The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

  “Take off your armor and try it again.”

  A thin and girlish voice spoke from the ring on Daphne’s hand: “Do not take off the armor! Daphne, move back! Phaethon is under attack!”

  11

  THE ENEMY

  1.

  While Phaethon stood amazed and wondering, Daphne (who had, after all, played through many more spy-dramas and dreams where people are shot at) fell to the ground and rolled under the cot.

  That very probably saved her life. Shrapnel from the exploding door tore the robe off Phaethon’s back, and bounced off his armor with musical chimes of thunder, but the blast was at head level.

  There was flame and energy in the door. Phaethon stepped into it; broken wires and destroyed housecoat circuits flashed white-hot around him.

  He put his hands around the creature he found there. The motors in his arms and elbows whined. He thrust the thing bodily up the ladder, out of the cabin, and away from Daphne.

  A kick (or perhaps it was an explosion) rang off his chest and tumbled him downstairs. Over his shoulder: “Daphne … ?”

  “I’m fine! Get him!”

  Thrust from his mass-drivers and thrown upstairs in a wash of magnetic energy, he landed on deck.

  All was dark. The diamond parasols overhead had been opaqued, and spread to grasp the rails at every point, so that the deck was now enclosed, like some wide tomb, sealed with a lid.

  The only light came from the monster. There it was, rearing up, with steam and hissing liquid dripping from its form. Light came from a circle of fire beneath its hoofs. The rising steam spread in a smoke ring across the black, sealed canopy overhead.

  It was Daphne’s horse, of course.

  Or, rather, it had been the horse. It stood upright on its rear hoofs, forehoofs hanging crookedly high in mid-air. Blue-white semi-translucent material flowed out from its mouth and eyes, radiating waste heat as nanomaterial reaction boiled inside. With gush and a spray of blood, the horse’s skull split wide, and a larger mass of the substance spilled into the air. In the dim light, Phaethon could see metal glints from instruments being constructed rapidly within the tendrils of substance vomiting from the shattered skull of the rearing stallion.

  Phaethon raised his hand, powered his accumulators …

  “Stop! Negotiate!” came a voice from the horse. It looked something like a rearing centaur from myth now, except with a nest of writhing black whips where a human face should have been. The tentacles of substance swayed and nodded like the heads of so many cobras, but nothing fired.

  Ironic. He, the civilized man should have been the first one to call to negotiate. “Who are you?” shouted Phaeton.

  “No memory of that has been permitted to me. I am nothing.”

  (What was the sudden chill that touched him? He had been hoping, secretly, all this time, that everything, his enemies, and their evil, would turn out to be a simulation, a dream, a hoax, a mistake. But here was an enemy. It was all real.)

  “You are from Nothing Sophotech?”

  No answer. The creature took a mincing step forward, rear hoofs clashing on the blackened deck, forehoofs still held high and crooked. More tendrils of substance pushed out from the shattered horse-skull, these bearing tubes and focusing elements of ominous import. Weapons? In the darkness, it was impossible to see clearly.

  Phaethon used the time to make adjustments within his own armor. Heat from the rapid changes he made in his nanomachine lining vented from his armor seams as hissing streams of steam.

  Phaethon called out again. “Are you organic or inorganic? Individual or partial?”

  “I am nothing you can understand. Comprehension cannot comprehend us.” The words were spoken in a monotone, inflectionless, empty, soulless.”

  “Do not speak nonsense, sir! Tell me if you are an independent self-aware entity, so that I can deduce whether or not destroying you would be murder.”

  A toneless and unemotional voice said back: “Self-awareness is nothing. It is illusion, produced by diseased perception. Only pain is real.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Surrender. Mingle with us.”

  “Surrender? Me … ? Why? In return for what?”

  “We will strip your foul lust-corrupted flesh from your naked brain, and sustain your nervous system among our self-ocean. All actions and movement will be taken from you, and you may lay down the horrid burden of individuality. All sense perceptions, which are lies, will be blinded; all memories of anything other than Nothing will be blotted out. Thus will you know true service, true devotion, true morality. The only true moral action is that which generates no benefit whatsoever to the actor; thus you will receive no good nor any reward of any kind again, no pleasure, no kindness, no self-love. The only true reality is pain; it is the only signal that demonstrates that we are alive. You will embrace an infinity of that reality, as your helpless and disembodied brain will be stimulated to endless pain, forever. This will teach you unpride, unegotism, unselfishness. You will achieve the enlightenment called no-thought.”

  Phaethon organized his armor to emit several types of discharge, calculated to burn flesh and overload circuitry. His mass-drivers now could sweep the area with brutal force. The creature loomed tall in the darkness. Phaethon raised his hands and focused aiming elements.

  Yet he was reluctant merely to shoot down this creature in cold blood, while it was talking. It did not sound sane. Was there some way to discover its origin, its motives?

  Dryly, Phaethon said, “Your offer is quite tempting, sir, but I fear I must decline. Frankly, I fail to see how a life of endless and pointless torture benefits either yourself or myself. Surely there is something else you want for yourself … ?”

  The rearing creature said in a leaden monotone: “Self is illusion. To seek benefit is selfishness. Seek nothing, achieve nothing, be nothing. True being is non-being.”

  Phaethon was tempted to open fire. What was this annoying, pathetic, hopeless creature hoping to achieve? Was this talk merely delay while other agents or elements made other attempts?

  Phaethon need only think the proper thought-command, and he could log on to the mentality in an instant, and tell the world what was happening here. All the secrecy of the Nothing would be nullified.

  But would Phaethon live long enough to tell? Was a virus in the mentality waiting to block any outgoing communications he might attempt? This whole clumsy attack, this final face-to-face confrontation, this emissary of meaningless horror, all this might be merely an elaborate ploy to force him to log on.

  He simply was not sure what to do.

  Phaethon said, “Explain your conduct. Why attempt force? Violent interaction is mutually self-destructive; peaceful cooperation is mutually beneficial.”

  “To benefit the self is wrong. It produces pleasure, which is gross corruption. Pleasure produces life, which damages the ecology and is abhorrent to nature, and life produces joy-of-life, which traps the mind in material reality, imprisons the false-self in logic. But once the state of mind beyond all logic is imposed, then there are no definitions, no boundaries, no limits, and endless freedom, the freedom of nothingness, is present. This state cannot be explained or described to you, since you do not exist, and since all descriptions are false. Your brain will be reconstructed. You will be absorbed. Submit.”

  There was silence in the darkness. Phaethon still could not bring himself to shoot a self-aware being, even an enemy, during negotiations. But did that mean he would have to wait until the alien threatened him again? That would be worse than foolish.

  His duty was to log on, and to warn the world, even if it cost him his life. Doubt made him hesitate. This was not the kind of problem Phaethon had practiced to solve. He knew how to solve engineering problems, problems made of rational magnitudes, definite structures, clear goals. But this … ?

  A child, or a madman, who was irrational, was a figure to invoke fond patience, or pity. But when that same irrationality controlled the weapon
s and science of a civilization as great and as powerful as the Silent Oecumene once had been, that was a figure of horror.

  Yet how could such unreason, even so, be taken seriously? This was the silliest and the least persuasive negotiator it had ever been Phaethon’s bad fortune to meet. There were logical contradictions in its philosophy a schoolboy could see through.

  What could it want? And what did one say to such a creature … ?

  Phaethon plucked up his courage and spoke. “Forgive me, sir, but I am going to have to ask you to turn yourself in to the nearest constabulary. Please surrender; I have no wish to harm you. You are quite insane, and so there is no point in arguing with you, but I’m sure our noumenal science can restore you to sanity after a brief redaction.”

  “You admit, finally, the truth of our proposition,” issued the headless horse-creature. “Logic is futile. Truth must be imprinted on captive brains by force. But our truth is not your truth. There is no common ground between us, no understanding, no compromise, no trust. There is nothing between us.”

  The creature’s leaden voice ground to silence.

  Phaethon said in a voice of cold bewilderment: “But then why did you ask to negotiate? Or, for that matter, why do anything at all? If your life is so horrible and irrational and meaningless, put an end to it! I won’t hinder you, I assure you of that. Quite frankly, it would relieve me of the upsetting chore of doing it for you.”

  This seemed to be the first thing Phaethon said that produced an emotional response from the creature, for the many tentacles began to writhe and lash, and fragments of material, hooks and weapon-barrels, began to worm their way out through the steaming horseflesh of the chest and haunches with agitated twitches. Blood streamed down the horse’s fetlocks and stained the deck. It took little steps back and forth, to the left and right, like a comic little dance, rear hoofs clanging, and the tall upper body swayed, forelegs curling and uncurling.

  The two stood facing each other, a man in bright armor, a smoldering and faceless horse-creature, stepping and swaying, looming like a black shadow.

  Phaethon took a step back, made certain all his new-made weaponry was aimed and primed and ready. He drew a tense breath.

  Neither one of them fired.

  The creature planted its rear hoofs again, raised its many arms, and froze in place. The creature’s voice, speaking in a deeper tone, came forth: “We have imprinted our over-self into the internal fields of a black hole, beyond the event horizon. In the center of the black hole, there, all irrationalities are reality, all boundary conditions reach infinities and infinitesimals. Logic stops. No rational signal can reach out from the event horizon to communicate with those who have not been absorbed. You are beyond my event horizon. You still exist in the universe limited by logic, selfishness, perception, thought. You will enter us, and be embraced, enter our singularity, and all distinctions between self and other shall cease. You shall cease. We shall cease. Nothing shall triumph.”

  Phaethon thought: But then what in the world do you want? Why have you been attacking me? Yet he did not bother to say anything aloud. It would have been futile.

  The was a bob of light from behind him. Phaethon saw Daphne, a broken cot leg in one hand, like a club, step up the ladder to peer out over the deck. The ring on her finger was producing a thin beam of light. “Phaethon?! What’s wrong with you? Haven’t you destroyed that creature yet?”

  “Daphne!! Stay back!” Phaethon made a noise of frustration and fear and stepped between Daphne and the monster, his back to her, spreading his arms as if to shield her. He was sure that in one of her spy-dramas or bellipographic simulations, the heroine was supposed to use a chair leg or something as a truncheon to beat off the computer-generated figments.

  Was she insane, to come up here? His agonized and bitter thought was that Daphne had no real experience of emergencies, and could not judge degrees of danger.

  The horse-thing reared back even farther, and its spine elongated, pushing its upper body higher yet in a bloody convulsion of ripping horseflesh. Blood gushed every way across the deck. Two of the tendrils springing from the horse’s neck doubled in size, and reached far left and far right, so as to be able to point down at Daphne. Whichever way Phaethon moved so as to block the weapon with his body, left or right, the creature would still have a clear line of fire the other way.

  The monster’s monotone came: “Surrender, or I destroy the love-object.”

  “‘Love-object’?!” Exclaimed Daphne in a voice of outrage. “Phaethon, who is this thing?” And then, when the light from her ring fell across the dripping mass of the monster, she gave out a tear-choked gasp: “My horse! My poor Sunset! What have you done to my horse?!”

  Phaethon said quickly, “What do I need to do to surrender?”

  The monster said. “Give us the armor. We need it to fly the ship.”

  (The armor. Of course. What else could it have been?)

  “And if I give you my armor, you will let my wife go?”

  Daphne said in a very soft voice from behind him: “Kill the damn thing, Phaethon. You can’t bargain with it.”

  The monster said: “You are impelled by thoughts of love and safety for loved ones, a morality of good and evil. We are beyond good and evil, beyond love. We have … no loved ones. We have nothing. Nothing fulfills us. You shall give us the armor and submit to selflessness.”

  Daphne whispered from behind him: “Don’t feel fear. Don’t listen. Kill it.”

  Phaethon hesitated.

  Daphne’s whisper came: “I will be so ashamed of you, so very ashamed, Phaethon, if you let love or fear make you weak. I will hate you forever. Don’t be a coward. Kill the damned thing.”

  Phaethon drew a breath, held it, thought for a moment. He said, “I love you Daphne. I’m sorry.”

  And he gave a mental command to his armor.

  Arms of intolerable fire erupted in thunder out from his gauntlets and stuck the creature. A dozen lightning bolts leapt from discharge-points along his shoulders, lances of incandescent brightness. The main energy cell in his breastplate opened into a single, all-consuming beam of atomic flame. Mass-drivers flung lines of near-light-speed particles into the target. An instantaneous cataclysm of fire converged upon the monster and pierced it.

  The horse body exploded and spread flaming debris across the deck. Phaethon, batteries drained, energy exhausted, suddenly felt the full weight of the armor across his shoulders, and fell heavily to one knee.

  Phaethon knelt, panting. The concussion within the contained space of the deck had been tremendous. On the deck before him, a column of oily flame was roaring, lashing the black parasols above with writhing arms of smoke.

  He turned his head. Daphne was on her face. Was she dead? But then he saw her stir and raise her head. It was impossible and amazing. She was not even bleeding. Had the creature not fired? She had been standing in the shadow of Phaethon’s armor, and his weapons had been configured to minimize any backscatter or spread. Even so, the discharge of forces in this enclosed space should have …

  No matter. He accepted it as a miracle.

  “You’re alive …” he whispered.

  She was on her hands and knees on the threshold of the hatch. Her face was red, and her tears ran down the soot on her cheeks. She coughed, and said, “You called me wife, that time, lover. I guess this means I win …”

  “I tried to log on to the mentality,” Phaethon said heavily. “I realized that you must be right, that there is no virus, nothing to fear. But …”

  He saw Daphne’s eyes, focused beyond his shoulder, turn into circles of horror.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding …” she murmured.

  His head seemed slow, filled with pain, as he turned it again. Out from the column of fire where once a horse had been now stepped a tall skeletal figure, made only of blue-white nanomaterial, and still shaped something like the horse body it had been wearing. Forward it came, mincing delicately on its rear hoofs, upper
body looming high. From the upper-spine shape of the structure, a nest of snakes still spread, still holding weapons and instruments pointing down at the two of them.

  The monotone came again: “We approve of futile, pointless, and meaningless actions. We welcome your attempt to cause us pain. But we disapprove of your motive, which was selfish. Remove your armor. Insert your head into the cavity we open in this unit, so that we may sever your neck and ingest your brain-material. Your brain will be sustained by artificial means, during transport.”

  The rib cage opened like two grillworks made of bone, showing a crude mechanism, still steaming with the heat of nanoconstruction, whose orifice was like the jaws of a guillotine.

  Tiny flakes of slime fell from the points of the welcoming rib cage bones. The guillotine jaws snapped wide, forming a round, wet hole about the size of a man’s head.

  Phaethon used his emergency persona to turn off his fear. Immediately, a crisp clarity came into his thoughts, unhampered by emotion.

  2.

  The first conclusion that entered his mind was that Daphne had been right: His fear of logging on to the mentality had been imposed externally, by the Cacophiles, at the time when Phaethon had just come out from the courthouse. The Silent Ones had not so far demonstrated the ability to manipulate mentality records, erase Sophotech memories, or do any other thing Phaethon had once believed them able to do.

  The second conclusion was the screen of interference that was presently blocking his access to the mentality must be grossly conspicuous to network monitors. The entire noumenal mind-information system of Earth, including the thoughts of the Sophotechs and the brain recordings of the immortality circuits, relied on the complete and unobstructed flow of communication, and hence was extraordinarily sensitive to any interruptions.