'You are deluded. I do not have a gram of money, not a second of computer time.'
'I said rich. It's not enough to buy our ship out of hock, but it should be enough to hire a Black House vessel to carry us to Mercury Equilateral, and pay for at least some of the last-minute preparations the Phoenix Exultant still needs done.'
'Oh, come now. And where did this alleged money come from?'
'Flying suits.'
'Flying suits?'
'You hold the patent on them. The way Rhadamanthus set up the business, you only lease the patent in return for a shared percentage. During the masquerade, everybody wants to fly. Its just so much fun. Aurelian Sophotech set up a second levitation array above Western Europe, for the Aryan Individualists, and a third over India, where the Uncomposed Cerebelline art-capital Macrostructure is.'
'Ridiculous. The Hortators ...'
'Are a private and voluntary organization. They cannot subpoena your records; they are not the police. Everyone who is renting a flying cloak from you is in masquerade. Nobody knows who they are, except for Aurelian.'
'But-but why would people-why would they defy the Hortators?'
Daphne raised her slender hands and her soft, round shoulders in an exaggerated pantomime shrug. 'Theory one: People support the Hortators, in principle, except when that principle causes them some sacrifice or hardship, such as forgoing the pleasure of personal levitation, whereupon their principles evaporate like spit on Mercury dayside. A lot of people were upset, you know, about the unforeseen consequences of that mass-amnesia they let the Hortators talk them into. Theory two: People know the Hortators are actually, really, supposed to ostracize folks like all your friends here, the child pornographers and semislavers and weaponeers, destructionists and malignifiers and mystagogues, hatemongers and history-forgers and suicide-panderers; and the people know that bright, heroic Phaethon does not fit in with that muck.'
Phaethon's muffled voice came out from underneath his layers of coats, lines, wires. 'Would people really defy the Horators ... for me? Do they believe in my dream, finally, after all?'
'Don't get so dewy-eyed. Occam's razor forbids us from adopting theories that require us to postulate unreal entities, such as, for example, the existence of conscience, noble dreams, or good wishes among our fellow citizens. No, theory number one makes more sense. They don't care about you and your ideals or about the Hortators and their ideals. They just want their toys.'
'Their love for their toys may allow me to repossess my toy. Isn't there the seed of free-market morality buried in that somewhere? I want my ship. The Neptunian conversation-tree has already predicted that their Duma will hire me to pilot the Phoenix Exultant.'
Daphne pointed with a slender finger toward the chest pocket of his housecoat, where the noetic unit rested. 'But first you must get us the hell out of his miserable exile. Say the magic word and let that thought-forsaken thing read your mind already. If I'm actually a Silent One spy, and this is all an elaborate trap, I'll apologize to you later.' 'What if I'm dead?'
She shivered with disgust. 'Well, then I won't apologize! Will you just get on with it?! They dumped all my spare lives, and it makes me nervous. I've been mortal for at least an hour now, and it's beginning to bother me. I mean, what would happen if a meteor struck the earth at this spot, or something?'
'I wouldn't worry about meteors, were I you,' said Phaethon. 'There hasn't been a big strike since the Baltimore event in the Fourth Era. Since that time, a watch has been tracking and recording the movements of all objects within the detectable danger zone, first by the Chicken Little Subcomposition, then by Star-Dance Cerebelline, and now by the Sophotechs. Nothing could get past them ...'
He frowned. A thought, so obvious and so large as to have been invisible before, surfaced in his mind.
Where was the Silent Oecumene starship?
There must be a second Phoenix Exultant, perhaps a colder, slower, stealthier ship, but a starship capable of travel from Cygnus X-l nevertheless. A dark twin of his golden Phoenix. Where was it hidden? Sophotech navigation watches observed every rock, practically every dustmote, in inner-system space. But if the Silent Phoenix was somewhere beyond Neptune (as Phaethon had been assuming) then how could the Sophotechs not notice whatever information, instructions, or reports were traveling back and forth between Nothing's agents on Earth and wherever the evil Sophotech was housed?
(Unless ... ? Could the agents be operating with only furtive and infrequent contact with their Sophotech? If so, then the agents were capable of obtuseness, illogic, and human error.)
The Silent Oecumene technology might be different from that of the Golden Oecumene. Nonetheless, in general, it was safe to assume that the technology level still had to be roughly equal, since a godlike superiority in technology would have permitted the Silent Ones to disregard any need for precaution or secrecy.
Therefore, it was safe to assume that normal principles of science and engineering applied. The Silent Ones could not motivate their starship without discharges of energy sufficient to move the ship's mass across the intervening distance.
And also, even if the Nothing Sophotech could be housed in a frame physically much smaller than huge electrophotonic matrices of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs, the energy density, and the energy required to perform a respectable Sophotech-level number of operations-per-second, would still give it a large mass-energy reading. The pseudo-neutronium inside the noetic unit he was holding, for example, could have been detected from orbit by weakly interacting particle ranging-and-detection gear.
Where could one put a body that large, or put a starship, without the Earthmind detecting either?
Daphne said, 'You're not talking, lover. That means you're thinking.'
'Shouldn't I be?'
A feminine sigh floated in the candle-lit gloom. 'You should be thinking about hurrying up, getting a noetic reading, proving that you are right, and getting home in time for a real comfortable night, including a warm pool, a communion, a mensal performance, and a walk in the Eveningstar Garden of the New Senses. The Non-Apotheosis School was going to surface back into human thoughtspace from their daring sub-transcendence tomorrow, and everyone says they will be bringing back Para-artistic phenomena from deep in the Earth-mind, miniaturized and recalculated to make sense to our neuroforms. I thought it would be a much better way to spend an afternoon than sitting here on a rusting barge, watching each other undergo the aging process. Can't we go home? All this poverty and trash here is beginning to depress me. Too much like my folks' old Stark place on the Reservation.'
She was clutching her elbows and shivering. One of the candles on the porthole sill behind her had begun to gutter out. She had half-turned and was watching it die.
Phaethon knew she was thinking morbid thoughts. The Starks had not connected their child to any noumenal immortality circuit, nor even told her that such a thing as immortality was possible. Daphne had suffered more than one bad accident as a child, falling from trees, overturning boats, being trampled by antique walking-statues; for she had led an active life. She found out from a wandering confabulator, a Jongleur from the Warlock Benevolent Mischief School, about Orphic reincarnation banks: and she had never forgiven the mad risk her primitivist parents had taken with her life.
The bright flame sputtered, gave off a greater light than before, swayed, failed, and vanished. A slender tail of smoke rushed upward.
'Will you just hurry up and get us out of here?' said Daphne.
Phaethon said: 'Darling, don't be afraid.'
She spoke without turning her head. 'Why not?' came a bitter reply. 'You are.'
There was an odd sharpness to her voice. He said: 'Just what do you mean by that?'
Daphne turned, picked up the child slate, touched the screen. The light from the slate shone up from her chin, and threw the shadow of her nose across one eye. 'I would not have had to go into exile, and come all the way out here, or get that portable reader from Aurelian, or do any of those things, if you had just had the common sense to log on to the network and get a noetic reading from Rhadamanthus or from any public contracts channel! You even read a self-consideration analysis of your own psychometrics, and it told you (it told you!) that your fear of logging on was unnatural and out of characterfor you. It should have been obvious that it was an imposed fear, imposed from outside. If you had half the brains you pretend, you would not have needed me to come by and rescue you!'
'You read my self-analysis?! That is private material!'
