John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

"Those Hortators don't tell the military what to do. Besides, our system is not a part of any public record the Silent Ones could see. Do you get what I am trying to tell you? You really do not have much choice about joining up, Phaethon."

Daphne said, "I've got something sort of really unbelievably important to say; can I interrupt at this point?"

Phaethon said, "Please excuse us for just a moment, my dear. There is just one more matter I need to settle with Marshal Atkins."

Daphne muttered, "Which one of you produces more testosterone ... ? Don't worry, lover, I think he's got you beat on that one..."

Phaethon, with dignity, pretended not to hear. He turned to Atkins. "Let us table this discussion of my future for the moment. I'm still curious about one thing in my past. When you were following me all this time, you were also Constable Pursuivant, weren't you? I should have realized that that must have been you. No Silent One spy would actually be trying to get me to log on to the mentality because there actually was no mind-virus waiting for me. In fact, if I had logged on just once during this whole episode, I would have found out when the false-memories were implanted. The real Silent Ones would have been trying to stop me from logging on, not encouraging me."

Atkins blinked in confusion. "Beg pardon? Who? Who is this Constable Pursuivant... ?"

Phaethon said, "You mean you don't know ... ?"

They both looked at Daphne, who looked confused, and shrugged. "I don't know who you're talking about."

But a little voice on her ring finger said, "I know! He says he wants to talk to you."

Phaethon looked left and right. "Ah... Atkins, do you, ahh..."

"Don't worry, sir," said Atkins. "I'm armed."

"There's an understatement if I ever heard one," muttered Daphne. Then she said, "OK, little one. Put him on."

A dot of light from the ring touched one of the unstained diamond parasols. A connection was made. An image formed.

Phaethon stared in surprise. "You. It was you. But why ... ?"

In the parasol, the very detailed image of Harrier Sophotech smiled and touched a finger to the bill of his deerstalker cap by way of salute. "My investigation was not yet complete. And I thought, to gather all the evidence, I would have to send a contingent out into space. And I knew that you could not pilot your fine ship without your armor, now could you?" His keen eyes swept back and forth across the group. "So then. Are we all ready to go..?"

"Go?" said Atkins in surprise. "Pardon me for seeming obtuse, but we don't know where to go yet. We only have one vector. We need a second vector to triangulate."

"That difficulty shall soon be adjusted. The particular nihilist psychology of the Silent One you just slew, Mr. Atkins, was, I calculate, a defense intended to prevent that poor creature from being, shall we say, 'corrupted' ... ? During its stay here on Earth. Or should I call it exposure to Earth? The other servants of the Silent Ones we have seen so far have not manifested that particular type of unreason. You understand my meaning."

"Forgive me for both seeming and for being obtuse," said Phaethon, "But... You? You?"

"I? I, what, Mr. Rhadamanth?" Harrier smiled.

"How could you be Pursuivant? I thought that Sophotechs may not and do not serve in any position of Parliament, government, or military, nor (or so I thought) in the constabulary. How could you be Constable Pursuivant?"

Harrier smiled. "But I never was. Pursuivant is a fictional character, a share-mind with a download of training and police experience, who, as a character, is in the public domain. It is no crime, during masquerade, to pretend to be a public-domain character."

"Certainly it is a crime!" said Phaethon. "It is the impersonation of a police officer!"

"No, sir," said Harrier. "To impersonate a police officer one must show a badge or blazon or display a uniform, or do some other definite act, which a reasonable person would take to be a warrant of authority."

"I saw you when you were a mannequin. "You held out hand and said your badge was in it," said Phaethon.

"I held out my hand, but there was nothing in it. No reasonable person would have been fooled. At that time, I was still expecting you to log on to the mentality. Once you engaged your sense-filter and saw who I really was, I thought you would submit to a noetic examination, and we could solve this matter. Surely you were expecting me to meet you in Talaimannar... ?

"In any case, when you did not log on, despite that I had provided you with every good reason to do so, I realized that your behavior differed so widely from what my anticipatory models had led me to believe, that someone must have interfered with your normal thought-process.

"Then I spent a considerable amount of time (about how long it took you to fall out the window twenty feet down into the water) checking the records, one at a time, of every citizen, neuroform, and self-aware entity in the Golden Oecumene, to see if anyone else had acted out of character, to the same degree or in the same way. (I was thinking the criminal might be using a standard mode of operation, you see.) Well, I can certainly tell that during a wild celebration has got to be the worst time to check to see if anyone is behaving oddly. Everyone behaves oddly during a party.

"After about one-half second of this, your time, or 789 billion seconds, computer time, I had narrowed the scope of my investigation down from around 300 million people, to only some 45 hundred. And guess who one of those mentally altered people turned out to be?"

Phaethon said, "Helion. They had to control him to use the Solar Array as a weapon."

Daphne said, "Diomedes. They have to control him to seize control of the ship!"

Atkins said, "Daphne Prime. They made her drown herself to stop Phaethon from launching."

"Hmm. Daphne Prime ... ? Interesting idea ..." muttered the image of Harrier.

The ring on Daphne's finger chirped: "Can I guess, too? It must be Neo-Orpheus. How else could the Silent Ones have ensured that Phaethon would suffer an exile?"

"Excellent guesses, all!" said Harrier expansively. "But no. The person I was thinking of was none other than Mr. Jason Sven Ten Shopworthy, base half-communal with projected avatar share-mind, Glass Onion School, who lives in Dead Horse, Alaska."

Dull silence followed that announcement.

Phaethon stirred and turned, and asked his companions, "Is there anyone here besides me who is just simply incredibly irritated?"

Atkins had a what-the-hell-is-the-point-of-this look on his face. He said, "Pardon me, sir, but who is this, um, what's his name ... ?"

Daphne said, "And what is so weird about this guy you had to pick him out of 45 hundred people?"

Harrier continued, "Mr. Shopworthy had made it his practice, every day, to put on his winter-body and to ski out to his local contemplationary for incremental vastenings of his special avatar personality he keeps in his supercortex. Normally, in the afternoon when he is done, he pauses for a sensory-overload type of refreshment/apotheosis at a small tea-and-wire cafe on the slope of New Idea Mountain-sculpture. I do not know if you are familiar with the Glass Onion habit of using sensory overloads to test what degree of mental capacity, recall, and detail-recognition they achieve after periodic vastenings ... ? But here is the strange behavior I noticed ..."

Phaethon, Atkins, and Daphne leaned toward the image slightly, small, unconscious movements.

"Mr. Shopworthy usually sits looking north, on a mat placed near the post's thermal-illusion window, with the balcony railing on his right. But recently he had started sitting facing the south, which is odd, because he had to prop his left elbow on the balcony to turn on the goblet for his overloader. But his control points for his hand extension are on his left elbow."