The Phoenix Exultant

THE THOUGHT-SHOP

Phaethon woke slowly, groaning. Jarring noises throbbed and trembled in his ears; cheerful voices shouted rhymes in a language unknown to him. His sleep had been troubled again, plagued by nightmare-images of a black sun rising over a blood-soaked landscape.

He came more awake, and discovered his head throbbing in tempo to the loud beat of the drum music shouting from the flashing garment he wore. Garment? No; he was wrapped up in an advertisement, lying on the floor in the curving corner of a blue-white room. The noise of the advertisement drilled into his skull.

Where was his armor?

For that matter, where was he? Curving walls like the inside of a seashell rose around him. The far wall was dotted with blank receptor-cells, like a line of blind eyes. There was dust and brine staining the floor. An oval nearby admitted a harsh light, which stung his eyes. The floor seemed to sway and slide, lurch and jump in a sickening fashion.

Where was his armor? A gram of his nanomaterial would have been able to flush the toxins from his body and cleanse his bloodstream of debris.

He closed his eyes; closing his eyes created the same stabbing pains as opening them. His memory was clouded. Phaethon signaled for a reconstruction routine to index his memory fragments and holographically extrapolate the missing sections, before he recalled that such services were no longer available to him.

And never would be again ...

But he vaguely remembered dismantling the black nanomachinery, which formed the lining, control system, and interface of the armor plates. Dismantling it and tossing it to cheering crowds, who programmed the expensive and highly complex nanomachinery to re-form itself into simple intoxicants and slurp it down their throats or rub it across their skin, absorbing hallucinogens into the pores of their flesh.

Phaethon raised his hand to his aching head. It could not be true. Surely that memory was false, an exaggeration. All his Sophotech-crafted nanosoftware erased and reconstructed as morphines or pleasure-endorphins? It would be as if someone were to eat the brain of a well-skilled genius merely for the protein content, or melt down a hard-process superintegrator merely to loot the few pfennings' worth of copper wire in the heat regulator.

Please, let it not be true.

And what would Daphne say if she found out he had been so foolish, so careless, as to allow his beautiful gold armor to be destroyed ... ? But then Phaethon remembered that he was never going to see Daphne again.

Perhaps this was all a simulation. "End program!" shouted Phaethon. But the scene did not end. Everything was as before; he sat in a dirty white shell, with sunlight blazing in through a window above, and the floor still swooped and lurched, sickeningly. Or perhaps the floor was steady and he was ill. There was no way to tell. "End program!" he shouted again, slamming his fist into the curving wall beside him. "End! End! End program! I want my life back, damn you!"

Phaethon fought his way to his feet. This place remained solid and "real" (if that concept had meaning any longer in his life). He was alone; he was unwell. Or perhaps he was not unwell. The floor was actually rocking.

Hunger pangs stung his stomach. Where was his armor? It was his only food supply.

At that, he heaved himself upright and tore the noisy, flashing advertisement banner off his body. With a convulsion of disgust, he threw it fluttering out the window. It struck some impediment just below his line of sight and napped there, giving off a shout.

No; it was a man who had shouted. Now that man rose into view. He had been walking up to the window, and Phaethon had thrown the advertisement over his head. He was dressed in gray.

Now, the oval expanded, and the man stepped in. The oval was not an oeil-de-boeuf or window; it was a door. The mechanism was jammed or ill. The door tried to iris shut, but dwindled only to its former dimension, trembled, squeaked, and remained half-open. Now through the opening, Phaethon saw he was inside a house floating on angular legs in the waters of the bay.

"Where is my armor?" said Phaethon, squinting. He had one hand against the sloping wall to keep himself upright.

The man took the advertisement carefully off his head, balled it up, and tossed it out the window. The banner floated away, looking for prospective clients.

When the man turned, Phaethon saw he had no face.

It was not a man. It was a mannequin.

Phaethon straightened up in shock. No person from the Golden Oecumene would be telepresenting himself here, not with the Hortators' ban in place.

Scaramouche ... ? It was not impossible ...

"What do you want of me?!" asked Phaethon in a ragged voice.

The mannequin's external speakers said: "I've come to ask you to cooperate."

Phaethon stepped away from the wall, and tried to stand straight. He did not want to show any weakness. "Cooperate? In what way?"

"You have been the victim of a crime. I want you to help me punish the people who did this to you. They claim that they are your society and your people and that you owe them loyalty now, but don't listen to that rubbish. Your interests still are best served by cooperation."

Phaethon squinted. This was an odd thing for Scaramouche to be saying. Yes, forcing Phaethon into exile was a crime, but did this creature from beyond actually think Phaethon would help Scaramouche punish the Hortators?

Phaethon said, "Where do you creatures come from? Another star? Another time? How do you know so much about the Golden Oecumene when we know nothing about you?"

The gray mannequin had no face, but there was an expression of surprise in its posture, in the set of its shoulders. "Uh, sir, I don't mean to intrude on your hallucination, but I'm a constable officer from the local commandry, Ceylon 21. My name is Pursuivant Eighteenth Co-Mentalist Neoform of the Andropsyche-Projection Orthochronic Schola."

"What?"

"Forgive me for not introducing myself. I had my valet place a description of myself and my reason for coming into the Middle Dreaming, and I had assumed you would know all about me at a glance. That is the way we at the Andropsychic Projection school run our affairs. I had been informed that you, despite being ostracized, still had access to the mentality. It just did not occur to me you would not use it."

The gray mannequin now held out an empty hand toward Phaethon. "Here is my badge of office, with warrants and commissions appended in nearby files. Do you wish to inspect it? All you need do is log on to the mentality."

Phaethon looked at the mannequin's hand. To Phaethon's mentality-blind eyes, it was empty. "I am not willing to log on to the mentality," he said.

"Ah. That's too bad. I have a magistrate standing by on channel 653. She-they will sign a warrant for the seizure and arrest of your remaining nanomaterial--that suit-substance in your armor-before the rest of the Drunks here eat the stuff. A lot of people last night took handsful of your stuff back to their rafts, and most of them injected or inhaled only a few grams, according to my best guess. If you want to get it back, what little is left, we must act quickly. Just log on to the mentality and talk with the magistrate; I'm sure we can get an injunction and have that stuff seized before your new pals wolf down the rest of it for breakfast. We may only have a few minutes. Just log on."

For a moment, such a wild emotion pulsed in Phaethon that he could not speak. But a cold ripple of doubt quelled his joy. What evidence did he have that his armor had not been entirely destroyed? What evidence did he have that this faceless mannequin was not, in fact, Scaramouche? He seemed to have insisted once too often that Phaethon should log on to the mentality.

And yet, if part of his armor still existed, and might still be saved, and if it were destroyed because Phaethon stood here hesitating and doubting ... ?

Phaethon licked dry lips, not sure what to believe.

The mannequin said, "We don't have much time."

Phaethon thought a moment, came to a decision. "I will go talk to Ironjoy," he said to the constable.

It was with some difficulty that Phaethon made his way to the central barge where Ironjoy kept his thought-shop. First, he could not dilate the oval window-door to get out of his house with any dignity; nor would the constable help him by overriding the house-mind's faulty command-line, as such charity might have been in violation of the Hortators' ban. Phaethon had to squirm through the hole, whereupon he fell across a narrow ledge and plummeted twenty feet into the sea.

The water here was clogged and clotted with snag-lines and ropy tendrils, which made up part of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea's body, or perhaps one of her manufacturing subsections, so Phaethon did not sink. But neither was his body buoyant; the special organs and space-adaptations built into his thick hide added weight. However, his strength was much greater than an unmodified man's, and he was able to lunge forcefully through the thicket. Another modification enabled him to hold his breath for the twenty minutes or so it took him to walk (and crawl and swim) across the beds of undersea kelp and ratting to the rusted barge in the center of the bay.

He swarmed up the anchor lines, awkwardly negotiated the float-sponsons, and eventually found himself dangling from the side of the barge.

Clinging to an anchor line, Phaethon looked up. Sheer vertical surface loomed above him, and a metal overhang or catwalk extended out overhead. There was no way upward. The mannequin representing Constable Pursuivant was not in sight.

Phaethon banged on the side of the hull and shouted for attention. Once again, he underestimated the strength involved in his space-adapted body; the metal dented under his blows.

The hull rang like a gong. In the heat of the equatorial morning, the hull metal seemed scalding. Rust flakes and barnacles scraped his fist.

After what seemed a long time, a tall silhouette stepped out upon the catwalk. Phaethon craned his neck and stared overhead. It was Ironjoy; he had four arms, and the same wide hat he wore yesterday, the same shifting green-blue garment. The housecoat was whining as its air conditioners attempted to keep a zone of cool, scented air around Ironjoy.

"Hoy! You clang at my personal property, creating disturbance. Aboard I have early shift workers, with their work personalities ready to load, and needing sanity-chips to balance themselves after last night's festivity. Why do you irk them? Do you come for work?"

Without his sense-filter Phaethon could neither amplify the view, nor edit out the metal honeycomb that formed the catwalk floor, so his vision was obscured. Ironjoy was holding a large round golden object in three hands, and as he spoke, he bowed to sip or lick something from the inside of the golden bowl. Eating did not hinder speech: his voice issued from a machine in his chest.

Phaethon said, "I've come to get my armor back. You must be able to call everyone together."

"Not possible."

"But I saw Oshenkyo do it yesterday! He set his advertisement cloak to emit a call!"

"Yes. Oshenkyo has enough chits to pay off the interruption fee. You have not. The rental on your revived house-mind has already accumulated over two hundred units, and it's another twenty-five units' fare you'll owe to rent my coracle to carry you back to your house. Unless you want to swim back? Plus my consultation fee, which started to accumulate from the moment you began to speak to me. You are severely in debt, New Kid. Are you ready to start working it off, or are you going to cling there, jabbering?" Ironjoy now bent to take a slow sip of whatever he held in his golden bowl. Phaethon saw, with a sensation of shock, that Ironjoy was holding, not a bowl, but the helmet of Phaethon's armor, and that he was eating out grams of the delicate skullcap interface webbing.

Rage throbbed in his body. "Stop! You are destroying my property! You will return my helmet to me as of this instant! Then you will take all steps to recover whatever of my equipment as might remain from the others here!"

Ironjoy's insectoid face was incapable of expression. "Do not irk me. You may have been a significant man before, on the outside. Here, only I am significant. Cooperation is necessary to survive in this community. Cooperation is defined as acclimation to my wishes."

Phaethon's fists tightened on the anchor line. He wanted to leap up the sheer surface but saw no way up. His head swam with anger; he tried to calm himself. (He wished Rhadaman-thus were there to calm him.)

"I have made a lawful request that you return property that has been stolen from me," said Phaethon "Look! Constable remotes as thick as wasps hover over this entire area! Do you think to defraud me of my only possessions?"

"I see Drusillet and Oshenkyo did not explain real things to you, as I instructed. Come up; I will tell you the truth." With a kick, Ironjoy unfolded a gangway of stairs from the catwalk. Phaethon dropped into the water, awkwardly made his way to the stairs, climbed. Ironjoy stood under a parasol of diamond in one of the pavilions on deck, rainbow shadows rippled around his feet.

Other pavilions, to the left and right, showed sleeping figures, their mind-sets connected by cheap hard-wire to an interface board which ran the length of the deck.

A winged girl nearby had her arms around Phaethon's gold breastplate, to which she was snuggled up, like a child sleeping with a favorite toy. Phaethon, without a word, stepped over to her and knelt. His arms reached for the breastplate, which, to his delight, he saw still had more than half its nanomachine coating glistening on the interior.

"Halt!" said Ironjoy. "No stealing!"

Phaethon turned, his eyes burning, his head pounding. Civilized instinct told him not to touch the armor, to negotiate, and to allow the normal process of law to settle the dispute. But were those instincts of any use to him now?

He pulled up the breastplate and set it off to one side. The winged girl stirred and murmured but did not wake. Then Phaethon stood, his eyes glassy with anger, and crossed to confront Ironjoy.

He stared at his foe for a moment. Was there any point in talking? Floating in the transparent surface of the diamond parasol, which spread like a halo over Ironjoy's head, were the icons and display-boards indexing the contents of Ironjoy's thought-shop. The icons appeared in Objective Aesthetic sym-bology; Phaethon understood their meaning.

To Ironjoy's left were routines to suppress restless thoughts, to produce personas incapable of fatigue, boredom, talkativeness, or dishonesty. Evidently his work roster. To his right were pleasure-stimulants, a wide number of anesthetics and pornography simulations, mood alterants, false memories, gambling interfaces, and self-justification dreams. Here were stupifiers, nullifiers, distorted mythoformations, and choose-your-own revenge dramas.

Phaethon, to his deep disgust, also saw sickly sweet addictive thought-forms of the type passed out freely by the mass-mind Compositions, intended only to persuade individuals to surrender the pain and loneliness of individuality to the unconditional and mindless love of the group-mind. Since, of course, no real Composition would permit an exile to join its ranks, Ironjoy could not fulfill the promises those addictives created. But next to them were a group of awareness-interrupters intended to create the temporary illusion of being a member of a mass-mind.

Phaethon saw not a single intelligence enhancer, memory augment, philosophy text, emotion balancer, or any other useful or wholesome application. He now saw what kind of thought-shop Ironjoy ran.

Without a word, he yanked the golden helmet out of Ironjoy's grasp.

Ironjoy grappled Phaethon, seizing him by both wrists, putting his third hand on the helmet itself, and grasping Phaethon's neck with his remaining hand. His hands were as hard and strong as mechanical grapples; he evidently expected no resistance. Ironjoy's face, pressed to Phaethon's, now showed the only expression of which it was capable: the mandible plates drew back, making a parody of a sneering smile.

Ironjoy certainly was not expecting Phaethon's strength to exceed his own. With a brush of his arm, Phaethon threw Ironjoy aside. The tall creature stumbled, four arms windmilling, and fell.

A group of constable remotes, glittering and buzzing, had descended to take up a circle around the two of them, tiny stings and stunners open.

Ironjoy rose to his feet and addressed the nearest constable: "I have been assaulted. You boast that violence is unknown in the Golden Oecumene! Yet now this wild barbarian commits outrages upon me!"

The flat voice spoke from the constable: "The law allows a person to use a reasonable amount of force to recover stolen property."

Phaethon said: "Yet neither did you protect me against him!"

The constable said: "His action was arguably self-defense. Also, the grounds of your action are not unambiguous. Ironjoy may have a colorable claim to the property."

At this, Ironjoy stepped forward again and reached toward the helmet.

Phaethon said softly: "The property is mine. Interfere at your peril."

Ironjoy drew back. But his voice machine issued a strident tone: "By what right do you make this claim? You gave it all away, last night. Observe!" Ironjoy drew out a field slate from his coat. He touched the slate surface and called up an image of glowing dragon-signs, surrounded by icons and cartouches of the legal sub-language. Beneath, in Phaethon's perfect Second-Era-style handwriting, using linear-style cursive letters, was Phaethon's signature.

"Last night you signed our Pact. It states our properties are to be administered according to the group will. Haven't you read it? I left a copy at your house. Your signature passed title to your armor."

Phaethon stared at the slate. In a window to the side of his signature, the document showed a visual recording from last night. The picture showed him, giggling, one arm around some pink-haired air-sylph, reaching out with a light-stylus to inscribe a slate Lester was proffering. The time in the scene was dusk. A clock statement stamped by a notary public showed the hour and place and reality level. In the background of the scene, a group of men had begun to chop down a dead house. Phaethon recalled no such scene; but his memory was blurred.

"The donation is void on the grounds that I was intoxicated."

"Intoxication and other voluntary alterations of mental capacity do not form a valid basis for setting aside such a contract. That is the primary law of the Golden Oecumene."

"Scoundrel! The intoxication was not voluntary."

Ironjoy drew back the slate. He produced a nasal tone: "No doubt you have edited your memory. Fortunately, the records of the garden monitors will confirm my version of events. You drank an expansive from a bulb offered you; you doused yourself with painkillers from your own internal supply."

"Only because I was already drunk, and unable to control myself. Earlier than that, you conspired to have one of your fellows, a man with diamond teeth and glass eyes, stab me with a drug!" As he spoke, Phaethon realized who the man must have been. With his stimulant beard, housecoat, and opaque eye cusps removed, Phaethon had not then recognized him. Phaethon said: "You ordered Lester to do the deed. You feared that the capacities of my nanomachinery would threaten your monopoly. It was your intention from the first to rob me."

Ironjoy's tone grew even more nasal: "You will not prove this."

"Are you insane!? We are citizens of the Golden Oecumene! How can you even dream to succeed at your deceptions? There are a hundred constable remotes within earshot. Come, let us have the constables do a noetic reading. Your own thoughts and memories will show what you intended!"

"Perhaps so, if you bring forward a complaint to the constables. But you will not. This is a trick the constables always play whenever a New Kid is thrown to us here on Death Row. They wait until the New Kid is disadvantaged by one of our practices, but before he has been here long enough to learn our ways. Then they swoop in to stir up trouble. To stir up disloyalty. To stir up disunity. Yes, they would like to have a complaint against me. The Hortators put them up to it."

"Why?"

"Why? I give these exiles a way to stay alive. The Hortators want them to die. I alone of all these people here have the presence of mind, the discipline and willpower to prosper in this adversity. I alone brought wealth with me into exile, and established secret contacts and way stations in the more private sections of the mentality before I came, or made contracts without the standard Hortators' escape clause."

"You volunteered to live this way?" Phaethon's words came out slowly, amazed, perhaps disgusted.

"Out there I am of no account. Here, I am as rich as Gannis, as popular as Helion, as feared as Orpheus. It is a filthy, stinking, wretched, and temporary existence, but I am the most important aspect of it. Do you understand? You will not make any complaint to the constables."

"Why won't I?"

Ironjoy pointed with two right arms out to where the lopsided and unpowered house which they had given Phaethon wallowed in the waves. Some invisible signal radiated from Ironjoy; there was a snap of energy from below the sea, and the buoyancy floats holding up the house-legs bobbed loose. In a matter of moments, the seashell-shaped house had flooded and sank.

Phaethon stared in puzzled dismay, trying to remember if anything he owned might have been in the house.

Ironjoy said: "Keep in mind, the wording of the pact you signed requires you to continue to pay rent. If you wish to sleep this night, I will rent you, at a considerably higher rate, a square meter of deck space here. If you are frugal, work hard, and sell some of your more expensive organs, you will be able to buy a carbon-organizer to weave yourself a pillow and a pavilion roof in less than a month. If you do anything more to exasperate me, such as, for example, continue to threaten me with constables, I will refuse to rent to you, to sell you food or goods at any rate whatever."

Phaethon drew a deep breath, trying to control his shaking rage. Was he not a civilized man? Educated and bred to rationality, dignity, peace?

He made an attempt: "Let us reconcile. Use a circuit from your thought-shop to allow us to mingle our minds, either to comprehend each other from each other's point of view or to create a temporary arbitration conciliator, who will share memory chains from both of us and be able to decide our case with full justice."

The chest vox of Ironjoy gave forth a squawk. Laughter? Or the sign of some emotion known only to Ironjoy's peculiar half-Basic, half-Invariant neuroform?

"Absurdity! We are mortal and we are poor. Such circuits are expensive. We have not the time nor the wealth to enjoy the dream of perfect justice you manor-born play at. Life is unfair. We cannot buy sense-filters to fabricate pretty illusions that tell us otherwise. Unfair, because there are times when necessity requires the weak to submit to the strong. I have stolen your armor, perhaps. That is your opinion. But you cannot afford to object. That is a fact. Instead of getting your armor back, you will apologize, you must now plead with me, you must now beg humbly to be forgiven. Why? Not because you are wrong. Only because you are weak."

Phaethon's rage filled him like fire, but suddenly, impossibly, turned to jovial disdain, and left him clear-minded and cold. He felt like a man who struggled up some shifting slope of sand, with everything disintegrating and sliding backward beneath his fingers, but who suddenly stands at the peak of the slope, and finds a much wider view than he had expected.

He said, "Weak? Compared to whom? To you? My actions do not stink of hysteria and shortsighted fear. To the Hortators? They were willing to blot the world with amnesia rather than face me. To my nameless enemies? I discovered their cowardice at Lake Victoria. Justice and lightness are on my side: I need never think a weak thought again."

Ironjoy brushed this aside with a wave of both left hands. "Congratulations. But where will you live? To whom will you speak? Not to the Ashores; they regard the Afloats with nothing but hatred. Cooperate. Here you will find friends."

Phaethon said, "I make you a counteroffer. If you cooperate with me, and return my remaining armor intact, not only will I not turn you over to the constables, but I will take you with me, you and all the Afloats, and make you a planet for your very own, a world drawn up according to your own specifications, once I regain control of my ship, the Phoenix Exultant, and once I set out to conquer the stars."

"Absurd. You are deluded."

"I am not deluded! My memories are true and exact. Come now, which is it to be? My armor, or the constables? If I testify against you, the Curia will apply pain directly to your nervous system, or they will rewrite your evil thoughts with a reformation program."

"They have no case; otherwise, they would have already moved against me. Be reasonable, New Kid! Why do you want or need that armor? To fly to the stars? That will never happen. You need the nanomachinery lining to control some complex supersystem or maintain internal energy ecologies aboard your ship? There is no ship. The armor is worthless to you, and meaningless to your new life. I am all that matters to your new life. You will not find work without me. You will not eat breakfast without me. You will need my dreams and delusions to keep at bay despair and suicide.

"Try to understand the grim necessity of the reality that confronts you," continued Ironjoy. "You are like a man who was thrown headlong from orbit into the deep sea, with only my little boat to fish you out from drowning. In my boat, you are sailing on an ocean of death, a bottomless ocean, with no net to catch you should you fall overboard, with no backup copies of yourself to restore you to life, no Sophotech to save you from your own foolishness. There is only me. Me. And if I throw you overboard, you will sink into that sea, never to rise again. Do not pester me about your foolish armor again; it was worthless to you, but my employees and charges will gain some momentary pleasures from it. The rest of the nanomachinery will be consumed later tonight, or tomorrow at the latest. Go down below, and I will give you a charge of noosophorific to put your memories of your armor permanently out of your head. Then return here, and I will plug you into the assembly formation. Some deviants are charging me for bit-work; I can use your brain's storage capacity for some of the overruns. It pays four chits per hour. Well?"

Phaethon said, "I will allow you to escape punishment for robbing me, and I will allow you to escape punishment for destroying the house, which, as far as I can tell, actually was given to me and was actually my property. I will allow you to escape punishment for your various lies and frauds. I will even consent to work at any job you care to set for any wages upon which we can mutually agree, provided it is honest labor. I am an intelligent and diligent worker, and I will not decrease my capacity for work by buying any dreams or false memories from your shop. I can certainly improve the house-minds of the wounded houses; I can restore the dead houses to life, I can string up a simple energy system, and I can organize a communication grid. I can program your thought-shop with a working dreamspace at least to the first-magnitude interactions, which should more than double your productivity. All this I can and will do. But only if you immediately recover my armor and restore it to me."

"The armor is a worthless memento of a life now closed to you. You have no use for it. The Pact you have signed is clear."

"I need the armor to fly my ship."

"There is no such ship. It does not exist. It is from a story. It is a dream."

" 'She.' Ships are not called 'it.' And... she is indeed a dream. A fine dream. Surrender my armor. This is your last chance."

Ironjoy stood looking at him, moving by not so much as a twitch.

Phaethon said loudly, "Constable Pursuivant! Are you standing by?"

One of the thumb-sized remotes, suspended on eight tiny nacelles, came forward, humming, from the circling swarm. A tiny voice, the same as had come from the mannequin earlier, issued forth: "I cannot make an arrest unless you agree to testify. The court will need to examine both your memories and his to discover if your intoxication was voluntary, and whether or not he had fraudulent intent."

Phaethon turned to stare at Ironjoy. Now was the crisis. Ironjoy could not know that Phaethon dared not log on to the mentality, and dared not open a deep channel to permit a noetic examination. Could he be deceived? Ironjoy lived in a culture where deception was practiced, like someone from ancient times.

Surely he would see through Phaethon's bluff...

He did not.

With no change of his insect expression, Ironjoy tapped a command into his slate. All of the sleeping figures on deck were wearing advertisement robes of dull blue-gray. Now those robes strobed, yelling, into life. The figures stirred, groaning.

Ironjoy made a general announcement. Sullenly, faces downcast, people shuffled forward and dropped pieces of golden adamantium at Phaethon's feet. Some of them spat at him as they dropped a vambrace or greave. Coracles were sent out, towed by daughter-vines across the water to the nearby houses; more people returned, and brought back a few remaining pieces of the armor, an arm ring and elbow piece.

There were some arguments about bits of the black nanomachinery, which people had turned into other substances but had not consumed yet. Ironjoy gave a curt command, and pointed. Jars and caps and little bags were brought forward. Sullen figures dumped the material at Phaethon's feet, to form a spreading black pool. Oshenkyo himself had swallowed a large amount, but was storing it, undigested, as an inert material, for his stomach to consume slowly, one gram at a time. With many sneers and curses he vomited the material up. Then he sat slumped on the deck, weeping; it had been enough substance to keep him in pleasant hallucinations for weeks, almost unimaginable wealth.

It was all over in less than an hour. The whole community stood on the deck of the barge, beneath the crystalline pavilion roofs, glowering at Phaethon. The black pool at his feet trembled as it went through its self-cleaning routine, restoring broken memory chains and command lines. About one-fourth of the material had been consumed; the memory storage in the rest had sufficient mass to recompile the missing parts. The damage was curable.

Phaethon, his heart large with emotion, placed his foot into the pool. The suit lining recognized his cell structure. Like a loyal hound after a long absence, it remembered him. There was an upward rush of motion. The lining flowed over his body and established connections to his skin, nerves, and muscles. The golden plates slid upward and clattered into their proper places. A sense of wonderful well-being suffused him.

Ironjoy made a signal to his people. "And now, trespasser, you are no longer welcome here. Don't show your face again!"

And, with a rush, the people crowded forward and threw Phaethon into the sea. The constables did not interfere. Phaethon plummeted, splashed, and sank like a stone. But, beneath his helmet, he was smiling.

As he sank, Phaethon's smile faded, and he began to realize the enormity of his error.

Above, the barge was a square shadow, surrounded by ripples of agitated light. To every side were lesser shadows, spider shapes of the dead houses seen from below, their splayed float pods tangled with trailing vines and nets and lines of kelp.

He had erred. Intent on his armor, he had forgotten his life.

For what was he to do now?

The inescapable obstacle to any attempt by Phaethon to build up another fortune, buy passage to Mercury, call his ship, or organize a protest against the Hortators' decision was, simply and absolutely, that he dared not log on to the mentality. The enemy virus lurking in the mentality, waiting for Phaethon, closed all Phaethon's options.

Ironically, if he had gone to a simple thought-shop before his exile, and bought a script board, or some other indirect means of communicating with the mentality-even through a cheap pair of gloves as he had seen some of the wretched Ashores of Talaimannar use-he might have been able to find ways to send messages to, and perform useful work for, some of Ironjoy's dark markets; markets which the Hortators apparently could not close off.

Worse, there were obviously such devices for sale from Ironjoy. Had Phaethon not gotten himself exiled from the exiles, he might have been able to begin a long, slow, painful process of rebuilding his life, of reaching his ship.

Now, there was not even that.

Down he sank.

The bottom of the bay fell in a series of shelves into the deeper seabeds beyond. Bioformations that formed the nervous system of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea were mingled among the nets and beds of kelp and seaweed lining the muck and silt underfoot. Phaethon spied a place where the kelp had been crushed aside, as if by the rolling of a massive cylinder. Curious (and unwilling to return, just as yet, to the surface) Phaethon followed the trail of destruction.

He pondered as he slogged through the floating clouds of mud. Occasionally he stumbled. He had been without proper sleep for so long that his makeshifts were not able to catch and repair all the damage it was doing to his nervous system. A check on his internal systems showed another disaster looming. If he used his reduced supply of nanomaterial to form a recycling environment, allowing him to stay down here, there might not be enough to form the neuretic tissues he needed to reconstruct the crude self-consideration circuit he was using to stave off sleep deprivation. Also, some of the memories directly relating to past dream states, associational chains, and proper mental balance had been lost. He might not have time to reconstruct that information.

He was reluctant to rise to the surface, however. He suspected the behavior of the constables just now. Why had they been so very slow to interfere when Phaethon had been robbed? Or when Phaethon and Ironjoy had wrestled over the helmet? Phaethon recalled the Hortators' promise that Nebu-chednezzar Sophotech could see to it that Phaethon would not stand any chance of finding food or help. Could this whole scene have been arranged? Had both Ironjoy and Phaethon been tricked, manipulated, out-guessed?

Perhaps it had been foolish even to dream that the Hortators' Sophotech would not deduce Phaethon's flight to Talaimannar. The cyborg calling itself the Bellipotent Composition might not have had as secure a privacy as it had said. The cyborg could have been deluded, dream-caught, simply a memory addict who thought it was Bellipotent, thought it had privacy rights.

Besides, there were ways of tracking air movements Phaethon could think of; signals bounced from the underside of the ring-city, for example. If Phaethon could think of one, trust that a Sophotech could think of a thousand.

Had Nebuchednezzer Sophotech been able somehow to influence the constables to produce a crisis between Ironjoy and Phaethon? Anyone wishing to destroy Phaethon would rejoice at Ironjoy's enmity with him. In Ironjoy's shop, Phaethon might have been able to buy a self-consideration circuit to enable himself to program his sleep-and-dream cycles to repair, annex, balance, and regenerate the tired nerve paths in his artificial brain tissue in the same way that natural dreaming restored natural tissue. Had he and Ironjoy cooperated, it would have saved him from going mad.

Within the limits of the law, there was some scope, some gray areas, some flexibility of interpretation, as to how the constables could do their jobs. If so, it was safe to assume they would use that flexibility to do Phaethon as much harm as they could without actually overstepping the strict boundary of what was permissible. If so, it was better not to return to the surface, where the constables swarmed.

And Phaethon saw none down here.

His sleep deprivation, no doubt, was what had allowed his anger to escape him during his confrontation with Ironjoy. It was affecting more and more of his memory; he was suffering spasms of fatigue, dizziness, light-headedness. Eventually, he would die of this.

Without a self-consideration circuit to help organize his complex brain levels, the neural degeneration would proceed at an ever-increasing rate.

There was nothing to do, but to lie down and wait to go mad and die.

Strange. That a lack of a dream could kill a man.

Or maybe it was not so strange.

The line of wreckage dropped off the edge of a long slope. Here were grooves in the mud where some great weight had passed, discoloration where coral had been scarred. Phaethon began to pick his way down the slope, deeper into the green gloom.

Phaethon was more fatigued than he suspected. Farther and farther down the subsea slope he wandered, having long since lost the trail of debris he followed, and, in his daze, having forgotten what whim or purpose brought him here.

It grew darker; he was very deep; and clouds of slow mud, like wings, billowed from his every shuffling step.

He was jarred awake by an ache in his chest. It was a pain signal from a special organ he had had implanted in his lung. The organ was one of the earliest modifications of space-biotechnology, dating back to the first Orbital City, and allowed the user to detect a loss in oxygen levels (something the nose of an unmodified man was not able to detect), and warned of hypnoxia, hyperventilation, or anoxia.

He was choking to death without noticing it.

Phaethon blearily activated his internal thoughtspace and demanded a report from his suit. Headache pains stabbed him as the system came on; the icons seemed to drift and slide and blur in his vision.

The report jumped and swam jerkily into his thoughts.

The nanomachinery in his suit had been damaged, of course. But Phaethon had not realized that part of the damage had affected the suit's internal damage-control and safety routines.

One of the Afloats had erased the safety interlocks from the oversight routine in order to allow him to reprogram a stolen scrap of the suit to make nitrous oxide, not oxygen, through its recycler. When that section had rejoined the main suit, some error in the reproducer had carried the erase-command over into the maintenance routine. Thus, every time Phaethon's lungs pumped carbon dioxide into the suit's faceplate, the erroneous command broke up the carbon dioxide and made nitrous oxide.

The broken safety checker knew enough not to pass the laughing gas back to Phaethon, but did not know enough either to dispose of it or to call it to Phaethon's attention. Instead, the broken safety checker shunted the nitrous oxide into the little storage pockets meant for the stacked oxygen molecules, and dumped the oxygen.

The suit contained little packages or bubbles of iso-molecular raw materials, like tiny storehouses of gold and carbon, frozen oxynitrogen or hydrogen chains for the other mechanisms in the suit to combine and manipulate. These pockets were designed only to hold racks and rows of molecules at a standardized orientation and spin; otherwise, the suit mechanisms could not grasp and manipulate them. The nitrous oxide, flooding the pockets, was, of course, not at the correct temperature, orientation, or composition. This had damaged most of the manipulator elements in the suit. Normally, it would have been child's play to draw oxygen out of the H2O molecules of the water around him, but now all the pores he would have used to separate out the oxygen were jammed. It would take at least an hour to repair the damage; Phaethon doubted that he could hold his breath that long.

Even if he abandoned the armor, his space-adapted body was not buoyant, and he could not float to the surface. He might be able to survive the buildup of nitrogen in his blood; special osmotic layers in his veins, another space adaptation, could screen out most nitrogen buildup. Could he simply swim up by brute strength alone? He was not sure how far overhead the surface was. And how could he find his armor again if he simply left it on the sea bottom?

One moment of supreme self-loathing and self-pity stabbed through him. Why had he not carefully checked every element, every command line of his armor when he had recovered it? His armor on which his life depended? Why? Because he had been raised as a pampered aristocrat, with a hundred machines to do all his bidding for him, to think his thoughts and anticipate his whims, so that he had lost the basic survival skills of discipline, foresight, and thoroughness.

Choking on bile, Phaethon thought the escape command, and panels of his armor fell away. Black seawater closed in on his face, blinding him. The black nanomachine lining swelled up, forming pockets of hydrogen along the chest and arms, trying to add buoyancy.

His armor, his beautiful armor, which had meant so much to him an hour ago, sank down swiftly and was gone.

He kicked away from the bottom, swung his arms and legs, and tried to pull his heavy body upward.

Upward. Icy water sucked the heat from his body in a moment. His limbs moved more slowly.

Upward. His struggles grew more wild. He lost his sense of direction.

Upward. He encountered some sort of kelp or seaweed, which tangled around his flailing arms, wrapped his legs with soft embrace.

Upward. It was the direction the stars were in. Phaethon did not know where they were. He was disoriented. He had lost the stars.

What were those little lights approaching him? Were they fairy lamps, come to greet him in his hour of victory? Or were they the metallic flashes in the eyes of a dying man about to faint?

Then there was nothing.