And suppose he should reach the ground, where then?
Was it true he would never see his ship again? (Was it true he was never going to see Daphne again? Either one of them? Even the doll-wife had seemed appealing, in her own way …)
The Constable remote now floated down near him. “The owners of this area of the dock no longer wish to have you as a patron, and ask for your immediate removal.”
What was taking his armor so long to find the proper configurations and anchor points? When he had flown upward, the armor had required only a moment. Of course, then Rhadamanthus had probably been helping.
Phaethon said with leaden voice: “Will the owners of the space elevator let me go down the shaft, so that I can leave?”
“Certainly. The laws against trespass always allow a trespasser enough right-of-way to depart.”
He pulled his legs so that his body turned a slow somersault, end over end, to bring his face pointing downward in the shaft. There he floated, face-downward, ready to trigger an acceleration. He drifted out over the rim of the pit, with nothing below him but vacuum.
“Be careful!” said the Constable.
Instead of triggering the acceleration, Phaethon, warned by the Constable unit, brought up his internal read outs. Now he found what was taking his armor such a long time to find the proper configurations to use the energy units in the walls. There were none. There was no answering reaction from the energy units. The magnetics in Phaethon’s armor were sliding every which way, catching nothing. The system signals were bouncing, being ignored. A spurt from his wrist jet pushed him gently back way from the rim.
“What?! What is this?!”
The Constable said, “The energy units lining the space elevators wall, which you have used hitherto to motivate your armor in this area, are no longer available for your use. They are owned by the Vafnir Energy Effort, and have been instructed not to accept field-manipulation command from the circuits in your armor.”
Another harassment. It was too much to bear. He forced his voice into a low and level calm: “But then how am I to get down?”
“I am instructed to inform you that there is a service staircase reaching two-thirds of the way to the ground, and maintenance ways and ladders for the remainder.”
Phaethon felt a dull sense of shock. He did not know the distance to the atmosphere, or to the surface of the earth, from here. There was no almanac in his mind to provide him with the data on the height and position of the space elevator. But he knew it was a staggering distance. Climbing down from the tallest mountain ever made was nothing compared to climbing down from geosynchronous orbit.
He hazarded a rough guess: “It will take me months! Years, if I stop to sleep.”
“Nonetheless. That is your only legal course of action.”
Phaethon rotated his floating body to peer once more over the edge of the rim. He could see the energy units, like lines in a Greek column, descending away from him, infinitely.
There would be no danger until gravity started to reassert itself. He could just drift down, slowly at first, never noticing the gently mounting acceleration, never seeing the danger until it was too late, until he was speeding down, faster and faster, with no way to stop himself. No way except to engage the energy units with a magnetic grappling field. Would they truly fail to support him?
Surely there was an emergency circuit to catch falling objects, to prevent damage to the bottom, if nothing else. Surely the Sophotechs, who were so wise, would not simply stand by idly, and watch him fall and watch him die? Would they protect Vafnir’s property rights so jealously, when a mere flick of a switch to the energy units, a few micrograms of power, would save a human life? Wouldn’t Vafnir’s lack of action be a crime?
Foolish thoughts. No law would protect a man who voluntarily walked off a ledge.
Suicide, after all, was not against the law in the Golden Oecumene.
Curled into a ball like a fetus, barely able to keep his eyes on his target, Phaethon ejected a few desultory squirts of steam and bobbed over to the air lock entrance of the service stair. The air lock was the size of a coffin. It whined as it cycled. The atmosphere beyond was thin, high in inert gasses, meant to maintain basic pressure, not meant for humans to breathe. The stairwell beyond was dark, narrow, and barren. Stairs in microgravity?! Obviously no one had ever bothered to program this segment of the service access way to react intelligently to the surrounding circumstances.
There was hardly enough room to maneuver. He kicked off the door and fell to the next landing, rotating at the halfway. His foot hit the far wall with a dull clang. He kicked off again. He fell down to the next landing. The far wall clanged under his boot. The echo resounded down the long, long, shaft underfoot, a large, hollow, endlessly empty noise.
Already he was exhausted. And there were roughly fifteen million flights of stairs left to go.
He kicked off the wall again. The metallic echoes clanged through the emptiness.
21
THE DESCENT
1.
Slowly, gradually, the weight grew heavier and heavier. Slowly, the air grew heavier. Slowly, the burden in his mind grew heavier.
There were things he did to keep despair and grief at bay. All he had to do, he told himself, was think about it later. Let him get down the tower first. Let him get to Talaimannar in Ceylon. Harrier Sophotech must have had something in mind when he named that city; Phaethon had that as his goal, as his hope. He saw no further.
Flying, one long kick after another, down the first hundred flights of stairs, he had exhaustively inventoried the macrocommands and routines loaded into his personal thoughtspace, the vast mental hierarchy of (now useless) controls in his armor, the amount and composition of the nanomachinery in his black cloak and skin garment.
Then he busied himself by arranging a priority list for his cloak and inner garment, which he expected could shelter, feed, water, and nurse him. He went through a system check on the armor. When he was done with that, because he had nothing else to do, he did it again. Then a third time …
There came a time when he had to skip; a push of the toe was enough to send him down the next flight of stairs. Each landing slapped his feet more heavily. Then there came a time when he had to walk. He walked, he marched. Then he trudged. Then he plodded. The weight seemed always to grow more. Each time he thought that he was finally far enough down the tower length to suffer the normal Earth gravity, the next hour or so of descent seemed only to make it all heavier.
For some of the flights of stairs, he rested his legs, letting the leg motors do all the work, folding his legs in lotus position on the open belly plate of the armor’s midriff. But once his priority list was done, and he calculated the drain on his suit energy, he realized that the batteries could not be recharged indefinitely, and perhaps should be conserved.
But conserved for how long? No one was ever going to sell him a gram of antimatter again. Perhaps he could build a simple solar converter out of the nanomaterial in his cloak. But was this cost-effective? He had only a limited amount of nonrecyclable cloak material. Clearly he had to use it for some things and not others, such as the production of food and water for himself.
He told himself not to think about the future. Get to Talaimannar in Ceylon. That was the goal.
He shut off his leg motors, folded his cape, and walked down the stairs using his legs.
Down more stairs he trod. And then more, and more.
2.
The last hour before he slept, he began accumulating carbon out of the air around him into his cloak. The weight began to slow him, but he spent some of his power to increase the action of his leg motors to tolerate the extra burden. He stopped to rest on a landing, consulted the thousands of ecological programs he had loaded in his thoughtspace, and built a place to sleep out of the nanomaterial of his cloak.
His little encampment spread across the landing and up several steps. He had accumulated enough carbon, nitrogen, and water v
apor out of the air to combine complex amino acids in a life-filter canister he grew from his cloak. He carpeted the landing with soft moss on which he could rest, and his vapor canister, converted to a condenser, and placed at the top stair, was able to put out a little streamlet of water. This trickled down the mossy stairs, and fell into his helmet. Inside the helmet he had his nanomachines construct a nuclear recycler to break up the water, store the hydrogen, and release the fresh oxygen back into the atmosphere. The mildly higher partial pressure of oxygen refreshed him without leading to drunkenness.
He decided that it would not be too wasteful of his limited material to construct a few simple microorganisms, which he introduced into the streambed, and which he programmed to a symbiotic interrelationship with the moss of the stair. Nanomachines gathered nitrogen from the air and herded it together into floating spores; inside the spores, other machines rearranged the materials into simple nutrients to keep the moss green and healthy during the night, and to convert the moss into sugars and carbohydrates, starches and vitamins, so that Phaethon could have a bland, if nourishing, meal in the morning. Wastes from the groin piece of his armor he buried and filtered in a mound of moss which he then dotted with perfumed flowers; and the recycling spores gathered here like flies, to draw out elements to feed the moss. There was no sunlight here, of course. The energy for his little ecosystem came from his armor, for he had adjusted the outer plates to radiate in the infrared, and draped the whole affair in a thermophilic fungus organism like pale seaweed, to photosynthesize heat energy and start the simple food chain.
The control hierarchies within the armor, designed to run the complex interconnected machine-and-organic ecologies of a starship, would have had more than enough capacity to track and control this tiny plot of moss ten steps across; but Phaethon did not have a responder, or a radio set, or a point-to-point system that a child could buy for a pfenning from a thought shop, and so there was no way for any command to reach from the suit-mind to the microorganisms. Phaethon had to content himself with a crude, old-fashioned binary chemical tag system, loading each cell with little viruses to disintegrate them if they passed outside of the area, or a time, or the behavior, defined by his preset chemical cues.
He folded himself in spun silk polymer sheets, and sat on other sheets inflated with air to form a pillow beneath. He propped the armor up, so it sat facing him, and the warmth from the glowing red breastplate and vambraces was like a camp stove.
But he could not sleep, not a proper sleep. There were times when he was semiconscious; he did some of that hallucinating dawn-age men called dreaming.
In one hallucination, he saw a bride (or perhaps it was a bird of fire) still moving feebly, lowered in a coffin into the waiting earth, and dirt was shoveled onto her casket, while little scraping noises and soft cries for help rose up from inside. In another hallucination, he saw a mansion built upon a cloud, floating away, ever farther away, forever, now out of reach, burnt to black and smoking rubble. In a third hallucination, he saw a black sun looking down upon an airless world coated with blood and black debris.
Phaethon jerked his head upright. His face was pale with sweat; his heart thundered in his chest. The headless armor, burning red, and draped with seaweed like a drowned ghost from some children’s sea tale sat facing him. All was silent. There was something wrong with his dreaming.
There were supposed to be no nightmares in the Golden Oecumene.
Phaethon’s natural sleep cycle could not correctly integrate his various artificial modes and levels of consciousness with the natural sections of his neurology. Little corrections and integrations were needed. Always before, he had had Rhadamanthus to do this task. He had a similar system on board the Phoenix Exultant. Without such a system, his subconscious mind would begin to act much like a dawn-age man’s or a primitivist’s, with self-sustaining mental actions neither checked, nor overruled, nor brought to light for inspection.
His mind could run away from him now, showing him weird scenes as he slept. Always before he had been alert and lucid as he had slept. Always before, one of Rhadamanthus’s monitors could have warned him about dangerous subconscious influences, strange emotional conjunctions, growing mental disorders. The natural checks and balances nonartificial minds might have had to protect themselves from neurosis, Phaethon might not necessarily have. The more complex and the more delicate artificial systems in his brain now would operate without supervision and without repair. What if he fed commands into his thoughtspace while he slept? What if the ordinary signal traffic from the artificial sections of his nervous system had odd or unexpected side effects on his subconscious?
He worried but saw no easy answer. At some point, somehow, he would have to get access to a self-consideration program. If he logged on to the Mentality to retrieve one, his enemies might find him. Perhaps he could somehow build one of his own, once he reached … ?
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?
3.
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.