Fénix Exultante (70 page)

“Fine! I cannot believe we are going through this old argument, when you might actually be a horrible puppet controlled by the Silent Ones.”

“What a terrible thing to say about a person!”

He shook his finger at her. “I’m telling you, if this turns out to be a Silent One trick, and you killed that sweet Daphne-doll—the image of the woman I love—I’ll destroy your whole damn civilization with no more hesitation than if I were wiping out a nest of cockroaches! You tell that to your masters! I was born to burn worlds!”

“Don’t be silly, dear, you sound like a caveman. But I appreciate the sentiment; not every girl gets a maniac to slaughter people indiscriminately for her. So do you really think I’m sweet?”

“It’s not funny. Well, perhaps it is a trifle funny, but it’s really not entirely funny.” He threw off the housecoat and stepped back over to his armor.

Daphne sat up. “Now what are you doing?”

“I can take a precaution. The thought-ports in my armor can act as an intermediary. The noetic-read energy cannot penetrate the admantium. I can just set up a buffer, like an air lock, something to quickly interrupt the circuit if the noetic reader does something untoward.”

Black tentacles of nanomaterial fitted the armor around him. Then he straggled to put the housecoat back on. Then followed a few minutes while he spread nanomaterial across his upper helmet surfaces, growing contact-points to be routed through the thought-points in his shoulder boards. The carrier lines clustered like a drooping mass of hair across his head, and around his shoulders, spilling out of the front of the housecoat hood.

Then he spent several moments downloading routines out of the thought-shop. A point-to-point system, a format translator, security cycles, relative time adjustment groups, and so on…

Ironjoy, because of his clientele, had far more security programs than any other thought-shop Phaethon had seen. He sent out a search-tree to use and combine them all.

Then he discovered, of course, that, since his secretarial and seneschal programs had been erased out of his personal thoughtspace, he had to get architectural activators, routing judges, information condensers and decondensors, pattern assessors, step locks, hold-and-go priority switches …

Some of this required additional hardware chips, processing beads, and so on, which he clipped to the various parts of the housecoat, and hung from the carrier strands. The wall behind the talking mirrors opened up into several construction cabinets, where Phaethon either made or found what more he needed.

Soon, it was hard to move his arms, because he now wore two housecoats (since the first had not had enough storage area of action circuits), and, practically a third coat itself, was the layer of additional materials he had been forced to add, wires and join-boxes, cooling disks and through-put forks, dangling from all eight sleeves.

He had opened one of the mirrors to allow him to run additional lines to contact points there, to get direct access to thought-shop routines. Every wire running to the mirror had a circuit-interrupt with a security assessment cell clipped to it.

“You look like a walking Yule tree,” Daphne called from the cot.

“Just don’t put a candle on my head.” His voice was muffled, because the external speakers on his armor were obscured. He sighed. “I’m just glad the Silver-Greys aren’t around to see this. Helion’s ancient vow to make our technology serve Beauty.”

“You aren’t a Silver-Grey at the moment, hero. Besides, I’m recording the picture into my ring. We’ll all have a good laugh about it, once our exile ends.” There was a wistful note to her voice.

“Hmp. You show them that picture, the Silver-Grey won’t take me back.”

“Don’t worry. I show them this picture, the Black Manorials will take you. You’ll start a new Absurdist Sartorial Movement. Asmodius Bohost will dress like you.”

“Well, good heavens! It’s worth the risk of having the Silent One’s booby-trapped noetic reader here burn out my brain just for that, if nothing else! My other accomplishments will sink into obscurity by contrast, once history remembers that I once influenced Mr. Bohost’s ghastly wardrobe!”

Daphne favored him with a level stare.

“You’re delaying.”

“Perhaps a little…”

“You’re afraid.”

“Not unreasonable, considering that this might actually kill me.”

“You are a paranoid deluded maniac.”

“But a lovable one. Are you attempting to bolster my courage, miss? You should have Eveningstar Sophotech teach you more about how to manipulate the moods of men.”

“Are we back to ‘miss’ are we? That’s fine with me; because at least you are talking now as if we are going to make it back out of this exile. You sound mildly less doomed.”

“I’m wondering if there are further steps I can take to make it so this noetic reader, if it is trapped, cannot hurt me.”

“Put another bucket on your head.”

“This is not a bucket; it monitors energy levels in the hood-interface.”

“It’s still a bucket.”

“Maybe I’m worried about what will happen if this succeeds. The automatic exile—the one I agreed to suffer at Lakshmi—will be ended. But so what? There is not a single thing that will prevent the College from turning around and bringing a new proceeding against me. They still fear star colonization. Till now, I had been sort of assuming that the mere existence of surviving colonists from the Silent Oecumene would compel us to travel out there. To discover what had become of them, if nothing else. But, if you are right after all, and all this is a hallucination imposed by Gannis, that compelling reason vanishes.”

Daphne sat with her elbows on her knees, cupping her cheeks in her palms, looking up at Phaethon with an impertinent and girlish look. “Leave everything to me and Aurelian. We can clear that hurdle when we come to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was saving it as a surprise.”

“I thought you hated surprises.”

“Not when they are my surprises.”

“Please tell me, miss.”

“Are we still back on ‘miss’? Say, ‘please tell me, Daphne my darling wife,’ and maybe I will.”

“Sha’n’t. You’ll tell me and gladly.”

“And why shall I?” She favored him with an impish smile.

“Because, like me, you are too proud of your accomplishments to keep quiet about them.”

Her smile burned languid, and she brushed her hair with her fingers, preening.

Phaethon said, “Any time now. I’m tired of standing here with a bucket on my head.”

“We’re rich.”

“What?”

“Actually, you’re rich. I’m only rich if you marry me again.”

“You are deluded. I do not have a gram of money, not a second of computer time.”

“I said rich. It’s not enough to buy our ship out of hock, but it should be enough to hire a Black House vessel to carry us to Mercury Equilateral, and pay for at least some of the last-minute preparations the Phoenix Exultant still needs done.”

“Oh, come now. And where did this alleged money come from?”

“Flying suits.”

“Flying suits?”

“You hold the patent on them. The way Rhadamanthus set up the business, you only lease the patent in return for a shared percentage. During the masquerade, everybody wants to fly. Its just so much fun. Aurelian Sophotech set up a second levitation array above Western Europe, for the Aryan Individualists, and a third over India, where the Uncomposed Cerebelline art-capital Macrostructure is.”

“Ridiculous. The Hortators…”

“Are a private and voluntary organization. They cannot subpoena your records; they are not the police. Everyone who is renting a flying cloak from you is in masquerade. Nobody knows who they are, except for Aurelian.”

“But—but why would people—why would they defy the Hortators?”

Daphne raised her slender hands and her soft, round shoulders in an exaggerated pantomime shrug. “Theory one: People support the Hortators, in principle, except when that principle causes them some sacrifice or hardship, such as forgoing the pleasure of personal levitation, whereupon their principles evaporate like spit on Mercury dayside. A lot of people were upset, you know, about the unforeseen consequences of that mass-amnesia they let the Hortators talk them into. Theory two: People know the Hortators are actually, really, supposed to ostracize folks like all your friends here, the child pornographers and semislavers and weaponeers, destructionists and malignifiers and mystagogues, hatemongers and history-forgers and suicide-panderers; and the people know that bright, heroic Phaethon does not fit in with that muck.”

Phaethon’s muffled voice came out from underneath his layers of coats, lines, wires. “Would people really defy the Hortators … for me? Do they believe in my dream, finally, after all?”

“Don’t get so dewy-eyed. Occam’s razor forbids us from adopting theories that require us to postulate unreal entities, such as, for example, the existence of conscience, noble dreams, or good wishes among our fellow citizens. No, theory number one makes more sense. They don’t care about you and your ideals or about the Hortators and their ideals. They just want their toys.”

“Their love for their toys may allow me to repossess my toy. Isn’t there the seed of free-market morality buried in that somewhere? I want my ship. The Neptunian conversation-tree has already predicted that their Duma will hire me to pilot the Phoenix Exultant.”

Daphne pointed with a slender finger toward the chest pocket of his housecoat, where the noetic unit rested. “But first you must get us the hell out of this miserable exile. Say the magic word and let that thought-forsaken thing read your mind already. If I’m actually a Silent One spy, and this is all an elaborate trap, I’ll apologize to you later.” “What if I’m dead?”

She shivered with disgust. “Well, then I won’t apologize! Will you just get on with it?! They dumped all my spare lives, and it makes me nervous. I’ve been mortal for at least an hour now, and it’s beginning to bother me. I mean, what would happen if a meteor struck the earth at this spot, or something?”

“I wouldn’t worry about meteors, were I you,” said Phaethon. “There hasn’t been a big strike since the Baltimore event in the Fourth Era. Since that time, a watch has been tracking and recording the movements of all objects within the detectable danger zone, first by the Chicken Little Subcomposition, then by Star-Dance Cerebelline, and now by the Sophotechs. Nothing could get past them…”

He frowned. A thought, so obvious and so large as to have been invisible before, surfaced in his mind.

Where was the Silent Oecumene starship?

There must be a second Phoenix Exultant, perhaps a colder, slower, stealthier ship, but a starship capable of travel from Cygnus X-l nevertheless. A dark twin of his golden Phoenix. Where was it hidden? Sophotech navigation watches observed every rock, practically every dustmote, in inner-system space. But if the Silent Phoenix was somewhere beyond Neptune (as Phaethon had been assuming) then how could the Sophotechs not notice whatever information, instructions, or reports were traveling back and forth between Nothing’s agents on Earth and wherever the evil Sophotech was housed?

(Unless…? Could the agents be operating with only furtive and infrequent contact with their Sophotech? If so, then the agents were capable of obtuseness, illogic, and human error.)

The Silent Oecumene technology might be different from that of the Golden Oecumene. Nonetheless, in general, it was safe to assume that the technology level still had to be roughly equal, since a godlike superiority in technology would have permitted the Silent Ones to disregard any need for precaution or secrecy.

Therefore, it was safe to assume that normal principles of science and engineering applied. The Silent Ones could not motivate their starship without discharges of energy sufficient to move the ship’s mass across the intervening distance.

And also, even if the Nothing Sophotech could be housed in a frame physically much smaller than huge electrophotonic matrices of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs, the energy density, and the energy required to perform a respectable Sophotech-level number of operations-per-second, would still give it a large mass-energy reading. The pseudo-neutronium inside the noetic unit he was holding, for example, could have been detected from orbit by weakly interacting particle ranging-and-detection gear.

Where could one put a body that large, or put a starship, without the Earthmind detecting either?

Daphne said, “You’re not talking, lover. That means you’re thinking.”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

A feminine sigh floated in the candle-lit gloom. “You should be thinking about hurrying up, getting a noetic reading, proving that you are right, and getting home in time for a real comfortable night, including a warm pool, a communion, a mensal performance, and a walk in the Eveningstar Garden of the New Senses. The Non-Apotheosis School was going to surface back into human thoughtspace from their daring sub-transcendence tomorrow, and everyone says they will be bringing back Para-artistic phenomena from deep in the Earth-mind, miniaturized and recalculated to make sense to our neuroforms. I thought it would be a much better way to spend an afternoon than sitting here on a rusting barge, watching each other undergo the aging process. Can’t we go home? All this poverty and trash here is beginning to depress me. Too much like my folks’ old Stark place on the Reservation.”

She was clutching her elbows and shivering. One of the candles on the porthole sill behind her had begun to gutter out. She had half-turned and was watching it die.

Phaethon knew she was thinking morbid thoughts. The Starks had not connected their child to any noumenal immortality circuit, nor even told her that such a thing as immortality was possible. Daphne had suffered more than one bad accident as a child, falling from trees, overturning boats, being trampled by antique walking-statues; for she had led an active life. She found out from a wandering confabulator, a Jongleur from the Warlock Benevolent Mischief School, about Orphic reincarnation banks: and she had never forgiven the mad risk her primitivist parents had taken with her life.

The bright flame sputtered, gave off a greater light than before, swayed, failed, and vanished. A slender tail of smoke rushed upward.