He blinked. 'Like when?'
'What about the time you collapsed the east wing of the mansion, when we were staying in New Paris? Or what about the time you were trying to re-thread all the impellers in our confluence register, because you thought it would get more tension out of the drive? All you did was capsize us into the lava.'
'I cannot believe you would bring that up again! That was caused by a flux in the current around us: and even Boreus Sophotech said later that that was an unexpected consequence of chaotic flows in the magnetic core! And I'm sorry about the wing collapsing, but I thought we could save power by running it through a nonlinear interrupt.'
Daphne rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling. 'Men! You are so touchy. All I'm saying is, how did you right the mole boat again? How did you erect the mansion-fields? Just hit the damn reset button. Null everything back to the default.'
Phaethon frowned. 'That seems too easy. But there is no reason why that should not work...'
'And besides, you were monkeying with the east wing to show off, not because we needed to save any energy, and you know it.'
'Fine! I cannot believe we are going through this old argument, when you might actually be a horrible puppet controlled by the Silent Ones.'
'What a terrible thing to say about a person!'
He shook his finger at her. 'I'm telling you, if this turns out to be a Silent One trick, and you killed that sweet Daphne-doll-the image of the woman I love-I'll destroy your whole damn civilization with no more hesitation than if I were wiping out a nest of cockroaches! You tell that to your masters! I was born to burn worlds!'
'Don't be silly, dear, you sound like a caveman. But I appreciate the sentiment; not every girl gets a maniac to slaughter people indiscriminately for her. So do you really think I'm sweet?'
'It's not funny. Well, perhaps it is a trifle funny, but it's really not entirely funny.' He threw off the housecoat and stepped back over to his armor.
Daphne sat up. 'Now what are you doing?'
'I can take a precaution. The thought-ports in my armor can act as an intermediary. The noetic-read energy cannot penetrate the admantium. I can just set up a buffer, like an air lock, something to quickly interrupt the circuit if the noetic reader does something untoward.'
Black tentacles of nanomaterial fitted the armor around him. Then he straggled to put the housecoat back on. Then followed a few minutes while he spread nanomaterial across his upper helmet surfaces, growing contact- points to be routed through the thought-points in his shoulder boards. The carrier lines clustered like a drooping mass of hair across his head, and around his shoulders, spilling out of the front of the housecoat hood.
Then he spent several moments downloading routines out of the thought-shop. A point-to-point system, a format translator, security cycles, relative time adjustment groups, and so on...
Ironjoy, because of his clientele, had far more security programs than any other thought-shop Phaethon had seen. He sent out a search-tree to use and combine them all.
Then he discovered, of course, that, since his secretarial and seneschal programs had been erased out of his personal thoughtspace, he had to get architectural activators, routing judges, information condensers and decondensors, pattern assessors, step locks, hold-and-go priority switches ...
Some of this required additional hardware chips, processing beads, and so on, which he clipped to the various parts of the housecoat, and hung from the carrier strands. The wall behind the talking mirrors opened up into several construction cabinets, where Phaethon either made or found what more he needed.
Soon, it was hard to move his arms, because he now wore two housecoats (since the first had not had enough storage area of action circuits), and, practically a third coat itself, was the layer of additional materials he had been forced to add, wires and join-boxes, cooling disks and through-put forks, dangling from all eight sleeves.
He had opened one of the mirrors to allow him to run additional lines to contact points there, to get direct access to thought-shop routines. Every wire running to the mirror had a circuit-interrupt with a security assessment cell clipped to it.
'You look like a walking Yule tree,' Daphne called from the cot.
'Just don't put a candle on my head.' His voice was muffled, because the external speakers on his armor were obscured. He sighed. 'I'm just glad the Silver-Greys aren't around to see this. Helion's ancient vow to make our technology serve Beauty.'
'You aren't a Silver-Grey at the moment, hero. Besides, I'm recording the picture into my ring. We'll all have a good laugh about it, once our exile ends.' There was a wistful note to her voice.
'Hmp. You show them that picture, the Silver-Grey won't take me back.'
'Don't worry. I show them this picture, the Black Manorials will take you. You'll start a new Absurdist Sartorial Movement. Asmodius Bohost will dress like you.'
'Well, good heavens! It's worth the risk of having the Silent One's booby-trapped noetic reader here burn out my brain just for that, if nothing else! My other accomplishments will sink into obscurity by contrast, once history remembers that I once influenced Mr. Bohost's ghastly wardrobe!'
Daphne favored him with a level stare.
'You're delaying.'
'Perhaps a little ...'
'You're afraid.'
'Not unreasonable, considering that this might actually kill me.'
'You are a paranoid deluded maniac.'
'But a lovable one. Are you attempting to bolster my courage, miss? You should have Eveningstar Sophotech teach you more about how to manipulate the moods of men.'
'Are we back to 'miss' are we? That's fine with me; because at least you are talking now as if we are going to make it back out of this exile. You sound mildly less doomed.'
'I'm wondering if there are further steps I can take to make it so this noetic reader, if it is trapped, cannot hurt me.'
'Put another bucket on your head.'
'This is not a bucket; it monitors energy levels in the hood-interface.'
'It's still a bucket.'
'Maybe I'm worried about what will happen if this succeeds. The automatic exile-the one I agreed to suffer at Lakshmi-will be ended. But so what? There is not a single thing that will prevent the College from turning around and bringing a new proceeding against me. They still fear star colonization. Till now, I had been sort of assuming that the mere existence of surviving colonists from the Silent Oecumene would compel us to travel out there. To discover what had become of them, if nothing else. But, if you are right after all, and all this is a hallucination imposed by Gannis, that compelling reason vanishes.'
Daphne sat with her elbows on her knees, cupping her cheeks in her palms, looking up at Phaethon with an impertinent and girlish look. 'Leave everything to me and Aurelian.
We can clear that hurdle when we come to it.'
'What do you mean?'
'I was saving it as a surprise.'
'I thought you hated surprises.'
'Not when they are my surprises.'
'Please tell me, miss.'
'Are we still back on 'miss'? Say, 'please tell me, Daphne my darling wife,' and maybe I will.'
'Sha'n't. You'll tell me and gladly.'
'And why shall I?' She favored him with an impish smile.
'Because, like me, you are too proud of your accomplishments to keep quiet about them.'
Her smile burned languid, and she brushed her hair with her fingers, preening.
Phaethon said, 'Any time now. I'm tired of standing here with a bucket on my head.'
'We're rich.'
'What?'
'Actually, you're rich. I'm only rich if you marry me again.'
