Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  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.