“It is just standing there?”

“Standing, no. It sways like a dancer: these inhabited sections at the bottom, the malls and parking warehouses are an anchor point.”

“You know what I mean. It ain’t being used.”

“But it is. The Torre Real was recently bought by my people, and renamed the Celestial Tower. I wanted to call it the Golf Tee, because of its shape, but my publicity consultants insisted on a more dignified name: I should have followed my instinct and saved myself their fees, because these days everyone calls it the Folly Tower.”

Menelaus frowned when he heard that. “One of most ace-high bits of engineering this poxy race of man ever built, and they call it foolwork? Someone should make ’em regret that name. What if we set it to rights, put it back in business? We got the money.”

“A noble dream,” she said, almost dismissively, but smiling. “Del Azarchel would have allowed it, had I married him, because then any increase in my power and authority would have increased his also. But now?”

Montrose looked up. “I saw a flare.”

“It is a correction burn. There is a tourist hotel at the spot twelve miles up, clinging to the carbon nanotube tether proper. The cable swells from a one-centimeter diameter at the top of the anchor atop the base superscraper, to almost a hundred meters wide at the geostationary point. The tourist hotel is much lower than that, still inside the stratosphere. It was ordered closed many years ago.”

He opened his mouth to ask why, and snapped it shut again. He knew why. Del Azarchel did not want people being too curious about outer space.

He pointed at a cluster of lights, bright as a small city seen from orbit.

He said, “Is that it?”

“No, that is the spaceport itself, which is above the atmosphere. You cannot see from this angle, but the cable is bent to the west whenever a payload rides up, due to the differences in angular momentum of the spider car versus the various sections of cable—the horizontal increment of speed increases with altitude. The Hotel of Sorrow is not overhead, but hangs above the Pacific Ocean.”

“If I had had a tower like this, hanging up, all shining over my head, I would not have waited for Del Azarchel and his bully boys to give me permission to mount up and go into space. I would have stormed the damn place, and forced my way aboard any vessels the spaceport could support! What happened to these people these days? Spineless as squids, I call ’em.”

“Some cherish the long peace. Some fear a return of fire from heaven.”

“Man shouldn’t be afraid. Men were bolder, life was better, in my time.”

“Oho? Was it? So says a man who shot lawyers for a living, back in the good old days.” Her eyes twinkled with mirth.

“There are some that envy me that job. I’ve heard it called a public service, shooting lawyers.” He had to smile.

She did not let her smile show, but there was a lilt in her voice. “Let us excuse it on those grounds, then, and call it the practice of a more excitable era. But perhaps you will tell me more about why your people hanged Mormons?”

“When they stole our women. But who cares who shot first? War changes people, and biowar makes ’em crazy. I weren’t around when the rumors flew that the Mormons were tainted, infected with Spore, and wouldn’t take blood transfusions needed to clean them. I heard stories from my aunt what those rumors did. The Burnings. It must never happen again.”

She said, “To eliminate all diseases was the dream of the Pure Order. They were well on their way to making the race too hygienic to resist the next disease: and there was a next one, and many next ones. No pathogens of this century are entirely natural. Those not caused nor encouraged by bad medical practice of the last generation, are descended from non-self-eliminating biotic weapons from the generation before.”

Menelaus just grunted. “Darwin’s curse.”

“Curse? If so, we must take care with our own curses. The secret of second youth we released to the public I fear will also result in the same dieback cycle, as pathogens robust enough to survive the molecular-level scrubbing the second youth process involves will find themselves alone in a rich and newly-virginal environment, without competition, and without natural defenses against them.”

“Agh! That’s pessimistic talk. You got to have faith that our children will be able to invent the means to fight whatever comes up. We could not just sit on the secret of youth and let everyone’s grammy up and die.”

Rania smiled, as she always did when the talk turned to children.

Menelaus said, “Hellfire, and I ain’t just talking about disease: disease did not cause the Human Torch parades in Utah. One day science will fix things, so this part of us, this vicious part, will be caged up. The Beast. Maybe we can make a child without the gene for sorrow and rage, maybe we can make a thinking machine without the subroutine for hate. Maybe.”

“We have the genes and routines now,” she said. “The cure for hate is forgiveness. The cure for outrage is humility. The cure for sorrow is thankfulness. Even a child can learn these three: no grand scheme of human eugenics to produce the transhuman is needed.”

He gave her a long look. “I wonder if the Hermeticists who made you left out all the flaws of this old, sad, all-too-human race. You should be the mother of new people.”

“Oh my! Such a responsibility. And when should we get started on that project?”

She smiled, then, and the towerlight was as bright as moonlight, so he could see her smiling, a dim gold shadow in the night, and so he kissed her.

When they paused to breathe, she asked, “Where are you going to stable your horse? We cannot bring him up on the spider car.”

3. Limits

Menelaus Montrose, when he should have been the happiest man on Earth on the happiest day of his life, was aware of an ache in his throat, a bitterness—no, it was a resentment, a feeling that he had been betrayed. It reminded him of the time his mother had thrown his birthday cake to the hogs, because he had not done his chores (it had been his birthday that day, after all, and Leonidas told him it was okay to sleep late). With one part of his mind, he told himself that Del Azarchel was the source of this feeling. Blackie was a cold bastard, no doubt.

Another part of his mind told him it was the future that had betrayed him, the human race itself. Filthy, stupid poop-flinging tool-using monkeys not smart enough to use their tools to better themselves, and live like men, not monkeys.

During the ride up the side of the cable, his mood grew more and more elated the higher they rose. The scattered lights of the city fell away. The ocean was a dark seething mass, still tinted rose-red by the sunset receding westward, but more and more of it came into view as they rose higher, outpacing the dusk.

The car was a bubble affixed to a contraption of legs that were pulled along by induction currents in the cable itself, and the legs were hinged to grow wider as the cable grew wider.

He spoke about the wealth his marriage had put into his hands; he spoke about rebuilding. Why couldn’t the Celestial Tower be restored to its old glory? Why not establish a moonbase, mine the asteroids, put men in space instead of just satellites? And why not colonize Titan?

“And flying cars,” he added. “We’re in the future. There are supposed to be flying cars.”

She said, “And what about Del Azarchel? He will prohibit it. Titan is outside of spy bee range.”

“He cannot really be against a space program! When we were young—well, spittle, colonizing habitats both spaceborne and planetary, ’smostly all we talked on. Besides, the news that the Hermetic is making a second expedition to the Diamond Star might quell the discontent gripping the—uh, the masses.” (He had almost said the Hylics but he caught himself.)