The Phoenix Exultant

THE NIGHTMARE

Little Spirit, why are you alive?"

Words, like something from myth, or dream, floated up. Sorrow, great sorrow, to be his fate, and deeds of renown without peer... to little men, the height is too great; to him, the stars are near...

"Daphne. Daphne said ..." He heard his own voice, muttering gibberish. Did he speak aloud? The words on his memory casket had come from the epic Daphne once composed in his honor ... back before he sank and drowned ...

"Then is she that one for whom you live, little one?"

Phaethon jerked open his eyes. A blur of green, dimness, shadows. He saw nothing.

His body jerked. He was numb, floating, drifting. Some sort of vines or swarms of living eels entwined his limbs with soft firmness; he could not move.

"Do not struggle, little one, unless to damage yourself is your goal. We have formed a pocket of your air; our dolphins rise to the surface, draw breath, and descend to breathe into your pocket here."

He attempted speech again. This time, his voice was clear. "Whom do I have the honor of addressing?"

"Aha. Polite little one, isn't he? We are Old-Woman-of-the-Sea."

The words were coming directly into his thoughtspace, over his suit-lining channel. Some sort of tube or medical appliance was thrust in his mouth. Other vines felt as if they held pads to his skin. Needles pierced his arm. The black nanomachinery of his lining was in motion; it was forming and unforming chemicals and combinations. He could feel the pulse of heat burning through it. The sensation comforted him.

Phaethon's eyes rolled back and forth. He saw nothing, at first. Then he detected a slide of gray shadow to his left and right. Two dolphins came near. He heard a rush of bubbles, a high-pitched squeak of dolphin sound. Air bubbled into the little space around his head.

"Madame, I thank you, and the gratitude I have is without limit. And yet I must warn you that those who assist me may fall under the ban of the College of Hortators."

"Our dolphins act by their own nature, and it is their nature to assist those in need. Had there been sharks nearby, the parts of our mind may have reacted differently. Such is life."

(Why did it sound so much like the voice of his mother, Galatea, whom he recalled from his far-vanished youth? Perhaps it was merely how regal, how queenly, how very much in command the voice rang ...)

"Ah. Forgive me, Madame, but, nonetheless, you yourself may be held to account for your generosity to me."

"The little one is noble as well! You seek to shield us from harm? Us?" There was a hint of vast laughter in the voice.

"The College of Hortators wields wide influence!"

"Yet we are as wide as the sea. Part of us are in the kelp, the coral, and the dust of the seabed, measuring, moving, releasing heat, storing it. Part of us is woven into the thoughts of fish and sea-beast, moving from brain to brain with the swiftness of a radio flash, or slowly, over centuries, thoughts encoded into chemicals drifting in the sea tides. After centuries or seconds, our thoughts come together again in new forms, drops that rise as dew above the gentle tropics, or move through storms that ring the arctic.

"We breathe to calm the hurricanes; we blush to stir the trade winds into life. We sway the Gulf Streams, we thrust the currents and the counter-current of the tide as if they were limbs a hundred miles wide, and yet we count each plankton cell which feeds your world's air. Predator and prey move through us like corpuscles of arteries and veins, governed by the stirring of a mighty heart. Parts of us are older than any other living being, older than all other Cerebellines, older than all Compositions save for one. You cannot imagine what we are, dear little one; how, then, could you imagine we could fear your Hortators? We know nothing of your land-world; we care nothing for your Hortators. There is only one man of all your Earth whose name we know; one man whose fate fascinates our far-ranging and ancient thoughts."

Phaethon knew the Old-Woman-of-the-Sea was a unique entity, both a Cerebelline and a Composition, a group-mind made of many widely scattered partial and global minds. There was none other like her; this particular combination of neu-roform and mental architecture was deemed too wild and strange by the consensus of psychiatric conformulators of the Golden Oecumene.

Yet she was old, very old. Some of the organisms or systems which housed her many conciousnesses dated back to the first Oceanic Ecological Survey, in the middle of the Third Era.

He asked: "Who is this man? This one man who is the only man of Earth you know?"

"We felt him tug at our tides a moment or a century ago, when he moved the moon. His name is Phaethon."

Phaethon felt a tremor ran through his body. His breath was caught by sudden emotion. Fear? Wonder? He was not sure. "What do you know of this Phaethon?" he asked.

"We have been waiting for him for five aeons, a million years of human history."

"How could you wait so long? He is only three thousand years old."

"No. He is the oldest dream of man. Even before men knew what the stars were, their myths peopled the night sky with winged beings, gods and angels and fiery chariots, who lived among the stars. We have waited, we have always been waiting, for one who would carry the Promethean gift of fire back to the heavens."

There was silence for a space of time. Phaethon could feel adjustments being made in his nanomachinery, his blood chemistry; he became more clear-headed.

"I am Phaethon. I am he. The dream has failed. I am hunted by enemies whom no one else can see, enemies whose names I do not know, whose motives and powers I cannot guess. I am denounced and hated by the Hortators. I am rejected by my father. My wife committed a type of suicide rather than see me succeed. I have lost my ship; I have lost my armor; I have lost everything. And now I die. I am suffering from sleep deprivation, dream deprivation, and I cannot balance the neural pressures between my natural and artificial brains without a self-consideration circuit."

There was a space of silence for a time. Then the voice came again:

"You lose because you have not given up enough. Let go of all your artificiality, release yourself from your machine-thoughts. Do you understand?"

Phaethon thought he understood. "You ask a terrible price of me."

"Life asks. There is an evil dream in you, I sense it, which creates this blockade. A virus or outside attack attempts to blot your memory, so that you will not know who attacks you. We have no noetic circuits in us; we cannot cure your thoughts. This you must do on your own. But we can use our art, which balances flows and ecologies of sea life, to restore some sanity to your blood chemistry and nerve chemistry. We can remove the block that prevents your nightmare-dream from emerging."

Phaethon was too weary to grasp all the implications of what he was hearing. External virus? He said: "I will still need a self-consideration circuit when I wake, to cure the damage already done, even if I shut down most of my artificial neural augments now."

"All you will need to survive will be at hand for you when you wake, if you have wit enough to see it."

"And if not?"

"Then we will wait a year or a billion years for another Phaethon. If you are such a man as cannot live without a dozen servants and nursemaids to assist you, then you are no Phaethon."

"I am he."

"Not yet. But you may yet be."

"Yet why will you help me even as much as you have?"

"Your world of solid land is ruled by the Earthmind, my sister and my enemy. She is a creature of pure logic, structure, an inanimate geometry of lifeless intellect. I am a creature of life, of passion and sorrow, of flux and chaos and ever-changing shapes. Her rules prevent her from doing what is right; her laws enforce safety and stop life. She seeks to help you but cannot. I seek not to help you, but I will.

"Why will I? My tragedy is written in the living things which grow along the beach above. Here is the mind that once was myself and my daughter, which I sent long ago to Venus, for the terraforming there.

"For two aeons, we were supreme and supremely happy on Venus, for there were, there, all things life could not find here: change, growth, expansion, new sensation, new challenge, new danger.

"Then, victory created defeat. The sulfur-poisoned skies of Venus were cleaned and made serene and blue, the filth of clouds was drained and cooled to create oceans of primordial beauty, the actions of the world's core were tamed, the earthquakes silenced, and proper tectonics established, to support a landscape stable and fair to look upon.

"And yet this was defeat. Venus became nothing more than another Earth, ruled by a Venusmind no different from the Earthmind, and my daughter returned in sorrow to dwell with me."

"Why sorrow? You had success."

"Do not mock me. My daughter is alive; therefore, she must grow; that growth produces uncertainty, change, instability, and danger; therefore the Earthmind and her machines out-maneuver us, thwart us, hinder us, (legally! oh, ever so very legally!) and act in every way to stop our growth, which stops our life. And then they wonder why we grieve."

"Madame, honesty compels me to state, that, when I achieve my dream, the worlds I shall create in far places shall be children of this one, like this one. I regard this society, for all her ills, as near to Utopia as reality allows."

"Foolish, noble, pompous, brave, good Phaethon! Listen to your airs! What you intend and what you do not intend have smaller import than you might suspect. The question is not what you shall do with life but what life shall do with you. A mother salmon might die to lay a thousand eggs, only in the hope that one such egg might live; such is the cruelty and beauty of life."

A great fatigue swept over Phaethon again. Perhaps Old-Woman-of-the-Sea was preparing his body for sleep. He uttered a tired thought: "So far, the only creatures who have expressed support for my efforts, are yourself, and a horrid vulture thing who either was, or who pretended to be (I don't know which is worse) a survivor of the Bellipotent Composition. He rejoiced because I was going to start a war. Now you rejoice because I will unleash chaos. I am not comforted."

"Death is the other side of life; chaos, of thought. You will dream now, you will wake, you will know your enemy, and you will kill."

But Phaethon was fatigued, and inattentive, and he failed to ask what this last meant.

Half-asleep, dazed, Phaethon gave instructions to his suit-mind, and attempted a much deeper reorganization technique than he had tried during earlier sleep cycles.

This was what the Old-Woman-of-the-Sea made clear. It was the artificial sections of his mind which were creating the problem.

And so he began to erase those parts of his mind.

There. He no longer had an eidetic memory. There. He could no longer calculate complex equations. There. A hundred languages, along with grammar and nuance-thesaurus were gone. There, and there. No more perfect pitch, no more perfect sense of direction. There. His brain could no longer interpret energy signals from beyond the normal visual range (a facility he could have erased long ago, as he no longer had any supervisual or subvisual receptors).

There. Pattern-recognition directories; gone. There, an automatic thought corelation checker, which aided in creative thinking; erased. There, several circuits to record, store, and manipulate emotional percepts; undone. He had just lost his ability to discriminate between and appreciate a wide variety of aesthetic and artistic universes. There. Intelligence augmentation; destroyed. Phaethon could feel his thoughts becoming slower and stupider.

Should he erase the rest? Phaethon no longer trusted his own judgment. He had, after all, just damaged his ability to make those judgments, perhaps greatly. Perhaps his intelligence, by now, was only as deep as a dawn-age man's had been. Was it enough to allow him to stay sane?

The great yawning gulf of sleep tugged at him. Wait. Had he programmed his nanomachine lining to keep him alive while he slept? For a panicky moment (and how strange it was to feel true panic again, now that his emotion buffers were erased!) Phaethon wondered if he had accidentally erased the sending and receiving system that allowed him to communicate with his nanomachinery suit lining. But no; the circuits had merely been indexed through an automatic secretarial program which was now erased. His suit-lining functions were still intact, even if he no longer had automatic help to manipulate them.

Then, unconsciousness.

And, at last, a clear dream came.

It was a nightmare.

In the dream, he saw a black sun rising over an airless wasteland of fused and broken rock, craters ringed with jaws like broken glass. The ground had been fused by powerful radiation. Dry riverbeds scarred the land. On the too-near horizon, volcanoes produced by prodigious gravitic tides, and massive core turbulence, vented flaming gas and molten metal with pressure enough to send particles into orbit. And yet there was something familiar about this surface, something too regular and too symmetrical to be natural. Two lines of black pyramids, geometrically straight, ran in double ranks to the horizon and beyond.

The black sun was surrounded by a disk of gas, which it wore like some mockery of Saturn's many-colored rings of ice. A mockery, for this accretion disk was a ring of hazy fire and snarled gray dust, trembling with electrical discharges whenever atoms were stripped of their outer electron shells as they plunged toward the surface of the black sun and were torn apart by tidal forces. Nucleonic particles, traveling at near-light speeds and striking the surface obliquely, were sheared in two; half the particle falling into blackness and the other half liberated as pure radiation. Subatomic particles, when they were sheared in two by similar forces at the surface, broke up into their short-lived and very strange constituents, things not normally seen in nature, magnetic monopoles and half-quarks.

The surface itself was not visible, except as a silhouette against the corona created by these radiation discharges. And the continuous shower of energy from this corona was Doppler-shifted far into blood-red as it straggled to escape the immense gravity well.

But it was not a surface; it was an event horizon. The object looming in the sky was a singularity. It was a black hole in space; crushed beyond the density of neutronium by its own mass.

In the dream, he (or, rather, whatever dream-persona he was playing) stooped to scrape the blasted surface of the wasteland with his hand. Beneath a thin and bloody layer of crust he had found the adamantium surface of a hull. All around him, the landscape took on a new aspect. What had seemed volcanoes were piled debris accumulating around broken air locks; what had seemed dry riverbeds to his left and right now were the crusted tracks where railguns once had rested; the regular lines of stumps and outcroppings became the accumulators, antennae, and docking rings of the star-colony hull on which he stood.

The bits of crust in his fingers were dried blood. Tiny fragments of bone and dried gore and brain-stuff trickled through his fingers, mummified by vacuum and radiation. This packed substance, the dry residue of uncounted millions of corpses, went all the way to the horizon, as far as the eye could see.

Where the crust of blood was pulled up, shone a segment of hull. In the hull was a thought-port. He had held a jack from his gauntlet to that port, seeking whatever local ship-mind record might have survived.

The record unfolded, and the dream changed to images of horror. He saw a great city in space, peopled with philosophers and savants from the Fifth Era, an elegant and adventurous race, strolling along wide boulevards, leaning from the tiers of graceful cafes and thought-shops, minds entwined in a well-choreographed harmony of several Compositions, one for each of the neuroforms, Warlocks, Cerebellines, Invariants, and Basics.

Then he saw the lights go dark, the air fall still. Nanomachine substances, pouring like black oil, came out from walls, bubbling up from floors. Some of the well-dressed savants threw themselves into the surface willingly; others with grim resignation; others were pushed.

Bald men in white robes and armor, Invariants all, armed themselves with cutting-torches and modified communication lasers, and made a last stand in a sea of rising black filth. The black material formed clouds and waves of swarming semiorganic material to overwhelm them; the men fought calmly, with machine-like precision, and, at the moment when defeat became mathematically certain, with no change of expression or sign of fear, they methodically turned their weapons against themselves and slew each other.

The black corruption spread. It flooded streets; it reached into windows; it sought out hiding places.

Lovers embracing were drenched by waves of the substance, and clung to each other as they sank, their flesh dissolving, their limbs and faces melting into each other. Mothers with babies in their arms tried to shield their infants as black waves swallowed them, and one watched in horror as the little child, limbs waving, was absorbed back into her own melting flesh. Whoever was thrown into the substance began to dissolve, limbs and organs floating free as they were assimilated, snake nests of wires reaching into their severed heads, thrusting with spasmodic jerks up the holes in their torn necks, till the material bonded to their brains.

The black substance grew more active and more clever in its attacks the more victims it absorbed. The most intimate knowledge of captured loved ones was used to deceive those still at large into touching the black goo. Private data systems were overwhelmed and their secrets plundered. If one group member in a composition was caught, he found, to his horror, his unguarded thoughts betraying his fellows.

The city soon was entirely bathed in blackness. In this ocean of material, human brains floated, helpless and disembodied, the balls of their eyes still connected by nerve fibers to their forebrains. The brains were opening and unraveling. Layer by layer of cortex material, still intact, was now interconnecting all the disembodied people with strands and webs of nervous tissue, to form one huge homogenous mass.

Black tentacles reached from the substance, rose and formed the twin lines of black pyramids on the dark side of the space city, the side facing the singularity, and created a series of noumenal thought-antennae. Now, above the apex of each pyramid, in orbit there hovered a rapidly spinning ring of crystallized neutronium pseudomatter, rotating at near-light speed. Gravitic distortions appeared at the hubs of each disk. The pyramids hummed with power; in the dream, he heard a million screams of utmost panic and despair; and the thought-information, the living souls, of all those helpless people, was beamed through those disk hubs and then down into the event horizon of the black hole.

Whatever is sent into a black hole does not emerge again.

In the dream, one who seemed to be himself now turned, overwhelmed in fear and horror, and opened deep channels in his mind. He uttered the secret commands, the codes and combinations needed to open wide space in the mentality to hold his message, to warn other colonies and planets, as many people as he could at once.

But it was all in vain. The blood he had touched had contaminated his glove and hand and nervous system. His thoughts were twisted into strange shapes. With dark exaltations he rejoiced at how he had been tricked, how he was now to be absorbed. He smiled, as his flesh dissolved into the black muck at his feet, to think of how his attempted warning, broadcast so far and wide, would carry viruses destroying the very ones he had, a moment before, desired to save.

And, as the dream ended, he thought he saw, all around him in space, city after city like the one on which he stood, also overwhelmed with black corruption, their populations raped and beheaded by attacking tendrils of neural nanomaterial, their souls sucked out, and sent, like a river of screams, down into the bottomless well of the singularity. Four burning gas giants, their odd atmospheres of hydrogen and methane aflame, fell from their orbits, were pulled like taffy as they fell ever lower into the singularity's gravity well, scattered into asteroids and waste heat, and were consumed.

This star system also had a second sun, a source of light and warmth. It disintegrated into flaming nebula as it fell, elongating into monstrous streamers of fire, as it was consumed by the black sun.

All the energy sources and points of light from the many beautiful cities went dark; all the radio signals, throughout this once-great Oecumene, fell silent.

So the dream had ended.