John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

And the people cheered. They did not call him "New Kid" now; they shouted, "Engineer! Engineer!"

But another burst of music started at that moment, and Phaethon was rushed off to join in a line of clapping, swaying, kicking men. He was dizzy and hot from the exertions of the house-felling, and he took a drink from something someone had thrust into his hand. After that the dusk became even more gay and giddy, his memory became pleasantly blurred. There was dancing, singing, and carrying on. Someone had affixed a rope swing to a chemical-tree, which hung over the cliff shore. He remembered whooping with fear as he soared far out above the water and back again. He remembered kissing someone, perhaps a hermaphrodite. It must have been late; there were stars overhead, shining above the steel rainbow of the orbital ring-city. He remembered tossing out huge gobs of his precious nanomaterial to all his fine new friends, scraping it up from the inside of his armor, despite the irksome warning buzz the suit gave off as it fell below necessary internal integrity levels.

He was everyone's darling after that. All his new friends loved him. He wanted to swing on the rope swing again, and they pushed him in high arcs, higher and higher.

He remembered shouting: "Higher! Faster! Farther! The stars! I have vowed the stars shall be mine!"

And, as the swing hesitated at the crest of its high arc, he stood in the rope swing and reached up, as high as he could reach. His new friends all laughed and cheered as he slipped and fell into the waters far below.

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."