The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  “The other Afloats whom I am tasked to attempt to protect, may be relocated,” continued Notor. “I anticipate that I will require my service provider’s communication lines if I am to continue that protection; therefore, if, in fact, maintaining my connections with you, and continuing that protection, are mutually exclusive, I must place a higher priority on the latter.”

  “Can we still communicate by letter?” asked Phaethon with little hope.

  “Who would carry it? Who would translate it from your written format? I cannot read your archaic Silver-Grey letters and signs.”

  “Then I am defeated?”

  “You terminology is inexact. ‘Defeat’ as a concept, refers to a complex of emotion-energy reactions created by a mind interpreting the universe. But the universe, by definition, must always be more complex than the information-parts or thoughts one uses to encode that complexity. ‘Defeat’ is not a fact, it is an assessment of facts, and may be subject to interpretation.”

  Perhaps that was meant to cheer him.

  The signal shut off, with an icon showing that further service would be discontinued. The mirrors went black, and would not light up again.

  3.

  Phaethon walked slowly back up on deck. He stood at the prow with one foot on the rail, leaning on his knee and staring out across the water. What options still were open to him? Had he been defeated at every turn?

  And yet things were not as bad as they had been even two days ago, when he had been choking at the bottom of the sea. Now, he had allies. Weak ones, perhaps, like Antisemris, or ones with whom he could not speak, like Notor-Kotok, or like the distant Neptunians. But he also had a dream, and it was a strong dream. Strong enough, perhaps, to make up for the weaknesses of his allies.

  The offer Phaethon had made to Notor-Kotok was one manifestation of the strength of that dream. The endless energy supplies of the singularity at Cygnus X-1, as well as the wealth of multiple worlds yet to be born, would tempt investment and support from among those disenfranchised or dissatisfied with the present Oecumene. Immortality had not changed the laws of economics, but it had created a situation where men now could contemplate, as economically feasible, long voyages, long projects, and plans patient beyond all measure of time for their fruition. Somewhere would be men willing to invest in Phaethon’s dream, willing to trust that millennia or billennia from now, Phaethon could amply reward their faith in him. Somewhere, somehow, he would find people who would support him.

  He raised his head and looked. The stars were dim here, washed out by lights and power satellites around the ring-city, the flares from nearby mining asteroids in high-earth orbit. And his eyes were not as strong as they had been, blind to all but human wavelengths. But he could still see the stars.

  Cygnus X-1 itself was not visible. The almanac in his head (the one artificial augment he would never erase) told him the latitude and right ascension of that body. He turned his eyes to the constellation of the Swan, and spoke aloud into the general night. “You’ve manipulated the Hortators to suppress me, strip me, revile me, exile me. But you cannot stop me, or move me one inch from my fixed purpose, unless you send someone to kill me.”

  “But you dare not perform a murder here in the middle of the Golden Oecumene, do you? Even in the most deserted places, there are still many eyes to see, many minds to understand, the evidence of murder.”

  He paused in his soliloquy to realize that, indeed, there could be spies and monitors listening to him, watching him, including instruments sent by his enemy.

  He spoke again: “Nothing Sophotech, Silent Ones, Scaramouche, or however you are called, you may exceed me greatly in power and force of intellect, and may have weapons and forces at your command beyond anything my unaided thought can understand. But you cower and hide, as if afraid, possessed by fear and hate and other ills unknown to sane and righteous men. My mind may be less than yours, but it is, at least, at peace.”

  He was not expecting a reply. It was probably more likely that no one was watching him, and that his enemy had lost sight of where he was. He doubted there were any enemies within the reach of his voice.

  There was, on the other hand, still one ally with whom he could speak, not far away.

  He drew out the child’s slate he had, and, with a short-range plug, connected to the shop-mind and employed the old translator he had found earlier. He engaged the circuit and transcribed: “I address the Cerebelline called Daughter-of-the-Sea and send greetings and good wishes. Dear Miss, it is with grave regret that I inform you that our period of mutual business and mutual aid, so lately begun, has drawn abruptly to a close. The Hortators (or, rather, Nebuchednezzar Sophotech, acting at their behest) have manipulated events to deprive us of the Afloat workforce. I am unable to fulfill my contract with you concerning the bird-tending, weeding, microgenesis, and other simple tasks you wished to have done …”

  He went on to describe the situation in some detail. He explained his plan to introduce Neptunian forms among the Afloats, to generate capital, so that he could afford to persuade the Neptunians to hire him as pilot for the Phoenix Exultant. He knew the poverty-stricken Neptunians, without aid, probably did not have the money necessary even to ship the Phoenix Exultant from Mercury Equilateral to the outer system.

  He concluded: “ … Therefore the only salvation for which I can hope must come from you. Not truly an exile yourself, it is possible Antisemris and his deviant customers will treat with you, and be willing to carry messages from you to the Neptunian Duma. Only if contact with my friend Diomedes, and with the newly founded Silver-Grey houses among the Neptunians, is established and maintained, can the Phaethon Stellar Exploration Effort be resurrected. Can you carry these messages and offers to them for me?”

  The slate encoded the messages as a series of chemical signals and pheromones. Phaethon drew out a few grams of his black suit-lining, and imprinted the nanomachinery substance with those signals. He threw that scrap into the water.

  A moment later a small night bird (belonging to Daughter-of-the-Sea, he hoped) pecked at the scrap, swallowed it, and flew off.

  Gram by gram, his nanomachinery was vanishing. He could not suppress a twinge of regret as he watched the little bird fly off.

  He settled himself to wait. Daughter-of-the-Sea, a Cerebelline, did not have a unified structure of consciousness. The various parts of the mental networks that served her as cortex, midbrain, and hindbrain were scattered among three acres of bush and weed and wiring, pharmicon groves, insect swarms, and bird flocks. Not every part communicated with every other by the same medium or at the same time rates. A thought coded as electricity might take a microsecond to travel from one side of the underbrush root system to another, a thought coded chemically, or as growth geometries, might take hours, or years.

  Phaethon wondered why anyone would volunteer to have such a disorganized and tardy consciousness. But then again, the Invariants and Tachystructuralists no doubt wondered the same thing about Phaethon’s clumsy, slow, organic, multileveled, and all-too-human brain.

  And so it was with considerable surprise that Phaethon saw his slate light up with a reply before even half an hour had gone by. Daughter-of-the-Sea must have reconstructed part of her consciousness, or assigned a special flock of thought carriers, to maintain near-standard time rates just for his sake, in case he should call. He was touched.

  The reply was radiating in the form of inaudible pulses from a group of medical bushes and vines clinging to the southern cliff shore.

  The translation ran: “Anguish is always greater than the words we use to capture it. Can I attempt to express my soul unblamed? What are your thoughts but little lights, glinting in through all the stained-glass panes of words, burning in the loneliness of your one skull? And you would have me cast such light as that toward eyes of blind Neptunians. Where is coin enough to burn within the Pharos of such high desire, that I might make a bonfire even giants envy, and cast so bright a beam across so wide a night? And to what
end? Success shall gather Phaethon to heaven, to struggle with silent monsters in the wide star-interrupted dark; or failure pull down Phaethon into a lonely pauper’s tomb beneath some nameless stone. In either fate, bright Phaethon departs, all his fire lost, to leave me, Daughter-of-the-Sea, again in misery and solitude on this frail, saccharine, spiritless, thin-winded, green-toned world I so despise.”

  Phaethon frowned. Struggle with silent monsters in the dark? Did Daughter-of-the-Sea expect Phaethon to conduct some sort of war with whatever had been left of the Second Oecumene? Perhaps these “silent monsters” were a metaphor for the various forces of inanimate nature with which any engineer must struggle as he builds. No matter. One could not expect to understand everything even people of one’s own neuroform meant to say.

  But he understood the thrust of the message. Daughter-of-the-Sea wanted to know what was in the deal for her.

  Phaethon had the translator cast his reply in the same florid mood and metaphor as hers: “I will create for you, out of some rock or cometary mass circling Deneb or far Arcturus, a world to be the bridegroom of your delight. All shall be as your desires say. The angry clouds of long-lost Venus shall boil again with the drench of stinking sulfur in that far world’s atmosphere, and never need you breathe this thin and listless air of Earth again. Tumultuous volcano-scapes shall flood a trembling surface, immense as any laughter of a god within your ears, and once more shall you watch as hurricanes of acid pour in flame from ponderous black skies of poison into reeking seas of molten tin. You will be embodied such as you once were on Venus, Venus as she was so long ago! And veneric organs and adaptions (which find no other place or purpose, old Venus lost) now shall bloom from you again, to yield to you those hot, strange, powerful sensations, unknown to any Earthlike eyes, those sensual impressions that your memories so faintly echo. Come! Aid me now! And once the Phoenix Exultant is mine again, she shall nest within the circle of the Galaxy, and brood, as her young, a thousand shining worlds.”

  It was the same offer he had made Notor-Kotok. Chemical codes appeared on the translation screen, and again he took up another precious gram of his limited nanomaterial, impregnated the message into it, and dropped it into the waters.

  A night bird gobbled it.

  4.

  It was Greater Midnight when Phaethon went belowdecks to perform his evening oblations. This included a feeding hardly worthy of the name “mensal performance” (he merely slapped nutrients into his cloak-lining, and let the cloak feed him intravenously.) Next, he underwent a careful and very spartan sleep cycle. Finally, he did an exercise of adjustment to his neurochemistry, which he encompassed in a ceremony called “Answering the Circle.” This ceremony dated from the early Fourth Era, and had originally been used to restore weary members of vast group-minds to their proper health and courage and purpose.

  It was hours later, in the dead of night, near Lesser Midnight (as Jovian Midnight was called) when Phaethon emerged on deck again. The slate showed a response from Daughter-of-the-Sea had arrived, this time, from another center of her consciousness housed in filtration grasses somewhat inland of here. The slate was not complex enough to tell him if this part of her mind was analogous to a “conscious” level, or if this was a subconscious reaction, something like a dream. “Poor—seed—scatter—answer—dark/masked/approaching—bright promises sowed—accept—a world to keep you gently chained? Now comes one.”

  He ran two other reconstructions through the translator, attempting other modes. The parts of the message unfolded and were interpreted into a coherent format: “Lacking wealth or prestige, lacking funds or friends enough to buy or beg what media Phaethon requires to communicate to his remote Neptunians, Daughter-of-the-Sea this night emanates your message out through several modes. By land and sea and sky it spreads, by light, by speech, by printed letters such as are known no more, save among the far-past-loving Silver-Grey. Each message, scattered like a thousand wanton seeds, recites the promise of rewards to come to whoever might carry it one further step along. In your name, I promised them each gram devoted to your cause would be returned a hundredfold, and any exile ostracized on your behalf would be given a world of his own. Surely uncounted hundreds of these messages were simply consumed by silence, seeds spread on rocky soil.

  “But an answer came from one who wears a mask, protected, during the festival, from the eyes of the Hortators. This masked one accepts your offer, and says you will be taken from this place, and carried into the infinite silent wilderness of space, where you will have no one but your solitary love to protect you, never to be seen again. This masked one promised you shall create a world which shall keep you, bound there with gentle chains, and that you not travel so very far into the mysteries of outer space as your ambition dreams.”

  “Now comes this one.”

  Phaethon stared at the words. Was this masked one Scaramouche? Some prankster who had logged on to answer, hidden by masquerade from the retaliation of the Hortators? Or perhaps a dream or fantasy invented by some non-literal segment of Daughter-of-the-Sea’s scattered consciousness?

  In any case, the words seemed ominous. His armor had been left below; Phaethon wondered if he should go down and put it on.

  On the other hand, the battery power of the suit was not infinite …

  Then he heard the noise of motion in the water not far away.

  5.

  In the dim light he could see an awkward shape moving through the water with plunging energetic splashes. It was hard to see, in the gloom, the body-form of the creature. It seemed two-headed, many-legged. Or perhaps it was a slim manlike shape astride a larger swimming shape.

  There was a clatter as the creature or creatures came up against the hull. Then a high-pitched whinny, and more clatter, pounding noises, as they climbed from the water to the floating stairs of the gangway. Whoever or whatever it was was out of sight below the curve of the hull.

  “Ahoy! Hello!” came a voice. “Permission to come aboard!”

  Phaethon stiffened. He recognized that voice.

  Then came a rushed, huge hammering of some large beast pounding up the gangway stairs.

  Phaethon turned, voiceless and numb with astonishment.

  The tall shadow of a horse came plunging over the gangway stairs, water flying from its mane and tail. Clinging low over its neck, head down, jacket flying, was a slender form in archaic riding habit. Black hair swirled around her head.

  She laughed in joy, and the horse reared and pawed the air, perhaps in annoyance, perhaps in triumph.

  With a smooth movement, the slender form dismounted, and walked lightly over to where Phaethon stood wondering.

  She tapped her riding crop against her tall black boots. She ran her fingers through the silken mass of her hair. “I lost my hat,” she said. And then, stepping close: “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

  There, in the dim light of the stars, beneath the diamond pavilion canopies, was Daphne, smiling. She wore a long dark jacket, laced at the throat, and skintight pale riding breaches.

  “Daphne—” He tried to remind himself that this was the doll-wife, the copy, and he told himself that the sudden emotion that flooded him made no sense, no sense at all.

  “Daphne—in exile? How long have you been ostracized?”

  “Since about a second ago, when I said hello.” She smiled an impish smile.

  “But—why? Your life is ruined now!” His voice rang hollow with horror.

  “Silly boy. I’ve come to rescue you. Aren’t you going to kiss me? I’m not going to ask you again.”

  It made no sense. It made no sense at all. This was not really the woman he had fallen in love with, was it? Why had she ruined her life to be with him?

  He took her in his arms. He bent his lips to hers.

  Suddenly, it made perfect sense.

  6.

  On the deck of the barge in the gloom, Phaethon and Daphne stood in each other’s arms. Her stallion was quiet, standing near the stern, his nos
e moving among the crystal panels of the pavilions overhead.

  In the east, like a rainbow of steel, the lower third of the ring-city shone with moon-colored arch-light, silver at the horizon, shading to a golden rose-red in the heights. This was the reflection of a sunrise still hours away, light and reddened, bent by the atmosphere and cast against the orbiting walls and sails of the city, to shine down again on parts of the world still embraced by night. That great curve of light was reflected again to form a rippling trail across the waters, like a road, beyond the horizon, to heaven, and reflected once again, from the ripples, to play against Daphne’s cheek and gleam in her dark eyes. Phaethon, looking into those eyes, wondered at how many twists and reflections of sunlight, arch-light, and sea-glimmer were required to make the light in his wife’s eyes dance. Yet it was still light from the sun.

  His wife’s eyes? No. Exact copies, perhaps. But the woman wearing them was nonetheless not his wife. The light in her eyes ultimately came from the sun; but it was not sunlight. The thoughts and memories ultimately came from the real Daphne; but this was not Daphne.

  This ex-doll, this sweet girl whom he did not love, had embraced exile, and perhaps death. Why? To be with him? Because she thought herself to be in love with him?

  The sense that things made sense, so strong just a moment before, was crumbling.

  “Why are you here, really?” The words came out stiffly.

  Suddenly, their embrace was mere awkwardness, the unwanted intimacy of two strangers.

  Daphne stepped away from him. Her head was turned so that he could not see her eyes. She spoke in a voice brittle and impersonal: “I’ve had my ring organize and write the beginning of the story of how I got here. I’m coming out with a sequel to your saga. After so many years of not having anything to do, now I have it! I thought you would be pleased—you’re always nagging me about how I should take up a vocation again.”