And that was all. Was this Phaethon's innermost thinking area? If so, he certainly did not coddle himself.
The barren emptiness was oppressive. And it certainly ignored Silver-Gray traditions of detailed utter realism. There wasn't even a "wallpaper" image hereno room, no desktop.
Phaethon had his glove jab the yellow disk. A blood red disconnect cube appeared. He put his glove inside it and made the ending gesture.
Words appeared unsupported in the air: "WARNING. You are about to disconnect from all Rhadamanthine systems and support. Do you wish to proceed?"
He touched finger to thumb, spreading his other fingers: the yes signal.
A moment of disorientation floated through him. For a mo-
ment, his mind was clouded; the sensations in his body changed, slowed, became somewhat numb, and yet more painful. He opened his eyes and winced.
Phaethon was awake in the real world.
The medical tubes and organs wrapping him were made of hydrocarbons, and slid aside, re-forming themselves into water and diamond plates for easy storage. Phaethon stood up slowly from his coffin, surprised and shocked.
The room was small and ugly. To one side was a large window opening on a balcony. Above the medical coffin was a crystal containing the routines and biotics to keep his slumbering body intact. The crystal was huge, a crude out-of-date informata, fixed to the ceiling with awkward globs of adhesion polymer. The walls were dumb-walls, not made of pseudo-matter, not able to change shape or perform other functions. When he put his foot over the edge of the coffin and swung himself to his feet, he made two other unpleasant discoveries.
Despite Silver-Gray promises of total realism, his self-image in mentality was represented as being stronger and more agile than his real body in reality. Phaethon climbed slowly and clumsily to his feet.
The second surprise was that the floor was cold. Furthermore, it stayed cold. It did not anticipate his orders, did not automatically adjust or react to his presence; it did not conform its texture to soothe his feet. He thought several peremptory commands at it, but nothing happened.
Then he remembered to speak aloud. "Carpeting! Foot massage!"
The floor adjusted to carpet, and warm pulses caressed his feet, but irregularly, slowly. The carpeting was irregular and tattered, ugly looking. The fact that he had to speak his orders drove home to him how impoverished these quarters were.
He looked around slowly, noticing the crooked tension in his neck; perhaps his spine had become misaligned while he slept.
He looked up; there was grime on the ceiling and upper
walls. Phaethon could not even recall the last time he had seen grime.
A second shock came when he looked down at his body. The skin was a dull, leathery substance; it looked very much like inexpensive artificial skin. He pressed his fingers against his chest, his stomach, his groin. Beneath the flesh, he felt, or perhaps he imagined, that some of the organs under his fingers had the hard, unyielding texture of cheap synthetic replacements.
His senses were duller. Distant objects were blurred; his hearing was restricted in pitch and range, so sounds were dull and flat. Perhaps his skin was slightly numb as an aftereffect of the crude medical care he had been under. Or, what was more likely, the sense impressions directed by the computer stimulated his nerves more thoroughly and precisely than his natural organs. And he was blind on every wavelength except on narrow visible-light range.
There was a door, but no knob. He stepped into it and bumped his nose. Now he jumped back in alarm, wondering for a moment why the door had failed to move.
What shocked him was that he had lost some of his sanity. Normally, when he made a discovery, or realized something, Rhadamanthus made adjustments in Phaethon's midbrain, sculpting whatever habits or patterns of behavior Rhadamanthus thought Phaethon might need directly into Phaethon's nerve paths. This decreased learning time; Phaethon normally did not have to remind himself to do things twice.
Then Phaethon said, "Open ..."
The door slid open slowly. Behind was not an exit but a wardrobe. A strange garment was hanging from a cleaning levitator. A few bottles of life-water were hanging, weight-lessly, in a magnetic suspension rack.
Phaethon took one of the bottles in hand. At his touch, information appeared in the glassy bottle's surface. Reading the label, one word and icon at a time, was painful, and Phaethon got a headache after slowly picking through the first few menu pages hovering in the depths of the label. The bottle could not put the knowledge of its contents directly into his
brain; Phaethon was disconnected from Middle Dreaming. It was a low-quality manufacture, with only a few formations and reactions recorded by the microbe-sized nanomachines suspended in the liquid. He put the bottle back in place.
On a low shelf was a box of dust cloud. Phaethon picked up the box, and said, "Open box."
Nothing happened. Phaethon pushed open the lid with his hand. The amount of dust material inside was minor, a few grams.
"I really am poor after all," he muttered sadly. Where had all his money gone? After twenty-nine or thirty centuries of useful work, investment and reinvestment, he had accumulated considerable capital.
With the box tucked under one arm, Phaethon wandered back into the pathetic room. He looked back and forth. It was ghastly.
Phaethon straightened his shoulders, drew a deep breath. "Phaethon, gather your spirits together, steel yourself, and stop this moping! Look: there is nothing here so vile, nothing which you cannot endure. Princes of past ages could not live like this: they would have called it luxury beyond luxury!"
It was not as easy to change his attitude without computer assistance, but one advantage of the Silver-Gray discipline was that he could do it at all.
He released the contents of the box. The dust cloud rose up to the ceiling, found the dirt, and began dusting. But there was only a small volume to the cloud; Phaethon had to direct a beam from the box against certain patches of filth the cloud was too small and stupid to notice by itself. He knew that, at one time, before the invention of basic robotics, humans had to toil like this all the time.
It seemed grotesque and faintly embarrassing, but, by the time he had directed the cloud to scrub the whole room, Phaethon had a glowing feeling of accomplishment. The room was clean; entropy had been reversed. It was small, but now the universe was different than it had been before his work, and, in a very small way, better.
It was a good emotion, but when he made a mental signal to record it, nothing happened.
Phaethon sighed. Good thing he was not stuck in reality, cut off from the thoughts and systems of the Oecumene. There was no point in trying to get used to this flat, dead, unresponsive world; Phaethon planned to be here only long enough to get some private time to think.
He walked over to the window port, remembered to open it, stepped outside.
Phaethon stood on the balcony of an infinite tower. It stretched above him as far as the eye could see, at least, in his present and limited vision. Below him, it fell into clouds; there was no visible base.
This was a room built into one of the space elevators that led up to the ring-city circling Earth's equator.
Phaethon sat, calling "Chair..." But the balcony surface created a chair very slowly, so he struck his bottom painfully on the rising chair back as he sat. The chair was not smart enough to avoid the blow, nor did any contours change or shape themselves to his particular height.
"Everything here is a clue. If I have forgotten this little room, it's because it's part of what I'm supposed to forget, a reminder. The blankness of my private thoughtspace; that is a clue. That foolish and pessimistic Cerebelline ecoperform-ance, another clue. The strange garment in the wardrobe. All of these things are clues."