Phaethon thought such things happened only in comedies. Wryly, he realized that the tree artist, being a Puritan, had worn no sense-filter. He would have been exposed naked to all the clamor and commotion of the Advertisements, the roar of the music. Small wonder, then, that he had been in a testy mood.
“He implied I had done something shameful or dreadful, something showing hatred or contempt for the Golden Oecumene. Is this related to your forbidden topic?”
“Directly related.”
“Hm. It is well-known that the Neptunians love to test the boundaries of reason and good taste, and forever chafe and complain at the protocols and polite customs—one can hardly call them ‘laws’—with which we voluntarily bind ourselves. And before you used the obscure word ‘crime.’ Were we partners, you and I, in some criminal attempt?”
“Not criminal. Neptunians experiment with unusual mind forms, but we are not insane. And yet, you and I were partners in an attempt which was not well loved by your small-souled people here, not well loved at all.”
“Some Neptunian prank or trick or fraud, was it, then?”
“You repeat the slanders of our detractors. The Tritonic Composition explores the boundaries of mental effort, unhindered by the ponderous moral posturing of your leaden machine-minds! Allow me to transmit my stored compendia into your brain space. Time is short, and the Neptunian philosophy is complex, and is based on value judgments which only experience, not logic, can convey.”
“Load them onto a semipublic channel, and I will peruse them at leisure, without danger of mind-to-mind contamination or manipulation.”
“I am not permitted to undertake the insecurity or expense of placing valuable and private thought templates from my life experience into a public box.”
“Expense?” This was ridiculous. Why, the expense of shipping Phaethon to Neptune—or, saving on mass, of shipping Phaethon’s brain in a lightweight life support—was astronomical. Phaethon consulted an almanac in the Rhadamanthus Mansion-Mind. Neptune and Earth were not in favorable positions for any fuel-efficient flight paths. Phaethon calculated how the increased payload of his weight would affect the mass-energy costs of even a low-boost orbit. The cost in energy-currency was roughly equal to a several thousand seconds of time-currency. In other words, a small fortune. “The expense is nothing compared to what you’ve already offered in transportation costs.”
At first, it looked as if the iceberg shape were melting. But no, it was flattening, the high crown dropping, and the wide base growing wider and wider. Fluid flowed from the base, thickening and freezing into leg pillars. Under the ice at each foot of these pillars, Phaethon could see, dimly, complex machines being quickly made out of neurocomposite crystal and ceramic. The bulbs and globes and insulated tubes seemed to be energy batteries and field manipulators.
“You have acted against my advice and signaled to your mansion. I must flee before I am discovered.”
Signaled? Phaethon had retrieved one almanac file and run a calculation routine, Almost automatic functions. Phaethon had thought the Neptunian had only not wanted him to talk to his mansion. “Don’t be absurd! No one would dare to listen in on my private communications.”
“Even your vaunted Sophotechs will bend their precious laws to serve a purpose they call higher. But I shall use their own laws against them. They allow you some privacy during the distractions and masquerades meant to appease you. Behold. I shall construct a masquerader for you; he shall hold the files you will not receive from me; when you are strong enough to face truth, strong enough to defy this world of illusions, my messenger shall come for you.”
Phaethon saw, in the depth of the armored crystal, a shape like a naked body floating to the surface. It was complete with bones, muscles, nerves, veins. Only the skin of the face and neck had not been wholly grafted on; and the skull was opened like a flower of bone, and strands and lines of nerve fiber were still being packed into place, with umbilicuslike channels still leading back to the main Neptunian brain-group. The lower body had a costume being woven around it, bulky and ill-fitting, but it was recognizable as the costume of Scaramouche, a character from the same period and operetta cycle as Phaethon’s Harlequin.
“Phaethon, come now. This is the final second.”
“Forgive me, sir, but I am not satisfied with your various mystifications and hints. I suspect a deception, for which your kind are notorious. You have not even yet told me your name.”
“How should I tell you my name when you do not even recall the meaning of your own!”
“Phaethon? The name dates from the Time of the Second Mental Structure. The myth is of the sun god’s bastard child who dared to drive his father’s chariot … .” Phaethon’s voice trailed off.
There was a final surge and broil in the depth of the Neptunian body substance, as structural elements were formed and grown into place. A gush of wind announced the creature was activating its lift generators, joined by whistling screams from compression-jets.
The Neptunian’s voice, channeled into Phaethon’s sensorium, did not need to get any louder to speak over the rush and rumble of the liftoff. “You named yourself for a demigod whose ambition burned a world. Not the name a man content with his lot in life would choose. But you don’t recall why you chose it, do you? Can you begin to guess now how much of your memory is missing? They did not even let you keep the meaning of your name.”
Phaethon backed up as pressure exploded from the feet of the Neptunian. Its low, flat shape was now in an aerodynamic configuration. With ponderous grace, it raised its nose to the sky, and moved upward.
Phaethon adjusted his sense-filter so that, instead of the roar of jets and the whine of magnetics, he still only heard the chirruping of night insects in the Saturn-grove. Amplifying his vision to the highest extent he could, he saw the body of the masquerader, wrapped in some sort of cocoon or buoyancy chute ejected from the Neptunian as it rose. He attempted to encompass the satellite and ground-based location routines within his vision, and to open more sense-channels. But apparently the same protocol that disabled the location routines during masquerade extended to escaping aircraft as well. Phaethon was not able to track the body as it fell.
As for the Neptunian, it flashed like distant ice, gained altitude. Then the light twinkled and receded, one star lost among many.
6.
In the palace:
Wheel-of-Life was a Cerebelline ecoperformer of the Decentral Spirit School, as well as trustee for all copyrighted biotechnology based on the Five Golden Rings mathematics. She appeared as a matron of serene beauty and grave demeanor, seated on a throne of living flowers, grass, and hedge, in which a dozen species of birds and insects nested. She was also physically present (insofar as that word had meaning for Decentral Spiritualists), but her great cloak of interwoven living fibers ran from her shoulders out the window to where the other plants and animals that formed her corporate body and mind components reposed.
Cerebellines were a neuroform whose hindbrain and cortex were interconnected in the pattern called “global,” from their ability to resolve multiple simultaneous interrelationships. They could think in a timeless meditation, and from many points of view at once. This avoided set-theory paradoxes, and linear-thought limitations. It was one of the least popular neuroforms in the Golden Oecumene, however, since it fell prey too easily to mystical conundrums and nonverbalisms.
(Helion was not able to maintain a translation from her point of view for any length of time. The plantlike parts of her were aware of the room only as motion, pressure, sunlight, moisture, but also as computer movements, information flows. The birds and rodents gave so many small, scattered pictures and sounds of the Conclave that Helion was perplexed; and the thoughts were so tangled with sharp, bright shards of instinct, lust, hunger, fear, that Helion’s brain-structure could not assimilate or index the perceptions.)
Wheel-of-Life indicated an objection. She expressed herself by holding up her hands and creating a mini
ature ecosystem in its globe. Microbes, plankton, brightly colored fish-shaped darts swam in the globe; triangular shark things fought many-tentacled cephalopods in relentless subsea wars.
She shattered the globe on the table surface into many globes. In each of the lesser globes, one species and only one rose to dominance, destroyed all competition, overgrazed, died back, and lost its throne. In every case the single dominant life form subdivided into new avenues as evolution continued.
Ao Aoen, the Master Dreamer, owner of a vast entertainment empire, spoke up: “I agree with Wheel-of-Life. Helion’s vision will create a future of monochromatic conformity; events will narrow toward simplicity. Yet our society is diverse. Solutions are diverse. Within the mind are webs of interconnections, laws of thought; between minds are webs of social relation, laws of institutions. Turn one inside out and you have the other. Yet which of us is simple enough to be understood by, or complex enough to understand, ourselves?!”
Helion responded by inventing a mathematical game of geometric solids and spaces within a three-dimensional grid. The rules of the game allowed the solids, if surrounded by spaces, to reproduce; but the solids evolved their shapes due to pressure from the other solids.
He held it up like a glass box in his hand, and ran it, in compressed time, a dozen or a thousand times. In all but one case, the shapes bowed to the pressure of the surrounding solids, eventually formed cubes, and consumed all the available empty spaces.
The one nonstandard case was a beautiful snowflake-shaped system, with octahedrons and tetrahedrons radiating out from the single central dodecahedron. Ao Aoen thoughtfully reached across the table with his extremely long fingers, picked up that system, saved it, and handed it to Wheel-of-Life, who sent several birds and insects to gaze at it with joy.
“I’d like to disagree with Peer Wheel-of-Life,” said Helion. “The diversity in nature is sustained because the beasts and plants must solve their disputes in inefficient life-or-death competitions. Rational creatures can create treaties, laws, and social mechanisms to channel aggression into peaceful competition. Competition encourages efficiency. Efficiency encourages uniformity. Even a society as diverse as ours has certain rules and mores which we must enforce against those who deviate.”
Gannis murmured: “And here I had thought we were agreed not to speak about Phaethon again … .”
Helion hid a frown in a backup file, were no one could see it. Yet he frowned.
Vafnir, the energy magnate, said, “The same argument implies, Peer Helion, that those society employs to enforce its rules against deviations are justified in their use of force. Is this consistent with the arcadian ease and utopian peace we all have known?”
Helion said, “There are warriors even in paradise. And even in Arcadia, death comes.”
3
THE SOLDIER
1.
In the garden:
As Phaethon stood and stared at the receding glimmer of the Neptunian, something came floating in on the night breeze.
Phaethon looked. A gaggle of little black bubbles swirled, windblown, across the grass under the trees and stars. Phaethon did not see from whence these machine organisms came. The bubbles swirled and swooped, circling the spot where the Neptunian just had been.
“Now what?” muttered Phaethon.
Some spheres dropped to roll across the grass, uphill and downhill. The main group of them slowly went back and forth along the path toward the grape trellises where Phaethon had first seen the Neptunian. The black spheres paused frequently to insert a slender probe or proboscis into the ground. Nearer to Phaethon, at the spot from which the Neptunian had launched, the spheres gathered into several rounded tetrahedrons and drove more probes into the ground.
It did not look very beautiful; the sphere movements were at once too slow and methodical, and too quick and efficient, to be an animation dance, nor was there music. Unless it was meant for an audience with senses not like his? Setting his hearing to a search routine, Phaethon found only high-frequency encrypted signals coming from the spheres, all squawks and stuttering whines, with no trace of rhythm or grace.
Phaethon pointed a finger and made the identification gesture, knowing it would be blocked by the masquerade. To his surprise, it was not. To his eyes, it looked as if a window had opened in midair, or a scroll unfurled, and in the frame was a dragon glyph radiating four ideograms in an archaic style: Honor, Courage, Fortitude, Obedience.
“Preliminary array, hostile organism detection and counteraction system identifies itself. Copyright information (Security Clearance required). Public Ownership. This unit is assigned to: Marshal-General Atkins Vingtetun, General-Issue Humaniform (multiple battle augmentations) Military Hierarchy, Semicompilation (ghosthaunted, and combat-reflexes), Warmind, Staff Command, Base Neuroform, Unschooled, Era Zero (the Creation).”
Phaethon was truly amused that someone would come to a masquerade disguised as Atkins. Atkins was the soldier. The last soldier. Phaethon was under the vague impression that Atkins had long ago, centuries upon centuries ago, killed himself or gone to stand-by or been stored in a museum, or something.
The impersonation was in questionable taste, however. A soldier? No one liked to be reminded of their barbaric past. And, unless Phaethon had misunderstood the masquerade guidelines, identity and location information could be masked but not actually falsified. But it seemed as if someone were nonetheless impersonating Atkins. Wouldn’t the Hortators consider this a breach of propriety?
On the other hand, falsifications of fictional people, or people whose identities were retired, or whose memory copyrights had expired, must be permissible. Such identities were in the public domain, were they not? After all, no one was going to object to Phaethon, for example, impersonating Harlequin.
But Phaethon was still curious. For what were the spheres so diligently searching? Had the Neptunian (assuming it had been real) left behind some clue or trace of its origins or goals?
Well, if the false Atkins was going to be so gauche as to imitate a long-retired war hero, Phaethon could overstep politeness also. (This was a party, after all, and the standards of behavior were relaxed.)
After all, it was also in very bad taste to intrude icon-objects (like this midair window and dragon glyph) into Phaethon’s field of view without any attempt whatever to blend the objects into the real environment, so as not to disturb Phaethon’s previously established visual-continuity aesthetic. So perhaps it was in equally bad taste to tap into another person’s private communication link, decode it, and find out what information all the spheres were sending back to their base point. But Phaethon did it anyway.
He caught only a fragment of the many messages: “ … an information-deception-and-avoidance routine more complex—magnitude eight—than a nonmechanical intelligence can produce … . Sophotechnology of origin unknown …”
“ … artificial viral bodies introduced into grass DNA where subject stepped. Excessive information strand-coding—unknown data-compression techniques—grass will spore microorganisms of highly complex systematology—intelligence level 100—seeking out raw materials and creating larger organizations …”
And also: “ … deduces (from the enemy success against civilian countermeasures) electron and quantum-state manipulation technologies comparable to those produced by Oecumenical civilization, based on the same history-development up through to late-period Fifth Mental Structure, but deviating thereafter in a fashion no member schola, or group embraced within the Golden Oecumene, could theoretically produce. Conclusion: …”
Then, an interruption: “Who the hell is on this line? Sir—hey, you! Excuse me, sir! But what do you think you are doing?”
The window in midair changed, and the dragon sign was replaced by an image of a man-shape in streamlined black power-armor of a style dating from the Sixth Mental Structure. The helmet turned toward Phaethon (who had his mask back on by then) and, somehow, Phaethon nonetheless felt that nape-hair prickling sensation w
hich was his cue from Rhadamanthus that his name file was being read.
Phaethon was shocked beyond words. Then: “Who, if I may ask, are you, sir, that you just trample on the protocols of the masquerade without a word?”
“Sorry, sir,” the man in the floating window replied. “Atkins. I’m acting on orders from the partial-Parliament extrapolation of the Warmind. You’re tapping into a secured channel. May I ask what you’re doing in this area?”
2.
In the palace:
Ao Aoen was a Warlock neuroform. His brain had interconnections between the temporal lobes, nonverbal left-brain lobes, and the thalamus and hypothalamus, seats of emotion and passion. Consequently, the relationships between his conscious and subconscious were nonstandard, and allowed him to perform accurately what base neuroforms could do only infrequently: acts of insight, intuition, inspiration, pattern recognition, lateral thinking. He could script his dreams. And dreams were merely one of several overlaps between conscious and unconscious realms that he had mastered, or to which he had surrendered.
He was physically present in a hideously beautiful body, patterned with scales like a colored cobra. Extra skull extensions gave his head the shape of a manta ray, shadowing his shoulders and reaching down his back. He had a half a dozen hands and arms, with fingers a yard or more in length. Between his fingers and his arms, like butterfly wings, tissues carrying a dozen delicate sensory-membranes stretched. This gave him scores of sensual sensations beyond the normal ranges.
(Ao Aoen saw the standardized version of the library scene, but overlaid with several dreams and half-dreams, so that every object seemed charged with mysterious and profound symbolism. Ao Aoen had superimposed a webwork of lines, glyphs, astrological notations, indicating loyalties and emotional, or, perhaps, magical-symbolic, sympathies or affiliations. Each Peer was represented by the self-image they projected, so that Orpheus, for example, who projected none, looked to Ao Aoen like an empty black cube.)