John Wright - The Golden Age

By the time he slid to the bottom of the long slide, Phaethon found that he had lost only four hundred grams of nanomaterial in unrecoverables; but his battery power was restored to full strength.

He dissolved the belly sled with a pang of farewell. It had not been an elegant engineering solution. Nonetheless, it was with some pleasure that Phaethon could add to the inventory of his resources and possessions that he had so exhaustively noted days before the entry: potential energy (position above

the earth).

Below a certain point, he began to hear, through the walls, the creaking and singing of the wind shear against the sides of the infinite tower. He kept expecting to find some hatch or window to the outside. Perhaps he thought his experiment at parachuting would have better success if he were not jumping down a narrow tube; certainly it would be easier to fall thirty or forty thousand feet rather than walk down thirty or forty

thousand feet of stair. But no window interrupted the solitude of this dark stair.

Days, weeks, fortnights went by. But even seemingly endless time eventually must end.

At the bottom of the tower, the maintenance hatch came out upon a concourse.

He paused at the door to change an entry in his suit log. He removed "potential energy" as a possible resource, for, at ground level it was zero.

Looking at his resources log, Phaethon stood a moment in thought.

In the negative column, however, he made several entries:

"No father. My real father has been replaced by a relic, who was one of the conspirators who worked my downfall. I must count him my enemy."

He half expected Rhadamanthus to come on-line and remark with rueful humor that this was somewhat unfair of Phaethon, whose father was, after all, a more complex individual than that. No remark came.

"No manor, no sophotechnology. I am limited to merely human intelligence. My enemies have intellects like unto gods at their command."

Then, more grimly: "No more spare life. My next death is final."

And: "No wife. My love has slain herself, and left a puppet, programmed to love me, to mock me."

The last entry: "Alien creatures hunt me like a dog, to kill me, while an ignorant and ignoble world rollicks with gaiety and festive cheer, unseeing, uncaring, and unable, by law, to see me die. My location is a matter of public record..."

No. No, wait. Phaethon erased that last ideogram-gestalt line. His location was secret, was it not? In the assets column, he noted that it was still the middle of a Masquerade. He could move unseen, undetected.

Or could he? Anyone with access to the Mentality could look up Phaethon's last known location, at the top of the endless tower. It was not hard to calculate his rate of descent; and, every time he had stepped into an area where a no-

trespassing injunction was flagged, his position would be public knowledge again. Temer Lacedaimonius, for example, had dogged his progress.

So the enemies had to be here. Somewhere on the other side of this door. Perhaps very near.

With a deliberate motion of his hand, he pushed open the door.

Beyond was light, noise, the sounds of crowds. Phaethon blinked, blinded for a moment, unable to make himself step into the rectangle of light framed by the doorway.

There was a sharp noise in the near distance, like the shot of rail gun, or perhaps the snap of a short-range energy weapon. Phaethon, certain that his enemies had found him, flinched back, hand before his face.

He crouched there in the dark, waiting for pain.

None came.

He realized that it had just been some noise from the crowd of people in the concourse beyond; a slap of water in a fountain, or the bark of a child's ear-toy. Or perhaps the snap of a circuit in some ill-tended machine. In a world hidden by sense-filters, there was little need to make all noise muffled, or to keep all public engines in repair.

He tried to lower his hands, to straighten up, but the sensation gripped his throat for a long, shameful moment: loneliness, self-pity, fear, the degrading physical terror that he would be killed, and die the final death.

Mingled with this was the more subtle oppression of knowing he had no place to go, no home, no shelter, and no friend—and no real destination....

That moment passed. With a snort, Phaethon straightened up. He sardonically added an entry to his negative asset column: "More easily frightened than expected."

In his asset column, he noticed the listing of how much directed energy per square inch his armor could withstand. Then he uttered a harsh laugh. "Good luck to you, my assassins," he murmured half-aloud. They would need an energy output equal to a b-type star even to scratch him; they could blow the planet to asteroids beneath his feet without even

jarring him. Even if they pushed him into a pit of frictionless, superconductive slime, his internal ecological structures would remain intact for years upon years.

And yet, the enemy must be aware of all this. They would be prepared. A charge of antimatter would burn through his armor, as it would through any normal atomic structure, heavy or light.

With Sophotechs helping them, these enemies, whoever they were, could outthink him, anticipate his moves, create better weapons, have more resources at their command

No one would raise a hand to help him. No one else even believed these foes existed.

In the positive assets column, he added, grimly, with no trace of a smile: "And I alone, out of a whole world of deluded and forgetful men, know and recall the truth about this matter. I love truth more than happiness; I will not rest."

Squinting, he stepped into the light.

Here ends volume I, to be concluded in volume II, The Phoenix Exultant.

scanned by bec Nov 2004