by John Wright
"What is it?" he said.
"You called me 'darling,' instead of 'miss,' " she said, her smile getting warmer. She spoke slowly, as if the words tasted good to her. "And 'we' have not argued a million times. I have the memory of the woman you argued with a million times. But, according to you, that wasn't me."
"I, ah..."
She waved her hand, and in a light lilt, said, "But I will let you change your mind about that later!" Then she said: "At the moment, you were saying I booby-trapped the noetic reader. Fine. But if I did, then I'm not as smart as a Sophotech; I'm not even as smart as Daphne Tercius Eveningstar Emancipated Download-redact, am I? Because if I had been that smart, I would have realized that I could not fool an engineer with a booby-trapped piece of equipment. You are an engineer, aren't you? Take the thing apart, if you like. But you better make damn sure that you can put it back together, because, without it, we are never getting out of this mess."
Phaethon looked down again at the portable noetic reader. Could he inspect it? He was standing in the middle of a well-equipped thought-shop, after all. The shop-mind had routines with which to examine basic mental interfaces; it could certainly tell the difference between a passive noetic reader and some active circuit meant to make a change in Phaethon's thought-process.
Daphne raised both eyebrows, and said, "And I do not get emotional when I argue. I'm just passionate about my convictions!"
The green-and-blue housecoat in the corner of Ironjoy's cabin was hooked into the general thought-shop circuitry, and served as the main command menu. Phaethon stepped out of his armor, the black material pulling the chrysadmantium plates out from him like the petals of an opening flower. Then the mass pulled itself back together with a bright clash, forming an empty stand of plate mail.
Phaethon shrugged into the housecoat. The coat hesitated, then pulled in the two extra sleeves. Phaethon drew the hood, and then worked the ornamental buttons which riggered the translation from Ironjoy's rather peculiar semi-Invariant neuroform to a base neuroform.
The robe was slow and old, perhaps an antique. It took almost half a minute for the reader-heads in the hood to reconfigure, and find the contact points for the cybernetic neurocircuitry grown throughout Phaethon's brain and spine. A web of energies wove Phaethon into the mind-space of the thought-shop.
The thought-shop was utterly isolated; all communication channels were black. Whatever it was that Antisemris had done, whatever services Notor-Kotok's provider had cut off, had stranded the entire shop outside of the mentality. Which meant, Phaethon hoped, that the shop was secure from intrusion, safe, and virus-free.
He took the gold tablet of the portable noetic reader and placed the unit into the housecoat's large chest pocket. Threads from the housecoat began to weave themselves across the thought-ports, making connections, finding correspondences, downloading initial routines into holding spaces. At the same time, Phaethon had the housecoat insert a physical probe into the golden tablet's housing, so that he could generate tiny fiber-optic pictures of the interior works, and magnetic images of the fields surrounding each part of the construction. Beads on the hem of the hood focused imaging lasers into his eyes, stimulating the areas behind the cornea, to create three-dimensional pictures diagramming the tablet's interior spaces for him.
Daphne sat back down on the bed, picked up his child slate again, and began flicking through different records and menus.
Phaethon inspected the unit and was baffled.
The secondary systems he could grasp: triggers, data-migration mechanisms, coders and decoders, junction cells. The arrangement of thought-reader processors and interprocessors was particularly clever, based on concentric geometries; it looked as if the Sophotechs had finally solved the permeability-interference problems involved in ring-shaped psuedomaterial fields, and constructed the legendary circular self-sustaining information wave. Brilliant.
But the main memory and processing core was an utter enigma. It seemed to be made of a sheet of neutronium, frozen at absolute zero, a matrix of dense subatomic particles bound together by strong nuclear forces, but orderly, very orderly. The edges of the sheet faded into virtual particle masses, a haze without clear properties; but pulses moving to one side of the sheet seemed to disappear and reappear at the opposite side of the sheet, as if the thing was curved in some dimension he could not sense or imagine. The energy field suspending the sheet in place certainly acted as if there were no boundary conditions or edges.
And what was this sheet? Whether it was made of matter or energy was a question for debate. Why it was not heavier than a city, Phaethon could not guess; why it did not explode or randomize was an impossibility. Perhaps it was made of something like tightly woven quantum strings? Or a force produced by another geometry of supersymmetric breaking, like, yet unlike, pseudomatter? Antigravity? Or perhaps that so called subgravity, which graviton-fraction theory said might exist?
But the main question was: Had it been tampered with? Phaethon could have laughed. The whole thing could have been taken apart, turned inside out, rotated in the fourth dimension, and put back together again without him being able to tell a thing. He did not know what the original configuration was; he had no instruments that could sense the disposition of neutral subatomic particles, where the main memory and process information were stored. And, even if he had, he would not be able to read that information by inspecting the gross outward mechanism storing it, any more than a man could read a novel by looking at the electron crystal in his library-ring.
Some engineer. He was a human. This was like the handiwork of the gods. This was magic.
Well. At least he could look at the parts of the mechanism he recognized. First, the reader-heads fed into the central rotary information-ring through a nested series of concentric interprocessors. It was a beautiful solution to certain basic design problems. Phaethon felt privileged just to see it.
"I think I understand why the Second Oecumene destroyed themselves," he said aloud, absentmindedly.
"Why is that, darling?" Daphne did not look up from the record in the slate she was viewing.
"They did not get to watch the Sophotechs solve problems. This is a breathtaking piece of work! The designers created a self-sustaining complex of information waves traveling around a frictionless ring. The geometry is entirely radial, so there are no edge-bleeding effects, and, as far as I can tell, the thing is distortionless, intertialess, and self-interference-free, so that anything stored on it will last until the end of time, or until quanta-level decay erodes the fundamental substructure of the behavior of basic particles, whichever comes first. The memory can be configured from any two points on the ring to form a triangular matrix of any given height, limited only, I would guess, by the curvature of space itself. That means you can put practically any number of code lines into a given area, without worrying about stop points and edge bleed-off that the old rank-and-file square matrixes suffered. And that is just the intermediate thresholding. The information core itself is a block of weightless neutronium!"
"That's nice, dear," said Daphne absently.
"The reader-heads that feed into the ring can be used in any combination, in multiple scan-functions, so that you do not need a separate thought-port for every combination of neuron actions in the subject. The heads are on a timer... Hullo. What's this ... ?"
Daphne looked up. "Find anything, dear?"
Phaethon shoved back his hood, blinking his eyesight clear of illusions so that he could see the cabin again. His gaze met hers. "When was the last time you used this unit?"
"Used it? I haven't even taken the tape off the reader-heads. No one has ever used it. Its a prototype."
"Atkins did not do something to it? Examine it for weapons, or activate it by remote control?"
Daphne sat up, eyes big. "Oh, dear heavens! The thing isn't really booby-trapped, is it?! I was just kidding when I said you should inspect it. You know, to give you something to do, so you wouldn't fret. Is there something
wrong? There cannot be! I kept it in my pack the whole time!"
Phaethon said, "The line clock reads zero, as if the unit had never been used, but there is a separate clock, attached to the timer controlling the coordination of the reader-heads, which indicated that the heads cycled through 1 X 10 to the 28th power combinations about fourteen hours ago. That is about the number of combinations one would get if someone used the unit, and examined his own mind."
Daphne blinked. "Oh. That doesn't sound dangerous."
"But who did it?"
"No one. The thing was in my pack. Fourteen hours ago? I was sleeping on the ground with twelve pebbles sticking into my back. I. remember because I got to count them, over and over again. I'd show you the bruises, but, until you get around to admitting we are man and wife, I wouldn't want to do anything to shock Silver-Grey Victorian propriety. Are you really not going to use that noetic unit now? Do you really think I'm an agent of your spy-thriller villains? Just because the reader-heads are misaligned? That doesn't prove the thing is booby-trapped! Can't you just get it to read your brain without allowing it to change anything in your brain?"
"The reason why noetic machines are so complex, and the reason why the early Warlocks, back in the Fifth Era, could fool the readings, is that there is a continuous back-and-forth between the unit and the brain-information it reads. Any act of examination changes an object."
"I still don't understand. You mean that someone-for the sake of argument, let's say it was your bad guys-came up and used the machine while I was sleeping. That means they did what? Swore an oath? Testified in court? Made a contract? But in any case, it wasn't anything that damaged the unit, or that reprogrammed it to do you any harm."
"I said there was a continuous two-way energy flow between the subject and the noetic reading unit. Each one changes the other. I just said that ancient Warlocks learned how to hoax these readings. They did it by altering the machine during the reading process. If this machine was altered by the enemy, it could not have been for a good purpose."
"But can't you look at it and find out? Have it check itself for flaws? Order it to re-set to zero? Do one of those things you are always doing to our systems at home whenever you are ignoring Rhadamanthus and don't want to hear why what you are doing is going to make things worse?"
He blinked. "Like when?"
"What about the time you collapsed the east wing of the mansion, when we were staying in New Paris? Or what about the time you were trying to re-thread all the impellers in our confluence register, because you thought it would get more tension out of the drive? All you did was capsize us into the lava."
"I cannot believe you would bring that up again! That was caused by a flux in the current around us: and even Boreus Sophotech said later that that was an unexpected consequence of chaotic flows in the magnetic core! And I'm sorry about the wing collapsing, but I thought we could save power by running it through a nonlinear interrupt."
Daphne rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling. "Men! You are so touchy. All I'm saying is, how did you right the mole boat again? How did you erect the mansion-fields? Just hit the damn reset button. Null everything back to the default."
Phaethon frowned. "That seems too easy. But there is no reason why that should not work..."
"And besides, you were monkeying with the east wing to show off, not because we needed to save any energy, and you know it."
"Fine! I cannot believe we are going through this old argument, when you might actually be a horrible puppet controlled by the Silent Ones."
"What a terrible thing to say about a person!"
He shook his finger at her. "I'm telling you, if this turns out to be a Silent One trick, and you killed that sweet Daphne-doll-the image of the woman I love-I'll destroy your whole damn civilization with no more hesitation than if I were wiping out a nest of cockroaches! You tell that to your masters! I was born to burn worlds!"
"Don't be silly, dear, you sound like a caveman. But I appreciate the sentiment; not every girl gets a maniac to slaughter people indiscriminately for her. So do you really think I'm sweet?"
"It's not funny. Well, perhaps it is a trifle funny, but it's really not entirely funny." He threw off the housecoat and stepped back over to his armor.
Daphne sat up. "Now what are you doing?"
"I can take a precaution. The thought-ports in my armor can act as an intermediary. The noetic-read energy cannot penetrate the admantium. I can just set up a buffer, like an air lock, something to quickly interrupt the circuit if the noetic reader does something untoward."
Black tentacles of nanomaterial fitted the armor around him. Then he straggled to put the housecoat back on. Then followed a few minutes while he spread nanomaterial across his upper helmet surfaces, growing contact-points to be routed through the thought-points in his shoulder boards. The carrier lines clustered like a drooping mass of hair across his head, and around his shoulders, spilling out of the front of the housecoat hood.
Then he spent several moments downloading routines out of the thought-shop. A point-to-point system, a format translator, security cycles, relative time adjustment groups, and so on...
Ironjoy, because of his clientele, had far more security programs than any other thought-shop Phaethon had seen. He sent out a search-tree to use and combine them all.
Then he discovered, of course, that, since his secretarial and seneschal programs had been erased out of his personal thoughtspace, he had to get architectural activators, routing judges, information condensers and decondensors, pattern assessors, step locks, hold-and-go priority switches ...
Some of this required additional hardware chips, processing beads, and so on, which he clipped to the various parts of the housecoat, and hung from the carrier strands. The wall behind the talking mirrors opened up into several construction cabinets, where Phaethon either made or found what more he needed.
Soon, it was hard to move his arms, because he now wore two housecoats (since the first had not had enough storage area of action circuits), and, practically a third coat itself, was the layer of additional materials he had been forced to add, wires and join-boxes, cooling disks and through-put forks, dangling from all eight sleeves.
He had opened one of the mirrors to allow him to run additional lines to contact points there, to get direct access to thought-shop routines. Every wire running to the mirror had a circuit-interrupt with a security assessment cell clipped to it.
"You look like a walking Yule tree," Daphne called from the cot.
"Just don't put a candle on my head." His voice was muffled, because the external speakers on his armor were obscured. He sighed. "I'm just glad the Silver-Greys aren't around to see this. Helion's ancient vow to make our technology serve Beauty."
"You aren't a Silver-Grey at the moment, hero. Besides, I'm recording the picture into my ring. We'll all have a good laugh about it, once our exile ends." There was a wistful note to her voice.
"Hmp. You show them that picture, the Silver-Grey won't take me back."
"Don't worry. I show them this picture, the Black Manorials will take you. You'll start a new Absurdist Sartorial Movement. Asmodius Bohost will dress like you."
"Well, good heavens! It's worth the risk of having the Silent One's booby-trapped noetic reader here burn out my brain just for that, if nothing else! My other accomplishments will sink into obscurity by contrast, once history remembers that I once influenced Mr. Bohost's ghastly wardrobe!"
Daphne favored him with a level stare.
"You're delaying."
"Perhaps a little ..."
"You're afraid."
"Not unreasonable, considering that this might actually kill me."
"You are a paranoid deluded maniac."
"But a lovable one. Are you attempting to bolster my courage, miss? You should have Eveningstar Sophotech teach you more about how to manipulate the moods of men."
"Are we back to 'miss' are we? That's fine with me; because at least you are talking now a
s if we are going to make it back out of this exile. You sound mildly less doomed."
"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."