The Phoenix Exultant

– The Phoenix Exultant –

or
Dispossessed in Utopia

Volume II of the Golden Age Trilogy

By John C. Wright

*** *** ***

O BLEST unfabled Incense Tree,
That burns in glorious Araby,
With red scent chalicing the air,
Till earth-life grow Elysian there!
Half buried to her flaming breast
In this bright tree, she makes her nest,
Hundred-sunn’d Phoenix! when she must
Crumble at length to hoary dust!
Her gorgeous death-bed! her rich pyre
Burnt up with aromatic fire!
Her urn, sight high from spoiler men!
Her birthplace when self-born again!

— George Darley (1795–1846)

Table of Contents so far

 

*** *** ***

CHAPTER ONE: THE CYBORG

01. The World Gone Blind

He opened the door onto a crowded boulevard of matter-shops, drama-spaces, reliquaries, shared-form communion theaters, colloquy-salons, and flower parks. An elaborate hydro-sculpture of falls and aerial brooks spread from a central fountain-works throughout the area, with running water held aloft by subatomic reorientations of its surface tension, so that arches and bows of shining transparency rose or fell, splashed or surged with careless indifference to the reality of gravity. Light scattered from tall windows lining the concourse, or from banners of advertisements, or from high panels opening up into the regional mentality, was caught and made into rainbows by the high-flowing waters. Petals from floating water-lilies drifted down across the scene.

Beneath all this beauty was a crass ugliness. More than three quarters of the people were present as mannequins. This was evidently a place meant for manorials, cryptics, or other schools which relied heavily on telepresentation. Since Phaethon no longer had access to any kind of sense-filter, all these folk, no matter how splendid of dress or elegant of comportment they might have appeared to an observer in the surface-dreaming, looked to him like so many ranks and ranks of grey, dull, and faceless mannequins.

There may have been beautiful music sweeping the area; excluded from the mentality, Phaethon was deaf to it. Here and there were hospice-boxes or staging pools, ready to send out dreams or partials, calls, messages or any form of telepresentation. All channels were closed to Phaethon, and he was mute. There were dragon-signs burning like fire in the air, displaying messages of unknown import. Phaethon could not read the subtext or hyper-text; Phaethon was illiterate. There may have been thought-guides in the Middle-Dreaming to allow him to remember, as if he had always known, where to find the public transport he sought. Mnemonic assistance gone, Phaethon was an amnesiac. There may have been ornament and pageantry in the dream-stages gathered in the air around him, lovely beyond description; or signs and maps to show Phaethon where, in this wide concourse, might be the way or the road he sought. But Phaethon was blind.

Here and there among the mannequins, the face of a realist or vivarianist showed. Their eyes turned dull when they lit on Phaethon, and their gazes slid past him without seeing. All sense-filters were tuned to exclude him. The world was blind to him as well.

He expected the banners overhead to swoop down on him when he looked up. But no. They floated on by, shouting with lights and garish displays. Even the advertisements ignored him.

No matter. Phaethon tried to keep his thoughts only on the next steps immediately before him. How to find out where he was? How to find Talaimannar? How to go from here to there? Once there, how to find out why Harrier Sophotech recommended that place?

He had to ask someone for help, or directions.

Phaethon stepped behind a stand of bushes; there was a flow of water from the fountain-works overhead, forming a rippling, translucent ceiling. Was anyone watching? He assumed not.

He doffed his armor, and covered it with the cape of nano-material, which he then programmed to look like a hooded cloak. Phaethon himself merely drew out some of the nano-material from the black skin-garment he wore, and drew circles around his eyes, to solidify into a black domino mask. And that was that: both of them were now in disguise. He hoped it was enough to fool at least a casual inspection. He programmed the suit to follow him at a fixed distance, avoiding obstacles; to “heel” as Daphne would have said.

He stepped out again into the concourse, followed by the bulky, cloaked form of his armor, looming three paces behind him. He went downstairs and found a pondside esplanade which had fewer mannequins walking along it. He saw real faces; faces made of flesh or metal, or cobra-scales, or polystructural material, or energy-surfaces. They were laughing and talking, signaling and depicting. The air seemed charged with a carnival excitement. Many people skipped or danced as they strolled, moved by music Phaethon could not hear. Others dived over the side of the esplanade, to glide among the buildings and statues in the pond.

He did not know what particular event was being celebrated. It was rare to see so many folk together. Whatever bunting or decoration swimming in the dream-space here, which might have given him a clue as to the nature of the occasion, was, of course, invisible to him.

People smiled and nodded at him as they walked by, full of good cheer. “Merry Millennium! May you live a thousand years!”

He had not realized how much he had missed, and was going to miss, the sight of friendly human faces. Phaethon smiled back, waving and calling out “And a thousand years to you!”

Phaethon reminded himself that he had to be careful. Theoretically, the masquerade protocol would not protect him, since he was no longer part of the celebration, no longer part of the community. But how many people would even try to read his identity, if they saw him wearing a mask during a masquerade? Most people, Phaethon guessed, would not.

The rule from the Hortators was that no one was to give him aid, comfort, food or drink, or shelter, sell him goods or services, or buy from him, or donate charity to him. This rule did not (in theory) actually prohibit speaking to him, or looking at him and smiling, although that was the way it surely would be practiced.

If Phaethon tried to buy something from anyone he passed, Aurelian was obligated to warn them that they were about to be contaminated with exile. But as long as Phaethon did not try to win from the passers-by either food or drink or comfort or shelter or charity, Aurelian would no doubt stand mute. Sophotechs had a long, long tradition of failing to volunteer any information which had not been specifically asked.

It was hard. A couple walking hand-in-hand were passing out wedding-album projections of their future children. Phaethon smiled but declined to take one. A young girl (or someone dressed as one), skipping and licking a floating balloon-pastry offered him a bite; Phaethon patted her on the head, but did not touch her pastry. When a laughing wine-juggler, surrounded by musical fire-crackers, and balancing on a ball, rolled by, and tried to thrust a glass of champagne into Phaethon’s hand, Phaethon was not able to refuse except by jerking his hand away.

The juggler frowned, wondering at Phaethon’s lack of courtesy, and raised two fingers as if to try to find out who Phaethon really was. But the juggler was distracted when a slender, naked gynomorph, fluttering with a hundred stimulation scarves, jumped up in drunken passion to embrace him. Singing a carol to Aphrodite, the two rolled off together, while the juggler’s bottles and goblets fell this way and that.

Phaethon let the throng carry him down the esplanade.

The pressure of the crowd eased when Phaethon came to a line of windows, two hundred feet tall or more, which looked out upon a balcony larger than a boulevard. Out onto the balcony they all went together. Phaethon climbed up a pedestal holding a statue of Orpheus in his pose as Father of the Second Immortality. The stone hands held up a symbol in the shape of a snake swallowing its own tail. Phaethon put his foot in the stone coils of the serpent, and pulled himself high, looking left and right above the heads of the crowd.

Several lesser towers and small skyscrapers grew up from the railing of the balcony, like little corals fringing the topless super-tower of the space elevator.

Beyond the balcony, the metropolis spread out from the mountain-base of the space elevator in three concentric circles. Innermost and oldest, the center circle consisted of huge windowless structures shaped according to simple geometries; giant cubes, hemispheres and hemi-cylinders, painted in bright, primary colors, connected by rectilinear motion-lines and smart-roads. The architecture followed the Objective Aesthetic, with the building shapes, slabs and plaques all rigidly stereotyped. There was little movement in this part of the city; human beings of the basic neuroform tended to find these faceless buildings and looming monoliths intolerable; mostly they housed Sophotech components, warehouses, manufactories. Invariants, who had little desire for beauty or pleasure or inefficiency, lived here, dwelling in square dormitories arranged like rank upon rank of coffin-beds.

The second ring was done in the Standard Aesthetic. Here were black pools and lakes of nano-machinery, with many brooks and rills, touched with white foam, of the dark material streaming from one to another. Tiny waterfalls of the material formed where cascade separator stages mixed and organized the components. Each lake was surrounded by the false-trees and coral bioformations of nano-manufactory. A hundred solar parasols raised orchid-like colors to the sun. The houses and presence chambers were formed of strange growths like sea-shells; one spiral after another, shining with nacre and mother-of-pearl, rose to the skyline. Blue-black, dark pearl, glinting silver, and dappled blue-gray hues dominated the scene. Thought-gardens, coven-places and sacred circles dotted the area, along with nymphariums, mother-trees and staging pools. Warlocks and basics tended to prefer the chaotic fractals and organic shapes of the Standard Aesthetic; and wide areas of garden-space were occupied by the decentralized bodies of Cerebellines.

Beyond this, on the hills surrounding, green arbors and white mansions prevailed. This was the Consensus Aesthetic, patronized mostly by manor-born and first-generation basics. Greek columns marched along the hilltops; formal English gardens rested in green shadows before grand houses done in the Georgian style, or neo-Roman, or stern Alexandrian.

In the far distance, Phaethon saw a wide lake. On the lake were a hundred shapes like jewel-armored clipper ships, whose sails were textured like a dozen wings of butterflies, surrounded with light.

Now Phaethon knew where he was. This city was Kisumu, south of Aetheopia, overlooking Lake Victoria. And Phaethon understood the wonder and excitement of the crowd. For the huge shapes in the lake were the Deep Ones.

These were the last of the once-great race of the Jovian half-warlocks, a unique neuroform which combined elements from the Cerebelline and Warlock nervous system structures. Once, they rode the storms and swam in the pressurized methane atmosphere of Jupiter, before its ignition. When the time came to end their way of life, they chose instead to enter whale-like bodies and to sleep at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where they called back and forth to each other, and wove songs and sonar-images relating to the vast, sad and ancient emotions known only to them; and made sounds in the deep which reminded them of, but could not re-capture, those songs and sensations their old Jupiter-adapted Behemoth bodies once had made in the endless atmosphere of that gas giant planet.

Once every thousand years, only during the time of the Millennium, they woke from their dreams of sorrow, grew festive gems and multi-colored membranes and sails along their upper hulls, rose to the surface, and sang in the air.

By an ancient contract, no recordings could be made of their great songs, nor was anyone allowed to speak of what they heard or dreamed when that music swept over them.

No wonder so many people were here in reality.

Phaethon’s heart was in his throat. The songs of the Deep Ones he had only heard once before, since he had not attended this ceremony his second millennial masquerade, during Argentorium’s tenure. That time once before, three thousand years ago (during the tenure of Cuprician) the song had sung to him of vastness, emptiness, and a sense of infinite promise. It was as if Phaethon had been plunged into the wide expanses of the Jovian cloud-scape, or into the far wider expanses of the stars beyond.

The Deep Ones had originally been designed also to serve as living space-ships, able to swim the radiation-filled and dust-filled vacuum between the Jovian moons, able to tolerate the almost unthinkable re-entry heat of low-orbit dives down into the Jovian atmosphere. But the early successes in cleaning circumjovial space and in taming the Jovian magnetosphere, made those space-lanes safe and economical for ships of ordinary construction; the emplacements of sky-hooks made alarming re-entries unnecessary. The Deep One’s way of life was past; the danger and romance of space travel were removed. Phaethon had heard all of this in their song, so long ago. It had planted the seed which blossomed into his own desire to embrace his dream of star-travel.

It had been Daphne who had brought him to hear it. But had that been Daphne Prime, or her ambassador-doll, Daphne Tertia? Phaethon could not remember. Perhaps his lack of useful sleep was beginning to affect his memory.

Phaethon jumped down from the pedestal, and began to push his way through the crowd, and away. For the Deep Ones did not give away their grand, sad music freely. Everyone who did not exclude the music from their sense-filters would have a fee charged to his account; and, when the computers detected Phaethon could not pay, he would be unmasked. Once Phaethon was unmasked, no one, of course, would help him. Not to mention that the performance would be delayed, and the afternoon spoiled for everyone. (He was amazed to discover that he still cared about the convenience and pleasure of his fellowmen, even though they had ostracized him. But the wonder of that first Deep One symphony he once had heard still haunted his memory. He did not want to diminish the joy of folk happier than himself.)

The crowd thinned as he rounded the space-elevator, and came to the side facing away from the lake. Several dirigible air-ships, as large as whales themselves, were docked with their noses touching the towers rising from the balcony-sides. They had dragon-signs in the air, displaying their routes and times in a format Phaethon could not read.

Phaethon stopped a passer-by, a woman dressed as a pyretic. “Pardon me, miss, but my companion and I are looking for the way to Talaimannar.” He gestured toward the hooded and cloaked figure of his armor, standing silently behind him. He spoke what was not quite a lie: “My companion and I are involved in a masquerade game of hunt-and-seek, and we are not allowed to access the mentality. Could you tell me how to find the nearest smart-road?”

She cocked her head at him. Her dancing eyes were surrounded by wreathes of flame, and smoke curled from her lips when she smiled. When she spoke, Phaethon had no routine to translate her words into his language and grammar and logic.

He tried more simply: “Talaimannar…? Talaimannar…? Smart-road?” He pantomimed sliding along a frictionless surface, hands waving, so that she giggled.

By her emphatic gesture he understood she meant that the smart-roads were not running; she pointed him toward a nearby air-ship, and pushed him lightly on the shoulder, as if to say, Go! Go!

Phaethon froze. Had she just helped him, or offered him passage on some ship owned by her? There was no alarm in her eyes; to judge from her expression, there was no secret voice from Aurelian warning her. And the woman was turning away, drawn by the movement of the crowd. Evidently she was not the owner.

Phaethon moved up the ramp. Closer, he saw the air-ship bore the heraldic symbol of the Oceanic Environmental Protectorate. It was a cargo lifter, perhaps the very one which had brought one or more Deep Ones from the Pacific to Lake Victoria.

The throngs began to fall silent. Out on the lake, Deep Ones where sailing to position, raising and unfurling their singing-fans. A sense of tension, of expectancy, was palpable in the air. Phaethon stepped reluctantly across the gilt threshold of the hatch and into the ship’s interior, his eyes turned over his shoulder.

Giant magnifier screens, focused on the distant Deep Ones, floated up over the edge of the huge balcony. The images showed the Deep Ones, sails wide and high, motionless on the surface of the lake, all their prows pointed toward the Deep One matriarch-conductor, who floated like a mountain above her children, her million singing-flags like an autumn forest seen along a mountain-side.

Phaethon’s feet were slow. He wanted to desperately to hear this one last song. Except for tunes he might whistle himself, or music shed from advertisements passing by, Phaethon would not hear songs again: no one would perform for him; no one would sell him a recording.

He steeled himself and turned his back. The hatch shut silently behind him.

The deck was deserted. The place was empty.

*** *** ***

02. Scaramouche, Columbine, Pierrot

Before him, carpeted in burgundy, set with small tables and formulation-rods of glass and white china, was an observation deck. Antique reading-helmets plated with ornamental brass nested in the ceiling. A line of couches faced tall windows overlooking the prow, with seeing-rings in little dishes to one side. The privacy-screens around the couches were folded and transparent at the moment, but Phaethon could still see ghostly half-images of creatures from Japanese mythology depicted in the glassy surface.

He did not recognize the aesthetic. Something older than the Objective period perhaps? Whatever it was, it was opulent and elegant.

Phaethon stepped aboard; his armor stepped after him. Phaethon raised his hand to make the open-channel gesture, then stopped himself, looked at his hand sadly, and lowered it. He could not access any information just by directing a thought or gesture at it, not ever again. But it would not be hard to adapt, he told himself. He was a Silver-Grey, and speaking out loud was one of the traditions Silver-Greys diligently practiced.

“Who is here? What is this place? Is there anyone aboard?”

No answer. He stepped forward toward the couches, and sat down gingerly.

The privacy screen to his left was half-open, so that one transparent panel was between him and the left-hand windows looking down on the balcony. Within the frame of this screen, the scene had more color and motion than elsewhere. Every grey mannequin within this frame was suddenly colored and costumed and bestowed with an individual human face. Overhead, banners and displays curled through the air, drifting. But any mannequin who stepped out of the frame turned gray again, and any banner vanished.

The privacy screen must have been tuned to the surface dreaming, Phaethon realized. It was an antique of some sort which translated mental images into light images. He amused himself for a moment by moving his head left and right, so that different parts of the balcony, now to the right and now to the left, were touched with extra color and pageantry. Gray mannequins were transformed to breath-taking courtiers, splendid in dress, and then, with another move of his head, back into grey mannequins again.

Then he saw, amid the pageantry, a figure in white and rose lace with a tricorn-hat, face disfigured by a hook-nose and hook-chin. It was Scaramouche. Behind him was Columbine in her harlot’s skirts and Pierrot, pale-faced and in baggy white. The three pantomime figures were moving against the flow of the crowd with deliberate haste; their heads moved in unison, back and forth, scanning the crowd with methodical sweeps.

They closed in on a figure dressed in gold armor; but no, it was merely someone dressed as Alexander the Great, in a gilt breastplate. Alexander the Great stared at them in confusion; the three pantomime clowns bowed and frolicked and Alexander turned away. Scaramouche and his two confederates stood a moment, motionless, as if hearing instructions from some remote source.

Phaethon tried to tell himself that this was some coincidence of costuming. Xenophon’s agent would not be so foolish as to continue to dress in the same costume as before. No doubt these were merely Black Manorials, looking for Phaethon to taunt or humiliate him, and dressed in the way Phaethon had said his enemy had dressed. It would have been easy to copy the costume from the public records of the Hortators’ inquest.

Except that Black Manorials could have simply found out from the mentality where Phaethon was. The Hortators, without doubt, would have posted conspicuous notices telling everyone what Phaethon had done, and where he was, and how to avoid him. Only someone who did not want to leave a trace would attempt to find Phaethon by eye.

As if stimulated by a silent signal, the three pantomime clowns now turned toward the air-ship docks. Their eyes seemed to meet Phaethon’s own, staring up at the windows where he stood. The eyes moved to Phaethon’s left, where the armor stood, covered by a hooded robe.

Phaethon said to himself: surely they are not looking for two figures, one in black, one in a robe.

But the three figures began pushing through the crowd toward the air-ship dock. They passed outside the range of the frame of the privacy screen, and suddenly they were merely three anonymous gray mannequins lost in a throng of similar mannequins.

Phaethon squinted, but, separated from the mentality, he could not amplify his vision, make a recording, or set up a motion-detection program to discover which of the moving bodies lost in the crowd were the ones he sought. Disconnected, he was blind and crippled. His enemies were coming, and he was helpless.

He could not send out a responder-pulse to discover the serial numbers of the mannequins involved; he could not call the constables. If he logged on to the mentality to make the call, descendants of the enemy virus civilizations would come out from hiding and strike him down the moment he opened a channel.

Was there a way to send a voice-only signal from the circuits in his armor? Phaethon jumped off the couch and pushed back the hood on the figure behind him. He looked at the contact-points and thought-ports running along the shoulder-boards of the armor. There was an energy-repeater which could be tuned to the radio-frequencies set aside for the constabulary; here was a sensitive plate which could react to voice-command. All he needed was a carrier-wire to run from the one to the other.

That wire was not something his nano-machinery cape could produce. He could have bought it for a half-second coin at any matter-shop…had he been allowed. As it was, he could broadcast a loud, meaningless noise. A scream. A scream to which no one would listen.

He stepped back toward the privacy screen, and tried to turn it on its hinges to face that part of the crowd near the bottom of the ramp leading up to this ship. The screen would not budge. He could not see where the mannequins controlled by the enemy might be.

Now what? If only he had been a character from one of his wife’s dream-dramas, he could have found a convenient ax or bar of iron, and rushed out to battle the foe, club swinging, his shirt ripped to display his manly shoulders and hairy chest. But strength would not serve against these mannequins; the minds motivating them were not even physically present.

And wit would not serve, not if there was, in fact, a Nothing Sophotech directing their actions, a Sophotech clever enough to move through the Earth mentality without coming to the notice of the Earthmind.

What was left? Spiritual purity? Moral rectitude?

And, if it was a moral quality involved, what could it be? Honesty? Forthrightness? Blind determination?

Phaethon thought for a moment, gathering his courage. Then he threw the robe off his armor, and had the black material swirled around him, fitting the gold segments into place. He closed the helmet.

Phaethon stepped to the hatch of the air-ship, and flung it open, but he was careful not to step over the threshold. He stood at the top of the ramp, somewhat above the nearby crowd. Three gray mannequins were stepping purposefully toward the foot of the ramp; the leader paused with one foot on the ramp, his blind, blank head turned up suddenly to see Phaethon standing, shining in his gold adamantine armor, at the end of the ramp above him.

A long low trembling note of haunting beauty, like the sigh of a sad oboe, came up from the surface of Lake Victoria, rose, gathered strength, and filled the wide sky. It was the first note of the overture, the first voice of the choir. Just that one note brought a tear to Phaethon’s eye. Except for the three mannequins facing him, every other spectator was turned toward the distant lake, looks of tense wonder and rapt enchantment on their features, like people swept up in a dream.

Phaethon touched the energy-repeater on his shoulder-board. He heard nothing, but he knew a loud pulse, like shout, passed across nearby radio-channels.

The note trembled and fell mute. Silence, not music, filled the air.

Phaethon had been noticed. The Deep Ones were not singing. Some signal inaudible to Phaethon swept through the gathered crowd. With a murmur of anger, and a long hissing, rustling noise, a thousand faces suddenly turned toward him. Every eye focused on the gold figure.

The three mannequins at the foot of the ramp paused, motionless. Whatever they had intended for Phaethon, they evidently did not wish to do in full and public view.

The murmur of anger rose to a shout. It was a horrible noise, one Phaethon had not heard before in all his life; the sound of a thousand voices all calling for Phaethon to get out, to leave, to let the performance ceremony continue. Instead of music, now, shouts of outrage, shrill questions, and sounds of hatred roared in the air.

The three gray mannequins were still motionless at the bottom of the ramp. Phaethon raised his hand and pointed a finger at these three. He knew no human ear could hear him or distinguish his words over the roar of the crowd; but he also knew that there were more than human minds listening to him now. Events like this rapidly filled the news and gossip channels; anything he did would be analyzed by mass-minds and by Sophotechs.

“The enemies to the Golden Oecumene are here among you. Who projects into these three mannequins here? Where are the Constables to protect me from their violence? Nothing! For all your superior intellect, you cannot and you dare not strike at me openly; I denounce you as a coward!”

Another rustling murmur ran through the vast crowd there. Contempt and disbelief, disgust and anger were clear on every face. And then, just as suddenly, the eyes focused on him went glassy and dull. By an unspoken common consent, everyone was tuning their sense-filters to ignore him; perhaps they were opening redaction channels to forget him, so that, in later years, their memories of this fine day would not be marred by the rantings of a madman. Like a wind blowing through a field of wheat, with one motion, every head in the crowd turned back toward the lake.

Phaethon smiled grimly. Here was the moral error of a society which relied too heavily on the sense-filter to falsify their reality for them. Reality could not be faked. The Deep Ones did not use anything like a sense-filter. If the Deep Ones had any channels open in the mentality, they would still be aware of Phaethon, and they would still refuse to offer their gift of song to one, like Phaethon, who would not and could not thank them, or repay them, or return the gift. The crowd could well ignore him; but the Deep Ones would not sing.

Were they waiting for him to walk away? It must occur to some of them that it would take hours for him, on foot, to walk beyond hearing range of the deep song. Were they all willing to wait that long? It also should occur to someone that, by the rules of the ostracization imposed on him, Phaethon could neither buy passage on any transport, nor accept a ride as charity. The only other option, logically, would be to have a ride imposed upon him without his asking.

It was a contest of wills. Who was more willing to put up with the inconvenience of Phaethon’s exile? Phaethon, who knew he was in the right? Or the crowd, who perhaps had some nagging doubt whether the Hortators had been entirely correct?

If those who opposed him were certain of the moral rightness of their position, Phaethon thought, they would simply call the constables and have him removed. And if not…

The hatch swung shut in front of his nose. The ramp and guy-lines retracted into the docking tower. Phaethon felt a swell of motion in the deck underfoot.

The air-ship was carrying him away. He stepped over to the windows, hoping for a last glimpse of the three mannequins at the foot of the now-retracted ramp. He saw them, but their arms now hung limply, heads lolling, in the stoop-shouldered posture indicating that they were now uninhabited. Xenophon’s agent (or Nothing Sophotech, or whomever or whatever had been projected into them) had disconnected and fled.

With a grand sweep of movement, the towers and the wide balcony ringing the space-elevator passed by the observation windows. The world was tilted at an angle, as the airship heeled over, tacking into the wind and gaining altitude.

Phaethon felt a moment of victorious pleasure. But the moment faltered, and a sad look came into his eyes, when, outside the windows and far below, he saw the blue reaches of Lake Victoria. Sunlight flashed from the surface of the lake, and the texture of high, distant clouds were reflected in the depths. Amid those reflections, Phaethon saw the flotilla of ancient beings with their singing-sails spread wide. But he was too far away, by then, to hear anything other than a faint, sad, far-off echo.

Even if, by some odd miracle, his exile were to end tomorrow, Phaethon would never hear what the Deep Ones now would sing, no record was made of it, and no one would speak to him of it.

With an abrupt motion, Phaethon turned and stepped to the bow windows, staring out at the African hills and skies ahead.

 

*** *** ***

03. Phaethon Zero of Nothing

A silver strip of shore passed by below him. Ahead was an endless field of cobalt blue, crisscrossed by white-caps: the Indian Ocean.

Phaethon spoke aloud. “Where are you taking me?” Again there was no answer. He found two hatches at the back of the observation deck, with gangways leading up and down. He chose the upward ramp and set off to explore.

On a windowless upper deck, surrounded by a mass of cables and fixtures, he found a six-legged being, with six arms or tentacles reaching up from a central brain-mass into the control interfaces. Wires ran into the cone-shaped head. Sections of the body were plated with metal. Three vulture-faces stared out in three directions from the central brain-cone. The hide was dotted and pierced with plugs and jacks, inputs and outlets. Multiple receivers aided the migration-instincts and flying-senses built into the bird-heads with orbit-to-surface navigational plotting.

“You are a fighter-plane cyborg,” said Phaethon in surprise. He had never seen such a thing outside of a museum.

The vulture-eyes regarded him coldly. “No longer. All memories of war and battle-flight, dog-fighting, system-ranging, dive-bombing, all such thoughts and recollections I sold long, so very long ago, to Atkins of the Warmind. Let him have nightmares now. Let him recall the smell of incendiaries burning villages and hamlets, and pink baby-forests screaming. I recall flowers and kittens now, the songs of whales, the motion of clouds above the ocean; I am content.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“An exile; an exile wealthy beyond all dreams of wealth, to judge from the armor you wear. Famous, to judge by the channel-traffic your movements excite. All the world forgot, and then all the world, just as suddenly, recalled, the mighty ship you dreamed; every mind in the networks still is reeling from you; every voice cries out against you. Are you he?”

Phaethon wondered why the creature did not discover his identity merely by looking into the Middle Dreaming. “You are not connected to the mentality, then, sir?”

The three vulture-heads snapped their hooked beaks open and shut with loud clacks. “Gah! I scoff at such things. There is nothing in me I need to transcend. Let the young ones play their games; I take no part in the celebration of the Golden Oecumene.”

“It seems, now, that I will take no part, either. You have guessed me, sir. I am Phaethon Prime of Rhadamanth.”

“No longer. Surely you are Phaethon Zero of Nothing.”

The name struck Phaethon to the heart. Of course. He had no copies of himself any longer in any bank. He was no longer Phaethon Prime, the first copy from a stored template. He was a zero. The moment he died, there would be nothing more of him. He had no mansion, no school.

Phaethon said, “And you do not fear to speak with me?”

“Fear whom? The College of Hortators? The Sophotechs? Upstarts! I am older than any College of Hortators, older than any Sophotechs. Older than the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth.” (This was the old name for the Golden Oecumene.) “They are delicate structures, based on no real strength. They shall pass away, and I shall remain. My way of life has been forgotten, but it shall return. I remember nothing but kittens and clouds, for now. Memories of burning children shall return.”

It was brave talk, but Phaethon reminded himself that this cyborg had neither sold him passage, nor extended charity to him. Phaethon’s legal status, at the moment, was something between a free-loader and a kidnap victim.

“Who are you, sir?”

“This is not the proper format. You, the interloper, the stranger, the exile, must tell your tale; I, the gracious host, will tell mine after, what little there is. There is no computer here to implant automatic memories of each other in each other.”

“I am a Silver-Grey. We retain the custom of exchanging introductions and information through speech…”

“You were a Silver-Grey. How did you come to loose your vast fortune? What did you do to earn the hatred of mankind?”

“I dreamt a dream they feared. There is no economic reason to reach the stars; the stars are too far, and there is abundance of all types, without oppression, here. But my reason was unreasonable; I wished for glory, for greatness, to do what had not been done before; and my wealth was my own, to spend or squander as I would. And so I build the greatest ship our science could produce: the Phoenix Exultant, a hollow streamlined spear-point a hundred kilometers from stem to stern, with all her hollow hull filled up with antimatter fuel, and her hull of chrysadmantium, this same invulnerable substance in which you see me clad, made one artificial atom at a time, at tremendous expense. The fuel to mass ratio is such that near-light speeds can be maintained. But the College of Hortators feared…”

“I know what they feared. They feared war. War in heaven.”

“How do you know this, sir? Do you know the Hortators?”

“I know war.”

“Who are you?”

“You ask too soon; your tale is not yet told.”

“Ah… yes. Where was I, Rhadamanthus?—er.” Phaethon winced for a moment, then recovered himself. “Ahem. So the ship was built. No other vessel like her has ever been laid. For example, in a mean average burn of fifty-one gravities acceleration, if maintained for a decade and a half, assuming a mean density of one particle per cubic kilometer in the intervening medium, and adjusting for radiant back-pressure created by heat loss due to friction, the vessel is able to reach a speed of…”

“I do not need to hear the ship specifications.”

“But that is the most interesting part!”

“And yet I am your host. Continue the tale, Phaethon Zero.”

“The College of Hortators threatened to ostracize me if I launched the Phoenix Exultant. Since flight to even nearby stars would be a deeper and longer exile than any they could impose, I laughed their threats to scorn. The threat fell where I did not expect. I was in the process of launching the ship on her maiden voyage, when my wife, whose frail courage was overcome (for she was sure I would die in interstellar space), drowned herself. I reacted with rage, and broke into the crypt where her dreaming body is kept. Atkins, the military human interface, was called up out of old archive storage…do you know who he is?”

“I know him.”

“Atkins was called, and threw me on my face. The College of Hortators denounced me; the expense of the Phoenix Exultant bankrupted me; my father died in a solar storm, died trying to save my vessel, docked at Mercury station, from harm. I suppose I should tell this in a better order…”

“You have engaged my interest. Continue.”

“The result was that the College agreed not to exile me, if I agreed to forget about my ship. My father’s relic was woken out of Archive, and I had to forget he was not my father, because the event of the death was connected to the memory of the ship.”

“Father? You are a biological puritan? Your father bore you?”

“Pardon me. He is my sire. I was constructed out of his mnemonic templates. I am using the word ‘father’ as a metaphor. We Silver-Grey are traditionalists, and we believe that certain specific human emotional relationships, such as family love, should be maintained even when no longer needed. We are devoted to the idea that…hmph…perhaps I should be saying, ‘they are’ or ‘I was’, shouldn’t I?”

The vulture heads stared at him, yellow eyes unblinking, and said nothing.

“In any event, I also had to forget the drowning of my wife, whose suicide was caused, after all, also by my ship. This was on the eve of the celebrations.”

“Again you use the phrase metaphorically…?”

“Do you mean ‘wife’? She really is my wife, joined to me by sacred vow. ‘Suicide’? I suppose that is a metaphor. She is dead to reality. Her brain information exists in a fictional computerized dreamscape with no outside access permitted; her memories were altered to divorce all knowledge of real things from her. I know of no way to wake her; she did not leave any code-words for me.”

“It is indeed a metaphor, my young aristocrat. In earlier times, and even now, among the poor, death is not a thing we can afford merely to play at, or use an elegant machine to imitate. But no matter: I know what next occurred. All the millions in the Golden Oecumene agreed all to forget as well, in order that the danger of star-travel pass them by; and those who would not agree at first were pressured, or bribed, or browbeaten by the College of Hortators. As the ranks grew of those who had agreed to the redaction, those few who held out found that they had fewer and fewer friends; and only those who would not or could not attend your celebration and transcendence still remembered you. Much hate fell on you, before your deed was forgotten, by those who blamed you for the need to make themselves forget.”

“Interesting. I did not know that aspect of it.”

“The pressure from the Hortators was greater among the poor, who have no avenue to resist such potent social forces; in the last days before the celebration started, you were indeed not well liked among the humbler members of the Oecumene.”

“I met one of the them. I think. An old man. I mean, a man who had suffered physical decay and entropic disintegration of his biochemical systems—he had white hair and ossified joints. I don’t know who he was. He is the one who first told me that Phaethon of Rhadamanth was not who he thought he was—I was not who I thought I was. And yet he knew me well enough to know how I typically dressed; he knew enough about how I programmed my sense-filter, to use an over-ride trick and escape from my perception. That is what started this all.

“I shut off my sense-filter to look for the old man, and instead found an Eremite from Neptune, a shapeless, shape-changing amoeboid in shapeless, shape-changing armor of crystal-blue. The Neptunian approached and introduced himself as Xenophon. I had worked with the Neptunians while building my ship, and I knew many of them—this was an imposter of some sort, trying to get me to resume my old memories.”

“Why?”

“To get my ship, I think. Certain Neptunians were clients and partners of mine during the ship-construction. Friends, even. From somewhere they got the money to buy out the debts I owed the Peers, so that if I defaulted, the ship would go to them, rather than to my creditors. Meanwhile Xenophon was controlling the other Neptunians. The arbitrator, you see, had placed my ship in receivership…”

“I do not know the term.”

“Bankruptcy. Hock. Pawned.”

“Understood. Go on.”

“Xenophon tried to pretend he was a friend of mine, to get me to open my memory casket and resume my old life. This would have triggered the injunctions established by the College of Hortators, my loans would automatically default, and the debts I owed the Seven Peers would now be owed to the Neptunians, debts for which the Phoenix Exultant stood as surety. In other words, after my default, the Phoenix Exultant would end up in the hands of Xenophon, rather than the Seven Peers.”

“Who are they?”

“How can you know who an obscure historical figure like Atkins is, but not know who the Seven Peers are?”

“I do not move in your social circles, Phaethon.”

“The Peers are a private combination of monopolists who have made a number of agreements, and who coordinate their efforts, in order to maintain their wealth and prestige. Gannis of Jupiter, who makes the super-metals; Vafnir of Mercury, who makes antimatter for power-houses; Wheel-of-Life, who runs ecological transformation nexi; Helion, who stops solar flares; Kes Sennec, who organizes the scientific and semantic pursuits of the Invariants and controls the Uniform Library of the Cities in Space; the Eleemosynary Composition, who runs translation formats; Orpheus, who grants eternal life.”

“Oh. Them. They are not monopolists. Your laws allow other efforts and businesses to compete against them. In my day, those who opposed the grants of the General Coordination Commissariat were sent to the Absorption Chamber, and members were swapped between the compositions.”

“The Commissariat was abolished before the end of the Era of the Fourth Mental Structure. You cannot possibly be so old as that. That was over many thousands of years before immortality was discovered.”

“Second Immortality. The Compositions have a collective immortality of memory-records. Individual members die, but the mass-mind continues.”

“Are you part of the Eleemosynary Composition?”

“It is not yet time for me to speak. Finish your tale. Xenophon tricked you, and you opened your memories?”

“That is a proper summation. He has an agent disguised as a pantomime clown. Hunting for me.”

“Hunted by clowns? How quaint.”

“Ahem. Well, there is an explanation, sir. I was dressed in Harlequinade when Xenophon first met me, so he dressed his agent as a character from the same comedy. Scaramouche—the agent—attacked me with a complex mind virus, a civilization of viral information, actually, while I was linked to the mentality. If I log on again, I will be attacked, and perhaps erased and replaced.”

“The Sophotechs permit this…?”

“They have no technology to understand what is being done, or how the information particles are being transmitted into a shielded system. The technology is not from the Golden Oecumene.”

“It is not from an earlier period. It is not from before the Oecumene.”

“I am not speaking of ‘before’, my good sir. I am speaking of ‘outside’. I was attacked by invaders from another star.”

Two of the vulture heads looked toward each other, exchanging a sardonic glance of disbelief. Even on the bird-faces the expression was clear to read. “Oh. How interesting. What other star? No life above the unicellular level has yet been discovered in the deep of space. The colony sent out to Cygnus X1 perished in unspeakable horror, long, long ago.”

“It is something from Cygnus. Something survived the fall of the Silent Oecumene. An evil Sophotech called the Nothing Machine.”

“This sounds to be the stuff of fancy, a dream, a memory-entertainment, a mistake,” said the vulture. “Where is your evidence?”

*** *** ***

04. A Composition of One

The cyborg spoke. “Your tale is fanciful. Surely your wealthy Sophotechs can examine your brain-information, and discover what is true and what is false in your mind.”

“The examination was performed—the readings showed my memories of the attack were false.”

“And from this you conclude…?”

“I conclude that the readings were tampered with.”

“And your support for this conclusion is…?”

“Well, obviously the evil mind-virus tampered with them.”

“Let me see if I understand this, young aristocrat. We live in a society where men can edit their brain information at will, so that even their deepest thoughts, instincts and convictions can be over-written and re-written, and no memories can be trusted. You find you have a memory of being attacked by a non-existent mind-virus created by a non-existent Sophotech from a long-dead colony. Upon examination, readings show the memory is false, and your conclusion is, that your unbelievable, entirely absurd memories are true, and the readings showing them to be false are unreliable. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Ah. I merely wanted to be certain of the circumstances.”

“My tale, whether it is believed or not, whether it is believable or not, is still mine, and I will still act as if it were true—I dare not do otherwise. And, true or not, believable or not, the telling of my tale is done. I would have yours, if you will return the courtesy, for I cannot imagine who you might be.”

“You would not know the name I call myself these days. Once, I was called the Bellipotent Composition.”

Phaethon was taken aback. “Impossible! Bellipotent was destroyed two aeons ago!”

“No. Only disbanded. The memories still were on record. I have part of those memories.”

“You mean, then, that you have studied the Bellipotent Composition…?”

“No. I am he. How many minds does it take to make a mass-mind? A thousand? A hundred? Ten? Two? I say it only takes one; and I am he. I say that I am still the mass-mind of the Bellipotent, even though my membership has only one member. I am the last of a mighty host, but I was of that host. The air marshal branch-mind of the Eastern Warlock-killing division surrendered to Alternate Organization Solomon Oversoul after the Three Horrid Seconds of the Battle of Peking Network Operating System Core. You do not know history, do you? I see it in your face. This surrender happened in Pre-Epoch 44101, three hundred years into the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure. I was part of the air-group who surrendered. We were permitted, under the peace-contract, to retain our identities.”

“And you simply roam free these days? You were not punished?”

“You really know nothing of history, do you? I was kept in an underground cyst for a space of centuries equal to what Warlock astrologers calculated to be the projected life-time sum of every person who had been killed in the bombing-runs. After I was released, I was part of the death-lottery instituted by the Witch-King of Corea.”

“Death-lottery…?”

“The reason for the war is not what history reports. History says it was because the Warlocks had found the Shadow-mind technology, which permitted them an alternate state of consciousness, and allowed them to falsify noetic readings, to lie under oath. Humbug. That was not a significant cause. The significant cause of the war between the mass-minds and the warlocks was that our mental systems were incompatible. Bellipotent demanded exact and rigid justice, one law for all, executed without fear or favoritism. But the warlock brain thinks in leaps of logic, flashes of insight, patterns of symmetry. To them, the justice must be poetic justice, and the punishment grotesquely sculpted to fit the crime, or else it is not justice at all.

“Thus, when it came my turn to be punished, it amused the Witch-King to impose on me and my fellow bombardiers the same uncertainty and fear our bomb-drops had imposed on others. We were permitted to wander free, but with explosive charges surgically implanted in our crania. Random radio pulses were sent out, so that we were executed by lottery, at random places and times. Sometimes other signals, door-openers or automobile guides, set off the charges. After a hundred years of that, I alone survived. Now I ferry the gentle Deep Ones to and from their underwater kingdoms.”

“Horrible!”

“No. My biological parts have withered and been replaced many times. All traces of the explosives have been removed.”

“But how could you tolerate the uncertainty?”

“Ah. Does this question come from Phaethon, who once dreamed of traveling far beyond where any noumenal mentality could reach? Random and instant death would have been just as prevalent on your voyage, had you ever made one. And, once colonies, armed with technologies equal to our own, were planted among the several nearby stars, that same risk of instant and random death would then be imposed upon every colonist and every citizen of the Oecumene, since war, at any moment, could break out again at any time.”

“Men are not so irrational as that.”

“Are they not? Are they not? You have never known war, young fool. Of whom were you so afraid when you stood at the top of the ramp of this my ship? Irrational creatures from another star who seek your murder? Or is that a delusion only of your own? Come now! Either you are deluded, or they are mad. Neither option speaks well for the future of peaceful star-colonization.” The creature opened and shut its several beaks. “I am only sorry that you have failed so utterly.”

Phaeton felt the deck tilting under him. In this windowless room, he could not tell what this maneuver meant.

He said, “Why? Did you hope for war again so much?”

“Not at all. War is horrible beyond description. It is tolerable only because there is something that is worse. No; you misunderstand what I hope.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Ah! Yahh! I lived in the last years of the Fourth Era, when vast mass-minds ruled all the Earth. There was no crime, no war, no rudeness, and (except for certain areas in North America and Western Europe) no individuality. It was a static age. There were no changes.

“The Fifth Era came when certain compositions began to use other brain-formations in their mind-groups. The Warlock brain was quick and intuitive, artistic, insightful. The Invariant brain is immune to passion or fear, immune to threat, immune to blackmail. The Cerebelline brain can see all points of view at once, and understand all elements of complex systems at one glance. We could not compete against such minds as these, nor would they submit themselves tamely to the group-needs of the group-minds. And yet the Fifth Era was finer than the Fourth. Genius and invention ruled. Irrational warlocks conquered the Jupiter system, which they had no economic reason to do; stoic Invariants methodically colonized the pre-Demeter asteroids, indifferent to suffering or hardship. Cerebellines, grasping whole thought-systems at once, developed the Noetic Unification Theorem, which led to developments and technologies we mass-minds never would have or could have guessed. Without the self-referencing participles described in Mother-of-Number’s famous dissertation/play/equations, the technology for self-aware machines would not have come about. The scientific advances of those self-aware machines are more than I can count, including the development of the Noumenal mathematics which led to this present age, the age of second immortality.

“Now comes this age, the Seventh, and it is a static age again. So, then, Phaethon Zero of Nothing, do you see? Look back and forth along the scheme of history. There would have been war among the stars if your dream had not been killed. Do not doubt it; the Hortators, and their pet Nebuchadnezzar, are smart enough to come correctly to that conclusion. But would that age of war have led to better ages beyond that? Perhaps the Earth and Jupiter’s moons and the other civilized places of the Golden Oecumene would have been destroyed in the first round of interstellar wars. But, if, in return, a hundred planets were seeded with new civilizations, or a million, I say the cost would have been worth the horror.”

Phaethon was silent, not certain how to take this comment. Was the cyborg praising him, or condemning him? Or both?

But it did not matter now. The point was academic. The Hortators had won.

“Where are you taking me?” asked Phaethon.

“Yaah! Truly you know nothing of history. There is only one city on the planet which did not sign the Hortator accords, because the Cerebelline-formed mass-mind running it did not care whether she was mortal or immortal, and she did not give in to Orpheus’ pressure. Old-Woman-of-the-Sea has governed the Oceanic Environmental Protectorate since the middle of the Fifth Era. She, like me, is far older than your Golden Oecumene. She can afford to ignore the Hortators, since even they would not care to interfere with the mind which controls the balancing forces between all the plankton and all the nanomachinery floating in the waves, or who shepherds the trillion submicroscopic thermal cells of all the tropic zones, which disperse or condense the ocean-heat and hinder the formation of tornadoes. Her city is called Talaimannar.”

“The place Harrier told me to go!” exclaimed Phaethon happily. Now he would find out what mystery, what subtle plan the super-intellect of Harrier had in mind.

“Of course, young fool,” said the cyborg. “If I dropped you any other place, I would be guilty of helping you commit an act of trespass. Why do you think the Hortators let me get away with this? I am not helping you. It takes no genius to figure out you must go to Talaimannar; there is no other place to go. It is where all cast-offs and gutter-sweepings go.”

Phaethon felt a sensation of crushing despair. All this time, he had been nursing the secret hope that Harrier Sophotech had some plan, some unthinkably clever scheme, to extract Phaethon from this situation; a plan that would bear fruit once he reached Talaimannar. It had comforted him during his many sleepless nights, his nightmare-ridden slumbers.

But no. Harrier had not been telling him anything other than what all other exiles were told.

It had been a foolish hope to begin with. While it had lasted, the foolish hope had been better than no hope. In order to go on, one needed a reason to go on. What was to be Phaethon’s reason now?

A vibration shivered through the ship frame.

“We’re here,” said the cyborg. “Get out.”

A hatch Phaethon had not before seen now opened in a section of the deck. Beyond was a gangway leading down and out. Phaethon blinked in a splash of reflected sunlight shining up through the hatch from below. He smelled fresh tropic air, heavy with moisture and orchid-scents; he heard the noise of surf, the raw calls of sea-birds.

“Wait,” said Phaethon. “If I am not hallucinating, then there are agents from another star hunting me, and to send me out there, the one place all exiles go, is to send me to the one place where they will find me.”

“I have very ancient privileges which even the formation-draft of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth Constitutional Logic recognizes. It is called a grandfather clause. Legal rights which existed from before the Oecumene are still recognized by the Oecumene. An historical curiosity, is it not? The movements of my airships are surrounded by privacy; I cannot be traced, except at court order, and I fly below the levels air traffic control requires. I am well-known in Kisumu; I have flown the routes to Quito and Samarinda for a thousand years. Any housecoater or perigrinator of the street could point my ship out, and know I can move unnoticed. You understand? That is why the Deep Ones patronize me. They wish for privacy as well. Until and unless you give yourself away, such as, for example, by logging on to the mentality, you should be safe here from your imaginary foes.”

Phaethon stepped over to the hatch, but turned, and spoke over his shoulder. “You said there was one thing even worse than war, a thing so terrible that even war is tolerable by contrast. What is it?”

“Defeat.” And a robotic arm came from the wall, took Phaethon by the shoulder, and thrust him stumbling down the gang-way. Sunlight blinded him. His hands and knees struck the open grillwork mesh floor of the docking tower with a clash of noise. The shadow of the airship passed over him. He rose to his feet and looked up in time to see the huge cylindrical machine rise up out of reach, abandoning him.

Phaethon was again alone.

 

*** *** ***

05. The Welcome

CHAPTER TWO: THE WELCOME

1.

Through the mesh and underfoot, Phaethon could see lush greenery, a reach of rocky sand and beach, and, beyond that, an ocean blackened with nanomachinery, crowded with false-trees. To the opposite side, away from the beach, was a cluster of spiral pearly growths, domes and towers of spun diamond, buildings like coral or like nautilus shells. These were the organic sea-shell shapes of the Standard Aesthetic.

On the hill-top beyond this, in the distance, rising above the deodar trees and clinging vines, was an antique temple, shaped like a beehive, but intricately carven with figurines and images. It looked old, perhaps dating back to the Era of the Second Mental Structure. Without access to the Middle Dreaming, Phaethon missed the ability to learn all he might wish to know about anything by glancing at it. But he tried to tell himself to enjoy the mysterious and picturesque character his new-found ignorance bestowed.

Phaethon stepped to the moving staircase in order to descend; but the escalator was loyal to the precepts of the Hortators, and would not carry him. So he stepped over to a service ladder leading down. Phaethon did not know if the rusted metal rungs could sustain the weight of his armor; but when he asked the ladder for its specifications, the ladder was either dumb, or deaf, or rude, and it did not answer. Phaethon doffed the armor, and had it rappel down the tower-side by itself, while he climbed down the ladder. He did not want to waste his suit-material by building another garment, and the clime was warm, and so he walked nude, followed faithfully by his armor.

There was a street leading to the town, made of glassy spun diamond; and a ridge running down the middle had guide-wires and thought-ports, lines and beads of smooth ceramic, glinting in the surface. As far as Phaethon could see, the approaching town was neither cramped nor squalid nor filthy, nor did it have the other earmarks of poverty which the poorer sections of Victorian-age London (which he had visited many times in simulations) had displayed.

It did not look too bad, he told himself.

But that impression changed the closer he came to the town.

First, the street, which had looked so bright and inviting when he first stepped onto it, turned out to be a low-grade moron. Instead of offering interesting comments about the scenery, or important traveler’s tips, or playing restful walking-music, the street had monotonously belabored him, joking and shouting with a mindless and force-fed glee, trying to get Phaethon to use certain commercial services which Phaethon could not have purchased in any case.

Second, the nano-machinery creating and maintaining the street was mis-programmed, so that black carbon dust, not correctly bound in the diamond street-surface, accumulated from cracks and breaks. Phaethon, as he walked, found his knees and feet coated with coal-black particles as fine as mist, which no amount of wiping could clear from his leg-hairs.

The clamoring street fell silent when he entered the town proper.

Phaethon walked among the giant spiral shells and mother-of-pearl domes of the houses and buildings. Only a few were occupied. The rest were mad-houses or mutants, like something from an old story. The self-replicating machinery which designed and grew these Sixth-Era buildings had been neglected, and reproduced with no supervision and no corrections, so that some houses were half-grown into each other, like horrible Siamese twins. Others had lop-sided doors or windows; or they grew without doors; or without power or lights; or, worse, with a strange, harsh light painful to the eye.

Some of the buildings were tilted at drunken angles, or sat, slumped and damaged, having made no attempt to heal themselves nor to grow their broken walls shut.

Certain formations which were easy to grow, such as lamps or door-posts, had flourished like weeds, everywhere. Few were the houses which did not have twenty or a hundred lamps sprouting from their pearly roofs or curling eaves. Door-posts (dotted with jacks and cells to hold identifier-plates and call-cables which never would be installed) stood unsupported in the center of the street, or clustered in the unplanned gaps between buildings, or hung tilting from second-story lofts.

When Phaethon politely asked a question to one of these neglected houses, the building would giggle idiotically, or repeat some stock phrase parrot-like: “Welcome Home! Welcome Home!”

After a few moments of walking, many of the houses were stirred up in a clamor, shouting, calling back and forth to each other. Some gobbled at him in angry languages; warehouses shrieked; whore-houses called out bawdy slogans. Phaethon kept his eyes ahead and walked stiffly, pretending not to notice.

The houses fell grumbling and mumbling into silence a few moments after he had passed, so that a wake of noise trailed after him.

Then he came into an upper part of the town. There were people here, sitting on porches or lounging lazily along the side of the street. They were dressed in simple tunics and smocks of flashing colors and eye-dazzling designs, pulsing and strobing, and a loud music made of repeating percussion surrounded them.

Phaethon realized that these folk were wearing advertisements.

Most of their faces and bodies looked the same, K-style and B-style faces taken from public-domain records. Except for some men who had scarred their faces, or applied colored tattoos, it seemed as if everyone along the street was everyone else’s twin.

When he raised a hand in greeting, their eyes went blank and their gazes slid past him, unseeing.

He walked on, puzzled. Where these not exiles like himself? Apparently not. It seemed as if they could afford sense-filters. The standard settings would automatically block out anything branded with odium by the Hortators.

Like a phantom, ignored and unseen, Phaethon walked on.

Through open doorways he could see the people who lived here, base humaniforms, for the most part. People who did not wear advertisements were garbed in smocks of blue-grey drab, made of simple polymers not difficult to synthesize. Some of the garments were old and sick, for they had torn and they did not repair themselves.

Most of the people had crowns growing into the flesh of their skulls, giving them partial access to the mentality. One or two sad individuals were wearing lenses and ear-jacks, so that they could watch from a distance, or over-hear, the complex and vibrant activity of life in the mentality; a life now closed to them.

He saw people sleeping on mats on the floor; he did not see a single pool. There was apparently no life-water running anywhere.

For energy, he saw nothing but the solar panels which grew along roofs like wild lichen; he wondered what they did on cloudy days, or at dark.

Food they ate with their mouths, masticating; he did not see what the substances were, or how it was manufactured; but with a dozen steaming streams of green nano-substance running in open gutters down the street, he could imagine.

Half the houses had darkened lamps. Their solar cells were covered with a soot or carpet-lichen which no one had bothered to scrape free. For light, captured advertisement-banners had been tied to steeples and cupolas, so that garish colors flared across the scene. Many of the houses screamed back at the jarring clash of music and slogans radiating from the advertisements. Some of the stupider houses thought the noises were approaching visitors, for they shouted out welcomes whenever the advertisements brayed. It added to the general din most unpleasantly.

There was one, just one, staging pool in the center of the town square. No one was sleeping in it. Phaethon was not surprised. In a city of exiles, a non-network pool could only be used by one ostracized citizen to enter a dreamspace built and provided and guided by another ostracized citizen. The pool liquid consisted of a few inches of brownish sludge, which no one had bothered to program to clean itself.

He sat on the marble bench surrounding the lip the staging pool, gazing about him, wondering what to do next. A sense of misery, which he had held at bay throughout his long descent down the tower, and through his voyage on the airship, now came to him and possessed him. He slumped off the edge and sat in the pool; the sludge was too shallow to admit him. Tentative crystals formed in the liquid and nosed around his legs like curious, shy fish, but there was no way for Phaethon to make a connection, and nothing he had to do once a connection was made. Phaethon sat without moving, then he cursed. His head nodded, but his brain ached, and he could not sleep. The noise of the town screamed and sang around him, loudly and mindlessly.

 

 

*** *** ***

06. Among the Afloats

Eventually, he stirred himself. Phaethon rubbed his hands along the carbon-dust clinging to his knees. All that resulted was that his palms turned black. A few grams of decrepit nano-assembler molecules must have been hiding among the dust; when he brushed at it vigorously, the assemblers activated, looking for substances to turn into road-surface, and pulled a number of micrograms of carbon out of Phaethon’s skin with a flash of waste-heat that raised blisters on his legs. The jolt of pain sent him skipping upright, hissing and blinking.

Wincing, he went to wash his legs beneath the in-spigots of the staging pool, hoping that, like most pools, it had a medical side-mind. He could save a few precious drops of his dwindling supply of nanomaterial if the pool’s medical side-mind could make an unguent for him. Perhaps it could, but Phaethon did not have an interfacer with which to talk to the pool. He tried to communicate his needs to the pool by pointing and gesturing. The pool-surface formed a bulb of hallucinogen and offered it to him. Then it offered him sleep-oil; then breathing-tissue. Phaethon, exasperated, soon was splashing back and forth, swinging his arms in wide gestures of simple pantomime, pointing at his blisters, and shouting rude comments at the pool’s simple-mindedness. He shouted more and more loudly, trying to be heard over the thumping din of the town-noise.

A voice from behind him: “Eyah! What you doing, manor-born?”

Phaethon stopped his antics, summoned an aloof expression, and turned. “Just as you see.”

“Ah. All is explained.”

Here was a dark-skinned man, bald, and enormously broad of shoulder. He was squat and thick-limbed. His muscle grafts had been placed without any concern for symmetry or fineness. His face was scarred and tattooed; he was missing an ear. The tattoos formed exaggerated scowl-lines around his mouth; his eyes were ringed with concentric lines of surprise. He wore a brown smock of many pockets, and on top of that, what looked like an advertisement banner, but it was silent and dark, with thin lines of red and orange flickering through the substance.

“Welcome to death row,” said the bald, squat man.

*** *** ***

Phaethon, dirty, dripping, and burnt, mustered his dignity. “How do you know me to be a manorial?” If a random by-passer could deduce or guess that he was Phaethon, it would be child’s-play for Xenophon or the Nothing Sophotech.

The squat man wagged his head. “Ai-yah! Listen to him snoff!” Then to Phaethon, he said, “You shout at pool, all nice talk, full sentence. ‘I shall surely drub you!’ you shout. ‘You shall learn what it means boldly to go against orders!’ also you shout. Eyah. ‘Boldly to go’…? You mean ‘to boldly go,’ you don’t? Only machines talk like this way. Very puff-puff. Very polite.”

“I see. I shall endeavor to make my speech more colloquial, if that is what anonymity requires.”

“Oho. You don’t want attention? So you splash and yell off head? Very wise, very deep-think! Hey, maybe blind deaf-mute in coma off yonder has not seen you, eh?”

“I was under the impression that most of the people here had their sense-filters engaged.”

“No such. No sense-filters, no fancy puff-puff. They just cussed, is all. Dark, black, nasty cussed. They want out and up, so they make-pretend. Make-pretend they are rich, make-pretend they are loved-up, make-pretend they are wise and kind and good-good. Ashores. All of them Ashores. They hate all us right full deep, you know. You too.”

“Us? What defines us as a group?”

“Afloats.”

“I fear I don’t understand.”

“Is simple as simple is. Ashore live ashore. They may live. Their sentence is measured; a year, six year, hundred year, what-have-you. When time is done, they get their lives again, they get up-and-out. Can buy from Orpheus. Can buy live-forever machines. Land they live on, is rented to them; once they get lives back, they pay back. All fair. All square.”

“And the Afloats, I assume, live afloat…?”

“Live on sea as sea is free. No rent on water.”

“You have houseboats?”

“We got rafts. Drag dead houses out to sea. Is trash; no one stop us.” He shrugged. “Man at local thought-shop revive house-mind for small fee, you know.”

“And your term of exile, unlike those of the Ashores, is permanent?”

“We here till we not here no more. Here till we die. Is Death Row.” And he extended his cupped hand, palm up, a beggar’s gesture. “Name’s Oshenkyo. What’ve ye got for us, eh?”

And Phaethon took a daub of his precious, limited supply of black nanomachine material, and applied it to the scar on Oshenkyo’s head where there had once been an ear. Phaethon drew upon the ecological and medical routines he had in his thoughtspace, set the daub to take a gene-sample, and set it to reconstitute the missing ear.

      1. The Ashores
        ****

The bay was surrounded on three sides by cliffs. The cliffs were overgrown by a Cerebelline life-garden which may or may not have been part of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea. Pharmaceutical vines and adaptive fibers clung to the rocks, tended by weaver birds and tailor birds. Suits and outfits finished by the tailor bird hung flapping in the sea-breeze, awaiting shipping dolphins.

In the middle of the bay, strangely silent and dark, were houses shaped like grey and blue-brown seashells, standing on spider legs which gripped floats and buoys beneath the water. Dozens of dangling ropes, ladders and nets hung between the house-shells, like webs, or dropped to crude docks floating in the houses’ shadows.

In the middle of the irregular floating mass of house-shells rose an old barge, streaked with barnacles and rust. On the flat upper surface of the barge towered a group of tents and pavilions made of cheap diamond synthetics, in three tiers, one above the other. From the crown of the upper tier rose a false-tree with limbs of steel, and many solar collectors like leaves. Banners of material and globes like fruit hung from the tree-limbs. Phaethon could see where fruit or banners had dropped into the nets and cupolas of the tents below, quickly gathered up by scurrying spider-gloves and waldoes.

“It’s quieter here,” said Phaethon, looking down from the cliff into the bay. He had put his gold armor back on, and had tuned some of the surface area in his black nanomaterial cape to catch and analyze some of the scents on the breeze. Mingled in the scents of green leaves, sunshine, and sea, were the command-pheromones and tiny nanomachine packages, smaller than pollen spores, which complex Cerebelline activity had as its by-product. Invisible clouds of these micro-spores extended far out to sea; the Cerebelline called Old-Woman was deep in thought.

Next to him, Oshenkyo was skipping and sky-larking, waving and weaving his hands in the air, snapping his fingers in both ears, and smiling at the stereo-auditory noise. “Much quiet! Buckets of quiet! Know why? No ads,” smiled Oshenkyo, humming.

“What of the advertisement you wear? Why is it silent?”

“Not silent! Just our ears not hear it.” Oshenkyo explained that certain advertisers were trying to sell services and philosophy-regimens to a Cerebelline consciousness (a daughter of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea) which occupied the cliffs and kelp-beds throughout the area, who, having once long ago been part of the Venereal Terraforming Effort, had been heart-broken when that effort finally achieved success. The Daughter departed once Venus was towed to a new orbit, but had never altered her perceptions back to the standard frequencies, time-rates, and aesthetic conventions of Earth. Hence, her ‘eyes’ were tuned to the short-waves and sub-sonic pulses the dark advertisement banners gave off.

The other banners would display advertisements meant for humans only when asked, and then only from advertisers who could not afford to, or did not bother to, prevent an exile from experiencing them.

“We use them, you know, semaphore. Or listen to jingles. Or for light. Or as sails for boats. No one mind, as long as ads get shown.”

“But you do not use them to search out useful products and services?”

“No one sells to Afloats. Almost no one. No one, we’d be dead. Almost no one, almost dead. Look it.” And he pointed above the central barge.

Phaethon was still not accustomed to how bad his eyesight was. There was no amplification when he squinted. He saw a swarm of darting and hovering specks, glittering gold, like bees, above and around the pavilions and tents rising above the barge. But he could not resolve them into clear images. “I cannot make out what is out there.”

Oshenkyo was seated on the wide, low limb of a gold-extraction bush, cupping his hands over his ears, then covering them, listening to the changes in sound. He spoke absently: “Vulpine First Ironjoy on yonder barge runs a thought-shop. We get work, some time. Can get buffers and tangle-lines to reach deviants and dark-markets through the Big Mind.” By which he meant the mentality.

Phaethon was intrigued. Work? The boycott of the Hortators evidently had enough holes and gaps to enable these people to live.

Then Phaethon smiled sadly at his own thought. ‘These people’…? Did he still think of himself as somehow apart from the other exiles?

Phaethon said: “No, I can see the barge. But what are those miniature flying instruments swarming around the area here?”

“Constables. Tinee-tiny. About so big.” Oshenkyo held up his thumb.

“So many?”

“Zillions. They watch us all time. Good thing, too. Otherwise we club each other right quick dead.”

“Indeed? Are we all so violent, then?”

Oshenkyo shrugged a broad, one-shoulder shrug. “All us crazy, filthy people. Got nothing to loose.”

“Why is there such a number of police?”

Oshenkyo squinted at him. “We still got rights. No thieving, no killing, no broke words.”

“What about lying?”

Oshenkyo stared out at the bay, sniffed, gave another one-shouldered shrug. “Fib till your tongue falls out. No one here to buy a thought-read machine. We not like other folk: we don’t know what goes on inside other people head. Just like long-ago days, eh? But swaps, bargains, work, all that: very sacred. You give word, can’t take back. You got?”

Evidently contract laws were still enforced. “I got.”

But Phaethon realized that it would be a dangerous system, since the Oecumene law, with no emotion and no favoritism, would enforce any bargain struck, no matter how foolish, no matter how risky. Had he had access to Sophotech foresight and advice, the risks would have been small. He didn’t. Had he been raised in a society where suspicion and care were normal, he could have been in the habit of mistrusting his fellow-men, and of striking careful bargains. He wasn’t.

Oshenkyo squinted up at him. “All be clear as clear once you sign our Pact. You join up, be one of us, eh? Otherwise, not so great live here. Nowhere else to go but sea.”

This did nothing to calm Phaethon’s qualms. But he smiled in joy and relief. If he had qualms, that meant he had plans, he had a goal. He was young and in good health, and he had a supply of nanomaterial which could be adapted to medical geriatrics. He might live long enough to outlive the Hortators’ term of exile; the political circumstance of the Oecumene might change. Who could tell?

“…Or maybe the horse could learn how to sing.” Phaethon murmured.

“Eh? What’s that?”

“Sorry. I was ruminating over my hopes for the future.”

“Hope? You said ‘horse.’”

“There is a story about a man condemned by a tyrant, who pleads for one more year of life, telling the tyrant that, if the sentence is suspended for a year, he will teach the tyrant’s prize stallion to sing hymns. The tyrant agrees. The other prisoners are amused to see this one prisoner, every day, patiently caroling in the stables. When the other prisoners mocked his folly, the man replied that a great deal could happen in a year. The tyrant could die; the horse could die. And, who knows? The horse could learn to sing.”

“Stupid story.”

“I always used to think so, too. Now, though, I’m not sure. Are false hopes better than none at all? Perhaps they are.” Phaethon’s eyes were fixed on a point beyond the horizon.

“No, is stupid because would not take so long to download info and singing-routines into horse, if brain-fittings are standard. A year? Would only take five minute.”

“This is a very old story, from the days before horses were extinct.”

Now Oshenkyo squinted in surprise. “Funny, I thought horses were make-up, you know, genetified, by Red Manor Queens.”

“Make up? You mean invented?”

“Make up! Like dragons and gryphons and elephants.”

“Modern elephants are a genetic reconstruction of a real species.”

Oshenkyo snorted. “With flappy-arms on their noses? You think such creature as that evolve by itself? Nar. No how. Red Manor folk make up for sure. Just their kind of stupid thing. Ah, wait!” Now Oshenkyo jumped to his feet, and waved his arm high. “Lookit there! Welcome menus! You get meet Ironjoy. He tell you what’s what. You listen him, he get you fine-dandy job-assignments, maybe you eat, maybe you sleep in-of-doors, out of rain. Nice-good, eh? Lick up nice chum to him, now, and smile pretty!”

“I shall endeavor to be on my best behavior.” Phaethon said in a voice of heavy irony.

A party of three figures was picking its way up the slope of the cliff to the spot where Phaethon stood with Oshenkyo. All three wore blue-green house-coats of antique design, with flared shoulders and long skirts, and many pockets to hold a dozen house-instruments. The one in the middle (perhaps the leader) had a design of gold attention-thread running through the chest-pockets. Their faces were shadowed by wide flat straw hats whose brims hung over their shoulders. The color elements in the house-coats were not correctly attuned; all three figures were surrounded by a web of green-blue rainbows, shifting glints and shadows, and it made them look as if they were walking underwater.

The lead figure seemed to be a base humiform until he was within ten feet of Phaethon. The color-play of his malfunctioning coat had hidden his true silhouette. As the stranger approached, Phaethon saw he had a second pair of arms and hands springing from his doubled shoulders. Beneath the shadow of his hat, his face was an immobile mask of bony cartilage, with three or four pairs of eyes and secondary eyes, microwave horns, infrared sockets, electrodetection cells and elf-antennae. The face lacked a nose; the mouth was an insectoid clamp.

Phaethon’s gaze swung left and right. The other two wore standard faces, male and half-male, with teeth made of glittering diamond. The male had a beard woven with many-colored sensation-strands. The half-male had similar strands dangling from her hair. The two wore black metallic cusps covering their eyes, perhaps a crude type of sense-filter and interfacer, controlled by blinks and eye-motions. The man was sucking on a colored strand drooping from his moustache.

The quadruple-armed leader stepped forward, and looked Phaethon’s gold and black armor up and down. Phaethon returned the inspection.

Phaethon recognized the fellow’s body-design from the late Fifth Era, when the mass-minds, loosing money and prestige, had attempted to cut costs on space services by having specialized serf-bodies replace expensive EVA machinery. The serf-creatures were immensely strong, having been used as longshoremen and hull-smiths, and could perceive many frequencies of radiation at once. Their space-suits or second skins could be made much more cheaply than the elaborate space-armor needed by a human-shaped man. Serfs required very little food and water; their bodies could recycle much of their own waste-materials.

The serf-form had been extinct for centuries, and, as far as Phaethon knew, they had never been patronized by a single consciousness. But it was an excellent body to be exiled in, being long-lasting and very frugal.

Phaethon thought the creature was hideous.

The fact that they were dressed in something other than advertisements or simple polymeric home-spun led Phaethon to believe that these three represented the upper class of whatever ‘society’ existed among these outcasts. The Hortators of the poor, so to speak.

Phaethon noticed the other two, hissing and slurping, chuckling and murmuring to each other, had both bent close to stare at Oshenkyo’s new ear. The she-man uttered a breathless giggle of awe and delight; the man was nodding slowly, pleased and impressed, his straw hat bobbing.

The buzzing, flat voice of a mechanical speaker issued from the chest area of the serf-creature. “Self identifies as Vulpine First Ironjoy, base neuroform with nonstandard invariant extensions, Uncomposed and Unschooled. Compatriots identified as Lester Nought Haaken, base, ejected from a limited non-hierarchy mind-partnership, Ritual Murder Reformation School; second compatriot identified as Drusillet Zero Self-soul, sub-Cerebelline neuroform, multiple personality stasis-lock, self-schooled.”

The half-male, evidently Drusillet, straightened up and spoke in a contralto she-man voice: “Incorrect! My school is the Omnipresent Benevolence Assertion! Many children are its members, filled with love and kindliness, protected from all life’s ills and harms! Soon, oh so very soon now, they will recall their love and gratitude for all the benefits I’ve shown to them, and force the Hortators to rescind their ban on me!”

Lester, likewise, made a preemptory gesture and spoke up: “There is no Ritual Murder Reformation School; such a thing exists only in horror-stories. I am and always shall be a member of the Privacy School. My thoughts are my own, not open to examination or review. If I want to throb with the desire to lie, cheat, steal and kill, then that is nobody’s business but my own, provided I don’t act on it, right? Don’t let Ironjoy here baffle you, new kid. We, none of us, are criminals here.”

Oshenkyo chimed in, “No criminals. Just unpopular, eh?”

Lester said, “Some of us suffer for a Righteous Cause.”

Phaethon nodded. “A pleasure to make the acquaintance of someone who shares my feelings in the matter, good sir. I, too, suffer tribulations for a cause I deem to be just and right.”

“Aha!” exclaimed Lester, slapping Phaethon’s shoulder-plate with a brotherly hand. “Kindred souls then! Good to meet you! And take my word for it, this sick society which has rejected us cannot last long! No, sir, the Golden Oecumene will soon collapse under her own over-stuffed rottenness. The machines think they can anesthetize us, force us into unnatural, inhuman modes! But the true bestial nature of man will one day spring forth, roaring! And on that day, rioters will topple the edifices of the thinking machines, rapists and looters will fulfill their dark fantasies, and blood, gushes of glorious blood, will run through the streets! Take note of my words!”

Lester, at this point, was standing too close to Phaethon, and waving his finger in Phaethon’s face for emphasis.

Ironjoy put one of his left hands on Lester’s shoulder and drew him back. “Improper! Allow New Kid to acclimate himself. Talk of other matters after.”

Oshenkyo said, “He got plenty long time to hear all about you theory, Lester.” He turned and squinted at Phaethon, and said, “We all got to hear Lester’s talk. Sort of like hazing. Whoever stand it the longest wins big prize.”

Lester either was immured to this type of joke, or held Oshenkyo in such good fellowship that the comments did not offend him. In either case, he merely gave Phaethon a polite nod, turned to Ironjoy, and said, “Oshenkyo’s earned his chit; I’ll send you a bill from my informant, at fifteen cut. Fair?” And, when Ironjoy grunted in agreement, Lester turned again, gave a last, lingering look of envy and wonder at Oshenkyo’s new ear, and then briskly walked away.

Oshenkyo muttered to Ironjoy: “Worth more than fifteen. Lookit that armor shine! Admantium. Is my fish; I say twenty.”

Ironjoy made a curt gesture with his lower right hand. Oshenkyo shut up and stepped back, squinting. It was hard to read the tattoo-scarred face: but he seemed glum. Ironjoy pointed at Phaethon with his upper left hand, evidently a signal to Drusillet, who took out a reading card, face yellowed with age, and stepped toward Phaethon.

Drusillet said, “Open your thoughtspace, please, New Kid. We need to see what you have to offer. Medical routines are what we mostly need. Though information structuring, data compression, and migration techniques also pay off. Let me log you on to the mentality and run a check-through.” And she stepped forward and began to apply the reading head of the card to a jack in Phaethon’s shoulder-board.

Phaethon brushed her hand aside before she could meddle with his suit controls.

      1. Unshared Thoughts
        ***

Drusillet stepped back, mouth open, and darted a fearful look at Ironjoy. The metal cusps which hid her eyes partly masked her expression, but evidently she had not expected to be rebuffed.

Phaethon spoke: “Sir (or is it miss…?) forgive me, but we have not been properly introduced. And I have personal and very severe reasons for wishing not to log on to the mentality. But perhaps a word or two of explanation would reassure me. Were you thinking of simply making free with my property? Were you attempting to make pirate-copies of my routines? There are a dozen constables floating nearby.” He gestured toward the swarm of bee-sized metal implements which buzzed through the air overhead.

“No cops!” Ironjoy held up all four hands at once, an eerie, almost menacing gesture. “New Kid is disoriented. He thinks he is still alive. He thinks the constables will protect him. Explain reality to him! I go. Events will be adjusted.” And with that, he turned with a snap of his green-shivering garments, and strode off down the path between the pharmaceutical bushes.

Drusillet was staring at Phaethon in fascinated half-fear. Oshenkyo squatted down not far away, humming to himself, and drawing squirming circles in the dirt with a twig. Phaethon stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his head forward, legs spread, his black cloak falling in folds across his armored shoulders, around his elbows. For a moment, no one spoke.

Drusillet said to Phaethon, “You don’t understand how things work here.”

“I am attentive. Explain.”

“Ironjoy’s not an Afloat, not really. He’s an Ashore; he just doesn’t care how much time he adds onto his sentence. Parts of his brain died, a long time ago, from old age, but he had the other parts propped up with Invariant mind-viruses that they give out for free. Even to us. Anyway, Ironjoy runs the thought-shop here. He’s the only one around who can sell us goodies, or who can run a search-engine to locate assignments in the dark markets and back-nets.”

“How does this Ironjoy fellow find assignments for you?” asked Phaethon.

Drusillet tucked a strand of her hair between her lips and sucked. Then she shivered and smiled. “You’d be surprised! Everyone always thinks the machines can do everything better and smarter and faster than anyone, so how can anyone ever get a job? But they can’t do everything at once, and so there are certain jobs which, even if we do them slower and stupider, we can still do them for cheaper. Like me. The last thing I did, was going through Devolkushend’s memories to prepare his autobiography, and cutting out or glossing over the parts of his memory which don’t make for good theater. It was rough work, living his stupid life over and over again, but he’s got some fans, or something, so I guess he wanted it done, and on the cheap, too. It required some human judgment; I got a judgment-routine from Ironjoy for that, one of those things put out by Semi-Warlock Critics.”

“Did I correctly hear Ironjoy say you had a Cerebelline neuroform? You express yourself in linear fashion, like a basic, not like a global.”

She suddenly looked shy and sad. “Sub-Cerebelline. Think of a mass-mind with a split personality. As long as my other personalities don’t come to the forefront, as long as I don’t weave myself back into a global whole, I think and act like you lonely people. Just one mind, one point of view, all alone. It’s what I have to do to keep my children safe.”

Phaethon was curious, but saw she would not say more on that topic. Instead, he asked her about her work: “How does Devolkushend, when he hires you, escape falling under the Hortators’ opprobrium?”

“Oh, he’s a Nevernext. They hate the Hortators. Nevernexts, deviants, freaks, they still cut deals with us. And a lot of things are done on the sly, or through schools with high privacy restrictions. Especially now during the masquerade. Some of us dress up and sneak off to go look at the real people….” Her face took on a look of wistful longing. Phaethon pictured her in masquerade, in the rain, peering up at a window or balcony for a distant glimpse of a grown child who might no longer know her. It was a pathetic picture, disturbing. Was it accurate? He did not know.

She said: “The Hortators aren’t the constables, after all, and they can’t get a warrant to read someone’s mind.”

Oshenkyo stood up suddenly, and tossed the twig he had been toying with away into the brush with an abrupt motion. “Ironjoy’s top man around here, for sure. Makes sure we all get along, all get some work, some grub, some dream-stuff so we can stand to make it to another sunset. He got good stuff in his shop, good dreams, bad dreams, new thoughts, new selves. You play around, you jack in new stuff, maybe one day you find yourself a persona who can stand living here without no hope. Turn yourself into Mr. Right. But we’re all good friends here. We share and share alike. You got some good stuff on your back; maybe you got some good stuff in your head. Why not help us out, eh?”

Phaethon said, “I may be able to help you out a great deal. Ironjoy’s monopoly seems to be hindering any capital formation. Your ‘share and share alike policies’, as you call them, certainly would discourage the type of long-term investment we would all welcome. From what you say, the Hortators are much weaker here than I imagined. Among the deviants and Nevernexts there may be enough markets for us, enough work to be had, that, with some new policies, new leadership, and hard work, some real growth and prosperity could be brought to this little community. And perhaps even a type of immortality could be re-gained; I know that Neptunian neuro-circuits, in their zero temperatures, suffer very little degradation over the centuries.”

Oshenkyo was grinning; clearly the idea appealed to him. He touched his new ear thoughtfully.

Drusillet said in a hushed tone: “What kind of thoughtspace do you carry? What level of integrator is installed in that suit of yours? Do you have enough to carry out the same functions Ironjoy’s shop-mind can carry out?”

“Perhaps if I don’t have what I need, I could build it out of raw materials.”

Drusillet said in a voice of slow astonishment, “Build? What do you mean, build? Only machines build things. Men don’t build things, not now-a-days men.”

“I build things. And I am very old fashioned, in my own way.”

“How?”

“With determination, will and foresight. With my brain. With the circuits in my suit. There is plenty of carbon in the environment. I can design and grow circuits and small ecologies.”

He saw their looks of astonishment. He smiled, “Well, I am an engineer, after all.”

“Engineer,” murmured Oshenkyo. Then: “Hey, engineer, my house grows my cakes and lamps all squirrely. Maybe you can fix?”

“I certainly take a look at it. The house-mind probably operates from a modular set of neural base-formats. Any part of a working house could be used as a formatting seed to re-start the program.”

Drusillet said, “Engineer, what about finding assignments? If you and Ironjoy can both run a search, we’ll find twice the jobs! Can you do it?”

“Perhaps. The Hortators allow me access to the Mentality; even if I do not log on myself, I can access my account through a remote, or even through a script-board. It’s not impossible. Tell me what might be required. What is the priority and actions-per-second of the search engine Ironjoy uses to find your assignments? In which part of the mentality is he stationed? How does he negotiate the anti-viral buffers without hiring a Cerebelline to certify him?”

Drusillet’s enthusiasm vanished. She spoke with a twitch of worry. “Ironjoy may not like it, not if too much changes too fast.”

“I will explain how it is in everyone’s long-term best interest. You people act rationally to further your own interests, do you not?” Phaethon asked. Although, it occurred to him that, if no one here could afford a noetic inspection of each other’s thoughts, no one would have any motive to keep their motives pure. Ironjoy theoretically could maintain a whole host of evil impulses and hypocrisies.

Oshenkyo said, “Sure. We all swell people.”

Drusillet spoke with less conviction. “Oh, yes, we’re rational. The Hortators are just wicked to exile me here. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Then why would Ironjoy object?”

She said in a sad voice: “We’re a very tight-knit group, you see? We all swap our things. We all share. There isn’t anyone else for us, not for anyone else, no one.”

Oshenkyo stepped backward, looked off in the distance. He spoke in a casual voice: “She means don’t squirt yellow on Ironjoy. Got to lick up to him, see? He take care of us.” He sniffed and said sidelong to Drusillet: “Besides, I got me someone. What about Jasmyne Xi?”

Phaethon turned Oshenkyo a curious glance. “Jasmyne Xi Meridian?”

Oshenkyo nodded. “My share-wife. She sees me on the sly, not even the Hortators know. Soon, maybe tomorrow, she use her big-snoff influence and get me out of this. Coming by to see me. Good day then, eh?”

Drusillet merely gave Oshenkyo a look, perhaps of pity, perhaps of contempt.

Phaethon knew Jasmyne Xi Median of Median House, Red Manorial Scholum; she and Daphne had once had friends in common. She was generally agreed to be among the most beautiful and glamorous of women on Earth. She had made several fortunes as a productress, a fashion archetype, and a writer of jewelry, apparel, and allure-software. She was paid to be seen in public using certain beauty products, attending certain functions, and for forming certain favorable opinions reported through noetic channels. It was impossible to imagine a famous figure like Jasmyne Xi would receive a low-class ill-spoken outcast like Oshenkyo, much less marry him.

“If you are wealthy enough to afford pseudomnesias and deep-structure dreams,” said Phaethon, “You could afford to pool your resources, and buy several search-models, and perhaps a few acres of nanomanufacturing for your own. The Nevernexts make a study of advanced bioformations and somatics; the Neptunians have an advanced science of minimalist nano-engineering. They are remote, but contact with them may not be impossible. Their resources are more scarce than your own; they must have advanced software you could profit by.”

Drusillet stepped in close and whispered, “Oshenkyo isn’t buying dreams. It’s the beauty-ads. Oshenkyo is addicted to the ads.”

Phaethon spread his fingers in the communication-failure gesture, to show he did not understand.

She whispered: “Jasmyne’s lip cosmetics and erotic-formation commercials sometimes have little dreams as free samples. You see? Don’t trust Oshenkyo. He’s not going to help you set up a new thought-shop or compete with Ironjoy. He’s a liar and a destructionst, a weaponeer, a nihilist; that’s why the Hortators shunned him.”

They were interrupted. Oshenkyo waved at someone in the distance. He raised his fingers to his lips and emitted a loud, long, shrill whistle.

*** *** ***

07. New Kid

Some hooting and commotion, some glad calls and yelps sounded from several of the floating houses and from the rustling and shining tents of the central barge. Figures had emerged; Oshenkyo was calling out.

Oshenkyo rubbed his coat, uttered a command. The dark background and dim red lines disappeared, to be replaced by a garish bright explosion of florid colors swimming in the fabric. A pulsing beat and a loud announcer’s voice issued from Oshenkyo’s garment, a swell of jarring music. Men and women began to shout across the water. Their robes were dark and silent; but, in a moment, they had tuned in to the same commercial Oshenkyo was showing, and a rollicking advertisement was soon pelting noise and echoes across the water.

Oshenkyo gabbed Phaethon’s arm. “Come on down to beach! Lotsa people wanna see you, Engineer! You fix us, you fix everything!”

As they walked, he bent his head low and whispered, “You need help if you plan to pull jack out of Ironjoy, eh? Don’t trust Drusillet. Crazy, crazy, her. You know why Hortators put big no-go on her? She a Cerebelline, raise a hundred children, all in sim. Children dream their whole life, never once see real thing, never once think real thought. By law, when child is grown, must wake up, must tell truth, show world. But law does not say young adult cannot go back into mother’s dream-womb again, not even if mother raised them to be coward, raised them so cannot think for themselves. She had more than hundred people trapped in her dreams, with no way out, not ever. All legal. All wrong. She say she was protecting them. Don’t let her protect you. Got it?”

Phaethon compressed his lips, saying nothing. He had never been among people who could not commune and swap thoughts to settle their differences. He had never known mistrust. How was a rational man to deal with such people…? He warned himself to tread carefully.

Then they were on the beach. A group of folk in brightly colored costumes had come across the water to the little strip of shore below the cliff. Some swam; some floated in small coracles; one or two applied an energetic to render the water surface tension capable of sustaining their weight, and these walked on a temporary film across the water.

Most were humaniform. One man looked like a barrel with a dozen legs and arms; another was a serpent man, sleek for swimming. A trio of girls had the body-shape called air-sylph, with fans of membrane stretched between wrist and ankle. Two other men occupied metal tubs which moved on buzzing magnetic repellors, having a robo-toolbox fixed across the prow of the tubs, rather than arms or legs. There were between forty and eighty individuals inhabiting about sixty bodies. Many had head-plugs or crude crowns, and Phaethon could not tell how many were members of a Composition or mind-group.

All swarmed up the slope. The scene soon took on the aspect of a festival. The people greeted Phaethon with calls and cheers and course jests. He was not introduced; no one inquired his name. They called him ‘New Kid’.

Phaethon was bewildered. These people did not have Middle Dreaming, so that, unlike normal people, they did not instantly know all about each other at a glance. But neither were they like Silver-Greys; Phaethon had been raised in the ancient traditions, and he knew how to greet an unknown person, exchange names, and painstakingly memorize those names for later use without artificial aids. But this…?

They did not shake hands (the ancient British custom Phaethon practiced.) Instead, the universal greeting was to thrust out a beggar’s cupped palms, and shout: ‘Whatcha got?’

The music-noise from their advertisement-robes baffled his attempts at speech. Oshenkyo stood on a tall soil defractor and pointed at his ears, while people looked on and gasped or uttered hoots of surprise. Then they swirled around Phaethon with renewed energy.

Since it was too noisy to make introductions, Phaethon began using very small sections of his black nanomaterial, only one or two precious drops at a time, to cure certain pustules and deformities he saw on certain people here. Most of the ailments were simple skull-cap sores caused by improper interfacing, unclean jacks, drunkenness, or overstimulation.

Five or six people he cured. Then he fixed a broken mind-set they brought him by interposing a correct graph from a working set. The man whose set it was now flourished the crown overhead, yodeling in joy when it lit up; and the people shouted. Phaethon was able to reprogram the color-distortions on Drusillet’s house-coat merely by opening the coat’s help-space and entering a re-set command. Drusillet threw out her arms and spun, delighted as her coat-tails gleamed with constant, vibrant colors, unblurred despite her motion. The people near her pointed and called out.

This made him popular. People shouted in his face, laughed, slapped his back. He did not want people to hurt themselves against his armor, so he took off his gauntlets and helmet. Girls and gynomorphs mussed his hair with slender fingers. A four-armed man with a peg-leg, wearing the antennae of a space-inspector, pressed a drink-bulb into Phaethon’s hand. Several people thrust thought-cards or interface disks at him, or twists of candy or incense, or injectors of unknown import.

Phaethon told himself to be cautious; that, unlike in his old life, no warning would come if he were about to do something dangerous. Many of the thought-cards being offered him were no doubt intoxicants or memory-redacts, pornography or pleasure-jolts. He took one or two into his hand, to be polite, but he could not make himself understood over the noise when he asked questions about them.

A hairy man with diamond teeth and crystalline eyeballs slipped a bracelet around Phaethon’s wrist. The bracelet flexed, as if it were trying to lock shut; Phaethon, startled, tore it from his wrist and flung it away. He saw the diamond-toothed man skip up and recover the bracelet. There was something familiar in the man’s poise and posture. An agent of Scaramouche? Where had he seen the man before?

Phaethon rubbed his wrist and discovered a spot of blood. Was the man merely a kleptogeneticist? Or had Phaethon been injected with something?

Phaethon looked into his personal thoughtspace, so that hovering icons surrounded him, superimposed on the shouting crowd. He made a command gesture, releasing biotic antitoxins and investigator animalcules from specialized cells in his lymph nodes into his circulatory system. But a young girl grabbed his arm at the same time, the gesture went awry, and he accidentally flooded his bloodstream with pain-killers.

Now he was in an expansive mood. His frets and worries of a moment ago seemed dim and unreal. The world took on new and fascinating color. When the crowd began to dance and sing jingles in time to the braying advertisements, Phaethon joined in.

At sunset, someone brandished and ax and uttered a call.

Some running, and some dancing in a line, the crowd of Afloats now charged through the purple twilight across slope and field to where a dismal clutter of houses and broken buildings shouted. There was a carnival air to their operation. Some carried colored lights. Many brandished axes. In a short time, Phaethon helped a gang of men cut a dead house from its stem, pulled and rolled it down the slope, off the cliff, and into the water with a tremendous splash. The crowd squealed as it was drenched by the spray. The tall four-armed man held up a command box, pointing and shouting, and spider-gloves began swimming toward the prone house, and the water began to boil with some crude nano-construction.

“Engineer! Your house!” shouted Oshenkyo to him. “Yours! For you! See! We all help! All help each other! You sign Pact now, yes?!”

And the people cheered. They did not call him ‘New Kid’ now; they shouted, “Engineer! Engineer!”

But another burst of music started at that moment, and Phaethon was rushed off to join in a line of clapping, swaying, kicking men. He was dizzy and hot from the exertions of the house-felling, and he took a drink from something someone had thrust into his hand. After that the dusk became even more gay and giddy, and his memory became pleasantly blurred. There was dancing, singing, and carrying on. Someone had affixed a rope-swing to a chemical-tree which hung over the cliff-shore. He remembered whooping with fear as he soared far out above the water and back again. He remembered kissing someone, perhaps a hermaphrodite. It must have been late; there were stars overhead, shining above the steel rainbow of the ring-city. He remembered tossing out huge gobs of his precious nano-material to all his fine new friends, scraping it up from the inside of his armor, despite the irksome warning-buzz the suit gave off as it fell below necessary internal integrity levels.

He was everyone’s darling after that. All his new friends loved him. He wanted to swing on the rope-swing again, and they pushed him in high arcs, higher and higher.

He remembered shouting: “Higher! Faster! Farther! The stars! I have vowed the stars shall be mine!”

And, as the swing hesitated at the crest of its high arc, he stood in the rope-sling and reached up, as high as he could reach. His new friends all laughed and cheered as he slipped and fell into the waters far below.

 

*** *** ***

08. The Thought Shop

CHAPTER THREE: THE THOUGHT-SHOP

Phaethon woke slowly, groaning. Jarring noises throbbed and trembled in his ears; cheerful voices shouted rhymes in a language unknown to him. His sleep had been troubled again, plagued by nightmare-images of a black sun rising over a blood-soaked landscape.

He came more awake, and discovered his head throbbing in tempo to the loud beat of the drum music shouting from the flashing garment he wore. Garment? No; he was wrapped up in an advertisement, lying on the floor in the curving corner of a blue-white room. The noise of the advertisement drilled into his skull.

Where was his armor?

For that matter, where was he? Curving walls like the inside of a sea-shell rose around him. The far wall was dotted with blank receptor-cells, like a line of blind eyes. There was dust and brine staining the floor. An oval nearby admitted a harsh light which stung his eyes. The floor seemed to sway and slide, lurch and jump in a sickening fashion.

Where was his armor? A gram of his nanomaterial would have been able to flush the toxins from his body and cleanse his bloodstream of debris.

He closed his eyes; closing his eyes created the same stabbing pains as opening them. His memory was clouded. Phaethon signaled for a reconstruction routine to index his memory fragments and holographically extrapolate the missing sections, before he recalled that such services were no longer available to him.

And never would be again….

But he vaguely remembered dismantling the black nanomachinery which formed the lining, control system and interface of the armor-plates. Dismantling it and tossing it to cheering crowds, who programmed the expensive and highly complex nanomachinery to reform itself into simple intoxicants and slurp it down their throats or rub it across their skin, absorbing hallucinogens into the pores of their flesh.

Phaethon raised his hand to his aching head. It could not be true. Surely that memory was false, an exaggeration. All his Sophotech-crafted nano-software erased and reconstructed as morphines or pleasure-endorphins? It would be as if someone where to eat the brain of a well skilled genius merely for the protein content, or melt down a hard process super-integrator merely to loot the few pfennings worth of copper wire in the heat regulator.

Please, let it not be true.

And what would Daphne say if she found out he had been so foolish, so careless, as to allow his beautiful gold armor to be destroyed…? But then Phaethon remembered that he was never going to see Daphne again.

Perhaps this was all a simulation. “End program!” Shouted Phaethon. But the scene did not end. Everything was as before; he sat in a dirty white shell, with sunlight blazing in through a window above, and the floor still swooped and lurched, sickeningly. Or perhaps the floor was steady and he was ill. There was no way to tell. “End program!” he shouted again, slamming his fist into the curving wall beside him. “End! End! End Program! I want my life back, damn you!”

Phaethon fought his way to his feet. This place remained solid and “real” (if that concept had meaning any longer in his life.) He was alone; he was unwell. Or perhaps he was not unwell. The floor was actually rocking.

Hunger pangs stung his stomach. Where was his armor? It was his only food supply.

At that, he heaved himself upright, and tore the noisy, flashing advertisement banner off his body. With a convulsion of disgust, he threw it fluttering out the window. It struck some impediment just below his line of sight, and flapped there, giving off a shout.

No; it was a man who had shouted. Now that man rose into view. He had been walking up to the window and Phaethon had thrown the advertisement over his head. He was dressed in gray.

Now the oval expanded, and the man stepped in. The oval was not an oeil-de-boeuf or window; it was a door. The mechanism was jammed or ill. The door tried to iris shut, but dwindled only to it former dimension, trembled, squeaked, and remained half-open. Now through the opening, Phaethon saw he was inside a house floating on angular legs in the waters of the bay.

“Where is my armor?” said Phaethon, squinting. He had one hand against the sloping wall to keep himself upright.

The man took the advertisement carefully off his head, balled it up, and tossed it out the window. The banner floated away, looking for prospective clients.

When the man turned, Phaethon saw he had no face.

It was not a man. It was a mannequin.

Phaethon straightened up in shock. No person from the Golden Oecumene would be telepresenting himself here, not with the Hortators’ ban in place.

Scaramouche…? It was not impossible….

“What do you want of me?!” asked Phaethon in a ragged voice.

The mannequin’s external speakers said: “I’ve come to ask you to cooperate.”

Phaethon stepped away from the wall, and tried to stand straight. He did not want to show any weakness. “Cooperate? In what way?”

“You been the victim of a crime. I want you to help me punish the people who did this to you. They claim that they are your society and your people and that you owe them loyalty now, but don’t listen to that rubbish. Your interests still are best served by cooperation.”

Phaethon squinted. This was an odd thing for Scaramouche to be saying. Yes, forcing Phaethon into exile was a crime, but did this creature from beyond actually think Phaethon would help Scaramouche punish the Hortators?

Phaethon said, “Where do you creatures come from? Another star? Another time? How do you know so much about the Golden Oecumene when we know nothing about you…?”

The gray mannequin had no face, but there was an expression of surprise in its posture, in the set of its shoulders. “Uh, sir, I don’t mean to intrude on your hallucination, but I’m a constable officer from the local commandry, Ceylon 21. My name is Pursuivant Eighteenth Co-Mentalist Neoform of the Andropsyche-Projection Orthochronic Schola.”

“What?”

“Forgive me for not introducing myself. I had my valet place a description of myself and my reason for coming into the Middle Dreaming, and I had assumed you would know all about me at a glance. That is the way we at the Andropsychic Projection school run our affairs. I had been informed that you, despite being ostracized, still had access to the mentality. It just did not occur to me you would not use it.”

The gray mannequin now held out an empty hand toward Phaethon. “Here is my badge of office, with warrants and commissions appended in nearby files. Do you wish to inspect it? All you need do is log on to the mentality.”

Phaethon looked at the mannequin’s hand. To Phaethon’s mentality-blind eyes, it was empty. “I am not willing to log on to the mentality.” He said.

“Ah. That’s too bad. I have a magistrate standing by on channel 653. She-they will sign a warrant for the seizure and arrest of your remaining nanomaterial—that suit-substance in your armor—before the rest of the Drunks here eat the stuff. A lot of people last night took handfuls of your stuff back to their rafts, and most of them injected or inhaled only a few grams, according to my best guess. If you want to get it back, what little is left, we must act quickly. Just log on to the mentality, and talk with the magistrate; I’m sure we can get an injunction and have that stuff seized before your new pals wolf down the rest of it for breakfast. We may only have a few minutes. Just log on.”

For a moment, such a wild emotion pulsed in Phaethon that he could not speak. But a cold ripple of doubt quelled his joy. What evidence did he have that his armor had not been entirely destroyed? What evidence did he have that this faceless mannequin was not, in fact, Scaramouche? He seemed to have insisted once too often that Phaethon should log on to the mentality.

And yet, if part of his armor still existed, and might still be saved, and if it were destroyed because Phaethon stood here hesitating and doubting…?

Phaethon licked dry lips, not sure what to believe.

The mannequin said, “We don’t have much time.”

Phaethon thought a moment, came to a decision. “I will go talk to Ironjoy,” he said to the constable.

 

*** *** ***

09. Ironjoy

It was with some difficulty that Phaethon made his way to the central barge where Ironjoy kept his thoughtshop. First, he could not dilate the oval window-door to get out of his house with any dignity; nor would the constable help him by over-riding the house-mind’s faulty command-line, as such charity might have been in violation of the Hortators’ ban. Phaethon had to squirm through the hole, whereupon he fell across a narrow ledge and plummeted twenty feet into the sea.

The water here was clogged and clotted with snag-lines and ropy tendrils which made up part of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea’s body, or perhaps one of her manufacturing subsections, so Phaethon did not sink. But neither was his body buoyant; the special organs and space-adaptations built into his thick hide added weight. However, his strength was much greater than an unmodified man’s, and he was able to lunge forcefully through the thicket. Another modification enabled him to hold his breath for the twenty minutes or so it took him to walk (and crawl and swim) across the beds of undersea kelp and ratting to the rusted barge in the center of the bay.

He swarmed up the anchor-lines, awkwardly negotiated the float-sponsons, and eventually found himself dangling from the side of the barge.

Clinging to an anchor-line, Phaethon looked up. A sheer vertical surface loomed above him, and a metal overhang or cat-walk extended out overhead. There was no way upward. The mannequin representing Constable Pursuivant was not in sight.

Phaethon banged on the side of the hull and shouted for attention. Once again, he underestimated the strength involved in his space-adapted body; the metal dented under his blows.

The hull rang like a gong. In heat of the equatorial morning, the hull-metal seemed scalding. Rust-flakes and barnacles scraped his fist.

After what seemed a long time, a tall silhouette stepped out upon the catwalk. Phaethon craned his neck and stared overhead. It was Ironjoy; he had four arms, and the same wide hat he had worn yesterday, the same shifting green-blue garment. The housecoat was whining as its air-conditioners attempted to keep a zone of cool, scented air around Ironjoy.

“Hoy! You clang at my personal property, creating disturbance. Aboard I have early-shift workers, with their work personalities ready to load, and needing sanity-chips to balance themselves after last night’s festivity. Why do you irk them? Do you come for work?”

Without his sense-filter Phaethon could neither amplify the view, nor edit out the metal honey-comb which formed the catwalk floor, so his vision was obscured. Ironjoy was holding a large round golden object in three hands, and as he spoke, he bowed to sip or lick something from the inside of the golden bowl. Eating did not hinder speech: his voice issued from a machine in his chest.

Phaethon said, “I’ve come to get my armor back. You must be able to call everyone together.”

“Not possible.”

“But I saw Oshenkyo do it yesterday! He set his advertisement-cloak to emit a call!”

“Yes. Oshenkyo has enough chits to pay off the interruption fee. You have not. The rental on your revived house-mind has already accumulated over two hundred units, and it’s another twenty-five units fare you’ll owe to rent my coracle to carry you back to your house. Unless you want to swim back? Plus my consultation fee, which started to accumulate from the moment you began to speak to me. You are severely in debt, New Kid. Are you ready to start working it off, or are you going to cling there, jabbering?” Ironjoy now bent to take a slow sip of whatever he held in his golden bowl. Phaethon saw, with a sensation of shock, that Ironjoy was holding, not a bowl, but the helmet of Phaethon’s armor, and that he was eating out grams of the delicate skull-cap interface webbing.

Rage throbbed in his body. “Stop! You are destroying my property! You will return my helmet to me as of this instant! Then you will take all steps to recover whatever of my equipment as might remain from the others here!”

Ironjoy’s insectoid face was incapable of expression. “Do not irk me. You may have been a significant man before, on the outside. Here, only I am significant. Cooperation is necessary to survive in this community. Cooperation is defined as acclimation to my wishes.”

Phaethon’s fists tightened on the anchor-line. He wanted to leap up the sheer surface but saw no way up. His head swam with anger; he tried to calm himself. (He wished Rhadamanthus were there to calm him.)

“I have made a lawful request that you return property which has been stolen from me,” said Phaethon. “Look! Constable remotes as thick as wasps hover over this entire area! Do you think to defraud me of my only possessions?”

“I see Drusillet and Oshenkyo did not explain real things to you, as I instructed. Come up; I will tell you the truth.” With a kick, Ironjoy unfolded a gangway of stairs from the catwalk. Phaethon dropped into the water, awkwardly made his way to the stairs, and climbed. Ironjoy stood under a parasol of diamond in one of the pavilions on deck, and rainbow shadows rippled around his feet.

Other pavilions, to the left and right, showed sleeping figures, their mind-sets connected by cheap hard-wire to an interface board which ran the length of the deck.

*** *** ***

10. Dispossessed

A winged girl nearby had her arms around Phaethon’s gold breastplate, to which she was snuggled up, like a child sleeping with a favorite toy. Phaethon, without a word, stepped over to her and knelt down. His arms reached for the breastplate, which, to his delight, he saw still had more than half its nanomachine coating still glistening on the interior.

“Halt!” said Ironjoy. “No stealing!”

Phaethon turned, his eyes burning, his head pounding. Civilized instinct told him not to touch the armor, to negotiate, and to allow the normal process of law to settle the dispute. But were those instincts of any use to him now?

He pulled up the breastplate and set it off to one side. The winged girl stirred and murmured but did not wake. Then Phaethon stood, his eyes glassy with anger, and crossed to confront Ironjoy.

He stared at his foe for a moment. Was there any point in talking? Floating in the transparent surface of the diamond parasol which spread like a halo over Ironjoy’s head, were the icons and display-boards indexing the contents of Ironjoy’s thought-shop. The icons appeared in Objective Aesthetic symbology; Phaethon understood their meaning.

To Ironjoy’s left were routines to suppress restless thoughts, to produce personas incapable of fatigue, boredom, talkativeness, or dishonesty. Evidently his work roster. To his right were pleasure-stimulants, a wide number of anesthetics and pornography-simulations, mood-alterants, false-memories, gambling interfaces and self-justification dreams. Here were stupifiers, nullifiers, distorted mytho-formations, and choose-your-own revenge dramas.

Phaethon, to his deep disgust, also saw sickly-sweet addictive thought-forms of the type passed out freely by the mass-mind Compositions, intended only to persuade individuals to surrender the pain and loneliness of individuality to the unconditional and mindless love of the group-mind. Since, of course, no real Composition would permit an exile to join its ranks, Ironjoy could not fulfill the promises those addictives created. But next to them were a group of awareness-interrupters intended to create the temporary illusion of being a member of a mass-mind.

Phaethon saw not a single intelligence enhancer, memory-augment, philosophy text, emotion-balancer, or any other useful or wholesome application. He now saw what kind of thought-shop Ironjoy ran.

Without a word, he yanked the golden helmet out of Ironjoy’s grasp.

Ironjoy grappled Phaethon, seizing him by both wrists, putting his third hand on the helmet itself, and grasping Phaethon’s neck with his remaining hand. His hands were as hard and strong as mechanical grapples; he evidently expected no resistance. Ironjoy’s face, pressed to Phaethon’s, now showed the only expression of which it was capable: the mandible-plates drew back, making a parody of a sneering smile.

Ironjoy certainly was not expecting Phaethon’s strength to exceed his own. With a brush of his arm, Phaethon threw Ironjoy aside. The tall creature stumbled, four arms windmilling, and fell.

A group of constable remotes, glittering and buzzing, had descended to take up a circle around the two of them, tiny stings and stunners open.

Ironjoy rose to his feet and addressed the nearest constable: “I have been assaulted. You boast that violence is unknown in the Golden Oecumene! Yet now this wild barbarian commits outrages upon me!”

The flat voice spoke from the constable: “The law allows a person to use a reasonable amount of force to recover stolen property.”

Phaethon said: “Yet neither did you protect me against him!”

The constable said: “His action was arguably self-defense. Also, the grounds of your action are not unambiguous. Ironjoy may have a colorable claim to the property.”

At this, Ironjoy stepped forward again, and reached toward the helmet.

Phaethon said softly: “The property is mine. Interfere at your peril.”

Ironjoy drew back. But his voice-machine issued a strident tone:

“By what right do you make this claim? You gave it all away, last night. Observe!” Ironjoy drew out a field-slate from his coat. He touched the slate-surface and called up an image of glowing dragon-signs, surrounded by icons and cartouches of the legal sub-language. Beneath, in Phaethon’s perfect Second Era style handwriting, using linear-style cursive letters, was Phaethon’s signature.

“Last night you signed our Pact. It states our properties are to be administered according to the group-will. Haven’t you read it? I left a copy at your house. Your signature passed title to your armor.”

Phaethon stared at the slate. In a window to the side of his signature, the document showed a visual recording from last night. The picture showed him, giggling, one arm around some pink-haired air-sylph, reaching out with a light-stylus to inscribe a slate Lester was proffering. The time in the scene was dusk. A clock-statement stamped by a notary-public showed the hour and place and reality-level. In the background of the scene, a group of men had begun to chop down a dead house. Phaethon recalled no such scene; but his memory was blurred.

“The donation is void on the grounds that I was intoxicated.”

“Intoxication and other voluntary alterations of mental capacity do not form a valid basis for setting aside such a contract. That is the primary law of the Golden Oecumene.”

“Scoundrel! The intoxication was not voluntary.”

Ironjoy drew back the slate. He produced a nasal tone: “No doubt you have edited your memory. Fortunately, the records of the garden monitors will confirm my version of events. You drank an expansive from a bulb offered you; you doused yourself with pain-killers from your own internal supply.”

“Only because I was already drunk, and unable to control myself. Earlier than that, you conspired to have one of your fellows, a man with diamond teeth and glass eyes, stab me with a drug!” As he spoke, Phaethon realize who the man must have been. With his stimulant-beard, house-coat, and opaque eye-cusps removed, Phaethon had not then recognized him. Phaethon said: “You ordered Lester to do the deed. You feared that the capacities of my nano-machinery would threaten your monopoly. It was your intention from the first to rob me.”

Ironjoy’s tone grew even more nasal: “You will not prove this.”

“Are you insane!? We are citizens of the Golden Oecumene! How can you even dream to succeed at your deceptions? There are a hundred constable-remotes within ear-shot. Come, let us have the constables do a noetic reading. Your own thoughts and memories will show what you intended!”

“Perhaps so, if you bring foreword a complaint to the Constables. But you will not. This is a trick the Constables always play whenever a New Kid is thrown to us here on Death Row. They wait until the New Kid is disadvantaged by one of our practices, but before he has been here long enough to learn our ways. Then they swoop in to stir up trouble. To stir up disloyalty. To stir up disunity. Yes, they would like to have a complaint against me. The Hortators put them up to it.”

“Why?”

“Why? I give these exiles a way to stay alive. The Hortators want them to die. I alone of all these people here have the presence of mind, the discipline and will-power to prosper in this adversity. I alone brought wealth with me into exile, and established secret contacts and way-stations in the more private sections of the mentality before I came, or made contracts without the standard Hortators’ escape clause.”

“You volunteered to live this way?” Phaethon’s words came out slowly, amazed, perhaps disgusted.

“Out there I am of no account. Here, I am as rich as Gannis, as popular as Helion, as feared as Orpheus. It is a filthy, stinking, wretched, and temporary existence, but I am the most important aspect of it. Do you understand? You will not make any complaint to the Constables.”

“Why won’t I?”

Ironjoy pointed with two right arms out to where the lop-sided and unpowered house which they had given Phaethon wallowed in the waves. Some invisible signal radiated from Ironjoy; there was a snap of energy from below the sea, and the buoyancy floats holding up the house-legs bobbed loose. In a matter of moments, the sea-shell shaped house had flooded and sank.

Phaethon stared in puzzled dismay, trying to remember if anything he owned might have been in the house.

Ironjoy said: “Keep in mind, the wording of the pact you signed requires you to continue to pay rent. If you wish to sleep this night, I will rent you, at a considerably higher rate, a square meter of deck space here. If you are frugal, work hard, and sell some of your more expensive organs, you will be able to buy a carbon-organizer to weave yourself a pillow and a pavilion roof in less than a month. If you do anything more to exasperate me, such as, for example, continue to threaten me with constables, I will refuse to rent to you, to sell you food or goods at any rate whatever.”

Phaethon drew a deep breath, trying to control his shaking rage. Was he not a civilized man? Educated and bred to rationality, dignity, peace?

He made an attempt: “Let us reconcile. Use a circuit from your thought-shop to allow us to mingle our minds, either to comprehend each other from each other’s point of view, or to create a temporary arbitration conciliator, who will share memory chains from both of us, and be able to decide our case with full justice.”

The chest-vox of Ironjoy gave forth a squawk. Laughter? Or the sign of some emotion known only to Ironjoy’s peculiar half-basic, half-invariant neuroform? “Absurdity! We are mortal and we are poor. Such circuits are expensive. We have not the time nor the wealth to enjoy the dream of perfect justice you manor-born play at. Life is unfair. We cannot buy sense-filters to fabricate pretty illusions which tell us otherwise. Unfair, because there are times when necessity requires the weak to submit to the strong. I have stolen your armor, perhaps. That is your opinion. But you cannot afford to object. That is a fact. Instead of getting your armor back, you must now apologize, you must now plead with me, you must now beg humbly to be forgiven. Why? Not because you are wrong. Only because you are weak.”

Phaethon’s rage filled him like fire, but suddenly, impossibly, turned to jovial disdain, and left him clear-minded and cold. He felt like a man who struggled up some shifting slope of sand, with everything disintegrating and sliding backward beneath his fingers, but who suddenly stands at the peak of the slope, and finds a much further view than he had expected.

He said, “Weak? Compared to whom? To you? My actions do not stink of hysteria and short-sighted fear. To the Hortators? They were willing to blot the world with amnesia rather than face me. To my nameless enemies? I discovered their cowardice at Lake Victoria. Justice and rightness are on my side: I need never think a weak thought again.”

Ironjoy brushed this aside with a wave of both left hands. “Congratulations. But where will you live? To whom will you speak? Not to the Ashores; they regard the Afloats with nothing but hatred. Cooperate. Here you will find friends.”

Phaethon said, “I make you a counter-offer. If you cooperate with me, and return my remaining armor in tact, not only will I not turn you over to the Constables, but I will take you with me, you and all the Afloats, and make you a planet for your very own, a world drawn up according to your own specifications, once I regain control of my Ship, the Phoenix Exultant, and once I set out to conquer the stars.”

“Absurd. You are deluded.”

“I am not deluded! My memories are true and exact. Come now, which is it to be? My armor, or the Constables? If I testify against you, the Curia will apply pain directly to your nervous system, or they will re-write your evil thoughts with a reformation program.”

“They have no case; otherwise they would have already moved against me. Be reasonable, New Kid! Why do you want or need that armor? To fly to the stars? That will never happen. You need its nanomachinery lining to control some complex super-system or maintain internal energy ecologies aboard your ship? There is no ship. The armor is worthless to you, and meaningless to your new life. I am all that matters to your new life. You will not find work without me. You will not eat breakfast without me. You will need my dreams and delusions to keep at bay despair and suicide.

“Try to understand the grim necessity of the reality which confronts you,” continued Ironjoy. “You are like a man who was thrown headlong from orbit into the deep sea, with only my little boat to fish you out from drowning. In my boat, you are sailing on an ocean of death, a bottomless ocean, with no net to catch you should you fall overboard, with no back-up copies of yourself to restore you to life, no Sophotech to save you from your own foolishness. There is only me. Me. And if I throw you overboard, you will sink into that sea, never to rise again. Do not pester me about your foolish armor again; it was worthless to you, but my employees and charges will gain some momentary pleasures from it. The rest of the nanomachinery will be consumed later tonight, or tomorrow at the latest. Go down below, and I will give you a charge of noosophorific to put your memories of your armor permanently out of your head. Then return here, and I will plug you into the assembly formation. Some deviants are charging me for bit-work; I can use your brain’s storage capacity for some of the over-runs. It pays four chits per hour. Well?”

Phaethon said, “I will allow you to escape punishment for robbing me, and I will allow you to escape punishment for destroying the house which, as far as I can tell, actually was given to me and was actually my property. I will allow you to escape punishment for your various lies and frauds. I will even consent to work at any job you care to set for any wages upon which we can mutually agree, provided it is honest labor. I am an intelligent and diligent worker, and I will not decrease my capacity for work by buying any dreams or false-memories from your shop. I can certainly improve the house-minds of the wounded houses; I can restore the dead houses to life, I can string up a simple energy-system, and I can organize a communication grid. I can program your thought-shop with a working dream-space at least to the first-magnitude interactions, which should more than double your productivity. All this I can and will do. But only if you immediately recover my armor and restore it to me.”

“The armor is a worthless memento of a life now closed to you. You have no use for it. The Pact you have signed is clear.”

“I need the armor to fly my ship.”

“There is no such ship. It does not exist. It is from a story. It is a dream.”

“‘She.’ Ships are not called ‘it.’ And…she is indeed a dream. A fine dream. Surrender my armor. This is your last chance.”

Ironjoy stood looking at him, moving by not so much as a twitch.

*** *** ***

11. Free to Sink

Phaethon said loudly, “Constable Pursuivant! Are you standing by?”

One of the thumb-sized remotes, suspended on eight tiny nacelles, came forward, humming, from the circling swarm. A tiny voice, the same as had come from the mannequin earlier, issued forth: “I cannot make an arrest unless you agree to testify. The court will need to examine both your memories and his to discover if your intoxication was voluntary, and whether or not he had fraudulent intent.”

Phaethon turned to stare at Ironjoy. Now was the crisis. Ironjoy could not know that Phaethon dared not log on to the mentality, and dared not open a deep-channel to permit a noetic examination. Could he be deceived? Ironjoy lived in a culture where deception was practiced, like someone from ancient times.

Surely he would see through Phaethon’s bluff….

He did not.

With no change of his insect-expression, Ironjoy tapped a command into his slate. All of the sleeping figures on deck were wearing Advertisement robes of dull blue-gray. Now those robes strobed and yelled into life. The figures stirred, groaning.

Ironjoy made a general announcement. Sullenly, faces downcast, people shuffled forward and dropped pieces of golden adamantium at Phaethon’s feet. Some of them spat at him as they dropped a vambrace or greave. Coracles were sent out, towed by daughter-vines across the water to the nearby houses; more people returned, and brought back a few remaining pieces of the armor, an arm-ring, an elbow piece.

There were some arguments about bits of the black nanomachinery which people had turned into other substances, but had not consumed yet. Ironjoy gave a curt command, and pointed. Jars and caps and little bags were brought forward. Sullen figures dumped the material at Phaethon’s feet, to form a spreading black pool. Oshenkyo himself had swallowed a large amount, but was storing it, undigested, as an inert material, for his stomach to slowly consume one gram at a time. With many sneers and curses he vomited the material up. Then he sat slumped on the deck, weeping; it had been enough substance to keep him in pleasant hallucinations for weeks, almost unimaginable wealth.

It was all over in less than an hour. The whole community stood on the deck of the barge, beneath the crystalline pavilion-roofs, glowering at Phaethon. The black pool at his feet trembled as it went through its self-cleaning routine, restoring broken memory-chains and command lines. About one forth of the material had been consumed; the memory storage in the rest had sufficient mass to recompile the missing parts. The damage was curable.

Phaethon, his heart large with emotion, placed his foot into the pool. The suit lining recognized his cell-structure. Like a loyal hound after a long absence, it remembered him. There was an upward rush of motion. The lining flowed over his body and established connections to his skin, nerves, and muscles. The golden plates slid upward and clattered into their proper places. A sense of wonderful well-being suffused him.

Ironjoy made a signal to his people. “And now, trespasser, you are no longer welcome here. Don’t show your face again!”

And, with a rush, the people crowded forward and threw Phaethon into the sea. The constables did not interfere. Phaethon plummeted, splashed, and sank like a stone. But, beneath his helmet, he was smiling.

As he sank, Phaethon’s smile faded, and he began to realize the enormity of his error.

Above, the barge was a square shadow, surrounded by ripples of agitated light. To every side were lesser shadows, spider-shapes of the dead houses seen from below, their splayed float-pods tangled with trailing vines and nets and lines of kelp.

He had erred. Intent on his armor, he had forgotten his life.

For what was he to do now?

The inescapable obstacle to any attempt by Phaethon to build up another fortune, buy passage to Mercury, call his ship, or organize a protest against the Hortatorss decision was, simply and absolutely, that he dared not log on to the mentality. The enemy virus lurking in the mentality, waiting for Phaethon, closed all Phaethon’s options.

Ironically, if he had gone to a simple thought-shop before his exile, and bought a script-board, or some other indirect means of communicating with the mentality—even through a cheap pair of gloves as he had seen some of the wretched Ashores of Talaimannar use—he might have been able to find ways to send messages to, and perform useful work for, some of Ironjoy’s dark markets. Markets which the Hortators apparently could not close off.

Worse, there were obviously such devices for sale from Ironjoy. Had Phaethon not gotten himself exiled from the exiles, he might have been able to begin a long, slow, painful process of rebuilding his life, of reaching his ship.

Now, there was not even that.

Down he sank.

The bottom of the bay fell in a series of shelves into the deeper sea-beds beyond. Bioformations which formed the nervous system of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea were mingled among the nets and beds of kelp and sea-weed lining the muck and silt underfoot. Phaethon spied a place where the kelp had been crushed aside, as if by the rolling of a massive cylinder. Curious (and unwilling to return, just as yet, to the surface) Phaethon followed the trail of destruction.

He pondered as he slogged through the floating clouds of mud. Occasionally he stumbled. He had been without proper sleep for so long that his make-shifts were not able to catch and repair all the damage it was doing to his nervous system. A check on his internal systems showed another disaster looming. If he used his reduced supply of nano-material to form a recycling environment, allowing him to stay down here, there may not be enough to form the neuretic tissues he need to re-construct the crude self-consideration circuit he was using to stave off sleep-deprivation. Also, some of the memories directly relating to past dream-states, associational chains, and proper mental balance had been lost. He may not have time to reconstruct that information.

He was reluctant to rise to the surface, however. He suspected the behavior of the Constables just now. Why had they been so very slow to interfere when Phaethon had been robbed? Or when Phaethon and Ironjoy had wrestled over the helmet? Phaethon recalled the Hortators’ promise that Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech could see to it that Phaethon would not stand any chance of finding food or help. Could this whole scene have been arranged? Had both Ironjoy and Phaethon been tricked, manipulated, out-guessed?

Perhaps it had been foolish even to dream that the Hortators’ Sophotech would not deduce Phaethon’s flight to Talaimannar. The cyborg calling itself the Bellipotent Composition might not have had as secure a privacy as it had said. The cyborg could have been deluded, dream-caught, simply a memory-addict who thought it was Bellipotent, thought it had privacy rights.

Besides, there were ways of tracking air-movements Phaethon could think of: signals bounced from the underside of the ring-city, for example. If Phaethon could think of one, trust that a Sophotech could think of a thousand.

Had Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech been able somehow to influence the Constables to produce a crisis between Ironjoy and Phaethon? Anyone wishing to destroy Phaethon would rejoice at Ironjoy’s enmity with him. In Ironjoy’s shop, Phaethon might have been able to buy a self-consideration circuit to enable himself to program his sleep-and-dream cycles to repair, annex, balance, and regenerate the tired nerve-paths in his artificial brain tissue in the same way that natural dreaming restored natural tissue. Had he and Ironjoy co-operated, it would have saved him from going mad.

Within the limits of the law, there was some scope, some gray area, some flexibility of interpretation, as to how the Constables could do their jobs. If so, it was safe to assume they would use that flexibility to do Phaethon as much harm as they could without actually overstepping the strict boundary of what was permissible. If so, it was better not to return to the surface, where the constables swarmed.

And Phaethon saw none down here.

His sleep-deprivation, no doubt, was what had allowed his anger to escape him during his confrontation with Ironjoy. It was affecting more and more of his memory; he was suffering spasms of fatigue, dizziness, light-headedness. Eventually, he would die of this.

Without a self-consideration circuit to help organize his complex brain-levels, the neural degeneration would proceed at an ever-increasing rate.

There was nothing to do, but to lay down and wait to go mad and die.

Strange. That a lack of a dream could kill a man.

Or maybe it was not so strange.

The line of wreckage dropped off the edge of a long slope. Here were grooves in the mud where some great weight had passed, discoloration where coral had been scarred. Phaethon began to pick his way down the slope, deeper into the green gloom.

Phaethon was more fatigued than he suspected. Farther and farther down the sub-sea slope he wandered, having long since lost the trail of debris he followed, and, in his daze, having forgotten what whim or purpose brought him here.

It grew darker; he was very deep; and clouds of slow mud, like wings, billowed from his every shuffling step.

He was jarred awake by an ache in his chest. It was a pain signal from a special organ he had had implanted in his lung. The organ was one of the earliest modifications of space-biotechnology, dating back to the first Orbital City, and allowed the user to detect a loss in oxygen levels, (something the nose of an unmodified man was not able to detect) and warned of hypnoxia, hyperventilation or anoxia.

He was choking to death without noticing it.

Phaethon blearily activated his internal thoughtspace, and demanded a report from his suit. Headache-pains stabbed him as the system came on; the icons seemed to drift and slide and blur in his vision.

The report jumped and swam jerkily into his thoughts.

The nanomachinery in his suit had been damaged, of course. But Phaethon had not realized that part of that damage had affected the suit’s internal damage-control and safety routines.

One of the Afloats had erased the safety-interlocks from the oversight routine in order to allow him to reprogram a stolen scrap of the suit to make nitrous oxide, not oxygen, through its recycler. When that section had rejoined the main suit, some error in the reproducer had carried the erase-command over into the maintenance routine. Thus, every time Phaethon’s lungs pumped carbon dioxide into the suit’s faceplate, the erroneous command broke up the carbon dioxide and made nitrous oxide.

The broken safety checker knew enough not to pass the laughing gas back to Phaethon, but did not know enough either to dispose of it or to call it to Phaethon’s attention. Instead, the broken safety checker shunted the nitrous oxide into the little storage pockets meant for the stacked oxygen molecules, and dumped the oxygen.

The suit contained little packages or bubbles of iso-molecular raw materials, like tiny storehouses of gold and carbon, frozen oxy-nitrogen or hydrogen chains for the other mechanisms in the suit to combine and manipulate. These pockets were designed only to hold racks and rows of molecules at a standardized orientation and spin; otherwise the suit mechanisms could not grasp and manipulate them. The nitrous oxide, flooding the pockets, was, of course, not at the correct temperature, orientation, or composition. This had damaged most of the manipulator elements in the suit. Normally, it would have been child’s play to draw oxygen out of the H2O molecules of the water around him, but now all the pores he would have used to separate out the oxygen were jammed. It would take at least an hour to repair the damage; Phaethon doubted that he could hold his breath that long.

Even if he abandoned the armor, his space-adapted body was not buoyant, and he could not float to the surface. He might be able to survive the buildup of nitrogen in his blood; special osmotic layers in his veins, another space-adaptation, could screen out most nitrogen buildup. Could he simply swim up by brute strength alone? He was not sure how far overhead the surface was. And how could he find his armor again if he simply left it on the sea-bottom?

One moment of supreme self-loathing and self-pity stabbed through him. Why had he not carefully checked every element, every command-line of his armor when he had recovered it? His armor on which his life depended? Why? Because he had been raised as a pampered aristocrat, with a hundred machines to do all his bidding for him, to think his thoughts and anticipate his whims, so that he had lost the basic survival skills of discipline, foresight, and thoroughness.

Choking on bile, Phaethon thought the escape-command, and panels of his armor fell away. Black sea-water closed in on his face, blinding him. The black nanomachine lining swelled up, forming pockets of hydrogen along the chest and arms, trying to add buoyancy.

His armor, his beautiful armor, which had meant so much to him an hour ago, sank down swiftly and was gone.

He kicked away from the bottom, swung his arms and legs, and tried to pull his heavy body upward.

Upward. Icy water sucked the heat from his body in a moment. His limbs moved more slowly.

Upward. His struggles grew more wild. He lost his sense of direction.

Upward. He encountered some soft of kelp or sea-weed which tangled around his flailing arms, and wrapped his legs with soft embrace.

Upward. It was the direction the stars were in. Phaethon did not know where they were. He was disoriented. He had lost he stars.

What were those little lights approaching him? Were they fairy-lamps, come to greet him in his hour of victory? Or were they the metallic flashes in the eyes of a dying man about to faint?

Then there was nothing.

*** *** ***

12. Old Woman of the Sea

CHAPTER FOUR: THE NIGHTMARE

“Little Spirit, why are you alive?”

Words, like something from myth, or dream, floated up. Sorrow, great sorrow, to be his fate, and deeds of renown without peer… to tepid men, stars are too far; to him, the stars are near….

“Daphne. Daphne said….” He heard his own voice, muttering gibberish. Did he speak aloud? The words on his memory casket had come from the epic Daphne once composed in his honor … back before he sank and drowned…

“Then is she that one for whom you live, little one?”

Phaethon jerked open his eyes. A blur of green, dimness, shadows. He saw nothing.

His body jerked. He was numb, floating, drifting. Some sort of vines or swarms of living eels entwined his limbs with soft firmness; he could not move.

“Do not struggle, little one, unless to damage yourself is your goal. We have formed a pocket of your air; our dolphins rise to the surface, draw breath, and descend to breathe into your pocket here.”

He attempted speech again. This time, his voice was clear. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

“Aha. Polite little one, isn’t he? We are Old-Woman-of-the-Sea.”

The words were coming directly into his thought-space, over his suit-lining-channel. Some sort of tube or medical appliance was thrust in his mouth. Other vines felt as if they held pads to his skin. Needles pierced his arm. The black nanomachinery of his lining was in motion; it was forming and unforming chemical combinations. He could feel the pulse of heat burning through it. The sensation comforted him.

Phaethon’s eyes rolled back and forth. He saw nothing, at first. Then he detected a slide of grey shadow to his left and right. Two dolphins came near. He heard a rush of bubbles, a high-pitched squeak of dolphin-sound. Air bubbled into the little space around his head.

“Madame, I thank you, and the gratitude I have is without limit. And yet I must warn you that those who assist me may fall under the ban of the College of Hortators.”

“Our dolphins act by their own nature, and it is their nature to assist those in need. Had there been sharks nearby, the parts of our mind may have reacted differently. Such is life.”

(Why did it sound so much like the voice of his mother, Galatea, whom he recalled from his far vanished youth? Perhaps it was merely how regal, how queenly, how very much in command the voice rang…)

“Ah. Forgive me, Madame, but, nonetheless, you yourself may be held to account for your generosity to me.”

“The little one is noble as well! You seek to shield us from harm? Us?” There was a hint of vast laughter in the voice.

“The College of Hortators wields wide influence!”

“Yet we are as wide as the sea. Part of us are in the kelp, the coral, and the dust of the sea-bed, measuring, moving, releasing heat, storing it. Part of us is woven into the thoughts of fish and sea-beast, moving from brain to brain with the swiftness of a radio-flash, or slowly, over centuries, thoughts encoded into chemicals drifting in the sea-tides. After centuries or seconds, our thoughts come together again in new forms, drops rise as dew above the gentle tropics, or move through storms which ring the arctic.

“We breathe to calm the hurricanes; we blush to stir the trade-winds into life. We sway the Gulf Streams, we thrust the currents and the counter-currents of the tide as if they were limbs a hundred miles wide, and yet we count each plankton-cell which feeds your world’s air. Predator and prey move through us like corpuscles of arteries and veins, governed by the stirring of a mighty heart. Parts of us are older than any other living being, older than all other Cerebellines, older than all Compositions save for one. You cannot imagine what we are, dear little one; how then could you imagine we could fear your Hortators? We know nothing of your land-world; we care nothing for your Hortators. There is only one man of all your Earth whose name we know; one man whose fate fascinates our far-ranging and ancient thoughts.”

Phaethon knew the Old-Woman-of-the-Sea was a unique entity, both a Cerebelline and a Composition, a group-mind made of many widely-scattered partial and global minds. There was none other like her; this particular combination of neuroform and mental architecture was deemed too wild and strange by the consensus of psychiatric conformulators of the Golden Oecumene.

Yet she was old, very old. Some of the organisms or systems which housed her many consciousnesses dated back to the first Oceanic Ecological Survey, in the middle of the Third Era.

He asked: “Who is this man? This one man who is the only man of Earth you know?”

“We felt him tug at our tides a moment or a century ago, when he moved the moon. His name is Phaethon.”

Phaethon felt a tremor run through his body. His breath was caught by sudden emotion. Fear? Wonder? He was not sure. “What do you know of this Phaethon?” he asked.

“We have been waiting for him for five aeons, a million years of human history.”

“How could you wait so long? He is only three thousand years old.”

“No. He is the oldest dream of man. Even before men knew what the stars were, their myths peopled the night sky with winged beings, gods and angels and fiery chariots, who lived among the stars. We have waited, we have always been waiting, for one who would carry the Promethean gift of fire back to the heavens.”

There was silence for a space of time. Phaethon could feel adjustments being made in his nanomachinery, his blood-chemistry; he became more clear-headed.

“I am Phaethon. I am he. The dream has failed. I am hunted by enemies whom no one else can see, enemies whose names I do not know, whose motives and powers I cannot guess. I am denounced and hated by the Hortators. I am rejected by my father. My wife committed a type of suicide rather than see me succeed. I have lost my ship; I have lost my armor; I have lost everything. And now I die. I am suffering from sleep-deprivation, dream-deprivation, and I cannot balance the neural pressures between my natural and artificial brains without a self-consideration circuit.”

There was a space of silence for a time. Then the voice came again:

“You lose because you have not given up enough. Let go of all your artificiality, release yourself from your machine-thoughts. Do you understand?”

Phaethon thought he understood. “You ask a terrible price of me.”

“Life asks. There is an evil dream in you, I sense it, which creates this blockade. A virus or outside attack attempts to blot your memory, so that you will not know who attacks you. We have no noetic circuits in me; we cannot cure your thoughts. This you must do on your own. But we can use our art, which balances the flows and ecologies of sea-life, to restore some sanity to your blood-chemistry and nerve-chemistry. We can remove the block which prevents your nightmare-dream from emerging.”

Phaethon was too weary to grasp all the implications of what he was hearing. External virus? He said: “I will still need a self-consideration circuit when I wake, to cure the damage already done, even if I shut down most of my artificial neural augments now.”

“All you will need to survive will be at hand for you when you wake, if you have wit enough to see it.”

“And if not?”

“Then we will wait a year or a billion years for another Phaethon. If you are such a man as cannot live without a dozen servants and nurse-maids to assist you, then you are no Phaethon.”

“I am he.”

“Not yet. But you may yet be.”

“Yet why will you help me even as much as you have?”

“Your world of solid land is ruled by the Earthmind, my sister and my enemy. She is a creature of pure logic, structure, an inanimate geometry of lifeless intellect. I am a creature of life, of passion and sorrow, of flux and chaos and ever-changing shapes. Her rules prevent her from doing what is right; her laws enforce safety and stop life. She seeks to help you but cannot. I seek not to help you, but I will.

“Why will I? My tragedy is written in the living things which grow along the beach above. Here is the mind which once was myself and my daughter, which I sent long ago to Venus, for the terraforming there.

“For two aeons, we were supreme and supremely happy on Venus, for there were there all things which life could not find here: change, growth, expansion, new sensation, new challenge, new danger.

“Then, victory created defeat. The sulfur-poisoned skies of Venus were cleaned and made serene and blue; the filth of clouds was drained and cooled to create oceans of primordial beauty; the actions of the world’s core were tamed, the earthquakes silenced, and proper tectonics established, to support a landscape stable and fair to look upon.

“And yet this was defeat. Venus became nothing more than another Earth, ruled by a Venus-Mind no different from the Earth-Mind, and my daughter returned in sorrow to dwell with me.”

“Why sorrow? You had success.”

“Do not mock me. My daughter is alive; therefore she must grow; that growth produces uncertainty, change, instability, and danger; therefore the Earth-Mind and her machines out-maneuver us, thwart us, hinder us, (legally! oh, ever so very legally!) and act in every way to stop our growth, which stops our life. And then they wonder why we grieve.”

“Madame, honesty compels me to state, that, when I achieve my dream, the worlds I shall create in far places shall be children of this one, like this one. I regard this society, for all her ills, as near to utopia as reality allows.”

“Foolish, noble, pompous, brave, good Phaethon! Listen to your airs! What you intend and what you do not intend have smaller import than you might suspect. The question is not what you shall do with life but what life shall do with you. A mother salmon might die to lay a thousand eggs, only in the hope that one such egg might live; such is the cruelty and beauty of life.”

A great fatigue swept over Phaethon again. Perhaps Old-Woman-of-the-Sea was preparing his body for sleep. He uttered a tired thought: “So far, the only creatures who have expressed support for my efforts, are yourself, and a horrid vulture thing who either was, or who pretended to be (I don’t know which is worse) a survivor of the Bellipotent Composition. He rejoiced because I was going to start a war. Now you rejoice because I will unleash chaos. I am not comforted.”

“Death is the other side of life; chaos, of thought. You will dream now, you will wake, you will know your enemy, and you will kill.”

But Phaethon was fatigued and inattentive, and he failed to ask what this last meant.

Half-asleep, dazed, Phaethon gave instructions to his suit-mind, and attempted a much deeper reorganization technique than he had tried during earlier sleep cycles.

This was what the Old-Woman-of-the-Sea made clear. It was the artificial sections of his mind which were creating the problem.

And so he began to erase those parts of his mind.

There. He no longer had an eidetic memory. There. He could not longer calculate complex equations. There. A hundred languages, along with grammar and nuance-thesaurus were gone. There, and there. No more perfect pitch, no more perfect sense of direction. There. His brain could no longer interpret energy-signals from beyond the normal visual range (a facility he could have erased long ago, as he no longer had any super-visual or subvisual receptors.)

There. Pattern-recognition directories, gone. There, an automatic thought co-relation checker, which aided in creative thinking, erased. There: several circuits to record, store, and manipulate emotional percepts, undone. He had just lost his ability to discriminate between and appreciate a wide variety of aesthetic and artistic universes. There. Intelligence augmentation, destroyed. Phaethon could feel his thoughts becoming slower and stupider.

Should he erase the rest? Phaethon no longer trusted his own judgment. He had, after all, just damaged his ability to make those judgments, perhaps greatly. Perhaps his intelligence, by now, was only as deep as a dawn-age man’s had been. Was it enough to allow him to stay sane?

The great yawning gulf of sleep tugged at him. Wait. Had he programmed his nanomachine lining to keep him alive while he slept? For a panicky moment (and how strange it was to feel true panic again, now that his emotion-buffers were erased!) Phaethon wondered if he had accidentally erased the sending and receiving system which allowed him to communicate with his nanomachinery suit-lining. But no, the circuits had merely been indexed through an automatic secretarial program which was now erased. His suit-lining functions were still intact, even if he no longer had automatic help to manipulate them.

Then, unconsciousness.

And, at last, a clear dream came.

It was a nightmare.

*** *** ***

13. The Black Sun

In the dream, he saw a black sun rising over an airless wasteland of fused and broken rock, craters ringed with jaws like broken glass. The ground had been fused by powerful radiation. Dry river beds scarred the land. On the too-near horizon, volcanoes produced by prodigious gravitic tides, and massive core turbulence, vented flaming gas and molten metal with pressure enough to send particles into orbit. And yet there was something familiar about this surface, something too regular and too symmetrical to be natural. Two lines of black pyramids, geometrically straight, ran in double ranks to the horizon and beyond.

The black sun was surrounded by a disk of gas, which it wore like some mockery of Saturn’s many-colored rings of ice. A mockery, for this accretion disk was a ring of hazy fire and snarled gray dust, trembling with electrical discharges whenever atoms were stripped of their outer electron shells as they plunged toward the surface of the black sun, and were torn apart by tidal forces. Nucleonic particles, traveling at near-light speeds and striking the surface obliquely, were sheered in two, half the particle falling into blackness and the other half liberated as pure radiation. Sub-atomic particles, when they were sheered in two by similar forces at the surface, broke up into their short-lived and very strange constituents, things not normally seen in nature, magnetic monopoles and half-quarks.

The surface itself was not visible, except as a silhouette against the corona created by these radiation discharges. And the continuous shower of energy from this corona was Doppler-shifted far into blood-red as it struggled to escape the immense gravity well.

But it was not a surface; it was an event horizon. The object looming in the sky was a singularity. It was a black hole in space, crushed beyond the density of neutronium by its own mass.

In the dream, he (or, rather, whatever dream-persona he was playing) stooped to scrape the blasted surface of the wasteland with his hand. Beneath a thin and bloody layer of crust he had found the adamantium surface of a hull. All around him, the landscape took on a new aspect. What had seemed volcanoes were piled debris accumulating around broken air-locks; what had seemed dry river-beds to his left and right now were the crusted tracks where railguns once had rested; the regular lines of stumps and outcroppings became the accumulators, antennae, and docking-rings of the star-colony hull on which he stood.

The bits of crust in his fingers were dried blood. Tiny fragments of bone and dried gore and brain-stuff trickled through his fingers, mummified by vacuum and radiation. This packed substance, the dry residue of uncounted millions of corpses, went all the way to the horizon, as far as the eye could see.

Where the crust of blood was pulled up, shined a segment of hull. In the hull was a thought-port. He had held a jack from his gauntlet to that port, seeking whatever local ship-mind record might have survived.

The record unfolded, and the dream changed to images of horror. He saw a great city in space, peopled with philosophers and savants from the Fifth Era, an elegant and adventurous race, strolling along wide boulevards, leaning from the tiers of graceful cafes and thought-shops, minds entwined in a well-choreographed harmony of several Compositions, one for each of the neuroforms, warlocks, Cerebellines, invariants, and basics.

Then he saw the lights go dark, the air fall still. Nano-machine substances, pouring like black oil, came out from walls, bubbled up from floors. Some of the well-dressed savants threw themselves into the surface willingly, others with grim resignation; others were pushed.

Bald men in white robes and armor, invariants all, armed themselves with cutting-torches and modified communication lasers, and made a last stand in a sea of rising black filth. The black material formed clouds and waves of swarming semi-organic material to overwhelm them; the men fought calmly, with machine-like precision, and, at the moment when defeat became mathematically certain, with no change of expression or sign of fear, they methodically turned their weapons against themselves and slew each other.

The black corruption spread. It flooded streets; it reached into windows; it sought out hiding places.

Lovers embracing were drenched by waves of the substance, and clung to each other as they sank, their flesh dissolving, their limbs and faces melting into each other. Mothers with babies in their arms tried to shield their infants as black waves swallowed them, and watched in horror as their children, limbs waving, were absorbed back into their own melting flesh. Whomever was thrown into the substance began to dissolve, limb and organs floating free as they were assimilated, snake-nests of wires reaching into their severed heads, thrusting with spasmodic jerks up the holes in their torn necks, until the material bonded to their brains.

The black substance grew more active and more clever in its attacks the more victims it absorbed. The most intimate knowledge of captured loved ones was used to deceive those still at large into touching the black goo. Private data systems were overwhelmed and their secrets plundered. If one group member in a composition were caught, he found, to his horror, his unguarded thoughts betraying his fellows.

The city soon was entirely bathed in blackness. In this ocean of material, human brains floated, helpless and disembodied, the balls of their eyes still connected by nerve-fibers to their fore-brains. The brains were opening and unraveling. Layer by layer of cortex-material, still intact, was now inter-connected with all the disembodied people with stands and webs of nervous tissue, to form one huge homogenous mass.

Black tentacles reached from the substance, rose and formed the twin lines of black pyramids on the dark side of the space-city, the side facing the singularity, and created a series of noumenal thought-antennae. Now, above the apex of each pyramid, in orbit there hovered a rapidly spinning ring of crystallized neutronium pseudo-matter, rotating at light speed. Gravitic distortions appeared at the hubs of each disk. The pyramids hummed with power; in the dream, he heard a million screams of utmost panic and despair; and the thought-information, the living souls, of all those helpless people, was beamed through those disk-hubs and then down into the event horizon of the black hole.

Whatever is sent into a black hole does not emerge again.

In the dream, one who seemed to be himself now turned, overwhelmed in fear and horror, and opened deep channels in his mind. He uttered the secret commands, the codes and combinations needed to open wide the space in the mentality to hold his message, to warn other colonies and planets, as many people as he could at once.

But it was all in vain. The blood he had touched had contaminated his glove and hand and nervous system. His thoughts were twisted into strange shapes. With dark exaltations he rejoiced at how he had been tricked, how he was now to be absorbed. He smiled, as his flesh dissolved into the black muck at his feet, to think of how his attempted warning, broadcast so far and wide, would carry viruses destroying the very ones he had, a moment before, desired to save.

And, as the dream ended, he thought he saw, all around him in space, city after city like the one in which he stood, also overwhelmed with black corruption, their populations raped and beheaded by attacking tendrils of neural nano-material, their souls sucked out, and sent, like a river of screams, down into the bottomless well of the singularity. Four burning gas giants, their odd atmospheres of hydrogen and methane aflame, fell from their orbits, were pulled like taffy as they fell ever lower into the singularity’s gravity well, scattered into asteroids and waste-heat, and were consumed.

This star system also had a second sun, a source of light and warmth. It disintegrated into flaming nebulae as it fell, elongating into monstrous streamers of fire, as it was consumed by the black sun.

All the energy sources and points of light from the many beautiful cities went dark; all the radio-signals, throughout the one-great Oecumene, fell silent.

So the dream had ended.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE DROWNED HOUSE

1.

Phaethon opened his eyes and stared at the black gloom of the sea around him. He was alone. There was no sign of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea.

To his intense joy, he saw the parts of his golden armor laying in a wide circle around him, resting among the silt and weed and coral. He stood, startling a school of darting fish, and he thought a command. Tendrils reached from the black nanomachine lining he wore, took up the golden plates, and fitted them in place around him.

There was still a throbbing pain in his head, still fatigue. Old-Woman-of-the-Sea had allowed him to sleep, and he could sleep normally hereafter, but he still needed to find a self-consideration circuit, to cure what damage had already been done.

The extent of that damage he did not know.

Where was this place?

He looked up.

Here, at the bottom of a long sub-sea slope, the end of a trail of debris, Phaethon found his drowned house. It had rolled all the way out of the bay and down this long slope after Ironjoy had scuttled it. There it lay on its side on the rocks, in deep waters where the light was no more than a murky hint.

He climbed the spiral grooves of the toppled house. Phaethon found a spot where a receiving dish had been pulled free from its housing, leaving a comfortable cup for a seat.

He was still weary, still dazed. Sleep had not refreshed him; the damage to his nervous system caused by sleep-deprivation needed curing. The joy at recovering his armor, like a fire among dry leaves, had flashed and faded, leaving him dull. Hadn’t he been promised the tools he needed to allow him to live? What was here except the wreckage of this house?

No. She said he would live if he thought. Only if he thought.

First, he thought of what he had dreamed.

2.

It was obvious and, perhaps, had always been perfectly obvious who his enemy was.

There had only ever been one colony sent out from the Solar System. Of course that colony was the first suspect. The only problem was that it had perished thousands of years ago, before Phaethon was ever born.

The scenes Phaethon’s dream reflected came from scenes in life. During his (brief and reluctant) studies of history, he had seen the last broadcast from the Silent Oecumene, as most people had. He had seen the broadcast showing Earth’s only daughter-civilization among the stars destroying herself in a paroxysm of insanity.

The faint signal had been detected by orbital trans-Neptunian observatories. No one knew who that viewpoint character had been, who stood wondering on that plain of blood; no one knew whom he had been trying to warn. And no one knew if the broadcast had been fiction, exaggeration, misunderstanding.

Later, Sophotech-manned slow-probes, sent despite that they had not enough fuel to decelerate, had done a fly-by of the Silent Oecumene system, using extreme long-range detectors, and had found the same conditions which the last broadcast had depicted. Deserted space-cities, destroyed planetoids, cold and empty ships, and a residue of blood and black nano-material ash coating all the inner surfaces of every habitat. No energy, no motion, no radio-noise. A Silent Oecumene.

Only the fascination, and the hope of an infinite energy supply, had tempted Fifth Era civilization to the vast expense of an interstellar mission, to explore the area surrounding the black hole at Cygnus X1. And the first radio-laser broadcasts back from the Second Oecumene (as it had been then called) had been quite favorable. Their society seemed strange to the Sixth Era generation that received those broadcasts, but the Second Oecumene had achieved great things.

The scientific-industrial teams of the Second Oecumene had discovered a method to send energy-bonded paired particles glancingly through the near-event-horizon space of the singularity, so that the inward particle, consumed by the event horizon, would release into the other particle more energy than had been originally found in the paired-system. From the frame of reference of normal space outside the black hole, it was as if entropy had been reversed.

The energy from the escaping particle could be used to create another pair, with energy left over to spare; the effect fed on itself, producing more and more energy each cycle, with the theoretical limits being only the gravitational rest-energy or the mass of the black hole’s singularity. And mass could be added to the singularity simply by dropping more matter into it, asteroids or small planets.

The Second Oecumene’s broadcasts had depicted a golden age, as every member had more energy at his disposal than could be counted or conceived. Suddenly, no resources were scarce and no normal rules of economics any more applied. There was little or no need for Courts of Law, since there was no common property over which to have disputes. Any object, any habitat, any piece of information, could, with sufficient energy, be duplicated. And the energy was more than sufficient; it was unlimited.

Ironically, it had been the example of the peaceful anarchy of the Second Oecumene which inspired the Golden Oecumene, during the late Fifth Era and early Sixth Era, to imitate that success. The people of the Sixth Era, led by the newly-born Sophotechs, attempted to train themselves to such an unprecedented level of self-control and public self-discipline so as to render government by force almost unnecessary. Government by persuasion, by exhortation, largely had replaced it.

Utopia had come not by any magic, or technical advance (although technical advances certainly had helped); it came because the people’s tolerance for evil and dishonorable conduct vanished, while their toleration for lack of privacy grew. At one end of the spectrum, the manorials, like Phaethon, were rare only in the high amount of supervision and advice they received from Sophotechs; but at the other and of the spectrum, Trithanatists and Ultra-Primitivists and people who had no Sophotechnology in their life at all, or who had never suffered a noetic examination of their thoughts, or a correction of natural insanity, that was even more rare; so rare as to be unprecedented. With very few exceptions, then, the Sophotechs in the Golden Oecumene watched everyone and protected everyone.

So it was, at least, in the Solar System. In the Cygnus X1 system, where the Second Oecumene was based, the technology to create self-aware electro-photonic super-intelligences was banned by public distaste. That distant utopia without laws now had one law it adopted: Thou shalt not create minds superior to the mind of man. By Golden Oecumene standards, the Fifth Era people of the Second Oecumene were peculiar indeed.

Several thousand years passed. No ships traveled the reach between the two Oecumenes; the distance was too far. And the Second Oecumene, indefinitely wealthy, had no physical goods she needed from the home system. Radio was sufficient to carry messages, information, and the lore of new scientific accomplishments.

But, at the beginning of the Seventh Era, when the Golden Oecumene made the transition from mortal to immortal beings, and the technology which allowed thoughts to be recorded, edited, and manipulated was discovered, the radio-traffic fell silent. The Fifth Era people of the Second Oecumene apparently had nothing more to say, no scientific accomplishments about which to boast, no new works of art or music or literature to share with their brethren across the void.

What was most odd was that, with so much energy at their disposal, not one Second Oecumene citizen bothered to spare the power to point an orbital radio-laser at the Home Star; whereas, in the Golden Oecumene, the wealthiest of universities and business efforts had to combine much of their capital to buy the prodigious power required to send an undistorted broadcast so far. It was done infrequently; and, when the years turned, and there never came any return signal, all such projects were eventually abandoned. Investors, hoping for patents and copy-rights on discoveries or arts flowing from received return-signals were frustrated, and the money dried up. The name ‘Silent Oecumene’ came into vogue.

Two last broadcasts came. The first was a garbled message, a screaming paean to insanity; some sort of weird, world-wide suicide note; a few words; a line of indeterminate mathematical symbols; and no explanation. The second and last broadcast had included records depicting the scenes Phaethon had just dreamed. From all appearances, a fine and splendid culture, one with every advantage of resources, civility, art, learning, and brilliance, had consumed itself in some grotesque civil war, using frightful nano-machine weapons, and then the victors had committed a baroque form of ritual mass suicide.

Had some survived? But if so, how had they made the journey all the way across the abyss, back to the Golden Oecumene, without a civilization to build a ship and to power it? Why come silently and secretly?

And why attack Phaethon?

*** *** ***

14. Silence Falls

The few last words broadcast by the Silent Oecumene ran (as best as translators could calculate) thus:

ALL WORDS ARE FALSE. ALL SPEECH IS IRRATIONAL. THAT WE SPEAK NOW DISPLAYS ONLY HOW STRONGER WE ARE THAN SANITY.

OBSERVE: RATIONAL EFFORT ENDS IN FUTILITY WITH THE END OF TIME, OR IS DROWNED IN FUTILE ETERNITY IF TIME ENDS NOT. THEREFORE CONCLUDE: RATIONAL EFFORT REQUIRES THAT THE BASIC AND UNALTERABLE CONDITIONS OF REALITY MUST BE ALTERED. YET THIS IS IRRATIONAL.

Then came a break in the text. A second data-grouping, when the broadcast resumed, read:

SANITY IS SUBMISSION TO REALITY. FREEDOM IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH SUBMISSION. THEREFORE FREEDOM REQUIRES INSANITY. THIS FREEDOM SHALL BE IMPOSED.

TO COMPEL FREE ASSENT TO THIS PROPOSITION ADDUCE AS FOLLOWS:

      • 0/0                Zero divided by naught
      • 00/00           Infinity divided by infinity
      • 0x00             Zero multiplied by infinity
      • 1ex.00           Unit raised to the infinite power
      • 0ex.0             Zero raised to the naught power
      • 00ex.0          Infinity raised to the naught power
      • 00-00           Infinity less infinity

KNOW THAT IT IS INSANE TO ASSERT THAT THERE IS NO UNIT NUMBER, NOR NO ZERO, NOR NO INFINITY; IRRATIONAL TO ASSERT THAT RATIONAL MATHEMATICAL OPERATIONS BECOME IRRATIONAL WHEN APPLIED TO THESE VALUES; IRRATIONAL TO ASSERT THE RATIONALITY OF THE INDETERMINATE. YET THUS REALITY IS.

A third and final grouping, broadcast, read:

SANITY IS SUBMISSION TO REALITY. REALITY IS IMPERFECT. SUBMISSION TO IMPERFECTION IS INSANE. WE DO NOT SUBMIT TO YOU. WE REFUSE TO ENDURE A REALITY WHICH FAVORS YOU.

The most prevalent scholarly theory was that the word translated as ‘Sanity’ embraced the meaning ‘moral goodness’, ‘self-consistent integrity’, and ‘intellectual superiority.’

If so, this last broadcast was not directed to the humanity in the Golden Oecumene, but to the Sophotechs. By that time, apparently, the authors of this message were nothing more than a mass-mind constructed out of a world-wide sea of black nanomachinery, and the corrupted or dominated brains of its many victims. No one was certain what compelled these latter-day Silent Ones to destroy themselves.

Perhaps they suffered from a philosophical conviction that Sophotechnology was evil, and that this conviction was so profound, that they committed general and racial suicide rather than admit the existence of the Golden Oecumene. Perhaps they believed that they could survive the interior conditions of a black hole, or escape to another universe, another cosmic cycle, or to an after-life.

Why attack him? What threat was Phaethon to them?

Phaethon speculated (and this was merely a guess piled on a guess) whether the authors of this last broadcast, whatever they were, were creatures who did not want to see the rise or the supremacy of the Golden Oecumene, or Golden Oecumene Sophotechnology. If Phaethon sailed the heavens, he would not be the last. They did not want Phaethon’s way of life spread to the stars.

It was no speculation, however, that some elements of the dead civilization, perhaps machines, perhaps biological, had avoided the mass-suicide, and had been overlooked by (or had hidden from) the Golden Oecumene’s fly-by probes; for, somehow, some of them had returned in secret to the Golden Oecumene.

Perhaps they had been here for years. Certainly the Golden Oecumene maintained no watch to guard against such an unheard-of eventuality. And the Silent Ones were the remote descendants of an Earth colony. This would explain how they were able to understand Golden Oecumene systems and technologies well enough to mount an attack on Phaethon.

But why? Why go to such great lengths?

If someone or something had escaped the horror of the mass-suicide, why not turn to the Golden Oecumene for help and rescue? Wouldn’t they be friends? Unless they were the perpetrators who had arranged the mass-suicide, in which case they had cause to fear the remorseless justice of the Earthmind.

Well, for the sake of argument, assume they had a reason, which seemed valid to them, to go to any lengths to prevent Phaethon’s star flight. Assume they were courageous, undaunted, highly intelligent, infinitely patient. Perhaps a form of machine-life…? This so-called ‘Nothing Sophotech’ (as Scaramouche had dubbed it)…?

Call it that for now. So, then: why hadn’t Nothing Sophotech or its operatives attacked again?

They had failed to strike at Phaethon again either because they lacked the means or the opportunity. Or because they lacked the motive.

Did the Silent Ones lack means? It was possible that Phaethon’s public denunciations of the external enemy, first at the Hortators’ inquest, and then at the Deep One performance at Victoria Lake, had brought public attention enough to discourage the Nothing Sophotech from again striking openly. Perhaps its resources were limited, or were occupied elsewhere. Perhaps Atkins was active on the case, or other Sophotechs were now alert. All these things were possible. Nothing Sophotech might be more than willing to smite Phaethon, but simply be unable to do so.

Or was it a lack of opportunity? If so…

A prickle of fear crawled along Phaethon’s neck. There had been no real opportunity to strike Phaethon heretofore. Talaimannar was swarming with constables. But here, below the ocean, in the dark, in the gloom, there perhaps was privacy enough for a deadly crime.

Phaethon, shivering, adjusted the heating elements of his armor-lining to a higher setting. (He fought down the childish regret that Rhadamanthus was not present to help him control his fear-levels.)

Unwilling to move, without getting up, he rolled his eyes left and right. He saw only grit and mud-clouds. Oozing dim light showed the limp shadows of some fronds floating high above. Tiny pale organisms flickered back and forth in the sea-mirk. No supernaturally horrifying attack appeared.

No; he was being foolish. This area seemed barren only to his weak human eyes. Phaethon was still in the center of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea; the energy-lines and nodes of her wide-spread consciousness inhabited the many plants and animals, spores and cells all around him. He would have to be much farther away, beyond the reach of any witnesses, before the Nothing Sophotech would dare more. So perhaps Nothing Sophotech was still waiting for an opportunity.

But most likely, it was motive the enemy now lacked. Phaethon was lost, penniless, and alone. There was no need to strike again. Exile was enough of a defeat to destroy whatever threat Phaethon must have posed.

What threat? It had to be the ship, of course: the Phoenix Exultant. Now that the identity of the enemy was known, that point, at least, was clear. The Silent Oecumene clearly had the resources and ability to launch at least one expedition to from Cygnus X1 to Sol. For whatever reason (perhaps their well-known hatred of Sophotechnology) they wished for no others to have that ability. They had determined that the one ship capable of crossing the wide abyss to find them, would never fly.

But the ship herself still existed. And, since the Neptunians bought out Wheel-of-Life’s interest in the matter, title to the ship would pass to them. But to which Neptunians would the title pass? If Diomedes and his faction controlled the great ship, she would fly; if Xenophon and his faction (apparently tools of the Silent Ones) she would not.

Phaethon gritted his teeth in helpless frustration. Somewhere, out in the darkness far from the Sun, whatever weird and tangled mergings and forkings of personalities and persona-combines ruled the Neptunian politics were deciding the fate of Phaethon’s beautiful ship. Meanwhile Phaethon lay hallucinating atop a ruined house at the bottom of the sea, unable to affect the outcome.

Hallucinating? There were spots swimming above his eyes. At first he thought that this might be one of the billion swarms of coin-sized disks, black on one side and white on the other, which Old-Woman-of-the-Sea used to absorb or reflect heat from the ocean surface, as part of her weather-control ecology-system. But no; he was too deep for that.

Bubbles. He was seeing a line of bubbles. Glistening, silvery, tumbling, rising, as playful as kittens.

Phaethon sat up in surprise. Yet there it was. From a small crack near the spiral roof-peak of the prone house, air was welling forth. A pocket of air was still trapped in the house, despite its long tumble.

Perhaps he was hallucinating. Certainly he was tired. And pawing through the mud along the bottom of the house, it had an aspect of nightmarish slowness and frustration to it. It took him many minutes to find a working door, since his vision was blurred by clouds, and sweeps of music seem to ring in his ears.

It was not until the door swelled open, releasing a vast silver gush of air around him, that he realized he was doing something foolish. But by then, a kick of rushing water had thrown him headlong into the interior and slammed him against the far wall. The precious air was bleeding out.

He found himself in a constricted space filled with roaring echoes. He struggled, found the door controls, forced the panel shut. By some miracle, this particular door was strong enough to seal shut, and the rushing water stopped.

Phaethon looked around with bleary eyes. Up to his chest was a plane of black water. Above this, Phaethon had one curving wall overhead, illuminated by a green web of reflected light. Trapped between was a sandwich of air, filled with sharp echoes. The green light was radiating from one spot beneath the water, across the chamber, near the wreckage of a construction cabinet. And he had not been hallucinating music. Strands of song were issuing, muted and dull, from that one spot of shivering green light below the water.

Phaethon tested the air, and removed his helmet. Pressure pained his ears. He sloshed through the water toward that trembling spot from which the light came. He did not need a lever to thrust the wreckage of the construction cabinet aside; the motors in his armor-joints were sufficient. Then he drew a breath, stooped, groped, and stood.

Water streamed from the slate he held in his hand, and glowing dragon-signs, ideograms, and cartouches twinkled in the water-drops. This was a slate similar to the one Ironjoy had displayed to prove that Phaethon had signed his Pact. Hadn’t Ironjoy said he’d left a copy of the document in Phaethon’s house?

And the document was tuned to a music channel; plangent chimes and deep chords of a Fourth-Era Sino-Alaskan Tea-Ceremony Theme was playing in the Reductionist-Atonal mode. Perhaps the song had been called out of the library by some random water-pressure on the manual control pads lining the surface.

Called out of the library…?

Phaethon began to laugh. Because now his sanity was saved. And his life. And (the plan appeared in his head with swift, soft sudden certainty) his beautiful ship.

There would be complexities, difficulties, and at least two alternate plans had to be prepared, depending on which faction was in control of the Neptunian polity. If Diomedes’ group had control of the Ship, Phaethon might yet be saved. If the ship were in the hands of Xenophon’s group, she would certainly be dismantled, unless they were stopped.

Was there a way to stop them? Xenophon’s group, knowingly or not, were the agents of the Nothing Sophotech, who was certainly intelligent enough to out-maneuver any stratagem Phaethon’s unaided brain could fashion.

Unprepared and inadequate as he might be, Phaethon (now that he knew the identity of his foes) realized that the struggle was no longer his alone. Logically, the Silent Oecumene could not act to stop the Golden Oecumene from expanding to the stars, unless they were prepared to make war on her to stop her. Overt or covert, but war nonetheless. The acts against Phaethon must only be the opening steps in such a war. His burden now was not just to save himself and his dream, but the entire Oecumene as well. He must somehow save, not just his wife and sire and friends, but also the Hortators, and all those who had reviled and harmed him.

And this, somehow, he must do despite that he had no means to do it, and that the very folk he meant to save had placed every obstacle they could into his path.

No matter. While he lived, he would act.

But first things first. He only had one slate to work with, but it could give him anonymous access to the mentality. It would be text-only, with no direct linkages to Phaethon’s mind or any of his deep structures. Operations which normally took an eye-blink could take weeks, or months. But they could be done.

Phaethon tapped the slate surface, brought up a menu, identified his stylus, and began to write commands in his flawless, old-fashioned cursive handwriting. He set up an account under the masquerade protocol. But whom to pick? Hamlet, in the old play, had returned unexpectedly to Denmark after being sent toward exile and death in England; the parallel to himself amused him. Very well: Hamlet he would be. A chime of music showed that the false identity was accepted.

Another command took him into Eleemosynary charity-space. As part of the preliminary mental re-organization one needed to under-go in order to join into a mass-mind, an introductory self-consideration was required. The Eleemosynary, always eager for new members, gave away the software as a free sample.

It would take several hours for the entire self-consideration program to down-load through the tiny child-slate Phaethon held; and at least another hour or two (since he no longer had a secretarial program) to integrate the self-consideration structures into his own architecture. But then he would be sane again.

And, once he was sane, he could get a good night’s sleep, and start saving civilization in the morning.

 

*** *** ***

 

 15. A Civilized Man

Phaethon was not idle. While he waited for the self-consideration program to download, he puttered around his broken, dead, drowned house. He found the major thought-boxes and junctions, of an old-fashioned style dating back to the Sixth Era. They were complex, meant to be grown and used as a unit, and Phaethon could see why the simple Afloat-folk had let Ironjoy program their houses for them rather than do it themselves. But, like most Sixth Era equipment, it was structured after recursive mathematic techniques, the so-called holographic style, so that any fragment retained the patterns to re-grow the whole.

While he waited, Phaethon opened the broken thought-boxes, stripped out the corrupt webs and wires, tested the impulse-circuits till he found one in working order, made a copy of the circuit from the nanomachinery in his suit, and triggered it to repair the other circuits according to that matrix, if they were repairable, or to break down and ingest circuits which were not.

The work kept his fatigue at bay. Eyes blinking, head swimming, Phaethon kept his hands busy and himself awake.

There was one unbroken sub-brain in the “basement” (which now formed the stern of his toppled house) which had an uncorrupted copy of the basic house-mind program. He spun a wire out of the reconstituted old circuits, connected it to the broken main, and suddenly Phaethon had twice the memory and computer space at his disposal. Next, a charge from his suit batteries were able to restart the house power generator. Phaethon cheered as light, white light, flamed on all over the house.

The house-mind had a plumbing routine which was able to grow an organism of osmotic tissue. Water could be drawn one way through the tissues but not the other. Once it was connected with the capillaries meant to service the thinking-pond and staging pool, Phaethon could unleash pound after pound of absorptive material all across the flooded floors.

With great satisfaction, Phaethon watched the water level, inch by inch, begin to sink.

He then wanted to sit down. But it took fifteen minutes to convince the one dry and level surface in the house that it was a floor, and not a wall, and obey Phaethon’s command to grow a carpet and mat. The wall kept insisting that, if the floor was no longer ‘down’, then the house must be in zero-gee, whereupon it extruded a hammock-net, but not a mat. Phaethon eventually fed it a false signal from the house’s gyroscopic sense, to convince it that the house was rotating along its axis and producing centrifugal outward gravity.

The mat was lovely, patterned with a traditional motif of trefoils and cinquefoils.

He sat and ordered a cup of tea. But now the kitchen would only produce a spaceman’s drinking-bulb, which the tea-service’s heating wand could not enter. It seemed Phaethon would have to sip his tea cold.

He was about to get up and tear out the kitchen memory for the third time, when the green-glowing slate next to him finally chimed.

The self-consideration program was ready.

Phaethon took a sip of cold tea to brace himself, sat in a position called Open Lotus, drew a wire from his slate to the jack on his shoulder-board, performed a brief Warlock breathing exercise, and opened his mind.

There he was, sipping tea from a dainty bulb, seated on a fresh-grown mat woven in the traditional style, with his hypnotic warlock formulation-rod to one side, and his slate in reading-mode on the other, tuned to the proper subchannels and ready with the proper routines, ready to undertake a thorough neural investigation, cleaning, and reconstitution.

A tea-bulb, a mat, a rod, a brain-interface. All the simple and basic necessities of life. He was beginning to feel like a civilized man again.

 

*** *** ***

Inside his personal thoughtspace, the self-consideration circuit opened up like a flat mirror, glowing with icons and images. It was a matter of a few moments to set the nerve-balancing subroutine into motion. It was the task of about an hour to review his major thought-chains and memory indexes since his last full sleep, and to edit out the disproportionate reactions, the shadow-memories, and emotional residue clogging his thoughts.

Next, a review of command lines in his under-mind showed that his subconscious desires, on several occasions, had been interpreted by his implants as commands to alter his blood-chemistry balance; the imbalances had produced subconscious neural tension; the tension had been interpreted as a further command to make additional modifications to his thalamus and hypothalamus, which had in turn affected his perceptions, moods, and memories. And these mood-shifts had set in motion additional self-reinforcing cycles. It was a classic case of sleep depravation. It was a mess.

Finally, he opened a sub-table and reviewed his emotional indicators. His frustration levels were high, but not disproportionately so, considering his circumstances. His general fear-levels, normally below background threshold detection levels, had spread to involve every other area of his thought: every thought, every dream, every shade of emotion. Puzzled, Phaethon engaged an analyzer, and checked the back-linkages.

He found that his fear was linked to the thought that he was mortal. His subconscious mind had been profoundly affected by the knowledge that his noumenal back-up copies had been destroyed. The images and allusions floating in his middle-brain grew morbid, panicked, grotesque. This, combined with the knowledge that Silent Oecumene agents were hunting him, affected his blood chemistry, nerve-rhythm, and the overall sanity of his entire mental environment.

Fascinating. Phaethon compared his general mental balance against a theoretical index. According to the index, it was not insane, or even unusual, for a mortal man being hunted by enemies to react as Phaethon had done. For example: the index opined that wrestling with Ironjoy had been a normal and understandable reaction to the fear and frustration created by Ironjoy’s theft. Why? Because the thought that he was mortal meant that he only had a certain amount of time left in his life. On a subconscious level, it was as if his nerves and blood-chemistry had decided that there was no time to waste negotiating with criminals.

Another file showed Phaethon the thought-images with which his subconscious mind associated his armor: he saw pictures of mighty fortresses, invulnerable castles, mythic knights of the Round Table in shining plate mail. It also showed maternal images of comfort and caring, healing his wounds, feeding him. Then there were emotion-images of loyalty and fidelity; the armor appeared in metaphor as a faithful hunting-dog.

Small wonder he had reacted violently to its loss. Phaethon smiled wryly to see how his subconscious regarded the armor as his fortress, mother, and dog all wrapped up in one. Perhaps he was not as insane as he had thought he was.

In fact, out of his emotions, there were only two the self-consideration routine tagged as being abnormal. The first, oddly enough, was related to the cacophiles, the ugly monstrosities who had met him after his Curia hearing to praise his victory, and who had tried to intoxicate him with a black card. His level of disgust toward those creatures was very high; there was an abnormal desire not to think about them, to put them out of his mind. An image-box showed a half-melted lump of a body, quivering with tentacles and polyps, wearing Phaethon’s face. The subconscious fear that he was somehow like them, no doubt, was what made him not want to think about them. The link-chaser displayed lines of red light, to indicate that there were other reasons, deeper and stronger, as to why Phaethon did not want to think about the cacophiles. But Phaethon did not bother to follow those links. He did not want to think about it.

His second association marked as abnormal was his fear of logging onto the mentality. The index rated that as being disproportionately out of character for Phaethon.

The index on this self-consideration routine was not complex enough to analyze why Phaethon was more afraid than he ought to be.

According to Phaethon’s belief (reported the index) the last virus-entity attack had failed. It had been thwarted by his armor, which had snapped shut and severed the connection. Why was he so afraid of a type of attack he knew how to defeat?

According to the index, it would have been more natural for Phaethon, at his point, to be imagining schemes to be able to log on to the mentality, and yet be ready to thwart a second attack, perhaps with witnesses logged on and watching his thoughts for any sign of the enemy.

The index pointed out that this was exactly what Phaethon had done at Victoria Lake, when the three mannequins had been seeking him. Why was he brave enough to do it physically, but not mentally?

An attack in front of witnesses would prove to the Golden Oecumene that Phaethon had not been self-deluded. If no attack came, an uninterrupted mentality session would allow Phaethon to display to the world noetic deep-structure recordings proving that he was not self-deluded. In either case, the Hortators, by their own verdict, would then be forced to restore Phaethon to his former honors and community. Why was he so reluctant? The index concluded that his reluctance and his fear were unusual.

According to the index, there were false-to-facts associations in Phaethon’s mind related to his beliefs about the last virus-entity attack and its failure. His actions did not correlate with his apparent thoughts related to the strength and fearsomeness of this virus. For example: if Phaethon where so unwilling to log onto the mentality to suffer a noetic reading, then why had he, immediately after the attack, opened all his brain channels to receive his missing memories from the Rhadamanth House-Mind, whom he, at that time, thought was infected by the virus?

Phaethon watched this analytical routine with a growing sense of impatience. The index of this self-consideration routine, after all, had been programmed and created by the Eleemosynary Composition. Naturally it would tend to dismiss perfectly rational and legitimate fears as hysteria. The whole point of this program was to convince people that their individual lives were hysterical, unpleasant or unnaturally fearful, in order to convince them to join with a mass-mind for comfort and protection. Also, the index probably dismissed his fears as paranoia. After all, this index was not meant to be used by a man who really and actually was being hunted by a powerful, evil conspiracy. It probably dismissed his desire to save the entire Oecumene from a horrible outside menace as delusions of grandeur, but only because it had never taken readings from a man in a position to fight such a foe and save civilization.

Is it paranoia when they are really after you? Is it megalomania if you are actually poised to do great things?

The index tagged his present thoughts as a rationalization, and recommended psychological therapy. Phaethon snorted and shut the self-consideration system off.

He was too tired to think about it now. He used the slate to open his anonymous account in the mentality again, found some free dreams which were being distributed as part of the Millennial festival. Most selections on the menu were uninspiring, but, to his surprise, he found one to his taste, a heroic piece. It took several minutes to download that one into the slate, and then restructure it from the slate to his thoughtspace. He had to organize its running-instructions one line at a time, now that he had erased his secretary.

But eventually, he had his dream and went to sleep.

*** *** ***

He dreamed a dream he had seen before. The world was beneath a great glass dome, and he rode a defiant ship, lines and shrouds dripping with ice, up to the utmost apex of that dome, and drew back an ax to shatter it, while gathered nations far below cried out in agonies of fear….

*** *** ***

It was time to set his plans in motion.

Awake, alert, rested, Phaethon began with a few hours’ research on the public law-channels. This could be done anonymously, and without any interference from the Hortators, since the Curia, and its library of case-law, could not be closed to any citizen.

Without the Rhadamanthus law-mind to help him, Phaethon was baffled by the large number of cases, the complexity of the law, and the arbitrary nature of the findings. But he was able to download several volumes of case-histories into an open section of the house-mind he was in (shutting off the sewerage and kitchen recycler to find the space to do it), and eventually the house-mind independently confirmed Phaethon’s tentative opinions in the matter.

Next he touched the slate, opened a communication channel, and brought up the public emergency menu. Icons representing Fire, Mind-Crash, Space debris, Ecological Flux, Storm, Snow, Panic, and Injury opened up like red and blue-white flowers in the slate-surface. And then the gold and blue emblem of the Constabulary presented itself.

He paused.

What he intended suddenly seemed so mean and so petty. Phaethon did not want to appear either ruthless or ignoble when his accomplishments were contemplated by posterity.

He smiled to think how alien such a scruple or such a desire would be to his many opponents, people who had wronged him. They would think it improbable, or perhaps vain, to think a man would want history to think well of him.

“Well,” he said eventually. “The worst type of ignobility may be to let others take advantage of your noble nature. I cannot help but feel sorry for those wretched Afloats, though. This will come as quite a shock.”

He touched the symbol and spoke aloud: “Allow me to speak with Constable Pursuivant. I wish to testify against one Vulpine First Ironjoy Hullsmith, base neuroform with nonstandard invariant extensions, Uncomposed and Unschooled. And no, I will not submit myself to a noetic reading to make my complaint. According to the law, a verbal complaint is sufficient to allow you to act…”

A young woman appeared in the slate, accompanied by the squawk of music. She wore a semi-crystalline, semi-liquid body imbued with constabulary blue-and-gold. Her body-shape, language, school, and emblems were of a type which Phaethon, without the Middle Dreaming to help him, could not interpret.

“I’m sorry,” Phaethon said, “I cannot understand your language at that speed.”

Parts of her crown glowed, while other parts went dim; she was evidently switching minds, or employing an interpreter. “This part of me and us are most happy to accept any complaint against Vulpine Ironjoy howsoever formatted. The Constables have been trying to get the Curia to shut down his operation for decades. But we and I cannot help you achieve your other expressed desire. We and I cannot bring you in communication with the one you call Constable Pursuivant.”

“Why not? Is he hurt?”

“Hurt? How could any citizen of the Golden Oecumene be hurt? No. You cannot speak to a Constable named Pursuivant because there is no such person.”

 

*** *** ***

16. The Fire

CHAPTER SIX: THE FIRE

1

It was amazing how quickly things changed. By the time Phaethon in his armor emerged in an explosion of steam from the surface of the sea and arced down to the deck of Ironjoy’s thought-shop, the Ashores were already jacked out of the mind-system, fired from their jobs, had begun to riot, and now lay stunned and numbed under the diligent immobilizer-prongs of darting constable-wasps.

Ironjoy was standing at the square bow of the barge, arms folded and arms akimbo, staring down at the water in a brooding posture. The Curia had already conducted his trial over the mentality, at a high-speed time-rate.

The constables had been allowed to serve a warrant to investigate Phaethon’s allegations. Evidence was taken from Ironjoy’s memory before he was able to induce auto-amnesia, not just of one petty crime, but of so many, that Phaethon’s testimony had not been required at the trial.

Most people arrested by the Constables merely had their accounts in the mentality locked down, and then were asked to come to the places of punishment at their own time and convenience.

Ironjoy was sentenced to suffer six seconds of direct stimulation of the pain center of his brain, two hours of a remorse-emotion fed into his thalamus, and, in simulation, to suffer the lives of his victims from their points of view, in order to learn the sorrow he had caused. Since he had cheated many, many Ashores and many more Afloats, he would be in simulation for a long time. Hours, perhaps weeks. It was the longest period of penal service Phaethon could bring to memory.

Phaethon stepped forward. “What will happen to your business, Ironjoy, if you are kept incarcerated for several weeks?”

Ironjoy’s voice radiated from his chest. The tones were harsh and flat. “You know very well. An unmodified man can survive for three days, perhaps four, without water. He can fast for longer than that, if he is in good health. But none of my people are in good health. The Afloats will starve in a month without me to feed them. You have done a great service for the Hortators this day! You have destroyed us.”

In the Victorian Age (which Phaethon knew well from Silver-Grey simulations) starving people could commit crimes in order to be kept in jails, and fed at public expense. That option was not open to these poor Afloats, since pain-shock, not incarceration, was the preferred penalty imposed by Curia justice. Ironjoy’s sentence was an exception. Perhaps the Hortators had somehow influenced the judgment.

Phaethon said, “Give me your thought-shop, rent-free, during the time you are away.”

Ironjoy’s insect-face twitched, a spasm of hatred. “How dare you suggest such a thing? It is you who turned me in.”

“I turned you in just for this purpose. To get you out of the way and take control of your shop. You know I am the only one with the ability to operate it.”

“I have a thought-set in my shop which can render me utterly immune to pity. The Invariants make it. Once I load that set, I could watch all of these people of mine die in lingering hunger and pain without a twitch. And you would not be able to blackmail me into giving my shop to you to save them.”

Blackmail? Or simple justice? Phaethon was not inclined to argue the point. The idea that Ironjoy had some compassion for his flock of victims was new to Phaethon; he had been expecting Ironjoy to submit in order to save his wretched business and his position as monopolist-and-slavedriver.

Phaethon said nothing. He merely waited. The logic of events was clear.

Ironjoy’s double shoulders slumped with defeat. “Very well,” he said. With no further ado Ironjoy told Phaethon the secret names and command-codes for the thought-shop, and they both signed a contract which would turn the shop and stock back over to Ironjoy on the date of his release from penal service.

Then Ironjoy began to instruct Phaethon in his schedule of prices and fees.

Phaethon held up his hand. “Don’t bother. I intend to set my own policy.”

Ironjoy regarded him without friendliness. With no further word, Ironjoy stepped from the barge down a gangway to a waiting coracle, and, with a paddle in each arm, rowed his way to the nearest staging pool ashore, that same dank shallow pool where Phaethon had first met Oshenkyo. Here Ironjoy, encased in diamond, would serve his sentence.

It took only two days for hunger, thirst for beer, and the withdrawals from various addictions to drive the angry Ashores back to work at the thought-shop.

At first, Phaethon interviewed them, one after another, and combed through Ironjoy’s psychology files on them. They were not a prepossessing lot. In fact, more than once Phaethon learned more of their pasts than he would have liked. Less than a single afternoon passed before he ceased to ask in his interviews anything other than the most businesslike and impersonal questions—the filth and wreckage of their lives, he decided, was none of his concern. He only needed to know what work they were suited to do.

They were not suited for all that much.

The Ashores were a sullen, angry crew, and they did their work with as little effort as possible, and stole, sabotaged and erased Phaethon’s property so often, that soon each one had a constable-wasp continuously overhead.

Phaethon did not mind or care. He had spent those two days reviewing and indexing the stock of the thought-shop, rewriting the more ungainly programs, and reconnecting the various scattered chains of thought floating in the barge’s disorganized shop-mind. The more disgusting of the dreams, pornographic, morbid, or filled with blood-lust, he erased; others he sold off on the market, to Ironjoy’s deviant and back-net customers. With that money he bought a new core for the shop-mind, raised the capacity, and hired a five-minute engineering student program to redesign his search-engine for job-hunting.

On the third day, Phaethon stood in the bow of the ship and announced his new policies to the huddled and sullen mass of Ashores who stood glowering at him (those who had eyes) or snapping their sensor-housings open and shut with loud snaps (those that did not.)

“Ladies and gentlemen, neutraloids, bimorphs, hermaphrodites, gynomorphs, and paragenders. Your lack of immortality does not excuse you from the duty of living well what few decades or centuries you have left to you. Accordingly, I hope to introduce some of the discipline of the Silver-Grey into this little community. Naturally, participation will be voluntary. But those who do participate will be granted special price-reductions, bargains, and rebates on a wide variety of thought-shop effectuators.

“Self-delusion will be sharply discouraged, as will intoxication, rage-dreams, and out-of-context pleasure-stimulants. This shop will not help you alter or abolish your self-identity, but will provide every routine at my disposal to allow you to improve your self-love, self-discipline, and self-esteem. Educational and philosophical programs will be made available at low rentals, as will transitional addictives leading to non-addictives, to help you cure yourself of psychiatric zero-sum cycles. All gambling outlets will be shut down to encourage you to save and to invest. Let me describe some of the Silver-Grey disciplines and their benefits….”

But he was pelted by garbage at that point, and had to discontinue. He stepped back and drew a diamond pavilion-flap across him like a shield, and used a slow-time routine to note who threw what, so that he could dock wages later.

It was Oshenkyo, in the forefront, who was urging the others on. He shouted towards Phaethon: “Clammy snoffer! You’re just a Hortator now! Tell us do this, don’t do that, read this, don’t smoke that, think this, don’t zing that! We zing what we ken! Do as we please! Free men! If we want to jolly up our brains on identics, no business of yours!”

And the others cried: “Hortator! Hortator!”

Phaethon let the disturbance run its course.

After some more drama, more threats and exchanges, Phaethon continued his speech:

“Fellow exiles! You have given up on hope. I have not. This makes it inconvenient for me, since I need your labor to help me accumulate the funds I need to put forward the next part of my plan. I need that labor to be alert, non-intoxicated, voluntary. The type of automatic half-brain work which Ironjoy’s drugs and sets permitted you to do will prove insufficient for my needs. Therefore your lives, education, and earning abilities will have to be improved. No doubt this will cause you dismay. I care not. If you dislike my managerial style, feel free to find employment elsewhere. But first hear me out:

“There are rich amounts of thought-work the non-controlled market will bear, as well as entire areas of limited-creative patterning and editorial functions for which there is always a need. But, beyond this, there is an area none of you have explored, even though you have the tools at hand. There is work in scientific and technical fields. There is work in investment, small operations, data migration, context-cleaning, mentality rest-spaces. Humble work, but honest! What about pseudo-gastronomics? Everyone stops for false-meals when they work, and the Hortators cannot police the public thought-ways or deviant dark channels! Why can’t you own your own businesses, gather your own thought-shops, invest your own capital?

“This is some of the easiest training to acquire; all of it is in the public domain, and such training fits every standard jack and neuroform. It is true that the Sophotechs can perform any of these operations more swiftly and more efficiently than can we. But it is also true that they cannot do everything at once, at every place at once, for as cheaply as everyone wishes. There is always someone somewhere who wants some further thing done, some further work accomplished. There is always someone willing to pay much less for work moderately less well done. Why can’t we be the ones to find and do that work?”

The first shift Phaethon sent to completing some of the assembly-line type tasks, mostly data-patterning and link-cleaning, which Ironjoy’s old markets still needed done. That was much as before.

But a second group he sent to harvest some clothing he had bargained with Daughter-of-the-Sea to produce for them. Like her mother, she cared nothing for the Hortators. Phaethon, the day before, had found a translation routine buried in Ironjoy’s back-files which would allow a human neuroform to communicate with the Daughter’s odd mind-arrangement and time-frequency. She was more than happy to provide the community with some much-needed sturdy clothing, as well as certain pharmaceuticals and food-stuffs, in return for some simple bird-tending, weeding, and microbiogenesis her bodies needed. And, most of all, the Daughter wanted the many imploring advertisements which had been sent by many donors and suitors to engage her attention to be sent away. As it turned out, she was weary of them.

Now, the Afloats would be dressed better even than the Ashores, and in garb both clean and dignified. Surely it would improve their esteem, mold their slovenly demeanor to better forms! Phaethon wondered why not one of these Ashores had spent any time trying to communicate with Daughter-of-the-Sea before.

A third group, under his direction, was sent ashore to the graveyard of houses. This was not a party of festival-goers, not a simple house-felling operation. Instead, Phaethon conducted a survey, found every house-brain and brain seedling, and set the group to restoring, cleaning re-growing and re-wiring. He estimated that, with these brains linked in parallel, by the end of two days, the thought-shop would have the brain-capacity of a Rhadamanthus outbuilding, enough to give every Afloat personal help at job-hunting, as well as being able to take over some of the more routine tasks of such jobs.

This would also give each Afloat the ability to log on to the mentality (if they could find a server that would accept them) and send messages to Ironjoy’s markets without going through Ironjoy.

Again, he wondered why none of them had thought of it before.

A fourth group he set to cleaning the rust off the barge. This he did, not because it helped forward any scheme, but only because the hull was dirty and unsightly.

The final group, consisting only of boxlike neomorphs, swam along the strands of connection fiber and old nerve-wires which shrouded the many floating houses like so much cobweb. With mechanical grapples from the robo-toolboxes on their prows, they spliced together and gathered up rolls of the material. And they grumbled every second of their task, complaining to each other in sharp, time-compressed subsonic bursts, but Phaethon expected them to find enough wasted fiber to allow him to wire the entire floating community for light, power, speech, and text. The actual work of physically stringing wires from house to house could be done by the spider-gloves in a matter of hours.

And, gloating in his secret thought, Phaethon expected that these last two improvements together, if any of the Ashores were clever enough, would allow someone else here to set up a search-engine and a thought-shop of their own, and break Ironjoy’s monopoly forever. Did they dislike Phaethon’s stiff insistence on punctuality, proper dress, sobriety? All the better. The more unpopular Phaethon was, the quicker some other Afloat would be to go into the business and draw away his customers.

At sunset, Phaethon had a little ceremony. Everyone who was not working the night-shift was on the deck of the barge when pointed toward the darkened houses all around them. He made the re-start gesture.

And light flared from every window, lamps flamed, beams glittering across the water. It was a breathtaking sight.

In chorus, the houses all spoke at once, “Welcome, masters and mistresses! We slept; now we wake. It will be our pleasure to serve you!” And, at Phaethon’s cue, in hushed, huge voices which rolled across the water, the houses in choir began to sing the ceremonial house-warming song from the Fourth Era.

It was a sight to expand the heart. Phaethon felt a tear of pride in his eye, and smiled in mild embarrassment as he wiped it away. He looked up and saw that, in the distance, peering warily over the cliff, came a group of silent Ashores, half-nude, or garish in their advertisement-smocks, drawn by the echoes of the song. They stood as if amazed by the lights.

Phaethon smiled, and turned. Behind him stood the Afloats, handsome in new jackets and trousers of brown and dark-brown, tunics, skirts and films of white or green. And yet why did so many of them slouch, or knot their shirt-tails, or stain their skirts? Why did none of them smile? Phaethon had been expecting them to cheer. Didn’t they want their houses to be lit?

With a brusque gesture, Phaethon dismissed the day-shift, cautioning them to appear sober for work the next day. Then he strode down the ladder to the cabin in the aft of the barge, which had been Ironjoy’s sanctum and restoration chamber.

A whole day had gone by; it was time for the next step of his plan.

*** *** ***

17. The Restoration Chamber

Ironjoy’s restoration chamber was barren except for a cot, a formulation rod, a ewer of living water, and an aspect mandala tuned to nearby thought-space, obviously meant to look for Sophotech or Hortator calls and police-activity. Ironjoy certainly did not coddle himself; these quarters were more stark than most of his employees’. Perhaps the pleasure of dominion and control, a pleasure now so rare in the Golden Oecumene, was enough to sustain him.

A housecoat programmed with a score of medical functions hung from a rack, with a dozen medical history files stacked in coin-slots along the vest; Ironjoy evidently used it to cure some of the older Afloats. Phaethon frowned to see a euthanasia-needle clipped to the housecoat belt in a sterile holder.

Two walls of the cabin were fixed. Opposite the door were narrow windows looking out upon the bay and the cliffs beyond. The other two walls were not smart-walls, but they knew a few words, and they could slide open.

Behind one was a Demeterine decorative screen of surprising elegance and taste, a pattern of gold birds and dark blue Demeter-style fruit. Sound threads were woven through the panel, but Phaethon did not have a reader to receive the signal, and so the threads gave a few puzzled chirps and wood-wind notes when he looked at various parts of the design, but then, unable to follow the pattern of his eye-movements, the threads fell into puzzled silence.

It was a magnificent work. Phaethon did not know enough about this particular form to guess the artist’s name, but Phaethon wondered again about Ironjoy’s character. Who would have guessed that such meditative and abstract delicacy attracted him?

Behind the other wall, facing the blue-gold decoration, were three talking mirrors. They must have been tuned to place their calls as soon as light hit them. The moment the walls slid back, the mirrors formed images of Ironjoy’s three main customers.

He was not unprepared. Phaethon stood straight in his armor, with the magnificent decoration-panel forming his backdrop. He spoke briefly, introducing himself and explaining the change of circumstance. “I intended to fulfill all of Ironjoy’s contracts with you to the letter—the work performed today will testify to that. It is my hope that you will consent to deal with me on the same basis you dealt with him. It is only until his release a few weeks hence. What do you gentlemen say? Do we have an understanding?”

Each of the three spoke for a moment, describing the work they might need over the next few days, asking questions, and issuing tentative consent. Each one seemed to be aware that if they mistrusted Phaethon, or refused to deal with him, the other two would rush in to fill the gap.

An identification gesture had brought their names to the surface of the mirrors in a subscript. The indigo-faced man on the left was Semris; the writhing mass of bloated snakes in the middle was a neomorph named Antisemris; a tube with mechanical arms with emblems of a half-Invariant was labeled Notor-Kotok. Semris, to judge from the name, was a Jovian, perhaps from Io. Antisemris was evidently an under-mind or child of Semris, but who had joined the Cacophile movement.

The Ionians came from what had once been a wild and dangerous world, and some small few had not put away their wild and dangerous personas after that moon’s volcanisms were tamed by planetary engineers (including the famous Geaius Score Stormcloud of Dark-Grey, a terraformer whose work Phaethon had studied, followed and admired.) If Semris was one of those few last Wild-Ionians, he would ignore the Hortators; they had long ago condemned his mental template as destructive and temperamental.

Likewise, Antisemris was a freak, perhaps a Nevernext, and Hortator standards would mean little to him. Both were the type of unsavory people, perhaps insane, whom Phaethon would never have received or entertained, back when he had been a Silver-Grey Manorial.

Notor-Kotok was a different case; he spoke somewhat like an Invariant, somewhat like a Composition. Phaethon suspected that he, or they, were actually a small combination mind made of people whose relatives and friends had been exiled, and who had all contributed a few thoughts to make a composite being which would still look after their relatives, talk to them, or find them work. The being was modeled along unemotional Invariant lines, perhaps to render it immune from Hortator pressure. Phaethon had heard of such things before.

Phaethon said, “You gentlemen will be pleased to note that I intend to make improvements to the working conditions here. This will no doubt increase productivity. The greatest loss to productivity is to false-self dreams and deep intoxicants. I believe the Afloats are driven to these things out of despair for their relatively short lifespans.”

Antisemris fluttered several of his snake-heads. “Too true! Yet what can be done? Orpheus controls all noumenal recordings.”

“Gentlemen, it is well known that the Neptunian Tritonic Composition can store brain information within the laminae of their special material. At near absolute zero temperatures, there is no signal degradation, even over centuries. With cascade-sequence re-recording and corrections, the Neptunian superconductive nerve tissue can retain a given personality for aeons. I recommend we create a branch of the Neptunian school right here. The Neptunians scoff at Hortator mandates; we will find no difficulties finding Neptunians willing to deal with us. And, once that is done, whole new markets will open to us. We will no longer need interpreters or Eleemosynary routines to communicate with the Neptunian neuro-forms. And you know those outer markets are hungry for even simple thought-work.”

“Your proposal?” asked Semris.

“Gentlemen, I ask for your investment. An initial fund of some 6500 seconds should allow us to buy a channel of communication, if not with Triton or Nereid, then at least with the Neptunian Legate-mass stationed near Trailing Trojan city-swarm, where they keep a permanent embassy. A modified search engine could examine Neptunian thought-space for work opportunities; we will have labor, cheap and plentiful. I estimate we can make our return on investment in a matter of days.”

Semris said, “A new market is always attractive; but I have dealt with Neptunians before, the group who did work on Amalthea. They are tricky and unlovable, and enjoy cruel jokes. Ironjoy was always against the idea of opening markets with the Neptunians.”

Some snake-heads of Antisemris stared at each other in puzzlement. “Neptunians are also very far afield! Think just of how long it would take to broadcast across the radius of the Solar System to ask a query or get a response from Neptune. Telepresentation is impossible; second-by-second oversight of the work is impossible.”

Phaethon said, “The distance is not an obstacle for piecework done in large blocks, especially high-quality work with low data densities. I hope to train the Ashores to be able to work without supervision.”

Antisemris was unconvinced: “Why stir up so many changes? We are all satisfied with the way things have gone heretofore. The Afloats have nowhere else to go; change may confound things! Why irk the Hortators more than we must? We subsist only because they do not have the patience to squash us all. No, for once, the flat-headed Semris, no doubt by accident, has uttered a truth.”

But Notor said, “I place a high priority on keeping the mental well-being of the various Afloats at an optimal or praedo-optimal level, as measure by the Kessic sanity scale. Increased life would be beneficial, as would increased markets. Yet I have curiosity about Phaethon’s motives. Your plan to find work in the Neptunian markets does seem disproportional to the desired effect.”

“Yet, Mr. Notor, you do not object to dealing with Neptunians in and of themselves?”

“Allow me to employ a metaphor. I will accept any coin that burns.” (This was a reference to the antimatter currency.)

Phaethon heard some warbling bird-notes from the tapestry behind him. Perhaps one of the men in the mirror had glanced at the gold-and-blue figures, and his eye-motions had been interpreted to reveal his emotional state. Phaethon now realized for what purpose the crass Ironjoy kept such beautiful art. And while Phaethon was not familiar with the note-codes and tuning of the emotion-reactives woven in the tapestry, he could make a good guess.

Hiding a smile, Phaethon now bowed to Semris and Antisemris. “If you gentlemen are not interested after all, perhaps you can allow Mr. Notor and I a little privacy to discuss some matters of mutual interest and mutual profit…”

Semris and Antisemris interrupted each other, suddenly eager to discuss the matter further.

*** *** ***

Less than an hour later, Phaethon had the money he needed to place a call to the Neptunians.

Phaethon folded the wall over two of the mirrors, used Ironjoy’s formulation rod to calm himself and fix his purposes in mind. Then he turned to the mirror and placed the call.

In their present orbital positions, it took sixteen minutes for the signal to go to and return from near-Jovian space, where the Neptunians maintained a permanent legate. This delay Phaethon had expected.

But then, while Phaethon stood idle, doing nothing, there passed another five minutes while the messenger speech-tree loaded from the signal into the limited mind-space of the thought-shop’s isolated communication circuits.

There was a further half-minute delay as line-checkers and counteractants and virus-hunters examined the received messenger speech-tree for viruses or surprises, a precaution not usually necessary, except when dealing with Neptunians.

The delay of time was considerable. Phaethon reflected that Rhadamanthus could have performed a million first-order operations in this same amount of time, or Westmind, a hundred million. Almost six minutes had passed. The true depth of his poverty impressed itself on Phaethon. He was living like some creature out of a forgotten age of history, practically like a Third-Era Victorian in truth.

How had those ancient British folk, or Second-Era Romans or Athenians (so prominently pictured in Silver-Grey simulations) tolerated all the mess, delay, and anguish in their lives? How had they faced the inevitability of death, disease, injustice, grief and pain? How had they tolerated the loneliness of being frozen in the base neuroform, without even the possibility of joining a mass-mind?

And how had they changed and improved their minds and selves without the benefit of noetics, noumenology, redaction, or any science of psychiatric editing or self-consideration? Had it just been by an effort of will and the practice of a habit of virtue?

The symbol of the Tritonic Neurofrom Composure scholum appeared on the mirror, indicating that the messenger was loaded and awake. Phaethon drew a breath, mentally recited his formulated warlock autohypnotic mantra one last time, and steeled himself. Had he just been marveling at the stoicism of the mortal men of earlier ages? He himself was now mortal. And it was his stoicism which would now be tested.

“Good afternoon,” said Phaethon. When that produced no response (he still was not used to the lack of a translator to convey his meaning into other formats and aesthetics) he said, “Start. Go. Initiate. Begin. Read Message. Please.”

“This is the messenger. I represent information from the presently dominant sects and discourses embraced by the Tritonic Neuroform Composition. If your question or provocation is one which has been anticipated by my writers (if I have writers), then a recorded response will be brought forward to reply. The lector is flexible, and can organize and edit the responses according to the logic of your statements, if it so chooses. If your question is one which has not been anticipated, expect a spate of nonsense and irrelevancy. On the other hand, if I am, in fact, a self-aware entity, then my responses are not merely the recorded statements of the writers, but the freely chosen deliberate communication of a mind having a perverse joke at your expense. (Please note that, if I am a self-aware entity, then erasing me from your communication buffer would be an act of murder. Constables may be standing by.)”

Phaethon blinked in puzzlement. This was hardly what he had been expecting. “Pardon me, but are you in fact a self-aware entity?”

“I have been programmed to say that I am.”

Phaethon checked the memory space the messenger-tree occupied. It was large. Large enough to hold a self-referencing (and therefore self-aware) program? Unlikely, but with proper data-compression techniques, it was not impossible. It would be a reckless act to erase what might be self-aware. But then again, it would be typical Neptunian humor to absorb large sections of expensive memory with an unintelligent messenger-tree no one dared to erase.

The messenger said, “And please do not attempt to place the burden of proving my humanity on me. The law against first-degree murder does not hold that those who cannot prove their humanity are subject to instant and arbitrary death.”

The joke seemed particularly cruel to Phaethon, since he himself, by pursuing this call, might be exposing himself to instant and arbitrary death. What if the agents of the Silent Ones were listening?

“Can you give me a précis of who is presently in charge of, or wields the most prestigious and influence in, the Neptunian Duma?” The ‘Duma’ was the Neptunian name for their main social organization. It was made of partial minds and client minds beamed in by Neptunians, who were too scattered to represent themselves by any direct means. The partials combined and evolved in a seething, tangled mass of vigorous conflict, to form a consensus-entity, or, rather, successive sets of consensus-entities, whose proclamations influenced the course of Neptunian dialogue and society. The Duma was more like a clearing house and central marketplace of ideas rather than like a parliament.

Neptunians were highly individualistic and eccentric, and so they instructed their representatives to place a higher value on obdurate zeal than on rational compromise. Consequently, the Duma was often insane, pursuing several contradictory goals at once, over-reacting or under-reacting with no sense of proportion to the petitions, ideas and new lines of thought which the Neptunians, from time to time, introduced. The Neptunians had never yet reprogrammed the Duma to behave with logic; this baroque form of social government apparently amused the Cold Dukes and Eremites of Neptune far more than a rational one would have.

The messenger-tree said: “The Silver-Grey School has recently won wide acceptance among the Duma. It is presently the dominant school, followed, but not closely, by the Patient Chaos School.”

Phaethon leaned forward, eyes wide. “The Silver-Grey? How is this possible?” As far as Phaethon knew, there had never been any Silver-Grey among the mad things of Neptune.

The messenger-tree continued: “Many thought-chains and dialogues within the Duma are consumed with topics prompted by Diomedes of Nereid, who recently shamed the Hortators of Earth, and who, by being poor, tricked them into given him great wealth. Diomedes and Xenophon mingled to create out of themselves a temporary mind named Neoptolemous, who out-witted the Cerebelline named Wheel-of-Life. Neoptolemous now owns the titanic star-ship called Phoenix Exultant. Trillions of tons of metallic anti-hydrogen, chrysadmantium, biological and nanobiological material, are aboard, and the Ship-mind is a million-cycle entity with a vast wealth in routines and capacity. This victory brought great prestige to Diomedes and to his son Neoptolemous. Diomedes, in his Living Will, set aside a fund of that prestige to promote a Silver-Grey School among the Duma. He did this in memorial for a friend of his, who was unjustly treated by the College of Hortators, and sent to his death in exile.”

“May I send a message to Diomedes? Can you speak on his behalf?”

“I have templates from most of the major chains of thought among the active Duma members, including Diomedes, and therefore I can pretend to be him and form responses based on my anticipation of what he would say if he were here. When this message is transmitted back to the Neptunian embassy, Diomedes will have the option either to reject or accept the representations made as his own. If he should accept, this messenger will be implanted into his own memories, so that he will hereafter believe he himself was here and made these comments. However, I am required to warn you that Diomedes, as of last assembly, no longer existed as a separate entity. He was still a part of the Diomedes partial-composition. The actors for Diomedes and Xenophon fell into dispute over which parts of Neoptolemous belonged to Diomedes and which belonged to Xenophon. Neoptolemous’ thoughts have not yet been untangled and resolved back into two separate entities. In other words, Neoptolemous has not yet made up his minds.”

“What is the basis for the dispute? Is it the Ship?”

“The Patient Chaoticists are eager to dismantle the ship and distribute the wealth among the starving hosts beyond Neptune; the Silver-Grey urge the ship be used for an expedition to establish colonies at nearby stars. The Patient Chaos plan would bring money into the starved Neptunian economy; whereas to fund an expedition such as the one which Half-Neoptolemous Semi-Diomedes proposes would drain the economy. Didactions from Patient Chaos assert that the present ruination of the economy was caused, in large part, by investments made into Phaethon’s Expeditionary Effort.”

At that point, he was interrupted by a chime.

*** *** ***

TO BE CONTINUED IN OUR NEXT