The Phoenix Exultant Read online

  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 regained; I knew that Neptunian neurocircuits, 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 mine 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 squirley. Maybe you can fix?”

  “I’ll 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 restart 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 antiviral 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 Meridian 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 prod-uctress, fashion archetype, 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 that 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 nanoengineering. 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 lips 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 destruc-tionst, 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.

  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 waters.

  Oshenkyo grabbed 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.

  Not all 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 that 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 coarse 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 skullcap sores caused by improper interfacing, unclean jacks, or 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 housecoat merely by opening the coat’s help space and entering a reset command. Drusillet threw out her arms and spun, delighted as her coattails 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 cleptogeneticist? 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 painkillers.

  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 an 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 house 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, pull and roll 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 nanoconstruction.

  “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, 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 orbital ring-city. He remembered tossing out huge gobs of his precious nanomaterial 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 swing 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.

  3

  THE THOUGHT-SHOP

  1.

  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 a
n 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 seashell 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 re-form 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 nanosoftware erased and reconstructed as morphines or pleasure-endorphins? It would be as if someone were to eat the brain of a well-skilled genius merely for the protein content, or melt down a hard-process superintegrator 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.