The Phoenix Exultant

THE WELCOME

Through the mesh and underfoot, Phaethon could see lush greenery, a reach of rocky sand and beach, and, beyond that, an ocean blackened with nanomachinery, crowded with false-trees. To the opposite side, away from the beach, were a cluster of spiral pearly growths, domes and towers of spun diamond, buildings like coral or like nautilus shells. These were the organic seashell shapes of the Standard Aesthetic.

On the hilltop beyond this, in the distance, rising above the deodar trees and clinging vines, was an antique temple, shaped like a beehive, but intricately carven with figurines and images. It looked old, perhaps dating back to the Era of the Second Mental Structure. Without access to the Middle Dreaming, Phaethon missed the ability to learn all he might wish to know about anything by glancing at it. But he tried to tell himself to enjoy the mysterious and picturesque character his new-found ignorance bestowed.

Phaethon stepped to the moving staircase in order to descend; but the escalator was loyal to the precepts of the Hortators and would not carry him. So he stepped over to a service ladder leading down. Phaethon did not know if the rusted metal rungs could sustain the weight of his armor; but when he asked the ladder for its specifications, the ladder was either dumb, or deaf, or rude, and it did not answer. Phaethon doffed the armor, and had it rappel down the tower side by itself, while he climbed down the ladder. He did not want to waste his suit material by building another garment, and the clime was warm, and so he walked nude, followed faithfully by his armor.

There was a street leading to the town, made of glassy spun diamond; and a ridge running down the middle had guide-wires and thought-ports, lines and beads of smooth ceramic, glinting in the surface. As far as Phaethon could see, the approaching town was neither cramped nor squalid nor filthy, nor did it have the other earmarks of poverty that the poorer sections of Victorian-Age London (which he had visited many times in simulations) had displayed.

It did not look too bad, he told himself.

But that impression changed the closer he came to the town.

First, the street, which had looked so bright and inviting when he first stepped onto it, turned out to be a low-grade moron. Instead of offering interesting comments about the scenery, or important traveler's tips, or playing restful walking-music, the street had monotonously belabored him, joking and shouting with a mindless and force-fed glee, trying to get Phaethon to use certain commercial services that Phaethon could not have purchased in any case.

Second, the nanomachinery creating and maintaining the street was misprogrammed, so that black carbon dust, not correctly bound in the diamond street surface, accumulated from cracks and breaks. Phaethon, as he walked, found his knees and feet coated with coal-black particles as fine as mist, which no amount of wiping could clear from his leg hairs.

The clamoring street fell silent when he entered the town proper.

Phaethon walked among the giant spiral shells and mother-of-pearl domes of the houses and buildings. Only a few were occupied. The rest were mad-houses or mutants, like something from an old story. The self-replicating machinery that designed and grew these Sixth Era buildings had been neglected, and reproduced with no supervision and no corrections, so that some houses were half-grown into each other, like horrible Siamese twins. Others had lopsided doors or windows; or they grew without doors; or without power or lights; or, worse, with a strange, harsh light painful to the eye.

Some of the buildings were tilted at drunken angles, or sat, slumped and damaged, having made no attempt to heal themselves nor to grow their broken walls shut.

Certain formations, which were easy to grow, such as lamps or doorposts, had flourished like weeds, everywhere. Few were the houses that did not have twenty or a hundred lamps sprouting from their pearly roofs or curling eaves. Doorposts (dotted with jacks and cells to hold identifier plates and call cables which never would be installed) stood unsupported in the center of the street, or clustered in the unplanned gaps between buildings, or hung tilting from second-story lofts.

When Phaethon politely asked a question to one of these neglected houses, the building would giggle idiotically, or repeat some stock phrase parrot-like: "Welcome Home! Welcome Home!"

After a few moments of walking, many of the houses were stirred up in a clamor, shouting, calling back and forth to each other. Some gobbled at him in angry languages; warehouses shrieked; whore-houses called out bawdy slogans. Phaethon kept his eyes ahead and walked stiffly, pretending not to notice.

The houses fell grumbling and mumbling into silence a few moments after he had passed, so that a wake of noise trailed after him.

Then he came into an upper part of the town. There were people here, sitting on porches or lounging lazily along the side of the street. They were dressed in simple tunics and smocks of flashing colors and eye-dazzling designs, pulsing and strobing, and a loud music made of repeating percussion surrounded them.

Phaethon realized that these folk were wearing advertisements.

Most of their faces and bodies looked the same, K-style and B-style faces taken from public-domain records. Except for some men who had scarred their faces, or applied colored tattoos, it seemed as if everyone along the street were everyone else's twin.

When he raised a hand in greeting, their eyes went blank, and their gazes slid past him, unseeing.

He walked on, puzzled. Where these not exiles like himself? Apparently not. It seemed as if they could afford sense-filters.

The standard settings would automatically block out anything branded with odium by the Hortators.

Like a phantom, ignored and unseen, Phaethon walked on.

Through open doorways he could see the people who lived here, base humaniforms, for the most part. People who did not wear advertisements were garbed in smocks of blue-gray drab, made of simple polymers not difficult to synthesize. Some of the garments were old and sick, for they had torn, and they did not repair themselves.

Most of the people had crowns growing into the flesh of their skulls, giving them partial access to the mentality. One or two sad individuals were wearing lenses and ear-jacks, so that they could watch from a distance, or overhear, the complex and vibrant activity of life in the mentality, a life now closed to them.

He saw people sleeping on mats on the floor; he did not see a single pool. There was apparently no life-water running anywhere.

For energy, he saw nothing but the solar panels that grew along roofs like wild lichen; he wondered what they did on cloudy days, or at dark.

Food they ate with their mouths, masticating; he did not see what the substances were, or how it was manufactured; but with a dozen steaming streams of green nanosubstance running in open gutters down the street, he could imagine.

Half the houses had darkened lamps. Their solar cells were covered with a soot or carpet lichen, which no one had bothered to scrape free. For light, captured advertisement banners had been tied to steeples and cupolas, so that garish colors flared across the scene. Many of the houses screamed back at the jarring clash of music and slogans radiating from the advertisements. Some of the stupider houses thought the noises were approaching visitors, for they shouted out welcomes whenever the advertisements brayed. It added to the general din most unpleasantly.

There was one, just one, staging pool in the center of the town square. No one was sleeping in it. Phaethon was not surprised. In a city of exiles, a non-network pool could only be used by one ostracized citizen to enter a dreamspace built and provided and guided by another ostracized citizen. The pool liquid consisted of a few inches of brownish sludge, which no one had bothered to program to clean itself.

He sat on the marble bench surrounding the lip of the staging pool, gazing about him, wondering what to do next. A sense of misery, which he had held at bay throughout his long descent down the tower, and through his voyage on the airship, now came to him and possessed him. He slumped off the edge and sat in the pool; the sludge was too shallow to admit him. Tentative crystals formed in the liquid and nosed around his legs like curious, shy fish, but there was no way for Phaethon to make a connection, and nothing he had to do once a connection was made. Phaethon sat without moving, then he cursed. His head nodded, but his brain ached, and he could not sleep. The noise of the town screamed and sang around him, loudly and mindlessly.

Eventually, he stirred himself. Phaethon rubbed his hands along the carbon dust clinging to his knees. All that resulted was that his palms turned black. A few grams of decrepit nanoassembler molecules must have been hiding among the dust; when he brushed at it vigorously, the assemblers activated, looking for substances to turn into road surface, and pulled a number of micrograms of carbon out of Phaethon's skin with a flash of waste heat that raised blisters on his legs. The jolt of pain sent him skipping upright, hissing and blinking.

Wincing, he went to wash his legs beneath the in-spigots of the staging pool, hoping that, like most pools, it had a medical side-mind. He could save a few precious drops of his dwindling supply of nanomaterial if the pool's medical side-mind could make an unguent for him. Perhaps it could, but Phaethon did not have an interfacer with which to talk to the pool. He tried to communicate his needs to the pool by pointing and gesturing. The pool surface formed a bulb of hallucinogen and offered it to him. Then it offered him sleep-oil; then breathing tissue. Phaethon, exasperated, soon was splashing back and forth, swinging his arms in wide gestures of simple pantomime, pointing at his blisters, and shouting rude comments at the pool's simple mindedness. He shouted more and more loudly, trying to be heard over the thumping din of the town noise.

A voice from behind him: "Eyah! What you doing, manor-born?"

Phaethon stopped his antics, summoned an aloof expression, and turned. "Just as you see."

"Ah. All is explained."

Here was a dark-skinned man, bald, and enormously broad of shoulder. He was squat, and thick-limbed. His muscle grafts had been placed without any concern for symmetry or fineness. His face was scarred and tattooed; he was missing an ear. The tattoos formed exaggerated scowl lines around his mouth; his eyes were ringed with concentric lines of surprise. He wore a brown smock of many pockets, and, over the top of that, what looked like an advertisement banner, but it was silent and dark, with thin lines of red and orange flickering through the substance.

"Welcome to Death Row," said the bald, squat man.

Phaethon, dirty, dripping, and burnt, mustered his dignity. "How do you know me to be a manorial?" If a random passerby could deduce or guess that he was Phaethon, it would be child's play for Xenophon or the Nothing Sophotech.

The squat man wagged his head. "Ai-yah! Listen to him snoff!" Then to Phaethon, he said, "You shout at pool, all nice talk, full sentence. 'I shall surely drub you!' you shout. 'You shall learn what it means boldly to go against orders!' also you shout. Eyah. 'Boldly to go' ... ? You mean 'to boldly go,' you don't? Only machines talk like this way. Very puff-puff. Very polite."

"I see. I shall endeavor to make my speech more colloquial, if that is what anonymity requires."

"Oho. You don't want attention? So you splash and yell off head? Very wise, very deep-think! Hey, maybe blind deaf-mute in coma off yonder has not seen you, eh?"

"I was under the impression that most of the people here had their sense-filters engaged."

"No such. No sense-filters, no fancy puff-puff. They just cussed, is all. Dark, black, nasty cussed. They want out and up, so they make-pretend. Make-pretend they are rich, make-pretend they are loved-up, make-pretend they are wise and kind and good-good. Ashores. All of them Ashores. They hate all us right full deep, you know. You too."

"Us? What defines us as a group?"

"Afloats."

"I fear I don't understand."

"Is simple as simple is. Ashore live ashore. They may live. Their sentence is measured; a year, six year; hundred year, what-have-you. When time is done, they get their lives again, they get up-and-out. Can buy from Orpheus. Can buy live-forever machines. Land they live on, is rented to them; once they get lives back, they pay back. All fair. All square."

"And the Afloats, I assume, live afloat... ?"

"Live on sea as sea is free. No rent on water."

"You have houseboats?"

"We got rafts. Drag dead houses out to sea. Is trash; no one stop us." He shrugged. "Man at local thought-shop revive house-mind for small fee, you know."

"And your term of exile, unlike those of the Ashores, is permanent?"

"We here till we not here no more. Here till we die. Is Death Row." And he extended his cupped hand, palm up, a beggar's gesture. "Name's Oshenkyo. What've ye got for us, eh?"

And Phaethon took a daub of his precious, limited supply of black nanomachine material and applied it to the scar on Oshenkyo's head where there had once been an ear. Phaethon drew upon the ecological and medical routines he had in his thoughtspace, set the daub to take a gene sample, and he set it to reconstitute the missing ear.

The bay was surrounded on three sides by cliffs. The cliffs were overgrown by a Cerebelline life-garden, which may or may not have been part of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea. Pharmaceutical vines and adaptive fibers clung to the rocks, tended by weaver birds and tailor birds. Suits and outfits finished by the tailor bird hung flapping in the sea breeze, awaiting shipping dolphins.

In the middle of the bay, strangely silent and dark, were houses shaped like gray and blue-brown seashells, standing on spider legs that gripped floats and buoys beneath the water. Dozens of dangling ropes, ladders, and nets hung between the house shells, like webs, or dropped to crude docks floating in the houses' shadows.

In the middle of the irregular floating mass of house shells rose an old barge, streaked with barnacles and rust. On the flat upper surface of the barge towered a group of tents and pavilions made of cheap diamond synthetics, in three tiers, one above the other. From the crown of the upper tier, rose a false-tree with limbs of steel, and many solar collectors like leaves. Banners of material, and globes like fruit hung from the tree limbs. Phaethon could see where fruit or banners had dropped into the nets and cupolas of the tents below, quickly gathered up by scurrying spider-gloves and waldoes.

"It's quieter here," said Phaethon, looking down from the cliff into the bay. He had put his gold armor back on and had tuned some of the surface area in his black nanomaterial cape to catch and analyze some of the scents on the breeze. Mingled in the scents of green leaves, sunshine, and sea, were the command-pheromones and tiny nanomachine packages, smaller than pollen spores, which complex Cerebelline activity had as its by-product. Invisible clouds of these microspores extended far out to sea; the Cerebelline called Old-Woman was deep in thought.

Next to him, Oshenkyo was skipping and skylarking, waving and weaving his hands in the air, snapping his fingers in both ears, and smiling at the stereo-auditory noise. "Much quiet! Buckets of quiet! Know why? No ads." Oshenkyo smiled, humming.

"What of the advertisement you wear? Why is it silent?"

"Not silent! Just our ears not hear it." Oshenkyo explained that certain advertisers were trying to sell services and philosophy-regimen to a Cerebelline consciousness (a daughter of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea) that occupied the cliffs and kelp beds throughout the area, and who, having once, long ago, been part of the Venereal Terraforming Effort, had been heartbroken when that effort finally achieved success. The Daughter departed once Venus was towed to a new orbit, but had never altered her perceptions back to standard frequencies, time-rate, and aesthetic conventions of Earth. Hence, her "eyes" were tuned to the shortwaves and subsonic pulses the dark advertisement banners gave off.

The other banners would display advertisements meant for humans only when asked, and then only from advertisers who could not afford to, or did not bother to, prevent an exile from experiencing them.

"We use them, you know, semaphore. Or listen to jingles. Or for light. Or as sails for boats. No one mind, as long as ads get shown."

"But you do not use them to search out useful products and services?"

"No one sells to Afloats. Almost no one. No one, we'd be dead. Almost no one, almost dead. Look it." And he pointed above the central barge.

Phaethon was still not accustomed to how bad his eyesight was. There was no amplification when he squinted. He saw a swarm of darting and hovering specks, glittering gold, like bees, above and around the pavilions and tents rising above the barge. But he could not resolve them into clear images. "I cannot make out what is out there."

Oshenkyo was seated on the wide, low limb of a gold-extraction bush, cupping his hands over his ears, then covering, listening to the changes in sound. He spoke absently: "Vulpine First Ironjoy on yonder barge runs a thought-shop. We get work, sometime. Can get buffers and tangle lines to reach deviants and dark markets through the Big Mind." By which he meant the mentality.

Phaethon was intrigued. Work? The boycott of the Hortators evidently had enough holes and gaps to enable these people to live.

Then Phaethon smiled sadly at his own thought. "These people" ... ? Did he still think of himself as somehow apart from the other exiles?

Phaethon said: "No, I can see the barge. But what are those miniature flying instruments swarming around the area here?"

"Constables. Tinee-tiny. About so big." Oshenkyo held up his thumb.

"So many?"

"Zillions. They watch us all time. Good thing, too. Otherwise, we club each other right quick dead."

"Indeed? Are we all so violent, then?"

Oshenkyo shrugged a broad, one-shoulder shrug. "All us crazy, filthy people. Got nothing to lose."

"Why are there such a number of police?"

Oshenkyo squinted at him. "We still got rights. No thieving, no killing, no broke words."

"What about lying?"

Oshenkyo stared out at the bay, sniffed, gave another one-shouldered shrug. "Fib till your tongue falls out. No one here to buy a thought-read machine. We not like other folk: we don't know what goes on inside other people head. Just like long-ago days, eh? But swaps, bargains, work, all that: very sacred. You give word, can't take back. You got?"

Evidently contract laws were still enforced. "I got."

But Phaethon realized that it would be a dangerous system, since the Oecumene law, with no emotion and no favoritism, would enforce any bargain struck, no matter how foolish, no matter how risky. Had he had access to Sophotech foresight and advice, the risks would have been small. He didn't. Had he been raised in a society where suspicion and care were normal, he could have been in the habit of mistrusting his fellowmen, and of striking careful bargains. He wasn't.

Oshenkyo squinted up at him. "All be clear as clear once you sign our Pact. You join up, be one of us, eh? Otherwise, not so great live here. Nowhere else to go but sea."

This did nothing to calm Phaethon's qualms. But he smiled in joy and relief. If he had qualms, that meant he had plans, he had a goal. He was young and in good health, and he had a supply of nanomaterial which could be adapted to medical geriatrics. He might live long enough to outlive the Hortators' term of exile; the political circumstance of the Oecumene might change. Who could tell?

"... Or maybe the horse could learn how to sing." Phaethon murmured.

"Eh? What's that?"

"Sorry. I was ruminating over my hopes for the future."

"Hope? You said 'horse.' "

"There is a story about a man condemned by a tyrant, who pleads for one more year of life, telling the tyrant that, if the sentence is suspended for a year, he will teach the tyrant's prize stallion to sing hymns. The tyrant agrees. The other prisoners are amused to see this one prisoner, every day, patiently caroling in the stables. When the other prisoners mocked his folly, the man replied that a great deal could happen in a year. The tyrant could die; the horse could die. And, who knows? The horse could learn to sing."

"Stupid story."

"I always used to think so, too. Now, though, I'm not sure. Are false hopes better than none at all? Perhaps they are." Phaethon's eyes were fixed on a point beyond the horizon.

"No, is stupid because would not take so long to download info and singing routines into horse, if brain-fittings are standard. A year? Would only take five minute."

"This is a very old story, from the days before horses were extinct."

Now Oshenkyo squinted in surprise. "Funny, I thought horses were make-up, you know, genetified, by Red Manor Queens."

"Make-up? You mean invented?"

"Make-up! Like dragons and gryphons and elephants."

"Modern elephants are a genetic reconstruction of a real species."

Oshenkyo snorted. "With flappy-arms on their noses? You think such creature as that evolve by itself? Nar. No how. Red Manor folk make up for sure. Just their kind of stupid thing. Ah, wait!" Now Oshenkyo jumped to his feet and waved his arm high. "Lookit there! Welcome menus! You get meet Iron-joy. He tell you what's what. You listen him, he get you fine-dandy job assignments, maybe you eat, maybe you sleep in-of-doors, out of rain. Nice-good, eh? Lick up nice chum to him, now, and smile pretty!"

"I shall endeavor to be on my best behavior," Phaethon said in a voice of heavy irony.

A party of three figures was picking its way up the slope of the cliff to the spot where Phaethon stood with Oshenkyo. All three wore blue-green housecoats of antique design, with flared shoulders and long skirts, and many pockets to hold a dozen house instruments. The one in the middle (perhaps the leader) had a design of gold attention-thread running through the chest pockets. Their faces were shadowed by wide flat straw hats whose brims hung over their shoulders. The color elements in the housecoats were not correctly attuned; all three figures were surrounded by a web of green-blue rainbows, shifting glints and shadows, and it made them look as if they were walking underwater.

The lead figure seemed to be a base humaniform until he was within ten feet of Phaethon. The color play of his malfunctioning coat had hidden his true silhouette. As the stranger approached, Phaethon saw he had a second pair of arms and hands springing from his doubled shoulders. Beneath the shadow of his hat, his face was an immobile mask of bony cartilage, with three or four pairs of eyes and secondary eyes, microwave horns, infrared sockets, electrodetection cells, and ELF antennae. The face lacked a nose; the mouth was an in-sectoid clamp.

Phaethon's gaze swung left and right. The other two wore standard faces, male and half-male, with teeth made of glittering diamond. The male had a beard woven with many-colored sensation strands. The half-male had similar strands dangling from her hair. The two wore black metallic cusps covering their eyes, perhaps a crude type of sense-filter and interfacer, controlled by blinks and eye motions. The man was sucking on a colored strand drooping from his moustache.

The quadruple-armed leader stepped forward and looked Phaethon's gold-and-black armor up and down. Phaethon returned the inspection.

Phaethon recognized the fellow's body design from the late Fifth Era, when the mass-minds, losing money and prestige, had attempted to cut costs on space services by having specialized serf-bodies replace expensive EVA machinery. The serf-creatures were immensely strong, having been used as longshoremen and hullsmiths, and could perceive many frequencies of radiation at once. Their space suits or second skins could be made much more cheaply than the elaborate space armor needed by a human-shaped man. Serfs required very little food and water; their bodies could recycle much of their own waste materials.

The serf-form had been extinct for centuries, and, as far as Phaethon knew, they had never been patronized by a single consciousness. But it was an excellent body to be exiled in, being long-lasting and very frugal.

Phaethon thought the creature was hideous.

The fact that they were dressed in something other than advertisements or simple polymeric homespun led Phaethon to believe that these three represented the upper class of whatever "society" existed among these outcasts. The Peers of the poor, so to speak.

Phaethon noticed that the other two, hissing and slurping, chuckling and murmuring to each other, had both bent close to stare at Oshenkyo's new ear. The she-man uttered a breathless giggle of awe and delight; the man was nodding slowly, pleased and impressed, his straw hat bobbing.

The buzzing, flat voice of a mechanical speaker issued from the chest area of the serf-creature. "Self identifies as Vulpine First Ironjoy, base neuroform with nonstandard invariant extensions, I Uncomposed and Unschooled. Compatriots identified as Lester Nought Haaken, base, ejected from a limited non-hierarchy mind-partnership, Ritual Murder Reformation School; second compatriot identified as Drusillet Zero Self-soul, sub-Cerebelline neuroform, multiple personality stasis-lock, self-schooled."

The half-male, evidently Drusillet, straightened up and spoke in a contralto she-man voice: "Incorrect! My school is the Omnipresent Benevolence Assertion! Many children are its members, filled with love and kindliness, protected from all life's ills and harms! Soon, oh so very soon now, they will recall their love and gratitude for all the benefits I've shown to them, and force the Hortators to rescind their ban on me!"

Lester, likewise, made a preemptory gesture, and spoke up: "There is no Ritual Murder Reformation School; such a thing exists only in horror stories. I am and always shall be a member of the Privacy School. My thoughts are my own, not open to examination or review. If I want to throb with the desire to lie, cheat, steal, and kill, then that is nobody's business but my own, provided I don't act on it, right? Don't let Ironjoy here baffle you, New Kid. We, none of us, are criminals here."

Oshenkyo chimed in, "No criminals. Just unpopular, eh?"

Lester said, "Some of us suffer for a Righteous Cause."

Phaethon nodded. "A pleasure to make the acquaintance of someone who shares my feelings in the matter, good sir. I, too, suffer tribulations for a cause I deem to be just and right."

"Aha!" exclaimed Lester, slapping Phaethon's shoulder plate with a brotherly hand. "Kindred souls then! Good to meet you! And take my word for it, this sick society that has rejected us cannot last long! No, sir, the Golden Oecumene will soon collapse under her own over-stuffed rottenness. The machines think they can anesthetize us, force us into unnatural, inhuman modes! But the true bestial nature of man will one day spring forth, roaring! And on that day, rioters will topple the edifices of the thinking machines, rapists and looters will fulfill their dark fantasies, and blood, gushes of glorious blood, will run through the streets! Take note of my words!"

Lester, at this point, was standing too close to Phaethon, and waving his finger in Phaethon's face for emphasis.

Ironjoy put one of his left hands on Lester's shoulder and drew him back. "Improper! Allow New Kid to acclimate himself. Talk of other matters after."

Oshenkyo said, "He got plenty long time to hear all about you theory, Lester." He turned and squinted at Phaethon, and said, "We all got to hear Lester's talk. Sort of like hazing. Whoever stand it the longest wins big prize."

Lester either was inured to this type of joke, or held Oshenkyo in such good fellowship that the comments did not offend him. In either case, he merely gave Phaethon a polite nod, turned to Ironjoy, said, "Oshenkyo's earned his chit; I'll send you a bill from my informant, at fifteen cut. Fair?" And, when Ironjoy grunted in agreement, Lester turned again, gave a last, lingering look of envy and wonder at Oshenkyo's new ear, and then briskly walked away.

Oshenkyo muttered to Ironjoy: "Worth more than fifteen. Lookit that armor shine! Admantium. Is my fish; I say twenty."

Ironjoy made a curt gesture with his lower right hand. Oshenkyo shut up and stepped back, squinting. It was hard to read the tattoo-scarred face: but he seemed glum. Ironjoy pointed at Phaethon with his upper left hand, evidently a signal to Drusillet, who took out a reading card, face yellowed with age, and stepped toward Phaethon.

Drusillet said, "Open your thoughtspace, please, New Kid. We need to see what you have to offer. Medical routines is what we mostly need. Though information structuring, data compression, and migration techniques also pay off. Let me log you on to the mentality and run a check-through." And she stepped forward and began to apply the reading head of the card to a jack in Phaethon's shoulder board.

Phaethon brushed her hand aside before she could meddle with his suit controls.

Drusillet stepped back, mouth open, and she darted a fearful look at Ironjoy. The metal cusps that hid her eyes partly masked her expression, but evidently she had not expected to be rebuffed.

Phaethon spoke: "Sir (or is it miss ... ?) forgive me, but we have not been properly introduced. And I have personal and very severe reasons for wishing not to log on to the mentality. But perhaps a word or two of explanation would reassure me. Were you thinking of simply making free with my property? Were you attempting to make pirate-copies of my routines? There are a dozen constables floating nearby." He gestured toward the swarm of bee-sized metal implements, which buzzed through the air overhead.

"No cops!" Ironjoy held up all four hands at once, an eerie, almost menacing, gesture. "New Kid is disoriented. He thinks he is still alive. He thinks the constables will protect him. Explain reality to him! I go. Events will be adjusted." And with that, he turned with a snap of his green-shivering garments and strode off down the path between the pharmaceutical bushes.

Drusillet was staring at Phaethon in fascinated half-fear. Oshenkyo squatted down not far away, humming to himself, and drawing squirming circles in the dirt with a twig. Phaethon stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his head forward, legs spread, his black cloak falling in folds across his armored shoulders, around his elbows. For a moment, no one spoke.

Drusillet said to Phaethon, "You don't understand how things work here."

"I am attentive. Explain."

"Ironjoy's not an Afloat, not really. He's an Ashore; he just doesn't care how much time he adds on to his sentence. Parts of his brain died, a long time ago, from old age, but he had the other parts propped up with Invariant mind-viruses that they give out for free. Even to us. Anyway, Ironjoy runs the thought-shop here. He's the only one around who can sell us goodies, or who can run a search engine to locate assignments in the dark markets and back nets."

"How does this Ironjoy fellow find assignments for you?" asked Phaethon.

Drusillet tucked a strand of her hair between her lips and sucked. Then she shivered and smiled. "You'd be surprised! Everyone always thinks the machines can do everything better and smarter and faster than anyone, so how can anyone ever get a job? But they can't do everything at once, and so there are certain jobs which, even if we do them slower and stupider, we can still do them for cheaper. Like me. The last thing I did, was going through Devolkushend's memories to prepare his autobiography, and cutting out or glossing over the parts of his memory that don't make for good theater. It was rough work, living his stupid life over and over again, but he's got some fans, or something, so I guess he wanted it done, and on the cheap, too. It required some human judgment; I got a judgment-routine from Ironjoy for that, one of those things put out by Semi-Warlock Critics."

"Did I correctly hear Ironjoy say you had a Cerebelline neuroform? You express yourself in linear fashion, like a basic, not like a global."

She suddenly looked shy and sad. "Sub-Cerebelline. Think of a mass-mind with a split personality. As long as my other personalities don't come to the forefront, as long as I don't weave myself back into a global whole, I think and act like you lonely people. Just one mind, one point of view, all alone. It's what I have to do to keep my children safe."

Phaethon was curious, but saw she would not say more on that topic. Instead, he asked her about her work: "How does Devolkushend, when he hires you, escape falling under the Hortators' opprobrium?"

"Oh, he's a Nevernext. They hate the Hortators. Nevernexts, deviants, freaks, they still cut deals with us. And a lot of things are done on the sly, or through schools with high privacy restrictions. Especially now during the masquerade. Some of us dress up and sneak off to go look at the real people..." Her face took on a look of wistful longing. Phaethon pictured her in masquerade, in the rain, peering up at a window or balcony for a distant glimpse of a grown child who might no longer know her. It was a pathetic picture, disturbing. Was it accurate? He did not know.

She said: "The Hortators aren't the constables, after all, and they can't get a warrant to read someone's mind."

Oshenkyo stood up suddenly and tossed the twig he had been toying with away into the brush with an abrupt motion. "Ironjoy's top man around here, for sure. Makes sure we all get along, all get some work, some grub, some dream-stuff so we can stand to make it to another sunset. He got good stuff in his shop, good dreams, bad dreams, new thoughts, new selves. You play around, you jack in new stuff, maybe one day you find yourself a persona who can stand living here without no hope. Turn yourself into Mr. Right. But we're all good friends here. We share and share alike. You got some good stuff on your back; maybe you got some good stuff in your head. Why not help us out, eh?"

Phaethon said, "I may be able to help you out a great deal. Ironjoy's monopoly seems to be hindering any capital formation. Your 'share and share alike policies,' as you call them, certainly would discourage the type of long-term investment we would all welcome. From what you say, the Hortators are much weaker here than I imagined. Among the deviants and Nevernexts there may be enough markets for us, enough work to be had, that, with some new policies, new leadership, and hard work, some real growth and prosperity could be brought to this little community. And perhaps even a type of immortality could be regained; I knew that Neptunian neurocircuits, in their zero temperatures, suffer very little degradation over the centuries."

Oshenkyo was grinning; clearly the idea appealed to him. He touched his new ear thoughtfully.

Drusillet said in a hushed tone: "What kind of thoughtspace do you carry? What level of integrator is installed in that suit of yours? Do you have enough to carry out the same functions Ironjoy's shop-mind can carry out?"

"Perhaps if I don't have what I need, I could build it out of raw materials."

Drusillet said in a voice of slow astonishment, "Build? What do you mean, build? Only machines build things. Men don't build things, not now-a-days men."

"I build things. And I am very old-fashioned, in my own way."

"How?"

"With determination, will, and foresight. With my brain. With the circuits in my suit. There is plenty of carbon in the environment. I can design and grow circuits and small ecologies."

He saw their looks of astonishment. He smiled, "Well, I am an engineer, after all."

"Engineer," murmured Oshenkyo. Then: "Hey, engineer, my house grows my cakes and lamps all squirley. Maybe you can fix?"

"I'll certainly take a look at it. The house-mind probably operates from a modular set of neural base-formats. Any part of a working house could be used as a formatting seed to restart the program."

Drusillet said, "Engineer, what about finding assignments? If you and Ironjoy can both run a search, we'll find twice the jobs! Can you do it?"

"Perhaps. The Hortators allow me access to the mentality; even if I do not log on myself, I can access my account through a remote, or even through a script board. It's not impossible. Tell me what might be required. What is the priority and actions-per-second of the search engine Ironjoy uses to find your assignments? In which part of the mentality is he stationed? How does he negotiate the antiviral buffers without hiring a Cerebelline to certify him?"

Drusillet's enthusiasm vanished. She spoke with a twitch of worry. "Ironjoy may not like it, not if too much changes too fast."

"I will explain how it is in everyone's long-term best interest. You people act rationally to further your own interests, do you not?" Phaethon asked. Although, it occurred to him that, if no one here could afford a noetic inspection of each other's thoughts, no one would have any motive to keep their motives pure. Ironjoy theoretically could maintain a whole host of evil impulses and hypocrisies.

Oshenkyo said, "Sure. We all swell people."

Drusillet spoke with less conviction. "Oh, yes, we're rational. The Hortators are just wicked to exile me here. I didn't do anything wrong."

"Then why would Ironjoy object?"

She said in a sad voice: "We're a very tight-knit group, you see? We all swap our things. We all share. There isn't anyone else for us, not for anyone else, no one."

Oshenkyo stepped backward, looked off in the distance. He spoke in a casual voice: "She means don't squirt yellow on Ironjoy. Got to lick up to him, see? He take care of us." He sniffed, and said sidelong to Drusillet: "Besides, I got me someone. What about Jasmyne Xi?"

Phaethon turned Oshenkyo a curious glance. "Jasmyne Xi Meridian?"

Oshenkyo nodded. "My share-wife. She sees me on the sly, not even the Hortators know. Soon, maybe tomorrow, she use her big-snoff influence and get me out of this. Coming by to see me. Good day then, eh?"

Drusillet merely gave Oshenkyo a look, perhaps of pity, perhaps of contempt.

Phaethon knew Jasmyne Xi Meridian of Median House, Red Manorial Scholum; she and Daphne had once had friends in common. She was generally agreed to be among the most beautiful and glamorous of women on Earth. She had made several fortunes as a productress, fashion archetype, a writer of jewelry, apparel, and allure-software. She was paid to be seen in public using certain beauty products, attending certain functions, and for forming certain favorable opinions reported through noetic channels. It was impossible to imagine that a famous figure like Jasmyne Xi would receive a low-class ill-spoken outcast like Oshenkyo, much less marry him.

"If you are wealthy enough to afford pseudomnesias and deep-structure dreams," said Phaethon, "you could afford to pool your resources, and buy several search-models, and perhaps a few acres of nanomanufacturing for your own. The Nevernexts make a study of advanced bioformations and somarics; the Neptunians have an advanced science of minimalist nanoengineering. They are remote, but contact with them may not be impossible. Their resources are more scarce than your own; they must have advanced software you could profit by."

Drusillet stepped in close, and whispered, "Oshenkyo isn't buying dreams. It's the beauty ads. Oshenkyo is addicted to the ads."

Phaethon spread his fingers in the communication-failure gesture, to show he did not understand.

She whispered: "Jasmyne's lips cosmetics and erotic-formation commercials sometimes have little dreams as free samples. You see? Don't trust Oshenkyo. He's not going to help you set up a new thought-shop or compete with Ironjoy. He's a liar and a destructionst, a weaponeer, a nihilist; that's why the Hortators shunned him."

They were interrupted. Oshenkyo waved at someone in the distance. He raised his fingers to his lips and emitted a loud, long shrill whistle.

Some hooting and commotion, some glad calls and yelps sounded from several of the floating houses and from the rustling and shining tents of the central barge. Figures had emerged; Oshenkyo was calling out.

Oshenkyo rubbed his coat, uttered a command. The dark background and dim red lines disappeared, to be replaced by a garish bright explosion of florid colors swimming in the fabric. A pulsing beat and a loud announcer's voice issued from Oshenkyo's garment, a swell of jarring music. Men and women began to shout across the water. Their robes were dark and silent; but, in a moment, they had tuned in to the same commercial Oshenkyo was showing, and a rollicking advertisement was soon pelting noise and echoes across the waters.

Oshenkyo grabbed Phaethon's arm. "Come on down to beach! Lotsa people wanna see you, Engineer! You fix us, you fix everything!"

As they walked, he bent his head low, and whispered, "You need help if you plan to pull jack out of Ironjoy, eh? Don't trust Drusillet. Crazy, crazy, her. You know why Hortators put big no-go on her? She a Cerebelline, raise a hundred children, all in sim. Children dream their whole life, never once see real thing, never once think real thought. By law, when child is grown, must wake up, must tell truth, show world. But law does not say young adult cannot go back into mother's dream womb again, not even if mother raised them to be coward, raised them so cannot think for themselves. She had more than hundred people trapped in her dreams, with no way out, not ever. All legal. All wrong. She say she was protecting them. Don't let her protect you. Got it?"

Phaethon compressed his lips, saying nothing. He had never been among people who could not commune and swap thoughts to settle their differences. He had never known mistrust. How was a rational man to deal with such people ... ? He warned himself to tread carefully.

Then they were on the beach. A group of folk in brightly colored costumes had come across the water to the little strip of shore below the cliff. Some swam; some floated in small coracles; one or two applied an energetic to render the water surface tension capable of sustaining their weight, and these walked on a temporary film across the water.

Not all were humaniform. One man looked like a barrel with a dozen legs and arms; another was a serpent man, sleek for swimming. A trio of girls had the body shape called air-sylph, with fans of membrane stretched between wrist and ankle. Two other men occupied metal tubs that moved on buzzing magnetic repellors, having a robo-toolbox fixed across the prow of the tubs, rather than arms or legs. There were between forty and eighty individuals inhabiting about sixty bodies. Many had head-plugs or crude crowns, and Phaethon could not tell how many were members of a Composition or mind-group.

All swarmed up the slope. The scene soon took on the aspect of a festival. The people greeted Phaethon with calls and cheers and coarse jests. He was not introduced; no one inquired his name. They called him "New Kid."

Phaethon was bewildered. These people did not have Middle Dreaming, so that, unlike normal people, they did not instantly know all about each other at a glance. But neither were they like Silver-Greys; Phaethon had been raised in the ancient traditions, and he knew how to greet an unknown person, exchange names, and painstakingly memorize those names for later use without artificial aids. But this ... ?

They did not shake hands (the ancient British custom Phaethon practiced). Instead, the universal greeting was to thrust out a beggar's cupped palms, and shout: "Whatcha got?"

The music-noise from their advertisement robes baffled his attempts at speech. Oshenkyo stood on a tall soil defractor and pointed at his ears, while people looked on and gasped or uttered hoots of surprise. Then they swirled around Phaethon with renewed energy.

Since it was too noisy to make introductions, Phaethon began using very small sections of his black nanomaterial, only one or two precious drops at a time, to cure certain pustules and deformities he saw on certain people here. Most of the ailments were simple skullcap sores caused by improper interfacing, unclean jacks, or drunkenness, or overstimulation.

Five or six people he cured. Then he fixed a broken mindset they brought him by interposing a correct graph from a working set. The man whose set it was now flourished the crown overhead, yodeling in joy when it lit up; and the people shouted. Phaethon was able to reprogram the color distortions on Drusillet's housecoat merely by opening the coat's help space and entering a reset command. Drusillet threw out her arms and spun, delighted as her coattails gleamed with constant, vibrant colors, unblurred despite her motion. The people near her pointed and called out.

This made him popular. People shouted in his face, laughed, slapped his back. He did not want people to hurt themselves against his armor; so he took off his gauntlets and helmet. Girls and gynomorphs mussed his hair with slender fingers. A four-armed man with a peg leg, wearing the antennae of a space inspector, pressed a drink bulb into Phaethon's hand. Several people thrust thought-cards or interface disks at him, or twists of candy or incense, or injectors of unknown import.

Phaethon told himself to be cautious; that, unlike in his old life, no warning would come if he were about to do something dangerous. Many of the thought-cards being offered him were no doubt intoxicants or memory-redacts, pornography or pleasure-jolts. He took one or two into his hand, to be polite, but he could not make himself understood over the noise when he asked questions about them.

A hairy man with diamond teeth and crystalline eyeballs slipped a bracelet around Phaethon's wrist. The bracelet flexed, as if it were trying to lock shut; Phaethon, startled, tore it from his wrist and flung it away. He saw the diamond-toothed man skip up and recover the bracelet. There was something familiar in the man's poise and posture. An agent of Scaramouche? Where had he seen the man before?

Phaethon rubbed his wrist and discovered a spot of blood. Was the man merely a cleptogeneticist? Or had Phaethon been injected with something?

Phaethon looked into his personal thoughtspace, so that hovering icons surrounded him superimposed on the shouting crowd. He made a command gesture, releasing biotic antitoxins and investigator animalcules from specialized cells in his lymph nodes into his circulatory system. But a young girl grabbed his arm at the same time, the gesture went awry, and he accidentally flooded his bloodstream with painkillers.

Now he was in an expansive mood. His frets and worries of a moment ago seemed dim and unreal. The world took on new and fascinating color. When the crowd began to dance and sing jingles in time to the braying advertisements, Phaethon joined in.

At sunset, someone brandished an ax and uttered a call.

Some running, and some dancing in a line, the crowd of Afloats now charged through the purple twilight across slope and field to where a dismal clutter of house and broken buildings shouted. There was a carnival air to their operation. Some carried colored lights. Many brandished axes. In a short time, Phaethon helped a gang of men cut a dead house from its stem, pull and roll it down the slope, off the cliff, and into the water with a tremendous splash. The crowd squealed as it was drenched by the spray. The tall four-armed man held up a command box, pointing and shouting, and spider-gloves began swimming toward the prone house, and the water began to boil with some crude nanoconstruction.

"Engineer! Your house!" shouted Oshenkyo to him. "Yours! For you! See! We all help! All help each other! You sign Pact now, yes?!"

And the people cheered. They did not call him "New Kid" now; they shouted, "Engineer! Engineer!"

But another burst of music started at that moment, and Phaethon was rushed off to join in a line of clapping, swaying, kicking men. He was dizzy and hot from the exertions of the house-felling, and he took a drink from something someone had thrust into his hand. After that the dusk became even more gay and giddy, his memory became pleasantly blurred. There was dancing, singing, and carrying on. Someone had affixed a rope swing to a chemical-tree, which hung over the cliff shore. He remembered whooping with fear as he soared far out above the water and back again. He remembered kissing someone, perhaps a hermaphrodite. It must have been late; there were stars overhead, shining above the steel rainbow of the orbital ring-city. He remembered tossing out huge gobs of his precious nanomaterial to all his fine new friends, scraping it up from the inside of his armor, despite the irksome warning buzz the suit gave off as it fell below necessary internal integrity levels.

He was everyone's darling after that. All his new friends loved him. He wanted to swing on the rope swing again, and they pushed him in high arcs, higher and higher.

He remembered shouting: "Higher! Faster! Farther! The stars! I have vowed the stars shall be mine!"

And, as the swing hesitated at the crest of its high arc, he stood in the rope swing and reached up, as high as he could reach. His new friends all laughed and cheered as he slipped and fell into the waters far below.