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 vapor out of the air to combine complex amino acids in a life-filter canister he grew from his cloak. He car-
peted 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 ther-mophilic fungus organism like pale seaweed, to photosynthe-size 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 pfennig 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 Rhad-amanthus 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 nonartifi-cial 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 En-nead, 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 de-
manded. 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.
