'I am not permitted to undertake the insecurity or expense of placing valuable and private thought templates from my life experience into a public box.'
'Expense?' This was ridiculous. Why, the expense of shipping Phaethon to Neptune?or, saving on mass, of shipping Phaethon's brain in a lightweight life support?was astronomical. Phaethon consulted an almanac in the Rhadamanthus Mansion-Mind. Neptune and Earth were not in favorable positions for any fuel-efficient flight paths. Phaethon calculated how the increased payload of his weight would affect the mass-energy costs of even a low- boost orbit. The cost in energy-currency was roughly equal to a several thousand seconds of time-currency. In other words, a small fortune.
'The expense is nothing compared to what you've already offered in transportation costs.'
At first, it looked as if the iceberg shape were melting. But no, it was flattening, the high crown dropping, and the wide base growing wider and wider. Fluid flowed from the base, thickening and freezing into leg pillars. Under the ice at each foot of these pillars, Phaethon could see, dimly, complex machines being quickly made out of neurocomposite crystal and ceramic. The bulbs and globes and insulated tubes seemed to be energy batteries and field manipulators.
'You have acted against my advice and signaled to your mansion. I must flee before I am discovered.'
Signaled? Phaethon had retrieved one almanac file and run a calculation routine, almost automatic functions. Phaethon. had thought the Neptunian had only not wanted him to talk to his mansion. 'Don't be absurd! No one would dare to listen in on my private communications.'
'Even your vaunted Sophotechs will bend their precious laws to serve a purpose they call higher. But I shall use their own laws against them. They allow you some privacy during the distractions and masquerades meant to appease you. Behold. I shall construct a masquerader for you; he shall hold the files you will not receive from me; when you are strong enough to face truth, strong enough to defy this world of illusions, my messenger shall come for you.'
Phaethon saw, in the depth of the armored crystal, a shape like a naked body floating to the surface. It was complete with bones, muscles, nerves, veins. Only the skin of the face and neck had not been wholly grafted on; and the skull was opened like a flower of bone, and strands and lines of nerve fiber were still being packed into place, with umbilicuslike channels still leading back to the main Neptunian brain-group. The lower body had a costume being woven around it, bulky and ill-fitting, but it was recognizable as the costume of Scar-amouche, a character from the same period and operetta cycle as Phaethon's Harlequin.
'Phaethon, come now. This is the final second.'
'Forgive me, sir, but I am not satisfied with your various
mystifications and hints. I suspect a deception, for which your kind are notorious. You have not even yet told me your name.'
'How should I tell you my name when you do not even recall the meaning of your own!'
'Phaethon? The name dates from the Time of the Second Mental Structure. The myth is of the sun god's bastard child who dared to drive his father's chariot....' Phaethon's voice trailed off.
There was a final surge and broil in the depth of the Neptunian body substance, as structural elements were formed and grown into place. A gush of wind announced the creature was activating its lift generators, joined by whistling screams from compression-jets.
The Neptunian's voice, channeled into Phaethon's senso-rium, did not need to get any louder to speak over the rush and rumble of the liftoff. 'You named yourself for a demigod whose ambition burned a world. Not the name a man content with his lot in life would choose. But you don't recall why you chose it, do you? Can you begin to guess now how much of your memory is missing? They did not even let you keep the meaning of your name.'
Phaethon backed up as pressure exploded from the feet of the Neptunian. Its low, flat shape was now in an aerodynamic configuration. With ponderous grace, it raised its nose to the sky, and moved upward.
Phaethon adjusted his sense-filter so that, instead of the roar of jets and the whine of magnetics, he still only heard the chirruping of night insects in the Saturn-grove. Amplifying his vision to the highest extent he could, he saw the body of the masquerader, wrapped in some sort of cocoon or buoyancy chute ejected from the Neptunian as it rose. He attempted to encompass the satellite and ground-based location routines within his vision, and to open more sense-channels. But apparently the same protocol that disabled the location routines during masquerade extended to escaping aircraft as well. Phaethon was not able to track the body as it fell.
As for the Neptunian, it flashed like distant ice, gained
altitude. Then the light twinkled and receded, one star lost among many.
In the palace:
Wheel-of-Life was a Cerebelline ecoperformer of the De-central Spirit School, as well as trustee for all copyrighted biotechnology based on the Five Golden Rings mathematics. She appeared as a matron of serene beauty and grave demeanor, seated on a throne of living flowers, grass, and hedge, in which a dozen species of birds and insects nested. She was also physically present (insofar as that word had meaning for Decentral Spiritualists), but her great cloak of interwoven living fibers ran from her shoulders out the window to where the other plants and animals that formed her corporate body and mind components reposed.
Cerebellines were a neuroform whose hindbrain and cortex were interconnected in the pattern called 'global,' from their ability to resolve multiple simultaneous interrelationships. They could think in a timeless meditation, and from many points of view at once. This avoided set-theory paradoxes, and linear-thought limitations. It was one of the least popular neuroforms in the Golden Oecumene, however, since it fell prey too easily to mystical conundrums and nonverbalisms.
(Helion was not able to maintain a translation from her point of view for any length of time. The plantlike parts of her were aware of the room only as motion, pressure, sunlight, moisture, but also as computer movements, information flows. The birds and rodents gave so many small, scattered pictures and sounds of the Conclave that Helion was perplexed; and the thoughts were so tangled with sharp, bright shards of instinct, lust, hunger, fear, that Helion's brain-structure could not assimilate or index the perceptions.)
Wheel-of-Life indicated an objection. She expressed herself by holding up her hands and creating a miniature ecosystem in its globe. Microbes, plankton, brightly colored fish-shaped
darts swam in the globe; triangular shark things fought many-tentacled cephalopods in relentless subsea wars.
