'Where is everyone?' He did not expect an answer, but he thought it would do no harm to ask.
To his surprise, the unit spoke back: 'All of the guests were removed to a safe distance during the Inquest Hearing, and energy avenues and lines of fire opened by other Constabular operatives, so that, should you choose to resist, overwhelming firepower could be brought to bear against your armor, sufficient to drive you out through the walls and shielding and into space beyond.'
At the hub of the hospice, he came to the door of the lock. It did not open. Nothing happened when he touched it, and it ignored his voice command. He said to the wall: 'I thought you wanted me to leave.'
The wall said, 'There is a wheel to crank the door open manually. The Eleemosynary Composition does not wish to expend the battery cost to run the door motors.'
There was no point in arguing. The cost in energy to open one door, of course, was too small to measure. But, of course, the millionth part of a gram of antimatter it would take to hire the door motor to open the valve for him was beyond his means now. Creditors had long ago taken everything.
And even had he any money, no one would take it. Not even the simpleminded circuit in a door.
Phaethon felt more exhausted (without being tired) than he had ever felt in his long life.
Yet he had been exiled, so far, for only a few minutes. Years lay ahead. Grimly, he took the wheel in his hand and cranked.
Phaethon passed through the lock, and came out into the airlessness of the spaceport. The place was a wide sphere, with openings to the east and west leading to other segments of the ring-city. Nadirward was an entrance to the beanstalk. Phaethon could see, from the gold ornamentation around the rim buildings, that this space elevator was one of the larger, old-fashioned ones, with cars the size of warehouses, stocked and staffed with luxuries from the Middle Sixth Era, a time of hedonism and elegance.
Phaethon directed a signal from his armor to the remote. 'This is municipal space. My I use my thrusters?'
'Feel free,' replied the unit.
Steam ejected from the armor joints did not produce powerful thrust, only enough to move him a few meters away from the hospice. Then he triggered the more powerful mass-drivers, which lined the back and legs of the armor. Thin parallel lines of energy propelled him forward.
He dove through the weightless space to the edge of the rim. He dared not dive in; the drivers could not support his armor in flight, not against the earthly gravity that obtained in the middle and lower sections of the space elevator. But he could use the drive mechanisms in the same way he had before, to generate a magnetic field by reacting against energy units that lined the inner walls of the space elevator, and lower himself eventually to the ground. To do this, he needed to reconstruct the circuits in his armor he originally had used to propel himself upward. He anchored himself near the rim of the well with a magnetic line of force, and ordered his suit to adjust.
Phaethon looked overhead. With the Middle Dreaming absent, he could not tell which space elevator this was, or where
on Earth its foundations rested. There was no map present in his mind. There were no signs posted in any language he could read, because none of the thought glyphs on the walls nearby could trigger any reactions in the language centers of his brain, not when he was shut out of the Mentality. Was this the direction he wanted to go? He was not sure. (Did he even have a direction, when he had no place to go? Again, he was not sure.)
His eyes fell. Beyond his feet, he could see the vast well of the space elevator.
The windows and ports in the elevator's depths formed concentric rings of light, level upon level, balcony upon balcony, receded to the vanishing point. Approaching in the distance, the size of an ocean liner, ornamented and plush, came the great gold and crystal and ivory car of the space elevator. Beneath the dome on the car's ceiling, he could see the ponds and formularies and tables of a Sixth-Era mensal performance restaurant.
Phaethon looked on sadly. He would have loved to take this armor off and rest at leisure, descending in plush Sixth Era comfort until he arrived at the base of the tower. He could see, through the windows, white linen, surfaces of silver material, a group in festive costumes reclining in feast webs, pleasure amplifiers like crowns on their heads. It was strange to think that, somewhere, people were still celebrating a masquerade; somewhere there were smiles, and good cheer, and good company.
Now he would have welcomed even that horrid Nonan-thropomorphic Aesthetic elevator car, the car shaped like a bug's stomach, which he had spurned on his way up here. Now that he could not have it.
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 Rhad-amanthus 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
