John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

"Are we in any danger?"

"From fire? No. Our houses are screaming because of their fire alarms. I tried to talk to our houses and shut them up, but I need your command override."

"I don't have an override."

"We don't have a municipal net to coordinate the house-minds. Only the owners have authority to shut off the fire alarm, but most of them don't know how."

"The instructions are written in holographic Standard Aes-tethic icon code along the rims of the inner walls-"

"Most of us can't read."

Phaethon controlled a sense of impatience. "Then shut down power and reset."

"What if the house batteries are programmed to take over during a power out? The routine may have mutated since this morning."

She was right. Phaethon was not certain how to deal with machines that were not smarter than he was.

Drusillet sent a shutdown and restart command nonetheless. The wails and screams of the floating houses died off. Echoes floated for a moment above the waves, and then were gone. The crackling roar of distant fires was the loudest noise now in the area.

Darkness fell across the bay. The houses, bright a moment ago, were now no more than red-lit shadows in the night, as dark and powerless as when Phaethon first had seen them.

"Restart."

"I did. There must be a flaw in the routine."

Just great. "Well, at least we still have light from the house fires yonder," said Phaeton.

At that moment, however, the blaze along the north cliffs changed. The mist from the sea closed around the individual houses, forming a web not unlike silk, pumping pure oxygen into the burning houses. Each house and house stump blazed a silent blue-white, and was instantly consumed. The silk webs smothered any further fire in a matter of moments.

Everything was lit with magnesium-white light for an instant. Phaethon saw the angry, sullen faces of many of his workers standing along the pavilion balconies above him. Some stared north with looks of hate in their eyes. But some, with the same expressions, stared down at him.

Then, darkness rolled over the scene, like sudden blindness.

As the light died, Phaethon thought he saw a crawling, writhing movement along the northern cliffs. He cursed his lack of proper eyesight. But he guessed that the silk bags were altering again to new functions and sterilizing the soil so that seeds blown out from the damaged Afloat houses would no longer take root.

"It's bad," said Drusillet softly.

"They can't destroy any of the house-brains we've already harvested from the graveyard. Those are clearly our property. But the houses were abandoned. They had as much right to burn them down as we did to loot them."

"It's bad. No new house-brains. No new houses."

"The ones we have will last, with proper periodic cleaning and restructure."

Drusillet seemed dubious.

Phaethon asked, "How often do you gather up a new house?"

"About once a week ..."

"A week?!! Those things can last four hundred years!"

"Afloats use houses pretty roughly."

"Don't they maintain their homes, educate the house-minds? Clean them?"

Drusillet looked downcast. "No. Whenever the pantry was bare, or the floor mats got dirty, or the filters were stale, we'd just go chop down a new house. It was an excuse to celebrate."

Phaethon shook his head in disgust and turned away. Eventually he said: "Well, in any case, I'm just sorry I did not think to file some sort of legal claim of adverse possession over the graveyard. I had forgotten how fast Sophotechs think, how fast they can act..."

He was wondering if the Hortators had actually not known where he was until the moment he revealed his location over the public channel, just now, to Bellipotent. If so, then the Hortators clearly had not sent Constable Pursuivant.

If not the Hortators, then who? The Silent Ones? Some third person Phaethon was overlooking? (And whom had Bellipotent conveyed to the island here?)

Pursuivant probably was not from the Silent Ones. It seemed unlikely that, even with a very sophisticated set of virus entities, the Silent Oecumene's agents could so blithely infiltrate the local constabulary without some segment of the Earthmind noticing. And, if they were that powerful, they would have no need whatever to be secretive, since they would have already taken over the entire mentality.

Wait. An intuition told him that there was some flaw here in his logic, some obvious aspect to all these events he was sure he was overlooking. How powerful and how sophisticated was Nothing Sophotech?

But Phaethon was not a Warlock; he could not automatically bring his intuitions forward into his consciousness. The thought slipped away when a group of Afloats come up to the foredeck, and began demanding in loud voices that they be paid for the rest of their interrupted shift.

It was dark, and there was a press of bodies, and Phaethon had to squint to make them out.

The group consisted of a small triplicate-mind (whose three bodies looked like thin, big-eyed waifs,) a loud-voiced neo-morph in a floating box, and two tattoo-faced basics in torn shirts, one a neuter and the other a hermaphrodite.

The basics, rather than wearing Phaethon's uniforms, had doused their upper bodies in smart-paint, so that peacock tails of ever-changing colors blushed across their flesh as tiny cells in the paint flexed to cool their skins, or perhaps (Phaethon thought it more likely) released chemicals into their pores. The perfume from the paint was really quite powerful. Phaethon stepped fastidiously back, holding a scrap of his suit-lining over his nose like a handkerchief.

"I can do nothing for you," he said. "I cannot pay you with seconds of money I do not have. The clients for whom you were working have not yet paid me; nor can they, till we find a black line around whatever block Antisemris put up when he closed up his service."

The three bodies of the triplicate-mind all spoke at once, a spate of interrupted words, and Phaethon regretted yet again that he had no sense-filter to reshape the words into a linear format. "Your problem!" one of them was saying, "We did our part!" The second was saying: "No money? What about that big expense account they gave you to call Neptune?" And the third was archly mentioning that the Hortators had not bothered them until Phaethon's ambitions and high ideals had stirred up the wrath of the Hortators against them.

"We want Ironjoy back!" called one of the basics.

And the other called Phaethon a traitor.

But the neomorph in the floating coffin had a loudspeaker set to drown everyone else out. "On days when we got cut out of the Big Mind, or the services failed, or the lines were cut, it was good old Ironjoy that would declare a time-off party, wasn't it? He'd have dreams by the fistful, and he had a lot of fists, too, and he's pass out wire-points like they were candy. We'd have fluid and beer and happy-jack. For animal parties, we'd have beast-minds jacked in, to shut all those cortex-thoughts away, and just let our underselves and mid-brains come out to romp and play. For sex parties, we'd all link through the thought-shop into some of the rich, ripe, sims and wet dreams Ironjoy keeps on file, not just tame plunging, but real orgies of dirt, with all suppressed naughty under-thoughts read out by the sneak file and blasted back at double sensation! Aye, those were right days! There was fun! There was life! What've we got now, eh? A man named after Phaethon, the rich man's son, the man who thinks he owns the Sun! And what's he going to do for us, to help us survive our last few hours and years alive? Summon parties? Let us drink and stick and dream and jack and joy? No how! No how! He'll dress us up and drive us on and pound and preach and box us in till everything is either his or ours! No more sharing! No more playing fair! What say you all? You want to party? Or you want to listen to a Phaethon look-alike rich man's darling son stand up and preach?"