La Edad De Oro (103 page)

Reached where? His only “destination” was an arbitrary one, selected because having a meaningless goal was better than having none. Nothing waited for him there.

Phaethon looked from right to left, at the little red-lit plot of moss on which he sat. This was the only home he had now. Rhadamanthus Mansion was gone. His low-rent cube was gone, too. The landlord there certainly used the same standard language in his rental contracts that the Eleemosynary Hospice used. Phaethon had already been evicted. He had no possessions in that room, except a box of cleaning dust. He recalled now that even the medical equipment had been leased.

A second memory surfaced. The organs in his body, the thick synthetic texture of his skin, and the other changes to his body which he had thought were cheap artificial replacements, were, of course, nothing of the kind. His body had been redesigned by the surgical processes specially commissioned and created by Orient Overmind-group, one of the Ennead, at tremendous cost. His skin and organs were designed to withstand the shock of accelerations, the degeneration of microgravity, and the various radiation hazards, vertigo, deprivations and other emergencies the conditions of space demanded. His body had been designed in tandem with the inner lining of his suit.

Phaethon shook his head in dismay. Would this body remain fit and healthy under normal earthly gravity? Before it had been stored under constant medical attention. His skin was insensitive; his eyesight seemed dull and limited without the artificial enhancements he used to enjoy. He had sacrificed everything, even the normal healthy function of his normal body to his dream of space travel. That dream had been his spirit. What did one call a body after its spirit had fled? There were words from the old days: hulk; relic; corpse.

A third memory suddenly surfaced. He recalled why he had been there, in that filthy small cube of a rented room. It was not merely that it was cheap. It had been near a spaceport. Phaethon had rented it fully expecting to be back under way again before the end of December. He had wanted to be within a few minutes’ ride of a dock, so that he could sail immediately back to Mercury Equilateral, where the Phoenix Exultant waited. It had been for a quick departure.

Bitterness stung his throat till he laughed.

He had not slept well: but, at least, some of his old memories were being organized so that he could retrieve them now.

Phaethon closed his eyes and tried to sleep again. He dreamt a world was burning far below him.

He rested uneasily. Eventually he rose, gathered his helmet, drank, ate a sparse meal from the floor. Then he dissolved his little stream, and rolled his miniature landscape of moss and spore and microorganism back into his cloak, shed the extra mass as water, and used the water to absorb the waste-heat of the nanorecycling process, and eject it as steam. Then his armor cleaned itself and swirled up around his body, lifting metal plates into place. He swirled some medical nanomaterial into his mouth to clean his teeth and restore his blood-chemistry balance.

Phaethon drew a breath and closed his eyes. He did not have a formulation rod, or any working midbrain coordination circuits, but he attempted to embrace three phases of Warlock meditation he had learned from Daphne during one lazy year off they had taken together. It was crude, but he felt his nervous system, parasympathetic system, and the pseudo-organic circuitry in the various levels of his mind reach a balance. His eyes were calmer when he opened them again.

Then he turned and looked back at his little encampment, scanning it to be sure he had left no moss or mess behind.

He smiled. Was a life of solitude so bad? His little camp here had been crude and rough, without luxury, to be sure. But it could not have been so different from the way his ancestors had lived in the prehistoric wilderness. Could it?

The descent from the space tower took fewer weeks than he expected. His sleep was irregular; he woke exhausted. But he persisted. When strange moods or sudden despair came upon him, he attempted Warlock meditation techniques, and used the armor he wore in the place of a formulary wand. The armor lacked the proper biofeedbacks, but it allowed him to persevere.

In some places, the descent was easy to expedite; in others, he was hindered. The region of the tower from fifty to sixty thousand feet was owned by an old friend of Helion’s, a Dark-Gray ex-Constable named Temer Sixth Lacedemonian. Temer had ambitions to become one day a Peer himself, and did not wish to appear to favor Phaethon’s case, and so, during that whole length of the tower, Phaethon was herded and harassed by armed remotes, and not permitted to sleep on Temer’s territory, and hardly permitted to pause. And Temer must have guessed Phaethon’s patience to a nicety; just when Phaethon was fed up, and reaching his hand up to close his faceplate (so that he could stop and rest, while enjoying the spectacle of the remotes bouncing useless stun-shocks against his invulnerable armor) it was at that moment Temer’s remotes dropped back, and allowed him a few hours’ overdue rest. The episode caused Phaethon some grim satisfaction, and perhaps a spark of distant hope. There were limits to what the Hortator’s exile could impose on him, limits he could influence.

For other stretches, the going was much easier. Phaethon had been dreading reaching the tower segments that lacked stairs, and imagined aching limbs fatigued by endless hours of hand-over-hand climbing. The reality was much more pleasant.

The maintenance ladders dropped down sheer wells. Phaethon could attach himself by diamond-fiber cord spun out of available atmospheric carbon. He fashioned a system of pulleys and carabiners, which could lower him great distances quickly. He grew motors to control the arrangement, so that he could descend while he slept, albeit this used more battery energy than he would have liked. The suit’s gauntlets he programmed to untie and to retrieve the rope material periodically, so that Phaethon hardly lost any nanomaterial mass. The suit-mind was flexible enough to understand orders to find the next stanchion and retie the belaying knots. Thus Phaethon could sleep with his hands folded over his chest beneath his breastplate, safe as a papoose in a backpack, while the armor rappelled down one length of rungs after another. Many miles of descent were quickly consumed in this fashion. And he needed the rest. His growing mental fatigue, his lack of a proper self-consideration circuit, was forcing him to spend more and more time asleep.

The worst section was a maintenance well without rungs, meant only for robots using magnetic grapples. Phaethon thought he probably had the right to ask to be conveyed down past this segment, since the law against trespass did not require a trespasser to depart by ways that were dangerous or unhealthy. But a notion of pride or zeal made him go forward. Or perhaps his rashness came from certain mood-alteration stimulants he had attempted that week. The Warlock meditations were becoming less effective, and Phaethon was experimenting with a crude Noetic system he was trying to construct out of the helmet circuits, to see if he could do to himself, manually, some of the delicate nerve work and sleep integrations Rhadamanthus had used to do to restore mental balance.

This morning’s attempt at sleep integration had left him giddy and overconfident. He had been sure he could design a parachute out of his cloak, with sufficient lifting surface to slow his fall; the armor was too heavy, and he had merely dropped it down the shaft. The armor, of course, banged and rang against the shaft as it dropped, chiming like a gong the size of the moon, but was utterly unscratched by the five-thousand-foot plunge. Phaethon, on the other hand, had scraped against the side of the well, spilled air out of his parachute shroud, spun, recovered, tumbled, almost recovered, and broke both his legs upon landing.

In infinite agony, he had crawled and crawled, trying to find his armor, dragging his broken legs behind him. Finally he found it, and gasped out a command to turn on the emergency medical program before collapsing. The armor had swarmed across his body and fitted itself around him. Nanomachines inside the suit lining had aided the biomechanisms in his legs to regenerate the bone tissues. He lay in half-drugged discomfort for hours while his body repaired itself. The special construction of his space-adapted bones slowed the process, and the suit-mind had to make several hesitant guesses about how to proceed. (The medical routines and partial minds aboard the Phoenix Exultant were not, of course, available to him. The armor was a wonder of engineering, but it had not been designed to operate in solitude.)

A Constable remote came to hover over his dazed body, warning him not to drop dangerous objects from high places, lest he be sued for negligence.

The Constable made no move to help him, of course. Phaethon had no insurance, and no doctor would risk joining him in exile.

He lay on his back, blankly staring upward, wondering at his own stupidity, and vowing to touch no mood alterants of any kind again. For a man familiar with the power to project his self-image instantly anywhere into the Mentality, or to telepresent himself in reality anywhere there were mannequins, to lie immobile, fixed in place, helpless, was torture. He imagined an angel whose wings had been torn off.

That episode had consumed almost half of his available supply of nanomaterial (it was absorbed into his body as medical constituents) severely drained his suit batteries, lost him half a day of travel.

The best section of descent had had, for its maintenance way, merely a track of traction-variable plates set in a long slide, spiraling down the whole circumference of the tower at a steep slope. The metal in the plates were atomically organized to permit easier motion in one direction and speed than another, with resistance variables to control the rate of descent.

Phaethon saw the opportunity at once. He formed his cloak into a belly sled with magnetic elements that would be agitated by the action of the traction fields; that agitation could heat water stored through tiny capillaries and veins he grew into his cloak; the heat would drive a steam turbine he grew like a lump across his shoulders; the turbine would recharge his batteries, while the passing wind cooled the circulating water. Most of the nanoconstruction could be recycled.

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 notrespassing 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.