John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

The silence between them held during the dreary process of disembarkation, while their vessel was dismantled and their bodies were adjusted to the normal station environment. This process was made all the more dreary because the ban of the Hortators was still enforced against (hem, and the minds running the stations (sons or creations of Vafnir) would not speak to them directly, but only through disposable partials, who disintegrated after every speech.

Dreary again was the fact that they were not being offered the local embodiments and aesthetics for this environment. Without the aesthetic protocols, many of the objects shining from the station walls were meaningless, like tangles of colored string, and many of the sounds were mere hisses and coughs, rather than announcements and alerts. Without the proper bodies, Phaethon had to stay in his armor with his helm closed, and Daphne had to wear an awkward full-body suit Phaethon made. It looked like some piece of ecologic-torture equipment out of the Dark Green Ages, with a faceplate and a symbiotic plant growing all over her like moss. She itched abominably, and knew she looked stupid.

Phaethon had brought up a legal document of some sort out of her ring, and so (not unlike Alberich in the fairy tales, driving the unwilling dark elves to their tasks in the underworld, tormenting them with a threat of the all-powerful ring) she stepped, ring hand held high, one air lock at a time, up from the outer station into the inner, driving empty androids and surprised semiandroids from her path. Up the stairs and ladders she climbed, from full gravity to half-gravity, opening locks and silencing guards with a queenly scowl and a gesture from the ring.

But (not unlike Alberich being snared by Loge) eventually they reached Vafnir's seneschal and henchman, a polite young three-headed man named Sigluvafnir, who admitted in bland tones that Phaethon had every right to be here, but that Daphne did not, and could Phaethon please wait while Vafnir constructed suitable accommodations to receive him for an interview? All business would be conducted with dispatch; Phaethon would be thanked for his patience. Sigluvafnir smiled with all three mouths and looked innocent.

The magic in her ring could not deal with the diabolic cunning of polite agreement. The two of them were standing in a waiting area in an empty hall, alone. Underfoot, a transparent hull gave a view of the grand stars wheeling by, passing from station east to station west, a silent, moving carpet of constellations. The station rotated about once every twenty minutes, and half of a "station day" (if it could be called that) passed by while the two of them pretended studiously to have nothing important to say to each other.

They both stared down below their feet. Perhaps an uncertain shyness was between them, or, perhaps, it was more interesting to look at the moving lights of tugs and assistance-boats, the glints of solar fields, the flowery shine from the sails of distant antimatter generators, than to look at the barren bulkheads of the wide, upcurving hallway in which they stood.

It was Daphne who broke the silence. "Once Vafnir has his lien paid off, who else will have any claim over your ship?"

Phaethon spoke in an absentminded tone. "At that point, only Neoptolemous. Xenophon and Diomedes combined their funds and personalities to create Neoptolemous, who purchased Wheel-of-Life's interest."

"Don't you own half the ship by now? Gannis's debt was canceled."

Phaethon said briefly, "The moment I opened my memory casket, the Phoenix Exultant was seized by the Bankruptcy Court. She is actually in receivership, 'owned' by the Curia officers to be used for the benefit of the combination of all my creditors. Gannis dropped out of the combine. Which is good, because he would have gotten the ship dismantled for scrap."

"Is it too late to get the ship back?"

"No. If I came up with a huge fortune, I could pay off Neoptolemous. He has a lien, but he does not own the Phoenix Exultant, so he could not refuse to take the money."

"Oh."

Silence endured for a while.

Daphne hated the fact that Phaethon was wearing his helmet. She could not see his face, and could make no guess as to his expression.

She pointed at a small cluster of lights in the distance. "There's not much traffic here, is there?"

"No. Everyone is at some port where they will have long-range communication. The world-minds of Earth and Venus, Demeter and Circumjovia, the Outer and the Inner stations, the Mind-combines of the Cities in Space, of the Nonecliptic Supersails, the constructions who live in the concentrated ray issuing from the North Pole of the Sun, everyone, is going to be linked into the Grand Transcendence. Aurelian has arranged that no one need be isolated during that time, no one need be in space and far away from sufficient mental broadcast facilities. All the traffic is going still. How far away is the Transcendence? Ten days? Less?"

"Thirteen days. Tomorrow is the Twelfth Night Feast, when we all... when they all dress up as members of another sex or phylum."

"I'm sorry."

"That's OK. I wasn't expecting any Twelfth Night gifts anyway." Twelfth Night gifts were only, by custom, meant to be somatic or choreographic packages, such as lords leaping, or ballet choreographs.

Phaethon knew Daphne preferred the Twelfth Night gifts above the other gifts of the other nights in the Penultimate Fortnight, because the many fine training routines, steeplechases, races, leaps, and cabriolets she had received for her horses last millennium, during Argentorium's reign, were among the finest performances her stock could show.

"I'm more worried about trespassing laws," she said. "Vafnir probably has to throw me out into space, but probably cannot sell me the services of his accelerator rings. I'll just be drifting on the slow orbit to nowhere, I guess, until and unless you can come back for me. I wonder how long the life support will hold out. The little canister will be lonely without you."

"Maybe something will happen." He was not going to say aloud that he hoped the Nothing Sophotech would be found and destroyed before the week was up. Once there was no more need for secrecy, Atkins could testify to the Hortators that Phaethon's Inquest had been tampered with, that Phaethon's exile was invalid, and that therefore Daphne's was also.

She turned to him. "Darling, if you don't make it back, I'll be exiled for life. And my life probably won't last that long."

He turned toward her. She truly wished she could see his face. "Daphne, I..."

She stepped toward him, "Yes ... ?"

He raised his hands as if he were about to embrace her. "This voyage we've had together; it has made me realize that ... Well, you and I... We ..."

She stepped even closer. "Yes ... ?"

But at that moment, a golden light shone up from underfoot, dazzlingly bright.

The station had turned to face nearer the Sun. In the dark field, where every other boat and tug was no more than a dot of light, the Phoenix Exultant, gigantic, splendid, one hundred kilometers long, blazing like a triangle of gold, burning as brightly as the blade of a spear, was clearly visible, even at this distance, to any naked eye which could tolerate the reflected glare from the all-too-nearby Sun.

The miles.of hull near the point of the prow were entirely streamlined. Just behind the heavy shielding of the prow, about four kilometers or so, were the flattened blisters of the broadcast houses, antennae, and receivers for innumerable detectors and sensors. They looked small and decorative, like the scales on the neck of a cobra, but some of those radar houses were a kilometer in length.

Behind them, along the spine of the great ship, were other streamlined streaks, betraying the presence of truly gigantic mass-drivers, launch ports, radio-lasers.