John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

"You aren't a Silver-Grey at the moment, hero. Besides, I'm recording the picture into my ring. We'll all have a good laugh about it, once our exile ends." There was a wistful note to her voice.

"Hmp. You show them that picture, the Silver-Grey won't take me back."

"Don't worry. I show them this picture, the Black Manorials will take you. You'll start a new Absurdist Sartorial Movement. Asmodius Bohost will dress like you."

"Well, good heavens! It's worth the risk of having the Silent One's booby-trapped noetic reader here burn out my brain just for that, if nothing else! My other accomplishments will sink into obscurity by contrast, once history remembers that I once influenced Mr. Bohost's ghastly wardrobe!"

Daphne favored him with a level stare.

"You're delaying."

"Perhaps a little ..."

"You're afraid."

"Not unreasonable, considering that this might actually kill me."

"You are a paranoid deluded maniac."

"But a lovable one. Are you attempting to bolster my courage, miss? You should have Eveningstar Sophotech teach you more about how to manipulate the moods of men."

"Are we back to 'miss' are we? That's fine with me; because at least you are talking now as if we are going to make it back out of this exile. You sound mildly less doomed."

"I'm wondering if there are further steps I can take to make it so this noetic reader, if it is trapped, cannot hurt me."

"Put another bucket on your head."

"This is not a bucket; it monitors energy levels in the hood-interface."

"It's still a bucket."

"Maybe I'm worried about what will happen if this succeeds. The automatic exile-the one I agreed to suffer at Lakshmi-will be ended. But so what? There is not a single thing that will prevent the College from turning around and bringing a new proceeding against me. They still fear star colonization. Till now, I had been sort of assuming that the mere existence of surviving colonists from the Silent Oecumene would compel us to travel out there. To discover what had become of them, if nothing else. But, if you are right after all, and all this is a hallucination imposed by Gannis, that compelling reason vanishes."

Daphne sat with her elbows on her knees, cupping her cheeks in her palms, looking up at Phaethon with an impertinent and girlish look. "Leave everything to me and Aurelian.

We can clear that hurdle when we come to it."

"What do you mean?"

"I was saving it as a surprise."

"I thought you hated surprises."

"Not when they are my surprises."

"Please tell me, miss."

"Are we still back on 'miss'? Say, 'please tell me, Daphne my darling wife,' and maybe I will."

"Sha'n't. You'll tell me and gladly."

"And why shall I?" She favored him with an impish smile.

"Because, like me, you are too proud of your accomplishments to keep quiet about them."

Her smile burned languid, and she brushed her hair with her fingers, preening.

Phaethon said, "Any time now. I'm tired of standing here with a bucket on my head."

"We're rich."

"What?"

"Actually, you're rich. I'm only rich if you marry me again."

"You are deluded. I do not have a gram of money, not a second of computer time."

"I said rich. It's not enough to buy our ship out of hock, but it should be enough to hire a Black House vessel to carry us to Mercury Equilateral, and pay for at least some of the last-minute preparations the Phoenix Exultant still needs done."

"Oh, come now. And where did this alleged money come from?"

"Flying suits."

"Flying suits?"

"You hold the patent on them. The way Rhadamanthus set up the business, you only lease the patent in return for a shared percentage. During the masquerade, everybody wants to fly. Its just so much fun. Aurelian Sophotech set up a second levitation array above Western Europe, for the Aryan Individualists, and a third over India, where the Uncomposed Cerebelline art-capital Macrostructure is."

"Ridiculous. The Hortators ..."

"Are a private and voluntary organization. They cannot subpoena your records; they are not the police. Everyone who is renting a flying cloak from you is in masquerade. Nobody knows who they are, except for Aurelian."

"But-but why would people-why would they defy the Hortators?"

Daphne raised her slender hands and her soft, round shoulders in an exaggerated pantomime shrug. "Theory one: People support the Hortators, in principle, except when that principle causes them some sacrifice or hardship, such as forgoing the pleasure of personal levitation, whereupon their principles evaporate like spit on Mercury dayside. A lot of people were upset, you know, about the unforeseen consequences of that mass-amnesia they let the Hortators talk them into. Theory two: People know the Hortators are actually, really, supposed to ostracize folks like all your friends here, the child pornographers and semislavers and weaponeers, destructionists and malignifiers and mystagogues, hatemongers and history-forgers and suicide-panderers; and the people know that bright, heroic Phaethon does not fit in with that muck."

Phaethon's muffled voice came out from underneath his layers of coats, lines, wires. "Would people really defy the Horators ... for me? Do they believe in my dream, finally, after all?"

"Don't get so dewy-eyed. Occam's razor forbids us from adopting theories that require us to postulate unreal entities, such as, for example, the existence of conscience, noble dreams, or good wishes among our fellow citizens. No, theory number one makes more sense. They don't care about you and your ideals or about the Hortators and their ideals. They just want their toys."

"Their love for their toys may allow me to repossess my toy. Isn't there the seed of free-market morality buried in that somewhere? I want my ship. The Neptunian conversation-tree has already predicted that their Duma will hire me to pilot the Phoenix Exultant."

Daphne pointed with a slender finger toward the chest pocket of his housecoat, where the noetic unit rested. "But first you must get us the hell out of his miserable exile. Say the magic word and let that thought-forsaken thing read your mind already. If I'm actually a Silent One spy, and this is all an elaborate trap, I'll apologize to you later." "What if I'm dead?"

She shivered with disgust. "Well, then I won't apologize! Will you just get on with it?! They dumped all my spare lives, and it makes me nervous. I've been mortal for at least an hour now, and it's beginning to bother me. I mean, what would happen if a meteor struck the earth at this spot, or something?"

"I wouldn't worry about meteors, were I you," said Phaethon. "There hasn't been a big strike since the Baltimore event in the Fourth Era. Since that time, a watch has been tracking and recording the movements of all objects within the detectable danger zone, first by the Chicken Little Subcomposition, then by Star-Dance Cerebelline, and now by the Sophotechs. Nothing could get past them ..."

He frowned. A thought, so obvious and so large as to have been invisible before, surfaced in his mind.

Where was the Silent Oecumene starship?

There must be a second Phoenix Exultant, perhaps a colder, slower, stealthier ship, but a starship capable of travel from Cygnus X-l nevertheless. A dark twin of his golden Phoenix. Where was it hidden? Sophotech navigation watches observed every rock, practically every dustmote, in inner-system space. But if the Silent Phoenix was somewhere beyond Neptune (as Phaethon had been assuming) then how could the Sophotechs not notice whatever information, instructions, or reports were traveling back and forth between Nothing's agents on Earth and wherever the evil Sophotech was housed?

(Unless ... ? Could the agents be operating with only furtive and infrequent contact with their Sophotech? If so, then the agents were capable of obtuseness, illogic, and human error.)