Count to a Trillion (47 page)

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.”