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The Phoenix Exultant; or, Dispossessed in Utopia
Volume Two of The Golden Age
By John C. C. Wright, David G. Hartwell Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2003 John C. Wright
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1558-8
CHAPTER 1
THE CYBORG
1.
He opened the door onto a crowded boulevard of matter-shops, drama-spaces, reliquaries, shared-form communion theaters, colloquy-salons, and flower parks. An elaborate hydrosculpture of falls and aerial brooks spread from a central fountain works throughout the area, with running water held aloft by subatomic reorientations of its surface tension, so that arches and bows of shining transparency rose or fell, splashed or surged with careless indifference to the reality of gravity. Light, scattered from tall windows lining the concourse or from banners of advertisements or from high panels opening up into the regional mentality, was caught and made into rainbows by the high-flowing waters. Petals from floating water lilies drifted down across the scene.
Beneath all this beauty was a crass ugliness. More than three-quarters of the people were present as mannequins. This was evidently a place meant for manorials, cryptics, or other schools that relied heavily on telepresentation. Since Phaethon no longer had access to any kind of sense-filter, all these folk, no matter how splendid of dress or elegant of comportment they might have appeared to an observer in the Surface Dreaming, looked to him like so many ranks and ranks of gray, dull, and faceless mannequins.
There may have been beautiful music sweeping the area; excluded from the mentality, Phaethon was deaf to it. Here and there were hospice boxes or staging pools, ready to send out dreams or partials, calls, messages, or any form of telepresentation. All channels were closed to Phaethon, and he was mute. There were dragon-signs burning like fire in the air, displaying messages of unknown import. Phaethon could not read the subtext or hypertext; Phaethon was illiterate. There may have been thought-guides in the Middle Dreaming to allow him to remember, as if he had always known, where to find the public transport he sought. Mnemonic assistance gone; Phaethon was an amnesiac. There may have been ornament and pageantry in the dream-stages gathered in the air around him, lovely beyond description, or signs and maps to show Phaethon where, in this wide concourse, might be the way or the road he sought. But Phaethon was blind.
Here and there among the mannequins, the face of a realist or vivarianist showed. Their eyes turned dull when they lit on Phaethon, and their gazes slid past him without seeing. All sense-filters were tuned to exclude him. The world was blind to him as well.
He expected the banners overhead to swoop down on him when he looked up. But no. They floated on by, shouting with lights and garish displays. Even the advertisements ignored him.
No matter. Phaethon tried to keep his thoughts only on the next steps immediately before him. How to find out where he was? How to find Talaimannar? How to go from here to there? Once there, how to find out why Harrier Sophotech recommended that place?
He had to ask someone for help, or directions.
Phaethon stepped behind a stand of bushes; there was a flow of water from the fountain works overhead, forming a rippling, translucent ceiling. Was anyone watching? He assumed not.
He doffed his armor and covered it with the cape of nanomaterial, which he then programmed to look like a hooded cloak. Phaethon himself merely drew out some of the nanomaterial from the black skin-garment he wore, and drew circles around his eyes, to solidify into a black domino mask. And that was that: Both of them were now in disguise. He hoped it was enough to fool at least a casual inspection. He programmed the suit to follow him at a fixed distance, avoiding obstacles; to "heel" as Daphne would have said.
He stepped out again into the concourse, followed by the bulky, cloaked form of his armor, looming three paces behind him. He went downstairs and found a pondside esplanade that had fewer mannequins walking along it. He saw real faces; faces made of flesh or metal, or cobra scales, or polystructural material, or energy surfaces. They were laughing and talking, signaling and depicting. The air seemed charged with a carnival excitement. Many people skipped or danced as they strolled, moved by music Phaethon could not hear. Others dived over the side of the esplanade, to glide among the buildings and statues in the pond.
He did not know what particular event was being celebrated. It was rare to see so many folk together. Whatever bunting or decoration swam in the dreamspace here, which might have given him a clue as to the nature of the occasion, was, of course, invisible to him.
People smiled and nodded at him as they walked by, full of good cheer. "Merry Millennium! May you live a thousand years!"
He had not realized how much he had missed, and was going to miss, the sight of friendly human faces. Phaethon smiled back, waving, and calling out, "And a thousand years to you!"
Phaethon reminded himself that he had to be careful. Theoretically, the masquerade protocol would not protect him, since he was no longer part of the celebration, no longer part of the community. But how many people would even try to read his identity if they saw him wearing a mask during a masquerade? Most people, Phaethon guessed, would not.
The rule from the Hortators was that no one was to give him aid, comfort, food or drink, or shelter, sell him goods or services, or buy from him, or donate charity to him. This rule did not (in theory) actually prohibit speaking to him, or looking at him and smiling, although that was the way it surely would be practiced.
If Phaethon tried to buy something from a passerby, Aurelian was obligated to warn him that he was about to be contaminated with exile. But as long as Phaethon did not try to win from the passersby either food or drink or comfort or shelter or charity, Aurelian would no doubt stand mute. Sophotechs had a long, long tradition of failing to volunteer any information that had not been specifically asked.
It was hard. A couple walking hand in hand were passing out wedding-album projections of their future children. Phaethon smiled but declined to take one. A young girl (or someone dressed as one), skipping and licking a floating balloon-pastry offered him a bite; Phaethon patted her on the head, but did not touch her pastry. When a laughing wine-juggler, surrounded by musical firecrackers, and balancing on a ball, rolled by and tried to thrust a glass of champaign into Phaethon's hand, Phaethon was not able to refuse except by jerking his hand away.
The juggler frowned, wondering at Phaethon's lack of courtesy, and raised two fingers as if to try to find out who Phaethon really was. But the juggler was distracted when a slender, naked gyno-morph, fluttering with a hundred stimulation scarves, jumped up in drunken passion to embrace him. Singing a carol to Aphrodite, the two rolled off together, while the juggler's bottles and goblets fell this way and that.
Phaethon let the throng carry him down the esplanade.
The pressure of the crowd eased when Phaethon came to a line of windows, two hundred feet tall or more, which looked out upon a balcony larger than a boulevard. Out onto the balcony they all went together. Phaethon climbed up a pedestal holding a statue of Orpheus in his pose as Father of the Second Immortality. The stone hands held up a symbol in the shape of a snake swallowing its own tail. Phaethon put his foot in the stone coils of the serpent and pulled himself high, looking left and right above the heads of the crowd.
Several lesser towers and small skyscrapers grew up from the railing of the balcony, like little corals fringing the topless super-tower of the space elevator.
Beyond the balcony, the metropolis spread out from the mountain-base of the space elevator in three concentric circles. Innermost and oldest, the center circle consisted of huge windowless structures shaped according to simple geometries; giant cubes, hemispheres, and hemicylinders, painted in bright, primary colors, connected by rectilinear motion-lines and smart roads. The architecture followed the Objective Aesthetic, with the building shapes, slabs, and plaques all rigidly stereotyped. There was little movement in this part of the city; human beings of the basic neuroform tended to find these faceless buildings and looming monoliths intolerable. Mostly, this central ring housed Sophotech components, warehouses, manufacturies. Invariants, who had little desire for beauty or pleasure or inefficiency, lived here, dwelling in square dormitories arranged like rank upon rank of coffin-beds.
The second ring was done in the Standard Aesthetic. Here were black pools and lakes of nanomachinery, with many brooks and rills, touched with white foam of the dark material streaming from one to another. Tiny waterfalls of the material formed where cascade-separator stages mixed and organized the components. Each lake was surrounded by the false-trees and coral bioformations of na-nomanufactory. A hundred solar parasols raised orchidlike colors to the sun. The houses and presence chambers were formed of strange growthlike seashells; one spiral after another, shining with lambent mother-of-pearl, rose to the skyline. Blue-black, dark pearl, glinting silver, and dappled blue-gray hues dominated the scene. Thought-gardens, coven places, and sacred circles dotted the area, along with nymphariums, mother trees, and staging pools. Warlocks and basics tended to prefer the chaotic fractals and organic shapes of the Standard Aesthetic. Wide areas of garden space were occupied by the decentralized bodies of Cerebellines.
Beyond this, on the hills surrounding, green arbors and white mansions prevailed. This was the Consensus Aesthetic, patronized mostly by manor-born and first-generation basics. Greek columns marched along the hilltops; formal English gardens rested in green shadows before grand houses done in the Georgian style, or neo-Roman, or stern Alexandrian.
In the far distance, Phaethon saw a wide lake. On the lake were a hundred shapes like jewel-armored clipper ships, whose sails were textured like a dozen wings of butterflies, surrounded with light.
Now Phaethon knew where he was. This city was Kisumu, south of Aetheopia, overlooking Lake Victoria. And Phaethon understood the wonder and excitement of the crowd. For the huge shapes in the lake were the Deep Ones.
These were the last of the once-great race of the Jovian half-warlocks, a unique neuroform that combined elements from the Cerebelline and Warlock nervous-system structures. Once, they rode the storms and swam in the pressurized methane atmosphere of Jupiter, before its ignition. When the time came to end their way of life, they chose instead to enter whalelike bodies and to sleep at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, where they called back and forth to each other, and wove songs and sonar images relating to the vast, sad, and ancient emotions known only to them; and made sounds in the deep, which reminded them, but could not recapture, those songs and sensations their old Jupiter-adapted Behemoth bodies once had made in the endless atmosphere of that gas-giant planet.
Once every thousand years, only during the time of the Millennium, they woke from their dreams of sorrow, grew festive gems and multicolored membranes and sails along their upper hulls, rose to the surface, and sang in the air.
By an ancient contract, no recordings could be made of their great songs, nor was anyone allowed to speak of what they heard or dreamed when that music swept over them.
No wonder so many people were here in reality.
Phaethon's heart was in his throat. The songs of the Deep Ones he had only heard once before, since he had not attended this ceremony his second millennial masquerade, during Argentorium's tenure. That time once before, three thousand years ago (during the tenure of Cuprician) the song had sung to him of vastness, emptiness, and a sense of infinite promise. It was as if Phaethon had been plunged into the wide expanses of the Jovian cloudscape; or into the far wider expanses of the stars beyond.
The Deep Ones had originally been designed also to serve as living spaceships, able to swim the radiation-filled and dust-filled vacuum between the Jovian moons, able to tolerate the almost unthinkable re-entry heat of low-orbit dives down into the Jovian atmosphere. But the early successes in cleaning circumjovial space and in taming the Jovian magnetosphere, made those space-lanes safe and economical for ships of ordinary construction; the emplacements of sky hooks made alarming re-entries unnecessary. The Deep Ones' way of life was past; the danger and romance of space travel was removed. Phaethon had heard all of this in their song, so long ago. It had planted the seed that blossomed into his own desire to embrace his dream of star travel.
It had been Daphne who had brought him to hear it. But had that been Daphne Prime, or her ambassador-doll, Daphne Tercius? Phaethon could not remember. Perhaps his lack of useful sleep was beginning to affect his memory.
Phaethon jumped down from the pedestal and began to push his way through the crowd, and away. For the Deep Ones did not give away their grand, sad music freely. Everyone who did not exclude the music from his sense filter would have a fee charged to his account; and, when the computers detected that Phaethon could not pay, he would be unmasked. Once Phaethon was unmasked, no one, of course, would help him. Not to mention that the performance would be delayed, and the afternoon spoiled for everyone. (He was amazed to discover that he still cared about the convenience and pleasure of his fellowmen, even though they had ostracized him. But the wonder of that first Deep One symphony he had once heard still haunted his memory. He did not want to diminish the joy of folk happier than he.)
The crowd thinned as he rounded the space elevator, and came to the side facing away from the lake. Several dirigible airships, as large as whales themselves, were docked with their noses touching the towers rising from the balcony sides. They had dragon-signs in the air, displaying their routes and times in a format Phaethon could not read.
Phaethon stopped a passerby, a woman dressed as a pyretic. "Pardon me, miss, but my companion and I are looking for the way to Talaimannar." He gestured toward the hooded and cloaked figure of his armor, standing silently behind him. He spoke what was not quite a lie: "My companion and I are involved in a masquerade game of hunt-and-seek, and we are not allowed to access the mentality. Could you tell me how to find the nearest smart road?"
She cocked her head at him. Her dancing eyes were surrounded by wreaths of flame, and smoke curled from her lips when she smiled. When she spoke, Phaethon had no routine to translate her words into his language and grammar and logic.
He tried more simply: "Talaimannar ...? Talaimannar ...? Smart road?" He pantomimed sliding along a frictionless surface, hands waving, so that she giggled.
By her emphatic gesture he understood she meant that the smart roads were not running; she pointed him toward a nearby airship and pushed him lightly on the shoulder, as if to say, Go! Go!
Phaethon froze. Had she just helped him, or offered him passage on some ship owned by her? There was no alarm in her eyes; to judge from her expression, there was no secret voice from Aurelian warning her. And the woman was turning away, drawn by the movement of the crowd. Evidently she was not the owner.
Phaethon moved up the ramp. Closer, he saw the airship bore the heraldic symbol of the Oceanic Environmental Protectorate. It was a cargo lifter, perhaps the very one that had brought one or more Deep Ones from the Pacific to Lake Victoria.
The throngs began to fall silent. Out on the lake, Deep Ones were sailing to position, raising and unfurling their singing-fans. A sense of tension, of expectancy, was palpable in the air. Phaethon stepped reluctantly across the gilt threshold of the hatch and into the ship's interior, his eyes turned over his shoulder.
Giant magnifier screens, focused on the distant Deep Ones, floated up over the edge of the huge balcony. The images showed the Deep Ones, sails wide and high, motionless on the surface of the lake, all their prows pointed toward the Deep One matriarch-conductor, who floated like a mountain above her children, her million singing-flags like an Autumn forest seen along a mountainside.
Phaethon's feet were slow. He wanted so desperately to hear this one last song. Except for tunes he might whistle himself, or music shed from advertisements passing by, Phaethon would not hear songs again: no one would perform for him; no one would sell him a recording.
He steeled himself and turned his back. The hatch shut silently behind him.
The deck was deserted. The place was empty.
CHAPTER 2
Before him, carpeted in burgundy, set with small tables and formulation rods of glass and white china, was an observation deck. Antique reading helmets plated with ornamental brass nested in the ceiling. A line of couches faced tall windows overlooking the prow, with seeing rings in little dishes to one side. The privacy screens around the couches were folded and transparent at the moment, but Phaethon could still see ghostly half-images of creatures from Japanese mythology depicted in the glassy surface.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Phoenix Exultant; or, Dispossessed in Utopia by John C. C. Wright, David G. Hartwell. Copyright © 2003 John C. Wright. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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