The Phoenix Exultant

THE NOETIC READING

Phaethon was puzzled by the sudden, warm emotion which came to him then, seeing that undaunted, gallant, sensual look in the eyes of this the woman who was a copy of his wife. She stood, hands on hips, head thrown back, smiling a sunny smile, her figure warm and golden in the candlelight behind her. Phaethon dropped his eyes and pretended to study the noetic tablet he held.

(She was not a perfect copy. This wife differed in certain details. She did not hate him, she had not left him, she had fearlessly thrown herself into exile rather than lose him...)

Phaethon scowled, staring down at the noetic tablet in his hands. He would untangle his feelings later, he decided.

He raised the unit and hesitated.

Daphne asked, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing should stop me."

She raised an eyebrow. Her green eyes glittered with skeptical puzzlement. "Nothing is stopping you."

He said, "Nothing Sophotech, I mean. The one Scaramouche told me about."

"Is this the 'Evil' Sophotech built by the ghosts of the Second Oecumene?"

"It is real." He said heavily, "I am not deluded."

Daphne sat, leaning back on the cot, and laughed, mockery mingled with relief. "Oh, darling! You really ought to go through more trashy spy-romances, violence-novels, and bellipography. All those romances make the Second Oecumene their villains. Your hallucination is not very imaginative, as they go."

Angrily: "You believe the Hortators? You think I imposed these false memories on myself?"

Smiling: "No, beloved. Oh no, my darling. I believe in you. Would I have come here otherwise ... ?"

She straightened up and said in a more businesslike tone: "I know you. You would not falsify your memories. And if, for some reason, you did, you would have invented a better story! Living with an authoress will do that for you, I guess. But I said and I do think the hallucination imposed on you really is not very imaginative. Look at the story: The Second Oecumene hated Sophotechnology so much that it was the only thing, except for murder, their laws forbade. So who built this Nothing Sophotech?"

"Scaramouche said I did. But that was only a lie to get me to open my memory casket."

"So why do you think there is a Second Oecumene Sophotech at all... ? Why couldn't the whole thing be a lie? Why couldn't your enemies just be normal people no smarter than the rest of us?"

He said nothing.

A malicious note of humor lilted in her voice: "Or is it more flattering to your vanity to think you could have only been tricked by a superintelligence ... ?"

He said harshly: "The truth is not determined by my opinions. Nor, I should add, by any other person's. I could accuse the Hortators of blind egocentrism, for not recognizing the threat; or Atkins of cowardice, for not admitting that it is real; or I could accuse anyone of anything, who did not agree with my view. Such accusations are easy. But blind men and cowards sometimes have the truth. Perhaps by accident, but they do. And so do, sometimes, men victimized by evil, alien Sophotechs built by long-dead civilizations! So we don't discover the truth of a message by examining the man who speaks it. We examine facts. Where are the facts to support your conclusion, miss?"

She stood up, her voice musical with anger, or perhaps it was battle-joy: "Fact! The testimony of Atkins. Fact again, the testimony of Eveningstar Sophotech, who says no attack by Scaramouche or any other mannequin took place on the steps of her mausoleum. Fact the third, Gannis has been maneuvering to seize your Phoenix Exultant and sell it for scrap ever since this whole imbroglio began! He's been trying to keep you penniless; why else would he help Helion in the law case against you?"

Phaethon squinted, his head cocked to one side. "Gannis ... ?"

"Gannis of Jupiter? You know? A hundred-mind self-composition with a Sophotech who thinks just like all of him? I had my ring look up all sorts of records after I rode away from Atkins' cottage. I don't think Unmoiqhotep was acting alone. Over the last thousand years Gannis has been losing money hand over fist. He took risks in his youth, back when there was only one of him. But, once he got rich, he turned himself into a committee. To get more things done at once, I suppose. But committees always tend to more and more conservative and risk-fearing strategies. Always! (You should see some of the studies Wheel-of-Life has made on the ecology of decision-making within a fixed power structure.) But He-lion, in order to become a Peer, did the opposite. He took more and more risks, and even had a son, you, Phaethon, in order to get a mind more willing to take risks than he was:"

Phaethon turned the idea over in his mind. "Gannis? You suspect that he and the Eleemosynary Composition brain-raped me while I was in the Eleemosynary public box, is that it?"

"It explains the facts. Why else was there no evidence of the Neptunian at Eveningstar mausoleum? Why else was there no evidence of a mannequin confronting you or stabbing you on the stairs? That whole fight scene was a dream. A dream forced on you."

Could the whole fight scene with Scaramouche have been a dream? The Eleemosynary Composition had been in control of all of Phaethon's sensory inputs going into the hospice box, had been carrying all of Phaethon's motions and instructions going out. Could those have been edited?

It was hard to believe. By their very nature, Compositions had no privacy. The Eleemosynary's group-mind command structure had all its thoughts on public record. How could Eleemosynary commit a crime? Or even think about committing a crime?

Gannis, on the other hand, while there were a hundred versions of him linked in parallel, was a privately held entity, and could hide his thoughts, either from his other selves, or from the public.

Phaethon said, "I don't see how Eleemosynary could have been a conspirator; nor do I see how anyone (anyone equipped with technology known to the Golden Oecumene) could have manipulated my brain while I was in the Eleemosynary hospice box without Eleemosynary noticing it."

"When you closed your armor, you were cut off from all outside influence. Eleemosynary could not have detected what was going on inside you at that time. Suppose a brain-redaction had taken place then?"

"I would have been cut off from any brain-redactor as well."

"Unless you had it inside your armor with you."

"I was carrying it with me, is that what you mean, and then it activated?"

"How is that different from a memory casket set on a timer?"

"Are we talking about a piece of hardware, physically inside the armor? Atkins was the only person who touched it. He put a probe inside before I went into the courthouse. But... No, wait, that is ridiculous. I would have found any hardware during my trip down the tower. I completely inventoried everything in my armor, from helm to heel, more than once. Unless it dissolved itself after one use.. ?"

"I am thinking it was a thoughtware virus, existing only in your mind. Perhaps someone fed it to you through the Middle Dreaming, earlier."

Was it possible?

Perhaps with a clever logic-tree, such a virus could have added false memories one at a time, while he was speaking (or thought he was speaking) to Scaramouche, and different variations of Scaramouche's responses might have been prerecorded, each variation anticipating slightly different reactions in him. A stored semi-intelligent program could have unfolded in his consciousness, feeding false signals into his senses, or even directly into his cortex, with no intervening medium. No outside source would detect the "invasion" because Phaethon was carrying the invading program inside him. Daphne's theory also would explain why neither Rhadamanthus nor Eleemosynary, later, had any memory of the virus-civilization which Phaethon remembered seeing attack all three of them. There had been no such superviruses, no attack powerful enough to fool Rhadamanthus. Instead, a very simple chain of memories, reporting that an attack had already taken place, were introduced into Phaethon, then activated.

But when had it happened? Before he climbed into the public box at the Eleemosynary hospice? Before that he had been at the courthouse. Had Atkins done it? Before the courthouse he had been in the Rhadamanthine thoughtspace, at tea, talking with Daphne, and Rhadamanthus had been running his sense-filter, and would have prevented any thought-virus from entering from the Middle Dreaming.

Unless her diary had been the carrier to introduce the virus...?

The meddling with his thoughts must have been complete before he opened his memory casket. Because, after that, he had been in Helion's section of the mansion-mind, and, after that, at the Hortator Inquest.

Or had it been complete? Perhaps something introduced earlier had still been operating. A Trojan-horse program of moderate skill could have interfered with Phaethon's attempt to download a copy of his consciousness into the public channel when he had been testifying at the Inquest. Instead of the true copy Phaethon had tried to send, a pre-recorded false version could have gone out, fed into the channel Phaethon had opened. That version was false from the beginning, and no magic supertechnology needed to be postulated to explain how records could be altered while Nebuchednezzar was reading them, simply because they had not been altered at that time. They had been concocted long before, and loaded into Phaethon's subconscious whenever the original brain-rape had taken place. (But when could that have been?)

And why Gannis?

He asked it aloud: "Why Gannis?"

"Because Gannis hates Helion. He always has. It's always been the false sun fighting the true sun; Jupiter versus Sol."

"Why?"

"The Solar Array, in less than four centuries, will be large enough to circle the equator of the sun. It will be the largest single piece of engineering ever designed. Why wouldn't He-lion put in a supercollider at that point? To you and me the difference between a small, false-dwarf sun like Burning Jupiter, and a main-sequence G-type star like Sol may be hard to grasp, like the difference between a million and a billion. But Helion, at that time, could outproduce Gannis's metal supply, could more than triple Vafnir's antimatter output, and so on and so forth. Jupiter will be exhausted of hydrogen fuel long before Sol-look at the difference in size! And, long before that, some planetary engineer-I think it was always meant to be you-would have to move the moons of dying Jupiter into new orbits around the parent Sun."

"Impossible. How could Gannis get away with it? The first noetic reading made of his mind would reveal his crime."

Daphne shrugged. "I think he had been hoping Helion would help you, or follow you into exile, or at least raise such a stink that the Peers would withdraw their invitation to elevate Helion to join them. Then, at the Grand Transcendence in December, it is not Helion's dream which takes the center stage and forefront of the minds of men, but Gannis's. Afterward, long afterward, perhaps, Gannis would be found out. But I suppose parts of his mind don't know about the crime, and they will carry on after the evil Gannis is punished. But in any case, it will be too late for Helion's dream by then. After a Transcendence, people get so wrapped up in the unity of racial thought, you know how it takes them a few hundred years to begin trusting their own judgment again; and by that time, Helion may be broke. With your death, Helion certainly will be brokenhearted."

Phaethon opened his mouth to utter an objection, but then closed it. Because the theory did make sense. It make a lot more sense than believing he was being chased, for incomprehensible reasons, by agents from a long-dead colony one thousand light-years away. Instead, the oldest reason for crime known to man-jealousy-came from someone like Gannis- a real person. The danger was understandable, human, natural.

And he knew how untrustworthy Gannis was. Had he not already betrayed Phaethon once? And yet... and yet...

"This is precisely the sort of thing Nothing would like to get me to believe, if all this has been arranged to trick me," said Phaethon.

Daphne rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on. You are going to disbelieve a believable theory not because it is unbelievable, but because it is not?" "Er. Say that again ... ?"

"I don't need to. This Nothing Sophotech is your superstition. A paranoiac who sees conspiracies everywhere, says the lack of evidence only proves the conspiracy was successful. A man who believes in fairies, when he doesn't see them, says that this proves that fairies are invisible!"

"Reasoning by analogy is like filling balloons with liquid helium. It won't fly."

She said: "Then stick to the evidence. What can you prove?" "I can prove nothing. What we are trying to find out here is whether or not my ability to gather and to ponder proof- in other words, my mind and memory-has been compromised. How does one prove that the ability itself to prove things has not been distorted? What evidence can prove the evidence itself has not been tampered with?"

She said, "You're getting ridiculous. All you need to look for, in this case, is independent confirmation. Atkins does not agree with you, Rhadamanthus does not agree with you, Eveningstar does not agree with you, and the Eleemosynary Composition does not agree with you. You have not found a single shred of independent confirmation so far. But you have that mobile noetic circuit right there in your hand. It will tell you if the memories you have are true or false, and when any false memories were put into you, and how. So what are you waiting for? What are you afraid of?" Phaethon said nothing, but stared at her carefully. Daphne put her hands on her hips, her mouth a circle of astonishment. Then she cried: "How dare you! You think I'm an imitation Daphne sent here by the Nothing with a booby-trapped box just to brain-rape you! Good stinking grief! What do I have to do to prove who I am to you?"

Phaethon shrugged. "It is a natural and reasonable thing to suspect at this point." (Actually, it was a nightmare vision which chilled Phaethon to the bone. He imagined an innocent girl, the product of a gentle, Utopian society, defenseless, taken by surprise in the wilderness and murdered horribly, replaced by a cloned body, and, with gruesome irony, the clone's memory was falsified so that she, perhaps, actually believed she was the dead girl, believed she was in love, was good, was innocent. Then, once the mission was accomplished, or some other signal was given, that illusion of love and innocence, the whole dead girl's life, would vanish like a forgotten dream.)

" 'Reasonable'?! Ha! You've turned into a paranoid lunatic. And after I went to all this trouble! If you don't find some way to prove that you are innocent, I'll be stuck, too, you moron!"

"Darling, you've argued with me a million times, and you know it never does any good to become emotional. You might not even be aware that you are an agent for the Nothing, since the programming could have been done at a subconscious level..."

He broke off. She was standing with her arms folded, drumming her fingers against her elbow, one eyebrow raised, a slight smile on her lips.

"What is it?" he said.

"You called me 'darling,' instead of 'miss,' " she said, her smile getting warmer. She spoke slowly, as if the words tasted good to her. "And 'we' have not argued a million times. I have the memory of the woman you argued with a million times. But, according to you, that wasn't me."

"I, ah..."

She waved her hand, and in a light lilt, said, "But I will let you change your mind about that later!" Then she said: "At the moment, you were saying I booby-trapped the noetic reader. Fine. But if I did, then I'm not as smart as a Sophotech; I'm not even as smart as Daphne Tercius Eveningstar Emancipated Download-redact, am I? Because if I had been that smart, I would have realized that I could not fool an engineer with a booby-trapped piece of equipment. You are an engineer, aren't you? Take the thing apart, if you like. But you better make damn sure that you can put it back together, because, without it, we are never getting out of this mess."

Phaethon looked down again at the portable noetic reader. Could he inspect it? He was standing in the middle of a well-equipped thought-shop, after all. The shop-mind had routines with which to examine basic mental interfaces; it could certainly tell the difference between a passive noetic reader and some active circuit meant to make a change in Phaethon's thought-process.

Daphne raised both eyebrows, and said, "And I do not get emotional when I argue. I'm just passionate about my convictions!"

The green-and-blue housecoat in the corner of Ironjoy's cabin was hooked into the general thought-shop circuitry, and served as the main command menu. Phaethon stepped out of his armor, the black material pulling the chrysadmantium plates out from him like the petals of an opening flower. Then the mass pulled itself back together with a bright clash, forming an empty stand of plate mail.

Phaethon shrugged into the housecoat. The coat hesitated, then pulled in the two extra sleeves. Phaethon drew the hood, and then worked the ornamental buttons which riggered the translation from Ironjoy's rather peculiar semi-Invariant neuroform to a base neuroform.

The robe was slow and old, perhaps an antique. It took almost half a minute for the reader-heads in the hood to reconfigure, and find the contact points for the cybernetic neurocircuitry grown throughout Phaethon's brain and spine. A web of energies wove Phaethon into the mind-space of the thought-shop.

The thought-shop was utterly isolated; all communication channels were black. Whatever it was that Antisemris had done, whatever services Notor-Kotok's provider had cut off, had stranded the entire shop outside of the mentality. Which meant, Phaethon hoped, that the shop was secure from intrusion, safe, and virus-free.

He took the gold tablet of the portable noetic reader and placed the unit into the housecoat's large chest pocket. Threads from the housecoat began to weave themselves across the thought-ports, making connections, finding correspondences, downloading initial routines into holding spaces. At the same time, Phaethon had the housecoat insert a physical probe into the golden tablet's housing, so that he could generate tiny fiber-optic pictures of the interior works, and magnetic images of the fields surrounding each part of the construction. Beads on the hem of the hood focused imaging lasers into his eyes, stimulating the areas behind the cornea, to create three-dimensional pictures diagramming the tablet's interior spaces for him.

Daphne sat back down on the bed, picked up his child slate again, and began flicking through different records and menus.

Phaethon inspected the unit and was baffled.

The secondary systems he could grasp: triggers, data-migration mechanisms, coders and decoders, junction cells. The arrangement of thought-reader processors and interprocessors was particularly clever, based on concentric geometries; it looked as if the Sophotechs had finally solved the permeability-interference problems involved in ring-shaped psuedomaterial fields, and constructed the legendary circular self-sustaining information wave. Brilliant.

But the main memory and processing core was an utter enigma. It seemed to be made of a sheet of neutronium, frozen at absolute zero, a matrix of dense subatomic particles bound together by strong nuclear forces, but orderly, very orderly. The edges of the sheet faded into virtual particle masses, a haze without clear properties; but pulses moving to one side of the sheet seemed to disappear and reappear at the opposite side of the sheet, as if the thing was curved in some dimension he could not sense or imagine. The energy field suspending the sheet in place certainly acted as if there were no boundary conditions or edges.

And what was this sheet? Whether it was made of matter or energy was a question for debate. Why it was not heavier than a city, Phaethon could not guess; why it did not explode or randomize was an impossibility. Perhaps it was made of something like tightly woven quantum strings? Or a force produced by another geometry of supersymmetric breaking, like, yet unlike, pseudomatter? Antigravity? Or perhaps that so called subgravity, which graviton-fraction theory said might exist?

But the main question was: Had it been tampered with? Phaethon could have laughed. The whole thing could have been taken apart, turned inside out, rotated in the fourth dimension, and put back together again without him being able to tell a thing. He did not know what the original configuration was; he had no instruments that could sense the disposition of neutral subatomic particles, where the main memory and process information were stored. And, even if he had, he would not be able to read that information by inspecting the gross outward mechanism storing it, any more than a man could read a novel by looking at the electron crystal in his library-ring.

Some engineer. He was a human. This was like the handiwork of the gods. This was magic.

Well. At least he could look at the parts of the mechanism he recognized. First, the reader-heads fed into the central rotary information-ring through a nested series of concentric interprocessors. It was a beautiful solution to certain basic design problems. Phaethon felt privileged just to see it.

"I think I understand why the Second Oecumene destroyed themselves," he said aloud, absentmindedly.

"Why is that, darling?" Daphne did not look up from the record in the slate she was viewing.

"They did not get to watch the Sophotechs solve problems. This is a breathtaking piece of work! The designers created a self-sustaining complex of information waves traveling around a frictionless ring. The geometry is entirely radial, so there are no edge-bleeding effects, and, as far as I can tell, the thing is distortionless, intertialess, and self-interference-free, so that anything stored on it will last until the end of time, or until quanta-level decay erodes the fundamental substructure of the behavior of basic particles, whichever comes first. The memory can be configured from any two points on the ring to form a triangular matrix of any given height, limited only, I would guess, by the curvature of space itself. That means you can put practically any number of code lines into a given area, without worrying about stop points and edge bleed-off that the old rank-and-file square matrixes suffered. And that is just the intermediate thresholding. The information core itself is a block of weightless neutronium!"

"That's nice, dear," said Daphne absently.

"The reader-heads that feed into the ring can be used in any combination, in multiple scan-functions, so that you do not need a separate thought-port for every combination of neuron actions in the subject. The heads are on a timer... Hullo. What's this ... ?"

Daphne looked up. "Find anything, dear?"

Phaethon shoved back his hood, blinking his eyesight clear of illusions so that he could see the cabin again. His gaze met hers. "When was the last time you used this unit?"

"Used it? I haven't even taken the tape off the reader-heads. No one has ever used it. Its a prototype."

"Atkins did not do something to it? Examine it for weapons, or activate it by remote control?"

Daphne sat up, eyes big. "Oh, dear heavens! The thing isn't really booby-trapped, is it?! I was just kidding when I said you should inspect it. You know, to give you something to do, so you wouldn't fret. Is there something wrong? There cannot be! I kept it in my pack the whole time!"

Phaethon said, "The line clock reads zero, as if the unit had never been used, but there is a separate clock, attached to the timer controlling the coordination of the reader-heads, which indicated that the heads cycled through 1 X 10 to the 28th power combinations about fourteen hours ago. That is about the number of combinations one would get if someone used the unit, and examined his own mind."

Daphne blinked. "Oh. That doesn't sound dangerous."

"But who did it?"

"No one. The thing was in my pack. Fourteen hours ago? I was sleeping on the ground with twelve pebbles sticking into my back. I. remember because I got to count them, over and over again. I'd show you the bruises, but, until you get around to admitting we are man and wife, I wouldn't want to do anything to shock Silver-Grey Victorian propriety. Are you really not going to use that noetic unit now? Do you really think I'm an agent of your spy-thriller villains? Just because the reader-heads are misaligned? That doesn't prove the thing is booby-trapped! Can't you just get it to read your brain without allowing it to change anything in your brain?"

"The reason why noetic machines are so complex, and the reason why the early Warlocks, back in the Fifth Era, could fool the readings, is that there is a continuous back-and-forth between the unit and the brain-information it reads. Any act of examination changes an object."

"I still don't understand. You mean that someone-for the sake of argument, let's say it was your bad guys-came up and used the machine while I was sleeping. That means they did what? Swore an oath? Testified in court? Made a contract? But in any case, it wasn't anything that damaged the unit, or that reprogrammed it to do you any harm."

"I said there was a continuous two-way energy flow between the subject and the noetic reading unit. Each one changes the other. I just said that ancient Warlocks learned how to hoax these readings. They did it by altering the machine during the reading process. If this machine was altered by the enemy, it could not have been for a good purpose."

"But can't you look at it and find out? Have it check itself for flaws? Order it to re-set to zero? Do one of those things you are always doing to our systems at home whenever you are ignoring Rhadamanthus and don't want to hear why what you are doing is going to make things worse?"

He blinked. "Like when?"

"What about the time you collapsed the east wing of the mansion, when we were staying in New Paris? Or what about the time you were trying to re-thread all the impellers in our confluence register, because you thought it would get more tension out of the drive? All you did was capsize us into the lava."

"I cannot believe you would bring that up again! That was caused by a flux in the current around us: and even Boreus Sophotech said later that that was an unexpected consequence of chaotic flows in the magnetic core! And I'm sorry about the wing collapsing, but I thought we could save power by running it through a nonlinear interrupt."

Daphne rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling. "Men! You are so touchy. All I'm saying is, how did you right the mole boat again? How did you erect the mansion-fields? Just hit the damn reset button. Null everything back to the default."

Phaethon frowned. "That seems too easy. But there is no reason why that should not work..."

"And besides, you were monkeying with the east wing to show off, not because we needed to save any energy, and you know it."

"Fine! I cannot believe we are going through this old argument, when you might actually be a horrible puppet controlled by the Silent Ones."

"What a terrible thing to say about a person!"

He shook his finger at her. "I'm telling you, if this turns out to be a Silent One trick, and you killed that sweet Daphne-doll-the image of the woman I love-I'll destroy your whole damn civilization with no more hesitation than if I were wiping out a nest of cockroaches! You tell that to your masters! I was born to burn worlds!"

"Don't be silly, dear, you sound like a caveman. But I appreciate the sentiment; not every girl gets a maniac to slaughter people indiscriminately for her. So do you really think I'm sweet?"

"It's not funny. Well, perhaps it is a trifle funny, but it's really not entirely funny." He threw off the housecoat and stepped back over to his armor.

Daphne sat up. "Now what are you doing?"

"I can take a precaution. The thought-ports in my armor can act as an intermediary. The noetic-read energy cannot penetrate the admantium. I can just set up a buffer, like an air lock, something to quickly interrupt the circuit if the noetic reader does something untoward."

Black tentacles of nanomaterial fitted the armor around him. Then he straggled to put the housecoat back on. Then followed a few minutes while he spread nanomaterial across his upper helmet surfaces, growing contact-points to be routed through the thought-points in his shoulder boards. The carrier lines clustered like a drooping mass of hair across his head, and around his shoulders, spilling out of the front of the housecoat hood.

Then he spent several moments downloading routines out of the thought-shop. A point-to-point system, a format translator, security cycles, relative time adjustment groups, and so on...

Ironjoy, because of his clientele, had far more security programs than any other thought-shop Phaethon had seen. He sent out a search-tree to use and combine them all.

Then he discovered, of course, that, since his secretarial and seneschal programs had been erased out of his personal thoughtspace, he had to get architectural activators, routing judges, information condensers and decondensors, pattern assessors, step locks, hold-and-go priority switches ...

Some of this required additional hardware chips, processing beads, and so on, which he clipped to the various parts of the housecoat, and hung from the carrier strands. The wall behind the talking mirrors opened up into several construction cabinets, where Phaethon either made or found what more he needed.

Soon, it was hard to move his arms, because he now wore two housecoats (since the first had not had enough storage area of action circuits), and, practically a third coat itself, was the layer of additional materials he had been forced to add, wires and join-boxes, cooling disks and through-put forks, dangling from all eight sleeves.

He had opened one of the mirrors to allow him to run additional lines to contact points there, to get direct access to thought-shop routines. Every wire running to the mirror had a circuit-interrupt with a security assessment cell clipped to it.

"You look like a walking Yule tree," Daphne called from the cot.

"Just don't put a candle on my head." His voice was muffled, because the external speakers on his armor were obscured. He sighed. "I'm just glad the Silver-Greys aren't around to see this. Helion's ancient vow to make our technology serve Beauty."

"You aren't a Silver-Grey at the moment, hero. Besides, I'm recording the picture into my ring. We'll all have a good laugh about it, once our exile ends." There was a wistful note to her voice.

"Hmp. You show them that picture, the Silver-Grey won't take me back."

"Don't worry. I show them this picture, the Black Manorials will take you. You'll start a new Absurdist Sartorial Movement. Asmodius Bohost will dress like you."

"Well, good heavens! It's worth the risk of having the Silent One's booby-trapped noetic reader here burn out my brain just for that, if nothing else! My other accomplishments will sink into obscurity by contrast, once history remembers that I once influenced Mr. Bohost's ghastly wardrobe!"

Daphne favored him with a level stare.

"You're delaying."

"Perhaps a little ..."

"You're afraid."

"Not unreasonable, considering that this might actually kill me."

"You are a paranoid deluded maniac."

"But a lovable one. Are you attempting to bolster my courage, miss? You should have Eveningstar Sophotech teach you more about how to manipulate the moods of men."

"Are we back to 'miss' are we? That's fine with me; because at least you are talking now as if we are going to make it back out of this exile. You sound mildly less doomed."

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

"Put another bucket on your head."

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

"It's still a bucket."

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

Daphne sat with her elbows on her knees, cupping her cheeks in her palms, looking up at Phaethon with an impertinent and girlish look. "Leave everything to me and Aurelian.

We can clear that hurdle when we come to it."

"What do you mean?"

"I was saving it as a surprise."

"I thought you hated surprises."

"Not when they are my surprises."

"Please tell me, miss."

"Are we still back on 'miss'? Say, 'please tell me, Daphne my darling wife,' and maybe I will."

"Sha'n't. You'll tell me and gladly."

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

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

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

Phaethon said, "Any time now. I'm tired of standing here with a bucket on my head."

"We're rich."

"What?"

"Actually, you're rich. I'm only rich if you marry me again."

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

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

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

"Flying suits."

"Flying suits?"

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

"Ridiculous. The Hortators ..."

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

"But-but why would people-why would they defy the Hortators?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where was the Silent Oecumene starship?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daphne said, "You're not talking, lover. That means you're thinking."

"Shouldn't I be?"

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

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

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

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

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

Phaethon said: "Darling, don't be afraid."

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

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

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

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

"Oh, come on. I am your wife, you know. I've communed with you. I've been you."

"I would not go through your diary without asking!"

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

"I-well-you make a good point, I suppose. But still you should not-"

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

"You are changing the subject, miss!"

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

"What?"

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

"Y-yes. But why do you conclude that..."

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

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

"Don't get upset. Remember your self-control."

"Bugger that! I've left the Silver-Grey. Reds get hysterical. It's our privilege!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And-oh. You mean you-Are you volunteering to come with me?"

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

"What if it's not safe ... ?"

She spread her arms. "You'll only be hurting a Silent Oecumene spy."

"Wouldn't it be wiser to take a precautionary ..."

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

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

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

She said, "I swear."

The unit hummed. Daphne looked blank-eyed.

"No! Wait!"

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

She smiled at him. "And I swear I love you."

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

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

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

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

Daphne said in a worried voice, "Is something wrong?"

Phaethon said, "Report progress."

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

Daphne flapped her hands. "Try it again."

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

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

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

The unit said, "System must shut down and go through re-constitution process. Please stand by."

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

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

"Take off your armor and try it again."

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