Fénix Exultante (52 page)

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.

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 Nebuchednezzar 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.

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 oxynitrogen 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 seawater 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 sort of kelp or seaweed, which tangled around his flailing arms, 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 the 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.

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 little men, the height is too great; 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 thoughtspace, 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 chemicals and 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 gray 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.