The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  She glanced at the knapsack, and then quickly back again. It was a guilty, furtive movement. Her face was troubled.

  Phaethon eyes widened. A note of anger was in his voice: “You do know—!”

  He took a stride across the room toward the knapsack. He snatched it up.

  She said, “No, I …” And jumped to her feet, a nervous, quick movement. All composure and grace was gone.

  He ripped the flap of the knapsack open. “She told you, didn’t she? She told you, and she did not tell me.” He yanked out the silver memory casket. He tilted it toward the window. Dim candlelight traced letters in the surface.

  A graceful and feminine handscript on the casket lid read:

  To be delivered to my emancipated partial self before the event of her permanent and irreversible death, cryosequestration, exile, radical redaction, or any other final withdrawal from organized civilization.

  Emergency wakeup, memory reset, and sanity-restoration code.

  Limited power of attorney.

  This document overrides all prior Eveningstar instructions.

  (Sealed) Daphne Prime Semi-Rhadamanthus Self-Embraced, Constructed Indep-Cortex (Emotion-sharing, limited club), Base Neuroform (with lateral connections), Silver-Grey Manorial Schola, Era 7004 (Pre-Compression).

  Phaethon’s knuckles were white on the silver lid. “She gave you the password. Not me. I begged Eveningstar to tell. I begged and begged. She’ll tell you, not me. You can bring her back to life. Not me. For you, she’ll come alive again. But never, not ever, for me …”

  His knuckles were white on the lid, but the casket would not open for him. Suddenly exhausted, he leaned against the wall. He feet began to slide, scratching against the floorboards with a raucous noise. He did not try to catch himself, nor did he unhand the casket. Instead, he collapsed and sat down heavily, his back against the wall, his legs sprawled out carelessly. He bowed his head over the casket in his lap.

  Once or twice his shoulders shook, but he made no noise. There was something very dull and hollow in his eyes.

  Daphne stepped over to him, her hand reaching out, as if she were about to give comfort. But then she paused, stepped back, and said: “That casket is useless by itself. Even if the old version of me should wake, she will not leave her life and go into exile to be with you here. You must prove yourself correct, expose the fraud that has been perpetrated upon the Hortators, restore the honor of your name, and return from exile. It’s the other case in my knapsack you want. The gold tablet. Haven’t you figured out by now what that must be? I endured everything I have endured, all this pain and trouble, just to bring it to you.”

  Curiosity, in Phaethon, was even stronger than grief. He drew his head up. “What is it?” His voice was dull and low.

  She gestured toward where he had dropped the knapsack, an elegant flip of the wrist, like a mensal hostess displaying some particularly delectable dessert. “You’re the engineer, Lover. You’ll recognize it.”

  He put the silver casket carefully aside and pulled the large gold tablet out of the knapsack. Phaethon straightened, surprise and wonder on his features, climbed to his feet again, with the golden tablet gleaming in his hands. One whole surface, he saw, was patterned with a mosaic of reader-heads and thought-ports, their several shapes and sizes fitted to each other as snugly as a successful puzzle, with no overlap and no empty spaces left over.

  He looked up, “It is a noetic-examination circuit.”

  She spoke with a note of triumph in her voice: “And it’s not connected to the mentality. Its an independent unit, isolated, sterile, and safe. Even you cannot believe that it is being influenced by these invader enemies of yours. You see? You do not have to log on to the mentality to prove the memories the Hortators saw were concoctions. Someone has tampered with your brain. That machine will let you prove it. You can prove it to the world; and to yourself.”

  She smiled again: “Use it, and we can go home, and we can live happily ever after.”

  He glanced down at the silver casket at his feet, then glanced up at her, his eyes narrowed.

  Daphne’s lips compressed, a line of scarlet irritation. “And, yes, obviously. You cannot get her back unless you come back.”

  Phaethon said carefully, “You do not seem overly concerned at the prospect of (may I phrase it delicately … ?) of losing me to the real version of you.”

  Her glittering eyes narrowed with pert, supercilious amusement, and a half-smile touched her lips. Her voice lilted with pretended nonchalance: “Oh … ? You mean the old, scared, outdated version … ? All I can say is: May the best bride win.”

  10

  THE NOETIC READING

  1.

  Phaethon was puzzled by the sudden, warm emotion which came to him then, seeing that undaunted, gallant, sensual look in the eyes of this the woman who was a copy of his wife. She stood, hands on hips, head thrown back, smiling a sunny smile, her figure warm and golden in the candlelight behind her. Phaethon dropped his eyes and pretended to study the noetic tablet he held.

  (She was not a perfect copy. This wife differed in certain details. She did not hate him, she had not left him, she had fearlessly thrown herself into exile rather than lose him … )

  Phaethon scowled, staring down at the noetic tablet in his hands. He would untangle his feelings later, he decided.

  He raised the unit and hesitated.

  Daphne asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing should stop me.”

  She raised an eyebrow. Her green eyes glittered with skeptical puzzlement. “Nothing is stopping you.”

  He said, “Nothing Sophotech, I mean. The one Scaramouche told me about.”

  “Is this the ‘Evil’ Sophotech build by the ghosts of the Second Oecumene?”

  “It is real.” He said heavily, “I am not deluded.”

  Daphne sat, leaning back on the cot, and laughed, mockery mingled with relief. “Oh, darling! You really ought to go through more trashy spy-romances, violence-novels, and bellipography. All those romances make the Second Oecumene their villains. Your hallucination is not very imaginative, as they go.”

  Angrily: “You believe the Hortators? You think I imposed these false memories on myself?”

  Smiling: “No, beloved. Oh no, my darling. I believe in you. Would I have come here otherwise … ?”

  She straightened up and said in a more businesslike tone: “I know you. You would not falsify your memories. And if, for some reason, you did, you would have invented a better story! Living with an authoress will do that for you, I guess. But I said and I do think the hallucination imposed on you really is not very imaginative. Look at the story: The Second Oecumene hated Sophotechnology so much that it was the only thing, except for murder, their laws forbade. So who built this Nothing Sophotech?”

  “Scaramouche said I did. But that was only a lie to get me to open my memory casket.”

  “So why do you think there is a Second Oecumene Sophotech at all … ? Why couldn’t the whole thing be a lie? Why couldn’t your enemies just be normal people no smarter than the rest of us?”

  He said nothing.

  A malicious note of humor lilted in her voice: “Or is it more flattering to your vanity to think you could have only been tricked by a superintelligence … ?”

  He said harshly: “The truth is not determined by my opinions. Nor, I should add, by any other person’s. I could accuse the Hortators of blind egocentrism, for not recognizing the threat; or Atkins of cowardice, for not admitting that it is real; or I could accuse anyone of anything, who did not agree with my view. Such accusations are easy. But blind men and cowards sometimes have the truth. Perhaps by accident, but they do. And so do, sometimes, men victimized by evil, alien Sophotechs built by long-dead civilizations! So we don’t discover the truth of a message by examining the man who speaks it. We examine facts. Where are the facts to support your conclusion, miss?”

  She stood up, her voice musical with anger, or perhaps it was battle-
joy: “Fact! The testimony of Atkins. Fact again, the testimony of Eveningstar Sophotech, who says no attack by Scaramouche or any other mannequin took place on the steps of her mausoleum. Fact the third, Gannis has been maneuvering to seize your Phoenix Exultant and sell it for scrap ever since this whole imbroglio began! He’s been trying to keep you penniless; why else would he help Helion in the law case against you?”

  Phaethon squinted, his head cocked to one side. “Gannis … ?”

  “Gannis of Jupiter? You know? A hundred-mind self-composition with a Sophotech who thinks just like all of him? I had my ring look up all sorts of records after I rode away from Atkins’ cottage. I don’t think Unmoiqhotep was acting alone. Over the last thousand years Gannis has been loosing money hand over fist. He took risks in his youth, back when there was only one of him. But, once he got rich, he turned himself into a committee. To get more things done at once, I suppose. But committees always tend to more and more conservative and risk-fearing strategies. Always! (You should see some of the studies Wheel-of-Life has made on the ecology of decision-making within a fixed power structure.) But Helion, in order to become a Peer, did the opposite. He took more and more risks, and even had a son, you, Phaethon, in order to get a mind more willing to take risks than he was:”

  Phaethon turned the idea over in his mind. “Gannis? You suspect that he and the Eleemosynary Composition brain-raped me while I was in the Eleemosynary public box, is that it?”

  “It explains the facts. Why else was there no evidence of the Neptunian at Eveningstar mausoleum? Why else was there no evidence of a mannequin confronting you or stabbing you on the stairs? That whole fight scene was a dream. A dream forced on you.”

  Could the whole fight scene with Scaramouche have been a dream? The Eleemosynary Composition had been in control of all of Phaethon’s sensory inputs going into the hospice box, had been carrying all of Phaethon’s motions and instructions going out. Could those have been edited?

  It was hard to believe. By their very nature, Compositions had no privacy. The Eleemosynary’s group-mind command structure had all its thoughts on public record. How could Eleemosynary commit a crime? Or even think about committing a crime? Gannis, on the other hand, while there were a hundred versions of him linked in parallel, was a privately held entity, and could hide his thoughts, either from his other selves, or from the public.

  Phaethon said, “I don’t see how Eleemosynary could have been a conspirator; nor do I see how anyone (anyone equipped with technology known to the Golden Oecumene) could have manipulated my brain while I was in the Eleemosynary hospice box without Eleemosynary noticing it.”

  “When you closed your armor, you were cut off from all outside influence. Eleemosynary could not have detected what was going on inside you at that time. Suppose a brain-redaction had taken place then?”

  “I would have been cut off from any brain-redactor as well.”

  “Unless you had it inside your armor with you.”

  “I was carrying it with me, is that what you mean, and then it activated?”

  “How is that different from a memory casket set on a timer?”

  “Are we talking about a piece of hardware, physically inside the armor? Atkins was the only person who touched it. He put a probe inside before I went into the courthouse. But … No, wait, that is ridiculous. I would have found any hardware during my trip down the tower. I completely inventoried everything in my armor, from helm to heel, more than once. Unless it dissolved itself after one use … ?”

  “I am thinking it was a thoughtware virus, existing only in your mind. Perhaps someone fed it to you through the Middle Dreaming, earlier.”

  Was it possible?

  Perhaps with a clever logic-tree, such a virus could have added false memories one at a time, while he was speaking (or thought he was speaking) to Scaramouche, and different variations of Scaramouche’s responses might have been pre-recorded, each variation anticipating slightly different reactions in him. A stored semi-intelligent program could have unfolded in his consciousness, feeding false signals into his senses, or even directly into his cortex, with no intervening medium. No outside source would detect the “invasion” because Phaethon was carrying the invading program inside him.

  Daphne’s theory also would explain why neither Rhadamanthus nor Eleemosynary, later, had any memory of the virus-civilization which Phaethon remembered seeing attack all three of them. There had been no such superviruses, no attack powerful enough to fool Rhadamanthus. Instead, a very simple chain of memories, reporting that an attack had already taken place, were introduced into Phaethon, then activated.

  But when had it happened? Before he climbed into the public box at the Eleemosynary hospice? Before that he had been at the courthouse. Had Atkins done it? Before the courthouse he had been in the Rhadamanthine thoughtspace, at tea, talking with Daphne, and Rhadamanthus had been running his sense-filter, and would have prevented any thought-virus from entering from the Middle Dreaming.

  Unless her diary had been the carrier to introduce the virus … ?

  The meddling with his thoughts must have been complete before he opened his memory casket. Because, after that, he had been in Helion’s section of the mansion-mind, and, after that, at the Hortator Inquest.

  Or had it been complete? Perhaps something introduced earlier had still been operating. A Trojan-horse program of moderate skill could have interfered with Phaethon’s attempt to download a copy of his consciousness into the public channel when he had been testifying at the Inquest. Instead of the true copy Phaethon had tried to send, a pre-recorded false version could have gone out, fed into the channel Phaethon had opened. That version was false from the beginning, and no magic supertechnology needed to be postulated to explain how records could be altered while Nebuchednezzar was reading them, simply because they had not been altered at that time. They had been concocted long before, and loaded into Phaethon’s subconscious whenever the original brain-rape had taken place. (But when could that have been?)

  And why Gannis?

  He asked it aloud: “Why Gannis?”

  “Because Gannis hates Helion. He always has. It’s always been the false sun fighting the true sun; Jupiter versus Sol.”

  “Why?”

  “The Solar Array, in less than four centuries, will be large enough to circle the equator of the sun. It will be the largest single piece of engineering ever designed. Why wouldn’t Helion put in a supercollider at that point? To you and me the difference between a small, false-dwarf sun like Burning Jupiter, and a main-sequence G-type star like Sol may be hard to grasp, like the difference between a million and a billion. But Helion, at that time, could outproduce Gannis’s metal supply, could more than triple Vafnir’s antimatter output, and so on and so forth. Jupiter will be exhausted of hydrogen fuel long before Sol—look at the difference in size! And, long before that, some planetary engineer—I think it was always meant to be you—would have to move the moons of dying Jupiter into new orbits around the parent Sun.”

  “Impossible. How could Gannis get away with it? The first noetic reading made of his mind would reveal his crime.”

  Daphne shrugged. “I think he had been hoping Helion would help you, or follow you into exile, or at least raise such a stink that the Peers would withdraw their invitation to elevate Helion to join them. Then, at the Grand Transcendence in December, it is not Helion’s dream which takes the center stage and forefront of the minds of men, but Gannis’s. Afterward, long afterward, perhaps, Gannis would be found out. But I suppose parts of his mind don’t know about the crime, and they will carry on after the evil Gannis is punished. But in any case, it will be too late for Helion’s dream by then. After a Transcendence, people get so wrapped up in the unity of racial thought, you know how it takes them a few hundred years to begin trusting their own judgment again; and by that time, Helion may be broke. With your death, Helion certainly will be brokenhearted.”

  Phaethon opened his mouth to utter an objection,
but then closed it. Because the theory did make sense. It make a lot more sense than believing he was being chased, for incomprehensible reasons, by agents from a long-dead colony one thousand light-years away. Instead, the oldest reason for crime known to man—jealousy—came from someone like Gannis—a real person. The danger was understandable, human, natural.

  And he knew how untrustworthy Gannis was. Had he not already betrayed Phaethon once?

  And yet … and yet …

  “This is precisely the sort of thing Nothing would like to get me to believe, if all this has been arranged to trick me,” said Phaethon.

  Daphne rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. You are going to disbelieve a believable theory not because it is unbelievable, but because it is not?”

  “Er. Say that again … ?”

  “I don’t need to. This Nothing Sophotech is your superstition. A paranoiac who sees conspiracies everywhere, says the lack of evidence only proves the conspiracy was successful. A man who believes in fairies, when he doesn’t see them, says that this proves that fairies are invisible!”

  “Reasoning by analogy is like filling balloons with liquid helium. It won’t fly.”

  She said: “Then stick to the evidence. What can you prove?”

  “I can prove nothing. What we are trying to find out here is whether or not my ability to gather and to ponder proof—in other words, my mind and memory—has been compromised. How does one prove that the ability itself to prove things has not been distorted? What evidence can prove the evidence itself has not been tampered with?”

  She said, “You’re getting ridiculous. All you need to look for, in this case, is independent confirmation. Atkins does not agree with you, Rhadamanthus does not agree with you, Eveningstar does not agree with you, and the Eleemosynary Composition does not agree with you. You have not found a single shred of independent confirmation so far. But you have that mobile noetic circuit right there in your hand. It will tell you if the memories you have are true or false, and when any false memories were put into you, and how. So what are you waiting for? What are you afraid of?”