Fénix Exultante (47 page)

There was one, just one, staging pool in the center of the town square. No one was sleeping in it. Phaethon was not surprised. In a city of exiles, a non-network pool could only be used by one ostracized citizen to enter a dreamspace built and provided and guided by another ostracized citizen. The pool liquid consisted of a few inches of brownish sludge, which no one had bothered to program to clean itself.

He sat on the marble bench surrounding the lip of the staging pool, gazing about him, wondering what to do next. A sense of misery, which he had held at bay throughout his long descent down the tower, and through his voyage on the airship, now came to him and possessed him. He slumped off the edge and sat in the pool; the sludge was too shallow to admit him. Tentative crystals formed in the liquid and nosed around his legs like curious, shy fish, but there was no way for Phaethon to make a connection, and nothing he had to do once a connection was made. Phaethon sat without moving, then he cursed. His head nodded, but his brain ached, and he could not sleep. The noise of the town screamed and sang around him, loudly and mindlessly.

Eventually, he stirred himself. Phaethon rubbed his hands along the carbon dust clinging to his knees. All that resulted was that his palms turned black. A few grams of decrepit nanoassembler molecules must have been hiding among the dust; when he brushed at it vigorously, the assemblers activated, looking for substances to turn into road surface, and pulled a number of micrograms of carbon out of Phaethon’s skin with a flash of waste heat that raised blisters on his legs. The jolt of pain sent him skipping upright, hissing and blinking.

Wincing, he went to wash his legs beneath the in-spigots of the staging pool, hoping that, like most pools, it had a medical side-mind. He could save a few precious drops of his dwindling supply of nanomaterial if the pool’s medical side-mind could make an unguent for him. Perhaps it could, but Phaethon did not have an interfacer with which to talk to the pool. He tried to communicate his needs to the pool by pointing and gesturing. The pool surface formed a bulb of hallucinogen and offered it to him. Then it offered him sleep-oil; then breathing tissue. Phaethon, exasperated, soon was splashing back and forth, swinging his arms in wide gestures of simple pantomime, pointing at his blisters, and shouting rude comments at the pool’s simple mindedness. He shouted more and more loudly, trying to be heard over the thumping din of the town noise.

A voice from behind him: “Eyah! What you doing, manor-born?”

Phaethon stopped his antics, summoned an aloof expression, and turned. “Just as you see.”

“Ah. All is explained.”

Here was a dark-skinned man, bald, and enormously broad of shoulder. He was squat, and thick-limbed. His muscle grafts had been placed without any concern for symmetry or fineness. His face was scarred and tattooed; he was missing an ear. The tattoos formed exaggerated scowl lines around his mouth; his eyes were ringed with concentric lines of surprise. He wore a brown smock of many pockets, and, over the top of that, what looked like an advertisement banner, but it was silent and dark, with thin lines of red and orange flickering through the substance.

“Welcome to Death Row,” said the bald, squat man.

Phaethon, dirty, dripping, and burnt, mustered his dignity. “How do you know me to be a manorial?” If a random passerby could deduce or guess that he was Phaethon, it would be child’s play for Xenophon or the Nothing Sophotech.

The squat man wagged his head. “Ai-yah! Listen to him snoff!” Then to Phaethon, he said, “You shout at pool, all nice talk, full sentence. ‘I shall surely drub you!’ you shout. ‘You shall learn what it means boldly to go against orders!’ also you shout. Eyah. ‘Boldly to go’…? You mean ‘to boldly go,’ you don’t? Only machines talk like this way. Very puff-puff. Very polite.”

“I see. I shall endeavor to make my speech more colloquial, if that is what anonymity requires.”

“Oho. You don’t want attention? So you splash and yell off head? Very wise, very deep-think! Hey, maybe blind deaf-mute in coma off yonder has not seen you, eh?”

“I was under the impression that most of the people here had their sense-filters engaged.”

“No such. No sense-filters, no fancy puff-puff. They just cussed, is all. Dark, black, nasty cussed. They want out and up, so they make-pretend. Make-pretend they are rich, make-pretend they are loved-up, make-pretend they are wise and kind and good-good. Ashores. All of them Ashores. They hate all us right full deep, you know. You too.”

“Us? What defines us as a group?”

“Afloats.”

“I fear I don’t understand.”

“Is simple as simple is. Ashore live ashore. They may live. Their sentence is measured; a year, six year; hundred year, what-have-you. When time is done, they get their lives again, they get up-and-out. Can buy from Orpheus. Can buy live-forever machines. Land they live on, is rented to them; once they get lives back, they pay back. All fair. All square.”

“And the Afloats, I assume, live afloat…?”

“Live on sea as sea is free. No rent on water.”

“You have houseboats?”

“We got rafts. Drag dead houses out to sea. Is trash; no one stop us.” He shrugged. “Man at local thought-shop revive house-mind for small fee, you know.”

“And your term of exile, unlike those of the Ashores, is permanent?”

“We here till we not here no more. Here till we die. Is Death Row.” And he extended his cupped hand, palm up, a beggar’s gesture. “Name’s Oshenkyo. What’ve ye got for us, eh?”

And Phaethon took a daub of his precious, limited supply of black nanomachine material and applied it to the scar on Oshenkyo’s head where there had once been an ear. Phaethon drew upon the ecological and medical routines he had in his thoughtspace, set the daub to take a gene sample, and he set it to reconstitute the missing ear.

The bay was surrounded on three sides by cliffs. The cliffs were overgrown by a Cerebelline life-garden, which may or may not have been part of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea. Pharmaceutical vines and adaptive fibers clung to the rocks, tended by weaver birds and tailor birds. Suits and outfits finished by the tailor bird hung flapping in the sea breeze, awaiting shipping dolphins.

In the middle of the bay, strangely silent and dark, were houses shaped like gray and blue-brown seashells, standing on spider legs that gripped floats and buoys beneath the water. Dozens of dangling ropes, ladders, and nets hung between the house shells, like webs, or dropped to crude docks floating in the houses’ shadows.

In the middle of the irregular floating mass of house shells rose an old barge, streaked with barnacles and rust. On the flat upper surface of the barge towered a group of tents and pavilions made of cheap diamond synthetics, in three tiers, one above the other. From the crown of the upper tier, rose a false-tree with limbs of steel, and many solar collectors like leaves. Banners of material, and globes like fruit hung from the tree limbs. Phaethon could see where fruit or banners had dropped into the nets and cupolas of the tents below, quickly gathered up by scurrying spider-gloves and waldoes.

“It’s quieter here,” said Phaethon, looking down from the cliff into the bay. He had put his gold armor back on and had tuned some of the surface area in his black nanomaterial cape to catch and analyze some of the scents on the breeze. Mingled in the scents of green leaves, sunshine, and sea, were the command-pheromones and tiny nanomachine packages, smaller than pollen spores, which complex Cerebelline activity had as its by-product. Invisible clouds of these microspores extended far out to sea; the Cerebelline called Old-Woman was deep in thought.

Next to him, Oshenkyo was skipping and skylarking, waving and weaving his hands in the air, snapping his fingers in both ears, and smiling at the stereo-auditory noise. “Much quiet! Buckets of quiet! Know why? No ads.” Oshenkyo smiled, humming.

“What of the advertisement you wear? Why is it silent?”

“Not silent! Just our ears not hear it.” Oshenkyo explained that certain advertisers were trying to sell services and philosophy-regimen to a Cerebelline consciousness (a daughter of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea) that occupied the cliffs and kelp beds throughout the area, and who, having once, long ago, been part of the Venereal Terraforming Effort, had been heartbroken when that effort finally achieved success. The Daughter departed once Venus was towed to a new orbit, but had never altered her perceptions back to standard frequencies, time-rate, and aesthetic conventions of Earth. Hence, her “eyes” were tuned to the shortwaves and subsonic pulses the dark advertisement banners gave off.

The other banners would display advertisements meant for humans only when asked, and then only from advertisers who could not afford to, or did not bother to, prevent an exile from experiencing them.

“We use them, you know, semaphore. Or listen to jingles. Or for light. Or as sails for boats. No one mind, as long as ads get shown.”

“But you do not use them to search out useful products and services?”

“No one sells to Afloats. Almost no one. No one, we’d be dead. Almost no one, almost dead. Look it.” And he pointed above the central barge.

Phaethon was still not accustomed to how bad his eyesight was. There was no amplification when he squinted. He saw a swarm of darting and hovering specks, glittering gold, like bees, above and around the pavilions and tents rising above the barge. But he could not resolve them into clear images. “I cannot make out what is out there.”

Oshenkyo was seated on the wide, low limb of a gold-extraction bush, cupping his hands over his ears, then covering, listening to the changes in sound. He spoke absently: “Vulpine First Ironjoy on yonder barge runs a thought-shop. We get work, sometime. Can get buffers and tangle lines to reach deviants and dark markets through the Big Mind.” By which he meant the mentality.

Phaethon was intrigued. Work? The boycott of the Hortators evidently had enough holes and gaps to enable these people to live.

Then Phaethon smiled sadly at his own thought. “These people”…? Did he still think of himself as somehow apart from the other exiles?

Phaethon said: “No, I can see the barge. But what are those miniature flying instruments swarming around the area here?”

“Constables. Tinee-tiny. About so big.” Oshenkyo held up his thumb.

“So many?”

“Zillions. They watch us all time. Good thing, too. Otherwise, we club each other right quick dead.”

“Indeed? Are we all so violent, then?”

Oshenkyo shrugged a broad, one-shoulder shrug. “All us crazy, filthy people. Got nothing to lose.”

“Why are there such a number of police?”

Oshenkyo squinted at him. “We still got rights. No thieving, no killing, no broke words.”

“What about lying?”

Oshenkyo stared out at the bay, sniffed, gave another one-shouldered shrug. “Fib till your tongue falls out. No one here to buy a thought-read machine. We not like other folk: we don’t know what goes on inside other people head. Just like long-ago days, eh? But swaps, bargains, work, all that: very sacred. You give word, can’t take back. You got?”

Evidently contract laws were still enforced. “I got.”

But Phaethon realized that it would be a dangerous system, since the Oecumene law, with no emotion and no favoritism, would enforce any bargain struck, no matter how foolish, no matter how risky. Had he had access to Sophotech foresight and advice, the risks would have been small. He didn’t. Had he been raised in a society where suspicion and care were normal, he could have been in the habit of mistrusting his fellowmen, and of striking careful bargains. He wasn’t.

Oshenkyo squinted up at him. “All be clear as clear once you sign our Pact. You join up, be one of us, eh? Otherwise, not so great live here. Nowhere else to go but sea.”

This did nothing to calm Phaethon’s qualms. But he smiled in joy and relief. If he had qualms, that meant he had plans, he had a goal. He was young and in good health, and he had a supply of nanomaterial which could be adapted to medical geriatrics. He might live long enough to outlive the Hortators’ term of exile; the political circumstance of the Oecumene might change. Who could tell?

“…Or maybe the horse could learn how to sing.” Phaethon murmured.

“Eh? What’s that?”

“Sorry. I was ruminating over my hopes for the future.”

“Hope? You said ‘horse.’ ”

“There is a story about a man condemned by a tyrant, who pleads for one more year of life, telling the tyrant that, if the sentence is suspended for a year, he will teach the tyrant’s prize stallion to sing hymns. The tyrant agrees. The other prisoners are amused to see this one prisoner, every day, patiently caroling in the stables. When the other prisoners mocked his folly, the man replied that a great deal could happen in a year. The tyrant could die; the horse could die. And, who knows? The horse could learn to sing.”

“Stupid story.”

“I always used to think so, too. Now, though, I’m not sure. Are false hopes better than none at all? Perhaps they are.” Phaethon’s eyes were fixed on a point beyond the horizon.

“No, is stupid because would not take so long to download info and singing routines into horse, if brain-fittings are standard. A year? Would only take five minute.”

“This is a very old story, from the days before horses were extinct.”

Now Oshenkyo squinted in surprise. “Funny, I thought horses were make-up, you know, genetified, by Red Manor Queens.”

“Make-up? You mean invented?”

“Make-up! Like dragons and gryphons and elephants.”

“Modern elephants are a genetic reconstruction of a real species.”

Oshenkyo snorted. “With flappy-arms on their noses? You think such creature as that evolve by itself? Nar. No how. Red Manor folk make up for sure. Just their kind of stupid thing. Ah, wait!” Now Oshenkyo jumped to his feet and waved his arm high. “Lookit there! Welcome menus! You get meet Ironjoy. He tell you what’s what. You listen him, he get you fine-dandy job assignments, maybe you eat, maybe you sleep in-of-doors, out of rain. Nice-good, eh? Lick up nice chum to him, now, and smile pretty!”

“I shall endeavor to be on my best behavior,” Phaethon said in a voice of heavy irony.