Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright Page B

you’d’ve drilled him in the heart and left a good-looking corpse…”
    “Bugger that. Gunfighting ain’t a game. Besides, it’s not my fault I win.”
    “Win? You shoot like the devil’s in you, little brother. Lookit this. Got you a memento.”
    Leonidas pulled out a slug of metal. It was two bullets, melted into one shape, curled like a question-mark. The payload of Mike Nails’s main shot had been fused by the heat of impact to one of Menelaus’s escort bullets—a rare, perfect interception.
    Looking at the shape, Menelaus could see it in his head: the patterns, the pretty patterns of vortices. He could see the math needed to describe how that impact had been done, and he could guess at a way to solve for simultaneous partial differentials, more elegant than what he’d been doing before.
    “Shoot like the devil is in you,” Leonidas said again, this time more softly.
    “I just got a knack, is all,” muttered Menelaus.
    “That’s not what Rainier says.”
    “Who?”
    “Your Prince. The Prince of Monaco.”
    “Captain Grimaldi. Ain’t no titles in space.”
    “Ship ain’t done a-building yet. Most likely never will be.”
    “The Hermetic . He’s still the Captain,” said Menelaus. And in his heart, he wanted the words to be: my Captain .
    Leonidas shrugged. “Whatever his name is, His Serene Highness helped pay for some of your fixup. He was talking about a scholarship. They’ll pay your way to go to Oddifornia and study math.” Leonidas shook his head in wonder, as if baffled by rich foreigners and their lunatic ways. “Guess when it takes you more’n ten years to build a ship, you might as well put the kids through schooling what might grow up to be your crew. Train ’em up to the job, like.”
    For a moment, Menelaus had the strangest feeling, as if time itself had forgotten how to let the seconds pass. Pay? To study?
    It was the future. A doorway to the future had just become unlocked for him.
    In one part of his mind, he noticed how much joy was like horror: The same horripilation tingled his skin electrically, the same faintness of breath, the same prickling of the scalp, the same sensation that something too enormous to grasp was upon him.
    His gunfighter’s nerve knew how to deal with horror, and so he could master this wild bucking-bronco feeling, too. Menelaus controlled his voice and spoke nonchalantly.
    “So … pay my way outta here. He said that?”
    “He did indeed. And seeing as how pretty Lil Palmer will kiss any man who shoots you in the back, and her dad will give him a thousand acres of prime land, this might be a good time to pack up and go study. Pox, I’d beef you myself to get a lip-dicker from sweet Lilly: just as fine as cream gravy and easy on the eyes, she is.”
    “Did the brothers say how soon I’d be fit to travel?”
    “Your body’s got to flush out the cellular machinery used to hold you in life-suspension: so you’ll be crapping black ink for a while. Aside from that, we can leave as soon as…”
    “We?”
    Leonidas looked shy, and pulled his hatbrim down, but eventually said: “Well, I’m your brother, Meany Louse. Older brother now. Can’t let you go off by your lonesome. Lookit what all kinds of trouble you make.”
    Menelaus was not in the mind to argue the point. “You got a cigarette?”
    “Sure do.”
    “Old or new?”
    “New. This is newbacco. You don’t think I touch that poison stuff, do you?”
    So Menelaus leaned back comfortably in his bed, watching the blue plume of cigarette smoke drift toward the ceiling. The two brothers shared the silence, neither feeling much need to talk, not yet. The smoke trickled up.
    Up. The direction the stars were in.

4
    Life Extension
    1. Mining the Diamond Star
    A.D. 2004–2045
    The Diamond Star V 886 Centauri, known informally as “Lucy” and more officially as BPM 37093, was a variable white dwarf star about fifty lightyears from Sol.
    In the middle of the First Space Age,