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“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.