John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

"I do not move in your social circles, Phaethon."

"The Peers are a private combination of monopolists who have made a number of agreements, and who coordinate their efforts, in order to maintain their wealth and prestige. Gannis of Jupiter, who makes the supermetals; Vafnir of Mercury, who makes antimatter for powerhouses; Wheel-of-Life, who runs ecological transformation nexi; Helion stops solar flares; Kes Sennec organizes the scientific and semantic pursuits of the Invariants and controls the Uniform Library of the Cities in Space; the Eleemosynary Composition runs translation formats; Orpheus grants eternal life."

"Oh. Them. They are not monopolists. Your laws allow other efforts and businesses to compete against them. In my day, those who opposed the grants of the General Coordination Commissariat were sent to the Absorption Chamber, and members were swapped between the compositions."

"The Commissariat was abolished before the end of the Era of the Fourth Mental Structure. You cannot possibly be so old as that. That was over many thousands of years before immortality was discovered."

"Second Immortality. The Compositions have a collective immortality of memory-records. Individual members die, but the mass-mind continues."

"Are you part of the Eleemosynary Composition?"

"It is not yet time for me to speak. Finish your tale. Xenophon tricked you, and you opened your memories?"

"That is a proper summation. He has an agent disguised as a pantomime clown. Hunting for me."

"Hunted by clowns? How quaint."

"Ahem. Well, there is a an explanation, sir. I was dressed in Harlequinade when Xenophon first met me, so he dressed his agent as a character from the same comedy. Scaramouche - the agent - attacked me with a complex mind virus, a civilization of viral information, actually, while I was linked to the mentality. If I log on again, I will be attacked, and perhaps erased and replaced."

"The Sophotechs permit this ... ?"

"They have no technology to understand what is being done, or how the information particles are being transmitted into a shielded system. The technology is not from the Golden Oecumene."

"It is not from an earlier period. It is not from before the Oecumene."

"I am not speaking of 'before,' my good sir. I am speaking of 'outside.' I was attacked by invaders from another star."

Two of the vultureheads looked toward each other, exchanging a sardonic glance of disbelief. Even on the bird faces the expression was clear to read. "Oh. How interesting. What other star? No life above the unicellular level has yet been discovered in the deep of space. The colony sent out to Cygnus X-l perished in unspeakable horror, long, long ago."

"It is something from Cygnus. Something survived the fall of the Silent Oecumene. An evil Sophotech called the Nothing Machine."

"This sounds to be the stuff of fancy, a dream, a memory-entertainment, a mistake," said the vulture. "Where is your evidence? Surely your wealthy Sophotechs can examine your brain-information, and discover what is true and what is false in your mind."

"The examination was performed-the readings showed my memories of the attack were false."

"And from this you conclude ... ?"

"I conclude that the readings were tampered with."

"And your support for this conclusion is ... ?"

"Well, obviously the evil mind-virus tampered with them."

"Let me see if I understand this, young aristocrat. We live in a society where men can edit their brain-information at will, so that even their deepest thoughts, instincts, and convictions can be overwritten and rewritten, and no memories can be trusted. You find you have a memory of being attacked by a nonexistent mind-virus created by a nonexistent Sophotech from a long-dead colony. Upon examination, readings show the memory is false, and your conclusion is that your unbelievable, entirely absurd memories are true, and the readings showing them to be false are unreliable. Is that right?"

"That's right."

"Ah. I merely wanted to be certain of the circumstances."

"My tale, whether it is believed or not, whether it is believable or not, is still mine, and I will still act as if it were true-I dare not do otherwise. And, true or not, believable or not, the telling of my tale is done; I would have yours, if you will return the courtesy, for I cannot imagine who you might be."

"You would not know the name I call myself these days. Once, I was called the Bellipotent Composition."

Phaethon was taken aback. "Impossible! Bellipotent was destroyed two aeons ago!"

"No. Only disbanded. The memories still were on record. I have part of those memories."

"You mean, then, that you have studied the Bellipotent Composition ... ?"

"No. I am he. How many minds does it take to make a mass-mind? A thousand? A hundred? Ten? Two? I say it only takes one; and I am he. I say that I am still the mass-mind of the Bellipotent, even though my membership has only one member. I am the last of a mighty host, but I was of that host. The air marshal branch-mind of the Eastern Warlock-killing division surrendered to Alternate Organization Solomon Over-soul after the Three Horrid Seconds of the Battle of Peking Network Operating System Core. You do not know history, do you? I see it in your face. This surrender happened in Pre-Epoch 44101, three hundred years into the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure. I was part of the air group who surrendered. We were permitted, under the peace contract, to retain our identities."

"And you simply roam free these days? You were not punished?"

"You really know nothing of history, do you? I was kept in an underground cyst for a space of centuries equal to what Warlock astrologers calculated to be the projected lifetime sum of every person who had been killed in the bombing runs. After I was released, I was part of the death lottery instituted by the Witch-King of Corea."

"Death lottery ... ?"

"The reason for the war is not what history reports. History says it was because the Warlocks had found the Shadow-mind technology, which permitted them an alternate state of consciousness and allowed them to falsify noetic readings, to lie under oath. Humbug. That was not a significant cause. The significant cause of the war between the mass-minds and the Warlocks was that our mental systems were incompatible. Bellipotent demanded exact and rigid justice, one law for all, executed without fear or favoritism. But the Warlock brain thinks in leaps of logic, flashes of insight, patterns of symmetry. To them, the justice must be poetic justice, and the punishment grotesquely sculpted to fit the crime, or else it is not justice at all.

"Thus, when it came my turn to be punished, it amused the Witch-King to impose on me and my fellow bombardiers the same uncertainty and fear our bomb drops had imposed on others. We were permitted to wander free, but with explosive charges surgically implanted in our crania. Random radio pulses were sent out, so that we were executed by lottery, at random places and times. Sometimes other signals, door openers or automobile guides, set off the charges. After a hundred years of that, I alone survived. Now I ferry the gentle Deep Ones to and from their underwater kingdoms."

"Horrible!"

"No. My biological parts have withered and been replaced many times. All trace of the explosives have been removed."

"But how could you tolerate the uncertainty?"

"Ah. Does this question come from Phaethon, who once dreamed of traveling far beyond where any noumenal mentality could reach? Random and instant death would have been just as prevalent on your voyage, had you ever made one. And, once colonies, armed with technologies equal to our own, were planted among the several nearby stars, that same risk of instant and random death would then be imposed upon every colonist and every citizen of the Oecumene, since war, at any moment, could break out again at any time."