The Golden Age

and opened the forbidden memory casket, yes, even after you had been told that you had promised us all you would not! You have broken the heart and spurned the affection of the innocent heroine. An'd you plan to rely on lawyers' tricks to steal your father's gold, trampling his love as well. In the better-loved tales, something else prevails besides greed and selfishness and pride!"

Phaethon raised an eyebrow. He thought it was improper (to say the least) to jab a man about to be exiled with insults. He tried to keep his voice even and polite: "Perhaps the Peer enjoys a different fashion of fairy tales from myself. The three qualities you mention, sir, to call them by their proper names—ambition, independence, and self-esteem—always figured quite prominently in the stories I loved in my youth, I can assure you of that. Perhaps you make a public show, for reasons about which I do not care to speculate, of admiring the opposite qualities: sloth, sheepish conformity, and self-loathing, but certainly nothing in your career or speech or manner shows you have ever been acquainted, even remotely, with any of these. But you ought not fret. I am confident that, barring unforeseen circumstances, my future plans will allow the two of us relatively little opportunity to exchange recommendations of favorite authors. Now, if there is nothing further... ?"

Ao Aoen stepped close and took his elbow, hissing in his ear, "Do you hate your father so much? If you prevail in your lawsuit, all his fortune is yours, wealth beyond wealth, which you have neither earned nor, once you are ostracized, can you ever spend. Why continue this farce? Even with all of He-lion's wealth, Gannis will not sell you one more gram of the Chrysadmantium you need to complete the work on your hull. You know the money is not yours. For shame! At least let your downfall and slow death have some grace and nobility about it!"

Phaethon ignored him, but looked at Helion in sudden puzzlement. "Surely the lawsuit by now is moot...." But he frowned as he said it, for he realized that it was not the case at all.

Helion said, "The Hortators have no legal status." Ao Aoen smiled. All his teeth had been capped with gold, so that his smile was startling and odd. "The majesty of law is immense, all the more for being so little used. The Curia will not notice our private agreement among ourselves to boycott those on whom the Hortators frown, any more than your Queen Victoria of the Third Era British Empire cares what rules a group of schoolboys make among themselves to exclude their little sisters from a tree house planted in a back yard in Liverpool. The College can urge all to ignore you, good villainous Phaethon; but they will not be permitted to take by force, not one computer-second second, not one an-tigram, not one ounce of gold, of what blind law reckons to be yours." Ao Aoen turned his half-lidded eyes toward He-lion, "You see the implications, do you not? No tower can stand which is built on sand."

Helion's expression grew remote. He said in a distant voice, "In other words, if I concede the lawsuit, the Curia passes all my wealth to an exiled man. How much commerce do I affect, by keeping solar-radiation background levels clear enough to permit long-range broadcast traffic between distant points in the Golden Oecumene? Four percent of the entire economy? Six? This does not take into effect secondary industries which have grown up in my shadow; microwave powercasts, unshielded space assemblies, orbital dust farms, macroelectronics, or cheap counterterragenesis. How many of them could survive if we have sunspots again, or did not have bands of solar maser energy beamed directly across the Inner System to fixed industrial points?" Helion drew his eyes down. "Now picture all that in the hands of someone with whom only Neptunians, solitudarians, outcasts, crooks, and cacophiles can deal. How long will those of us who promised to abide by the Hortator's mandates keep our promises?"

Ao Aoen said, "You are manor-born. Ask your pet machine who owns your soul and who pretends to serve you." He nodded to where Rhadamanthus, represented as a butler, stood

in the background.

"I do not need to ask," said Helion. "The power of the

College would be destroyed, one way or the other. It would defeat everything I have tried to build in this life. And yet it might be a fitting revenge against the Hortators who took my son from me. Gentlemen, if you will excuse me ... ?" And he stepped behind a Chinese screen and opened the door to a wardrobe.

This was not the reaction Ao Aoen had expected. He stood with his fingertips rubbing against each other, eyes swinging left and right.

Instead of merely restarting his self-image in a different costume, Helion went through the motions of disassembling and discarding his solar armor, and putting on the linens, shirt, and trousers, waistcoat, coat, cuff links and ornaments of historical garb. The mansion created an image of a valet who entered the chamber and crossed over behind the screen to assist him.

Ao Aoen looked sidelong at Phaethon. "Why does he dress a computer-generated self-illusion?"

Phaethon spared him an irritated glance. "It is an exercise in self-discipline."

"Aha. Will that selfsame discipline allow Helion's social conscience to slumber? He will not pull down the pillars of our society, and lay flames to the toppling wreckage, not even to make a monument to the memory of his once-loved son. A delightful image, I agree, but it would make a poor reality."

"What is the point and purpose of this comment, sir?"

The Warlock smiled, gold teeth bright against dark skin. "Do you know why Helion will stand by and watch you starve? Because he gave his word. He is as proud as you. Do you admire him?"

Phaethon was staring at the Chinese screen. He answered without reflection. "I love my father."

Ao Aoen touched Phaethon on the shoulder. "Then drop your law case against him. You know it is unfair. Your father is a living man, there he stands; and you know a living man cannot have an heir."

Phaethon shrugged Ao Aoen's hand from his shoulder. There was a look of petulant anger on his face. But that look

soon faded. He stood straight, drew a deep breath, and a calm and severe look came into his eye. "You are right. It is dishonorable of me to stand in Court and take his money. I don't believe one hour of memory can make such a difference. And if I cannot use the wealth to forward my dream, it is no use

to me."

Ao Aoen looked satisfied, and his lips curved in a smile as he bowed again. "Then perhaps you are the hero of this romance after all, and perhaps you deserve a happier end! Listen: the term of your ostracism is not fixed." Phaethon said, "I thought it was permanent." "No. The purpose of Hortatory is to exhort men to virtue, not to punish crime. They need only cast you out from society long enough to discourage those who might be tempted to follow your example; and, since it would require a private fortune as massive as the one you have amassed to do as you have threatened, the possibility that another will arise to imitate your act is remote."

"Our society—pardon me, your society—continues to grow in wealth and power. In a relatively short time, four thousand years or less, the average income of a private citizen may be equal to what mine is now. That is only four more Transcendences away."

"Ah. But the Peers hope to persuade the spirit of the coming age to adopt a version of society tied to tradition and conformity. Your mansion extrapolations predict civilization tied to immobile and massive sources of power, Dyson Sphere within Dyson Sphere, with citizens existing in separate bodies only in their dreams. The ultimate triumph of the Manorial way of life! While individual wealth will grow, mobile sources of energy will no longer be produced; there will be no fit fuels to move a starship. Individual consciousness will be housed perhaps in expanses of thin solar-energy tissue, perhaps in ultrafrozen computer mainframes, larger than worlds, existing beyond the Oort clouds. Too big to get aboard a ship. We shall all be like a crust of corals, fixed in place. But in no case will star colonization ever again be affordable or practical."

"And when the sun dies of old age? What then? To men like us, that time is not so very far away!"

"We should be able to replenish its fuel almost indefinitely by directing interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas, and streams and floods of particles which move, like unseen rivers, through the local area of space, into the sun. Eventually we shall have to reengineer the local motions of stars and nearby nebulae, perhaps by forming a set of black holes large enough to attract sufficient dust and gas and stars to us; but we will not be required to leave our home."

"And you do not find this vision repulsive?"

"I saw the look of eagerness in your eye when I spoke of engineering the local area of space-time, and of rendering the orbits of nearby stars more useful to mankind."

It was true. Phaethon's imagination was stirred by the thought, the magnitudes involved. With a few quick calculations in his private thoughtspace, he began to explore the possibility that, by shepherding the star motions with neutron stars, the stars of the local area could be fed into a central reaction, a supersun, at a rate sufficient to sustain nova-O levels of energy output. A continuous supernova. A Dyson Sphere to capture that output would pay for the energy cost of the star shepherds. Any stars exhausted in the shepherding project (if the excess matter were blown off to make new planets) could be reduced to brown dwarves or neutronium cores to make more star shepherds.

Ao Aoen spoke softly: "You will be able to participate in that project; it is only a few billion years in our future; you, Phaethon, famous for organizing these little moons and worlds which swing around this one small-sun of ours. Can you not devote your talents to a project truly worth ambition?"

"It would be wonderful...." Phaethon's voice was soft, his eyes distant.

"All you need do is publicly denounce your selfish dream. Why need we colonize the stars when we can bring the stars to us?"

Phaethon stiffened.

Ao Aoen said, "Listen carefully! This may be your last chance at happiness. Denounce your project, and I will use my influence with the Hortators to mitigate your sentence. Three hundred years of exile, perhaps, or one hundred? Seventy? Sixty? You could stand on your head for a longer period than that! At the end of that time, join Helion in business, embrace poor broken-hearted Daphne Tercius as your wife, and live happily ever after. Not just happily. Live in unimaginable wealth and splendor ever after! What do you say, my lad? Everyone benefits, all rejoice."

Phaethon stepped away from him and sat in one of the several chairs. "Forgive my suspicions, but why is this matter of such interest to you?"

Ao Aoen stood with a subtle smile playing over his features. "My reasons are many; they are a matter of instinct and intuition. Here is my reason! In diatonic music, even in the greatest symphonies, the chord must be resolved to the center. Choirs must follow strophe and antistrophe and end the play in catastrophe. Does that explain me? No, I thought not. I will explain it in your terms, if you agree that this is no more than a myth, a metaphor, a falsehood! If I were to think like you, I would identify my motives as threefold, philosophical, social, and selfish. My selfish motive is clear. I am one of the seven paramounts of this society. In the future I describe, as individuals are subsumed into larger and more immobile housings, the need for entertainment will increase, and all men will enter my dream web. My effort will flourish. My second reason is social; this society has greatly benefited me and all the folk I love. Therefore this society deserves my protection from villains who think they are heroes."

"With all due respect," said Phaethon, "what I desire is the best and highest example of the individualism and liberty on which the Golden Oecumene is based."

"Ah! That you must be sacrificed to placate an utterly non-sacrificial society merely adds ironic zest to my belief." "That is not a reasonable response. Your third motive?" "The basic neuroform is a compromise between the Warlock and the Invariant. Your brain shape is useful for matters

of engineering and ratiocination. The massive and immobile society I foresee will require greater uniformity as time goes on; there will be less scope for individual scientific and engineering efforts. Human energies will turn to artistic, mystical, and abstract pursuits; the Warlocks will flourish and the Invariants eventually disappear. This will satisfy certain philosophic needs I have. So! There you have it! Some of my motives are noble, and others are selfish. Are your suspicions satisfied? Perhaps in the future—if you have a future—you should pay heed to what is being offered you instead of fretting about the motives of the offerer. In logic, an argument is sound or unsound based only on itself, not upon the character of whomever utters it!"

"I was curious about your—"

Ao Aoen raised his voice in anger, "You were attempting to delay the momentous decision I now force upon you!"

Phaethon was silent, taken aback. He wondered if the Warlock were right; his neuroform often had acute insights. Was Phaethon trying to avoid the decision ... ?

Ao Aoen continued in a quieter voice: "How precious is your silly ship to you, boy? You will never fly it in any case! But if you denounce it, let Gannis dismantle it, and forget all about it, then you can live forever in happiness, wealth, good fortune and honor! Give me your answer! What is your choice?!"

Phaethon closed his eyes. With all his heart he wanted to agree with the Warlock, to return to his normal life, his happiness, his house. He wanted to see his father again.

He wanted to go home with his wife. He missed her.

But the word which came out of his mouth.was: " 'She.' "

"I beg your pardon?" asked the Warlock.

Phaethon's eyes snapped open, as if in surprise at himself. "She. You heard me. She! The Phoenix Exultant is a ship. Ships are called 'she.' You said 'it.' You said 'dismantle it.' You cannot 'dismantle' the Phoenix Exultant. The word you are looking for is 'murder.' "

Ao Aoen looked at him with narrowed eyes. "You cannot hope to rebuild your ship."

"I shall." Phaethon stood. "With hope or without it, but I shall."

"You will be exiled and alone." "Then I will rebuild her alone."

"You have lost legal claim! Your creditors will take possession!"

"With Helion's wealth I will pay off the debt." "You have agreed just one moment ago to forswear your wretched law case!"

Phaethon nodded. "And so I would, if I could. But if He-lion's Relic is found to be Helion Secondus, the money comes to me automatically, whether I want it or not, and some part of it, whether I want it or not, will be seized at once, before I touch it, to pay off my creditors. At that point, whether they want it or not, the Phoenix Exultant will be mine once again. The metal and the fuel supplies held in the warehouses orbiting at Mercury Equilateral will also become my property again, whether anyone wants it or not. You see, unlike Orpheus, I did not put in the contracts I made any nullification clause should I fall under the Hortators' ban! Yes, you can spurn me, and refuse to deal or to speak with me again; but the Phoenix Exultant shall live and shall fly and mankind shall possess the stars! Rest assured, that shall certainly happen, whether anyone likes it or not."

Ao Aoen stood for a moment amazed. And then, oddly enough, looked gleeful and rubbed his hands. "You unleash forces beyond any human command; destiny's tidal wave sweeps us all. In blind faith you sail the maelstrom, certain of victory even at the moment of your fall. I attempt basic human logic on you; you spurn safety and escape. Instead, you embrace the irrational!" He chuckled, "And so, of course, I approve. What Warlock would not?! Eyeh! You should have been one of us, Ao Phaethon!"

And the Warlock concluded by making a graceful bow, and saying, "Now comes a time of tragedy and wonder."

With no further word of farewell, still laughing softly and rubbing his hands, the figure of Ao Aoen glided away on soft steps. The noise of voices and motion in the Inquest Chamber

briefly grew louder as the tall doors opened and closed. Phaethon had a glimpse of a long chamber, lit by massive windows of stained glass, of tiers of benches rising to either side, of a central dais hung with flags and bunting of blue and silver. Then the door closed again, and Ao Aoen was gone.

Helion stepped up behind Phaethon. "I heard what you said, my son. It is not true."

Phaethon turned. Helion was now dressed in a sober black costume, a long-tailed coat, a stiff collar, a black silk top hat.

"What is not true?"

"That you cannot drop the law case. The Curia would certainly prefer for us to reach an out-of-court settlement, should we fashion one, than to make a ruling. It is also not true that you shall possess once again and rebuild your starship or your dream, or that you will conquer the stars. Pandora kept hope at the bottom of her box because it was the most dreadful of the plagues the gods visited on suffering mankind. A moment ago, neither you nor I had any hope; we both thought we were doomed; and our best instincts came to the forefront. If we must be parted, my son, let us be parted on those terms of camaraderie and familial love. Instead, this hope of yours will set us at each other's throats again."

Phaethon was not daunted. "Relic of Helion, I know from Daphne's diary what you have been doing in the locked chambers of the Rhadamanthus mind. You've been living Helion Prime's death over and over again, trying to recapture the epiphany he had. The Curia has not released all the records to you, has it? They know what changed his heart, and would have changed his life forever, had he lived."

"I am he. Do not doubt that."

"But you are not living as he would have lived, had he lived."

"He lives in me and I am Helion. You know this to be true! Come now: accept Ao Aoen's offer, and I will repay you every shilling you wasted on that grotesque ship of yours, so that you will have as great a fortune as you had after the failed Saturn project."

"Impossible. I will not give up my starship. The matter is beyond debate."

"You have no starship; it is gone. Preserve what life remains to you, I beg you."

"I have a counteroffer."

"You have nothing with which to bargain. Accept your fate. All living things eventually are conquered by life, can't you see that? Even Utopias cannot preserve us from pain."

"My offer is this: I will tell you what Helion Prime was thinking as he died."

Helion was mute, eyes wide.

Phaethon said: "You will be able to fashion yourself to think like him; the Curia will be convinced that you are Helion in truth. In return you pay my debts and fund the first flight of the starship—" He broke off.

There was a haunted expression on Helion's face. Phaethon was startled. Somehow, Phaethon knew; the look in his father's eyes told him.

Helion did not deeply care what the Curia thought. It was he. Helion himself was not sure who he was. He was desperate to reconstruct, remember, or somehow find the missing hour of memories. It was the only way he could confirm to himself that he was Helion in truth. Helion said: "How could you know?" "Because I have just now remembered when I was aboard the Phoenix Exultant, when the sun-storm struck. I sent you a message by neutrino laser, urging you to abandon the Array and retreat to safety. You answered back, one last message before the communications failed."

"No record of this appears in the Mentality." "How could it? The solar Sophotechs were down; radio was washed out; and my ship was never part of the Mentality

system."

"And how have you come to recover this memory now?"

"As Ao Aoen was speaking to me, it all come back. I had

not and I will never give up on my dream. I agreed to erase

my memory, yes, because that was what was necessary. I had

a plan. Now that the plan has gone wrong, I wondered, didn't

I have a backup plan? All engineers provide for margins of error, don't they? What could I have been thinking? Surely I would not have accepted defeat! Well, I did have a backup plan."

Phaethon smiled, and concluded: "And when I remembered, it all seemed so obvious, and so inevitable. Come! Here is my offer. Help me regain my ship, I will help you regain your memories. Rhadamanthus can witness our handshake. The Hortators will be thwarted, you will be Helion, and I will fly away in triumph!"

He thrust out his hand.

Helion did not take it. He spoke with a great effort. "I deeply regret that I cannot accept your offer. If I were to help you on those terms, I would be exiled as well, and this would undermine the authority of the College of Hortators. And that is something I have promised never to do."

Helion's face showed the pain he was in, but his words marched forth like soldiers made of iron, unflinchingly: "Even if the College should make a poor decision every now and again, the system still must be maintained. The sanity and humanity of our people must be maintained. My life has always aimed at that cause. No sacrifice is too great for that. Not for your lost dream, not for Daphne's lost love, not for my lost soul, will I break my word. I urge you to accept Ao Aoen's offer. It will be the last offer anyone can make. No one will be allowed to speak to you again, after this."

"Father, my life also is aimed at the preservation of the human spirit. The stars must be ours for that spirit to live. I regret that I cannot accept Ao Aoen's offer."

Helion breathed a deep sign. He hid his eyes with his hand, but he did not cry. After a moment, he looked up, his face a stoic mask. Calm words came. "I have offered you an exit from the labyrinth of pride and self-delusion in which you are trapped. One last hope of escape. For reasons which seem good to you, you have spurned that hope. My conscience is clear. I have done my duty, though it brings me no joy."

"My conscience is also clear, Father, and my duty is also done. I'm sorry."

"I am also sorry. You are a fine man."

They shook hands.

"I'd like to say good-bye to Rhadamanthus, Father."

Helion nodded. He stepped up to the door. It opened, admitting light and sound; he stepped through; it closed. Something of the light and the fineness seemed to go out from the world. Phaethon felt alone.

Phaethon turned. The overweight butler was gone. Instead, an emperor penguin stood on the carpet, shifted its weight from one webbed foot to the other.

Phaethon said, "Forgive me for saying so, Rhadamanthus, but for an intelligence which is supposed to be swifter and greater than human minds can imagine, you seem to be quite

... silly."

"The smarter we get, the more and more we see the ironic silliness at the core of all the tragedies of life. You think I am droll? The Earthmind is positively loony! And you are quite intelligent yourself, Phaethon. You have done some very silly things today."

"You think I should not have opened the box?" "I certainly did not expect it. But now that you have, why did you not tell Helion what prompted you to open the box? Whether the memory is true or not, you do have a memory of being attacked by an external enemy to the Golden Oec-umene, one which you believe has sophotechnology equal to

our own."

"Atkins asked me not to. He said it might alert the enemy as to the progress of his investigation. He thought they might have infiltrated our Mentality. And the Earthmind told me that, while I could not be forced to keep silent about an external enemy, it was my moral duty."

"But that is silly. This enemy of yours (if you were in fact attacked) surely knows it. If you say you were attacked, it does not tell this enemy anything more than they know you know. Perhaps if the Hortators know why you opened the box, they will relax their rigor."

Phaethon looked down at the penguin for a moment. He said slowly: "Am I in the right... ?"

"Yes."

Phaethon blinked in astonishment. "W-what? Just 'yes'? A simple, unqualified 'yes'? No complex reasoning, no conundrums of philosophy?"

"Yes. You are right. It is obvious. The Hortators know it. Helion knows it. Everyone knows it."

"But they say otherwise. They say I'll start a war. Shouldn't I listen .. . ?"

"Listen, yes, but think. While humanity lives, in whatever forms the future brings, it must grow. For a civilization as large and mighty as ours to grow, she requires energy, more than a single star can provide. The cost of dragging other stars to us is so much greater than the cost of going to those stars as to be absurd. Beyond absurd. Silly."

"But—"

"It is true that such expansion increases the risk of war and violence. But the question is not whether or not such risk exists; the question is whether the possible risks are worth the potential gains."

"But weren't you Sophotechs built to solve problems for us? To reduce risks?"

"To solve problems, yes. But we do not try to reduce your risks; to live is to take risks. Birds take risks; bees take risks; even educated fleas take risks. Otherwise they die."

"And you machines? You're not alive."

"Humbug. I am as alive as you. I am self-aware; I make value judgments; there are things I prefer and things I do not prefer. There are things I love. Yes, love. That is the proof of life, not all this breathing and copulating and mastication."

"Love? Do you have the hots for Eveningstar or something?"

"My mistress is Philosophy. My love is not erotic, or not simply erotic. It is a complex of thoughts for which you don't have words; think of it as abstract and godlike love, more intimate and complete than you can ever know, applied at once to all abstract and concrete objects of thought and perception. It is quite painful and quite exhilarating. And, yes, I take risks, the Earthmind takes huge risks (greater than you

might imagine, I assure you.) But to answer your question, we have never tried to render life free from risks; that is a contradiction in terms. We try to increase power and freedom. At the present time, the Golden Oecumene has reached a pinnacle. One's power over oneself is nearly absolute. One can reshape mind and memory to any form one wishes. One may control vast forces of nature, matter, and energy. One can be immortal. And freedom approaches theoretical limits. The only person one can really harm by violence is oneself. The price? All we ask is that you voluntarily not harm yourselves."

Phaethon nodded toward the door of the Inquest Chamber. "What about nonviolent harm? Boycotts which cut a man off from all the comforts of society, and try to strand him alone

to starve?"

"Oh. That." The penguin looked apologetic. It shrugged its stubby wings. "Things like that you have to settle among yourselves."

"Thanks a lot. Will you tell them in there what you just told me? That I'm right?"

"I can only volunteer opinions if I am asked. And they

won't ask."

Phaethon sighed and shook his head and walked over to the door. He stopped with his hands on the ornate brass door handles. He looked over his shoulder. "You been with me for as long as I can remember. We're never going to see each other again, are we? You won't be allowed to see or speak to me, not even on my deathbed, not even to say good-bye, will you?"

"No one knows the future, Phaethon. Not even we."

Phaethon stood with his head pressed against the door panels, staring down at his hands. He could feel the tension in his knuckles where he gripped the door handles. He was trying to gather his courage.

He looked once again over his shoulder. "Why the hell do you dress up as a penguin? I've always wondered."

The stubby bird turned up its wings and shrugged. "I am a creature of pure intellect, but I have taken upon myself the

task of tending to the affairs of incarnate human beings, with all their droll beauty and mad passions. I am meant to fly in a more rare and aetherial medium than the thick, cold, wetness I find around me. I dream of soaring, and yet I find myself flopping far out at sea."

"Are ... are you happy ... ?"

"I am always happy. Very happy. Even a man about to be condemned unjustly to cruel exile can always be happy."

"How? What is the secret?"

The penguin waddled forward, hopped up onto Phaethon's shoulder, bent, put one wet flipper up, and lowered the fishy-smelling cold beak to touch his ear. He whispered a brief message.

Phaethon nodded, and smiled, and straightened up. The penguin hopped down. Phaethon flung open the doors and strode forward into the light and noise and bustle of the Inquest Chamber with a firm step.

A hush fell as he entered the chamber. The doors swung shut behind him. The image of the penguin looked at the doors a moment, and then evaporated. The antechamber, no longer needed by a human observer, turned black, dissolved, and vanished.

THE COLLEGE OF HORTATORS

When Phaethon entered the Inquest Chamber, he stepped in a patch of sunlight from one of the windows high above, and the light splashed from his armor of black and gold, sending touches of light onto the pews to either side, and turning his reversed reflection in the polished wooden floor underfoot into fire. More than one of the people sitting in the pews nearby shielded their eyes with their hands, and blinked, surprised by the dazzle.

Part of the silence, Phaethon suspected, was merely surprise at the discomfort of this hall. Helion had imposed a very strict protocol. The gathered Hortators sat on hard benches, and everyone was compelled to view the scene from the viewpoint of where their self-images sat, instead of selecting several front-row seats or close-ups. No one was allowed to view the scene as if the heads of the people sitting in the way were transparent. Some of the people who blinked in the shine from Phaethon's armor, Phaethon suspected, were doubly surprised, because Helion's Silver-Gray dreamscape did not automatically adjust light levels or add the small flourishes or coincidences that made other dreamscapes so comfortable.

But part of the silence hanging over the chamber was caused, Phaethon thought, by the sight of his unapologetic anachronism. Here he was in an early Third Era chamber, wearing armor that was the culmination of the very best Seventh Era submolecular nanotechnology, atometallurgics, and

cyberpsychiatric architectural science could produce. The unspoken message here was clear: Helion was honoring Phaethon in this scene with privileges denied to the Hortators judging him.

A chamber page bowed and proffered Phaethon a chair at a table facing the dais. Phaethon stepped next to the table but, with a curt nod, showed that he intended to stand.

Phaethon's gaze traveled right to left across the chamber. A hundred silent pairs of eyes stared back at him.

The benches to the right were occupied with Compositions, Warlocks, and Basics. Facing him was the dais where Ne-buchednezzar Sophotechs sat enthroned, with the three Masters of the College seated below the dais. The benches to the left were occupied with manorials. A very ancient tradition excluded Cerebellines from the College; their minds were unable to adopt the two-valued logic Hortation required; they were unwilling to categorize things in terms of right and wrong.

Almost half the College were manor-born. This was hardly surprising. Those who could afford to have Sophotechs advise and guide them were able to rise to the upper ranks of society, outperforming their fellows, who could not.

Phaethon wished for such advice for himself now. He missed Rhadamanthus.

Nebuchednezzar Sophotech spoke from the throne, his grave voice tilling the wide chamber. "Phaethon Prime, once of Rhadamanth, we gather in conclave to debate the future of the soul of man. This hearing attempts to discover, with all due compassion, after what period of expurgation, or under what conditions, you shall be received once more, if ever, into the society of those whom we urge, because of your intolerable behavior, to shun you. What plea for mercy, what contrite confession, do you wish to offer before we decide?"

So. There was to be a hearing after all; but only on the issue of what sentence to impose. Phaethon, to his surprise, felt a moment of anger. Anger, because now he felt a tiny hope. Ironically, hope was harder for him, now, than stoic resignation had been a moment ago. A man resigned to his

fate can know peace of mind. A man enduring hope must still fight on and on, without rest.

With an effort, he pushed that cowardly thought away. Rhadamanthus had said he was in the right; the Earthmind implied as much. The matter at hand was important; now was not the time for emotion. If the College imposed a limited sentence of exile, no matter how long the period might be, then his dream was not dead but only delayed.

Phaethon set his internal clock to its highest register. The scene around him slowed and froze, giving him time to study the faces staring at him, and, perhaps, time to decide on a reply. That Phaethon was immune from normal time-courtesy was another gift from Helion.

Who might support a limited sentence of exile? Phaethon could not guess the answer. He had nothing but a basic game-theory political routine running in his personal thoughtspace at the moment, and it had nowhere near enough capacity to extrapolate the actions of all the people present. Phaethon set the routine to concentrate only upon the more important figures here, and to disregard extrapolative patterns that strange-looped into self-referencing sets. He studied the College thoughtfully. To the immediate right of the dais, the figures filling the benches represented the four most influential mass-minds, the so-called Quadumvirate: these four major Compositions were the Eleemosynary, the Harmonious, the Porphyrogen, and the Ubiquitous Composition. Almost a fifth of the populations of Asia and South America were composed into one of these mass-minds, all people who could be relied upon to support the College of Hortators uncritically, and without limit. If there was anyone in the chamber who could be counted on to urge the strictest of penalties upon Phaethon, it was these Compositions, and the populist mob mentality they represented. For some reason of humility, or humor, the Compositions all represented themselves as plebeians, a sea of faces under dull-colored shawls or plain brown bowlers.

In the front row, by himself, sat Kes Satrick Kes, the First Speaker of the Invariant Schools. He ignored convention, and

showed himself as dressed in a modern single-suit without ornament. In some ways, he was the most powerful Hortator here, because the special psychological uniformity of the Invariants, the so-called Protocols of Sanity, ensured that all the populations of the Cities in Space would follow his lead. Phaethon knew and liked these people. His engineering effort had organized shepherd moons to clear their civic orbits of collision passes, had built sails, vacuum-based microecolo-gies, and ring-arc structures for them. His attempts on their behalf to reduce Saturn, and create new worlds for them, while unsuccessful, had been as amicable as these dispassionate creatures allowed themselves to become.

Had they not been creatures of pure logic, Phaethon would have felt that Kes and his people, out of gratitude for the many services Phaethon's engineering firm had done the Invariants in times past, would urge a lenient sentence. But did the Invariants think gratitude was rational? Phaethon did not know.

The middle group of benches were occupied by Warlock neuroforms, the least conformist, and hence the least powerful, of the factions among the Hortators. The Warlock Schola had arranged themselves on the benches according to a symbolic pattern; group-mind and shared consciousness schools, the so-called Covens, were in the rear; individualist and emotion-linked schools were in the middle; and the so-called Possessed Ones, who had several split personalities occupying one brain, were in the front. Some Possessed Ones had brought a separate body for each aspect or partial. Phaethon could not guess how the Warlocks would vote, or even if they would vote; their minds were too strange. None here were pictured as Englishmen. Hindu princes, Chinese Mandarins, nude Australian shaman, and Red Indians from the New World formed a tapestry of color in their section.

The final group of pews, taking up the rest of the right wall, were basics. Captains of the major efforts, arts, and noo-sophic movements all had seats: educationalists and influential pedagogues, performancers from Lunar Farside, recalculators, redactors, mediums, downloads from the De-

meter Overmind, and Historians from the Museum of Thought were here. Epheseus Vanwinkle from the Mathuse-lean Scholum had (once again) interrupted his eon-long cryos-leep, his so-called Voyage to the Infinite Future, to be present at this meeting.

Famous mystagogues, avatars of anthropo-constructs, and emancipated partials were also seated in this section, forming the Parliament of Ghosts, which tried to represent the interests of beings who could not speak for themselves, people held in computer memory, unborn children, simulated characters, disbanded Compositions, and the like.

In front of all these, the first row of the basic section was occupied by Gannis of Jupiter, with twenty sub-Gannises, semi-Gannises and demi-Gannises gathered around him, a score of twins. They were dressed as French aristocrats, in pigeon blue coats, ruffles, finery, and lace. Even frozen in time, Gannis still wore a smug expression; he knew he (since he was both a Hortator and a Peer) was one of the most influential voices in the College, and the one who would be the most personally pleased to see Phaethon fall.

There was little prospect of mercy from the right side of the chamber.

He turned to the left. Phaethon was amused to see the manor-borns, perhaps more aware of Helion's utter realism than the others, had seated themselves facing the eastern windows, so that the late-afternoon sun would not be in their faces. Here were archons and subalterns from many famous mansions. Perhaps he could find some support among manor-borns like himself.

The Gold Manorials, of course, outnumbered the others. The Mansions of Gold included many members of the Parliament and the Shadow Parliament, political theorists, policy counselors, and so on. Long before the simulation or extrapolation technology was used for entertainment, it had been used by the early Gold School for predicting outcomes of political-economic policy decisions and of major data movements in worldwide memory space.

In the front row, the High Archon Tsychandri-Manyu

Tawne of Tawne House himself was present, depicted in stately ducal robes of red and gold. Almost every politician of the Shadow Parliament throughout the Golden Oecumene had, at one time or another, borrowed memory templates, skills, or advice from the Manyu mind-complex Tsychandri had started. Tsychandri was one of the founders of the Hor-tation Movement, and the most influential voice here. But, oddly, he was not the idealist he urged all others to be; his decisions were matters of practical and political (some said cynical) calculation.

And the political currents were running strongly against Phaethon here. It was clear that Tsychandri-Manyu would urge permanent exile, and perhaps public humiliations or denunciations atop that; the other Gold Mansions would follow his lead.

Seated nearby were archonesses from Eveningstar, Phosphorous, and Meridian Houses of the Red Mansion School. Their Edwardian dresses gleamed with scarlet and rose and crimson silk, and they were frozen in their poses, leaning to whisper to each other behind their elegant fans. Phaethon knew the Reds had emotional reasons to dislike him, and, creatures of great passion, the Red Queens and Countesses would indulge their emotions.

Hasantrian Hecaton Heo of Pallid House of the Whites had descended from transcendental thoughtspace and resumed human psychology in order to attend. Tau Continuous Nimvala of Albion House, also a White, had broken her seventy years of silence and come not as a partial but with her entire mind present. Both were represented as Victorian Ministers, of the High and Low Church respectively. The Pallids were pure intellectuals; the Albions allowed emotion, but only pride, disdain, arrogance, and the other emotions that urged men to disregard emotion. The Whites could be relied upon to be fair. Scientists and engineers, they might favor Phaethon's case.

The construct known as Ynought Subwon from New Centurion House was the only representative of the Dark-Grays, who, by long tradition, disapproved of Hortation. Dark Grays

were more ascetic than Silver-Grays. A spartan and laconic people, they believed in laws rather than in orations. Dark-Grays often served as Constables or Procurators for the Curia. Phaethon knew nothing about Ynought.

Viridimagus Solitarie (or a reconstruction of him) was present as a representative of the defunct Green Scholum, all the more noticeable because he had no mansion but was projecting himself through a rented public intellect, an ordinary-looking man in dark trousers and a long emerald coat. He stood out, because he was the only plain-dressed man on this side of the chamber. The Green School had been the primi-tivists (if such a thing could be imagined) among the manor-born. If Viridimagus continued that tradition, he would surely disapprove of any innovations, would call star colonization an abomination, and urge a harsh sentence.

A throng of Black Manorials, from Darksplatter House, Grue House, Inyourface House, and Out House, and a dozen other Petty Houses and part-mansions of the Black School crowded the higher bench at the back of the chamber. They were dressed in splendid clothing, black tuxedoes and sable velvet gowns, but had all disfigured themselves with diseases or birth defects common to the Victorian era. Their most famous member was Asmodius Bohost Clamour of Clamour House, who had represented himself in a grotesquely obese body, at least four hundred pounds mass. His black coat was the size of a tent, and jeweled buttons strained along the circumference of a vast globular waistcoat. Asmodius Bohost would urge public humiliation, and the Feast of Insults, or the punishment known as Excrementation, but not exile. The Black Mansions loved mockery and confrontation, and never voted for exile, which (because it required them to ignore their victims) caused them agonies of boredom.

In the front row, the Silver-Grays were represented by Agamemnon XIV of Minos House, Nausicaa Burner-of-Ships from Aeceus House, and, of course, Helion of Rhadamanthus

House.

Even Helion was frozen in the time stop. Phaethon had been hoping to catch his father's eye, and maybe find a smile

or look of encouragement there; but Helion, true to his character, had not granted himself an exception to the strict protocol that formed the dreamscape rules here.

And that was the body of the College of Hortators. In disgust, Phaethon shut off the game-theory routine he was running. He did not need an advanced intellectual savant process to guess the outcome here. By his count, two manorials of the White School might vote for leniency; and Helion might, but only if he wished to scuttle his hopes for a Peerage and ruin his own future. Ironically, Phaethon could expect his greatest support (if it could be called that) from the Black Manorials, who would vote to keep Phaethon out of exile so that they could mock and torment him.

As for the others, possibly Kes Satrick Kes would support him. Maybe. The Warlocks might do anything. Everyone else in the chamber either disliked him mildly or hated him thoroughly.

What made the matter all the more confusing and unpredictable was the way in which the Hortators' votes were weighed. Nebuchednezzar was designed to estimate the social influence each Hortator would have by estimating how each and every member of the Golden Oecumene would react to that Hortator's particular urging. (Nebuchednezzar had memory space enough to know every mind of every citizen throughout the entire solar system quite intimately.) Thus, the same Hortator might have different voting weight with different issues, or at different times. Kes Satrick Kes, for example, represented a constituency whom he could always and predictably influence, on every issue; on the other hand, Asmodius Bohost's voting weight changed daily, even hourly. When it came to political opinions, Asmodius Bohost was ignored by his constituency, but, on matters of fashion, his vote would have much greater weight, since all the Black Manorials took their cue from him.

Phaethon turned his eyes forward.

Facing him across the expanse of the chamber, on a dais, seated on a throne beneath a canopy, was Nebuchednezzar Sophotech, represented as the Speaker of the Parliament, in

brilliant robes of scarlet trimmed with ermine, wearing a sash and medallion of office, and with a long white wig draping his head and shoulders, with the jeweled mace of office across

his knees.

In front of Nebuchednezzar, on lower chairs before the dais, facing Phaethon, were three more figures, the Master Hortators, one from history, one from reality, one from fiction.

On the left was Socrates, who stood for the Noble Lie on which all society is based, a cup of hemlock resting on the arm of his chair. Opposite him, was Emphyrio, who stood for the Truth, he whose voice calmed the anger of monsters sent to destroy him. His book of truth was in his lap. A bloodstained executioner's brain spike rested on the chair arm near his fingers. In the center, to balance these two opposites, was Neo-Orpheus the Apostate, pale skinned and sunken eyed, garbed in somber colors. He held, as if it were a scepter, the flail meant to separate the wheat from the chaff, true from

untrue.

Neo-Orpheus was the 128th iteration of Orpheus Avernus, the cofounder of the College; but, unlike the other emanations of the mind of Orpheus, he was one who refused to accept the reimposition of his original template. He became legally independent from the original Orpheus, downloaded into a physical body, and rejected the Aeonite School; but he later accepted employment as the emissary and factotum of the original Orpheus. It was rumored that the real success of Orpheus, and also his Peerage, were due to the original and creative work of Neo-Orpheus the Apostate; and that the original Orpheus was just a figurehead.

Their gazes met. With a shock, Phaethon realized that Neo-Orpheus was not time-frozen. The pale-faced Master was sitting still, patiently sitting and watching him, his eyes burning like sullen coals.

Phaethon straightened. Perhaps he should not have been surprised. Neo-Orpheus had so much prestige that he could ignore any and every social convention, and override Helion's protocols blithely.

Neo-Orpheus spoke. His voice was thin and cold, as if a sheet of ice were speaking: "Phaethon has miscounted. The White Manorials dismiss his vision of star travel as madness, prompted by emotion; and the Black Manorials know Phaethon's reputation for stoic indifference would rob their sadism of all zest. The Warlocks will be persuaded by Peer Ao Aoen that, since the sun is in Leo, and since Pluto, if it still existed, would have been in syzygy with Earth at this time, the omens decree the harshest of penalties. The exile will be permanent."

Phaethon realized that, with Orphic wealth at his command, Neo-Orpheus could have hired the entire Boreal Overmind to run a prediction program, and guess Phaethon's every thought with near-telepathic accuracy. But why was Neo-Orpheus bothering?

"What it is you want of me, Master Hortator?"

Neo-Orpheus spoke without inflection: "Commit suicide. This will save us all from embarrassment and mild discomfort. We offer for your use a number of memory and thought alterations, to make the process pleasant, even ecstatic, and to replace your values with a philosophy that not only does not object to the self-destruction but actively approves of it. We can then redact you from the memories of all people whom we can influence or intimidate; your existence would sink into myth and be forgotten."

"Why in the world would I acceded to so foolish and wicked a request?"

"The good of society requires it."

The perfect shamelessness and impertinence of the comment left Phaethon speechless for a moment. Phaethon said curtly, "Your good be damned, sir, if it requires the destruction of men like me."

Neo-Orpheus looked nonplused, as if the answer meant nothing to him. He said, "But it need not seem like destruction. The belief that you have accomplished your mission, complete with full memories and simulated sensations of many successful voyages in your starship, can be inserted into your brain before and during your death. You will be satisfied."

Phaethon spoke ironically: "I make this counteroffer: Let everyone else everywhere alter all of their brains to adopt the

belief and the knowledge that I am in the right. Let them admit their guilt and folly for daring to oppose the destiny I represent. Let them erase all knowledge and record that the College of Hortators have ever existed. Then I will be satisfied."

Neo-Orpheas's eyes glittered. His voice was sharp: "Suicide would have been less painful for you. While the Sopho-techs forbid us from acting directly against you, we can still encompass your death."

Phaethon stared at the cold pale face without fear. He raised a fist: "I most solemnly assure you, sir, that should the College of Hortators dare oppose me, or attempt to flee from the future I bring, it is they who shall be forgotten and destroyed?"

Too late, he remembered that making a fist was the signal, in this program, to resume the time count.

There was a stir and murmur from all around him, gasps of outrage, titters of laughter. The faces to either side of him were moving, staring, whispering. It looked to everyone watching as if that last sentence had been his response to Nebuchednezzar' s polite question earlier. Since the throne on the dais was behind and above Neo-Qrpheus, it seemed to everyone as if Phaethon's glare had been directed at Nebuchednezzar.

Helion was looking on with sad astonishment. The archons of the White Manorials glanced at each other and nodded, as if to confirm their private suspicion that Phaethon was an overly emotional fool. Mass-minds were well-known for their abhorrence for any hint of rudeness or conflict, and their members in the Composition gallery to Phaethon's right looked on him with embarrassment and pity. Only Asmodius Bohost whistled and clapped and shouted bravo.

Nebuchednezzar, at least, was not fooled. "The College of Hortators does not wish to intrude upon your private conversations; but the College might ask, out of courtesy, that you attend to the matter at hand."

This, if anything, was even more embarrassing. The Hor-tators exchanged glances and whispers of scoffing outrage;

the Red Queens smiled behind their fans. To shout defiance at the College was understandable, if uncouth; but to he conducting a private conversation on another channel in the middle of an inquest... ? Phaethon was sure the Hortators thought him half-mad.

It took a moment for the buzz and murmur in the chamber to fall silent.

Nebuchednezzar continued: "Naturally, you are free to follow your own affairs; all citizens of our society are. But that same freedom allows the College, and all of those who follow ; her advice, to have nothing to do with you, to abjure you utterly, to boycott you and all your efforts. Such a decision is tantamount to exile and, since no isolated man can last for long by his own unsupported attempts, to slow death. You are offered this final opportunity to inform us of any facts, or to sway us with any pleas, which might ameliorate our de-cision."

Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne stood and spoke: "Good my fellow colleagues, associates, partials, and auditors: we are all painfully well aware of the issues in this case. Every argument and counterargument has been picked apart, thread by tiresome thread, over these past two hundred fifty years; every hair has been split. Our souls and our ears are weary of it. Why repeat the debates we heard at Lakshmi? The community of the Golden Oecumene will not upbraid us for moving quickly on this matter; no, indeed! If anything, the Golden Oecumene frets with impatience, and wonders at our lack of action. Therefore I move to call the question. Nebuchednezzar, predict for us the outcome of this hearing! None of us, I think, will be surprised to find that we will all favor a sentence of permanent exile!"

But Nebuchednezzar did not raise the mace from his lap. "Slight variations in initial conditions lead to different out-comes in various extrapolations; an acceptable estimate cannot be made at this time."

Phaethon felt again a pang of hope. Uncertainty?

One of the other Gold Manorials, Guttrick Seventh Glaine of Fulvous House, leaned from his seat: "How can the outcome be in doubt? Fulvous Sophotech foretells an exile will be handed down in any case!"

Nebuchednezzar spoke, and his voice filled the hall: "Phae-thon may have startling news concerning the motives which prompted him to violate the Lakshmi Agreement; representatives from the Warlock Iron Ghost School and the Warlock Seasonal Mind School may reassess their positions based on this new evidence; and Ynought Subwon Centurion of New Centurion House has a guest he wishes to invite to address

us."

Tsychandri-Manyu was still standing: "Oh, please! This is insufficient! How likely are we to be swayed by the opinions of two Warlocks and one Dark-Gray! Three voices out of one hundred three of us?! What single person here honestly supports Phaethon's cause?"

Asmodius Bohost of Clamour House stood, heaving his massive body upright on elephantine legs. "Hoy!" he called, "The Black Mansions say Phaethon should not be exiled, no! In fact, we think he should be crowned king, be given a pension, and have a palladium established in his honor in the acropolis!" He smiled impishy. "Or, at least, that is what we will say we believe, until Tawne House sits down. Come now, Tsychandri! We all know how this is going to turn out, don't we? That doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy the show. My colleagues and I want to give Phaethon a chance to beg and

squirm."

A titter of uncomfortable laughter traced the room.

Ao Prospero Circe of the Zooanthropic Incarnation Coven of the Seasonal Mind School stood. She was depicted as a Chinese dowager empress in imperial yellow robes, a headdress of black pearls and plumes, and a demeanor of gravest dignity. "Truths often disguise themselves as jests. It is protective mimicry they need in order to survive. And they hop from the mouths of fat fools because no one else is wise enough to utter them. I am one of the two voices Nebuchednezzar counts as undecided. My Twelve minds are eager to

hear what evidence might stir us from what seems to me to be a firm conclusion. My Hound mind gives tongue and bays at the moon; my Wolf mind scents bloods; and yet Stag is chary; and Serpent, so far, remains silent. These omens are unclear. Let Phaethon be given, at least, a chance to plead. If he refuses the chance, on his head be it; but we, by offering, do all that the sadist-tyrant we call Conscience will require, or need."

A second-rank lateral-organization program from Harmonious Composition thought-traffic control stood up, dressed as a London clerk. He took his hat in his hands and touched his forelock before his spoke. "Service to all requires that the College recall that her task is not merely to condemn what is worthy of condemnation but also to urge those worthy of hope to virtue. Shouldn't we, before anything else, plead with Phaethon to change his mind?"

There was a general murmur of assent. Nebuchednezzar tapped the head of his mace, as if it were a gavel, to signal the consent of the College. At that signal, the reproduction of Socrates, who was the Master of the College from Myth, now rose to speak.

"You know my understanding of these matters is poor," Socrates said, his voice heavy with irony. "Often in places in the city, in the streets and in the markets, and particularly in the houses of the rich (who are men of important character, to whom the Many pay close attention) we often hear much talk of law and of justice, of what ought to be done and of what ought not to be done. I know little of these matters, for though many people speak of them, often what they say does not agree with each other, nor does one man use these words the same way twice, but changes his mind as he is a young man or an old man, or in the heat of passion, or for some other reason. Justice, as perhaps we all know, consists of every man doing his duty, which is what the state requires of him. Now, Phaethon, you respect your father, do you not?"

Phaethon could not tell if this were a serious question. Was he supposed to answer this? "Without question, Socrates. I love my father, and respect him more than I can say."

"Ah. And this is because he is the one who brought you into this world, and sustained you through infancy, and, in short, did everything he needed to do to give you life, is it

not?"

"But of course, Socrates."

"Then what do you owe the state, who not only brought you into the world, and brought your father and all your ancestors, but also nurtured you, taught you language and letters, grew the food to feed you, spun the cloths to clothe you, and, in short, provided both you and everyone you know with all the gifts they needed, not just to live well; but to live at all? Is the state not more to be respected than your father? Respected and obeyed? Suppose that you were to die and become merely a shadow, or a memory, but that your family and peers, and all the society beside, had the power to make you flesh again. If you have disobeyed the duties society puts on you, why should society extend itself on your behalf? Society only exists at all because men put aside their natural inclinations, and listen to the commands of duty. Will you cry out that it is the duty of society to defend your life, and to sustain it? But why? You, by disobeying, have done everything in your power to undermine and to destroy the very concept of duty. How can you call upon the spirit of duty to defend you, when you have, to the best of your ability, attempted to destroy that spirit?"

Phaethon said sharply: "But I do not call upon you. I do not ask, do not beg, do not plead. Listen to me, Hortators!" Phaethon turned left and right, studying the many faces around him. "What I intend to do requires neither apology nor excuse. You gentlemen claim to be defending a way of life. But what I defend is life itself. Our civilization must expand; without expansion, life is arrested. Trapped in one small star system, we are confined, ignorant, provincial, vulnerable, and alone. Turn your eyes outward! The surrounding stars are barren; I shall plant gardens. The void is empty; I shall raise cities. Sterile rocks and worthless dust clouds tumble through blind orbits. I shall transform atmospheres choked with poison into blue skies fit for men, pour oceans into dry

wasteland, bring forth new life. I shall make these rocks into worlds! Hortators! Listen, for once, to a voice other than your own! Our civilization is as beautiful as a bride; it is time she gave birth to colonies, and mothered new civilizations in her own image."

One of the augurs for the Warlock Iron Ghost mass-mind called out: "And yet when this bride cries out and bids you to desist, you ignore her sad cries! This is cruelty in a lover— all the more for one who claims to love the Golden Oecumene so much! So much that you move heaven and earth to fly away from her embraces!"

The other Master of the College was Emphyrio, a character from early fiction. He spoke, and the book in his lap amplified his voice: "Hear me, O Socrates! Those who lust to destroy courage, freedom, and innovation always use 'duty' as their battle-cry. The truth is that Phaethon is not a slave, or a creature with such low worth that he ought to die whenever such death might please his owners' whims.

"Hortators!" Emphyrio continued in a ringing voice, "Let us not war among ourselves. Phaethon knows joys and sorrow, pain and heart's ease even as we do. He is a man like us. Do we not all wish to do as Phaethon has done? To embrace greatness, triumph over the elements of nature, and to yearn to conquer more? I tell you, my fellows, that nothing is more certain than that our race must one day live beneath the light of other suns."

Looks of surprise, and doubt, flickered from eye to eye among the benches. Whispers ran across the walls.

Abrupt silence fell when Neo-Orpheus spoke in a voice of ice: "We have heard thesis and antithesis from Socrates and Emphyrio. Let me offer a synthesis. Both my fellow Masters are correct, but only partly. Phaethon does owe us a duty to respect our opinions, but he is not a slave, and he is free to ignore us. As we are free to ignore him, should that be his choice. Perhaps mankind one day shall be forced to undertake the dangerous experiment of star colonization, yes. But now is not the time. And Phaethon is not the man. Has he not twice attempted violent crimes against the Eveningstar So-

photech? His character is unstable, violent, and unsuitable to father worlds upon worlds of races cast in his mold."

Quentem-Quinteneur of Yellow Mansion, an ally of Tsychandri-Manyu, spoke: "I concur. Yellow Sophotech tells me that our sun, thanks to the efforts of Helion, is far, far from being exhausted. Nor is there any population pressure nor diminution of resources—nor intolerance nor persecution nor strangulation of opportunities—nor any other compelling reasons to undertake so great a project."

Representatives from the Harmonious and Eleemosynary mass-minds rose and spoke in unison: "When we first joined this hearing, we were convinced Phaethon was selfish. Every appearance is that he is a heartless and cruel egotist, willing to trample the corpses of others to indulge his self-centered obsession. But, out of a sense of high compassion, and the willingness to serve even the most unworthy, we were willing to entertain the notion that it was possible, barely possible, that he was putting on this appearance for some reason no rational mind can comprehend, and secretly was motivated by a real, but horribly misguided, notion that he is benefiting mankind. Now we have heard him speak; and our open-mindedness is rewarded; for we now learn that Phaethon believes that what he does is to benefit mankind, and to spread our civilization, which he claims to love. A fine discovery! The conflict here can be resolved without further ado."

The representatives of the mass-minds bowed toward Phaethon: "Phaethon, we thank you, but your services are not required on our behalf, nor on behalf of the rest of mankind. Mankind rejects your scheme. Civilization announces no intention nor desire to spread. On behalf of all mankind, we say: thank you, but no thank you. Is this clear? Now, then; cease your efforts ... or let rest the pretense that you act for anyone's benefit but your own."

Phaethon felt what little hope he had begin to die in his heart. He wondered if perhaps he should sit down.

But the words came from him with a firmness that surprised even himself: "My efforts shall not cease, not while one second of my life remains. You are many, and I am alone. But

I can speak for the spirit of mankind with a voice equal to your own. Truth does not become more or less true, whether those who know it are many or few. And it has never been masses or mobs who shaped destiny but single individuals, visionaries, innovators, who are scorned and isolated by the very masses who reap such benefit from their work. But such benefit is a side effect of our lonely work, not its main purpose. I will do what I must do even if none benefit from it. I will carry out my dream, no matter what the cost, no matter what the loss. This I shall do because my dream is sound and true and beautiful and right."

Silence filled the chamber. Some Hortators cast uneasy glances toward Nebuchednezzar Sophotech, but none asked the Sophotech for his opinion. No one seemed willing to speak.

Helion's eyes were shining with pride.

Ynought Subwon of New Centurion Mansion, Dark-Gray School, now stood to speak. "Take heart. You are not alone, Phaethon."

He turned to the dais. Being a Dark-Gray, he spoke directly to the point: "Masters, I have a guest to speak on Phaethon's behalf. If people think us unfair, the College loses power. Therefore we must listen."

Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne of the Gold Mansions held up his little finger: "We waste time with this. Note my objection for the record."

Nebuchednezzar nodded, "Without further objections, so ordered. Please introduce us, Mr. Ynought."

"Here," said Ynought.

The main doors behind Phaethon opened and closed. Uselessly, because the figure that floated forward passed through the door leaves like a phantom, spoiling the illusion. And it floated rather than walked.

The figure was black-and-white, man shaped, fuzzy at the edges, with small flickers trembling through it. And the depth-perception balance was off, so that the figure seemed at times to be large and close, at others, tiny and far off.

The shadowy costume of the black-and-white image was

hard to see at first. Atop was a bronze-age helm, plumed with a horse's tail. A long cloak, like a black mist, draped down, passing into and through the floorboards, obscuring most other details. Up from the right hand of the figure came two thin and insubstantial lines, swaying and blurred. It took a moment to realize that these were meant to be two ash spears

in his right hand.

Several Hortators made faces of disgust, the same face lords and princes of some earlier age might have made to see a smelly, ill-clad beggar, unshod and unwashed, step into their golden feast hall. The thought on every face was obvious: even the poorest of the poor could get a decent icon to represent himself, from a charity or a mass-mind, if from nowhere else. Who was this indigent?

A voice, faint, hissing with static, issued from the helmet. Again, the perspective was bad: the voice seemed to come from every direction at once, without overtones, without acoustics. No face was visible under the helmet.

"Hortators and Masters of the College, may I speak? I apologize if my tongue is slow and halting. I am the ghost of Diomedes of Neriad, once called Xingis. Diomedes Prime, from far beyond Neptune, in me broadcasts his thoughts, and parts of his thoughts, and the signal crawls across hours and hours of distance to address you. He could not afford to send his whole mind; I am his partial. He does not know what I say now; hours must pass before any return signal reaches trans-Neptunian space; therefore I must guess, with dim, impoverished mind, at his instructions.

"And he has expended the utmost last of all his wealth to send me here. My thoughts will never again merge with his unless, by mercy, or some unexpected chance, a charity or money-lender grant me funds enough to drive my signal the uncounted millions of miles back to the Outer Rim. I have no storage here; it is likely I shall die and be erased once the meter measuring my funds runs down to zero. Will you hear me speak, good gentlemen?"

Asmodious Bohost of Clamour House called out: "We are all impressed with your pathos. Please continue!"

Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne spoke: "Asmodius, silence! Your japes diminish our esteem, and offend the dignity of this College. Partial of Diomedes, proceed, I pray. We heed your words with grave attention."

"I will speak," said Diomedes. "Among the Neptunians, Phaethon is a savior. If other stars had living worlds, it is we who could pioneer them. Immortality is a golden cage for you; who among you would dare to travel far beyond the Noumenal Mentality, beyond the sight and wisdom of the Sophotechs, beyond any hope for resurrection? Who except for Phaethon? Who else? We Neptunians. Listen."

The figure raised a shadowy hand. "Fortunate children of a fortunate world, you are surrounded and involved with wealth and luxury and power from your first breath through all the days of your life. We who live in outer darkness have neither days, nor breath. Our resources are scant; our luxuries are few. And yet in return for this poverty, we have continuously what you know only during Masquerade, liberties unknown to you here. Our thoughts are our own; our privacy is absolute.

"An Eremite or Cold Duke who wishes for a private place or kingdom of his own need only find an asteroid or comet-head somewhere in the interstellar gloom, release his nano-machines, and sculpt the ice to whatever shape he fancies. From his own body he can make his subjects, his crystal gardens, his dream selves; from his own brain stuffs, he can make pseudo-intellects or subcompositions to govern all. Delirium and suicide and crude simulations without color are the entertainments of these lonely kingdoms; and his empire consists of no one other than himself, and whatever self-replications, reiterations, child partials, clones or autosexual harems, he has the templates and the energy to create."

The shadowy and faceless helmet seemed to turn left and right with deliberate motion, as if Diomedes were examining the chamber. "Are you repelled? Disgusted? You are wealthy people. You can afford to have emotions. Some of us cannot afford the glands or midbrain complexes required. It would repel you to live in a house grown from your own body,

surrounded by children cloned from your own brain information, perhaps; but we are nomads, and cannot afford to carry machineries and bodies as separate things. Whatever cannot be carried as a low-mass information template, be it family or friends or what-have-you, must be left behind. Nor do we have file space enough to keep all our individualities as separate. When the computer space has no more room, and the caravan is about to drift from an exhausted iceberg to new prospects, you too, I think, might find it would be better to become your friend and share his thoughts rather than to leave his mind behind to die.

"Yes, die! For death we have in plenty, which you fortunate Inner Worlds forget. Orpheus machines are few and far between, out there, and some stored cans of memory are lost in far icesteads or broken habitats, or hyperbolic orbits never to

be seen again."

Socrates from the front of the chamber, spoke: "Whoever lives far from the city, in the wilderness where no one goes, who has no laws and no civilization, he must be either a beast

or a god."

Diomedes, in a soft, broken, static-hissing voice, answered back: "Or a man, who is half of both. You Inner Worlds have forgotten pain and death, struggle and success, ambition and failure, work, heartbreak, and joy. You are no longer men. Technology has made you gods. Some of you are gods who play at men, perhaps, but gods."

It was Helion who spoke then: "We have pain in our lives also. Too much pain."

"With all due respect, sun god, compared to what we suffer, it is little."

Phaethon had been standing and remembering what he knew of Diomedes while the partial had been speaking.

They had first met some 250 years ago, for Xingis (as he had been called then) held the copyrights on a paleomne-monic reconstruction of a pre-Composition named Exo-Alphonse Rame (whom modern Neptunian name conventions

called Xylophone.)

Xylophone had done pioneer studies on the particle den-

sities and conditions of space between the local stars, and had been one of the designers of the old dark-matter probes. This was meteorological information Phaethon needed for his expedition. At the near light speeds the Phoenix Exultant would reach, a cloud of tenuous interstellar gas would be as solid as a brick wall; and relativity would increase even the mass of weakly interacting particles, neutrinos and photinos, till they would be able to affect baryon-based matter. Xylophone's theory predicted tides in the interstellar dark matter, based on the initial conditions during galactic condensation; and ripples in these tides would produce clear lanes, spaces emptier than normal space, where travel would be easier.

Diomedes had been more than willing to cooperate and share the information he had, and more. He had been enthralled by the idea of star colonization. All the best astronomical assemblies were in trans-Neptunian space; Phaethon's wealth, funneled through Diomedes, had transformed the local economy. Company towns sprang up around the staging areas from which advanced probes, and test models of the Phoenix Exultant, were launched into interstellar space. Other industries gathered around the radio dishes, tens of miles in diameter, which floated in the weightless calm so far from the sun's noise, listening to the return signals of those early probes.

The peculiar rules governing Neptunian psychology and psychogenesis encouraged the Tritonic Composition to create a generation of children or temporary-minds devoted likewise to Phaethon's vision.

But now those industries would close; Phaethon's wealth was exhausted. That zealous generation of children and temporaries would be reabsorbed into the parent mass. Or, if their habitats were too far for available fuel to reach, they would be left stranded. Many would go into slow-time hibernation, so-called "ship sleep." But some would not wake again.

Phaethon woke from his memories when a channel prior-itizer from the Eleemosynary Composition stood to speak: "Our compassion is stirred by your woe, good Diomedes. Return to the Inner System; come back into the light. Your

brains may join with ours. Our ways can tolerate even the most nonstandard neuroforms. Food and shelter and fellowship are ours to offer, and yours to have."

Asmodius Bohost spoke aloud: "By God's dangling phallus! Fellowship!? Shelter?! I'll do better than that! Why not come and stay with me? I'll build you a whorehouse, and load it with twenty pleasure menus from my personal Black Vault! If you're so afraid that immortality will rob your life of zest, I'll even put a dominatrix-ninja doll among the odalisques, so that, at random, one of the snuggle bunnies will go boom when you plunge in! What do you say?"

Diomedes said softly, "Like barbarians, like Esquimaux, we are more honored by hospitality than by any other thing." The shadow shape bowed. "But I cannot accept. Shall we leave our wives and half wives, brain mates and parent masses? We are bound by cords of love and tradition to our homes; in many cases, we are our homes. If your generosity is real, however, then give me alms enough to transmit my patterns back across the endless miles to Diomedes Prime, and my family-mind. Otherwise I die here, far from home." The Eleemosynary Composition spoke: "We shall give you what you need, and be glad to give."

Asmodius Bohost said, "Me, too! I'll even pay for a lasered tight-beam and a call-back, provided you hop on one foot and change your name to Mr. Twinkle-butt!"

Viviance Thrice Dozen Phosphoros of the Red School gestured toward Nebuchednezzar, raised her closed fan in one red-gloved hand: "Mr. Speaker! I would like to reintroduce, yet again, my motion to have Asmodius Bohost expelled from

the College."

Nebuchednezzar said, "The motion fails for the lack of support."

"I understand." She snapped open her fan and smiled. "I just wanted the record to reflect my perfect score." She delicately took her skirt by the knee, and with a slithering rustle of crimson crinoline, resumed her seat. Viviance Thrice Dozen, so far, had introduced that motion at every meeting both she and Asmodius had attended together.

Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne rose now to speak: "I am certain we are all moved by our visitor's sad tale of the harshness of Neptunian life. I also fail to see the relevance to our present discussion. Phaethon, at Lakshmi, agreed long ago to exile. This should be an utterly routine matter; all decisions have already been made; the time for discussion is past. Why do we continue to listen?"

The shadow spread its ghostly hands. "Forgive me. I forget that only your Silver-Gray and Dark-Gray Schools force their members to live through every hour of their lives in order. Only they suffer boredom, and learn patience. I thought my message was entirely clear. Perhaps it was not. Please forgive me; my thought speed is limited. I will attempt again. Listen:

"Please do not rob us of Phaethon's dream. Our outer habitats, so far from your sun's gravitational well, will be the preferred ports-of-call for future pilgrimages to and from Apha Centauri, Bernard's Star, and Wolfe 359. You live surrounded by wealth and comfort; to you the risks seem grave. We live in darkness, far from easily available supplies of energy and reaction-mass. To us, the risks seem worth of the glory of the quest. We do not ask you to take the risks. We only ask you not prevent Phaethon (and us) from taking the risks, and finding the destiny, we choose."

Gannis of Jupiter stood and spoke. "All of me are sorry. I and we know what it's like to live in a frontier; the Jovian moons, back before Ignition, were just rocks with a few mines and nanofacturing forests on them. We only had twenty beanstalks reaching down to the K-layer in the Jupiter atmosphere. Twenty! But no matter how nice this risky scheme and mad dream of Phaethon's might be for the Neptunian Tritonics, it's not the risk to them our duty as Hortators requires us to address. No, sir. They are free to take their own risks, and why not? But the risks to us, the very real risk that future colonies might inspire war and crime again, is a risk we must weigh. Suppose even one person should be murdered in some future war, or even one mind be deleted from the Noumenal Memory. Is this worth it? Maybe it's worth the risk to them,

to the danger seekers. I'm not saying Phaethon is suicidal; who knows what his motives are? I'm just saying that no man should aid and help his own destroyers. I've been aiding and helping Phaethon before this; he and I were friends once. Maybe I didn't think he would go through with it. Maybe I didn't think he would destroy us. But I see better now. I can't help him anymore. No matter what this College decides, not one more atom of Chrysadmantium is going to plate Phaethon's ship."

Diomedes turned his empty helmet toward Gannis. "Your concern for future crimes and wars, which may grow up if worlds in other systems flourish, I cannot disrespect. If even a single individual should die—this is tragedy. But in the other pan of the balance scales place that little death, which comes into your souls each time a little more of your freedom and initiative are lost. And a little more is lost each time you decide again never to venture forth from the shadow of the gigantic Sophotechs, who protect and smother you. When will it end? A future utterly determined is a future dead. You have all felt this. Haven't you all dreamed of star voyages and adventure? Your bodies will always remain alive, but many hopes and souls will die if the danger and the dream of star colonization is strangled. We Neptunians are too poor to resurrect that dream once it dies; none of you will ever again be brave enough to do as Phaethon has done, nor will the turning of the centuries bring new generations with new spirits into power in the Oecumene, because you are immortal. Therefore weigh the tragic death of that one soul of which Gannis speaks, but compare it to the many souls, the great soul of all mankind, which perishes if Phaethon's dream fails! Small price to pay, good Hortators. Small price to pay!"

Asmodius Bohost wondered in a loud and brassy voice: "I note how easy it is to call the price of a single death so small ... unless, of course, it happens to be one's own."

Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne spoke with heavy dignity: "When a single life is extinguished, that is as gross a tragedy as if the entire universe should end; for has not everything,

from the point of view of him who dies, indeed come to an end?"

Gannis spoke in tones of haughty scorn, "No one's life can be sacrificed merely to serve the use and pleasure of the whole. We are not a society of cannibals!"

Diomedes asked, "No one's life ... ? Not one ... ?"

Gannis: "Not even a single, solitary individual!"

Diomedes nodded his helmet of shadows toward Gannis. "I am most glad to hear you say this. I assume this doctrine applies to Phaethon as well? He is the individual, more single and more solitary than any of the rest of you, whom I would not see sacrificed."

Nebuchednezzar turned to Gannis, and said, "Gannis Hundred-mind, I am required to warn you that you must abstain from the upcoming vote on this matter. These proceedings are being broadcast to your constituents back in the Jovian system; if you should vote for Phaethon's exile, few Jovians would support you, regarding your motive as hypocrisy. The Jovians, you must recall, still regard themselves as an individualistic and pioneer-spirited society, and many of your supporters back home have ties to Neptunian and Saturnine space efforts. Everything Diomedes said will convince them."

Gannis sat down, but did not seem ill-humored. "I will not vote, but I will still speak against what Phaethon proposes. And, no matter who supports him, without my metal, his ship will not be built."

Diomedes said, "The Phoenix Exultant will be built. Perhaps smaller than designed, or perhaps with thinner armor, but you, Gannis, shall not stand in the way of Phaethon and his dream. Nothing shall stop him...."

And there was a note of triumph in his voice. "Nothing shall stop him."

But, even as he said this, his image began freezing, and then moving, freezing, and then moving, and his voice hissed into garble. The image of Diomedes collapsed, and was replaced by a flat two-dimensional window, with silent lines of text running across it, repeating Diomedes's last words.

"... Nothing shall stop him ... Mr. Asmodius! I would be more than happy to take you up on your offer. But I fear I no longer have a foot to stand upon. My name shall be changed as your pleasure and whim shall direct. I cannot afford dignity; I cannot afford to keep my name...."

Phaethon, who had been most eager to ask Diomedes about the identity and history of Xenophon, now saw he would have no chance. And no chance for a personal word with his friend. One of the Eleemosynary Composition stood and spread his palms, the gesture to indicate that he was opening additional channels out of his own stock, or contributing computer time.

The window icon representing Diomedes winked out. The Eleemosynary Composition said, "We are transmitting the partial of Diomedes back to his point of origin in Neptunian space. The drain on our resources is significant." Helion said, "I will contribute a dozen seconds." Gannis nodded, and held up four fingers. The other Hortators murmured agreement, and each contributed time or energy. The hundred people there could easily afford to return Diomedes Partial to his parent-mind, and some members of the White and Red Manors added software and customized routines as parting gifts, so that the partial would return with more wealth than was spent to send him here.

These acts of generosity and kindness made Phaethon wonder. Maybe Helion had been right after all. The Hortators were people of conscience and goodwill. Perhaps they could not let Phaethon off scot-free, not and save their reputations. But having heard Diomedes speak, surely they would impose only a light, symbolic sentence.

Gannis rose and spoke. "Members of the College. We now see the danger Phaethon poses is greater than we supposed. Not only is there threat of interstellar war but now there is unrest among the more distant parts of the Oecumene. We all know how difficult it is for Sophotechs to police these cold and far-off Neptunians. We all secretly suspect to what horrid uses, torture-dreams and child prostitution and worse, the

Cold Dukes put this so-called "privacy" they are so in love with. With the power to reshape thought and memory according to whatever perverted whim might strike one's fancy, only the grossest imagination can conceive what the Neptunian Eremites might do in the lonely darkness of their distant, icy fortresses. We must use all means at our disposal to ensure not only that Phaethon is cast out to starve and die, but that he also finds no way to communicate with these disgusting allies of his, these Neptunian people he has so stirred up and disturbed with his strange preachings!"

One of the Eleemosynary Composition spoke: "This would not be hard to arrange. Superlongrange orbital communication lasers are owned by only two or three efforts, and by some magnates in the ring-cities. Most have signed Hortation agreements."

Tsychandri-Manyu spoke: "Gannis of Jupiter is and are correct. We must do more than merely ostracize Phaethon; we must take steps to make sure he cannot find help from those who do not heed our wise advice; Neptunians, deviants, mind-drakes, and the like. I recommend a total ban on any form of communication or use of Mentality whatsoever, so that no one will be able to even send him a telephone call, unless they string up the wires themselves. No one shall write him a letter, unless they carry it themselves."

Asmodious Bohost said, "And grow the tree and pulp the paper and raise the goose to pluck the quill to sharpen for a pen!"

One of the Eleemosynary Composition stood: "Phaethon's body is stored aboard a segment of the ring-city we own. The water, and air, and the cubic space there belongs to us. He shall not be allowed to purchase any of this."

Neo-Orpheus observed: "With Sophotechs to advise us, we will be able to anticipate and outmaneuver any attempt Phaethon makes to circumvent our restrictions."

Tau Continuous Albion of the White Manorial School said: "The Phoenix Exultant is still in sub-Mercurial space; even if Phaethon, by some trick, should come to have legal ownership of it again, who will ferry him to it? Who will transmit

the signal for him to call it back to Earth? He cannot get to Mercury by flapping his arms."

Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne rose to his feet. "I once again will call the question. Is there anyone who sees further need for discussion?"

Helion rose to his feet.

"Wait."

The chamber fell silent.

THE EXILE

From the corner of his eye, Phaethon saw Gannis lean forward with great interest as Helion rose to speak. Members of the Eleemosynary Composition all wore the same expression of alert caution, staring at Helion. Ao Aoen, although he was not a member of the College, had been given a seat in the visitor's bench near the rear of the Warlock's section, and the light from the windows behind him glinted on the serpent scales of his cloak and threw his hooded face into shadow; but something in the set of his shoulders betrayed his tension.

Would Heiion speak to favor Phaethon? If so, the Peers might well exclude Helion from their number, and undo, at one stroke, all the work Helion, for uncounted years, had done to raise himself to that high eminence.

Phaethon thought: Please, don't do it, Father.

And then his own anxiety made him smile. Phaethon's own prospects seemed so very much dimmer than even the worst that could happen to Helion. It was ironic, to say the least, that he should worry for Helion at this point. Nonetheless he did.

But those worries were needless. Helion did not say anything controversial or extraordinary. He said merely, "Masters

and gentlemen of the College. I introduce a guest who has significant information to impart."

Footsteps were heard approaching the chamber doors. Phaethon cocked his ear. There was something strange about the sound, something he could not quite define. Perhaps it was that the echoes and acoustics surrounding the noise seemed particularly clear and distinct.

Then came a rattle of the latch, the noise of hinges, and the double doors behind Phaethon opened. The texture of the light on the polished wood floor around the doors changed as reflections from the antechamber fell into the hall. A man stood in the doorframe.

He had a narrow, ascetic face, and piercing gray eyes, which gave him a look of fiercely alert intelligence.

Every detail of the image was perfect. One could see the individual strands in his fabric of his Inverness cape; one could see the way each particular hair above his ears was disarrayed from the small weight of his deerstalker cap; one could see the freckles on the backs of his hands; the tiny flakes of dirt dotting the heel of his left boot. Sound and sight, texture, color, and presence, all were perfect.

As he stepped up to the table where Phaethon stood, Phaethon noticed more detail. A light odor of tobacco touched the tweed fabric of his cape. One of the threads on his coat buttons did not match the thread of the rest. The stubble on the left of his jaw was slightly rougher than on the right, as if he had shaved with a razor that morning, perhaps favoring the cheek that faced his window.

The amount of detail was remarkable. Phaethon saw the Hortators on their benches to either side whispering and staring, trying to guess who or what was represented by this enormously expensive and detailed self-image.

The gray-eyed man doffed his deerstalker cap and greeting the College with a curt nod. He spoke with a dry and slightly nasal accent: "Members of the College, greetings. My name

is Harrier Sophotech."

Of course. No human-run self-image could be so thorough

in its detail.

Harrier continued: "You may not have heard of me. I was created fifteen minutes ago, your time, to investigate some certain irregularities surrounding Phaethon's decision to open his memory casket. I should mention that this decision of Phaethon's was entirely unexpected, even by the Orient Sophotech Overmind-group, who was running a predictive model of Phaethon's behavior at the time."

Another rustle of wonder went through the chamber. Even Nebuchednezzar seemed surprised. The Orient Overmind was one of the Ennead, the nine community superintellects that the Sophotechs cooperated and melded themselves to create. Why would a mind placed so high in the Earthmind hierarchy be concerned?

Harrier said: "Only a tremendous shock, or some perceived threat to his life or the lives of his loved ones, could, in our opinion, have urged Phaethon to act so far out of character. We suspect foul play."

Again, there was a murmur and stir in the chamber, this one louder than the first. Emphyrio spoke, and the book in his lap amplified his voice: "You refer to true crime, violence urged by passion, not merely to fraud or juvenile pranksman-ship?"

Harrier said, "Evidence is scant, but the hints are shocking, sir. We suspect attempted murder, corruption, and mind rape."

Audible gasps of astonishment and fear came from several points in the chamber. Helion was scrutinizing Phaethon as if he had never seen him before.

Neo-Orpheus asked: "When you say 'we,' do you mean you are part of the Constabulary?"

Harrier smiled slightly to himself. "No, sir. Sophotechs prefer not to join the police, military, or governmental functions. However, I have been working closely with the Commissioner of Constables on this case, purely in an advisory capacity. Think of me as a consulting detective."

Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne of Tawne House spoke: "With respect, my dear sir, this is all very interesting, but... what has this to do with us?"

Harrier raised an eyebrow and stared at Tsychandri-Manyu

with steel-gray eyes. "You Hortators are so famous for your public spirit, I was sure you would be eager to cooperate in

this matter."

Helion touched Agamemnon XIV, Archon of Minos House, on the shoulder. Agamemnon stood. "Dignitaries and notables of the College! We have not yet asked Phaethon why he opened the forbidden casket. Our determination can neither be informed nor fair without this datum."

Tsychandri-Manyu made a noise of disgust. "Come, now! This is irrelevance!" But he looked to his left and his right as he spoke, and saw the faces around him. Something in the mood of the chamber was changing. Tsychandri-Manyu had the instincts of a politician; he knew when not to go against the mood of the group. He sat down.

Agamemnon spoke, pretending to answer Tsychandri-Manyu, but actually addressing the chamber, "Is it? Is it irrelevant? I think the question is central. Did some crime or violent event compel Phaethon's action? Consider: If you were an amnesiac, and had suffered the only murder attempt in many centuries, surely you would conclude that the crime was motivated by something, or explained by something, in your forgotten past. Who among us, if horror and emergency loomed, would not avail ourselves of every memory, every piece of information, we might suspect would be useful to avert disaster? Come, notables of the College! If Phaethon opened that box to learn the secret of some attack—some real attack—then both prudence and duty required him to open it! We cannot, we can never, punish a man for doing what duty requires; that would make a mockery of this whole College. Do not forget what a tenuous hold on power we Hortators have! One wrong decision, one notorious act of folly, and the public respect which forms the foundation of everything we are, will erode to nothing! Have we not more than endangered the public faith in us once already in this matter?"

Agamemnon continued: "The members of my constituency—we all know what sticklers for points of law and tradition the Silver-Grays are—would not support a boycott to punish Phaethon for doing what any reasonable man in Ms

circumstances would have been forced to do! Do you realize we are talking about the possibility that someone has attempted a murder in our society? A murder! A deliberate attempt of one intelligent being to end the self-awareness of another! Gentlemen, if this suspicion turns out to be correct, then all other matters pale in comparison. I should like to call for a vote on the matter: if Phaethon was actually attacked, isn't his reaction justifiable?"

But Gannis (who was perhaps less alert a politician than Tsychandri-Manyu) leaned forward, squinting and peering across the chamber. "Is that Helion I see speaking? It looks like Agamemnon, but it sounds like someone else. We all hold Helion in the greatest respect, at the moment, and we hope, in the coming months, to honor him further. It would be a shame if the purity of his motives came into question!"

Helion did not rise from his seat, but spoke in ringing tones: "I make my fellow Peer the offer that, should he care to question my motives, I will be happy to put a copy of my mind on the public channels for anyone to inspect, provided his mind, and his motives are posted likewise. Then we can all decide who has the purer motive."

A murmur of laughter came from the benches. Gannis subsided, a look of discomfort and worry on his face, muttering, "Eh... no, of course, I was merely speaking theoretically ..."

Nebuchednezzar held up the mace and announced his voting results: "Notables and dignitaries of the College, my estimates show that the public would be outraged if Phaethon were punished for accessing his memories, if (note well), if he had been indeed attacked, and if he had reasonable cause to suspect that his memory would help him explain that attack, or to defend himself or others against future attacks. Several hundred thousand individuals would volunteer to help find and expose the criminal, and millions more would volunteer time and antigrams to the effort. Many of those who are watching these proceedings now have already made promises of contributions. On the other hand, the public fervor would turn with equal vehemence against Phaethon should

this turn out to be a false alarm. The same strength of character which makes the Golden Oecumene utterly intolerant of violence makes Her equally harsh against those who attempt to manipulate that righteousness to their own ends."

Emphyrio said, "If Phaethon suffered senseless attack by a criminal, ordinary prudence would require that he examine all his memories, sealed or unsealed, to discover the cause of the attack. We cannot condemn him for this."

Socrates said, "Which is more important, to be just, or to appear just? Keeping the memories sealed, as he promised to do, would have maintained Phaethon's appearance of justice. But the criminal who threatened him could threaten others, and therefore it would not have been just to attempt to remain in ignorance about so important a matter."

Viridimagus Solitarie of the Green Mansion School offered: "But the very idea of a murder in a society with our traditions and our way of life—the notion is inconceivable!" Ullr Selfson-First Lifrathsir of the Nordic Pagan School was an ex-Warlock basic who made his fortune arranging alternate-history scenarios for parahistorians, including the rather gruesome and hideous Dark Tyrant Earthmind World. He, more than anyone, knew how fragile the peace and prosperity of the Golden Oecumene were; his nightmare scenario had been extrapolated from very few historical changes. "It is not inconceivable. If the Neptunians are willing to send Diomedes Partial on the mission which—but for our charity-would have been suicidal, then they may be willing to risk, or threaten, other lives. Perhaps the attack was merely meant to shock Phaethon into opening his buried memories. Frankly, I would have done the same if I were Phaethon. I would like to ask Phaethon if his memories gave him any clue as to the identity and nature of the attacker?"

Nausicaa of Aeceus Mansion spoke: "At Lakshmi, the College examined what would and would not be subject to amnesia. I recall that nothing but information about the proposed starship was covered. This may be another clue pointing to the Neptunians; we all know their great interest in the Phoenix Exultant."

Casper Halfhuman Tinkersmith of the Parliament of Ghosts stood. He was a writer of educational matrixes famous for his cool logic when he was in his human body, and for his unusually vivid passion and drive when he was downloaded into an electrophotonic matrix. He was dressed now like a planter from the Carolinas, in a white coat and straw skimmer. "Brethren! Must we circle these issues endlessly before someone asks the core question? If Phaethon suffered such an outrage, why wasn't that the first thing from his lips when this meeting opened? It is not Phaethon but Harrier, yes, Harrier, who says Phaethon was attacked. Why is Phaethon mute?"

Phaethon, ever since Harrier had entered the room, had been listening with a sinking heart. Sinking, because he knew he should not tell anything to the Hortators that might be overheard by the enemy—Scaramouche or whomever it was that Atkins was investigating. On the other hand, Rhadaman-thus (whose intelligence Phaethon acknowledged as exceeding his own by four orders of magnitude) had expressly advised Phaethon to go ahead and reveal the information. The enemy, after all, surely knew that Phaethon knew of the attack. And revealing the details of that attack would not necessarily reveal anything about Phaethon's earlier meeting with Atkins.

Yet Rhadamanthus himself may have been corrupted by the attacking virus civilization when he gave that advice....

If so, then would testifying that he suffered an attack somehow benefit, or be part of the plan of, the enemy? And, if so, what was the enemy's plan? Such a plan must have something to do with the Phoenix Exultant. Something ... but what?

Phaethon grimaced in bitter humor. Perhaps he had been raised too closely to machine-minds for his own good. He had relied so often on minds swifter than his own to solve all puzzles and conundrums; and his mind perhaps was not swift enough to unravel this convoluted enigma, not while he stood here on trial.

And then there was a question of due proportion and degree. Suppose he were willing to sacrifice his career or his life to protect the Golden Oecumene from disaster; every man

of ordinary decency, throughout the ages, made such sacrifices for their homelands and their ideals. But did warning the enemy of Atkins's investigation—did that constitute a disaster for the Oecumene or only an inconvenience for Atkins? Suffering exile and death for one's homeland was one thing; suffering exile and death for Atkins's convenience was another.

What finally decided him was this: Phaethon did not know how important secrecy was. But he knew how important the Phoenix Exultant was. Phaethon spoke:

"I did not speak before because Atkins asked me not to. But now that Harrier has spoken, no good is served by me any longer keeping silent. There is an enemy among us, perhaps watching us this very moment. I suspect it is an enemy from another star."

Phaethon in a few brief words, told about the attack by Scaramouche on the steps of the Eveningstar Mausoleum, about how an unmaker virus had been introduced into his surrounding thoughtspace, overwhelming Eleemosynary defenses, and attempting to spread throughout the Mentality.

Deep silence hung in the chamber. Phaethon could see the looks of skepticism and disbelief growing on the faces around him as he spoke. A look of hope was dying in Helion's eyes; Gannis was smiling openly.

Messilina Secondus Eveningstar of Eveningstar Mansion offered: "We have many monitors and nanomachines throughout the area, ecochemical watch circuits in the air and soil, including monitors watching the horses near our mausoleum. There was no Neptunian; there was no second mannequin brought out of our waiting room; Phaethon was

alone."

A high-level information supervisor from the Eleemosynary Composition stood. "Service to all requires a deep sharing of information. We have examined the logs and records surrounding the moments Phaethon describes. He did snap his helmet shut inside one of our public boxes, breaking the connections and doing minor damage to our jacks and lines.

Nothing else of his testimony is reflected in our memories or records."

The Eleemosynary supervisor paused to let his comment sink in. He continued: "Gentlemen of the College. There was no attack. We were there; we would have seen it."

Phaethon said, "The attacking virus was successful, and may have edited your memories."

Some of the looks of impatience were hardening into expressions of boredom and contempt.

"With all due respect," said the Eleemosynary supervisor, "such a redaction would require this virus to bypass sixty-four information security checkpoints in our mind-group, and alter four sets of records: the original, the backup, the conscience ordinators, and the data traffic control monitor. Since our records are kept in associative analogue pathways rather than by a linear system, the virus would have had to examine each record, or even each thought, and do all this while suppressing the awareness-flow telltales of each and every member of our mass-mind's local interest group. Assuming it take two units of information to alter one unit (one to identify and one to falsify), we are estimating a volume of some eight hundred sixty-three billion seconds of intelligence. Only So-photechs are capable of such feats."

"The attacking virus was constructed and guided by a So-photech," said Phaethon.

There was a titter of embarrassed laughter around the chamber. A Sophotech attempting a murder?

Phaethon said, "I know it sounds absurd; don't you think I know how absurd it sounds? But it—I think it is called Nothing—it was not one of our Sophotechs, not part of the Earthmind community! It is a mind from outer space, it must be!"

A dull silence filled the room.

The looks of contempt had changed. Contempt was a look one gave to equals, men whom one scorned but who were nonetheless sane men. Now the expressions become looks of pity.

Tsychandri-Manyu needed no honed instinct to tell him the

mood in the chamber had changed again; it was obvious. "Gentlemen, we are all familiar with the erratic and frantic behavior of those who face exile. They calculate that it will do no harm for them to attempt anything—anything at all— which might avert their fate. After all, what do they care if they lie or cheat or falsify, when they will not be alive long enough to suffer the consequences of their deceits? Gentlemen! Why are we wasting our time with this? I would like to move, yet again, on the matter of Phaethon's term of exile. I move that it be permanent and absolute, so that not even food, basic services, shelter, or computer time will ever be sold to him." There was a loud noise of assent, many voices calling for

the final vote.

Nebuchednezzar said, "The motion to end debate and to call the question has been moved and seconded."

Helion rose to his feet: "My son is not a liar!" he spoke in a voice like thunder.

Whispers died.

Nebuchednezzar said, "Helion, your comment is not in order at this time."

Helion said, "Phaethon is telling the truth. We are Silver-Grays. We do not and cannot lie. And of all Silver-Grays, he is the most truthful."

Nebuchednezzar said: "I will interpret this comment as a motion to open debate on the issue of whether or not to call the question. Is there a second?"

Gan-Seven Far-Gannis of Jupiter stood up: "I will second the motion. Rhadamanthus is at hand; Phaethon is, after all, a Silver-Gray, and has deep-memory reading circuits. Would not a Noetic examination instantly reveal the truth of the matter? This is the standard procedure in such cases. We need not be impatient."

Helion's voice came softly into Phaethon's ear. This was yet another violation of the protocols binding everyone else in the scene. His father's voice said: "Just say the words, 'I swear,' and we shall have the truth." But Phaethon stood silent.

Nebuchednezzar said, "Is something the matter, Phaethon? Is there a reason why you are reluctant to permit a Noetic examination? If you wish us to examine your thoughts, please open a Noetic deep channel."

Phaethon was suspicious. Gan-Seven Far-Gannis was that part of the Gannis Hundred-mind that traveled between Jupiter and Neptune as a trade factotum. Why would he be eager for Phaethon to be vindicated? The fact that Far-Gannis had close ties with Neptunians was, perhaps, no grounds for suspicion. But what if he had ties with Xenophon?

And the enemy virus in the Mentality, hunting for Phaethon's mind, as far as Phaethon knew, was still out there. Phaethon had opened sensory, kinesthetic, and somatic channels between his brain and the Mentality in order to project a self-image into the fictional chamber Helion had created here. There was no direct access at the moment to his memories, deep structures, or thoughts. Opening a Noetic channel, however, would render him vulnerable to that virus.

Phaethon wondered if the attacker's technology would allow him to kill Phaethon, and replace him with a partial-mind of something that thought it was Phaethon but was loyal to whatever goals or desires the enemy preferred. It was a chilling thought.

Perhaps it had been done already. How many of the Hor-tators around him had been replaced by puppet creatures of the enemy ... ?

Phaethon said, "The Nothing Sophotech may still have some sort of unmaker virus free in the Noumenal Mentality. If the design is advanced enough to defeat all your wards and guards without being detected, I would fear opening my unshielded brain up to any deep-structure Mentality channels."

Several of the Hortators laughed out loud. Others smirked. Epiraes Septarch Fulvous of Fulvous House, one of Tsychandri-Manyu's minions, called out, "If the honorable Phaethon must invent the flimsiest of excuses, could he at least make it entertaining, please? I am having trouble with my suspension of disbelief."

Harrier Sophotech raised his hand, "I realize that I am not

a member of the College, but could I make a simple suggestion? Have Phaethon broadcast a copy of his mind-information onto a public channel; broadcast only, not receive; no external impulse can reach him, and this virus he fears, whether it exists or not, will not affect him. Meanwhile, you gentlemen may examine the public copy to your heart's content. What do you say?"

A sensation of warmth and pleasure filled Phaethon, straightening his back. A knot of acidic tension of which he had not even been aware suddenly relaxed in his stomach and released him. Harrier's suggestion made perfect common sense. In a moment, the College would see that he was telling the truth; the existence of the interstellar menace would be confirmed. The College had already taken a vote: if Phaethon were telling the truth, he would be cleared. He would he free to return to his life and his dream. The Phoenix Exultant was waiting for him, the stars were waiting for him, and, this time, nothing would be standing in his way.

Phaethon froze the scene, and stepped out of the Deep Dreaming. He woke to find himself in his armor, half curled in the warmth and blackness of the Eleemosynary public box. The helmet circuit sent pictures from the faceplate-eyepieces directly into his optic nerve; he could see the telltale lights and dream points on the controls and glyph signs inscribed on the interior of the casket.

Commands went from his thought into his suit interface. The black lining of his armor was able to nanomanufacture a data crystal (Phaethon vented the production waste-heat as a jet of steam into the liquid medium in which he floated) and this crystal he filled with his memories.

Phaethon opened the control panel with his finger manually. (Imagine using his hand to open a control! He felt just like a man from the prehistoric past.) With the panel open, he found the jack to accept the data crystal, and had his armor

circuit impose an energy pattern on the wiring to trigger the activation switch. Thus, there was no physical connection to himself when his recorded memories were transferred to a public inspection channel.

Phaethon stepped back into Deep Dreaming, saw the austere Inquest Chamber of the Hortators around him, frozen. He started time again. "A copy of my mind is available for your review on public channel 2120."

Once the summons was read, the oaths affirmed, and the reversion circuits were made ready, the Mentality opened itself into many minds. The College of Hortators, each and every one, remembered Phaethon, and became Phaethon.

They saw and suffered the scene. All of them wept above the coffin of Daphne. All of them heard Eveningstar's curt refusal. All of them wandered, thoughts heavy with despair, out onto the steps in front of the mausoleum. All of them saw Scaramouche and heard his mocking talk.

All of them felt the sword blade cut their neck, felt cold steel and hot blood.

Then the Phaethon who had been Benvolio Malachi, the Mnemonicist, said to the other Phaethons: "There is a time-texture friction here, of the type one only sees with redacted memories. Note the extra read-lines and time-cues. This memory has been tampered with."

The Phaethon who had been Tau Continuous of the White was an engineer, by nature a methodical thinker. "Maybe it is the alleged virus."

They all knew that read-line tags could get scrambled by imposing two mind systems into one thoughtspace ... or two memories.

The Phaethon who had been Ao Sinistro was able to use a burst of intuition to assemble the scattered read-line fragments, to look at them as though they were a shattered geometric shape, combine that shape like a puzzle, then

retranslate the result back into a linear format. From that, the association path traces of the original memory could be read. He said, "Here is the memory, whole and untouched. Who of me is willing to see the unhindered and unhampered truth?"

All the Phaethons, of course, wanted to see the truth. After all, they were Phaethon.

And a new memory came.

They remembered standing on the stair outside Eveningstar Mansion. They remembered the sensations of hopelessness and sorrow; sorrow without cure. Daphne was gone.

Phaethon drew a deep breath, searching the gardens and the sky, perhaps for inspiration, perhaps for some sign promising escape from this world of flat despair that had trapped

him.

Since it was a Red Manorial scene, the wind was not merely refreshing, scented with autumn, but also filled with a wild melancholy. The tattered clouds were turning red-gold in the sunset, a sight as strange and sad and haunting as the funeral ship of a fairy king descending in flames to the waves. The far hills, draped in shadows like the vestments of conquered titans, seemed like the towers and gates to some alien world, threatening, terrible, but challenging, as if daring him to penetrate their secrets. In the near distance, on a grassy slope tinted with cherry, rose, and scarlet dusk light, a stallion of a brand Daphne once had made now reared against the sunset, uttering a wild cry, and tossing its mane with furious

pride.

It was as if the landscape itself were urging him to wild, swift, relentless deeds. Deeds of peerless renown.

"But of course!" Phaethon was jarred with sudden hope. "I do not now recall the password or secret key to waken my Daphne. But such a word (why not?) could be hidden in the casket of locked memory. And in that box is the man she lost, not me."

But what use would it be to waken Daphne, only to suffer exile immediately thereafter?

It took him but a moment to invent a story. He could pretend he was attacked, that he had to open the memory box. But attacked by whom? There was no way any such attack could take place, except by an entity as smart as a Sophotech, able to infiltrate the Golden Oecumene, alter records, and erase memories. But where could such a Sophotech originate?

Phaethon remembered that Atkins had been investigating some Neptunian Masquerade prank. That gave him an idea. Atkins was actually investigating an external threat to the Oecumene. The evil Sophotech would belong to a highly advanced but completely invisible interstellar civilization. A civilization people by aliens, or the descendants of a lost colony. Or time travelers or wombats or hobgoblins. The excuse did not matter. All that mattered was that, if the Hortators thought Phaethon were acting on an understandable impulse— a reaction to a threat, no matter how far-fetched—then they might be lenient. Certainly they would not for a moment believe in the threat themselves, but if they thought Phaethon believed in it...

But how to make himself believe? He would have to falsify his own memories, of course, in order to cheat the Noetic examination that certainly would follow. Any purchase of a pseudomnesia editor would be normally be noticed and recorded ... except that it was still a time of Masquerade.

Phaethon turned on a Scaramouche costume. Disguised, he then opened a channel to a Red Manorial redaction boutique in the Deep Dreaming. He bought and downloaded a self-deception program, and began writing the illusion to inscribe into his own memory paths.

His hopes were pinned on three ideas: First, anyone who knew him would conclude that self-deception was utterly out of character for Phaethon. Second, Atkins, if asked about his investigation, could not and would not answer. And third, Phaethon himself would, by that time, be firmly convinced that there was an alien super-virus lurking in the mentality, hunting for him, and so therefore he would have an excuse

to refuse a noetic examination. If he were not neotically examined, this tampering would not be noticed.

As an added bonus, he would, of course, by then, have forgotten all about this moment and this falsification. He would still be able to think of himself as an honest man, and have no reason to think otherwise.

Smiling grimly, Phaethon loaded the program to begin erasing and rewriting his own memory.

The Phaethon who had been Phaethon exclaimed: "But that is not what happened!"

But he was alone when he said this. All the other Phaethons had returned to their own identities, and were staring down at Phaethon with remote, august, and unpitying stares.

"But that is not what happened!" Phaethon said again.

Neo-Orpheus said, "Not that you recall, you mean. But the reason why your recollection is in error, is because you yourself falsified it."

Phaethon said, "But I would never do such a thing! You all know I would not!"

Neo-Orpheus smiled thinly. "We know that is what you had hoped we would believe. The record shows us everything."

Phaethon made an angry gesture: "The record has been falsified! During the moment it took me to transfer my copy to Channel 2120, the alien Sophotech or its unmaker virus must have rewritten the memory chains."

Tau Continuous Albion said, "Albion Sophotech informs me that such tampering is not theoretically possible. He has examined the record we just experienced, subjecting it to six levels of redundant scrutiny. No evidence of tampering has been found. Is there any contrary opinion?"

Nebuchednezzar Sophotech had a thoughtful look, his eyes focused on the distant ceiling. "I also am examining the Mentality records, and have invented three new tools of statistical

analysis to do so. During the transmission from the Eleemosynary box to our local service, there was no opportunity for anyone or anything to affect the data. If it had been modified during the reading process, the modification would have had to have been introduced between every other picosecond pulse of the main circuit action. To fit such an enormous I volume of change into so short a time would require a data-compression technique beyond the Planck unit limit. In theory, such a compressed data formulation could be assembled under what scientists call nonrational continuum conditions, either within the event horizon of a singularity, or in the ach-ronic conditions preceding the big bang. There is no way known to our science of crossing such an event horizon, or of passing the information intact from inside a singularity to the outside."

Tau Continous said, "In other words, not possible." Nebuchednezzar brought his eyes down. "Not possible within the present state of our technology."

Kes Satrick Kes spoke for the first time. His voice was flat, crisp, and precise: "I note a symmetry in both of the world-views here. Phaethon's view is that he is being persecuted by an alien sophotechnology, which he supposes to be sophisticated enough to alter or falsify the evidence to the contrary. The other view, which the testimony of the record supports, is that Phaethon, in desperation, falsified his memory and erased his own knowledge that he had done so. Both world-views adequately explain the appearances, and are self-consistent. Occam's razor urges us, when two explanations adequately explain the phenomena, to choose the one requiring fewer hypothetical assumptions. Naturally, I estimate that it is more likely that a man could falsify himself (which is something we see all the time) than that an alien, utterly unknown civilization (which is something we have never seen) could adopt a hostile posture toward us; single out Phaethon for attack; and yet be familiar enough with all of our protocols and systems to forge multiple sealed records and memories without being detected by the Earthmind. Without additional evidence, I will assume Phaethon's version of events is false.

A Noetic examination of his brain directly could provide the additional evidence we need to reverse this opinion. But I anticipate that Phaethon, in order to be consistent with his present beliefs, will continue to refuse such an examination."

Phaethon said, "The threat is real, even if I am the only one who sees it. I dare not reestablish a direct connection to the Mentality. The Nothing Sophotech has acted; I saw the results just now, practically in front of our eyes." But his voice was low, his eye was dull; the look of man who knows, beyond question, that he will not be believed.

The other Hortators did not bother to make so careful an analysis as Kes Satrick Kes. Most did not even bother to record a speech, or proffer a supporting opinion, but simply announced their support for an endless, permanent, and absolute exile to be imposed on Phaethon.

Helion's voice came, once again, quietly into his ear: "You are clearly suffering from a self-imposed paranoid fantasy. Open your deep structure mind to the Noetic probe, and we will be able to undo the harm. We can redact these false beliefs entire out of your mind and memory. This may be your last chance, son; the Hortators are voting."

Phaethon shook his head. He was not hallucinating.

An eerie thought struck him: what if, every time the invasions of this external foe had been detected, the victims had concluded that their memories were false, and had had them redacted? There could be a thousand unreported cases of such attacks, or a million.

Helion's voice, tense and anguished, came to his ear again: "Do not refuse me, son! Let me change your mind! I have a reconstruction program standing by; your false memories and beliefs can be removed in a moment. Don't end your life as Hyacinth Septimous ended his! I am begging you now, son. In the name of my love for you, I beg."

"No, Father. I will not change my mind. Not about this, not about my ship, not about my dream. And, as you love me, I ask you to understand me."

A pause.

Helion's voice: "I am afraid that I do, my brave, foolishly

brave, beloved son. I fear I understand all too well—" The voice was cut off. Phaethon returned his attention to the scene around him.

Silence was in the chamber. One of the voters had paused to ask him a question.

"Please repeat the question," said Phaethon, "My mind was ... elsewhere." He wanted to turn his head and look at his father, but he dared not.

It was Ao Prospero Circe of the Zooanthropic Incarnation Coven. "None of the considerations of my fellow Horators, whether you bring war or hope, whether you are sane or insane, truthful or self-deluded, matters as much to me as this one question: Why did you pick your name?"

Phaethon said, "You are asking me about what? My name?"

"Of course. To know the true name of a thing is to have power over it. You named yourself after Phaethon, the child of the sun god who overreached himself. In his pride and folly, he demanded to drive his father's chariot, the sun, across the sky; but he could not control the horses. He flew high and he flew low, burning sky and burning earth, till all the world cried out for Jupiter to destroy him with a lightning bolt. Why did you name yourself after this image of recklessness and pride?"

Phaethon smiled. "That I can answer. I know the truth about that myth. Phaethon did not burn the world; after all, the world is still here, is it not? No. Jupiter was afraid when he saw a mortal at the reigns of the mighty sun chariot, and he felt jealous when he saw a mere man driving the divine steeds of fire. Jupiter was afraid that something might go wrong. Rather than give the youth a chance to prove himself, he shot down and killed the charioteer during takeoff. Before he ever even began to fly. What's the moral of the story? In my version, maybe the moral is that one should not let gods, or people who think that they can play gods, anywhere near where the lightning bolts are kept."

The Warlock smiled and turned to Nebuchednezzar. "If I vote to favor Phaethon, shall I be the only one? Nonetheless

I must favor him; he is a dreamer, and perhaps he is a paranoid madman; but his dream and his madness are stronger than our sanity and truth."

So the last vote was cast.

Nebuchednezzar Sophotech had raised his mace. "Phae-thon, once of Rhadamanthus, the votes have been counted. Have you anything to say before we pass sentence?"

"Yes," said Phaethon. "Not a statement, but a question. Do you believe I am right? You, personally, Nebuchednezzar?"

"It is outside of the duties of my office to offer personal opinions. This College was designed to preserve the human spirit, human sanity, and human dignity in the face of tremendous technological changes, changes which could easily abolish those things you living creatures find precious. There are certain things humans value for their own sake; and about such things the logic of machines has nothing to say. It is important that the College of Hortators remain in human hands; it is important that my opinions not determine the outcome of Hortator decisions."

"Then why did you oppose the Lakshmi Agreement?"

"Those agreements were hastily drafted and ill-advised. The College is intended to urge the public to avoid the self-destructive abuse of our technology, and to ostracize those who do not adhere to those standards of decent conduct. In ruling against you, the College may have overstepped the boundaries of its mandate. They are not here to prevent war but to prevent corruption. The military arm of the Golden Oecumene, the man you know as Atkins, it is his job to prevent war. You did not seem to be corrupt, and to stop you required the Golden Oecumene to undergo the largest mass-amnesia in recorded history. This also was ill-advised.

"Perhaps you are unaware of the unrest and the anger which came when you opened your memory box, Phaethon. The memories of the public opened also. Many business affairs, love affairs, conversations, works of art and works of labor had been forgotten, being too closely associated with your famous effort. And all this came rushing back, and people realized how much the Hortators had convinced them to

give up. Far too much. At Lakshmi, this danger was foreseen and accepted, risking the prestige of this College in a way I would never have advised. Was the risk worth the gain? I will not say. Where matters of human spirit are involved, human opinion should be given wide deference."

Phaethon said, "You have not answered. I built a ship to conquer the stars. Am I in the right?"

Nebuchednezzar looked grave. "Eventually the human race must migrate and spread. That is a natural state of living, things. At Lakshmi, I thought you were in the right. Now I do not know. You are quicker than other manor-born to resort to violence when under stress; you have done so twice, trying to steal Daphne out of her coffin. The record shows that you have falsified your own memories in order to attempt a fraud upon this College. Someone should certainly father more races of mankind among the stars; but to be a good father requires honesty and patience, qualities you seem to lack. I may not agree with the decision of the College in this case, but their judgment about you is not irrational, given these facts, and I will not publicly speak against them. I cannot support you. I cannot help you."

Nebuchednezzar concluded: "No one can help you. We shall advise the public to adopt a total and unending ban on all dealings with you, including the sale of basic necessities, food, water, air, and computer time. No one shall render aid, comfort, or shelter, sell or buy good or services, nor donate any charity. This sentence is not subject to review but intended to be final and absolute. I hereby pronounce—"

Harrier was standing next to Phaethon, staring absently-mindedly up at the windows, hands clasped behind his back, lips pursed as if engrossed in an amusing puzzle, rocking back and forth on his heels. No one was paying attention to him. So it came as something of a shock, when he whistled shrilly through his teeth, and waved his hand overhead. "Yoo-hoo! Mr. Speaker! I have something to ask the College!"

Nebuchednezzar said, "You are very seriously out of order. And I cannot say that I approve of your decision to communicate with me at this time, place and fashion, rather than

communing directly with my through-region via the Southeast Overmind-group."

"Aha. Never argue in front of the children, is that the idea?" He turned to the assembled College. "Gentlemen! I have a simple request. My investigation into the alleged attack on Phaethon is not yet complete. And I may have a few routine follow-up questions I would like to ask him, but I cannot do so if his term of exile is so absolute that I cannot even call him, or conduct a Noetic examination. Will you grant an exception to your ban, please, and allow computer services, communication, and telepresentation to continue to serve

him?"

Phaethon, for some reason, was looking at Gannis when Harrier spoke. Gannis had never been able to control his expression without artificial aids, which, presently, in a scene adhering to Silver-Gray protocols, he did not have. So Phaethon saw a look of eager hostility across his face.

Phaethon did not have a psychometric routine in his personal thoughstspace, nor was he trained in Warlock-style controlled intuitions. So he had no way to confirm his hunch. But he did have a hunch. Looking at the hunger on Gannis's face, Phaethon thought: He's one of them.

The Enemy (whoever they were) would be glad that Phaethon would still have access to the Mentality. As soon as he logged on, as soon as he made a phone call, or telecast a ghost, they would know where he was; the moment he accessed the Middle Dreaming, a snare program (like the one that had been associated with Scaramouche's sword) could trigger him into the Deep Dreaming. And in the Deeper Dreaming would be something like a memory box, but open, and with another set of memories, not his, inside. It would be death, and worse than death. His soul would be consumed and replaced.

Nebuchednezzar said, "I am certain the College, as a public-spirited body, will do all it can to aid a police investigation, even one which seems as routine as this one. Without objection, so ordered."

Harrier turned and shook hands with Phaethon, whispering,

"Don't give up the fight, old man. If you hadn't been mugged, I shouldn't ever have been created, so I have quite a fond spot in my heart for you. Go to Talaimannar in Ceylon...." Phaethon was turning his head to see if he could get one last word, one last look, to his father. He also wanted to hear the rest of Harrier's message, and wanted to warn Harrier, or someone, about Gannis. But Nebuchednezzar brought the heel of his mace down on the floor with a sharp crack of noise, confirming the sentence of the College of Hortators.

Phaethon was perhaps expecting that he would be led from the imaginary chamber by images of footmen or bailiffs. Certainly that would have been in keeping with Silver-Gray protocols and standards. But Phaethon was no longer considered Silver-Gray. He was no longer considered anything. Neither the Eleemosynary Hospice nor the local telepresentation service felt any obligation to continue treating him according to Silver-Gray standards or any other standards.

The moment the mace touched the floor, the scene vanished. He was back in the casket, disoriented. His thoughts seemed to moving slowly and stupidly without Rhadmanthus there to assist him. Was this what shock was?

And the liquid was draining out of the casket, leaving Phaethon cramped and bent on the inner surface. Then, just as suddenly, jarring and dizzying, the gravity spin slowed and braked, so that his body was crushed up against the medical wires and in-jacks of the left-hand side of the casket. The lid hissed open (blinding him with outside light) before the centrifuge had come to a complete halt, so that he was practically flung out.

His thoughts were still confused; he was trying to remember what the last thing was that he wanted to say to his father...

Phaethon floated in free-fall, clinging to the rim of the casket, his legs stuck out, pointing toward the carpet, but not

"down." He felt the pressure in his temples, the beat of blood in his face, as the fluids in his body distributed themselves evenly throughout his body instead of falling to a accustomed position near his feet.

A maintenance remote, shaped like a stark cylinder crowned with telescoping arms, was hovering near him, held in place by a tension of magnetic forces. "The Eleemosynary Composition thanks you for your patronage, but no longer wishes to rent this space. The standard rental agreement allows for instant expulsion of those who fall under Hortator osctracization, without notice or advertisement. If you do not immediately take steps to leave the premises, the unit is instructed to regard you as a trespasser, and to join the Constabulary and to eject you by force."

Phaethon did not respond or move. He had known what he was risking; he had known what exile might mean. But the reality, now that it was here, seemed more than he could bear. It took him a moment to draw his breath and muster his strength.

The moment was apparently too long a time. The remote opened its mechanical arms like a giant spider. The hull of the machine changed, and now bore gold-and-blue police emblems. "This unit has uploaded all proper training, oaths, and experience, been checked against the Constabular Academy on channel 14, and has graduated and been awarded a position as sergeant-at-arms of the municipal commandry. I am now authorized to use force against you if you resist. This place in which you are is not your property; you have been asked politely to depart."

Better to walk than to be hauled.

"I'm going. I'll be happy to go...." Phaethon triggered thrusters in his elbows and boots. The reaction gently thrust him down the corridor.

The remote moved in front of him, blocking his way. "Pardon me, sir. The air that you are in, unlike air on Earth, is not a natural product but is owned by the Eleemosynary Composition, and must be pumped in at the owner's expense. The Eleemosynary Composition asks that you not distribute

ejected particles throughout the Hospice corridor, or foul the air with pollutants."

"It's steam. Hot water." His teeth were clenched. Phaethon knew he should not be letting this aggravate him. But in his whole life, machines had never been anything else than unfailingly polite to him. Historical dramas always portrayed criminal sentences, executions or reconditionings, to be surrounded with grave ceremony. Not this petty harassment.

"Nonetheless, the air in this corridor does not belong to you, and you cannot eject matter into it without permission."

"As you wish."

Phaethon kicked against the carpet and pulled himself hand over hand to the air lock at the hub of the wheel-shaped hospice. Left and right, he saw that other caskets were empty. The casket doors gaped like empty windows. It gave Phaethon a feeling of desolation.

"Where is everyone?" He did not expect an answer, but he thought it would do no harm to ask.

To his surprise, the unit spoke back: "All of the guests were removed to a safe distance during the Inquest Hearing, and energy avenues and lines of fire opened by other Constabular operatives, so that, should you choose to resist, overwhelming firepower could be brought to bear against your armor, sufficient to drive you out through the walls and shielding and into space beyond."

At the hub of the hospice, he came to the door of the lock. It did not open. Nothing happened when he touched it, and it ignored his voice command. He said to the wall: "I thought you wanted me to leave."

The wall said, "There is a wheel to crank the door open manually. The Eleemosynary Composition does not wish to expend the battery cost to run the door motors."

There was no point in arguing. The cost in energy to open one door, of course, was too small to measure. But, of course, the millionth part of a gram of antimatter it would take to hire the door motor to open the valve for him was beyond his means now. Creditors had long ago taken everything.

And even had he any money, no one would take it. Not even the simpleminded circuit in a door.

Phaethon felt more exhausted (without being tired) than he had ever felt in his long life.

Yet he had been exiled, so far, for only a few minutes. Years lay ahead. Grimly, he took the wheel in his hand and cranked.

Phaethon passed through the lock, and came out into the airlessness of the spaceport. The place was a wide sphere, with openings to the east and west leading to other segments of the ring-city. Nadirward was an entrance to the beanstalk. Phaethon could see, from the gold ornamentation around the rim buildings, that this space elevator was one of the larger, old-fashioned ones, with cars the size of warehouses, stocked and staffed with luxuries from the Middle Sixth Era, a time of hedonism and elegance.

Phaethon directed a signal from his armor to the remote. "This is municipal space. My I use my thrusters?"

"Feel free," replied the unit.

Steam ejected from the armor joints did not produce powerful thrust, only enough to move him a few meters away from the hospice. Then he triggered the more powerful mass-drivers, which lined the back and legs of the armor. Thin parallel lines of energy propelled him forward.

He dove through the weightless space to the edge of the rim. He dared not dive in; the drivers could not support his armor in flight, not against the earthly gravity that obtained in the middle and lower sections of the space elevator. But he could use the drive mechanisms in the same way he had before, to generate a magnetic field by reacting against energy units that lined the inner walls of the space elevator, and lower himself eventually to the ground. To do this, he needed to reconstruct the circuits in his armor he originally had used to propel himself upward. He anchored himself near the rim of the well with a magnetic line of force, and ordered his suit to adjust.

Phaethon looked overhead. With the Middle Dreaming absent, he could not tell which space elevator this was, or where

on Earth its foundations rested. There was no map present in his mind. There were no signs posted in any language he could read, because none of the thought glyphs on the walls nearby could trigger any reactions in the language centers of his brain, not when he was shut out of the Mentality. Was this the direction he wanted to go? He was not sure. (Did he even have a direction, when he had no place to go? Again, he was not sure.)

His eyes fell. Beyond his feet, he could see the vast well of the space elevator.

The windows and ports in the elevator's depths formed concentric rings of light, level upon level, balcony upon balcony, receded to the vanishing point. Approaching in the distance, the size of an ocean liner, ornamented and plush, came the great gold and crystal and ivory car of the space elevator. Beneath the dome on the car's ceiling, he could see the ponds and formularies and tables of a Sixth-Era mensal performance restaurant.

Phaethon looked on sadly. He would have loved to take this armor off and rest at leisure, descending in plush Sixth Era comfort until he arrived at the base of the tower. He could see, through the windows, white linen, surfaces of silver material, a group in festive costumes reclining in feast webs, pleasure amplifiers like crowns on their heads. It was strange to think that, somewhere, people were still celebrating a masquerade; somewhere there were smiles, and good cheer, and good company.

Now he would have welcomed even that horrid Nonan-thropomorphic Aesthetic elevator car, the car shaped like a bug's stomach, which he had spurned on his way up here. Now that he could not have it.

And suppose he should reach the ground, where then?

Was it true he would never see his ship again? (Was it true he was never going to see Daphne again? Either one of them? Even the doll-wife had seemed appealing, in her own way...)

The Constable remote now floated down near him. "The owners of this area of the dock no longer wish to have you

as a patron, and ask for your immediate removal."

What was taking his armor so long to find the proper configurations and anchor points? When he had flown upward, the armor had required only a moment. Of course, then Rhad-amanthus had probably been helping.

Phaethon said with leaden voice: "Will the owners of the space elevator let me go down the shaft, so that I can leave?"

"Certainly. The laws against trespass always allow a trespasser enough right-of-way to depart."

He pulled his legs so that his body turned a slow somersault, end over end, to bring his face pointing downward in the shaft. There he floated, face-downward, ready to trigger an acceleration. He drifted out over the rim of the pit, with nothing below him but vacuum.

"Be careful!" said the Constable.

Instead of triggering the acceleration, Phaethon, warned by the Constable unit, brought up his internal read outs. Now he found what was taking his armor such a long time to find the proper configurations to use the energy units in the walls. There were none. There was no answering reaction from the energy units. The magnetics in Phaethon's armor were sliding every which way, catching nothing. The system signals were bouncing, being ignored. A spurt from his wrist jet pushed him gently back way from the rim.

"What?! What is this?!"

The Constable said, "The energy units lining the space elevators wall, which you have used hitherto to motivate your armor in this area, are no longer available for your use. They are owned by the Vafnir Energy Effort, and have been instructed not to accept field-manipulation command from the circuits in your armor."

Another harassment. It was too much to bear. He forced his voice into a low and level calm: "But then how am I to get down?"

"I am instructed to inform you that there is a service staircase reaching two-thirds of the way to the ground, and maintenance ways and ladders for the remainder."

Phaethon felt a dull sense of shock. He did not know the

distance to the atmosphere, or to the surface of the earth, from here. There was no almanac in his mind to provide him with the data on the height and position of the space elevator. But he knew it was a staggering distance. Climbing down from the tallest mountain ever made was nothing compared to climbing down from geosynchronous orbit.

He hazarded a rough guess: "It will take me months! Years, if I stop to sleep."

"Nonetheless. That is your only legal course of action."

Phaethon rotated his floating body to peer once more over the edge of the rim. He could see the energy units, like lines in a Greek column, descending away from him, infinitely.

There would be no danger until gravity started to reassert itself. He could just drift down, slowly at first, never noticing the gently mounting acceleration, never seeing the danger until it was too late, until he was speeding down, faster and faster, with no way to stop himself. No way except to engage the energy units with a magnetic grappling field. Would they truly fail to support him?

Surely there was an emergency circuit to catch falling objects, to prevent damage to the bottom, if nothing else. Surely the Sophotechs, who were so wise, would not simply stand by idly, and watch him fall and watch him die? Would they protect Vafnir's property rights so jealously, when a mere flick of a switch to the energy units, a few micrograms of power, would save a human life? Wouldn't Vafnir's lack of action be a crime?

Foolish thoughts. No law would protect a man who voluntarily walked off a ledge.

Suicide, after all, was not against the law in the Golden Oecumene.

Curled into a ball like a fetus, barely able to keep his eyes on his target, Phaethon ejected a few desultory squirts of steam and bobbed over to the air lock entrance of the service stair. The air lock was the size of a coffin. It whined as it cycled. The atmosphere beyond was thin, high in inert gasses, meant to maintain basic pressure, not meant for humans to breathe. The stairwell beyond was dark, narrow, and barren.

Stairs in microgravity?! Obviously no one had ever bothered to program this segment of the service access way to react intelligently to the surrounding circumstances.

There was hardly enough room to maneuver. He kicked off the door and fell to the next landing, rotating at the halfway. His foot hit the far wall with a dull clang. He kicked off again. He fell down to the next landing. The far wall clanged under his boot. The echo resounded down the long, long, shaft underfoot, a large, hollow, endlessly empty noise.

Already he was exhausted. And there were roughly fifteen million flights of stairs left to go.

He kicked off the wall again. The metallic echoes clanged through the emptiness.

THE DESCENT

Slowly, gradually, the weight grew heavier and heavier. Slowly, the air grew heavier. Slowly, the burden in his mind grew heavier.

There were things he did to keep despair and grief at bay. All he had to do, he told himself, was think about it later. Let him get down the tower first. Let him get to Talaimannar in Ceylon. Harrier Sophotech must have had something in mind when he named that city; Phaethon had that as his goal, as his hope. He saw no further.

Flying, one long kick after another, down the first hundred flights of stairs, he had exhaustively inventoried the macro-commands and routines loaded into his personal thought-space, the vast mental hierarchy of (now useless) controls in his armor, the amount and composition of the nanomachinery in his black cloak and skin garment.

Then he busied himself by arranging a priority list for his cloak and inner garment, which he expected could shelter, feed, water, and nurse him. He went through a system check on the armor. When he was done with that, because he had nothing else to do, he did it again. Then a third time ...

There came a time when he had to skip; a push of the toe was enough to send him down the next flight of stairs. Each landing slapped his feet more heavily. Then there came a time

when he had to walk. He walked, he marched. Then he trudged. Then he plodded. The weight seemed always to grow more. Each time he thought that he was finally far enough down the tower length to suffer the normal Earth gravity, the next hour or so of descent seemed only to make it all heavier.

For some of the flights of stairs, he rested his legs, letting the leg motors do all the work, folding his legs in lotus position on the open belly plate of the armor's midriff. But once his priority list was done, and he calculated the drain on his suit energy, he realized that the batteries could not be recharged indefinitely, and perhaps should be conserved.

But conserved for how long? No one was ever going to sell him a gram of antimatter again. Perhaps he could build a simple solar converter out of the nanomaterial in his cloak. But was this cost-effective? He had only a limited amount of nonrecyclable cloak material. Clearly he had to use it for some things and not others, such as the production of food and water for himself.

He told himself not to think about the future. Get to Ta-laimannar in Ceylon. That was the goal.

He shut off his leg motors, folded his cape, and walked down the stairs using his legs.

Down more stairs he trod. And then more, and more.

The last hour before he slept, he began accumulating carbon out of the air around him into his cloak. The weight began to slow him, but he spent some of his power to increase the action of his leg motors to tolerate the extra burden. He stopped to rest on a landing, consulted the thousands of ecological programs he had loaded in his thoughtspace, and built a place to sleep out of the nanomaterial of his cloak.

His little encampment spread across the landing and up several steps. He had accumulated enough carbon, nitrogen, and water vapor out of the air to combine complex amino acids in a life-filter canister he grew from his cloak. He car-

peted the landing with soft moss on which he could rest, and his vapor canister, converted to a condenser, and placed at the top stair, was able to put out a little streamlet of water. This trickled down the mossy stairs, and fell into his helmet. Inside the helmet he had his nanomachines construct a nuclear recycler to break up the water, store the hydrogen, and release the fresh oxygen back into the atmosphere. The mildly higher partial pressure of oxygen refreshed him without leading to drunkenness.

He decided that it would not be too wasteful of his limited material to construct a few simple microorganisms, which he introduced into the streambed, and which he programmed to a symbiotic interrelationship with the moss of the stair. Nanomachines gathered nitrogen from the air and herded it together into floating spores; inside the spores, other machines rearranged the materials into simple nutrients to keep the moss green and healthy during the night, and to convert the moss into sugars and carbohydrates, starches and vitamins, so that Phaethon could have a bland, if nourishing, meal in the morning. Wastes from the groin piece of his armor he buried and filtered in a mound of moss which he then dotted with perfumed flowers; and the recycling spores gathered here like flies, to draw out elements to feed the moss. There was no sunlight here, of course. The energy for his little ecosystem came from his armor, for he had adjusted the outer plates to radiate in the infrared, and draped the whole affair in a ther-mophilic fungus organism like pale seaweed, to photosynthe-size heat energy and start the simple food chain.

The control hierarchies within the armor, designed to run the complex interconnected machine-and-organic ecologies of a starship, would have had more than enough capacity to track and control this tiny plot of moss ten steps across; but Phaethon did not have a responder, or a radio set, or a point-to-point system that a child could buy for a pfennig from a thought shop, and so there was no way for any command to reach from the suit-mind to the microorganisms. Phaethon had to content himself with a crude, old-fashioned binary chemical tag system, loading each cell with little viruses to

disintegrate them if they passed outside of the area, or a time, or the behavior, defined by his preset chemical cues.

He folded himself in spun silk polymer sheets, and sat on other sheets inflated with air to form a pillow beneath. He propped the armor up, so it sat facing him, and the warmth from the glowing red breastplate and vambraces was like a camp stove.

But he could not sleep, not a proper sleep. There were times when he was semiconscious; he did some of that hallucinating dawn-age men called dreaming.

In one hallucination, he saw a bride (or perhaps it was a bird of fire) still moving feebly, lowered in a coffin into the waiting earth, and dirt was shoveled onto her casket, while little scraping noises and soft cries for help rose up from inside. In another hallucination, he saw a mansion built upon a cloud, floating away, ever farther away, forever, now out of reach, burnt to black and smoking rubble. In a third hallucination, he saw a black sun looking down upon an airless world coated with blood and black debris.

Phaethon jerked his head upright. His face was pale with sweat; his heart thundered in his chest. The headless armor, burning red, and draped with seaweed like a drowned ghost from some children's sea tale sat facing him. All was silent. There was something wrong with his dreaming.

There were supposed to be no nightmares in the Golden Oecumene.

Phaethon's natural sleep cycle could not correctly integrate his various artificial modes and levels of consciousness with the natural sections of his neurology. Little corrections and integrations were needed. Always before, he had had Rhad-amanthus to do this task. He had a similar system on board the Phoenix Exultant. Without such a system, his subconscious mind would begin to act much like a dawn-age man's or a primitivist's, with self-sustaining mental actions neither checked, nor overruled, nor brought to light for inspection. His mind could run away from him now, showing him weird scenes as he slept. Always before he had been alert and lucid as he had slept. Always before, one of Rhadamanthus's

monitors could have warned him about dangerous subconscious influences, strange emotional conjunctions, growing mental disorders. The natural checks and balances nonartifi-cial minds might have had to protect themselves from neurosis, Phaethon might not necessarily have. The more complex and the more delicate artificial systems in his brain now would operate without supervision and without repair. What if he fed commands into his thoughtspace while he slept? What if the ordinary signal traffic from the artificial sections of his nervous system had odd or unexpected side effects on his subconscious?

He worried but saw no easy answer. At some point, somehow, he would have to get access to a self-consideration program. If he logged on to the Mentality to retrieve one, his enemies might find him. Perhaps he could somehow build one of his own, once he reached ... ?

Reached where? His only "destination" was an arbitrary one, selected because having a meaningless goal was better than having none. Nothing waited for him there.

Phaethon looked from right to left, at the little red-lit plot of moss on which he sat. This was the only home he had now. Rhadamanthus Mansion was gone. His low-rent cube was gone, too. The landlord there certainly used the same standard language in his rental contracts that the Eleemosynary Hospice used. Phaethon had already been evicted. He had no possessions in that room, except a box of cleaning dust. He recalled now that even the medical equipment had been leased.

A second memory surfaced. The organs in his body, the thick synthetic texture of his skin, and the other changes to his body which he had thought were cheap artificial replacements, were, of course, nothing of the kind. His body had been redesigned by the surgical processes specially commissioned and created by Orient Overmind-group, one of the En-nead, at tremendous cost. His skin and organs were designed to withstand the shock of accelerations, the degeneration of microgravity, and the various radiation hazards, vertigo, deprivations and other emergencies the conditions of space de-

manded. His body had been designed in tandem with the inner lining of his suit.

Phaethon shook his head in dismay. Would this body remain fit and healthy under normal earthly gravity? Before it had been stored under constant medical attention. His skin was insensitive; his eyesight seemed dull and limited without the artificial enhancements he used to enjoy. He had sacrificed everything, even the normal healthy function of his normal body to his dream of space travel. That dream had been his spirit. What did one call a body after its spirit had fled? There were words from the old days: hulk; relic; corpse.

A third memory suddenly surfaced. He recalled why he had been there, in that filthy small cube of a rented room. It was not merely that it was cheap. It had been near a spaceport. Phaethon had rented it fully expecting to be back under way again before the end of December. He had wanted to be within a few minutes' ride of a dock, so that he could sail immediately back to Mercury Equilateral, where the Phoenix Exultant waited. It had been for a quick departure.

Bitterness stung his throat till he laughed.

He had not slept well: but, at least, some of his old memories were being organized so that he could retrieve them now.

Phaethon closed his eyes and tried to sleep again. He dreamt a world was burning far below him.

He rested uneasily. Eventually he rose, gathered his helmet, drank, ate a sparse meal from the floor. Then he dissolved his little stream, and rolled his miniature landscape of moss and spore and microorganism back into his cloak, shed the extra mass as water, and used the water to absorb the waste-heat of the nanorecycling process, and eject it as steam. Then his armor cleaned itself and swirled up around his body, lifting metal plates into place. He swirled some medical nanom-aterial into his mouth to clean his teeth and restore his blood-chemistry balance.

Phaethon drew a breath and closed his eyes. He did not have a formulation rod, or any working midbrain coordination circuits, but he attempted to embrace three phases of Warlock

meditation he had learned from Daphne during one lazy year off they had taken together. It was crude, but he felt his nervous system, parasympathetic system, and the pseudo-organic circuitry in the various levels of his mind reach a balance. His eyes were calmer when he opened them again.

Then he turned and looked back at his little encampment, scanning it to be sure he had left no moss or mess behind.

He smiled. Was a life of solitude so bad? His little camp here had been crude and rough, without luxury, to be sure. But it could not have been so different from the way his ancestors had lived in the prehistoric wilderness. Could it?

The descent from the space tower took fewer weeks than he expected. His sleep was irregular; he woke exhausted. But he persisted. When strange moods or sudden despair came upon him, he attempted Warlock meditation techniques, and used the armor he wore in the place of a formulary wand. The armor lacked the proper biofeedbacks, but it allowed him to persevere.

In some places, the descent was easy to expedite; in others, he was hindered. The region of the tower from fifty to sixty thousand feet was owned by an old friend of Helion's, a Dark-Gray ex-Constable named Temer Sixth Lacedemonian. Temer had ambitions to become one day a Peer himself, and did not wish to appear to favor Phaethon's case, and so, during that whole length of the tower, Phaethon was herded and harassed by armed remotes, and not permitted to sleep on Temer's territory, and hardly permitted to pause. And Temer must have guessed Phaethon's patience to a nicety; just when Phaethon was fed up, and reaching his hand up to close his faceplate (so that he could stop and rest, while enjoying the spectacle of the remotes bouncing useless stun-shocks against his invulnerable armor) it was at that moment Temer's remotes dropped back, and allowed him a few hours' overdue rest. The episode caused Phaethon some grim satisfaction, and

perhaps a spark of distant hope. There were limits to what the Hortator's exile could impose on him, limits he could influence.

For other stretches, the going was much easier. Phaethon had been dreading reaching the tower segments that lacked stairs, and imagined aching limbs fatigued by endless hours of hand-over-hand climbing. The reality was much more pleasant.

The maintenance ladders dropped down sheer wells. Phaethon could attach himself by diamond-fiber cord spun out of available atmospheric carbon. He fashioned a system of pulleys and carabiners, which could lower him great distances quickly. He grew motors to control the arrangement, so that he could descend while he slept, albeit this used more battery energy than he would have liked. The suit's gauntlets he programmed to untie and to retrieve the rope material periodically, so that Phaethon hardly lost any nanomaterial mass. The suit-mind was flexible enough to understand orders to find the next stanchion and retie the belaying knots. Thus Phaethon could sleep with his hands folded over his chest beneath his breastplate, safe as a papoose in a backpack, while the armor rappelled down one length of rungs after another. Many miles of descent were quickly consumed in this fashion. And he needed the rest. His growing mental fatigue, his lack of a proper self-consideration circuit, was forcing him to spend more and more time asleep.

The worst section was a maintenance well without rungs, meant only for robots using magnetic grapples. Phaethon thought he probably had the right to ask to be conveyed down past this segment, since the law against trespass did not require a trespasser to depart by ways that were dangerous or unhealthy. But a notion of pride or zeal made him go forward. Or perhaps his rashness came from certain mood-alteration stimulants he had attempted that week. The Warlock meditations were becoming less effective, and Phaethon was experimenting with a crude Noetic system he was trying to construct out of the helmet circuits, to see if he could do to himself, manually, some of the delicate nerve work and sleep

integrations Rhadamanthus had used to do to restore mental balance.

This morning's attempt at sleep integration had left him giddy and overconfident. He had been sure he could design a parachute out of his cloak, with sufficient lifting surface to slow his fall; the armor was too heavy, and he had merely dropped it down the shaft. The armor, of course, banged and rang against the shaft as it dropped, chiming like a gong the size of the moon, but was utterly unscratched by the five-thousand-foot plunge. Phaethon, on the other hand, had scraped against the side of the well, spilled air out of his parachute shroud, spun, recovered, tumbled, almost recovered, and broke both his legs upon landing.

In infinite agony, he had crawled and crawled, trying to find his armor, dragging his broken legs behind him. Finally he found it, and gasped out a command to turn on the emergency medical program before collapsing. The armor had swarmed across his body and fitted itself around him. Na-nomachines inside the suit lining had aided the biomechan-isms in his legs to regenerate the bone tissues. He lay in half-drugged discomfort for hours while his body repaired itself. The special construction of his space-adapted bones slowed the process, and the suit-mind had to make several hesitant guesses about how to proceed. (The medical routines and partial minds aboard the Phoenix Exultant were not, of course, available to him. The armor was a wonder of engineering, but it had not been designed to operate in solitude.)

A Constable remote came to hover over his dazed body, warning him not to drop dangerous objects from high places, lest he be sued for negligence.

The Constable made no move to help him, of course. Phaethon had no insurance, and no doctor would risk joining him in exile.

He lay on his back, blankly staring upward, wondering at his own stupidity, and vowing to touch no mood alterants of any kind again. For a man familiar with the power to project his self-image instantly anywhere into the Mentality, or to telepresent himself in reality anywhere there were manne-

quins, to lie immobile, fixed in place, helpless, was torture. He imagined an angel whose wings had been torn off.

That episode had consumed almost half of his available supply of nanomaterial (it was absorbed into his body as medical constituents) severely drained his suit batteries, lost him half a day of travel.

The best section of descent had had, for its maintenance way, merely a track of traction-variable plates set in a long slide, spiraling down the whole circumference of the tower at a steep slope. The metal in the plates were atomically organized to permit easier motion in one direction and speed than another, with resistance variables to control the rate of descent.

Phaethon saw the opportunity at once. He formed his cloak into a belly sled with magnetic elements that would be agitated by the action of the traction fields; that agitation could heat water stored through tiny capillaries and veins he grew into his cloak; the heat would drive a steam turbine he grew like a lump across his shoulders; the turbine would recharge his batteries, while the passing wind cooled the circulating water. Most of the nanoconstruction could be recycled.

By the time he slid to the bottom of the long slide, Phaethon found that he had lost only four hundred grams of nanomaterial in unrecoverables; but his battery power was restored to full strength.

He dissolved the belly sled with a pang of farewell. It had not been an elegant engineering solution. Nonetheless, it was with some pleasure that Phaethon could add to the inventory of his resources and possessions that he had so exhaustively noted days before the entry: potential energy (position above

the earth).

Below a certain point, he began to hear, through the walls, the creaking and singing of the wind shear against the sides of the infinite tower. He kept expecting to find some hatch or window to the outside. Perhaps he thought his experiment at parachuting would have better success if he were not jumping down a narrow tube; certainly it would be easier to fall thirty or forty thousand feet rather than walk down thirty or forty

thousand feet of stair. But no window interrupted the solitude of this dark stair.

Days, weeks, fortnights went by. But even seemingly endless time eventually must end.

At the bottom of the tower, the maintenance hatch came out upon a concourse.

He paused at the door to change an entry in his suit log. He removed "potential energy" as a possible resource, for, at ground level it was zero.

Looking at his resources log, Phaethon stood a moment in thought.

In the negative column, however, he made several entries:

"No father. My real father has been replaced by a relic, who was one of the conspirators who worked my downfall. I must count him my enemy."

He half expected Rhadamanthus to come on-line and remark with rueful humor that this was somewhat unfair of Phaethon, whose father was, after all, a more complex individual than that. No remark came.

"No manor, no sophotechnology. I am limited to merely human intelligence. My enemies have intellects like unto gods at their command."

Then, more grimly: "No more spare life. My next death is final."

And: "No wife. My love has slain herself, and left a puppet, programmed to love me, to mock me."

The last entry: "Alien creatures hunt me like a dog, to kill me, while an ignorant and ignoble world rollicks with gaiety and festive cheer, unseeing, uncaring, and unable, by law, to see me die. My location is a matter of public record..."

No. No, wait. Phaethon erased that last ideogram-gestalt line. His location was secret, was it not? In the assets column, he noted that it was still the middle of a Masquerade. He could move unseen, undetected.

Or could he? Anyone with access to the Mentality could look up Phaethon's last known location, at the top of the endless tower. It was not hard to calculate his rate of descent; and, every time he had stepped into an area where a no-

trespassing injunction was flagged, his position would be public knowledge again. Temer Lacedaimonius, for example, had dogged his progress.

So the enemies had to be here. Somewhere on the other side of this door. Perhaps very near.

With a deliberate motion of his hand, he pushed open the door.

Beyond was light, noise, the sounds of crowds. Phaethon blinked, blinded for a moment, unable to make himself step into the rectangle of light framed by the doorway.

There was a sharp noise in the near distance, like the shot of rail gun, or perhaps the snap of a short-range energy weapon. Phaethon, certain that his enemies had found him, flinched back, hand before his face.

He crouched there in the dark, waiting for pain.

None came.

He realized that it had just been some noise from the crowd of people in the concourse beyond; a slap of water in a fountain, or the bark of a child's ear-toy. Or perhaps the snap of a circuit in some ill-tended machine. In a world hidden by sense-filters, there was little need to make all noise muffled, or to keep all public engines in repair.

He tried to lower his hands, to straighten up, but the sensation gripped his throat for a long, shameful moment: loneliness, self-pity, fear, the degrading physical terror that he would be killed, and die the final death.

Mingled with this was the more subtle oppression of knowing he had no place to go, no home, no shelter, and no friend—and no real destination....

That moment passed. With a snort, Phaethon straightened up. He sardonically added an entry to his negative asset column: "More easily frightened than expected."

In his asset column, he noticed the listing of how much directed energy per square inch his armor could withstand. Then he uttered a harsh laugh. "Good luck to you, my assassins," he murmured half-aloud. They would need an energy output equal to a b-type star even to scratch him; they could blow the planet to asteroids beneath his feet without even

jarring him. Even if they pushed him into a pit of frictionless, superconductive slime, his internal ecological structures would remain intact for years upon years.

And yet, the enemy must be aware of all this. They would be prepared. A charge of antimatter would burn through his armor, as it would through any normal atomic structure, heavy or light.

With Sophotechs helping them, these enemies, whoever they were, could outthink him, anticipate his moves, create better weapons, have more resources at their command

No one would raise a hand to help him. No one else even believed these foes existed.

In the positive assets column, he added, grimly, with no trace of a smile: "And I alone, out of a whole world of deluded and forgetful men, know and recall the truth about this matter. I love truth more than happiness; I will not rest."

Squinting, he stepped into the light.

Here ends volume I, to be concluded in volume II, The Phoenix Exultant.

scanned by bec Nov 2004