The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  Phaethon’s feet were slow. He wanted so desperately to hear this one last song. Except for tunes he might whistle himself, or music shed from advertisements passing by, Phaethon would not hear songs again: no one would perform for him; no one would sell him a recording.

  He steeled himself and turned his back. The hatch shut silently behind him.

  The deck was deserted. The place was empty.

  2.

  Before him, carpeted in burgundy, set with small tables and formulation rods of glass and white china, was an observation deck. Antique reading helmets plated with ornamental brass nested in the ceiling. A line of couches faced tall windows overlooking the prow, with seeing rings in little dishes to one side. The privacy screens around the couches were folded and transparent at the moment, but Phaethon could still see ghostly half-images of creatures from Japanese mythology depicted in the glassy surface.

  He did not recognize the aesthetic. Something older than the Objective period perhaps? Whatever it was, it was opulent and elegant.

  Phaethon stepped aboard; his armor stepped after him. Phaethon raised his hand to make the open-channel gesture, then stopped himself, looked at his hand sadly, and lowered it. He could not access any information just by directing a thought or gesture at it, not ever again. But it would not be hard to adapt, he told himself. He was a Silver-Grey; and speaking out loud was one of the traditions Silver-Greys diligently practiced.

  “Who is here? What is this place? Is there anyone aboard?”

  No answer. He stepped forward toward the couches, sat down gingerly.

  The privacy screen to his left was half-open, so that one transparent panel was between him and the left-hand windows looking down on the balcony. Within the frame of this screen, the scene had more color and motion than elsewhere. Every gray mannequin within this frame was suddenly colored and costumed and bestowed with an individual human face. Overhead, banners and displays curled through the air, drifting. But any mannequin who stepped out of the frame turned gray again, and any banner vanished.

  The privacy screen must have been tuned to the Surface Dreaming, Phaethon realized. It was an antique of some sort that translated mental images into light images. He amused himself for a moment by moving his head left and right, so that different parts of the balcony, now to the right and now to the left, were touched with extra color and pageantry. Gray mannequins were transformed to breathtaking courtiers, splendid in dress, and then, with another move of his head, back into gray mannequins again.

  Then he saw, amid the pageantry, a figure in white and rose lace with a tricorn hat, face disfigured by a hook nose and hook chin. It was Scaramouche. Behind him were Columbine in her harlot’s skirts and Pierrot, pale-faced and in baggy white. The three pantomime figures were moving against the flow of the crowd with deliberate haste; their heads moved in unison, back and forth, scanning the crowd with methodical sweeps.

  They closed in on a figure dressed in gold armor; but no, it was merely someone dressed as Alexander the Great, in a gilt breastplate. Alexander the Great stared at them in confusion; the three pantomime clowns bowed and frolicked, and Alexander turned away. Scaramouche and his two confederates stood a moment, motionless, as if hearing instructions from some remote source.

  Phaethon tried to tell himself that this was some coincidence of costuming. Xenophone’s agent would not be so foolish as to continue to dress in the same costume as before. No doubt these were merely Black Manorials, looking for Phaethon to taunt or humiliate him, and dressed in the way Phaethon had said his enemy had dressed. It would have been easy to copy the costume from the public records of the Hortators’ inquest.

  Except that Black Manorials could have simply found out from the mentality where Phaethon was. The Hortators, without doubt, would have posted conspicuous notices telling everyone what Phaethon had done, and where he was, and how to avoid him. Only someone who did not want to leave a trace would attempt to find Phaethon by eye.

  As if stimulated by a silent signal, the three pantomime clowns now turned toward the airship docks. Their eyes seemed to meet Phaethon’s own, staring up at the windows where he stood. The eyes moved to Phaethon’s left, where the armor stood, covered by a hooded robe.

  Phaethon said to himself: Surely they are not looking for two figures, one in black, one in a robe.

  But the three figures began pushing through the crowd toward the airship dock. They passed outside the range of the frame of the privacy screen, and suddenly they were merely three anonymous gray mannequins lost in a throng of similar mannequins.

  Phaethon squinted, but, separated from the mentality, he could not amplify his vision, make a recording, or set up a motion-detection program to discover which of the moving bodies lost in the crowd were the ones he sought. Disconnected, he was blind and crippled. His enemies were coming, and he was helpless.

  He could not send out a responder-pulse to discover the serial numbers of the mannequins involved; he could not call the constables. If he logged on to the mentality to make the call, descendants of the enemy virus civilizations would come out from hiding and strike him down the moment he opened a channel.

  Was there a way to send a voice-only signal from the circuits in his armor? Phaethon jumped off the couch and pushed back the hood on the figure behind him. He looked at the contact points and thought-ports running along the shoulder boards of the armor. There was an energy repeater that could be tuned to the radio frequencies set aside for the constabulary; here was a sensitive plate that could react to voice command. All he needed was a carrier wire to run from the one to the other.

  That wire was not something his nanomachinery cape could produce. He could have bought it for a half-second coin at any matter-shop … had he been allowed. As it was, he could broadcast a loud, meaningless noise. A scream. A scream to which no one would listen.

  He stepped back toward the privacy screen and tried to turn it on its hinges to face that part of the crowd near the bottom of the ramp leading up to this ship. The screen would not budge. He could not see where the mannequins controlled by the enemy might be.

  Now what? If only he had been a character from one of his wife’s dream-dramas, he could find a convenient ax or bar of iron, and rush out to battle the foe, club swinging, his shirt ripped to display his manly shoulders and hairy chest. But strength would not serve against these mannequins; the mind motivating them was not even physically present.

  And wit would not serve, not if there was, in fact, a Nothing Sophotech directing their actions, a Sophotech clever enough to move through the Earth mentality without coming to the notice of the Earthmind.

  What was left? Spiritual purity? Moral rectitude?

  And, if it was a moral quality involved, what could it be? Honesty? Forthrightness? Blind determination?

  Phaethon thought for a moment, gathering his courage. Then he threw the robe off his armor and had the black material swirled around him, fitting the gold segments into place. He closed the helmet.

  Phaethon stepped to the hatch of the airship and flung it open, but he was careful not to step over the threshold. He stood at the top of the ramp, somewhat above the nearby crowd. Three gray mannequins were stepping purposefully toward the foot of the ramp; the leader paused with one foot on the ramp, his blind, blank head turned up suddenly to see Phaethon standing, shining in his gold adamantine armor, at the end of the ramp above him.

  A long low trembling note of haunting beauty, like the sigh of a sad oboe, came up from the surface of Lake Victoria, rose, gathered strength, and filled the wide sky. It was the first note of the overture, the first voice of the choir. Just that one note brought a tear to Phaethon’s eye. Except for the three mannequins facing him, all other spectators were turned toward the distant lake, looks of tense wonder and rapt enchantment on their features, like people swept up in a dream.

  Phaethon touched the energy repeater on his shoulder board. He heard nothing, but he knew a loud pulse, like a shout, passed across nearby
radio channels.

  The note trembled and fell mute. Silence, not music, filled the air.

  Phaethon had been noticed. The Deep Ones were not singing. Some signal inaudible to Phaethon swept through the gathered crowd. With a murmur of anger, and a long hissing, rustling noise, a thousand faces suddenly turned toward him. Every eye focused on the gold figure.

  The three mannequins at the foot of the ramp paused, motionless. Whatever they had intended for Phaethon, they evidently did not wish to do in full and public view.

  The murmur of anger rose to a shout. It was a horrible noise, one Phaethon had not heard before in all his life; the sound of a thousand voices all calling for Phaethon to get out, to leave, to let the performance ceremony continue. Instead of music, now, shouts of outrage, shrill questions, and sounds of hatred roared in the air.

  The three gray mannequins were still motionless at the bottom of the ramp. Phaethon raised his hand and pointed a finger at these three. He knew no human ear could hear him or distinguish his words over the roar of the crowd; but he also knew that there were more than human minds listening to him now. Events like this rapidly filled the news and gossip channels; anything he did would be analyzed by mass-minds and by Sophotechs.

  “The enemies to the Golden Oecumene are here among you. Who projects into these three mannequins here? Where are the constables to protect me from their violence? Nothing! For all your superior intellect, you cannot and you dare not strike at me openly; I denounce you as a coward!”

  Another rustling murmur ran through the vast crowd there. Contempt and disbelief, disgust and anger were clear on every face. And then, just as suddenly, the eyes focused on him went glassy and dull. By an unspoken common consent, the crowd were tuning their sense-filters to ignore him; perhaps they were opening redaction channels to forget him, so that, in later years, their memories of this fine day would not be marred by the rantings of a madman. Like a wind blowing through a field of wheat, with one motion, every head in the crowd turned back toward the lake.

  Phaethon smiled grimly. Here was the moral error of a society that relied too heavily on the sense-filter to falsify their reality for them. Reality could not be faked. The Deep Ones did not use anything like a sense-filter. If the Deep Ones had any channels open in the mentality, they would still be aware of Phaethon, and they would still refuse to offer their gift of song to one, like Phaethon, who would not and could not thank them, or repay them, or return the gift. The crowd could well ignore him; but the Deep Ones would not sing.

  Were they waiting for him to walk away? It must occur to some of them that it would take hours for him, on foot, to walk beyond hearing range of the Deep Song. Were they all willing to wait that long? It also should occur to someone that, by the rules of the ostracization imposed on him, Phaethon could neither buy passage on any transport or accept a ride as charity. The only other option, logically, would be to have a ride imposed upon him without his asking.

  It was a contest of wills. Who was more willing to put up with the inconvenience of Phaethon’s exile? Phaethon, who knew he was in the right? Or the crowd, who perhaps had some nagging doubt whether the Hortators had been entirely correct?

  If those who opposed him were certain of the moral rightness of their position, Phaethon thought, they would simply call the constables and have him removed. And if not …

  The hatch swung shut in front of his nose. The ramp and guy lines retracted into the docking tower. Phaethon felt a swell of motion in the deck underfoot.

  The airship was carrying him away. He stepped over to the windows, hoping for a last glimpse of the three mannequins at the foot of the now-retracted ramp. He saw them, but their arms now hung limply, heads lolling, in the stoop-shouldered posture indicating that they were now uninhabited. Xenophon’s agent (or Nothing Sophotech, or whoever or whatever had been projected into them) had disconnected and fled.

  With a grand sweep of movement, the towers and the wide balcony ringing the space elevator passed by the observation windows. The world was tilted at an angle, as the airship heeled over, tacking into the wind and gaining altitude.

  Phaethon felt a moment of victorious pleasure. But the moment faltered, and a sad look came into his eyes, when, outside the windows and far below, he saw the blue reaches of Lake Victoria. Sunlight flashed from the surface of the lake, and the texture of high, distant clouds was reflected in the depths. Amid those reflections, Phaethon saw the flotilla of ancient beings with their singing-fans spread wide. But he was too far away, by then, to hear anything other than a faint, sad, far-off echo.

  Even if, by some odd miracle, his exile were to end tomorrow, Phaethon would never hear what the Deep Ones now would sing, no record was made of it, and no one would speak to him of it.

  With an abrupt motion, Phaethon turned and stepped to the bow windows, staring out at the African hills and skies ahead.

  3.

  A silver strip of shore passed by below him. Ahead was an endless field of cobalt blue, crisscrossed by whitecaps—the Indian Ocean.

  Phaethon spoke aloud. “Where are you taking me?” Again there was no answer. He found two hatches at the back of the observation deck, with gangways leading up and down. He chose the upward ramp and set off to explore.

  On a windowless upper deck, surrounded by a mass of cables and fixtures, he found a six-legged being, with six arms or tentacles reaching up from a central brain-mass into the control interfaces. Wires ran into the cone-shaped head. Sections of the body were plated with metal. Three vulture faces stared out in three directions from the central brain-cone. The hide was dotted and pierced with plugs and jacks, inputs and outlets. Multiple receivers aided the migration instincts and flying sense built into the bird heads with orbit-to-surface navigational plotting.

  “You are a fighter-plane cyborg,” said Phaethon in surprise. He had never seen such a thing outside of a museum.

  The vulture eyes regarded him coldly. “No longer. All memories of war and battle-flight, dogfighting, system ranging, dive-bombing, all such thoughts and recollections I sold long, so very long ago, to Atkins of the Warmind. Let him have nightmares now. Let him recall the smell of incendiaries burning villages and hamlets, and pink baby-forests screaming. I recall flowers and kittens now, the songs of whales, the motion of cloud above the ocean; I am content.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “An exile; an exile wealthy beyond all dreams of wealth, to judge from the armor you wear. Famous, to judge by the channel traffic your movements excite. All the world forgot, and then all the world, just as suddenly, recalled the mighty ship you dreamed; every mind in the networks still is reeling from you; every voice cries out against you. Are you he?”

  Phaethon wondered why the creature did not discover his identity merely by looking into the Middle Dreaming. “You are not connected to the mentality, then, sir?”

  The three vulture heads snapped their hooked beaks open and shut with loud clacks. “Gah! I scoff at such things. There is nothing in me I need to transcend. Let the young ones play their games; I take no part in the celebration of the Golden Oecumene.”

  “It seems, now, that I will take no part, either. You have guessed me, sir. I am Phaethon Prime of Rhadamanth.”

  “No longer. Surely you are Phaethon Zero of Nothing.”

  The name struck Phaethon to the heart. Of course. He had no copies of himself any longer in any bank. He was no longer Phaethon Prime, the first copy from a stored template. He was a zero. The moment he died, there would be nothing more of him. He had no mansion, no school.

  Phaethon said, “And you do not fear to speak with me?”

  “Fear whom? The College of Hortators? The Sophotechs? Upstarts! I am older than any College of Hortators; older than any Sophotechs. Older than the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth.” (This was the old name for the Golden Oecumene.) “They are delicate structures, based on no real strength. They shall pass away, and I shall remain. My way of life has been forgotten, but it shal
l return. I remember nothing but kittens and clouds, for now. Memories of burning children shall return.”

  It was brave talk, but Phaethon reminded himself that this cyborg had neither sold him passage nor extended charity to him. Phaethon’s legal status, at the moment, was something between a freeloader and a kidnap victim.

  “Who are you, sir?”

  “This is not the proper format. You, the interloper, the stranger, the exile, must tell your tale; I, the gracious host, will tell mine after, what little there is. There is no computer here to implant automatic memories of each other in each other.”

  “I am a Silver-Grey. We retain the custom of exchanging introductions and information through speech …”

  “You were a Silver-Grey. How did you come to lose your vast fortune? What did you do to earn the hatred of mankind?”

  “I dreamt a dream they feared. There is no economic reason to reach the stars; the stars are too far, and there is abundance of all types, without oppression, here. But my reason was unreasonable; I wished for glory, for greatness, to do what had not been done before; and my wealth was my own, to spend or squander as I would. And so I built the greatest ship our science could produce: the Phoenix Exultant, a hollow streamlined spearpoint a hundred kilometers from stem to stern, with all her hollow hull filled up with antimatter fuel, and her hull of chrysadmantium, this same invulnerable substance in which you see me clad, made one artificial atom at a time, at tremendous expense. The fuel-to-mass ratio is such that near-light speeds can be maintained. But the College of Hortators feared …”

  “I know what they feared. They feared war. War in heaven.”

  “How do you know this, sir? Do you know the Hortators?”