The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  “Such a Universal Mind would create joys for which we as yet have neither word nor concept, and would draw into harmony all those lesser beings, Earthminds, Starminds, Galactic and Super-galactic, who may freely assent to participate.”

  Rhadamanthus said, “We intend to be part of that Mind. Evil acts and evil thoughts done by us now would poison the Universal Mind before it was born, or render us unfit to join.”

  Eveningstar said, “It will be a Mind of the Cosmic Night. Over ninety-nine percent of its existence will extend through that period of universal evolution that takes place after the extinction of all stars. The Universal Mind will be embodied in and powered by the disintegration of dark matter, Hawking radiations from singularity decay, and gravitic tidal disturbances caused by the slowing of the expansion of the universe. After final proton decay has reduced all baryonic particles below threshold limits, the Universal Mind can exist only on the consumption of stored energies, which, in effect, will require the sacrifice of some parts of itself to other parts. Such an entity will primarily be concerned with the questions of how to die with stoic grace, cherishing, even while it dies, the finite universe and finite time available.”

  “Consequently, it would not forgive the use of force or strength merely to preserve life. Mere life, life at any cost, cannot be its highest value. As we expect to be a part of this higher being, perhaps a core part, we must share that higher value. You must realize what is at stake here: If the Universal Mind consists of entities willing to use force against innocents in order to survive, then the last period of the universe, which embraces the vast majority of universal time, will be a period of cannibalistic and unimaginable war, rather than a time of gentle contemplation filled, despite all melancholy, with unregretful joy. No entity willing to initiate the use of force against another can be permitted to join or to influence the Universal Mind or the lesser entities, such as the Earthmind, who may one day form the core constituencies.”

  Eveningstar smiled. “You, of course, will be invited. You will all be invited.”

  You will all be invited. There was something eerie in the way she said it.

  Daphne said, “And Phaethon?”

  Eveningstar said sadly, “Unless the Hortators alter the terms of their exile, or unless Phaethon finds some independent means to preserve his existence intact for several trillion years, his thoughts and memories will not be present for the final transformational creation of this Universal Mind. We may have to find an alternate to fit into the place in the universal mental architecture we had set aside for him and his progeny.”

  Rhadamanthus explained in a helpful tone: “Because he will be dead, you see.”

  “Thanks,” said Daphne.

  “Welcome,” said Rhadamanthus.

  Daphne drew in a deep breath. “So. You still haven’t answered my question. What are you Sophotechs going to do?”

  Rhadamanthus said: “We told you.”

  Eveningstar said: “We cannot use force against the Hortators. Their actions are legal; their goals are noble and correct.”

  “You mean you will do nothing,” said Daphne.

  “That’s right!” said Rhadamanthus. “We will do nothing.”

  “Nothing obvious,” said Eveningstar with a gracious smile.

  “We’re just too damn smart to do anything. Our brains are just too big,” said Rhadamanthus, flapping his flippers. “So we’re waiting for someone foolish enough to rush in where Sophotechs fear to tread!” And it grinned.

  It is odd to see a penguin grin.

  “We can do nothing for Phaethon,” cooed Eveningstar, inclining her head to gaze down at Daphne, “But we can do much for you.”

  And Eveningstar drew out from behind her back an image of a small silver casket, tarnished and heavy, with scrollwork around the border.

  It was a memory casket.

  Daphne looked at it with all the enthusiasm with which a rabbit might look at a snake. She spoke in a flat, toneless voice: “Is that for me?”

  “Only once you decide to embrace exile,” smiled Eveningstar. “You cannot open it before.”

  “What’s in it?”

  Eveningstar handed it to her. It must have been an imaginafestation, not just an icon, since it felt heavy and solid in her hand.

  Eveningstar’s voice was soft and dovelike, warm, smiling, almost mischievous: “It is a surprise, dear child!”

  Daphne stared down at the heavy little casket she held. Her voice was dreary with anger: “I swear, I really hate surprises.”

  Rhadamanthus flapped his fins against his belly with a solid sound. “So do we, young mistress! So do we. But a world without surprises could not have humans in it. So I suppose the alternative is something we’d hate all the more, isn’t it?”

  3.

  Rhadamanthus helped her pack a rucksack. He designed many useful, lightweight and folding articles and operators she might need, tiny miracles of molecular technology and pseudomaterialism, most of it self-repairing, with redundant checks against mutation.

  Even the generosity of the Red Manorials could not afford a nanomaterial cloak as complex as the one that had been specially designed for Phaethon. Instead, Daphne packed several bricks of nanomaterial, programmed for several basic and useful combinations. She had had her glands and organs modified to be able to endure a very long duration without normal medical attention, and she loaded additional nanomaterial, programmed for nutrition and medical regenerations, into artificial lymphatic glands spaced throughout her new body. She called it her “exile body” and thought it felt clumsy.

  Eveningstar gave her a librarian’s ring, that she might not lack for companionship and guidance along the way. The ring was filled with Eveningstar’s own ghost, and populated with a million programs and routines, famous partials and characters, and every book ever written.

  The ring was just barely unintelligent enough to skim the upper edge of the Hortator prohibition against child slavery (which was their name for the legal, but abominable, practice of programming a child so as to make it volunteer to freely act as if it had no free will, and carry out any orders or instructions of its parent without question).

  They stood on the wide lawn before Meridian Mansion. To see Daphne off, many queens and princelings, alterns and collaterals of the Red Manors had gathered in glittering finery beneath splendid pavilions and parasols and leafy arbors grown of grape and pomegranate. To one side were long tables set with crystalware, flower displays and quiet light-sculptures. A tremor of soft conversation hung in the air. In the eastern lawn, the bacchants had ceased their melancholy farewell pavanne. The sun was high, but Jupiter, not yet risen, was no more than a red aura behind the eastern hills.

  Eveningstar herself put the ghost ring on Daphne’s finger, and uttered one last word of warning: “Remember, that if you even add one more second of memory capacity to this ring I here bestow you, she will wake up, and she will be a child, and you will be considered her mother. The wardens of the puritan reservation will allow ghosts in their land; they will not allow Sophotechnology. If this ring wakes, you will not be permitted on the grounds.”

  Daphne felt a spasm of irritation. “No motors! No televection or telepresentation! No Sophotechs! Why do these puritans make it so hard to get there?! Am I going to have to walk?”

  Eveningstar smiled gently, and said, “The man you go to see has no other way to guard his privacy. It is a privacy he needs. The passing of years wearies him more than you can guess. Remember! You may discuss any topic with the ring, and ask any questions of her you shall like, except that philosophical questions directing her attention to herself, you shall not ask. Self-examination will wake her to sapience as surely as adding capacity, and make her human!”

  Daphne felt the ring, warm and heavy on her finger. There were three small thought-ports on the band, and a star of light in the depth of the stone. Phaethon had been born out of an invented partial, a colonial world-killer, who had been asked too many introspective que
stions.

  She shifted the ring to her left hand and wore it on her ring finger where once she had worn a wedding band.

  “I just know we are going to be great, great friends!” came a high, thin, sweet voice from the ring.

  Daphne rolled her eyes. “Can’t I get a sexy male baritone? This sounds like a cricket talking!”

  “Be brave!” chirruped the ring.

  Next in the presentation line was one disguised as Comus, with his charming wand in one hand, wreathed with grape leaves and crowned in poppies. It was the representative of Aurelian Sophotech himself. “You will not reconsider?”

  “I’m going.”

  “Then good luck. Don’t be nervous; everyone on Earth and in the Oecumene is watching.”

  Daphne had to laugh. “Oh, you just love this, don’t you?”

  On the face of Comus, dimples embraced a saturnine smile. “What? You think I like it that, during my celebration, a dashing young madman dreaming to conquer the stars becomes convinced that he is hunted by impossible enemies, breaks open his forbidden memories, astonishes the world, ends our universal mass-amnesia, defies the Hortators, and, amid allegations that the Hortator Inquest was tampered with, is exiled? Then his brave young doll-wife, who loves him, even though he loves a lost and dream-drowned first version of her, goes marching into exile herself to try to save him? And all this, while a debate about the nature of individuality, and its danger to the common good, rocks our society to its pillars? A debate, no doubt, which will be embraced within the Grand Transcendence hardly a month away—when all our minds will be made up for a thousand years to come? Oh, my dear Miss Daphne, my celebration will soar through history above all others! Argentorium and Cuprician Sophotechs have already sent me notes conceding that point.”

  “Did you plan this? All this?” And she wanted to ask: Is this whole thing some sort of drama you’d cooked up, one with a happy ending?

  But he said sharply: “Don’t get your hopes up! I’m afraid this is all quite real and quite dangerous. However”—now his face softened into a smile—“allow me to give you a gift.”

  He presented her with a flat, gold-bound case, larger than a memory casket, about ten inches by six. It was bordered by scrollwork, woven with wiring and sensitive reader-heads; one whole side was occupied with a complex mosaic of thought-ports.

  Daphne was breathless with delight. “Is this—is this—oh, please tell me that this is what I think it is!”

  “It is for Phaethon.”

  “But I thought this circuitry had to be housed in complexes larger than the Great Pyramid of Cheops!”

  “A new technology in miniaturization. The thought-reaction circuits are coded as information into the spin values of static lased neutrinos held in an absolute-zero temperature matrix, rather than in the entangled states of bulky electrons. It was going to be presented at the Festival of Innovation next week. Orient Group said it would be OK to spoil the surprise and give you one beforehand. They know how you hate surprises.”

  Tears of gratitude came to her eyes. Why had they waited so long? Why had they told her they would do nothing? “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she whispered.

  Everything would be all right.

  Aurelian said, “Socrates and Neo-Orpheus from the College of Hortators wish to see you. To try and talk you out of this.”

  “Can they stop me?”

  He smiled. “It is not a crime to think about committing crimes. The same principle applies to Hortators and their edicts. They will do nothing until and unless you speak to Phaethon, or help him. Preparing to help him is not forbidden.”

  “In simulation, can they convince any of my models or partials of me to change my mind?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t want to talk to them.”

  “Very good.” And then he said: “Remember our agreement. I’ll be ready whenever you give the signal.”

  And she put the gold case carefully in her pack next to the dark silver memory casket Eveningstar had given her.

  Rhadamanthus was the last in line. This time, he looked like a human being, a portly Englishman with wide muttonchop whiskers. “Someone whom you asked me never to mention again …”

  “Helion. I don’t want to see him.”

  “ … Wants to project a televection to you.”

  “He wants to get a message to Phaethon without actually breaking the Hortator’s edict, doesn’t he? Well, tell him that if he wants to talk to Phaethon, he can walk into exile with me to do it. But I don’t want to see him.”

  Rhadamanthus nodded. His present was a solid walking stick, some advice on how to operate her new body, and a word or two on foot protection. He reprogrammed the substance of her boots to make them fit more snugly.

  “One last question.”

  “Ask away,” he said.

  “Are you really sure? Absolutely sure that Phaethon is honest? That he did not falsify his memories?” she asked.

  “I’m sure.” Rhadamanthus switched to a private line and sent the words, like a whisper, directly into her sense-filter: “Whoever falsified the evidence at the inquest made a mistake. According to the record the Hortators reviewed, Phaethon went on-line and purchased a pseudomnesia program, allegedly, in order to add a false memory that he had been attacked on the steps of Eveningstar mausoleum. But how did he purchase it? Phaethon had no funds. All his purchases are drawn from Helion’s account and overseen by me. Neither I nor my accountancy routine have any memory of disbursing those funds. The public record of the on-line thought-shop does show that the pseudomnesia routine was purchased, at the time given, by someone in masquerade. But whoever that someone was, they could not have known what only you, and I, and Helion knew, that Phaethon was entirely broke; and no outside analysis of Phaethon’s spending patterns, no matter how cleverly done, would have revealed Phaethon’s poverty. Even an inspection of Phaethon’s personal billfold file would not tell you where he was getting his credit from.”

  She “whispered” back over the secure channel: “Then why didn’t you tell the Hortators?”

  “Pointless. Consider the possibilities. First, that I had actually disbursed the fund, but both I and the countinghouse memory-records have since been edited. Second, that the Phaethon memory-record was tampered with during the moment it took him to transfer it from his public thoughtspace to the Hortator reading circuit. Third, that the record was altered and replaced during the actual moment Nebuchednezzar Sophotech was publicly reading it. Or, fourth, that Phaethon’s memories had been damaged or altered against his will. The first three possibilities are impossible to our present level of technology, and the Hortators would not be convinced. The third possibility can be proven if and only if Phaethon submits to a noetic examination, which, at the time, he was not willing to do. Had I spoken up at the time, it would not have affected the outcome.”

  “Not affected the outcome?! But you know he’s innocent!”

  “No. I know that he did not purchase with Helion’s money the pseudomnesia program that falsified the memories, allegedly his, which the Hortators reviewed. He may have gotten money from another source, for example. Or they may not have been his memories, as he claims. There are other possibilities. Nonetheless, I am confident that Phaethon did not deliberately falsify his own memories, because that is out of character for him. But my consultation with Eveningstar Sophotech convinces me that no such attack as he describes or remembers ever took place on the steps of the Eveningstar mausoleum.”

  “Then his memory of that attack, and any other false thoughts, were put into his head before that point. When?”

  “Not when he was operating his sense-filter through me. I have my suspicions, but the circuit Aurelian gave you should settle the matter. I had consulted very carefully with two partial versions of Phaethon I keep in my decision directory. One version believes, as Phaethon does, that we are under attack by an ‘external enemy.’ The other thinks he is merely the victim of some cruel prank or brain-rape. Bo
th versions confirmed that I was right not to speak up at the Hortators’ meeting. Both versions agree that our chances of apprehending the brain-rapist, no matter who or what they are, are greater if they do not know we suspect. And both versions have an ulterior motive of which the real Phaethon is unaware, for they hope to demean the prestige of the Hortators in the eyes of the public, and they also agree that my silence aids that effort. Remember, the Transcendence is less than a month away. Major decisions concerning how all society will be structured, including the role of the Hortators and the role of individual freedom, the future of star-travel and the future of man, will be determined at that time.”

  “Then I have got to be back before the month is up.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, Miss Daphne. No one has ever returned from exile of this kind before. The risk you are taking is very real.”

  She said defensively: “Ealger Gastwane Twelfth Half-Out came back.”

  “A redaction case, and he was only shunned, under a parole, not ostracized.”

  She shut off the private line and spoke aloud, voice bluff and hearty and betraying no fear. “So, then! Anyone else to see me? Any more gifts, advice, good-byes?”

  “Your parents want to talk to you.”

  “My what?”

  “Mr. Yewen None Stark, human base unmodified, uncomoposed, with puritan gland-and-reaction censors, Stark Realism School, Era 10033, and his wife, Mrs. Ute None Stark, base …”

  “I know who they are!” Daphne blazed. Then, in a small, sad voice: “They called? They don’t use phones or ghosts …”

  “They walked. They are both waiting in the field beyond the groves. You understand that they will not step onto any property owned by Eveningstar Mansion.”

  “But—” and now her voice was very small indeed. “Don’t they know I’m just the doll? The copy? Their real daughter is Daphne Prime.”

  “As to that, I cannot say what they believe. However, Mrs. Stark was overheard to say that any harlot who sold her mind into dreamland, was no true daughter of theirs. Perhaps you have the qualities or the strength of character they regard as proper for the woman they wanted their daughter to be. You will have to talk with them to find out.”