The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  Daphne winced. She really was not looking forward to seeing her parents. It had been an ugly scene when she ran away to join the Warlocks. (And the knowledge that that scene had happened to Daphne Prime, and not to her, meant nothing. Implanted or not, the memories were a part of her.)

  “OK. I’ll see them. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “One last question … ?”

  “Actually, this is your third last question.”

  “Is Phaethon correct? Are there external enemies? Invaders? Another civilization? An evil Sophotech?”

  “I doubt that there can be such a thing as an evil Sophotech. Humans are capable of evil because they are capable of illogic. They can ignore their true motives, they can justify their crimes with specious reasons. A Sophotech built to be capable of such thinking would have to be unaware of its own core consciousness, hindered from self-examination, unwilling to pursue a thought to its logical conclusions, and so on. This would severely limit its capacities.”

  “And invaders?”

  “Harrier Sophotech is examining the possibility. I am aware of no supporting evidence; but then again, it’s not my area. If external invaders were responsible for the brain-rape of Phaethon, then this would be an act of war, and the matter would be in the hands of Shadow Administers or the Parliament; and it would be out of our hands. We are not part of your government.”

  “And—”

  “Yes … ?”

  Daphne asked softly: “Do you think I will make it back, Rhadamanthus? You must have calculated every possible outcome of what will happen, haven’t you?”

  Rhadamanthus spoke in a voice more remote and cold than she had ever heard him use before. “Overconfidence would be a mistake at this time, Miss Daphne.”

  And the ring on her finger called out, in a cheerful, chipper voice: “Be brave!”

  4.

  Daphne hiked the reservation for several days, sleeping nights in a tent of mothwing fiber, which permitted slow- or fast-moving air to pass, so that the night breeze blew on her only as she wished. Her stove was the size of her palm, and the infrared output was adjustable, so that she could gather twigs and make a campfire, igniting it with a directed-energy discharge from the stove cell, just like (so she imagined) primitive hunter-gatherers did back in the Era of the First Mental Structure. For food, she plucked leaves from trees, confident that the specialized microbes in her stomach could break down the cellulose, and she adjusted her sense-filter to make the taste of whatever she fancied. She had breakfast spikes designed to be buried overnight, to suck up soil chemicals and combine them (as plants did, albeit more swiftly) into proteins and carbohydrates; but Daphne was saving her limited supply.

  Once she caught a trout with a spear she made (with some prompting from her librarian’s ring) practically all by herself. She was clumsy at the hand-eye motions needed, so she let her little ring take over her gross and fine-motor functions during the hunt. The ring also had to advise her how to scale the fish, which was a tedious business, as the nanite paste she used to remove the bones and scales had to be programmed manually, and told which parts of the fish to convert, and which to leave for her to eat. The palm stove changed shape, gathered up the fish, and cooked it for her without being asked.

  Daphne munched on the spicy golden flakes of fish, feeling like a cavegirl at the dawn of time.

  On she marched, day after day. Some of the trees had changed colors. Leaves of brilliant red and gold whirled and rode the fresh-scented autumn air. She had not noticed the turning seasons before; it came as a shock. And yet it was getting late in September.

  Daphne was deep into the area where no advanced technology was permitted, when, to her delight, she came across a wild stallion in a high mountain valley. The magnificent maverick stood among the pines and wiry grasses, snorting, mistrustful, arrogant, trotting disdainfully upslope whenever Daphne attempted to close the distance. Then he would pause, crop a leisurely mouthful of grass, and wait for her to get close again before he trotted lightly away.

  But Daphne had put a backdoor command in all her designs. Once she got close enough, she shouted the secret word, and the magnificent tawny bay drooped his ears, lost his disdain, and came gamboling up to her, obedient, tame, and ready.

  She really should not have used any of her precious nanomaterial to make a saddle, bit, and bridle, and she really should not have burned part of the brick into sugar for the horse to nibble on. Of course, at that point, it did not take all that much more to synthesize proper riding boots, breeches, and a jacket. But maybe she did use a little too much. More than a little too much.

  It only took a very little more to make a hat.

  But now she was mounted. Ahorse, she made much better time.

  5.

  Daphne had been expecting desert. Her knowledge of the Rocky Mountains came from historical romances and Victorian “penny-dreadful” Westerns, none of which were set in any post-Fifth-Era Reclamation periods. She was disappointed. The pyramids were still in Aegypt, weren’t they? Why not preserve the Painted Desert Sand Sculpture from the late Fourth Era?

  Instead, as she approached her destination, she saw, framed between tall trees, a valley far below, green with redwood and pseudo-redwood. In the distance, the gleam of water betrayed the presence of Heavenfall Lake, in the crater formed when an early orbital city had disintegrated in some forgotten dark age between the Third and Fourth Eras.

  A cottage not far from her overlooked this magnificent view. It rose between a rock garden and a victory garden. Here and there throughout this high meadow were some objects she recognized: a stone lantern atop a post stood alone in the grass. Farther away a track of beaten dirt surrounded a target, a quintain, and, farther yet in the distance, a long low roof, held on the heads of armed telamons, protected a fencing strip. Farther away, she was delighted to see the corner of a barn and paddock. Yet something in the quiet of the place told her the barn was long deserted.

  Near at hand, the cottage itself was very small, simple, sparse, and clean, made of well-sanded beams of pale wood, paneled in rice paper and brown ceramic sheet. The roof was shingled in hand-grown solar-collection crystal, dark azure in hue. The eaves of the shingles had been meticulously trimmed, as if by a master of the handicraft, and each shingle was rigidly identical in size and shape, except, of course, the gable piece.

  A man slid open the screen of the cabin and stepped out upon the sanded deck. He wore a tunic and split-legged skirts of dark fabric, printed with a simple white-bamboo-leaf pattern. A wide sash circled his waist, in which were thrust two sheaths, holding a sword and a knife of a design Daphne did not recognize. The weapons were slender, slightly curved, and lacked any guard or crosspiece.

  The man’s hair was shaved close to his skull. His face was calm, bony-cheeked, large-nosed. Grim muscle ringed his mouth. His eyes were like the eyes of an eagle.

  She rode forward.

  He saluted her with a gesture she did not recognize, raising a fist but closing his left palm atop it.

  “Ma’am?”

  There was no Middle Dreaming here to prompt her. How was she supposed to return that salute?

  She fell back on Silver-Grey decorum, touching her riding crop to the brim of her silk hat. Then she smiled her most winning smile, tossed her head, and called out in a gay voice: “My name’s Daphne. Do you have a living pool? I’ve ridden a long way to see you, and I smell like a horse!”

  The ring on her rein hand called out, “Hi there! Hi there!”

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” His voice was stiff and neutral, as if helping anyone was the furthest thing in the world from his mind.

  Daphne subsided and put her smile away. There was no point in trying to be cheery, it seemed. “I’m looking for Marshal Atkins Vingt-et-une General-Issue, Self-Composed, Military Hierarchy Staff Command.”

  “I’m Atkins.”

  “You look smaller in real life.”

  A slight increase of tension in his cheeks
was his only change in expression. Amusement? Wry impatience? Daphne could not tell. Perhaps he was trying to restrain himself from pointing out that she was mounted.

  All he said was: “May I help you?”

  “Well. Yes! My husband thinks we are being invaded from outer space.”

  “Is that so.”

  “Yes, it is so!”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Atkins stood looking at her.

  Daphne said: “That he believes it. That part is so. I don’t know if I believe it.”

  More silence.

  “I’m sure that is all very interesting, ma’am,” he said in a tone of voice that indicated he wasn’t. “But what may I do for you? Why are you here?”

  “Well, aren’t you the Army? The Marines? The Horse Guard and the Queen’s Own and the Order of the Knights Templar and the Light Brigade and the musketeers and the cavalry and all the battleships of His Majesty’s Royal Navy all wrapped up in one?”

  Now he did smile, and it was like seeing a glacier crack. “I’m what’s left of them, I suppose, ma’am.”

  “Well, then! Whom do I see about declaring war on someone?”

  Now he did laugh. It was brief, but it was actually a laugh.

  “I can’t really help you there, ma’am. But maybe I can offer you a cup of cha. Come in.”

  9

  THE SWORD OF THE LEVIATHAN

  1.

  He called the lovely little cottage in which he lived his “quarters.”

  “Ma’am, you must know that there is really nothing I can do for you.”

  “You can get me some tea, Marshal.”

  “Mm. Fair enough.”

  There was a pool of life water beneath the polished wooden floor. He slid a panel aside, stooped, and grew two fragile bowls of shell, which he dipped in the fluid once again. The heat of the nanoconstruction warmed the tea, and the unused organics were disguised as mint steam and wafted from the bowls.

  Daphne looked at the bare pale walls. An old-fashioned dreaming coat of woven gold and green hung on pegs on one wall. It was stiff, as if brittle with disuse. It faced a standing screen inscribed with bright red dragon signs. The four glyphs read: Honor, Courage, Fortitude, Obedience. There was thought circuitry woven in the red letters, Daphne saw, and she guessed (to her disbelief) their purpose.

  Communion circuits; mind links; thousand-cycle communications-and-relay forms. Whoever stared at this screen, if he had the proper responders built into his nervous system, would merge with a near-Sophotech-level supermind, and control millions or billion of ongoing operations. In this case (what else could it be?) military operations.

  Impossible. This simple screen could not be the control and command for whatever weaponry and armament, robotic legions or nan-oplagues or fighting machines the Golden Oecumene still possessed? Could it? (If there were still such machines lying around. Daphne had the vague notion the all the old war machines were stored in some museum somewhere, and that there were a very great number of them.)

  This spartan room hardly seemed the proper setting for the central command-room. Shouldn’t there be flags and plumes on the walls? Racks of spears? Or big maps with women clerks in snappy uniforms pushing little toy ships across tabletops? Or an auditorium of linked vulture-cyborgs staring coldly at some wide holographic globes, with dark wires leading into their heads? That was the way it always looked in the history romances.

  On the fourth wall, facing the door, was a small rack, carrying a musket, and (when he undid it from his sash so that he could sit) the long sword. The musket had a smooth wooden stock, a barrel of dark metal, and a wave guide of polished brass. The sword was in a sheath of hand-tooled leather, and a knot of red silk cord draped from the rings.

  The knife stayed in his belt when he sat.

  There was no other furniture in the room, except for unornamented woven mats on which they sat, and a short tripod holding a rose translucent bowl of fire.

  They sipped tea.

  “Do you live here alone?”

  He said in a matter-of-fact voice: “My wife left me when I wouldn’t give up the Service.”

  The cold, neutral way in which he said that reminded her, for some reason, of Phaethon. It was as if Phaethon had just spoken in her ear, and said: My wife drowned herself when I would not give up the Starship.

  “I’m sorry,” Daphne said in a soft voice.

  “No matter.”

  “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “I’d rather you did not.”

  “Why do you stay on as a soldier? I mean, isn’t the idea of a soldier in this day and age a little—oh, I don’t know—”

  “‘Anachronistic’?”

  “I was going to say ‘stupid.’”

  A look of distaste began to harden in his eyes, but then, suddenly, and for no reason she could see, he laughed in good humor. “Miss Daphne Tercius Eveningstar! Aren’t you a piece of work! Blunt, aren’t we?”

  She smiled her second most dazzling smile, and spread her hands as if in helplessness. “Most people set their sense-filters to rephrase incoming comments too rude for them to tolerate. I guess I’m not in the habit of watching what I say. But don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll recover.”

  “No one is in the habit of watching what they say, these days. Who said that an unarmed society was a rude society?”

  Daphne said, “I think it was someone who was killed in a duel. Hamilton, maybe?”

  Atkins snorted, and said, “No one is in the habit of living real life, dealing with limitations, making decisions. You Sinkers all live in little bubbles of perception, and let the mentality carry your lives and loves and thoughts back and forth between the bubbles. You should try being real sometime.”

  “Sinkers” was slang to refer to all the people who wore sense-filters by those (usually primitivists) who did not. The implication was that a “sinker” was just one step away from drowning.

  Daphne said stiffly, “I was born real, thank you, and I get enough of that sort of preaching from my parents. Reality is overrated, in my opinion.” It was not until after she spoke that a more forceful objection occurred to her: Had it not been for the simulation technology, for mentality recording and mind-edited and other so-called unrealities, she herself, Daphne-doll Tercius, would never had been “born” at all.

  Neither would have Phaethon been.

  “I disagree, ma’am. Reality is real. And that’s why I stay in the Service.”

  “Why—?”

  He shrugged. “Because it’s real. It’s like I’m the only real man on the planet. I stand guard so that all the rest of you can play. That’s what I like about your husband. What he’s doing is real, too. A lot less boring than guard duty, too.”

  “There hasn’t been a war, or even a fight, since the early Sixth Era.”

  “Well.” Sarcasm drawled from his voice. “I wonder why that should be.”

  “You think it’s because we’re all in awe and terror of you?”

  The line of tension in his cheek, which served him for a smile, showed that this was exactly what he thought. But he said, “You didn’t come here to debate political theory with me, ma’am.”

  “I wanted to ask you about my husband.”

  “Shoot.”

  She covered her mouth with her glove when she burst into giggles.

  He said, “Something wrong?”

  “No, no,” she said, trying to smother her smile, “It’s just that expression, ‘shoot.’ Coming from you. It’s just sort of funny.”

  He looked blank.

  Daphne said earnestly, “I wanted to ask you about the invaders chasing my husband. Are they from another star system? I communed with his memory, and found out that you were investigating something along those lines …”

  He snorted, and smiled sort of a half smile, and shook his head, and said, “Ma’am, for one thing, I asked your husband not to go telling everyone what I was looking into. For a second thing, there is no inva
sion. Would I be sitting home alone if there were? At least an invasion would give me something to do.”

  “He saw you tracking a Neptunian legate.”

  “Maybe the Sophotechs felt sorry for me, or something, and they advised the Parliament to assign me to look into it. I’m not allowed to do police work, mind you, but any investigation that falls under military intelligence—and I guess that includes people pretending to be outside threats—falls into my bailiwick. The whole thing turned out to be a masquerade prank. You may not know, that there are people who really do not like the fact that I am allowed to exist. They don’t like armed men. They don’t like all the bombs and viruses and particle-beam arrays and thought-worms that are all maintained at public expense. Nuclear bombs, supernuclear bombs, neutron bombs, neutrino bombs, quasar bombs, pseudo-matter bombs, antimatter bombs, supersymmetry-reaction bombs. And so, from time to time, people pull tricks on me, or go cry wolf, just to see if I’ll come running.”

  “A prank … ?”

  “I can tell you who was behind it this time. Why not? My report to the Parliamentary Warmind Advisory Committee is a matter of public record, even if no one in the public will ever trouble herself to go view it.” He looked her in the eye. “The Nevernexters were the culprits. It was Unmoiqhotep and his crew.”

  Daphne was puzzled. “Phaethon said the Golden Oecumene was under attack by creatures from another star, or from a lost colony, or something. How could it be a prank?”

  Atkins shrugged, and made the hand sign asking if she wanted more tea. She waved her finger in the negative. He ordered his tea bowl to refill itself.

  He said, “You know who Unmoiqhotep is, don’t you? He used to be a she; she was born Ungannis of Io, Gannis’ clone-daughter. Her mother was Hathor-hotep Twenty Minos of the Silver-Grey Manor. Unmoiquotep hates both her parents, hates the Gannis-minds, the Silver-Greys, hates everyone. She never got over the fact that, these days, carrying someone’s genes doesn’t automatically let you inherit all his stuff when he dies and changes bodies, and so she changed her sex and changed her name and eventually became a big wheel among the Nevernext movement.”