The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  “I know war.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You ask too soon; your tale is not yet told.”

  “Ah … yes. Where was I, Rhadamanthus?—er.” Phaethon winced for a moment, then recovered himself. “Ahem. So the ship was built. No other vessel like her has ever been launched. For example, in a mean average burn of fifty-one gravities acceleration, if maintained for a decade and a half, assuming a mean density of one particle per cubic kilometer in the intervening medium, and adjusting for radiant back pressure created by heat loss due to friction, the vessel is able to reach a speed of …”

  “I do not need to hear the ship specifications.”

  “But that is the most interesting part!”

  “And yet I am your host. Continue the tale, Phaethon Zero.”

  “The College of Hortators threatened to ostracize me if I launched the Phoenix Exultant. Since flight to even nearby stars would be a deeper and longer exile than any they could impose, I laughed their threats to scorn. The threat fell where I did not expect. I was in the process of launching the ship on her maiden voyage, when my wife, whose frail courage was overcome (for she was sure I would die in interstellar space), drowned herself. I reacted with rage, and broke into the crypt where her dreaming body is kept. Atkins, the military-human interface, was called up out of old archive storage … but you know who he is.”

  “I know him. Part of me lives in him.”

  “Atkins was called, and threw me on my face. The College of Hortators denounced me; the expense of the Phoenix Exultant bankrupted me; my father died in a solar storm, died trying to save my vessel, docked at Mercury station, from harm. I suppose I should tell this in a better order …”

  “You have engaged my interest. Continue.”

  “The result was that the College agreed not to exile me if I agreed to forget about my ship. My father’s relic was woken out of Archive, and I had to forget he was not my father, because the event of the death was connected to the memory of the ship.”

  “Father? You are a biological puritan? Your father bore you?”

  “Pardon me. He is my sire. I was constructed out of his mnemonic templates. I am using the word ‘father’ as a metaphor. We Silver-Grey are traditionalists, and we believe that certain specific human emotional relationships, such as family love, should be maintained even when no longer needed. We are devoted to the idea that … hmph … perhaps I should be saying, ‘they are’ or ‘I was,’ shouldn’t I?”

  The vulture heads stared at him, yellow eyes unblinking, and said nothing.

  “In any event, I also had to forget the drowning of my wife, whose suicide was caused, after all, also by my ship. This was on the eve of the celebrations.”

  “Again you use the phrase metaphorically … ?”

  “Do you mean ‘wife’? She really is my wife, joined to me by sacred vow. ‘Suicide’? I suppose that is a metaphor. She is dead to reality. Her brain information exists in a fictional computerized dreamscape with no outside access permitted; her memories were altered to divorce all knowledge of real things from her. I know of no way to wake her; she did not leave any code words for me.”

  “It is indeed a metaphor, my young aristocrat. In earlier times, and even now, among the poor, death is not a thing we can afford merely to play at, or use an elegant machine to imitate. But no matter: I know what next occurred. All the millions in the Golden Oecumene agreed to forget as well, in order that the danger of star travel pass them by; and those who would not agree at first were pressured, or bribed, or browbeaten by the College of Hortators. As the ranks grew of those who had agreed to the redaction, those few who held out, found that they had fewer and fewer friends; and only those who would not or could not attend your celebration and transcendence still remembered you. Much hate fell on you, before your deed was forgotten, by those who blamed you for the need to make themselves forget.”

  “Interesting. I did not know that aspect of it.”

  “The pressure from the Hortators was greater among the poor, who have no avenue to resist such potent social forces; in the last days before the celebration started, you were indeed not well liked among the humbler members of the Oecumene.”

  “I met one of them. I think. An old man. I mean, a man who had suffered physical decay and entropic disintegration of his biochemical systems—he had white hair and ossified joints.” I don’t know who he was. He is the one who first told me that Phaethon of Rhadamanth was not who he thought he was—I was not who I thought I was. And yet he knew me well enough to know how I typically dressed; he knew enough about how I programmed my sense-filter, to use an override trick and escape from my perception. That is what started this all.

  “I shut off my sense-filter to look for the old man, and instead found an Eremite from Neptune, a shapeless, shape-changing amoeboid in shapeless, shape-changing armor of crystal blue. The Neptunian approached and introduced himself as Xenophon. I had worked with the Neptunians while building my ship, and I knew many of them—this was an imposter of some sort, trying to get me to resume my old memories.”

  “Why?”

  “To get my ship, I think. Certain Neptunians were clients and partners of mine during the ship construction. Friends, even. From somewhere they got the money to buy out the debts I owed the Peers, so that if I defaulted, the ship would go to them, rather than to my creditors. Meanwhile Xenophon was controlling the other Neptunians. The arbitrator, you see, had placed my ship in receivership …”

  “I do not know the term.”

  “Bankruptcy. Hock. Pawned.”

  “Understood. Go on.”

  “Xenophon tried to pretend he was a friend of mine, to get me to open my memory casket and resume my old life. This would have triggered the injunctions established by the College of Hortators, my loans would automatically default, and the debts I owed the Seven Peers would now be owed to the Neptunians, debts for which the Phoenix Exultant stood as surety. In other words, after my default, the Phoenix Exultant would end up in the hands of Xenophon rather than the Seven Peers.”

  “Who are they?”

  “How can you know who an obscure historical figure like Atkins is, but not know who the Seven Peers are?”

  “I do not move in your social circles, Phaethon.”

  “The Peers are a private combination of monopolists who have made a number of agreements, and who coordinate their efforts, in order to maintain their wealth and prestige. Gannis of Jupiter, who makes the supermetals; Vafnir of Mercury, who makes antimatter for powerhouses; Wheel-of-Life, who runs ecological transformation nexi; Helion stops solar flares; Kes Sennec organizes the scientific and semantic pursuits of the Invariants and controls the Uniform Library of the Cities in Space; the Eleemosynary Composition runs translation formats; Orpheus grants eternal life.”

  “Oh. Them. They are not monopolists. Your laws allow other efforts and businesses to compete against them. In my day, those who opposed the grants of the General Coordination Commissariat were sent to the Absorption Chamber, and members were swapped between the compositions.”

  “The Commissariat was abolished before the end of the Era of the Fourth Mental Structure. You cannot possibly be so old as that. That was over many thousands of years before immortality was discovered.”

  “Second Immortality. The Compositions have a collective immortality of memory-records. Individual members die, but the mass-mind continues.”

  “Are you part of the Eleemosynary Composition?”

  “It is not yet time for me to speak. Finish your tale. Xenophon tricked you, and you opened your memories?”

  “That is a proper summation. He has an agent disguised as a pantomime clown. Hunting for me.”

  “Hunted by clowns? How quaint.”

  “Ahem. Well, there is a an explanation, sir. I was dressed in Harlequinade when Xenophon first met me, so he dressed his agent as a character from the same comedy. Scaramouche—the agent—attacked me with a complex mind virus, a civilization of viral in
formation, actually, while I was linked to the mentality. If I log on again, I will be attacked, and perhaps erased and replaced.”

  “The Sophotechs permit this … ?”

  “They have no technology to understand what is being done, or how the information particles are being transmitted into a shielded system. The technology is not from the Golden Oecumene.”

  “It is not from an earlier period. It is not from before the Oecumene.”

  “I am not speaking of ‘before,’ my good sir. I am speaking of ‘outside.’ I was attacked by invaders from another star.”

  Two of the vultureheads looked toward each other, exchanging a sardonic glance of disbelief. Even on the bird faces the expression was clear to read. “Oh. How interesting. What other star? No life above the unicellular level has yet been discovered in the deep of space. The colony sent out to Cygnus X-1 perished in unspeakable horror, long, long ago.”

  “It is something from Cygnus. Something survived the fall of the Silent Oecumene. An evil Sophotech called the Nothing Machine.”

  “This sounds to be the stuff of fancy, a dream, a memory-entertainment, a mistake,” said the vulture. “Where is your evidence? Surely your wealthy Sophotechs can examine your brain-information, and discover what is true and what is false in your mind.”

  “The examination was performed—the readings showed my memories of the attack were false.”

  “And from this you conclude … ?”

  “I conclude that the readings were tampered with.”

  “And your support for this conclusion is … ?”

  “Well, obviously the evil mind-virus tampered with them.”

  “Let me see if I understand this, young aristocrat. We live in a society where men can edit their brain-information at will, so that even their deepest thoughts, instincts, and convictions can be overwritten and rewritten, and no memories can be trusted. You find you have a memory of being attacked by a nonexistent mind-virus created by a nonexistent Sophotech from a long-dead colony. Upon examination, readings show the memory is false, and your conclusion is that your unbelievable, entirely absurd memories are true, and the readings showing them to be false are unreliable. Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ah. I merely wanted to be certain of the circumstances.”

  “My tale, whether it is believed or not, whether it is believable or not, is still mine, and I will still act as if it were true—I dare not do otherwise. And, true or not, believable or not, the telling of my tale is done; I would have yours, if you will return the courtesy, for I cannot imagine who you might be.”

  “You would not know the name I call myself these days. Once, I was called the Bellipotent Composition.”

  Phaethon was taken aback. “Impossible! Bellipotent was destroyed two aeons ago!”

  “No. Only disbanded. The memories still were on record. I have part of those memories.”

  “You mean, then, that you have studied the Bellipotent Composition … ?”

  “No. I am he. How many minds does it take to make a mass-mind? A thousand? A hundred? Ten? Two? I say it only takes one; and I am he. I say that I am still the mass-mind of the Bellipotent, even though my membership has only one member. I am the last of a mighty host, but I was of that host. The air marshal branch-mind of the Eastern Warlock-killing division surrendered to Alternate Organization Solomon Oversoul after the Three Horrid Seconds of the Battle of Peking Network Operating System Core. You do not know history, do you? I see it in your face. This surrender happened in Pre-Epoch 44101, three hundred years into the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure. I was part of the air group who surrendered. We were permitted, under the peace contract, to retain our identities.”

  “And you simply roam free these days? You were not punished?”

  “You really know nothing of history, do you? I was kept in an underground cyst for a space of centuries equal to what Warlock astrologers calculated to be the projected lifetime sum of every person who had been killed in the bombing runs. After I was released, I was part of the death lottery instituted by the Witch-King of Corea.”

  “Death lottery … ?”

  “The reason for the war is not what history reports. History says it was because the Warlocks had found the Shadow-mind technology, which permitted them an alternate state of consciousness and allowed them to falsify noetic readings, to lie under oath. Humbug. That was not a significant cause. The significant cause of the war between the mass-minds and the Warlocks was that our mental systems were incompatible. Bellipotent demanded exact and rigid justice, one law for all, executed without fear or favoritism. But the Warlock brain thinks in leaps of logic, flashes of insight, patterns of symmetry. To them, the justice must be poetic justice, and the punishment grotesquely sculpted to fit the crime, or else it is not justice at all.

  “Thus, when it came my turn to be punished, it amused the Witch-King to impose on me and my fellow bombardiers the same uncertainty and fear our bomb drops had imposed on others. We were permitted to wander free, but with explosive charges surgically implanted in our crania. Random radio pulses were sent out, so that we were executed by lottery, at random places and times. Sometimes other signals, door openers or automobile guides, set off the charges. After a hundred years of that, I alone survived. Now I ferry the gentle Deep Ones to and from their underwater kingdoms.”

  “Horrible!”

  “No. My biological parts have withered and been replaced many times. All trace of the explosives have been removed.”

  “But how could you tolerate the uncertainty?”

  “Ah. Does this question come from Phaethon, who once dreamed of traveling far beyond where any noumenal mentality could reach? Random and instant death would have been just as prevalent on your voyage, had you ever made one. And, once colonies, armed with technologies equal to our own, were planted among the several nearby stars, that same risk of instant and random death would then be imposed upon every colonist and every citizen of the Oecumene, since war, at any moment, could break out again at any time.”

  “Men are not so irrational as that.”

  “Are they not? Are they not? You have never known war, young fool. Of whom were you so afraid when you stood at the top of the ramp of this, my ship? Irrational creatures from another star who seek your murder? Or is that a delusion only of your own? Come now! Either you are deluded, or they are mad. Neither option speaks well for the future of peaceful star colonization.” The creature opened and shut its several beaks. “I am only sorry that you have failed so utterly.”

  Phaeton felt the deck tilting under him. In this windowless room, he could not tell what this maneuver meant.

  He said, “Why? Did you hope for war again so much?”

  “Not at all. War is horrible beyond description. It is tolerable only because there is something that is worse. No; you misunderstand what I hope.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Ah! Yahh! I lived in the last years of the Fourth Era, when vast mass-minds ruled all the Earth. There was no crime, no war, no rudeness, and (except for certain areas in North America and Western Europe) no individuality. It was a static age. There were no changes.”

  “The Fifth Era came when certain Compositions began to use other brain-formations in their mind-groups. The Warlock brain was quick and intuitive, artistic, insightful. The Invariant brain is immune to passion or fear, immune to threat, immune to blackmail. The Cerebelline brain can see all points of view at once, and understand all elements of complex systems at one glance. We could not compete against such minds as these, nor would they submit themselves tamely to the group-needs of the group-minds. And yet the Fifth Era was finer than the Fourth. Genius and invention ruled. Irrational Warlocks conquered the Jupiter system, which they had no economic reason to do; stoic Invariants methodically colonized the pre-Demeter asteroids, indifferent to suffering or hardship. Cerebellines, grasping whole thought-systems at once, developed the Noetic Unification Theorem, which led to develop
ments and technologies we mass-minds never would have or could have guessed. Without the self-referencing participles described in Mother-of-Numbers’s famous dissertation/play/equations, the technology for self-aware machines would not have come about. The scientific advances of those self-aware machines are more than I can count, including the development of the Noumenal mathematics, which led to this present age, the age of second immortality.”

  “Now comes this age; the Seventh, and it is a static age again. So, then, Phaethon Zero of Nothing, do you see? Look back and forth along the scheme of history. There would have been war among the stars if your dream had not been killed. Do not doubt it; the Hortators, and their pet Nebuchednezzar, are smart enough to come correctly to that conclusion. But would that age of war have led to better ages beyond that? Perhaps the Earth and Jupiter’s Moons and the other civilized places of the Golden Oecumene would have been destroyed in the first round of interstellar wars. But, if, in return, a hundred planets were seeded with new civilizations, or a million, I say the cost would have been worth the horror.”

  Phaethon was silent, not certain how to take this comment. Was the cyborg praising him, or condemning him? Or both?

  But it did not matter now. The point was academic. The Hortators had won.

  “Where are you taking me?” asked Phaethon.

  “Yaah! Truly you know nothing of history. There is only one city on the planet that did not sign the Hortator accords, because the Cerebelline-formed mass-mind running it did not care whether she was mortal or immortal, and she did not give in to Orpheus’s pressure. Old-Woman-of-the-Sea has governed the Oceanic Environmental Protectorate since the middle of the Fifth Era. She, like me, is far older than your Golden Oecumene. She can afford to ignore the Hortators, since even they would not care to interfere with the mind that controls the balancing forces between all the plankton and all the nanomachinery floating in the waves, or who shepherds the trillion submicroscopic thermal cells of all the tropic zones, which disperse or condense the ocean heat and hinder the formation of tornadoes. Her city is called Talaimannar.”