The Phoenix Exultant Page 8

  “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 lopsided 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 seashell-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 that 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 will 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 wider view than he had expected.

  He said, “Weak? Compared to whom? To you? My actions do not stink of hysteria and shortsighted 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 counteroffer. If you cooperate with me, and return my remaining armor intact, 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 rewrite 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 the nanomachinery lining to control some complex supersystem 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 that 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 backup 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 overruns. 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 dreamspace 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.

  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 wearin
g advertisement robes of dull blue-gray. Now those robes strobed, yelling, 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 and 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 consume slowly, 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-fourth 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.

  3.

  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 Hortators’ 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 seabeds beyond. Bioformations that formed the nervous system of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea were mingled among the nets and beds of kelp and seaweed 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 makeshifts 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 nanomaterial to form a recycling environment, allowing him to stay down here, there might not be enough to form the neuretic tissues he needed to reconstruct 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 might 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 Nebuchednezzar 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 Nebuchednezzer 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 cooperated, it would have saved him from going mad.

  Within the limits of the law, there was some scope, some gray areas, 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 lie 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.

  4.

  Phaethon was more fatigued than he suspected. Farther and farther down the subsea 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 the 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.