The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  “I’m wondering if there are further steps I can take to make it so this noetic reader, if it is trapped, cannot hurt me.”

  “Put another bucket on your head.”

  “This is not a bucket; it monitors energy levels in the hood-interface.”

  “It’s still a bucket.”

  “Maybe I’m worried about what will happen if this succeeds. The automatic exile—the one I agreed to suffer at Lakshmi—will be ended. But so what? There is not a single thing that will prevent the College from turning around and bringing a new proceeding against me. They still fear star colonization. Till now, I had been sort of assuming that the mere existence of surviving colonists from the Silent Oecumene would compel us to travel out there. To discover what had become of them, if nothing else. But, if you are right after all, and all this is a hallucination imposed by Gannis, that compelling reason vanishes.”

  Daphne sat with her elbows on her knees, cupping her cheeks in her palms, looking up at Phaethon with an impertinent and girlish look. “Leave everything to me and Aurelian. We can clear that hurdle when we come to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was saving it as a surprise.”

  “I thought you hated surprises.”

  “Not when they are my surprises.”

  “Please tell me, miss.”

  “Are we still back on ‘miss’? Say, ‘please tell me, Daphne my darling wife,’ and maybe I will.”

  “Sha’n’t. You’ll tell me and gladly.”

  “And why shall I?” She favored him with an impish smile.

  “Because, like me, you are too proud of your accomplishments to keep quiet about them.”

  Her smile burned languid, and she brushed her hair with her fingers, preening.

  Phaethon said, “Any time now. I’m tired of standing here with a bucket on my head.”

  “We’re rich.”

  “What?”

  “Actually, you’re rich. I’m only rich if you marry me again.”

  “You are deluded. I do not have a gram of money, not a second of computer time.”

  “I said rich. It’s not enough to buy our ship out of hock, but it should be enough to hire a Black House vessel to carry us to Mercury Equilateral, and pay for at least some of the last-minute preparations the Phoenix Exultant still needs done.”

  “Oh, come now. And where did this alleged money come from?”

  “Flying suits.”

  “Flying suits?”

  “You hold the patent on them. The way Rhadamanthus set up the business, you only lease the patent in return for a shared percentage. During the masquerade, everybody wants to fly. Its just so much fun. Aurelian Sophotech set up a second levitation array above Western Europe, for the Aryan Individualists, and a third over India, where the Uncomposed Cerebelline art-capital Macro-structure is.”

  “Ridiculous. The Hortators …”

  “Are a private and voluntary organization. They cannot subpoena your records; they are not the police. Everyone who is renting a flying cloak from you is in masquerade. Nobody knows who they are, except for Aurelian.”

  “But—but why would people—why would they defy the Hortators?”

  Daphne raised her slender hands and her soft, round shoulders in an exaggerated pantomime shrug. “Theory one: People support the Hortators, in principle, except when that principle causes them some sacrifice or hardship, such as forgoing the pleasure of personal levitation, whereupon their principles evaporate like spit on Mercury dayside. A lot of people were upset, you know, about the unforeseen consequences of that mass-amnesia they let the Hortators talk them into. Theory two: People know the Hortators are actually, really, supposed to ostracize folks like all your friends here, the child pornographers and semislavers and weaponeers, destruction-ists and malignifiers and mystagogues, hatemongers and history-forgers and suicide-panderers; and the people know that bright, heroic Phaethon does not fit in with that muck.”

  Phaethon’s muffled voice came out from underneath his layers of coats, lines, wires. “Would people really defy the Horators … for me? Do they believe in my dream, finally, after all?”

  “Don’t get so dewy-eyed. Occam’s razor forbids us from adopting theories that require us to postulate unreal entities, such as, for example, the existence of conscience, noble dreams, or good wishes among our fellow citizens. No, theory number one makes more sense. They don’t care about you and your ideals or about the Hortators and their ideals. They just want their toys.”

  “Their love for their toys may allow me to repossess my toy. Isn’t there the seed of free-market morality buried in that somewhere? I want my ship. The Neptunian conversation-tree has already predicted that their Duma will hire me to pilot the Phoenix Exultant.”

  Daphne pointed with a slender finger toward the chest pocket of his housecoat, where the noetic unit rested. “But first you must get us the hell out of his miserable exile. Say the magic word and let that thought-forsaken thing read your mind already. If I’m actually a Silent One spy, and this is all an elaborate trap, I’ll apologize to you later.”

  “What if I’m dead?”

  She shivered with disgust. “Well, then I won’t apologize! Will you just get on with it?! They dumped all my spare lives, and it makes me nervous. I’ve been mortal for at least an hour now, and it’s beginning to bother me. I mean, what would happen if a meteor struck the earth at this spot, or something?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about meteors, were I you,” said Phaethon. “There hasn’t been a big strike since the Baltimore event in the Fourth Era. Since that time, a watch has been tracking and recording the movements of all objects within the detectable danger zone, first by the Chicken Little Subcomposition, then by Star-Dance Cerebelline, and now by the Sophotechs. Nothing could get past them …”

  He frowned. A thought, so obvious and so large as to have been invisible before, surfaced in his mind.

  Where was the Silent Oecumene starship?

  There must be a second Phoenix Exultant, perhaps a colder, slower, stealthier ship, but a starship capable of travel from Cygnus X-1 nevertheless. A dark twin of his golden Phoenix. Where was it hidden? Sophotech navigation watches observed every rock, practically every dustmote, in inner-system space. But if the Silent Phoenix was somewhere beyond Neptune (as Phaethon had been assuming) then how could the Sophotechs not notice whatever information, instructions, or reports were traveling back and forth between Nothing’s agents on Earth and wherever the evil Sophotech was housed?

  (Unless … ? Could the agents be operating with only furtive and infrequent contact with their Sophotech? If so, then the agents were capable of obtuseness, illogic, and human error.)

  The Silent Oecumene technology might be different from that of the Golden Oecumene. Nonetheless, in general, it was safe to assume that the technology level still had to be roughly equal, since a godlike superiority in technology would have permitted the Silent Ones to disregard any need for precaution or secrecy.

  Therefore, it was safe to assume that normal principles of science and engineering applied. The Silent Ones could not motivate their starship without discharges of energy sufficient to move the ship’s mass across the intervening distance.

  And also, even if the Nothing Sophotech could be housed in a frame physically much smaller than huge electrophotonic matrices of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs, the energy density, and the energy required to perform a respectable Sophotech-level number of operations-per-second, would still give it a large mass-energy reading. The pseudo-neutronium inside the noetic unit he was holding, for example, could have been detected from orbit by weakly interacting particle ranging-and-detection gear.

  Where could one put a body that large, or put a starship, without the Earthmind detecting either?

  Daphne said, “You’re not talking, lover. That means you’re thinking.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  A feminine sigh floated in the candle-lit gloom. “You should be thinking about hu
rrying up, getting a noetic reading, proving that you are right, and getting home in time for a real comfortable night, including a warm pool, a communion, a mensal performance, and a walk in the Eveningstar Garden of the New Senses. The Non-Apotheosis School was going to surface back into human thought-space from their daring subtranscendence tomorrow, and everyone says they will be bringing back Para-artistic phenomena from deep in the Earthmind, miniaturized and recalculated to make sense to our neuroforms. I thought it would be a much better way to spend an afternoon than sitting here on a rusting barge, watching each other undergo the aging process. Can’t we go home? All this poverty and trash here is beginning to depress me. Too much like my folks’ old Stark place on the Reservation.”

  She was clutching her elbows and shivering. One of the candles on the porthole sill behind her had begun to gutter out. She had half-turned and was watching it die.

  Phaethon knew she was thinking morbid thoughts. The Starks had not connected their child to any noumenal immortality circuit, nor even told her that such a thing as immortality was possible. Daphne had suffered more than one bad accident as a child, falling from trees, overturning boats, being trampled by antique walking-statues; for she had led an active life. She found out from a wandering confabulator, a Jongleur from the Warlock Benevolent Mischief School, about Orphic reincarnation banks: and she had never forgiven the mad risk her primitivist parents had taken with her life.

  The bright flame sputtered, gave off a greater light than before, swayed, failed, and vanished. A slender tail of smoke rushed upward.

  “Will you just hurry up and get us out of here?” said Daphne.

  Phaethon said: “Darling, don’t be afraid.”

  She spoke without turning her head. “Why not?” came a bitter reply. “You are.”

  There was an odd sharpness to her voice. He said: “Just what do you mean by that?”

  Daphne turned, picked up the child slate, touched the screen. The light from the slate shone up from her chin, and threw the shadow of her nose across one eye. “I would not have had to go into exile, and come all the way out here, or get that portable reader from Aurelian, or do any of those things, if you had just had the common sense to log on to the network and get a noetic reading from Rhadamanthus or from any public contracts channel! You even read a self-consideration analysis of your own psychometrics, and it told you (it told you!) that your fear of logging on was unnatural and out of character for you. It should have been obvious that it was an imposed fear, imposed from outside. If you had half the brains you pretend, you would not have needed me to come by and rescue you!”

  “You read my self-analysis?! That is private material!”

  “Oh, come on. I am your wife, you know. I’ve communed with you. I’ve been you.”

  “I would not go through your diary without asking!”

  “Oh, really? What if the wake-up code for the old version of me was there? Or are you only willing to break into private mausoleums, batter constables, fight Atkins, and try to kidnap sleeping women?”

  “I—well—you make a good point, I suppose. But still you should not—”

  “What, are you afraid I’ll come across your private sexual fantasies about making me dress up in a pony suit and horse-breaking me? I have to admit, I sort of like that one …”

  “You are changing the subject, miss!”

  “Demoted back to ‘miss,’ eh? Well, don’t worry, hero. If I die in exile, I wouldn’t be telling anyone your secrets.” She tossed the slate back onto the cot with a negligent flick of her wrist. “I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you use that damn noetic reader or not. I can tell you what it will say.”

  “What?”

  “The false memories were imposed through the Middle Dreaming. You were standing near the courthouse, and a friend of Unmoiqhotep’s, one of the Cacophiles, got you to accept some sort of quick-read file. You were on public courthouse ground. You must have been using public server support for your sense-filter, the same kind of low-budget public-works thing Atkins was complaining that Unmoiqhotep had cracked. Right?”

  “Y-yes. But why do you conclude that …”

  “Simple. You were brain-raped. It could not have happened when or at any time before you were sourced through Rhadamanthus, or the mansion-mind would have detected it, or before your trial, for then the Curia noetic reading would have detected it. And it didn’t happen after you entered the Eleemosynary hospice box, because the concierge would have detected it. So whom did you meet after you left the trial and before you went to the hospice? The Cacophiles.”

  She pointed at the slate glowing on the cot. “And the self-consideration analysis even told you that something was making you not want to think about the Cacophiles. It told you. You ignored it. And don’t give me this ‘how can I know anything if my brain has been altered?’ garbage! Look for the confirming evidence! Look at your own damn self-analysis! Look at basic Deception Theory you learned as an Apprentice, ‘for every false-to-facts system there must be at least one self-inconsistency value’ remember? It’s all lies, and you should be able to see through them, Phaethon! There is no Silent Oecumene and no spies and no booby-trap! And there is Nothing! I mean there isn’t a Nothing. No such thing as Nothing. Demons in Heaven! Boy, do I sound stupid even trying to say it!” And there were tears in her swollen eyes, and she began to laugh, and her face was flushed with anger, and Phaethon somehow thought she looked lovely anyway.

  “Don’t get upset. Remember your self-control.”

  “Bugger that! I’ve left the Silver-Grey. Reds get hysterical. It’s our privilege!”

  “Be that as it may, your theory simply does not cover all the facts. Why did someone put a dream-block in my head to prevent me from thinking or dreaming about the Second Oecumene? If it wasn’t the Silent Ones, then who?”

  “Perhaps the block was merely intended that you should not dream about anything. Maybe they wanted you to die of dream deprivation before anyone examined you noetically and discovered the fraud. Why the Second Oecumene? I don’t know. The subject matter may have been chosen at random, or they may have chosen the most upsetting image from your subconscious, or the thought-virus may have mutated in operation. Chaos happens, darling. Some things aren’t planned.”

  “Someone sent me a threatening message just earlier this evening, through Daughter-of-the-Sea.”

  “Oh, that. That was me. Your Daughter-of-the-Sea bollixed the message.”

  “What was all that about being chained on a foreign planet, then?”

  “All I said was that we could have a fourth honeymoon on a real moon. You could make a little lovers’ planetoid for us, just the two of us, and maybe you would not have to wander through the stars so far to find any happiness.”

  “And—oh. You mean you—Are you volunteering to come with me?”

  “Not while you have that stupid bucket on your head. But maybe I’ll come. Maybe not. But you know neither of us are going anywhere until you use that noetic box. Are you really worried about it being booby-trapped? Use the damn thing on me. Read my mind. Find out if I work for the Silent Oecumene. Or for the Blue Fairy-babies, or for Father Christmas.”

  “What if it’s not safe … ?”

  She spread her arms. “You’ll only be hurting a Silent Oecumene spy.”

  “Wouldn’t it be wiser to take a precautionary …”

  “You are not putting a bucket on my head, Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth, and that’s final. Come on! Get it over with.”

  She walked over and put her hand on Phaethon’s chest, she put her fingers in the chest pocket and touched the noetic unit’s thought-ports. “I’m not a spy, Phaethon.”

  Phaethon was gripped by the fear that he was going to see his wife die right in front of his eyes. “Wait!” But his clumsy hand, tangled with wire, could not move up quickly enough.

  She said, “I swear.”

  The unit hummed. Daphne looked blank-eyed.

  “No! Wait!”

  But
then Daphne smiled, and the unit said, “Subject is telling the truth to the best of her knowledge, information, and belief. She has no private mental reservations. There is no sign of subconscious tampering. Her last mental redaction was a temporary memory loss performed, at her request, by the Red Eveningstar Sophotech on November 2nd.”

  She smiled at him. “And I swear I love you.”

  The unit said, “Partially accurate. She has a private mental reservation that you are behaving so erratically and peculiarly, that she is quite exasperated with you, and she finds that this, despite her best efforts, makes you harder to love.”

  Daphne scowled and snatched her hand back. “Oh, shut up, you!” Then she muttered: “Blabbermouth.”

  Phaethon drew a breath. “Very well. I’m convinced it is worth the risk. Unit! Please examine me for signs of mental tampering.”

  The unit hummed again, coughed. The humming dropped in pitch and fell silent.

  Daphne said in a worried voice, “Is something wrong?”

  Phaethon said, “Report progress.”

  The unit said, “Unable to comply. No valid parameters are present.”

  Daphne flapped her hands. “Try it again.”

  The unit said, “External energy source interrupting matrix memory ring. Unit disabled.”

  Daphne gave off a little squeal of anger. “Take the bucket off and try again!”

  Phaethon reinserted his probe into the noetic-reader housing. “I don’t think it is any interference from me or my armor.”

  The unit said, “System must shut down and go through reconstitution process. Please stand by.”

  “Damn it!” exclaimed Daphne. “You plugged in one of those wires backward, or something. Just like the time you collapsed the east wing in Paris!”

  “There was an electromagnetic pulse. It scrambled some of the outer circuits. That infinite self-sustaining ring I was telling you about just stumbled all over itself and got tangled. The information is still there, tangled in a Moebius knot, and without any addresses. But the inner neutronium or pseudo-neutronium, or whatever it is, is still fine. You would need a beam of antimatter even to scratch that stuff … Hm. The energy-wave is coming in at normal thought-port bandwidth. Could it be some sort of feedback or resonance from the armor?”