The Phoenix Exultant tga-2

by John Wright

  Daphne slapped her riding crop against the shiny black leather of her boot. "Don't gull me with excuses! Don't talk to me of debts and liens and legal hither-and-yon. None of that is really what is really going on! Atkins and the Warmind are the puppeteers behind everything that happens now. Had Atkins' plan included me, there would be a way to let me go along, law or no law, come lien, legality, hell, or high water!" She flourished her riding crop and pointed at him, a gesture of imperious indignation. "You mark my words, Phaethon of Rhadamanth! This is all mere masculine testosteronic condescension! If I were a man, I'd not be slighted in this way! I'd be allowed to go and die with you!"

  "I think not, my dear," answered Phaethon, gently. "Were you a man, you would not be befogged with romantic ideas, nor would you suffer the delusion that you and I are man and wife. You are a fine woman-a wonderful woman-but you are not the one who, bound to me by marriage vows, has any right to ask to share my life, or, I suppose, my death."

  Her cheeks took on a rosy hue, and her eyes gleamed with unshed tears, perhaps of anger, or sorrow, or both. "You are a cruel man. So what am I supposed to do? Forget you? I tried that once, for just one day, and it is not worth trying again, I assure you."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Besides! The one to whom you are bound by your marriage vows would not ask to go with you. She would cower, screaming, and clutching the Earth with both hands, rather than travel in space; it's death she fears, and she would not risk it or seek it, not for any noble cause of yours, or for the sake of victory in war, or for the sake of seeking her true love, or for any reason whatsoever. And certainly she would not forsake the Earth, or any comforts in her life, for you!"

  Phaethon stiffened. He said in a level and judicious tone, "You are not without a certain cruelty yourself, miss, when you put your mind to it. It might make our parting easier, if we sting each other with bitter barbs first, mightn't it?"

  She said sullenly, "I only spoke the truth."

  "Of course you did. Lies make ineffectual weapons."

  Daphne's face was uncomposed. She spoke in a shaking voice. "Ineffectual? Then why are you to be sacrificed by Atkins's plan? What is there to his plan besides lies, vile lies, loss, darkness, treason, sacrifice, and lies? You know why you were singled out to be the sacrifice, Phaethon! Not because of any weakness! Not because you were the worst among us! You were chosen for your strengths, your virtues. Your genius, the unrelenting brightness of your dream! You were chosen because you were the best."

  "No. The accident of war chose me, what we call chaos, what our ancestors called fate. I am the only one who can fly the ship. We know the enemy desires the Phoenix Exultant; everything it has done has been bent to capturing me, my armor, and the ship. If I go now to repossess her, the enemy must come, the enemy must reveal itself. Then, whether I survive or not, all truths will be laid bare, and all this darkness and confusion will be undone. I have lived my life as if in a labyrinth; the end, I see, is near. If I die now, I die, at least, at the helm of my great ship, where I would wish. But if I prevail, the labyrinth must fail, and the way to the stars is clear."

  A silence came between them. The horse-beast pawed at the old road, digging up little diamond chips and puffs of black dust.

  She said, "Look me right in the eye, and tell me you don't love me, and I'll go."

  He stared at her. "Miss, I do not love you."

  "Don't give me that rot! I'm coming with you, and that's final!"

  "Daphne, you just said that if I said ..."

  "That doesn't count! I said look me right in the eye! You were staring at my nose!"

  Phaethon was opening his mouth to answer her shout for shout, when he noticed that it was a good nose; a cute nose, indeed, a well-shaped nose. Her eyes, too, were good to look upon, her shining hair, her curving cheeks, lips, chin, graceful neck, slender shoulders, graceful, slender, and fine figure, and, indeed, every part of her.

  "Well," he said at last, "you can come with me as far as Mercury."

  "I'm glad you said so," said Daphne, smiling. "Because Bellipotent's airship is waiting for us beyond the next hill, and I've already booked passage with him for the both of us."

  The way to Mercury was long, and the canister into which Daphne and Phaethon were packed was small. Her coffin required more equipment than did his, because she had no ability to alter her internal cellular configuration for acceleration, nor did she (or anyone in the Golden Oecumene) have a cloak like his, able perfectly to sustain him without external life support. And so the quarters were very cramped and intimate.

  There was, furthermore, nothing to do. Being Silver-Grey, they had vowed to limit their use of personal time-sense alterations, which most people used to make boring tasks fly quickly by. Nor did they have available the extensive array of diversions most travelers enjoyed. Still pariahs, few vendors would have given them anything to entertain or comfort them.

  They spent some time simply talking over old memories, a sort of crude, verbal form of communion. She asked him particularly about the time when he was aboard the Phoenix Exultant, preparing to depart, just before the beginning of the masquerade. Phaethon spoke about his last words with Helion before his death in the solar inferno, about his discovery of Daphne's semisuicide, and his grief-stricken decision at Lakshmi.

  Those conversations paled. Phaethon cobbled together a shared thoughtspace for them, and so they passed the long watches, immobile, entombed, with only their brains active. Their minds ranged far and wide inside dreamscapes Daphne wove for them, for she knew all the secrets of that art, and many of the techniques of false-life sculpting, and story-crafting, which, to her, were trite and worn, to him, were new; and she found pleasure in his delight.

  And yet there was an element of incompleteness in all the dream weavings she wove for them. For when she made them gods, able to dictate new laws of nature and establish new creations, he always would favor and follow the most conservative of themes, making universes very much like the real one, with realistic limitations, so that his universes seemed to her like little more than engineering or terraforming simulations.

  In lifetimes when they were heroes, rather than gods, Phaethon seemed little interested in the careful historical scenarios. His characters were always upsetting the basic order of things, inventing the printing press in Second-Era Rome, the submarine in Third-Era Pacific waters, or instituting gold-standard reforms to the benighted serfs in the mid-Bureaucracy period of the Union d'Europe.

  But Daphne found, to her surprise, that her own tastes were different than she had imagined them to be. The worlds she peopled with magicians and mythic beasts began to seem to her, somehow, trifling, or small, and she began to wonder about the evolutionary origins of things, the logic governing what magicians could and could not do, or the ultimate ends or applications of powers and abilities her mythic creatures possessed.

  More and more of their time, and, eventually, all of it, was spent in the world called Novusordo, and the limits she had imposed on the original construction were those she got from files in Phaethon's armor. It was, at first, like an engineering scenario, which assumed that a single ship, loaded with bio-genetic material, had come to terraform a barren world of methane sea and skies of sulfur ash.

  Together, they concocted tiny seeds and self-replicating robots to tame the winds and poisonous waves of their make-believe world; together they orbited solar tissues to eclipse the sun, or amplify its heat, as needed; they discharged antimatter explosives at pinpoint segments beneath the crustal plates to release trapped carboniferous chemicals, or in the upper atmosphere, to alter the balance of chemicals there, and trigger or suppress a greenhouse effect. Together they raked the seas with compounds, starting simple nanofactories, creating one-celled life. They tilled the soil and brought forth green; they incubated eggs upon the mountainside and watched as curious fledglings hatched; they called up beasts out of the earth and fish out from the sea.

  Years of subjective time went by. And, i
n objective time, many weeks.

  All too soon, it ended. Hand in hand, as they walked in a dream along the silver-white and crystal shapes of the trees they had made, and saw the small white-furred marmosets playing and gamboling in the grass not far away, and, on a ridge beyond, an albino hunting cat roaring at the sunset music issuing from cooling plains of fiberglass. Phaethon pointed at the setting sun, and said, "We could make this world with the Phoenix Exultant, exactly as we've imagined it here. Look at the rainbow colors we get from the particulate matter seeded in the troposphere! See how the ripples and streaks above the atmosphere still catch the light for hours after sunset! I wonder if any real greenhouse blanket we lay out will look so beautiful at that."

  Daphne, who had half-forgotten that this was not real, looked at her partner, her fellow lord of creation, in sadness. "All this must be abandoned, then. What if what we make is not so beautiful as what we dream?"

  Phaethon was troubled. "Perhaps we should stay here. I knew that, when I was awake in the real world, its concerns seemed pressing to me. But here they seem light enough. Stay with me, here, in this little world."

  Daphne said, "You are not as used to long simulation runs as I am, lover. You'll be so ashamed of yourself when you wake up. But we will both have work to do when we come to our right minds again, and this little fantasy will fade. And you won't want to have me with you then."

  He plucked a crystal leaf from one of the pale white trees and put it in her hair. "This seems so pleasant. Why should I want to wake up?"

  She shook the leaf away. "This is the only time I've ever seen you like this; it doesn't seem like you. Perhaps I set the modality register at too high a rate, and you are suffering state-related fugue. Or maybe you really know your chances out there with Nothing Sophotech are not that good. Atkins is not trying to save your life, you know; he's trying to kill the enemy, and he won't let unimportant things get in his way."

  He turned and took her by the shoulders, drawing her face near to his. "Is my life so unimportant then? It seems too precious to me ever to sacrifice, for any man or any cause. Stay here with me, in this false world of ours, which, even if it is false, is, after all, ours. What is out there which I cannot have in here?"

  She licked her lips, and felt the temptation to agree. But then the thought came to her that this was the last and most gentle and horrible trap. Everyone had tried to stop Phaethon: Gannis; Ao Aoen; the Eleemosynary; the College of Hortators; the Nothing Sophotech. Was she going to succeed where the rest of them had failed? Was she going to perform their work for them?

  Yet all it would take was a smile and a nod, and she would have almost everything she desired. She would have Phaethon.

  She would have almost everything. She would have someone who was almost Phaethon.

  Daphne summoned her spirits, resisted temptation, and spoke. "There is one thing you cannot do in here. You cannot perform deeds of renown without peer."

  A strange, stern look overcame his features then, and his smile fled. He stared deeply, deeply into her eyes in the way he could not do when she was in her transport-coffin. The look in his eyes grew more stern and more remote as if he also were resisting a great temptation.

  He raised his hand, made the end-program gesture, and his image vanished.

  She turned up her time so that she could cry and be done with it before she passed out from the dream and back into the real world. She woke in her coffin just in time to hear the proximity alarms ringing through the canister's crude and narrow hull.

  Jarring jolts began to kick the hull. Daphne could see nothing but the fogged surface of her coffin lid a few inches beyond her nose, but she knew the maneuvering jets were firing, aiming the canister toward the mouth of the long line of magnetic deceleration rings maintained near Mercury Equilateral Station.

  The whining bangs of the jets, and then the hissing roar of accumulators turning kinetic energy into stored electric power, prevented speech.

  Daphne wondered if that might not be just as well.

  The silence between them held during the dreary process of disembarkation, while their vessel was dismantled and their bodies were adjusted to the normal station environment. This process was made all the more dreary because the ban of the Hortators was still enforced against (hem, and the minds running the stations (sons or creations of Vafnir) would not speak to them directly, but only through disposable partials, who disintegrated after every speech.

  Dreary again was the fact that they were not being offered the local embodiments and aesthetics for this environment. Without the aesthetic protocols, many of the objects shining from the station walls were meaningless, like tangles of colored string, and many of the sounds were mere hisses and coughs, rather than announcements and alerts. Without the proper bodies, Phaethon had to stay in his armor with his helm closed, and Daphne had to wear an awkward full-body suit Phaethon made. It looked like some piece of ecologic-torture equipment out of the Dark Green Ages, with a faceplate and a symbiotic plant growing all over her like moss. She itched abominably, and knew she looked stupid.

  Phaethon had brought up a legal document of some sort out of her ring, and so (not unlike Alberich in the fairy tales, driving the unwilling dark elves to their tasks in the underworld, tormenting them with a threat of the all-powerful ring) she stepped, ring hand held high, one air lock at a time, up from the outer station into the inner, driving empty androids and surprised semiandroids from her path. Up the stairs and ladders she climbed, from full gravity to half-gravity, opening locks and silencing guards with a queenly scowl and a gesture from the ring.

  But (not unlike Alberich being snared by Loge) eventually they reached Vafnir's seneschal and henchman, a polite young three-headed man named Sigluvafnir, who admitted in bland tones that Phaethon had every right to be here, but that Daphne did not, and could Phaethon please wait while Vafnir constructed suitable accommodations to receive him for an interview? All business would be conducted with dispatch; Phaethon would be thanked for his patience. Sigluvafnir smiled with all three mouths and looked innocent.

  The magic in her ring could not deal with the diabolic cunning of polite agreement. The two of them were standing in a waiting area in an empty hall, alone. Underfoot, a transparent hull gave a view of the grand stars wheeling by, passing from station east to station west, a silent, moving carpet of constellations. The station rotated about once every twenty minutes, and half of a "station day" (if it could be called that) passed by while the two of them pretended studiously to have nothing important to say to each other.

  They both stared down below their feet. Perhaps an uncertain shyness was between them, or, perhaps, it was more interesting to look at the moving lights of tugs and assistance-boats, the glints of solar fields, the flowery shine from the sails of distant antimatter generators, than to look at the barren bulkheads of the wide, upcurving hallway in which they stood.

  It was Daphne who broke the silence. "Once Vafnir has his lien paid off, who else will have any claim over your ship?"

  Phaethon spoke in an absentminded tone. "At that point, only Neoptolemous. Xenophon and Diomedes combined their funds and personalities to create Neoptolemous, who purchased Wheel-of-Life's interest."

  "Don't you own half the ship by now? Gannis's debt was canceled."

  Phaethon said briefly, "The moment I opened my memory casket, the Phoenix Exultant was seized by the Bankruptcy Court. She is actually in receivership, 'owned' by the Curia officers to be used for the benefit of the combination of all my creditors. Gannis dropped out of the combine. Which is good, because he would have gotten the ship dismantled for scrap."

  "Is it too late to get the ship back?"

  "No. If I came up with a huge fortune, I could pay off Neoptolemous. He has a lien, but he does not own the Phoenix Exultant, so he could not refuse to take the money."

  "Oh."

  Silence endured for a while.

  Daphne hated the fact that Phaethon was wearing his helmet. She cou
ld not see his face, and could make no guess as to his expression.

  She pointed at a small cluster of lights in the distance. "There's not much traffic here, is there?"

  "No. Everyone is at some port where they will have long-range communication. The world-minds of Earth and Venus, Demeter and Circumjovia, the Outer and the Inner stations, the Mind-combines of the Cities in Space, of the Nonecliptic Supersails, the constructions who live in the concentrated ray issuing from the North Pole of the Sun, everyone, is going to be linked into the Grand Transcendence. Aurelian has arranged that no one need be isolated during that time, no one need be in space and far away from sufficient mental broadcast facilities. All the traffic is going still. How far away is the Transcendence? Ten days? Less?"

  "Thirteen days. Tomorrow is the Twelfth Night Feast, when we all... when they all dress up as members of another sex or phylum."

  "I'm sorry."

  "That's OK. I wasn't expecting any Twelfth Night gifts anyway." Twelfth Night gifts were only, by custom, meant to be somatic or choreographic packages, such as lords leaping, or ballet choreographs.

  Phaethon knew Daphne preferred the Twelfth Night gifts above the other gifts of the other nights in the Penultimate Fortnight, because the many fine training routines, steeplechases, races, leaps, and cabriolets she had received for her horses last millennium, during Argentorium's reign, were among the finest performances her stock could show.

  "I'm more worried about trespassing laws," she said. "Vafnir probably has to throw me out into space, but probably cannot sell me the services of his accelerator rings. I'll just be drifting on the slow orbit to nowhere, I guess, until and unless you can come back for me. I wonder how long the life support will hold out. The little canister will be lonely without you."

  "Maybe something will happen." He was not going to say aloud that he hoped the Nothing Sophotech would be found and destroyed before the week was up. Once there was no more need for secrecy, Atkins could testify to the Hortators that Phaethon's Inquest had been tampered with, that Phaethon's exile was invalid, and that therefore Daphne's was also.