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.”

“What happened?”

“War interrupted.”

“Which one?”

Rania just shrugged. “The Yellow War.”

“Which one was that? What was it about?”

Rania spoke in a soft, haunted voice. “You may ask the survivors for details. Inspect your coffins dated between 2333–2338. Both sides experimented on captured civilian populations with RNA-spoofing. The bloated monstrosities and boneless knots of flesh were biosuspended, because there was no way to keep them alive. They are now your wards.” She looked up.

Menelaus wore a puzzled frown, as if he had not realized that the fate of those slumbering souls was now his responsibility.

She said, “Work on the tower slowed. It was maintained by private subscriptions for a while.”

Menelaus gazed at the Celestial Tower. “And then?”

“And then what? There is no ‘and then.’”

“The tower is still there.”

“Worthless to Earth,” she said, sadly.

“The road to the stars!”

“The road to nowhere. The moonbase was abandoned due to bone-sickness. No colony on Ganymede was ever founded. It would have cost less, and been a friendlier environment, to build a greenhouse at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, and farm that. But since the Patagonian, African, and Gobi wastelands were blooming for the first time since the Triassic … so who would bother? After the war, first one institution then another maintained it, despite the volcano danger here. The Third Era of Space could begin at any moment, since launch costs are, even now, as long as that tower stands, merely the cost of a spider car, one going up, one coming down. Oh, look!”

He saw, high above, what seemed to be a meteor shower. For a moment or so, silver streaks of fire were falling to either side of the twilit, red-gold tower.

“What is it?”

“Decay. Fragments of ablative ceramic, from the upper structure, microscopic nano-tube fragments that have lost their Van der Waals adhesion. The tower is old, old, and its joints are stiff; its skin is peeling; upper sections suffer from sunburn and accumulated metal fatigue. It is a pendulum, you see, but the balancing governors are no longer in synch. I had been hoping your Pellucid would help us solve some of the calculation errors.”

Pellucid was the name for his Van Neumann diamond project. He had finally decided on an environment where the machines could be released with minimal danger to the human race. The depthtrain system had given him the idea.

Pellucid would be sent to govern a system for sensing and distributing pressures across the tectonics of Quito’s volcanic region. If it worked, Pellucid would be able to grow down the sides of old volcano vents, and spread as far and wide along the inner mantle of the Earth as need be, to gather valuable information about magma pressure systems as they formed. The more miles the diamond colony covered, the more calculating power it would have. Any single diamond, or any set of them, could be turned to any number of specialized functions as need dictated. The trick was to make them die on exposure to surface conditions.

Rania was speaking softly. “The tower is a living thing. It breathes, pumping air up to the station; its heart pumps hydraulics and coolants; it sweats, after a fashion, to distribute heat across its skin; it has nerves to carry energy and sensations of stress and wind-shear from one part of its structure to another; and it moves, shifting weight, flexing, maintaining balance. I have always felt its sorrow, rooted to this spot of rock, its upper head in space.”