John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

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

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

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

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

"Ah. All is explained."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Us? What defines us as a group?"

"Afloats."

"I fear I don't understand."

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

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

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

"You have houseboats?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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