Fénix Exultante (60 page)

For a moment, he thought he saw a figure, man-shaped, flying, camouflaged in black armor against the black sky. Then it dropped into the burning graveyard, and, with a flash, buried itself into the cliffside beneath the graveyard.

While Phaethon was still blinking and trying to decide what it was that he had seen, another explosion trembled through the gaunt seashell silhouettes of the dead and defective houses. Fire gushing from high windows, the tall thin silhouettes began to sway and fall.

Then, that noise was smothered, as all the houses Phaethon had just brought to life, all the floating houses of the Afloats, in one huge, terrible wail, began to scream.

Phaethon ran up the ladder and found himself on the fore-deck of the barge.

Red light from the fire surged along the northern cliff and lit the scene. Above him, through the pavilion floors of crystal, Phaethon saw black shadows stirring and groaning in the gloom. The workers on the night shift had been jacked out of their work. Perhaps the lines had been interrupted; perhaps Antisemris had shut down the server. The sound of screaming houses brought those figures above to their feet (those that had feet), and cries of anger and fear and wonder mingled with the general clamor.

“Calm! Calm!” Phaethon shouted upward. “It is not our houses burning. Only the empty shells in the graveyard. No one is in danger!”

Drusillet came forward. She was one of the few who had welcomed Phaethon’s changes and proudly wore the uniform jacket and skirt he had provided. The shawl she wore to cool her head against the tropic heat, originally designed with a thousand micropores to blow cold oxygen-mix, now also boasted several communication points and phone beads. Compared to the mentality, this small network, encompassing the few hundred yards occupied by the Afloat houses, was pathetic. But her beads and phones demonstrated that one person, at least, had ambition enough to take advantage of the links Phaethon had made among the floating houses.

And it was useful now. “What is the situation?” he asked.

She shouted her answer over the noise, “It’s the Hortators. They filed a petition to have the abandoned property destroyed as a public nuisance, submitted a plan for the public burning, and got permission to proceed, all in the last half-second. Energy beamed from stations along the ring-city are triggering the fires. There are constables with inhibitors and pseudo-matter smother fields patrolling the area to prevent the flames from spreading, and, also, Nebuchednezzar Sophotech invented and manufactured some new type of nanomachine cloud which can control the blaze. That’s the mist you see coming up out of the water. Either Nebuchadnezzar finessed Old-Woman-of-the-Sea, or else found some nanomanufacturing cells she doesn’t control.”

“Are we in any danger?”

“From fire? No. Our houses are screaming because of their fire alarms. I tried to talk to our houses and shut them up, but I need your command override.”

“I don’t have an override.”

“We don’t have a municipal net to coordinate the house-minds. Only the owners have authority to shut off the fire alarm, but most of them don’t know how.”

“The instructions are written in holographic Standard Aesthetic icon code along the rims of the inner wallsNebuchednezzer”

“Most of us can’t read.”

Phaethon controlled a sense of impatience. “Then shut down power and reset.”

“What if the house batteries are programmed to take over during a power out? The routine may have mutated since this morning.”

She was right. Phaethon was not certain how to deal with machines that were not smarter than he was.

Drusillet sent a shutdown and restart command nonetheless. The wails and screams of the floating houses died off. Echoes floated for a moment above the waves, and then were gone. The crackling roar of distant fires was the loudest noise now in the area.

Darkness fell across the bay. The houses, bright a moment ago, were now no more than red-lit shadows in the night, as dark and powerless as when Phaethon first had seen them.

“Restart.”

“I did. There must be a flaw in the routine.”

Just great. “Well, at least we still have light from the house fires yonder,” said Phaeton.

At that moment, however, the blaze along the north cliffs changed. The mist from the sea closed around the individual houses, forming a web not unlike silk, pumping pure oxygen into the burning houses. Each house and house stump blazed a silent blue-white, and was instantly consumed. The silk webs smothered any further fire in a matter of moments.

Everything was lit with magnesium-white light for an instant. Phaethon saw the angry, sullen faces of many of his workers standing along the pavilion balconies above him. Some stared north with looks of hate in their eyes. But some, with the same expressions, stared down at him.

Then, darkness rolled over the scene, like sudden blindness.

As the light died, Phaethon thought he saw a crawling, writhing movement along the northern cliffs. He cursed his lack of proper eyesight. But he guessed that the silk bags were altering again to new functions and sterilizing the soil so that seeds blown out from the damaged Afloat houses would no longer take root.

“It’s bad,” said Drusillet softly.

“They can’t destroy any of the house-brains we’ve already harvested from the graveyard. Those are clearly our property. But the houses were abandoned. They had as much right to burn them down as we did to loot them.”

“It’s bad. No new house-brains. No new houses.”

“The ones we have will last, with proper periodic cleaning and restructure.”

Drusillet seemed dubious.

Phaethon asked, “How often do you gather up a new house?”

“About once a week…”

“A week?!! Those things can last four hundred years!”

“Afloats use houses pretty roughly.”

“Don’t they maintain their homes, educate the house-minds? Clean them?”

Drusillet looked downcast. “No. Whenever the pantry was bare, or the floor mats got dirty, or the filters were stale, we’d just go chop down a new house. It was an excuse to celebrate.”

Phaethon shook his head in disgust and turned away. Eventually he said: “Well, in any case, I’m just sorry I did not think to file some sort of legal claim of adverse possession over the graveyard. I had forgotten how fast Sophotechs think, how fast they can act…”

He was wondering if the Hortators had actually not known where he was until the moment he revealed his location over the public channel, just now, to Bellipotent. If so, then the Hortators clearly had not sent Constable Pursuivant.

If not the Hortators, then who? The Silent Ones? Some third person Phaethon was overlooking? (And whom had Bellipotent conveyed to the island here?)

Pursuivant probably was not from the Silent Ones. It seemed unlikely that, even with a very sophisticated set of virus entities, the Silent Oecumene’s agents could so blithely infiltrate the local constabulary without some segment of the Earthmind noticing. And, if they were that powerful, they would have no need whatever to be secretive, since they would have already taken over the entire mentality.

Wait. An intuition told him that there was some flaw here in his logic, some obvious aspect to all these events he was sure he was overlooking. How powerful and how sophisticated was Nothing Sophotech?

But Phaethon was not a Warlock; he could not automatically bring his intuitions forward into his consciousness. The thought slipped away when a group of Afloats come up to the foredeck, and began demanding in loud voices that they be paid for the rest of their interrupted shift.

It was dark, and there was a press of bodies, and Phaethon had to squint to make them out.

The group consisted of a small triplicate-mind (whose three bodies looked like thin, big-eyed waifs,) a loud-voiced neo-morph in a floating box, and two tattoo-faced basics in torn shirts, one a neuter and the other a hermaphrodite.

The basics, rather than wearing Phaethon’s uniforms, had doused their upper bodies in smart-paint, so that peacock tails of ever-changing colors blushed across their flesh as tiny cells in the paint flexed to cool their skins, or perhaps (Phaethon thought it more likely) released chemicals into their pores. The perfume from the paint was really quite powerful. Phaethon stepped fastidiously back, holding a scrap of his suit-lining over his nose like a handkerchief.

“I can do nothing for you,” he said. “I cannot pay you with seconds of money I do not have. The clients for whom you were working have not yet paid me; nor can they, till we find a black line around whatever block Antisemris put up when he closed up his service.”

The three bodies of the triplicate-mind all spoke at once, a spate of interrupted words, and Phaethon regretted yet again that he had no sense-filter to reshape the words into a linear format. “Your problem!” one of them was saying, “We did our part!” The second was saying: “No money? What about that big expense account they gave you to call Neptune?” And the third was archly mentioning that the Hortators had not bothered them until Phaethon’s ambitions and high ideals had stirred up the wrath of the Hortators against them.

“We want Ironjoy back!” called one of the basics.

And the other called Phaethon a traitor.

But the neomorph in the floating coffin had a loudspeaker set to drown everyone else out. “On days when we got cut out of the Big Mind, or the services failed, or the lines were cut, it was good old Ironjoy that would declare a time-off party, wasn’t it? He’d have dreams by the fistful, and he had a lot of fists, too, and he’s pass out wire-points like they were candy. We’d have fluid and beer and happy-jack. For animal parties, we’d have beast-minds jacked in, to shut all those cortex-thoughts away, and just let our underselves and mid-brains come out to romp and play. For sex parties, we’d all link through the thought-shop into some of the rich, ripe, sims and wet dreams Ironjoy keeps on file, not just tame plunging, but real orgies of dirt, with all suppressed naughty under-thoughts read out by the sneak file and blasted back at double sensation! Aye, those were right days! There was fun! There was life! What’ve we got now, eh? A man named after Phaethon, the rich man’s son, the man who thinks he owns the Sun! And what’s he going to do for us, to help us survive our last few hours and years alive? Summon parties? Let us drink and stick and dream and jack and joy? No how! No how! He’ll dress us up and drive us on and pound and preach and box us in till everything is either his or ours! No more sharing! No more playing fair! What say you all? You want to party? Or you want to listen to a Phaethon look-alike rich man’s darling son stand up and preach?”

More and more people had come crowding up on the deck, and filled the stairs, and pushed forward, calling and gesticulating.

And the crowd shouted, “Party! Par-tee! Par-tee!”

Phaethon raised a hand and tried to shout back. “Are you mad? Go home! Rest! We will need to work double shift tomorrow, to make up for what we lost today. Otherwise, how will you eat tomorrow?”

Oshenkyo jumped down from one of the pavilions above and landed neatly atop the hull of the floating coffin. He crouched and put his mouth to the speaking hole, so that his voice was amplified as well. “Big Snoot Gold got plenty to eat, beneath that fancy suit. We all know it! Yummy black, hundred matrix, rich as cream, able to become whatever thing you dream! It’s ours, not his; we needs it more!”

Oshenkyo wanted Phaethon’s black nanomachine lining. A murmur through the crowds showed they all wanted some of it, too.

Phaethon’s armor also had amplifiers:

“Idiots! Think about tomorrow! Think about a million tomorrows! I’ve invited the Neptunians to come and grant you your endless lives again!”

“Tomorrow isn’t coming!” shouted the neomorph.

The crowd took up the call. “Tomorrow isn’t coming! Tomorrow isn’t coming!” And they surged forward to grapple Phaethon’s armor.

“Not for you, it isn’t,” said Phaethon grimly. And he shut his faceplate and made a calculation and sent a low-voltage charge of electricity through the armor’s hull. All the hands who were grappling him locked and froze, and everyone pressing forward, each person touching each other in the crowd, passed the charge among them. A noise arose like one Phaethon had never heard before, a gasp of breathless and convulsive agony squeezed from a hundred straining lungs at once.

When he cut the current, everyone dropped to the deck, groaning, twitching. After the press and roar of the crowd, the sudden silence was overwhelming.

Phaethon looked up at a floating constable-wasp. “Once again, you did not help me. Are only those who have wealth and power in this society afforded protection?”

“Apologies. The crowd was only exercising its right of free speech and free assembly, until the moment they laid hands on you. We were gathering units to respond, when you attacked them.”

“Attacked? I call it self-defense.”

“Perhaps. I notice that not everyone in the crowd was actually touching you; some of them may have been trying to pull people off you. The magistrate has not yet made a ruling. But none of your victims have yet filed a complaint. They all seem to be incapacitated. We will take them to a holding area till they are ready to face trial and punishment.”

And with that, dozens of large machines, like flying crabs, swooped down and began picking up the stunned Afloats and spiriting them away.

“Stop! Were are you taking my workforce! I’m going to need them before tomorrow to finish our projects!”

A constable-wasp near his ear said, “For many years, the Afloats, even though they were shunned exiles, never crossed the line to crime. Now, thanks to you, they have. The Golden Oecumene will tolerate no violence. Your other plans will have to wait.”

Half the Afloats were gone. The busy flying machines swooped and plucked up more. Soon they were all gone, and the decks were bare.

“When will they be returned to me?”

“I am not obligated to answer that, sir, although I have heard a rumor to the effect that the Hortators are willing to rent them cheap dwellings in Kisumu, near a delirium farm run by Red Eveningstar castoffs. I hear that there is a wide field of pleasure coffins piled up and left to rot among the parks and jungles nearby, with a thousand old dreamsheets and smart-drugs and personality-alterants just lying out on the grass. Some of the Afloats may volunteer to return here for a life of deprivation, hard reality, and hard work. Maybe.”