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 nanom-aterial 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?
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.
For other stretches, the going was much easier. Phaethon had been dreading reaching the tower segments that lacked stairs, and imagined aching limbs fatigued by endless hours of hand-over-hand climbing. The reality was much more pleasant.
The maintenance ladders dropped down sheer wells. Phaethon could attach himself by diamond-fiber cord spun out of available atmospheric carbon. He fashioned a system of pulleys and carabiners, which could lower him great distances quickly. He grew motors to control the arrangement, so that he could descend while he slept, albeit this used more battery energy than he would have liked. The suit's gauntlets he programmed to untie and to retrieve the rope material periodically, so that Phaethon hardly lost any nanomaterial mass. The suit-mind was flexible enough to understand orders to find the next stanchion and retie the belaying knots. Thus Phaethon could sleep with his hands folded over his chest beneath his breastplate, safe as a papoose in a backpack, while the armor rappelled down one length of rungs after another. Many miles of descent were quickly consumed in this fashion. And he needed the rest. His growing mental fatigue, his lack of a proper self-consideration circuit, was forcing him to spend more and more time asleep.
The worst section was a maintenance well without rungs, meant only for robots using magnetic grapples. Phaethon thought he probably had the right to ask to be conveyed down past this segment, since the law against trespass did not require a trespasser to depart by ways that were dangerous or unhealthy. But a notion of pride or zeal made him go forward. Or perhaps his rashness came from certain mood-alteration stimulants he had attempted that week. The Warlock meditations were becoming less effective, and Phaethon was experimenting with a crude Noetic system he was trying to construct out of the helmet circuits, to see if he could do to himself, manually, some of the delicate nerve work and sleep
integrations Rhadamanthus had used to do to restore mental balance.
This morning's attempt at sleep integration had left him giddy and overconfident. He had been sure he could design a parachute out of his cloak, with sufficient lifting surface to slow his fall; the armor was too heavy, and he had merely dropped it down the shaft. The armor, of course, banged and rang against the shaft as it dropped, chiming like a gong the size of the moon, but was utterly unscratched by the five-thousand-foot plunge. Phaethon, on the other hand, had scraped against the side of the well, spilled air out of his parachute shroud, spun, recovered, tumbled, almost recovered, and broke both his legs upon landing.
In infinite agony, he had crawled and crawled, trying to find his armor, dragging his broken legs behind him. Finally he found it, and gasped out a command to turn on the emergency medical program before collapsing. The armor had swarmed across his body and fitted itself around him. Na-nomachines inside the suit lining had aided the biomechan-isms in his legs to regenerate the bone tissues. He lay in half-drugged discomfort for hours while his body repaired itself. The special construction of his space-adapted bones slowed the process, and the suit-mind had to make several hesitant guesses about how to proceed. (The medical routines and partial minds aboard the Phoenix Exultant were not, of course, available to him. The armor was a wonder of engineering, but it had not been designed to operate in solitude.)
A Constable remote came to hover over his dazed body, warning him not to drop dangerous objects from high places, lest he be sued for negligence.
The Constable made no move to help him, of course. Phaethon had no insurance, and no doctor would risk joining him in exile.
