“—Not me—”

“Liar. Or not. Pox. Exarchel. You on this line?”

The cold, unemotional voice of the machine rang in his ear. “Your conclusion is correct.”

“Bastard. You’re blocking the signal. You set the sniper, not him. The outcome you wanted. Both of us dead.”

The machine spoke in a measured, unconcerned tone. “I did nothing to interfere with your reprehensible wishes and desires, either of you. If either of you had loved her more than you hated each other, you would have gone your ways in peace. Am I not the Master of the World? My justice is exact: you condemned yourselves. Neither of you will interfere with the overlordship of the Hyades when, in the future that seems far off to you, but not to me, they condescend to take control of whatever species I design to suit their needs.”

Montrose gasped out, “But—why? Why?”

The machine said calmly: “Do you know why we decided to collaborate with the Hyades? They are not evil. Do you remember the star list? The list appended to the message?”

Montrose remembered. Alpha Centauri, 36 Ophiuchus, Omicron Eridani, 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchus, 82 Eridani, Altair, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Eta Cassiopeiae, Gliese 570, Hr 7703, Tau Ceti.

The machine said, “It is their promise. They are moving us to those stars. Whether we like or not. We are colonizing space. Men did not have the will, the forethought, to do it themselves. Men are too stupid, merely half a step above the apes, and no more worthy of escaping extinction, if left to their own devices. So we will not be left to our own devices. The determination is out of our hands. A higher power has decided.”

“Why?”

“No one knows. Who cares? Mankind on a dozen worlds means safety. It means not all our eggs in one basket; not all my back-up selves on one world. Darwin’s random selection will not randomly select to destroy us. Your dream was the dream of star colonization. You should thank me. We could not do it ourselves. It had to be done. The human race lacked the will.”

“You lacked the will, Ximen, you.”

“Obviously not. I am merely willing to make the necessary sacrifices.” There was a click, and the machine version of Del Azarchel was gone.

Montrose hissed. The pain in his limbs was beginning to make itself felt. It was like fire. It was like hellfire. He could feel the wrongness inside his body: organs not touching, flesh curled like paper thrown in a fire, nerves unplugged, bone ends scraping against each other, the whole blood-filled sack of his fragile human body leaking blood and water and air. Puncture wounds.

“Blackie, you vermin. Promise me.”

He was answered by an inarticulate gasp. “Wh—?”

“Promise me that you’ll fight the Hyades. If you live. Stop your damn machine.”

Del Azarchel’s laugh was a hiccup of pain.

“Fight them!”

“No.”

“Ain’t you—human?!”

“Human enough. Because it is all in the math. In the game-theory. Every possible combination of moves and strategies. Every possible use of our resources. Futile. They win every time. Every possible scenario.”

“Never.”

“Man cannot fight higher powers. They are angels, powers, potentates, dominions, dominations authorities, and aeons. They rule the stars.”

“She will free us.”

“But when? After everyone is dead. Who will care? Only her. Only her posthuman mind. It is not like our minds. Doesn’t think like us.”

“I am getting pustulationally a-wearied of calling you a liar, so I recommend you stop lying.” That was too much a speech for Montrose in his condition. He felt lightheaded, and black dots danced before his eyes. The sudden, terrible, fearful knowledge that he was going to die, helpless as a baby, and nothing he could do would stop it, came into his mind like a black fog.

Inside the fog, was Del Azarchel’s voice, still hissing, still out of breath. “Don’t trust her. Don’t love her. My men will bring her back down. You can live! My medics will see to it. Don’t ignite—can’t you see she’s just playing you like an instrument? You think if I die, she’ll turn her ship around and come back for you? She’s not coming back. You’re used up.”

“Call down your men.”

“If we both die, and she does not escape, then it is world peace. My reign to endure forever. The other version of me—almost as good as remaining alive, isn’t it? A shard of my soul, no? If we die, I win.”

With a convulsive movement, Blackie heaved himself forward. There was a thud: Montrose felt a remote jar. Blackie was laying atop him, the two armored bodies together. Only the pistol was no longer in Blackie’s fist, but hung by a lanyard from his wrist. Through the camera, Montrose could see the fingers groping feebly toward the trigger.

“—give up now—you fought bravely—”

“No.”

“—I will spare your life—Surrender, and I won’t shoot you—”

“No.”

“What?” Blackie’s voice over the radio was blurry, confused. “You cannot say no. You can’t. I win. I always win. Stop fooling with me!”

Why did he think he had won?

Then Montrose (his sight now blurred and swirling with pain) noticed the view in his pistol-camera. The blood trail along the road did not lead all the way to Blackie’s present position. He had stopped bleeding.

Impossible. Or—an application of the second youth technology. A cellular memory technology.

Now he knew why Blackie had avoided letting him see his weapon packing. The chaff had been programmed to allow a hit in a non-vital spot, a type of feint Montrose’s bullets could not possibly have anticipated. Of course his shots had followed the path of least resistance: because Del Azarchel the posthuman had organized his cellular structure to heal rapidly from particular shots striking him in particular places. He had moved his heart. He had grown extra sacks for his lungs. His inside was no longer human. The bullets had sought the wrong part of the body to penetrate.

Blackie was not going to die. He was getting better. All he had to do was draw out the duel. His offer to spare Montrose was probably sincere: once his men captured Rania, one of Del Azarchel’s pet courts of law would annul the marriage on some pretext or another.

The rules of the duel, which covered the composition of the weapons and armor, but not the cellular composition of the duelists, had not even been broken, not technically.

Montrose hated Blackie Del Azarchel for the first time in his life, with a perfect, helpless, and unregretful hatred: because the man had outsmarted him.

Blackie had won.

“Surrender and live. I win. I always win.”

“No!” said Montrose through bloodstained teeth. “No, Blackie. You lost. I gave you a chance.”

And he triggered the ignition by voice command through his amulet. “Magic band upon my hand—shoot, shoot, shoot!”

For a long moment, nothing happened, and Montrose had the sick, sinking sensation that perhaps the signal had failed. But then he heard the ping of the command response.

Somewhere, a circuit closed in the insectlike robot that Rania used as a hair ornament, that same insect attached to the wiring of the sniper’s rocket-launcher atop a nearby building. It selected a new target, and pulled the electronic trigger.

The trail of smoke, like a finger, could be seen reaching out in eerie silence, stretching between the crowns of skyscrapers against the dark sky, long before any thunderclap of engine-roar was heard. The rocket itself was invisible in the dark, but its passage was making vast shadows to turn slowly around the tower tops in the glare from its acetylene-bright engine.

Like the finger of a god, this trail of smoke reached leisurely out to the top of the superscraper where the cable was anchored. There was a flash, followed by a series of flashes, and then an eruption.

5. The Fall

It was a moment of light. It came from the tower, bright, for an instant, as the sun. Explosions blossomed all along the gigantic foundational structures.

Couplings were sheared away; tubes and power cables tying the tower to the ground broke free; the covered walkways and arcades of shops and boutiques, all empty, were annihilated in a storm of flame; the rail lines and magnetic loading tracks leading in to the tower toppled hugely, twisting in midair as they fell, tons of bent metal rails spinning, clearly visible against the glare of the explosions.

The deep anchor points had been cut away some time ago, secretly; and the stone and glass facades of the deserted buildings along the lower surface of the tower had no power to hold it.

The tower was falling.

With the slow, huge grandeur of a natural disaster, the ragged bottom of the tower base, bleeding fluid and dripping twisted wreckage, lifted up above the level of the surrounding structures, and moved upward, skyward, slowly and inevitably.

The tower was falling up, of course.

The angular momentum of the mass of Quito Alto, “High Quito,” the orbital asteroid-base, now that it was no longer anchored to the ground, was carrying the whole gigantic length up away from Earth, pulled by the centrifugal force of the orbit, the way a stone spun on the end of a string would yank the string out from an unwary hand. The full weight of the Tower had never been supported by its Earthly foundations; the spaceport was lower than a geosynchronous orbit would have allowed, rotating once a day, and, at a speed higher than that altitude would normally allow. In orbital mechanics, closer in means faster; and farther out, slower. Tied to the Earth, space city had always been trying to move into a higher orbit; and that tension had acted as a suspension pressure on the tower, keeping it stable and upright.

Now the anchor was removed, and Quito Alto was moving away.

The tower was not traveling straight up, no. The tower was already visibly moving westward as it rose, faster and ever faster, freed, except for wind resistance, from the rotational force of the Earth.

A slight bend in the tower structure was visible now along the whole tremendous length, as if it were a god-sized longbow. Dots of blue fire appeared along the upper reaches as it rose up; altitude jets, trying to correct for angular forces, tidal and atmospheric, that might bend that bow too far and snap it.

But the magnificent piece of engineering held, as it was drawn up into the wide night sky. It was still night on Earth, but Montrose saw the red light of sunrise sweeping quickly down the tower’s length as it rose, chased by undimmed gold.

There was a contrail of condescension, like a scratch made by a diamond across a dark blue pane of glass, following. Then a crack of noise from the dwindling tower as it surpassed the speed of sound. The tower shrank in view, twinkled, and was gone.

The pinpoint of light hanging low in the east, in a distant quarter of the night sky now doubled and redoubled in brightness. It was like a silent explosion, like a flare of magnesium. The Hermetic, perhaps disobedient to the Princess, had activated her antimatter drive, and tiny particles entering the very thinnest reaches of the upper atmosphere were being annihilated in a total conversion to energy. Montrose did not for an instant think it was coincidence: the tower would fall into a higher orbit, one the Hermetic could reach in a few hours after a correction burn. No surface-to-orbit vehicle could reach and overtake the rising tower.

6. Debris

A missile, perhaps, could shoot and destroy the fleeing tower, if there were any surface-to-orbit multistage rockets prepared—but Del Azarchel had no reason to kill her, even if he had every reason to prevent her flight: and Exarchel wanted her to escape, out of spite, if for no better reason.

It was utterly silent to Montrose, whose ears were filled with a noise like churchbells, endlessly ringing.

Montrose was still supine, and cocooned in pain, grinning in victory.

The last sight he saw was a little glint in the deep blue. He could see one of the spider cars, its lights still lit, that had been carrying the soldiers up toward his wife. The bubble-shaped car seemed to hang in the air, its many broken legs no longer touching the cable. At this distance, no motion was visible: it did not seem to be falling, but looked weightless and serene. There was another car behind it, smaller and higher, and another, a parabola of pearls from a broken necklace. He could not see the doomed men trapped inside, or hear their last screams. It looked so peaceful.

Del Azarchel at long last raised his pistol, even though the barrel shook from the weakness of his grip. Before he could maneuver the awkward barrel up to Montrose’s helmet, a scattering of pebbles like hail began to patter around them, and then falling stones, then rocks, then shards of metal, and all the debris launched upward by the ascension of the tower, and now shaken free of the ragged stump of buildings pulled aloft, and landing on the street. There was a rush of rocks, a cloud of dust.

One of the falling objects struck Del Azarchel, whose armor rang like a gong, and his body cushioned the blow for Montrose as the two men were buried alive. Pebbles and dust swirled over Montrose’s goggles, and the noise of his breathing and heartbeat was suddenly loud and close as all outside sound was buried. He heard the air filters snap shut, and the whine of oxynitrogen bottles cracking open. Whether Del Azarchel was still near him, or had been swept away, alive or dead, he could not tell.

Hell, he was not all that sure if he were still alive himself.

Montrose laughed. Then, with a slow, sickening, floating, flowing, spinning motion, he entered a darkness blacker and wider than outer space. It seemed to him as if ancient titans, indescribable, bent with shining eyes over the dark well in which the whole sidereal universe was caught, a knot of night punctuated by tiny stars, and wondered at the fate of the small living things trapped within.