But he could not sleep, not a proper sleep. There were times when he was semiconscious; he did some of that hallucinating dawn-age men called dreaming.
In one hallucination, he saw a bride (or perhaps it was a bird of fire) still moving feebly, lowered in a coffin into the waiting earth, and dirt was shoveled onto her casket, while little scraping noises and soft cries for help rose up from inside. In another hallucination, he saw a mansion built upon a cloud, floating away, ever farther away, forever, now out of reach, burnt to black and smoking rubble. In a third hallucination, he saw a black sun looking down upon an airless world coated with blood and black debris.
Phaethon jerked his head upright. His face was pale with sweat; his heart thundered in his chest. The headless armor, burning red, and draped with seaweed like a drowned ghost from some children's sea tale sat facing him. All was silent. There was something wrong with his dreaming.
There were supposed to be no nightmares in the Golden Oecumene.
Phaethon's natural sleep cycle could not correctly integrate his various artificial modes and levels of consciousness with the natural sections of his neurology. Little corrections and integrations were needed. Always before, he had had Rhad-amanthus to do this task. He had a similar system on board the Phoenix Exultant. Without such a system, his subconscious mind would begin to act much like a dawn-age man's or a primitivist's, with self-sustaining mental actions neither checked, nor overruled, nor brought to light for inspection. His mind could run away from him now, showing him weird scenes as he slept. Always before he had been alert and lucid as he had slept. Always before, one of Rhadamanthus's
monitors could have warned him about dangerous subconscious influences, strange emotional conjunctions, growing mental disorders. The natural checks and balances nonartifi-cial minds might have had to protect themselves from neurosis, Phaethon might not necessarily have. The more complex and the more delicate artificial systems in his brain now would operate without supervision and without repair. What if he fed commands into his thoughtspace while he slept? What if the ordinary signal traffic from the artificial sections of his nervous system had odd or unexpected side effects on his subconscious?
He worried but saw no easy answer. At some point, somehow, he would have to get access to a self-consideration program. If he logged on to the Mentality to retrieve one, his enemies might find him. Perhaps he could somehow build one of his own, once he reached ... ?
Reached where? His only "destination" was an arbitrary one, selected because having a meaningless goal was better than having none. Nothing waited for him there.
Phaethon looked from right to left, at the little red-lit plot of moss on which he sat. This was the only home he had now. Rhadamanthus Mansion was gone. His low-rent cube was gone, too. The landlord there certainly used the same standard language in his rental contracts that the Eleemosynary Hospice used. Phaethon had already been evicted. He had no possessions in that room, except a box of cleaning dust. He recalled now that even the medical equipment had been leased.
A second memory surfaced. The organs in his body, the thick synthetic texture of his skin, and the other changes to his body which he had thought were cheap artificial replacements, were, of course, nothing of the kind. His body had been redesigned by the surgical processes specially commissioned and created by Orient Overmind-group, one of the En-nead, at tremendous cost. His skin and organs were designed to withstand the shock of accelerations, the degeneration of microgravity, and the various radiation hazards, vertigo, deprivations and other emergencies the conditions of space de-
manded. His body had been designed in tandem with the inner lining of his suit.
Phaethon shook his head in dismay. Would this body remain fit and healthy under normal earthly gravity? Before it had been stored under constant medical attention. His skin was insensitive; his eyesight seemed dull and limited without the artificial enhancements he used to enjoy. He had sacrificed everything, even the normal healthy function of his normal body to his dream of space travel. That dream had been his spirit. What did one call a body after its spirit had fled? There were words from the old days: hulk; relic; corpse.
A third memory suddenly surfaced. He recalled why he had been there, in that filthy small cube of a rented room. It was not merely that it was cheap. It had been near a spaceport. Phaethon had rented it fully expecting to be back under way again before the end of December. He had wanted to be within a few minutes' ride of a dock, so that he could sail immediately back to Mercury Equilateral, where the Phoenix Exultant waited. It had been for a quick departure.
Bitterness stung his throat till he laughed.
He had not slept welclass="underline" but, at least, some of his old memories were being organized so that he could retrieve them now.
Phaethon closed his eyes and tried to sleep again. He dreamt a world was burning far below him.
He rested uneasily. Eventually he rose, gathered his helmet, drank, ate a sparse meal from the floor. Then he dissolved his little stream, and rolled his miniature landscape of moss and spore and microorganism back into his cloak, shed the extra mass as water, and used the water to absorb the waste-heat of the nanorecycling process, and eject it as steam. Then his armor cleaned itself and swirled up around his body, lifting metal plates into place. He swirled some medical nanom-aterial into his mouth to clean his teeth and restore his blood-chemistry balance.
Phaethon drew a breath and closed his eyes. He did not have a formulation rod, or any working midbrain coordination circuits, but he attempted to embrace three phases of Warlock
meditation he had learned from Daphne during one lazy year off they had taken together. It was crude, but he felt his nervous system, parasympathetic system, and the pseudo-organic circuitry in the various levels of his mind reach a balance. His eyes were calmer when he opened them again.
Then he turned and looked back at his little encampment, scanning it to be sure he had left no moss or mess behind.
He smiled. Was a life of solitude so bad? His little camp here had been crude and rough, without luxury, to be sure. But it could not have been so different from the way his ancestors had lived in the prehistoric wilderness. Could it?
The descent from the space tower took fewer weeks than he expected. His sleep was irregular; he woke exhausted. But he persisted. When strange moods or sudden despair came upon him, he attempted Warlock meditation techniques, and used the armor he wore in the place of a formulary wand. The armor lacked the proper biofeedbacks, but it allowed him to persevere.
In some places, the descent was easy to expedite; in others, he was hindered. The region of the tower from fifty to sixty thousand feet was owned by an old friend of Helion's, a Dark-Gray ex-Constable named Temer Sixth Lacedemonian. Temer had ambitions to become one day a Peer himself, and did not wish to appear to favor Phaethon's case, and so, during that whole length of the tower, Phaethon was herded and harassed by armed remotes, and not permitted to sleep on Temer's territory, and hardly permitted to pause. And Temer must have guessed Phaethon's patience to a nicety; just when Phaethon was fed up, and reaching his hand up to close his faceplate (so that he could stop and rest, while enjoying the spectacle of the remotes bouncing useless stun-shocks against his invulnerable armor) it was at that moment Temer's remotes dropped back, and allowed him a few hours' overdue rest. The episode caused Phaethon some grim satisfaction, and
perhaps a spark of distant hope. There were limits to what the Hortator's exile could impose on him, limits he could influence.
For other stretches, the going was much easier. Phaethon had been dreading reaching the tower segments that lacked stairs, and imagined aching limbs fatigued by endless hours of hand-over-hand climbing. The reality was much more pleasant.