Fénix Exultante (80 page)

Phaethon’s posture showed surprise. He knew Daphne had conceived a hate for Helion. Now she wanted to talk to him…? “He will not receive you.”

“Oh, he’ll see me, all right. I know how to take care of that!” She smiled. “The Grand Transcendence is still thirteen days away, isn’t it? That means the Masquerade is still in force.”

Sigluvafnir issued one last warning. There was no further time for words.

Phaethon put out his hand.

(Shake hands?!! If you try to shake hands with me, I’ll rip your arm out of your socket and beat you to death with it.)

He said, “Good luck.”

Daphne smiled. (You’re lucky you’re wearing invulnerable armor, you stinking sack of medical waste. Otherwise, you’d be suffering multiple contusions delivered by a bleeding ex-limb!) She demurely put her little hand into the palm of his gauntlet. “You are most kind to be concerned about me, sir. I am ever so very grateful for what attention you can spare me from your other concerns.”

Phaethon pulled on her hand to draw her quickly and securely into his arms. Even through her suit, his hard embrace drove the breath from her, and she melted to him, pressing as closely as the suit-fabric allowed. “I’ll come back for you,” his voice burned in her ears.

Then he departed.

Daphne stood looking after him, love shining in her eyes, forgetful of all else.

There hung Phaethon, resplendent in his armor, hovering in weightlessness within the axial visitor’s dodecahedron at the dead center of the Mercury Equilateral Station. Wide, white expanses of pentagonal hull surrounded him. One of the Pentagons was tuned to a window. In the window, like a golden blade against a velvet black background, loomed an image of the Phoenix Exultant.

His ship.

Out of deference to Silver-Grey aesthetic conventions, or, actually, out of mockery, one of the other pentagons was designated as “floor” and the one opposite it was “overhead.” This “overhead” panel was blazing with direct light, rather than the indirect lighting all space tradition required. In fact, it was ablaze with the direct light of the Mercury-orbit Sun, so that Phaethon had to adjust his vision centers.

More mockery: Victorian furniture, chairs and settees on which no one in microgravity could sit, were bolted to the “floor” panel atop an expensive rug. Antimacassars, spinning slowly, sailed above the chairs. A tea service floated nearby, with a ball of scalding tea, held together mostly by its own surface tension but with moonlets of little teadrops all around it, surrounding the silver teapot. Tumbling china cups had drifted in each direction on the ventilation currents. Fortunately, the sugar bowl had held lumps, not powder.

The other bulkheads were established in a nonstandard aesthetic. Objects of unknown use, like strange half-melted candles, rotating glassworks, or webs of laser-light, shimmered in the bulkheads, extending arms or mists toward the center of the chamber.

In the center of the dodecahedron, not far from Phaethon, roared a turning cylinder of flame and pulsing energy. It was Vafnir. The beam of fire extended from one side of the huge chamber to the other.

Two other entities, smaller, dwarfed by Vafnir, were in the room: a dull olive-drab sphere in the Objective Aesthetic, representing the attorneys from the Bankruptcy Court; and a calitrop of black metal, with magnetic jets and manipulator gloves at each axis, surrounding brain housing into which Neo-Orpheus, or perhaps one of his partials, had downloaded, here to represent the College of Hortators.

In one hand Phaethon held up a credit ring. The circuit in the stone had memorized the numbers and locations of millions of seconds of time currency. He pointed it at the olive-drab sphere. A ray from the ring made a circuit with a point in the sphere; the currency exchange was recorded.

Within the ring also had been recorded the contracts and agreement between himself and the Neptunians, now the true owners of the starship, showing that he acted as their representative in this matter, and was accredited both as the pilot and agent of the Phoenix Exultant, and directed, after repairs and final checks were complete, to transport the vessel, with himself at the helm, to the Neptunian Embassy at Jovian Trailing Trojan.

His armor detected a rapid exchange of signals between Vafnir, Neo-Orpheus, and the Bankruptcy Attorneys, a huge volume of information compressed into a few short bursts. He could have tapped into their lines and eavesdropped on the conversation, perhaps. But he knew the gist of it. Vafnir furiously and Neo-Orpheus coldly were attempting to find some loophole, some delay, some chink in the iron plate of Phaethon’s original contract with Vafnir. But that contract did not contain the normal escape clause permitting one party to be excused of his duties should the other party fall under Hortator ban. Two hundred years ago, when this contract first had been drafted, Phaethon, planning to depart from the Golden Oecumene, had foreseen no need for such a clause, and insisted on its exclusion.

“Now, then,” Phaethon said aloud, “one of you is officially required, by law, to inform me that my debt to Vafnir has been settled, and that he shall perform his remaining duties under the contract. Fortunately, Vafnir’s warehouses and orbital factories are already at hand directly abeam of the Phoenix Exultant; some of the smaller factories, as I recall, are actually inside the hull, for ease of construction. It should require a hundred hours, or less, to load the remaining fuel aboard, and to fit into place the hull-metal segments which you began to dismantle. I demand that the Phoenix Exultant be restored to the condition specified, cleaned and polished with no sign of tool-marks, neglect, or debris. Now, which of you is going to embrace a life of exile by telling me these things? Or, better yet, which of you is going to be arrested by the constables for failing to tell me?”

The speaker on Neo-Orpheus’s housing whined to life. “The Hortator exile does not obtain against those who, by law, are compelled to treat with you, nor for comments strictly limited to legal business. Only gratuitous comments are forbidden.”

Phaethon regarded the calitrop without friendliness. “That itself was a gratuitous comment. Thank you for joining me in exile.”

There was something shameful about the fact that Neo-Orpheus, had, at one time, been the selfsame Orpheus who inspired the modern romantic movement; and he had led the team that invented the technology to preserve the human soul, intact, after bodily death; shameful that he should, nowadays, choose to dwell in bodies so ugly. This pyramid-shaped skeleton robot was not from the Objective Aesthetic, nor from any aesthetic at all. It was stark, functional, and utterly inhuman.

Neo-Orpheus said, “My last comment was permissible, as falling under the general umbrella of necessary comments required to conclude our business here with dispatch.”

“Ah. But now I must ask, was the comment explaining that last comment gratuitous…? It certainly was unnecessary. Welcome to exile!”

Neo-Orpheus did not deign to respond.

Vafnir said, “Phaethon! In order to conclude the contract quickly, and in order to minimize further interactions between the two of us, I hereby not only turn over to you the materials you bought from me, but also the warehouses and the robot workers attendant thereto, base work crew, supervisors, partials, decision informata, everything. I am giving you, as a free gift, without warranty, all the operators you will need to carry out this operation yourself. They are yours. They will load and equip and polish your insane ship according to your orders, but I will not be responsible hereafter for their acts. Do you acknowledge that this will satisfy all my obligations to you under the contract…?”

A window opened up on one of the decks to the left and showed a view from a point in space near the Phoenix Exultant. Even as he watched, he saw the flares of light darting from the warehouses, and saw the first of many spheres of fuel, like a line of pearls, beginning to emerge and slide across space toward the waiting ship.

To the port and starboard of the titanic ship, other warehouses opened their doors. A second string of pearls joined the first, then a third, then a score, then a hundred. The vast bays and fuel docks of the Phoenix Exultant stirred to life and opened to receive the incoming gifts.

The running lights of the ship lit up. Red to port. Green to starboard. Flashing white along the keel. The ship had come to life again.

“Do not imagine that your victory over us is achieved, Phaethon,” Neo-Orpheus said in a cold voice.

Phaethon said, “But, my dear sir, I am not imagining it at all. I see it clearly.”

In the window, at that moment, orbital tugs appeared, guiding the mile-long slabs of golden adamantium, one after another, toward the rents and gaps in the vast armored hull.

Silently steadily, ton upon countless ton of material, fuel, ship-brains, biomaterial, and the vast expanse of hull segments, began falling like gentle snow toward the golden doors opened so wide to receive them.

Phaethon said in his heart: Come to life, my Phoenix, that you may bring life to lifeless worlds. How could anyone fear so noble and so fine a ship as you?

It was only then that he noticed how much like a spear blade she was in truth, how sleek, how beautiful, how deadly. He realized how it would be easy, quite easy, magnificently easy and awe-inspiring, to use her world-creating power to destroy worlds. (And it did not please him that he took such pleasure at that thought.)

And, now that the teamsters and longshoremen robots were his and his alone, unlike material from the Phoenix Exultant (owned, now, by Neoptolemous) he could send them where he liked and to what task he liked.

A mental command was all he needed to turn legal ownership of half a hundred of them over to Daphne. No matter what else might happen to her, she would at least have several tugs and smallboats at her disposal, with their fuel, life support, and ship-brains. She now, at least, could depart the station in something roomier than a canister. And he could depart to the Phoenix Exultant. His ship.

Phaethon hung in space, a reaction lance in hand, poetry in his heart, a vision of gold in his eyes. He was about thirty kilometers aft of the main superstructure, watching from a hundred points of view at once as the last of the loading was completed.

Whatever the law might say, she was his ship, his dream made real, in golden adamantium, antimatter, energy, carbon fiber, molecularly strengthened steel.

Because he had no mentality support, he had to carry on his inspection of the great vessel using the protocols originally designed for refueling in distant star systems.

The golden hull was utterly immune to any electromagnetic signal; and he did not have as many attendant-craft as his original design had called for; so that, instead of being able to bounce a signal from remote to remote, and connect his mind to hull-tenders and macromannequins on every side of the ship at once, he had to move himself, physically, from one side of the ship to the other, and then get a line of sight on any system or robot squad with which he wanted to talk, commune, or mind-embrace.

It was crude and primitive, and he had, personally, to order much of the work done himself. Often he would flourish his lance and jet down to the surface of the great ship, and watch the work progress with his own eyes, or touch the golden hull with his own hand. He inspected, he checked, he tested, he reviewed. The process was insufferably archaic, as if someone from the late Fourth Era, after the invention of Van Neumann Self-regulating Robotics, suddenly had to carve a canoe from a log with a stone ax with his own hands, or as if someone from the Sixth Era had to manifest a Stable-Island pseudo-material launch shell using only the elements appearing on the original, nonartificial, periodic chart. It was archaic. It was beautiful. Phaethon was in love.

Love is frustrating. It did not help, for example, that the Sun was nearby, forcing him to rotate the great craft slowly, to distribute heat. It did not help that the self-evolving robots were just smart enough to recognize the benefits of huddling in the hundred-kilometer-wide shadow of the Phoenix to escape the solar rays, but not smart enough to grasp the principles of enlightened long-term self-interest and devotion to duty, to do their jobs efficiently. Phaethon put them all on a budget, deactivated their behavior regulators, and began setting up swarms of self-reconstruction and self-replication catalysts. Any robots who did not do their work, did not get paid enough out of the energy allowance to rent a catalyst and reproduce. Since the robots willing to risk exposure to the sunside of the ship increased geometrically in number and potency, Phaethon did not worry about individual regulation; he just let natural selection run its course.

It took less time than estimated to load and prepare the ship for burn, despite all this. After fifty hours, Phaethon was ready.

It was now the Ninth Night before the Grand Transcendence. Phaethon had missed the dance. There was no motion anywhere in space nearby, not even of automatic systems. All ships were falling cold. But there was radio-traffic unlike anything ten centuries had seen. Phaethon was alone in the star-dock, alone among the warehouses, orbital shops, and shipyards. Everyone else was celebrating. Only he was at work.

He needed no dance. Lance in hand, he flew through the vast afterbays toward the central core. It was darkened now, silent, cold. He passed up through the engine-core space, past endless kilometers of fuel cells, the horizonless geometry of antimatter globes of frozen metallic hydrogen, and past the ring on ring and bastion on bastion of thought-boxes and ship-brains englobing the living quarters.

The mainframe decks were like the walnut-sized brain, compared to this mighty ship, found in the original pre-reconstructed dinosaurs. Inward and “above” them (now that the carousel was under spin) the living decks had been pressurized and super-refrigerated to the standards of Neptunian Cold Ducal body forms. The outer levels of this small city of cabins and quarters were spinning now at many times the original design specifications.

Inward still, at Earth-normal gravity, the “higher” decks held laboratories, confabulationaries, extensive thought-shop and matter-shop appliances, communion atriums, baths, formularies, surgeries, nanoconstruction cells, gardens, greenhouses, blue-houses, feast halls, aviaries, palaces, museums, metanthropy studios, and the other basic necessities of civilized existence.