Fénix Exultante (56 page)

The mat was lovely, patterned with a traditional motif of trefoils and cinquefoils.

He sat and ordered a cup of tea. But now the kitchen would only produce a spaceman’s drinking bulb, which the tea service’s heating wand could not enter. It seemed Phaethon would have to sip his tea cold.

He was about to get up and tear out the kitchen memory for the third time, when the green-glowing slate next to him finally chimed.

The self-consideration program was ready.

Phaethon took a sip of cold tea to brace himself, sat in a position called Open Lotus, drew a wire from his slate to the jack on his shoulder board, performed a brief Warlock breathing exercise, and opened his mind.

There he was, sipping tea from a dainty bulb, seated on a fresh-grown mat woven in the traditional style, with his hypnotic Warlock formulation-rod to one side, and his slate in reading mode on the other, tuned to the proper subchannels and ready with the proper routines, ready to undertake a thorough neural investigation, cleaning, and reconstitution.

A tea-bulb, a mat, a rod, a brain interface. All the simple and basic necessities of life. He was beginning to feel like a civilized man again.

Inside his personal thoughtspace, the self-consideration circuit opened up like a flat mirror, glowing with icons and images. It was a matter of a few moments to set the nerve-balancing subroutine into motion. It was the task of about an hour to review his major thought chains and memory indexes since his last full sleep, and to edit out the disproportionate reactions, the shadow memories, and the emotional residue clogging his thoughts.

Next, a review of command lines in his undermind showed that his subconscious desires, on several occasions, had been interpreted by his implants as commands to alter his blood-chemistry balance; the imbalances had produced subconscious neural tension; the tension had been interpreted as a further command to make additional modifications to his thalamus and hypothalamus, which had in turn affected his perceptions, moods, and memories. And these mood shifts had set in motion additional self-reinforcing cycles. It was a classic case of sleep deprivation. It was a mess.

Finally, he opened a sub-table and reviewed his emotional indicators. His frustration levels were high, but not disproportionately so, considering his circumstances. His general fear levels, normally below background threshold detection levels, had spread to involve every other area of his thought: every thought; every dream; every shade of emotion. Puzzled, Phaethon engaged an analyzer, and checked the back-linkages.

He found that his fear was linked to the thought that he was mortal. His subconscious mind had been profoundly affected by the knowledge that his noumenal backup copies had been destroyed. The images and allusions floating in his middle-brain grew morbid, panicked, grotesque. This, combined with the knowledge that Silent Oecumene agents were hunting him, affected his blood chemistry, nerve-rhythm, and the overall sanity of his entire mental environment.

Fascinating. Phaethon compared his general mental balance against a theoretical index. According to the index, it was not insane, or even unusual, for a mortal man being hunted by enemies to react as Phaethon had done. For example: the index opined that wrestling with Ironjoy had been a normal and understandable reaction to the fear and frustration created by Ironjoy’s theft. Why? Because the thought that he was mortal meant that he only had a certain amount of time left in his life. On a subconscious level, it was as if his nerves and blood chemistry had decided that there was no time to waste negotiating with criminals.

Another file showed Phaethon the thought-images with which his subconscious mind associated his armor: he saw pictures of mighty fortresses, invulnerable castles, mythic knights of the Round Table in shining plate mail. It also showed maternal images of comfort and caring, healing his wounds, feeding him. Then there were emotion-images of loyalty and fidelity; the armor appeared in metaphor as a faithful hunting dog.

Small wonder he had reacted violently to its loss. Phaethon smiled wryly to see how his subconscious regarded the armor as his fortress, mother, and dog all wrapped up in one. Perhaps he was not as insane as he had thought he was.

In fact, out of his emotions, there were only two the self-consideration routine tagged as being abnormal. The first, oddly enough, was related to the cacophiles, the ugly monstrosities who had met him after his Curia hearing to praise his victory, and who had tried to intoxicate him with a black card. His level of disgust toward those creatures was very high; there was an abnormal desire not to think about them, to put them out of his mind. An image-box showed a half-melted lump of a body, quivering with tentacles and polyps, wearing Phaethon’s face. The subconscious fear that he was somehow like them, no doubt, was what made him not want to think about them. The link chaser displayed lines of red light, to indicate that there were other reasons, deeper and stronger, as to why Phaethon did not want to think about the cacophiles. But Phaethon did not bother to follow those links. He did not want to think about it.

His second association marked as abnormal was his fear of logging on to the mentality. The index rated that as being disproportionately out of character for Phaethon.

The index on this self-consideration routine was not complex enough to analyze why Phaethon was more afraid than he ought to be.

According to Phaethon’s belief (reported the index) the last virus-entity attack had failed. It had been thwarted by his armor, which had snapped shut and severed the connection. Why was he so afraid of a type of attack he knew how to defeat?

According to the index, it would have been more natural for Phaethon, at this point, to be imagining schemes to be able to log on to the mentality, and yet be ready to thwart a second attack, perhaps with witnesses logged on and watching his thoughts for any sign of the enemy.

The index pointed out that this was exactly what Phaethon had done at Victoria Lake, when the three mannequins had been seeking him. Why was he brave enough to do it physically, but not mentally?

An attack in front of witnesses would prove to the Golden Oecumene that Phaethon had not been self-deluded. If no attack came, an uninterrupted mentality session would allow Phaethon to display to the world noetic deep-structure recordings proving that he was not self-deluded. In either case, the Hortators, by their own verdict, would then be forced to restore Phaethon to his former honors and community. Why was he so reluctant? The index concluded that his reluctance and his fear were unusual.

According to the index, there were false-to-facts associations in Phaethon’s mind related to his beliefs about the last virus-entity attack and its failure. His actions did not correlate with his apparent thoughts related to the strength and fearsomeness of this virus. For example: if Phaethon where so unwilling to log on to the mentality to suffer a noetic reading, then why had he, immediately after the attack, opened all his brain channels to receive his missing memories from the Rhadamanth house-mind, whom he, at that time, thought was infected by the virus?

Phaethon watched this analytical routine with a growing sense of impatience. The index of this self-consideration routine, after all, had been programmed and created by the Eleemosynary Composition. Naturally it would tend to dismiss perfectly rational and legitimate fears as hysteria. The whole point of the program was to convince people that their individual lives were hysterical, unpleasant, or unnaturally fearful, in order to convince them to join with a mass-mind for comfort and protection. Also, the index probably dismissed his fears as paranoia. After all, this index was not meant to be used by a man who really and actually was being hunted by a powerful, evil conspiracy. It probably dismissed his desire to save the entire Oecumene from a horrible outside menace as delusions of grandeur, but only because it had never taken readings from a man in a position to fight such a foe and save civilization.

Is it paranoia when they are really after you? Is it megalomania if you are actually poised to do great things?

The index tagged his present thoughts as a rationalization, and recommended psychological therapy. Phaethon snorted and shut the self-consideration system off.

He was too tired to think about it now. He used the slate to open his anonymous account in the mentality again, found some free dreams, which were being distributed as part of the Millennial festival. Most selections on the menu were uninspiring, but, to his surprise, he found one to his taste, a heroic piece. It took several minutes to download that one into the slate, and then restructure it from the slate to his thoughtspace. He had to organize its running-instructions one line at a time, now that he had erased his secretary.

But eventually, he had his dream and went to sleep.

He dreamed a dream he had seen before. The world was beneath a great glass dome, and he rode a defiant ship, lines and shrouds dripping with ice, up to the utmost apex of that dome, and drew back an ax to shatter it, while gathered nations far below cried out in agonies of fear…

It was time to set his plans in motion.

Awake, alert, rested, Phaethon began with a few hours of research on the public law-channels. This could be done anonymously, and without any interference from the Hortators, since the Curia, and its library of case law, could not be closed to any citizen.

Without the Rhadamanthus lawmind to help him, Phaethon was baffled by the large number of cases, the complexity of the law, and the arbitrary nature of the findings. But he was able to download several volumes of case histories into an open section of the house-mind he was in (shutting off the sewerage and kitchen recycler to find the space to do it), and eventually the house-mind independently confirmed Phaethon’s tentative opinions in the matter.

Next he touched the slate, opened a communication channel, and brought up the public emergency menu. Icons representing Fire, Mind-crash, Space debris, Ecological flux, Storm, Snow, Panic, and Injury opened up like red and blue-white flowers in the slate’s surface. And then the gold-and-blue emblem of the constabulary presented itself.

He paused.

What he intended suddenly seemed so mean and so petty. Phaethon did not want to appear either ruthless or ignoble when his accomplishments were contemplated by posterity.

He smiled to think how alien such a scruple or such a desire would be to his many opponents, people who had wronged him. They would think it improbable, or perhaps vain, to think a man would want history to think well of him.

“Well,” he said eventually, “the worst type of ignobility may be to let others take advantage of your noble nature. I cannot help but feel sorry for those wretched Afloats, though. This will come as quite a shock.”

He touched the symbol and spoke aloud: “Allow me to speak with Constable Pursuivant. I wish to testify against one Vulpine First Ironjoy Hullsmith, base neuroform with non-standard invariant extensions, Uncomposed and Unschooled. And, no, I will not submit myself to a noetic reading to make my complaint. According to the law, a verbal complaint is sufficient to allow you to act…”

A young woman appeared in the slate, accompanied by the squawk of music. She wore a semi-crystalline, semi-liquid body imbued with constabular blue and gold. Her body-shape, language, school, and emblems were of a type which Phaethon, without the Middle-Dreaming to help him, could not interpret.

“I’m sorry,” Phaethon said, “I cannot understand your language at that speed.”

Parts of her crown glowed, while other parts went dim; she was evidently switching minds, or employing an interpreter. “This part of me and us are most happy to accept any complaint against Vulpine Ironjoy howsoever formatted. The constables have been trying to get the Curia to shut down his operation for decades. But we and I cannot help you achieve your other expressed desire. We and I cannot bring you in communication with the one you call Constable Pursuivant.”

“Why not? Is he hurt?”

“Hurt? How could any citizen of the Golden Oecumene be hurt? No. You cannot speak to a constable named Pursuivant because there is no such person.”

It was amazing how quickly things changed. By the time Phaethon in his armor emerged in an explosion of steam from the surface of the sea and arced down to the deck of Ironjoy’s thought-shop, the Afloats were already jacked out of the mind-system, fired from their jobs, had begun to riot, and now lay stunned and numbed under the diligent immobilizer prongs of darting constable-wasps.

Ironjoy was standing at the square bow of the barge, arms folded and arms akimbo, staring down at the water in a brooding posture. The Curia had already conducted his trial over the mentality, at a high-speed time rate.

The constables had been allowed to serve a warrant to investigate Phaethon’s allegations. Evidence was taken from Ironjoy’s memory before he was able to induce autoamnesia, not just of one petty crime, but of so many, that Phaethon’s testimony had not been required at the trial.

Most people arrested by the constables merely had their accounts in the mentality locked down, and then were asked to come to the places of punishment at their own time and convenience.

Ironjoy was sentenced to suffer six seconds of direct stimulation of the pain center of his brain, two hours of a remorse emotion fed into his thalamus, and, in simulation, to suffer the lives of his victims from their points of view, in order to learn the sorrow he had caused. Since he had cheated many, many Ashores and many more Afloats, he would be in simulation for a long time. Hours, perhaps weeks. It was the longest period of penal service Phaethon could bring to memory.

Phaethon stepped forward. “What will happen to your business, Ironjoy, if you are kept incarcerated for several weeks?”

Ironjoy’s voice radiated from his chest. The tones were harsh and flat. “You know very well. An unmodified man can survive for three days, perhaps four, without water. He can fast for longer than that, if he is in good health. But none of my people are in good health. The Afloats will starve in a month without me to feed them. You have done a great service for the Hortators this day! You have destroyed us.”