Count to a Trillion (42 page)

Montrose and Rania had released to the public the secrets of the
Hermetic
second-youth procedure. At the moment, only the wealthiest and most powerful of the elite could afford the painstaking cell-by-cell alteration: but as if overnight, the rich and mighty were also the young and dazzling.

Montrose hated the trend he could already see forming, but he could see no way around it. The human brain reacts to physical beauty on a preverbal level—it is instantly easier to trust and like handsome features, and remarkably easy to adore and follow. A gulf between ugly commoners and alluring aristocracy in prior ages had been a matter for clothing and ornament: hereafter it would be woven into gene and blood, flesh and bone.

As Rania ran, some hidden signal in the threads was triggered, the long satin train fell away, divided itself neatly into streamers of cloth. The twenty queens now raised their gloved arms, to beckon these streamers upward. Up the fabric flew, high overhead, to the delight of the cheering crowds, and diamonds rained down on them.

Menelaus, grim-faced with happiness, his pale eyes blazing at the adoring crowds, galloping on his long rangy legs, had drawn the ceremonial saber he wore with the absurd uniform. No doubt he would have thrust aside (or thrust into) any unwary well-wishers who dared impede his path away from the celebration and toward his hotly-awaited marriage bed: but the servants of Rania, both uniformed in scarlet and gold or hidden in the crowd, kept the singing mob in check.

The kiss Menelaus and Rania had exchanged before the Pope still burned on his lips: the strange, acrid scent of the high mountain grasses that grew along the lanes for ground-effect vehicles was in his nostrils, and whirled his thoughts like wine.

“You should not have made your legs longer,” he growled. There had been no time for last-minute alterations for the wedding dress, despite the number of seamstresses and fabric-programmers on her staff, so Rania had suffered an overnight modification, to trigger an artificial youth-cycle in her cells, and suffer a growth-spurt to add the needed inches to her height. She now had the coltish legs of an adolescent, a more willowy silhouette.

Menelaus had solved Rania’s neural divarication problem, and she had not been willing to wait, either to put off the wedding for the medical process, or to put off the medical process for the wedding. Since her preset RNA-spoofing black cells in her bloodstream were already programmed to make a universal and rapid change, it was nothing to tweak totipotent cells into her leg bones and muscles. She spent the night before the wedding in a biosuspension coffin, with seven quarts of nanomachinery moving through her body, while Menelaus struggled with the fear that she would wake up as someone different.

So far, she seemed to be normal.

“We discussed this,” she said, eyes elfin, mouth impish, “during our spat. Our first lovers’ quarrel! You lost.”

He hated the fact that the top of her head no longer fit nicely under his chin when they hugged. Now the crown of her head was at the level of his lower lip, and it bothered him more than it should have: it reminded him of the time he found out when he was four years old that
pi
could not be resolved to any rational number. It seemed obscurely unnatural, as if someone had made a mistake when putting the universe together.

“I’ll be made of sterner stuff when we reach the bridal bower, my fair rebel. Bad enough womenfolk can’t decide what to wear; what damn fool gave them the science to fashion up their flesh and bone, tissue and face?”

“Why! The recent breakthroughs in biotechnology are due, my beloved, to
someone’s
policy of total honesty to the public. We cannot blame the Hermeticists—they did not invent the system. Someone else performed a mathematical analysis of combination-solutions in genes, a notation system he read off the Monument back when he was insane. Who is to blame, then?”

“What? Next you’ll say the apeman who invented fire is to stand trial for every act of arson since the Stone Age.”

“Hush, for there are sure to be press and spy-bees near the bridal car.”

When they came to the end of the carpet, the flower-festooned electric car was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was Yorvel, looking plump and ridiculous in the gold-purple-scarlet livery of the Pope’s Swiss Guard, pole-arm held gingerly in one hand, bridle held firmly in the other. He was trying to restrain a nervous, stamping steed, a red horse the hue of blood.

Rania said in a voice of limpid surprise, “But where is our car?”

Menelaus petted the nose of the huge horse, who gently nuzzled him, sniffing with large, delicate nostrils the gold and ebony costume, the wide lace collar, wherein bridegrooms of this era and rank were clad. “What? The Pope arrives with forty-nine white horses and one red charger that I’ve owned for a year now, and you don’t recognize him?” He petted the long nose carefully. “There, my hayburning poop-factory. What does she know? She didn’t mean it. Born in a tin can in space, she was. No, no, don’t be wroth. Now, upsy daisy.”

“What? Husband mine, your delirium is to have me, in all my fine and delicate satin, balance atop the spine of this outsized uncouth mammal? Am I an acrobat? Am I a cavegirl, to be juggled and bounced atop a zoo creature? Where are the brakes? Where is the safety setting? The whole system of muscles and veins—I speak now as a lady who has more than dabbled in engineering—seems to be directly controlled by the organic brain of a horse, with no manual override or direct interface. As a motile arrangement, ungainly, and less responsive than having the caterers carry me in a punchbowl.”

“My strong right arm is your safety, my horsemanship your control.”

“I shall look ridiculous.”

“History books’ll clean it up, Rainy. ’Sides, if you look good to me, hang the world.”

“I say I will not have it.”

“And I say you will. Who is to be the man in my house, eh?” And with no further ado, he took her in one arm and swung her into the saddle, where Res Ipsa Nova, sensing her nervousness, danced and trembled. She emitted one short yelp of surprise, and clung to the mane; and the delighted crowd roared.

Yorvel meshed his fingers and bent, as if to allow Menelaus a leg up. Menelaus ignored both Yorvel and the stirrup, but merely put his hands on the horse’s flanks and vaulted himself into the saddle, half-colliding with his mussed bride. Her coronet was askew, and the trailing lace in her hair was tangled, but Rania sat with straight posture, and favored the crowd with a wave of her gloved hand.

“My master is a madman, and is too mad to know he is mad,” murmured Yorvel from about the level of Menelaus’s knee. “Do you know what I had to do to spread your bribes? The
Schweizergarde
were snickering in their mustachios. They never would have agreed to smuggle in your horse, except they are die-hard romantics. And you don’t treat your beast right: leaving him here in this heat with this caparison! And now you are going to double his load? He will buck you off, and you will fall on your royal buttocks, Master! The picture bugs will photograph it, and all the newsfeeds will show it, and add comic music as a soundtrack to the sidebar.”

“Everyone needs a good laugh,” grunted Menelaus, tearing the loose, huge collar from his neck and flinging it into the air. “Now we’re fixing to take our French leave of this crowd, and shin out. Nova! Gid-YAWP!”

And in a moment the steed, as the wind, flew past the pillar supporting a statue of Winged Independence, and his hoofbeats were the thunder. The bridal veils and white laces flowed behind, snapping bravely, shedding roses, and the bride clung tightly to her dark-faced, glittering-eyed groom. Perhaps she smiled, but her face was pressed to his chest. The crowd roared and parted, a frightened Red Sea.

The beast was as magnificent a steed as modern genetic meddling could make him: so it was astonishing, but not impossible, when he cleared the heads of the onlookers at the end of the lane, made it over the pilings into a rich man’s garden, danced in a cloud of dust first down the steep slope of the mountainous terrain, and then galloped madly up the further slope, leaping from rock to sliding rock as nimbly as a goat, mane and tail like flame.

All the photographers, both professional and merely curious, sent their bees flying after, but Quito was a city known for privacy, because the mountain winds often blew the tiny instruments astray. One or two bolder fellows, or more curious, followed on foot the trail of dust a few score yards down the slope, but gave up the chase as the sorrel’s long legs opened the distance on the uphill run, and the bride and groom were carried in a leap over the crest and out of sight. One man tried to follow on an antique petrol-powered motorcycle no doubt lent to him from a collector, but he had not practiced the old skills, and he left his machine in a heap when it struck a rock; hoots and whistles greeted him as he climbed painfully back up slope.

The remaining members of the photography cadre, sitting atop their electric carriages with cameras and lens-tubes enough to equip a small astronomical observatory, exchanged lost shrugs and bewildered smiles. Meanwhile the mounted Swiss, the only men there truly able to see the horsemanship, good and bad, that Menelaus displayed, raised their swords and lances and shouted,
“Acriter et Fideliter!”

Yorvel laughed until he lost his breath, and sat on the ground, pulling a hip-flask of whiskey from underneath his borrowed uniform. “No woman is truly a bride until she is stolen away on horseback! That is what horses are for! Like in all the old tales! A magnificent gesture! Madness, like all magnificent gestures, of course. But a good madness, most needful and
proper
to the mental health: like the shock of a stiff drink, just the thing to put a man in his right spirits. It would be madness to be sane and sober on a day like this.” And he mopped his brow with his handkerchief, laughing and drinking and roaring with merriment until he wept.

2. The Celestial Tower

Above the city loomed the Celestial Tower; titanic, cyclopean, rising straight from the crown of a mountain and upward as far as the eye could see. It dwindled with perspective to a point, like a highway seen in the desert.

Except that this, Menelaus thought, was surely a highway to the sky.

Menelaus had been following the old railroad tracks for some time as the sun settled in a welter of red into the sea. Rania rode with her body leaning against his chest and, despite that the ride must have been uncomfortable, did not complain.

It was dark now, and insects were singing. The scent of forest below the mountain slopes hung in the night air, and the distant chattering of animals could be heard. The city was still around them, but modern Patagonian cities were miraculously quiet: Menelaus noticed again the lack of the machine noise. It was also a splendor of lights, like constellations, down the slopes and underfoot. Here were Colonial-era buildings, held in spotlights for the tourist trade: the
Plaza de la Independencia,
there were the many churches, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the old Archbishop’s Palace. In a world where a tourist could arrive from any continent in a matter of minutes, the beautiful places of the Earth were kept spotless. The light shone, and Menelaus felt as if he were treading the galaxy underfoot, or a carpet of diamond dust.

The suburbs were like islands in the sky, with bridges linking the paved areas. But half a mile from any building in any direction might be found a sudden slope, rock and flints, not good for foundations. A high civilization merely a stone’s throw from empty wasteland.

They were high. From here the volcanoes that punctured the mountains to each side of the city could not be seen, but Menelaus knew where they were. He could have found them in his sleep.

Guagua Pichincha was westward, toward the sea; Cayambe Reventator was to the east; Chacana, Antisana, and Sumaco trailed away to the southeast; Cotopaxi was due south. In the distance, more than eighty miles away south, Tungurahua and Sangay. Far to the north, the peak of Galeras. All were active to some degree, with artificial vents opened to relieve pressure in a controlled fashion. Galeras was more active than the others, suffering a major burn that had been postponed for the wedding: now a plume of smoke like a second tower reached toward the stars, bending in the wind only a bit. Its upper reaches were torn and dissipated into grayish clouds. The lower parts looked so dark and sturdy, nearly the same color as the Celestial Tower, but as if built of smoke.

The volcanoes unnerved him. Controlled? He hoped so, even though the old and worn systems of volcano-preemption were from the previous rulers of this place, older even that the Coptic Order, the Late Hispanosphere. It was the years Menelaus slept through, but still ancient history.

Around him was a land of fire, cities perched on peaks moated by cliffs over empty air. The massive geothermal energy of the place was what allowed the Celestial Tower to be here.

He reined his sorrel and looked up.

The middle reaches of the tower, far above, were still blushed rose with the light of a distant sunset. This alpine glow made the tower seem to float, weightless in the twilit heavens, a supernatural apparition.

Farther above, the towerlight was a vertical streak of yellow gold, where the upper regions were still in direct sunlight. And yet again above that, craning back his head and squinting, Menelaus could barely make out a harsher gleam, a glint, where the sun’s radiation, undiluted by any atmosphere, splashed onto the tower side in naked vacuum.

The tower-top itself, the spaceport called Quito Alto, shined faint and distant at the very vanishing point of the perspective. Normally, it was not so bright as to be seen by the naked eye. Now, however, it outshined the evening star. It was a star that neither rose nor set.

“Our honeymoon suite,” he said.

She said, “I thought you would like to be near the canopy of space, my old home.”

“When did they erect this?”

“Never.”

“What?”

She giggled, a sound like silver chimes. “They lowered it. None of the weight sits on the ground. Seventy years ago, during the high point of Hispanosphere ascendancy. The King of Spain wanted an enduring monument to his tyranny, and he thought there would be traffic from a moonbase, asteroid mining, expeditions, and, yes, a colony on Ganymede or Titan.”