The Phoenix Exultant Read online

  “I have business here, and with you. What will you pay as a finder’s fee, if I can find three hundred workers, already trained in your methods and familiar with your work, and also find a customer, willing to pay sixty seconds per line-cycle, doing checking and format translation? The whole project should include between one-hundred twenty and one-hundred fifty subjective man-hours of work.”

  Ironjoy touched his chest and tuned his speaking machine to a sarcastic tone: “You would make me the wealthiest man on Death Row.”

  “I would like twenty percent commission on net profit, paid in advance based on standard actuarial estimates, with cost adjustments to be made later, standard intervening interest rates applied to the overpayment or underpayment. In return, at my own expense, I will transport here Drusillet and a little over half of the Afloats. She is the one who sent me the message. She asked me to tell you her terms: they will not work here unless you continue to enforce the policies and rules I started, including sobriety tests, job training, full-value resale of unused memories, and a dress code. I have no idea how she did it, and I am not even sure why she did it, but she has convinced about half of the original Afloats there in that Red pleasure-junkyard you were talking about, to come back here. The people willing to hire them are the Neptunians. We need the software aboard the Phoenix Exultant reconstructed so that personalities of the Tritonic Neuroform Composition can integrate into the ship’s onboard mindscape. Considering that, by your own admission, your life is destroyed if I do not help you, I think twenty percent is a small price to pay. Besides, you-as-you-are-now needs a chance to do some good work to redeem yourself.”

  Phaethon did much better during this round of bargaining. He ended up with almost a third of his money restored. Ironjoy’s only noticeable victory during the negotiation was that Phaethon agreed to cannibalize the communion circuitry out of his wedding ring, to allow Ironjoy the pleasure of experiencing the good he did to other people from their points of view.

  Before the discussion was over, Afloats began coming down from the sky, laughing and kicking their feet. No other air service would have carried them, of course. They were all wearing flying jackets distributed by the company Rhadamanthus had started for Phaethon.

  “This is a wonder! This is the beginning of new lives for us all …” said Ironjoy. But he was overcome with emotion, and so forgot to readjust his speaking machine back to a normal tone of voice, and so therefore the words came out dripping with sarcasm.

  2.

  Daphne was on the road, galloping from the airship dock back toward the outskirts of the Ashore community, when she saw the gleaming gold of Phaethon in flight, and waved an eager hand to bring him down to land by her. Her new horse had been made for her by Daughter-of-the-Sea, and (despite Daphne’s best efforts to explain the biogenetic details) the whim or inattention of Daughter-of-the-Sea had festooned the creature with many organs and adaptations useful only to middle-period Venereal environments.

  The creature’s skin shone with sleek black re-radiation stripes, and along its limber neck silver shells and clustered spots displayed infrared-echolocators, which occasionally flickered with singes of heat. The monstrosity reared and plunged as Phaethon landed in a wash of energy, spooked. Daphne, red lips compressed, gloved fingers tightly curled around the reins, brought the rearing beast under control; she did not lose her poise, despite that she sat sidesaddle (which she did to keep her feet away from the jets of gas and flame darting from the black monster’s ventral scales).

  Phaethon thought she made a fetching picture. How commanding, and yet how elegant and feminine she seemed! His heart expanded with warm emotion. Phaethon doffed his helmet and spoke. “Darling,” he said, “I want to discuss with you what our next …”

  “Don’t you even start to think about leaving me behind!” she snapped, drawing herself upright, eyes blazing.

  Phaethon said mildly, “Atkins has convinced me that his plan is wise.”

  “It’s suicide!”

  He said quietly, “The Earthmind herself, back when this all began, that first night when I saw her in the Saturn-tree grove, reminded me that a society as free as ours cannot endure except by the voluntary devotion of her citizens.”

  She spoke with pride: “My devotion is no less than your own!”

  “Nevertheless, even if I wished for it, I cannot bring you with me. Do you forget the legalities entangling me? My ship is no longer properly mine. Vafnir has a lien on the Phoenix Exultant, and Neoptolemous of Neptune holds the rest of the lien, which his contributors, Xenophon and Diomedes, combined to purchase from Wheel-of-Life. I do not own her, and even I would not be permitted aboard, had I not been hired by Neoptolemous as pilot. And neither I nor Neoptolemous can board, or even graze her hull with a fingertip, until Vafnir is paid off in full. How could I bring you, no matter how much I wished?”

  Daphne slapped her riding crop against the shiny black leather of her boot. “Don’t gull me with excuses! Don’t talk to me of debts and liens and legal hither-and-yon. None of that is really what is really going on! Atkins and the Warmind are the puppeteers behind everything that happens now. Had Atkins’ plan included me, there would be a way to let me go along, law or no law, come lien, legality, hell, or high water!”

  She flourished her riding crop and pointed at him, a gesture of imperious indignation. “You mark my words, Phaethon of Rhadamanth! This is all mere masculine testosteronic condescension! If I were a man, I’d not be slighted in this way! I’d be allowed to go and die with you!”

  “I think not, my dear,” answered Phaethon, gently. “Were you a man, you would not be befogged with romantic ideas, nor would you suffer the delusion that you and I are man and wife. You are a fine woman—a wonderful woman—but you are not the one who, bound to me by marriage vows, has any right to ask to share my life, or, I suppose, my death.”

  Her cheeks took on a rosy hue, and her eyes gleamed with unshed tears, perhaps of anger, or sorrow, or both. “You are a cruel man. So what am I supposed to do? Forget you? I tried that once, for just one day, and it is not worth trying again, I assure you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Besides! The one to whom you are bound by your marriage vows would not ask to go with you. She would cower, screaming, and clutching the Earth with both hands, rather than travel in space; it’s death she fears, and she would not risk it or seek it, not for any noble cause of yours, or for the sake of victory in war, or for the sake of seeking her true love, or for any reason whatsoever. And certainly she would not forsake the Earth, or any comforts in her life, for you!”

  Phaethon stiffened. He said in a level and judicious tone, “You are not without a certain cruelty yourself, miss, when you put your mind to it. It might make our parting easier, if we sting each other with bitter barbs first, mightn’t it?”

  She said sullenly, “I only spoke the truth.”

  “Of course you did. Lies make ineffectual weapons.”

  Daphne’s face was uncomposed. She spoke in a shaking voice. “Ineffectual? Then why are you to be sacrificed by Atkins’s plan? What is there to his plan besides lies, vile lies, loss, darkness, treason, sacrifice, and lies? You know why you were singled out to be the sacrifice, Phaethon! Not because of any weakness! Not because you were the worst among us! You were chosen for your strengths, your virtues. Your genius, the unrelenting brightness of your dream! You were chosen because you were the best.”

  “No. The accident of war chose me, what we call chaos, what our ancestors called fate. I am the only one who can fly the ship. We know the enemy desires the Phoenix Exultant; everything it has done has been bent to capturing me, my armor, and the ship. If I go now to repossess her, the enemy must come, the enemy must reveal itself. Then, whether I survive or not, all truths will be laid bare, and all this darkness and confusion will be undone. I have lived my life as if in a labyrinth; the end, I see, is near. If I die now, I die, at least, at the helm of my great ship, where I would wish. But if I prevai
l, the labyrinth must fail, and the way to the stars is clear.”

  A silence came between them. The horse-beast pawed at the old road, digging up little diamond chips and puffs of black dust.

  She said, “Look me right in the eye, and tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll go.”

  He stared at her. “Miss, I do not love you.”

  “Don’t give me that rot! I’m coming with you, and that’s final!”

  “Daphne, you just said that if I said …”

  “That doesn’t count! I said look me right in the eye! You were staring at my nose!”

  Phaethon was opening his mouth to answer her shout for shout, when he noticed that it was a good nose; a cute nose, indeed, a well-shaped nose. Her eyes, too, were good to look upon, her shining hair, her curving cheeks, lips, chin, graceful neck, slender shoulders, graceful, slender, and fine figure, and, indeed, every part of her.

  “Well,” he said at last, “you can come with me as far as Mercury.”

  “I’m glad you said so,” said Daphne, smiling. “Because Bellipotent’s airship is waiting for us beyond the next hill, and I’ve already booked passage with him for the both of us.”

  3.

  The way to Mercury was long, and the canister into which Daphne and Phaethon were packed was small. Her coffin required more equipment than did his, because she had no ability to alter her internal cellular configuration for acceleration, nor did she (or anyone in the Golden Oecumene) have a cloak like his, able perfectly to sustain him without external life support. And so the quarters were very cramped and intimate.

  There was, furthermore, nothing to do. Being Silver-Grey, they had vowed to limit their use of personal time-sense alterations, which most people used to make boring tasks fly quickly by. Nor did they have available the extensive array of diversions most travelers enjoyed. Still pariahs, few vendors would have given them anything to entertain or comfort them.

  They spent some time simply talking over old memories, a sort of crude, verbal form of communion. She asked him particularly about the time when he was aboard the Phoenix Exultant, preparing to depart, just before the beginning of the masquerade. Phaethon spoke about his last words with Helion before his death in the solar inferno, about his discovery of Daphne’s semisuicide, and his grief-stricken decision at Lakshmi.

  Those conversations paled. Phaethon cobbled together a shared thoughtspace for them, and so they passed the long watches, immobile, entombed, with only their brains active. Their minds ranged far and wide inside dreamscapes Daphne wove for them, for she knew all the secrets of that art, and many of the techniques of false-life sculpting, and story-crafting, which, to her, were trite and worn, to him, were new; and she found pleasure in his delight.

  And yet there was an element of incompleteness in all the dream weavings she wove for them. For when she made them gods, able to dictate new laws of nature and establish new creations, he always would favor and follow the most conservative of themes, making universes very much like the real one, with realistic limitations, so that his universes seemed to her like little more than engineering or terraforming simulations.

  In lifetimes when they were heroes, rather than gods, Phaethon seemed little interested in the careful historical scenarios. His characters were always upsetting the basic order of things, inventing the printing press in Second-Era Rome, the submarine in Third-Era Pacific waters, or instituting gold-standard reforms to the benighted serfs in the mid-Bureaucracy period of the Union d’Europe.

  But Daphne found, to her surprise, that her own tastes were different than she had imagined them to be. The worlds she peopled with magicians and mythic beasts began to seem to her, somehow, trifling, or small, and she began to wonder about the evolutionary origins of things, the logic governing what magicians could and could not do, or the ultimate ends or applications of powers and abilities her mythic creatures possessed.

  More and more of their time, and, eventually, all of it, was spent in the world called Novusordo, and the limits she had imposed on the original construction were those she got from files in Phaethon’s armor. It was, at first, like an engineering scenario, which assumed that a single ship, loaded with biogenetic material, had come to terraform a barren world of methane sea and skies of sulfur ash.

  Together, they concocted tiny seeds and self-replicating robots to tame the winds and poisonous waves of their make-believe world; together they orbited solar tissues to eclipse the sun, or amplify its heat, as needed; they discharged antimatter explosives at pinpoint segments beneath the crustal plates to release trapped carboniferous chemicals, or in the upper atmosphere, to alter the balance of chemicals there, and trigger or suppress a greenhouse effect. Together they raked the seas with compounds, starting simple nanofactories, creating one-celled life. They tilled the soil and brought forth green; they incubated eggs upon the mountainside and watched as curious fledglings hatched; they called up beasts out of the earth and fish out from the sea.

  Years of subjective time went by. And, in objective time, many weeks.

  All too soon, it ended. Hand in hand, as they walked in a dream along the silver-white and crystal shapes of the trees they had made, and saw the small white-furred marmosets playing and gamboling in the grass not far away, and, on a ridge beyond, an albino hunting cat roaring at the sunset music issuing from cooling plains of fiberglass. Phaethon pointed at the setting sun, and said, We could make this world with the Phoenix Exultant, exactly as we’ve imagined it here. Look at the rainbow colors we get from the particulate matter seeded in the troposphere! See how the ripples and streaks above the atmosphere still catch the light for hours after sunset! I wonder if any real greenhouse blanket we lay out will look so beautiful at that.”

  Daphne, who had half-forgotten that this was not real, looked at her partner, her fellow lord of creation, in sadness. “All this must be abandoned, then. What if what we make is not so beautiful as what we dream?”

  Phaethon was troubled. “Perhaps we should stay here. I knew that, when I was awake in the real world, its concerns seemed pressing to me. But here they seem light enough. Stay with me, here, in this little world.”

  Daphne said, “You are not as used to long simulation runs as I am, lover. You’ll be so ashamed of yourself when you wake up. But we will both have work to do when we come to our right minds again, and this little fantasy will fade. And you won’t want to have me with you then.”

  He plucked a crystal leaf from one of the pale white trees and put it in her hair. “This seems so pleasant. Why should I want to wake up?”

  She shook the leaf away. “This is the only time I’ve ever seen you like this; it doesn’t seem like you. Perhaps I set the modality register at too high a rate, and you are suffering state-related fugue. Or maybe you really know your chances out there with Nothing Sophotech are not that good. Atkins is not trying to save your life, you know; he’s trying to kill the enemy, and he won’t let unimportant things get in his way.”

  He turned and took her by the shoulders, drawing her face near to his. “Is my life so unimportant then? It seems too precious to me ever to sacrifice, for any man or any cause. Stay here with me, in this false world of ours, which, even if it is false, is, after all, ours. What is out there which I cannot have in here?”

  She licked her lips, and felt the temptation to agree. But then the thought came to her that this was the last and most gentle and horrible trap. Everyone had tried to stop Phaethon: Gannis; Ao Aoen; the Eleemosynary; the College of Hortators; the Nothing Sophotech. Was she going to succeed where the rest of them had failed? Was she going to perform their work for them?

  Yet all it would take was a smile and a nod, and she would have almost everything she desired. She would have Phaethon.

  She would have almost everything. She would have someone who was almost Phaethon.

  Daphne summoned her spirits, resisted temptation, and spoke. “There is one thing you cannot do in here. You cannot perform deeds of renown without peer.”
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  A strange, stern look overcame his features then, and his smile fled. He stared deeply, deeply into her eyes in the way he could not do when she was in her transport-coffin. The look in his eyes grew more stern and more remote as if he also were resisting a great temptation.

  He raised his hand, made the end-program gesture, and his image vanished.

  She turned up her time so that she could cry and be done with it before she passed out from the dream and back into the real world. She woke in her coffin just in time to hear the proximity alarms ringing through the canister’s crude and narrow hull.

  Jarring jolts began to kick the hull. Daphne could see nothing but the fogged surface of her coffin lid a few inches beyond her nose, but she knew the maneuvering jets were firing, aiming the canister toward the mouth of the long line of magnetic deceleration rings maintained near Mercury Equilateral Station.

  The whining bangs of the jets, and then the hissing roar of accumulators turning kinetic energy into stored electric power, prevented speech.

  Daphne wondered if that might not be just as well.

  4.

  The silence between them held during the dreary process of disembarkation, while their vessel was dismantled and their bodies were adjusted to the normal station environment. This process was made all the more dreary because the ban of the Hortators was still enforced against them, and the minds running the stations (sons or creations of Vafnir) would not speak to them directly, but only through disposable partials, who disintegrated after every speech.

  Dreary again was the fact that they were not being offered the local embodiments and aesthetics for this environment. Without the aesthetic protocols, many of the objects shining from the station walls were meaningless, like tangles of colored string, and many of the sounds were mere hisses and coughs, rather than announcements and alerts. Without the proper bodies, Phaethon had to stay in his armor with his helm closed, and Daphne had to wear an awkward full-body suit Phaethon made. It looked like some piece of ecologic-torture equipment out of the Dark Green Ages, with a faceplate and a symbiotic plant growing all over her like moss. She itched abominably, and knew she looked stupid.