John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

"Oh, that. That was me. Your Daughter-of-the-Sea bollixed the message."

"What was all that about being chained on a foreign planet, then?"

"All I said was that we could have a fourth honeymoon on a real moon. You could make a little lovers' planetoid for us, just the two of us, and maybe you would not have to wander through the stars so far to find any happiness."

"And-oh. You mean you-Are you volunteering to come with me?"

"Not while you have that stupid bucket on your head. But maybe I'll come. Maybe not. But you know neither of us are going anywhere until you use that noetic box. Are you really worried about it being booby-trapped? Use the damn thing on me. Read my mind. Find out if I work for the Silent Oecumene. Or for the Blue Fairy-babies, or for Father Christmas."

"What if it's not safe ... ?"

She spread her arms. "You'll only be hurting a Silent Oecumene spy."

"Wouldn't it be wiser to take a precautionary ..."

"You are not putting a bucket on my head, Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth, and that's final. Come on! Get it over with."

She walked over and put her hand on Phaethon's chest, she put her fingers in the chest pocket and touched the noetic unit's thought-ports. "I'm not a spy, Phaethon."

Phaethon was gripped by the fear that he was going to see his wife die right in front of his eyes. "Wait!" But his clumsy hand, tangled with wire, could not move up quickly enough.

She said, "I swear."

The unit hummed. Daphne looked blank-eyed.

"No! Wait!"

But then Daphne smiled, and the unit said, "Subject is telling the truth to the best of her knowledge, information, and belief. She has no private mental reservations. There is no sign of subconscious tampering. Her last mental redaction was a temporary memory loss performed, at her request, by the Red Eveningstar Sophotech on November 2nd."

She smiled at him. "And I swear I love you."

The unit said, "Partially accurate. She has a private mental reservation that you are behaving so erratically and peculiarly, that she is quite exasperated with you, and she finds that this, despite her best efforts, makes you harder to love."

Daphne scowled and snatched her hand back. "Oh, shut up, you!" Then she muttered: "Blabbermouth."

Phaethon drew a breath. "Very well. I'm convinced it is worth the risk. Unit! Please examine me for signs of mental tampering."

The unit hummed again, coughed. The humming dropped in pitch and fell silent.

Daphne said in a worried voice, "Is something wrong?"

Phaethon said, "Report progress."

The unit said, "Unable to comply. No valid parameters are present."

Daphne flapped her hands. "Try it again."

The unit said, "External energy source interrupting matrix memory ring. Unit disabled."

Daphne gave off a little squeal of anger. "Take the bucket off and try again!"

Phaethon reinserted his probe into the noetic-reader housing. "I don't think it is any interference from me or my armor."

The unit said, "System must shut down and go through re-constitution process. Please stand by."

"Damn it!" exclaimed Daphne. "You plugged in one of those wires backward, or something. Just like the time you collapsed the east wing in Paris!"

"There was an electromagnetic pulse. It scrambled some of the outer circuits. That infinite self-sustaining ring I was telling you about just stumbled all over itself and got tangled. The information is still there, tangled in a Moebius knot, and without any addresses. But the inner neutronium or pseudo-neutronium, or whatever it is, is still fine. You would need a beam of antimatter even to scratch that stuff... Hm. The energy-wave is coming in at normal thought-port bandwidth. Could it be some sort of feedback or resonance from the armor?"

"Take off your armor and try it again."

A thin and girlish voice spoke from the ring on Daphne's hand: "Do not take off the armor! Daphne, move back! Phaethon is under attack!"

Phaethon stood amazed and wondering, Daphne WW(who had, after all, played through many more spy-dramas and dreams where people are shot at) fell to the ground and rolled under the cot.

That very probably saved her life. Shrapnel from the exploding door tore the robe off Phaethon's back, and bounced off his armor with musical chimes of thunder, but the blast was at head level.

There was flame and energy in the door. Phaethon stepped into it; broken wires and destroyed housecoat circuits flashed white-hot around him.

He put his hands around the creature he found there. The motors in his arms and elbows whined. He thrust the thing bodily up the ladder, out of the cabin, and away from Daphne.

A kick (or perhaps it was an explosion) rang off his chest and tumbled him downstairs. Over his shoulder: "Daphne ... ?"

"I'm fine! Get him!"

Thrust by his mass-drivers and thrown upstairs in a wash of magnetic energy, he landed on deck.

All was dark. The diamond parasols overhead had been opaqued, and spread to grasp the rails at every point, so that the deck was now enclosed, like some wide tomb, sealed with a lid.

The only light came from the monster. There it was, rearing up, with steam and hissing liquid dripping from its form. Light came from a circle of fire beneath its hoofs. The rising steam spread in a smoke ring across the black, sealed canopy overhead.

It was Daphne's horse, of course.

Or, rather, it had been the horse. It stood upright on its rear hoofs, forehoofs hanging crookedly high in mid-air. Blue-white semi-translucent material flowed out from its mouth and eyes, radiating waste heat as nanomaterial reaction boiled inside. With gush and a spray of blood, the horse's skull split wide, and a larger mass of the substance spilled into the air. In the dim light, Phaethon could see metal glints from instruments being constructed rapidly within the tendrils of substance vomiting from the shattered skull of the rearing stallion.

Phaethon raised his hand, powered his accumulators ...

"Stop! Negotiate!" came a voice from the horse. It looked something like a rearing centaur from myth now, except with a nest of writhing black whips where a human face should have been. The tentacles of substance swayed and nodded like the heads of so many cobras, but nothing fired.

Ironic. He, the civilized man should have been the first one to call to negotiate. "Who are you?" shouted Phaeton.

"No memory of that has been permitted to me. I am nothing."

(What was the sudden chill that touched him? He had been hoping, secretly, all this time, that everything, his enemies, and their evil, would turn out to be a simulation, a dream, a hoax, a mistake. But here was an enemy. It was all real.)

"You are from Nothing Sophotech?"

No answer. The creature took a mincing step forward, rear hoofs clashing on the blackened deck, forehoofs still held high and crooked. More tendrils of substance pushed out from the shattered horse-skull, these bearing tubes and focusing elements of ominous import. Weapons? In the darkness, it was impossible to see clearly.

Phaethon used the time to make adjustments within his own armor. Heat from the rapid changes he made in his nanomachine lining vented from his armor seams as hissing streams of steam.

Phaethon called out again. "Are you organic or inorganic? Individual or partial?"

"I am nothing you can understand. Comprehension cannot comprehend us." The words were spoken in a monotone, in-flectionless, empty, soulless.

"Do not speak nonsense, sir! Tell me if you are an independent self-aware entity, so that I can deduce whether or not destroying you would be murder."

A toneless and unemotional voice said back: "Self-awareness is nothing. It is illusion, produced by diseased perception. Only pain is real." "What do you want?" "Surrender. Mingle with us." "Surrender? Me ... ? Why? In return for what?" "We will strip your foul lust-corrupted flesh from your naked brain, and sustain your nervous system among our self-ocean. All actions and movement will be taken from you, and you may lay down the horrid burden of individuality. AH sense perceptions, which are lies, will be blinded; all memories of anything other than Nothing will be blotted out. Thus will you know true service, true devotion, true morality. The only true moral action is that which generates no benefit whatsoever to the actor; thus you will receive no good nor any reward of any kind again, no pleasure, no kindness, no self-love. The only true reality is pain; it is the only signal that demonstrates that we are alive. You will embrace an infinity of that reality, as your helpless and disembodied brain will be stimulated to endless pain, forever. This will teach you unpride, unegotism, unselfishness. You will achieve the enlightenment called no-thought."