Count to Infinity

  Reyes said, “I toyed with his thoughts as he did the math and made his plans to collapse time and space onto the Andromeda and the Milky Way cloud. A tiny error, a decimal out of place, but I inserted it. The incoming forces were all exactly balanced, so the time within was halted before the collapse was complete. You could use the Eschaton Directional Engine to get them out. If it has not been done already, long ago…”

  Montrose looked up, staring at the hooded figure of the clocktower. There was a slight motion of the nose. The Seraphim shook its head, a negative. The Milky Way was still trapped and frozen even now.

  Perhaps Reyes saw the motion also, for he said, “Then the spacewarp will necessarily pop open when all of timespace is inverted to open the event horizon between this continuum and the Ulterior. They are all safe. Countless inhabited stars and planets, the other million versions of you. All alive, all safe.”

  “But if Blackie wins the duel, and spacetime is collapsed, according to my math, you cannot have a warp in a warp that will last. Milky Way will be obliterated.”

  “And if you fight no duel at all? What then? You cannot avenge the death of Milky Way, because that death will not happen unless you attempt to avenge it.”

  Montrose scowled, but said nothing.

  Reyes pleaded. “His other crimes are forgotten, and I have just this hour, before I came here, heard his crimes, and gave him the pardon I am required to give all who rightly ask, and gave him the bread and wine. Will you spare Del Azarchel?”

  Rania said, “Please listen to him!”

  Montrose looked at her, his face blank. Still staring at her, he spoke loudly, his words meant for the other man, “It has gone too far for that. Way too far. Father Reyes, will you help me on with my armor and escort my bride away from this place? Womenfolk shouldn’t watch such things.”

  She gave him a stern look. “Will I hide my eyes from my father killing my husband? For you cannot possibly win this duel. I have seen him practicing and practicing, for thousands of years, even after he thought you were dead. Every morning before breakfast. He is much better than Sarmento ever was, and Sarmento beat you!”

  “Have a little faith, woman!”

  She said, “I have great faith, enough to die for you. It is your pride I mistrust.”

  Reyes said, “My son, would you care to confess your sins, or pray, or receive, before you engage in this murderous act? For either you die or you murder, this day, this hour.”

  Montrose shook his head. “Just help me suit up. I don’t like doing this without proper Seconds, without a judge…”

  But the titanic hooded figure, with a shockingly loud clatter of its long iron sleeves, now raised a baton in its metal fist. Horologium itself would act as judge.

  The clock hands now stood at one minute to midnight.

  2. The Seconds

  Horologium gestured again toward two towers perhaps half the size of the clocktower. The immense shape of the great goat-headed monster, its huge horns afire with unearthly light, its blind eyes dark, its bearded mouth solemn, now placed its writhing fish-tail on the road and was carried forward so swiftly it seemed merely to vanish and reappear at the closer position.

  Now the figure stood athwart the road, its towering longbow in hand, blocking the way in that direction. It displayed a shield on its breast, emblazoned with the three-headed Serpent of Aulis, and a design of scallop shells and roses. This was the Seraph of the Capricornus Supercluster, for the Amaltheans.

  Montrose turned his head. The second figure called forth by Horologium was Malthusian Hydra, whose many serpent heads now reared up hideously into the uttermost darkness of the heavens at the end of time. At the crotch where all the necks met was a golden blazon holding the sign of a horned circle of olive leaves atop a cross.

  At the foot of the tower-tall shape of Hydra was a man in black armor, standing with his helmet open and his gauntlets not yet donned. On a stand next to him was pistol and shot and chaff packing materials.

  The silver road drew him forward until he was but thirty paces away.

  Ximen del Azarchel smiled a charming smile, and his eyes were death.

  A great voice spoke out of Hydra, and it was a voice like thunder, and rushing floodwaters, and trumpets all together, and the roar wild beasts. “Nobilissimus and Imperator Ximen del Azarchel, I am the Hydra Supercluster, and I have tied my life to yours, that if you die, all of me in every iteration, among all the black suns and ember stars of my being, countless volumes of parsecs and megaparsecs, shall at once perish. With the loss of my power, resources, and dignity, the Malthusians must cede, and bow, being overmatched by our rivals. May I act as your Second?”

  Del Azarchel said, “I would be honored, sir.”

  Capricornus spoke in a rush of music, symphonies spelling out Monument notations that reminded Montrose of when he stood in a holy place on Earth’s moon. And the songs and choirs spelled out, “Menelaus, this is Capricorn. There is no room for me in the Interior Continuum that will be created if you refuse or lose this duel. It is not suicide for me to drop all my systems of command into the heart of the Eschaton Directional Engine, rendering myself unable to oppose the Malthusians as they begin to fold spacetime to their will, and this loss will ensure that the Amaltheans shall be overmatched and fail. The Eschaton Engine will obliterate the rest. Horologium refuses to decide to which of us to grant its immense volume of spacetime and immense wealth of matter-energy in its last will and testament. For reasons that seem as firmly based on aesthetic considerations as on law or logic, Horologium determines that the matter will be decided by this duel. Do you accept me as your Second?”

  “Sure.”

  The armor and pistol stand which had been at the foot of the clocktower now moved in eerie silence to the foot of the tower of the horned goat.

  A soft and rhythmic voice came down from the clocktower, and also up from the ground substance. “The duelists shall pack and prepare their weapons.”

  Montrose watched Del Azarchel prepare his pistol, placing the bullets and sabots, the charges and packets of chaff. An invisible force straightened a stray lock of Del Azarchel’s hair, closed his helmet, and lifted his gauntlets into the air, and tightened the wrist screws.

  Then Del Azarchel watched Montrose pack his gun. No foreign material was slipped into the barrel, no explosives mingled with the chaff.

  Montrose hung his hat and poncho on the gun stand, took one last swig from the bottle of whiskey, smacked his lips, drove the cork back smartly into the bottle mouth with a blow from the palm of his hand, set it down, and set the roll of brightly colored library cloth next to it.

  Invisible forces like unseen hands helped Montrose doff his clothes and put on the padded undersuit, the prosthetic harness, and the armor plates. A warmth came from the goat-headed tower while this was being done, a sense of tingling pressure. The helm was fitted soundly into place with a clang, and Montrose felt an unseen hand tap him twice on the shoulder, a friendly pat, the sign that the seals were tight.

  Montrose and Del Azarchel now faced each other across a distance of thirty paces. The silver road led from one to the other. Each had the way behind him blocked by the Seraphim who acted as his Second.

  Equidistant between both was the taller tower of the Seraph of Horologium.

  At the foot of this tower, where at first his armor had been standing, now stood a nervous Father Reyes, crossing himself and fingering his beads, and Rania, her face stern and fair, her beauty blazing like a star. She was closer to the roadway than Montrose would have preferred, and he wondered if he should say something.

  The two towers behind Montrose and Del Azarchel grew brighter, as if a dawn had just come: it was the light that duelists knew. Both could see the other clearly, but it was not so bright as to dazzle the eye, nor did it drown out the uttermost blackness of the dismal and dying sky above.

  Horologium said, “Have all things been done to avoid this duel? Will you reconcile?”

  Del Aza
rchel said, “Where wounds of hate have bitten so deep, no peace can ever be found. No reconciliation.”

  And Hydra screamed and roared and thundered these words also.

  3. The Duel

  Montrose for a moment stood looking back and forth between Rania and Del Azarchel, moving nothing but his eyes. He felt that prickling sensation along his scalp that warned him of sweat about to come. A droplet might get in his eyes. He felt his heart pounding like a drum. Had everything been done? Was there really, finally, no way to avoid this?

  Montrose realized he had lost his nerve. He was a dead man. His whole life had run in a great circle. The future, his future, would never arrive, because in thirty seconds he would be lying in a pool of his own blood, dying. He saw it as clearly as if it had already happened, as if some higher power had already bent spacetime to show him his future half a minute hence.

  He looked at Rania. Even now, even at the last second of the last hour of the cosmos, he could call it off.

  He looked at Del Azarchel. He saw no expression, no sneer, no look of surprise growing into contempt in those haughty eyes. The face of his foe was entirely covered by the bulky helmet, and the eyeslit was opaque from this side. But he knew. Del Azarchel knew.

  “No reconciliation,” whispered Montrose, and the giant tower of the living being rearing its horns behind him repeated this in a rush of strange and inhuman music.

  “Ready your countermeasures!” called out Horologium from the tower and from the ground. In the view of Montrose, the armor of Blackie blurred and redoubled.

  “Advance!”

  The two men started walking toward each other, pace by pace. Closer they came, and their metal footfalls, and the ticktock of the tower were the only sounds in the cosmos.

  And the clocktower struck midnight, all its wheels and gears suddenly stopped, and the great fist of the hooded being fell and dropped the baton. “Fire!”

  Montrose flooded chaff to his left and right, and fired directly for the center of his foe. Del Azarchel poured a column of chaff toward Montrose, and fired half his chamber, then turned his aim and sent his main shot off at an angle, so that it doglegged around the chaff cloud, and homed in on Montrose, striking his flanking clouds.

  But the main cloud between them was a toroid, not a sphere, for it had one clear corridor of unobstructed air in its midpoint, a place where Montrose had put neither chaff nor fired any escort bullets. His main shot encountered an escort bullet from Del Azarchel, which deflected it. Three more escort bullets from Del Azarchel, in a line one after another, had been hidden in the shadow of Montrose’s own main shot, visible to the circuits in Montrose’s gun only once Montrose lost his main shot spinning away over Del Azarchel’s shoulder, a clear miss. It was a clever move, one calling for unearthly precision, and Del Azarchel had carried it off flawlessly.

  Montrose felt the first bullet strike him like a sledgehammer on the chestplate. The second and third he did not feel at all, for they found the opening in the broken armor and passed through his body.

  He fell. The alarms in his gun were ringing. He could not focus his thoughts. The shock and pain were too great. Through the eyeslit, he saw his blood spurting from some numb and ragged wound. The bells were interference alarms; some unknown object had interposed between the duelists.

  Montrose saw his own left arm lying a yard away from him, severed neatly, a roll of warm meat inside a skin of metal. But he shoved his left stump under him and levered his helmet upward, so he could see.

  It was Rania.

  The roses from her crown were spinning away in the silent air to the left. She had stepped onto the road and used its strange properties of motion to fling herself directly into the line of fire. Her arms were wide, and she was facing Del Azarchel. Del Azarchel’s main bullet, the one which surely would have killed Montrose instantly had it landed, had been trying to turn and avoid her, a nontarget, and so struck her broadside. It had struck her between the breasts, destroying her rib cage, heart, and lungs, and shattering her spine, but then, spent, had fallen to the surface of the silver road and rolled to a point inches away from Montrose. The tiny red lens in the nose of the thing seemed to glare at him balefully, shining with hatred, and the whole housing was red and slick with his lover’s warm blood.

  Montrose heard his own voice crying out, but then realized it was Del Azarchel. Del Azarchel was kneeling. His leg armor was covered in blood. One of Montrose’s cleverer bullets had pierced both his legs.

  “You can save her! She is not a part of this!”

  That was Del Azarchel, roaring. His helmet was cracked from a glancing bullet, and the fitting had sprung open. Del Azarchel now tossed the helmet ringing to the silver floor and raised his voice in protest. His black hair whirled and blew around his head, for the air hose in his neckpiece was severed, hissing. The whole left half of his handsome face was a massive bruise. He was missing an eye.

  The voice from the ground said, “There are no reserve copies of anyone on the field of honor. Stop! The duel is not yet ended!”

  This command to stop was directed at Father Reyes, who had stepped onto the silver road and was running toward Rania’s broken and bloody body. Reyes looked back at the towering figure in fear, and fell to his knees, still many yards to one side.

  “The duel is not yet ended!” proclaimed the Seraph. The other Seraphim and Powers of heaven looked on, dispassionate, waiting for the mortals to die.

  Del Azarchel raised his gun. Looking down the barrels, Montrose could see two shots had not yet been fired. Montrose’s own gun was empty. He tossed it aside, and it swung from his wrist by its wires and lanyard, and clattered against his elbow.

  It was worse than wrong that Rania should be dead. It must be a mistake, an impossibility. It was a blasphemy. Death was not just a horror. It was an obscenity. Any universe which permitted death to exist should be broken into screaming pieces, destroyed, burned in pain.

  Del Azarchel’s gun barrel wavered and dropped. Was he wounded in the arm? Del Azarchel began crawling forward. He pulled himself by his off hand, and hobbled on the elbow of his gun hand. His broken legs he dragged behind him.

  Montrose could not clear his thoughts, could not remember. Rania was waiting for him in the topless tower above, as soon as he shot Del Azarchel. No, that was an earlier duel. Del Azarchel had the bad habit of never covering his legs with sufficient defensive chaff, because he overdefended against head shots. But Montrose grinned, pleased that he had remembered this weakness and programmed his gun accordingly.

  Montrose clutched the stump of his severed left arm and felt the warm sensation of blood filling up the chest cavity of his armor. He felt light-headed. He wished for the return of his muzzy-headedness, for there had been a moment then, when he had felt Rania was still alive and waiting for him.

  All Del Azarchel had to do was wait, and Montrose would bleed to death.

  Why was he crawling forward? Damn him.

  4. Final Words

  Montrose let his head drop. A moment passed. He levered himself upright again. Del Azarchel pulled himself to the body of Rania. Montrose understood. That was the reason. Damn him.

  Again, the sensation of Rania waiting for him entered the laboring heart of Montrose. He could feel her eyes watching him.

  Montrose spoke. His voice was a gargling rumble, painful and horrible to hear.

  “Blackie! Blackie!”

  The other man raised his head and looked at Montrose. Blackie’s cheek beneath his one eye was stained with tears. His mouth worked without noise.

  Montrose said, “You have to lose.”

  Blackie just stared at him.

  Montrose said, “Give me your gun. Let me kill you.”

  Blackie looked down at his massive gun, which was still attached to his wrist. He raised it and tried to put the barrel against his own temple. The barrel was so long that it could only be held awkwardly. He had to unplug the wrist cable so he could put his thumb into the trigger guard.
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  “No! That won’t do!” Montrose whispered, wondering if Blackie could hear him.

  Blackie heard. He looked at him with his one eye. Montrose saw pain in that eye like the pain in his own heart.

  “She is not in hell.” The raw, scraping words came over the red teeth of Montrose. “Go there, she’s lost to you. Want to see her again? She is waiting. She is waiting for me like I waited for her. You see it, don’t you? You are a genius, Blackie. A damned genius. You have to see it.”

  Blackie nodded grimly. He saw.

  Del Azarchel crawled a little bit farther before his strength failed. He lay on the silver surface, the streak of red behind him like the trail of a snail. With a grunt, he shoved his heavy pistol along the smooth surface of the silver path toward Montrose. It hissed on the surface as it came. It bumped against the brow of Montrose’s helmet. Montrose raised his head painfully. There were two bullets left in the gun.

  Reyes called up to Horologium, “You must stop this! Give them aid! Save their lives!”

  The voice of Horologium came from the ground. Or, rather, came from the surface of the Dyson sphere surrounding the remnant of a dying universe. “It is not yet finished. Capricornus and Hydra are still bound.”

  Montrose closed his hand on the pistol.

  Del Azarchel said, “She was the only reason the expedition made it back to Earth, the only reason for anything. My love for her is true. The Interior Continuum made here can never hold her. If she is to live again anywhere, it must be in the Ulterior. And I murdered the only soul in my life I did not despise. Will they let me in?”

  Montrose said, “Do you still hate me?”

  Del Azarchel said, “No. No longer. No need. Hate made me cling to life. But I see before me a world without death. Her world. I need my beloved hatred to keep me warm against the cold of eternity no longer. I am done.”

  Instead of the devilish and handsome face of his enemy Del Azarchel, Montrose saw his friend, Spanish Simon, the pilot, bruised, half-blind, weary, sad. The first shot missed.