every element, every command line of his armor when he had recovered it? His armor on which his life depended? Why? Because he had been raised as a pampered aristocrat, with a hundred machines to do all his bidding for him, to think his thoughts and anticipate his whims, so that he had lost the basic survival skills of discipline, foresight, and thoroughness.
Choking on bile, Phaethon thought the escape command, and panels of his armor fell away. Black seawater closed in on his face, blinding him. The black nanomachine lining swelled up, forming pockets of hydrogen along the chest and arms, trying to add buoyancy.
His armor, his beautiful armor, which had meant so much to him an hour ago, sank down swiftly and was gone.
He kicked away from the bottom, swung his arms and legs, and tried to pull his heavy body upward.
Upward. Icy water sucked the heat from his body in a moment. His limbs moved more slowly.
Upward. His struggles grew more wild. He lost his sense of direction.
Upward. He encountered some sort of kelp or seaweed, which tangled around his flailing arms, wrapped his legs with soft embrace.
Upward. It was the direction the stars were in. Phaethon did not know where they were. He was disoriented. He had lost the stars.
What were those little lights approaching him? Were they fairy lamps, come to greet him in his hour of victory? Or were they the metallic flashes in the eyes of a dying man about to faint?
Then there was nothing.
THE NIGHTMARE
Little Spirit, why are you alive?'
Words, like something from myth, or dream, floated up. Sorrow, great sorrow, to be his fate, and deeds of renown without peer... to little men, the height is too great; to him, the stars are near...
'Daphne. Daphne said ...' He heard his own voice, muttering gibberish. Did he speak aloud? The words on his memory casket had come from the epic Daphne once composed in his honor ... back before he sank and drowned ...
'Then is she that one for whom you live, little one?'
Phaethon jerked open his eyes. A blur of green, dimness, shadows. He saw nothing.
His body jerked. He was numb, floating, drifting. Some sort of vines or swarms of living eels entwined his limbs with soft firmness; he could not move.
'Do not struggle, little one, unless to damage yourself is your goal. We have formed a pocket of your air; our dolphins rise to the surface, draw breath, and descend to breathe into your pocket here.'
He attempted speech again. This time, his voice was clear. 'Whom do I have the honor of addressing?'
'Aha. Polite little one, isn't he? We are Old-Woman-of-the-Sea.'
The words were coming directly into his thoughtspace, over his suit-lining channel. Some sort of tube or medical appliance was thrust in his mouth. Other vines felt as if they held pads to his skin. Needles pierced his arm. The black nanomachinery of his lining was in motion; it was forming and unforming chemicals and combinations. He could feel the pulse of heat burning through it. The sensation comforted him.
Phaethon's eyes rolled back and forth. He saw nothing, at first. Then he detected a slide of gray shadow to his left and right. Two dolphins came near. He heard a rush of bubbles, a high-pitched squeak of dolphin sound. Air bubbled into the little space around his head.
'Madame, I thank you, and the gratitude I have is without limit. And yet I must warn you that those who assist me may fall under the ban of the College of Hortators.'
'Our dolphins act by their own nature, and it is their nature to assist those in need. Had there been sharks nearby, the parts of our mind may have reacted differently. Such is life.'
(Why did it sound so much like the voice of his mother, Galatea, whom he recalled from his far-vanished youth? Perhaps it was merely how regal, how queenly, how very much in command the voice rang ...)
'Ah. Forgive me, Madame, but, nonetheless, you yourself may be held to account for your generosity to me.'
'The little one is noble as well! You seek to shield us from harm? Us?' There was a hint of vast laughter in the voice.
'The College of Hortators wields wide influence!'
'Yet we are as wide as the sea. Part of us are in the kelp, the coral, and the dust of the seabed, measuring, moving, releasing heat, storing it. Part of us is woven into the thoughts of fish and sea-beast, moving from brain to brain with the swiftness of a radio flash, or slowly, over centuries, thoughts encoded into chemicals drifting in the sea tides. After centuries or seconds, our thoughts come together again in new forms, drops that rise as dew above the gentle tropics, or move through storms that ring the arctic.
'We breathe to calm the hurricanes; we blush to stir the trade winds into life. We sway the Gulf Streams, we thrust the currents and the counter-current of the tide as if they were limbs a hundred miles wide, and yet we count each plankton cell which feeds your world's air. Predator and prey move through us like corpuscles of arteries and veins, governed by the stirring of a mighty heart. Parts of us are older than any other living being, older than all other Cerebellines, older than all Compositions save for one. You cannot imagine what we are, dear little one; how, then, could you imagine we could fear your Hortators? We know nothing of your land-world; we care nothing for your Hortators. There is only one man of all your Earth whose name we know; one man whose fate fascinates our far-ranging and ancient thoughts.'
Phaethon knew the Old-Woman-of-the-Sea was a unique entity, both a Cerebelline and a Composition, a group-mind made of many widely scattered partial and global minds. There was none other like her; this particular combination of neu-roform and mental architecture was deemed too wild and strange by the consensus of psychiatric conformulators of the Golden Oecumene.
Yet she was old, very old. Some of the organisms or systems which housed her many conciousnesses dated back to the first Oceanic Ecological Survey, in the middle of the Third Era.
He asked: 'Who is this man? This one man who is the only man of Earth you know?'
'We felt him tug at our tides a moment or a century ago, when he moved the moon. His name is Phaethon.'
Phaethon felt a tremor ran through his body. His breath was caught by sudden emotion. Fear? Wonder? He was not sure. 'What do you know of this Phaethon?' he asked.
'We have been waiting for him for five aeons, a million years of human history.'
'How could you wait so long? He is only three thousand years old.'
'No. He is the oldest dream of man. Even before men knew what the stars were, their myths peopled the night sky with winged beings, gods and angels and fiery chariots, who lived among the stars. We have waited, we have always been waiting, for one who would carry the Promethean gift of fire back to the heavens.'
There was silence for a space of time. Phaethon could feel adjustments being made in his nanomachinery, his blood chemistry; he became more clear-headed.
'I am Phaethon. I am he. The dream has failed. I am hunted by enemies whom no one else can see, enemies whose names I do not know, whose motives and powers I cannot guess. I am denounced and hated by the Hortators. I am rejected by my father. My wife committed a type of suicide rather than see me succeed. I have lost my ship; I have lost my armor; I have lost everything. And now I die. I am suffering from sleep deprivation, dream deprivation, and I cannot balance the neural pressures between my natural and artificial brains without a self- consideration circuit.'
There was a space of silence for a time. Then the voice came again:
'You lose because you have not given up enough. Let go of all your artificiality, release yourself from your machine-thoughts. Do you understand?'
Phaethon thought he understood. 'You ask a terrible price of me.'
