The Phoenix Exultant Read online

  There was something shameful about the fact that Neo-Orpheus, had, at one time, been the selfsame Orpheus who inspired the modern romantic movement; and he had led the team that invented the technology to preserve the human soul, intact, after bodily death; shameful that he should, nowadays, choose to dwell in bodies so ugly. This pyramid-shaped skeleton robot was not from the Objective Aesthetic, nor from any aesthetic at all. It was stark, functional, and utterly inhuman.

  Neo-Orpheus said, “My last comment was permissible, as falling under the general umbrella of necessary comments required to conclude our business here with dispatch.”

  “Ah. But now I must ask, was the comment explaining that last comment gratuitous … ? It certainly was unnecessary. Welcome to exile!”

  Neo-Orpheus did not deign to respond.

  Vafnir said, “Phaethon! In order to conclude the contract quickly, and in order to minimize further interactions between the two of us, I hereby not only turn over to you the materials you bought from me, but also the warehouses and the robot workers attendant thereto, base work crew, supervisors, partials, decision informata, everything. I am giving you, as a free gift, without warranty, all the operators you will need to carry out this operation yourself. They are yours. They will load and equip and polish your insane ship according to your orders, but I will not be responsible hereafter for their acts. Do you acknowledge that this will satisfy all my obligations to you under the contract … ?”

  A window opened up on one of the decks to the left and showed a view from a point in space near the Phoenix Exultant. Even as he watched, he saw the flares of light darting from the warehouses, and saw the first of many spheres of fuel, like a line of pearls, beginning to emerge and slide across space toward the waiting ship.

  To the port and starboard of the titanic ship, other warehouses opened their doors. A second string of pearls joined the first, then a third, then a score, then a hundred. The vast bays and fuel docks of the Phoenix Exultant stirred to life and opened to receive the incoming gifts.

  The running lights of the ship lit up. Red to port. Green to starboard. Flashing white along the keel. The ship had come to life again.

  “Do not imagine that your victory over us is achieved, Phaethon,” Neo-Orpheus said in a cold voice.

  Phaethon said, “But, my dear sir, I am not imagining it at all. I see it clearly.”

  In the window, at that moment, orbital tugs appeared, guiding the mile-long slabs of golden admantium, one after another, toward the rents and gaps in the vast armored hull.

  Silently steadily, ton upon countless ton of material, fuel, ship-brains, biomaterial, and the vast expanse of hull segments, began falling like gentle snow toward the golden doors opened so wide to receive them.

  Phaethon said in his heart: Come to life, my Phoenix, that you may bring life to lifeless worlds. How could anyone fear so noble and so fine a ship as you?

  It was only then that he noticed how much like a spear blade she was in truth, how sleek, how beautiful, how deadly. He realized how it would be easy, quite easy, magnificently easy and awe-inspiring, to use her world-creating power to destroy worlds. (And it did not please him that he took such pleasure at that thought.)

  And, now that the teamsters and longshoremen robots were his and his alone, unlike material from the Phoenix Exultant (owned, now, by Neoptolemous) he could send them where he liked and to what task he liked.

  A mental command was all he needed to turn legal ownership of half a hundred of them over to Daphne. No matter what else might happen to her, she would at least have several tugs and smallboats at her disposal, with their fuel, life support, and ship-brains. She now, at least, could depart the station in something roomier than a canister.

  And he could depart to the Phoenix Exultant.

  His ship.

  14

  THE FAREWELL CUP

  1.

  Phaethon hung in space, a reaction lance in hand, poetry in his heart, a vision of gold in his eyes. He was about thirty kilometers aft of the main superstructure, watching from a hundred points of view at once as the last of the loading was completed.

  Whatever the law might say, she was his ship, his dream made real, in golden admantium, antimatter, energy, carbon fiber, molecularly strengthened steel.

  Because he had no mentality support, he had to carry on his inspection of the great vessel using the protocols originally designed for refueling in distant star systems.

  The golden hull was utterly immune to any electromagnetic signal; and he did not have as many attendant-craft as his original design had called for; so that, instead of being able to bounce a signal from remote to remote, and connect his mind to hull-tenders and macromannequins on every side of the ship at once, he had to move himself, physically, from one side of the ship to the other, and then get a line of sight on any system or robot squad with which he wanted to talk, commune, or mind-embrace.

  It was crude and primitive, and he had, personally, to order much of the work done himself. Often he would flourish his lance and jet down to the surface of the great ship, and watch the work progress with his own eyes, or touch the golden hull with his own hand. He inspected, he checked, he tested, he reviewed. The process was insufferably archaic, as if someone from the late Fourth Era, after the invention of Van Neumann Self-regulating Robotics, suddenly had to carve a canoe from a log with a stone ax with his own hands, or as if someone from the Sixth Era had to manifest a Stable-Island pseudomaterial launch shell using only the elements appearing on the original, nonartificial, periodic chart. It was archaic. It was beautiful. Phaethon was in love.

  Love is frustrating. It did not help, for example, that the Sun was nearby, forcing him to rotate the great craft slowly, to distribute heat. It did not help that the self-evolving robots were just smart enough to recognize the benefits of huddling in the hundred-kilometer-wide shadow of the Phoenix to escape the solar rays, but not smart enough to grasp the principles of enlightened long-term self-interest and devotion to duty, to do their jobs efficiently. Phaethon put them all on a budget, deactivated their behavior regulators, and began setting up swarms of self-reconstruction and self-replication catalysts. Any robots who did not do their work, did not get paid enough out of the energy allowance to rent a catalyst and reproduce. Since the robots willing to risk exposure to the sunside of the ship increased geometrically in number and potency, Phaethon did not worry about individual regulation; he just let natural selection run its course.

  It took less time than estimated to load and prepare the ship for burn, despite all this. After fifty hours, Phaethon was ready.

  It was now the Ninth Night before the Grand Transcendence. Phaethon had missed the dance. There was no motion anywhere in space nearby, not even of automatic systems. All ships were falling cold. But there was radio-traffic unlike anything ten centuries had seen. Phaethon was alone in the stardock, alone among the warehouses, orbital shops, and shipyards. Everyone else was celebrating. Only he was at work.

  He needed no dance. Lance in hand, he flew through the vast afterbays toward the central core. It was darkened now, silent, cold. He passed up through the engine-core space, past endless kilometers of fuel cells, the horizonless geometry of antimatter globes of frozen metallic hydrogen, and past the ring on ring and bastion on bastion of thought-boxes and ship-brains englobing the living quarters.

  The mainframe decks were like the walnut-sized brain, compared to this mighty ship, found in the original pre-reconstructed dinosaurs. Inward and “above” them (now that the carousel was under spin) the living decks had been pressurized and super-refrigerated to the standards of Neptunian Cold Ducal body forms. The outer levels of this small city of cabins and quarters were spinning now at many times the original design specifications.

  Inward still, at Earth-normal gravity, the “higher” decks held laboratories, confabulationaries, extensive thought-shop and matter-shop appliances, communion atriums, baths, formularies, surgeries, nanoconstruction cells, gardens
, greenhouses, bluehouses, feast halls, aviaries, palaces, museums, metanthropy studios, and the other basic necessities of civilized existence.

  And, like the gemstone that makes a ring not merely an ornament, but a valuable servant and library, here was the bridge.

  Phaethon, it is true, had missed the dance of Earth and all the worlds on the Twelfth Night. And had missed participating in the Choir of All Worlds, that fantastic symphony and paean, where every mind and voice and soul was embraced in one single unimaginable harmony, which crowned the hours of the Tenth Night. But he needed neither music nor dance nor any other celebration.

  Phaethon rose; the door “above” him parted; a dim light, like the hint of light before the dawn, fell down around him; the floor beneath him rose, and carried him upward; and he was on his bridge. What other song or splendor did he need?

  2.

  He called for light; light came. He called for knowledge; tall, energy mirrors on concentric balconies sprang to life, and information flowed into his brain. He walked across the deck.

  Each tessellation of the deck was paved with another hue of wood, darker grains contrasted with lighter, to form a pleasing irregularity, each one shining like gold, dark or bright, by the sheen of its polish.

  Pressure curtains ran from the floor to the dome above, shimmering pale blue, royal scarlet, and burgundy. Concentric banks of thought-boxes and energy mirrors rose like an amphitheater, with one larger mirror extended up several balconies to the dome, tuned to display the local area of space and local communication activity. Space was deserted of ships under power; but communication channels flowed like rivers of light, everywhere, a wide-flung net burdened with massive volumes, connecting every habitat, ship-at-rest, sail, satellite, xenonanomechanical cloud and cloud bank, every coronal substation and intelligence formation, throughout all this area near Mercury Equilateral.

  Phaethon crossed to the captain’s chair. There it was, polished, cleaned, charged. To the left was a symbol table, showing two visitors awaiting him. To the right was the status board, showing that the million checklists of the preflight roster had been checked; the Phoenix Exultant was ready to start her burn.

  He savored the moment, merely looking at the chair. Then, with only the slightest of smiles, he seated himself, sighed, gripped the chair arms, and cast his gaze back, forth, upward, and down. The hundred energy mirrors shining on the balconies were lit with views and images from each part of the ship, diagrams, informata flows, engine status, field strengths, weight distributions, storage and containment formations for the cargo, supercargo projections, acceleration umbrellas, radio-radar views, meteorological reports on the conditions of near-space, including particle counts, ship-brain and robopsychiatric analysis, hull-configuration monitors. Everything.

  Phaethon sat on his throne and surveyed his kingdom, and he was well pleased with what he saw.

  To people his kingdom, and, as a sort of compliment to the Silver-Grey aesthetic in which he had been born and raised, he now created a mannequin crew, costumed in different periods, and downloaded with a different partial-personality. Because Phaethon did not want to be alone in his hour of triumph, he peopled the deck with his heroes from myth and history.

  Squares of the deck drew back. The mannequin racks beneath lifted several bodies into view. Phaethon activated his sense-filter, signaled to the ship-mind, created, downloaded, constructed, drew.

  Soon each one stood before a different duty station, manipulating controls that were merely symbols to display the ship’s status.

  Here was Ulysses, wearing beggar rags over his half-hidden armor, an unstrung bow of triple rhinoceros-hide in his hand, manning the navigation station. Next to him, Sir Francis Drake, splendid in blue surcoat and white lace, held a magic looking glass and watched for other ships and foreign objects. Admiral Byrd in his parka watched the board displaying internal heat and environment controls.

  Here was Neil Armstrong with the stiff banner of the United States on one hand, tasked with guiding the forward remotes and smaller robot-ships that flew before the Phoenix Exultant as part of her array. There was Jason with his Golden Fleece, holding the thread that showed open communication lines were still present; and, at the tiller, (of course) was Hanno.

  Magellan, Cortez, Clark, and Cook were also there, as well as Buckland-Boyd Cyrano-D’Atano, the first man to survive a Mars landing. Sloppy Rufus, Cyrano-D’Atano’s dog was there, not given any tasks to do, but just because Phaethon could not imagine the iconoclastic self-made Martian pioneer without the loyal mongrel he had brought with him to Mars.

  Oe Sephr al-Midr the Descender-into-Clouds was charged with watching the gravitic alterations and the acceleration schedule, which was ironic, considering the circumstances of his tragic death in a Jovian subduction layer.

  Vanguard Single Exharmony in his white ablative armor kept track of the total-conversion drive core temperatures, which was not ironic at all, considering the remarkable success of his first mission into the Solar Photosphere, after Harmony Composition had sent so many to fiery death and failure.

  Vanguard Single Exharmony was Phaethon’s second favorite historical character, not only because he was the ancestor-in-spirit for Helion’s work, but also because the transition from the Fourth Era to the Fifth was triggered partly because Vanguard, an individual detached from the Harmony group-mind, had succeeded where so many of the mass-minds had failed.

  Phaethon’s favorite explorer was Sir Francis Drake, who had not only explored the northern passage but turned a profit on the venture. His least favorite was Christopher Columbus, who was not pictured here in his bridge; Phaethon had no use for a man who miscalculated the diameter of the Earth, and reached, by accident, a continent he failed to identify. His second least favorite was Chan Noonyan Sfih of Io, the first man to “set foot” on Pluto. Phaethon also had no use for a man who, despite having been warned by experts, had his landing vehicle fall through the surface layer of hydrogen ice weakened and thawed by his landing jets, fall through successive layers of nitrogen and methane ice, strike a layer of oxygen ice, which thawed and ignited and set fire to the entire surface of the planet. On the coldest planet in space, Chan Sfih had burned to death, whereas a careful thinker like Vanguard Single had been dropped into the sun, and lived.

  There was also no image of Ao Ormgorgon Darkwormhole Noreturn. He had been the leader, during the Fifth Era, of the expedition to Cygnus X-1.

  Phaethon glanced to his left. The symbol table showed the glowing visitor icons. Only the most extraordinary circumstance would have a visitor calling him, now. A visitor would either have to be an exile or be beyond the fear of becoming one. Who could it be?

  Now that his ship and crew were ready, Phaethon made the acceptance gesture for the first icon in the symbol table.

  3.

  A mannequin rose up out of the square of deck, stood, and saluted. “Permission to come aboard.”

  How quaint and archaic. Phaethon looked into the ship’s Surface Dreaming, expecting to see a Silver-Grey, perhaps even some newly converted Neptunian introduced to Silver-Grey custom by his friend Diomedes.

  But no. Here was a man in a dark blue uniform and cuirass of a Sixth-Era Advocate Warden. The Advocates, before the evolution of the College of Hortators, acted as the emissaries and translators between the Sophotechs and the Humans. During those years, before the developments in noumenal technology allowed for vastenings, intelligence-augments, and synnoetics, the gulf between Sophotechnic minds and human minds had been large indeed. The Advocates were sent by the Sophotechs to guide by example and prediction, never by force, the human community away from self-inflicted dangers. The Warden were a subgroup of the Advocates that acted something like a voluntary police force, guarding people against fire, disaster, and mind-crash.

  The figure held up a twelve-pointed blazon in his hand, signaling his identity through the ship’s Middle Dreaming.

  No, he was not a Silver-Grey. He was a Dark-Grey.
/>   The Dark-Grey also followed ancient customs and disciplines, not because they admired the beauty of the ancient world, but because they admired the harshness and rigor that had formed the human character. Dark-Grey were required to devote a certain amount of their lives to public service, as Constables, Fire Wardens, Censors, Werewolf-monitors, Rescuers, and, back in the older times, as Reserve Soldiers under the Warmind.

  This was Temer Sixth Lacedemonian, Humodified (space-adapted), Uncomposed (ascetic werewolf self-imposed override), Multiple-parallel attention-monitors, base neuroform, Dark-Grey Manorial Schola.

  And his uniform was not a Masquerade costume. Temer Lacedemonian was the Advocate Warden in charge of space-traffic control. This corporation had maintained a monopoly on space-traffic control since the middle of the Sixth Era, despite fierce competition for the market. It was Temer Lacedemonian who controlled the safety of all ships in flight throughout the Inner System, and most of the Outer, and his position made him on the verge of becoming a Peer.

  Phaethon stood and projected an image of himself into the Dreaming, so that he did not need to remove his armor. “Welcome aboard. But before you speak, I feel I must warn you that the ban of the Hortators is still in force against me. You will find yourself shunned if you address me.”

  Temer Lacedemonian had the white hair face-symbology used to show sagacity, and his skin was the jet-black space travelers favored as a block against radiation. He smiled grimly.

  “As to that, sir, please tell me, if you can, how a machine one hundred kilometers from prow to stern-plate, radiating a four-hundred-kilometer drive discharge that washes out all the unshielded communications in her radio-aura, and able to accelerate at ninety gravities of thrust, and preparing even now to launch; tell me how I am to orchestrate safe flight-paths for all vessels in this area without speaking to the pilot of that machine?”