“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 i
t 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.
TOR BOOKS BY JOHN C. WRIGHT
The Golden Age
The Phoenix Exultant
The Golden Transcendence
The Last Guardian of Everness
Mists of Everness
Orphans of Chaos
Fugitives of Chaos
Titans of Chaos
Null-A Continuum
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
COUNT TO A TRILLION
Copyright © 2011 by John C. Wright
All rights reserved.
A Tor® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, John C. (John Charles), 1961–
Count to a trillion / John C. Wright.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2927-1 (hardback)
I. Title.
PS3623.R54C68 2011
813'.6—dc22
2011024212
First Edition: December 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-8637-3
John C. Wright, Count to a Trillion
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