The maintenance ladders dropped down sheer wells. Phaethon could attach himself by diamond-fiber cord spun out of available atmospheric carbon. He fashioned a system of pulleys and carabiners, which could lower him great distances quickly. He grew motors to control the arrangement, so that he could descend while he slept, albeit this used more battery energy than he would have liked. The suit's gauntlets he programmed to untie and to retrieve the rope material periodically, so that Phaethon hardly lost any nanomaterial mass. The suit-mind was flexible enough to understand orders to find the next stanchion and retie the belaying knots. Thus Phaethon could sleep with his hands folded over his chest beneath his breastplate, safe as a papoose in a backpack, while the armor rappelled down one length of rungs after another. Many miles of descent were quickly consumed in this fashion. And he needed the rest. His growing mental fatigue, his lack of a proper self-consideration circuit, was forcing him to spend more and more time asleep.
The worst section was a maintenance well without rungs, meant only for robots using magnetic grapples. Phaethon thought he probably had the right to ask to be conveyed down past this segment, since the law against trespass did not require a trespasser to depart by ways that were dangerous or unhealthy. But a notion of pride or zeal made him go forward. Or perhaps his rashness came from certain mood-alteration stimulants he had attempted that week. The Warlock meditations were becoming less effective, and Phaethon was experimenting with a crude Noetic system he was trying to construct out of the helmet circuits, to see if he could do to himself, manually, some of the delicate nerve work and sleep
integrations Rhadamanthus had used to do to restore mental balance.
This morning's attempt at sleep integration had left him giddy and overconfident. He had been sure he could design a parachute out of his cloak, with sufficient lifting surface to slow his fall; the armor was too heavy, and he had merely dropped it down the shaft. The armor, of course, banged and rang against the shaft as it dropped, chiming like a gong the size of the moon, but was utterly unscratched by the five-thousand-foot plunge. Phaethon, on the other hand, had scraped against the side of the well, spilled air out of his parachute shroud, spun, recovered, tumbled, almost recovered, and broke both his legs upon landing.
In infinite agony, he had crawled and crawled, trying to find his armor, dragging his broken legs behind him. Finally he found it, and gasped out a command to turn on the emergency medical program before collapsing. The armor had swarmed across his body and fitted itself around him. Na-nomachines inside the suit lining had aided the biomechan-isms in his legs to regenerate the bone tissues. He lay in half-drugged discomfort for hours while his body repaired itself. The special construction of his space-adapted bones slowed the process, and the suit-mind had to make several hesitant guesses about how to proceed. (The medical routines and partial minds aboard the Phoenix Exultant were not, of course, available to him. The armor was a wonder of engineering, but it had not been designed to operate in solitude.)
A Constable remote came to hover over his dazed body, warning him not to drop dangerous objects from high places, lest he be sued for negligence.
The Constable made no move to help him, of course. Phaethon had no insurance, and no doctor would risk joining him in exile.
He lay on his back, blankly staring upward, wondering at his own stupidity, and vowing to touch no mood alterants of any kind again. For a man familiar with the power to project his self-image instantly anywhere into the Mentality, or to telepresent himself in reality anywhere there were manne-
quins, to lie immobile, fixed in place, helpless, was torture. He imagined an angel whose wings had been torn off.
That episode had consumed almost half of his available supply of nanomaterial (it was absorbed into his body as medical constituents) severely drained his suit batteries, lost him half a day of travel.
The best section of descent had had, for its maintenance way, merely a track of traction-variable plates set in a long slide, spiraling down the whole circumference of the tower at a steep slope. The metal in the plates were atomically organized to permit easier motion in one direction and speed than another, with resistance variables to control the rate of descent.
Phaethon saw the opportunity at once. He formed his cloak into a belly sled with magnetic elements that would be agitated by the action of the traction fields; that agitation could heat water stored through tiny capillaries and veins he grew into his cloak; the heat would drive a steam turbine he grew like a lump across his shoulders; the turbine would recharge his batteries, while the passing wind cooled the circulating water. Most of the nanoconstruction could be recycled.
By the time he slid to the bottom of the long slide, Phaethon found that he had lost only four hundred grams of nanomaterial in unrecoverables; but his battery power was restored to full strength.
He dissolved the belly sled with a pang of farewell. It had not been an elegant engineering solution. Nonetheless, it was with some pleasure that Phaethon could add to the inventory of his resources and possessions that he had so exhaustively noted days before the entry: potential energy (position above
the earth).
Below a certain point, he began to hear, through the walls, the creaking and singing of the wind shear against the sides of the infinite tower. He kept expecting to find some hatch or window to the outside. Perhaps he thought his experiment at parachuting would have better success if he were not jumping down a narrow tube; certainly it would be easier to fall thirty or forty thousand feet rather than walk down thirty or forty
thousand feet of stair. But no window interrupted the solitude of this dark stair.
Days, weeks, fortnights went by. But even seemingly endless time eventually must end.
At the bottom of the tower, the maintenance hatch came out upon a concourse.
He paused at the door to change an entry in his suit log. He removed "potential energy" as a possible resource, for, at ground level it was zero.
Looking at his resources log, Phaethon stood a moment in thought.
In the negative column, however, he made several entries:
"No father. My real father has been replaced by a relic, who was one of the conspirators who worked my downfall. I must count him my enemy."
He half expected Rhadamanthus to come on-line and remark with rueful humor that this was somewhat unfair of Phaethon, whose father was, after all, a more complex individual than that. No remark came.
"No manor, no sophotechnology. I am limited to merely human intelligence. My enemies have intellects like unto gods at their command."
Then, more grimly: "No more spare life. My next death is final."
And: "No wife. My love has slain herself, and left a puppet, programmed to love me, to mock me."
The last entry: "Alien creatures hunt me like a dog, to kill me, while an ignorant and ignoble world rollicks with gaiety and festive cheer, unseeing, uncaring, and unable, by law, to see me die. My location is a matter of public record..."
No. No, wait. Phaethon erased that last ideogram-gestalt line. His location was secret, was it not? In the assets column, he noted that it was still the middle of a Masquerade. He could move unseen, undetected.
Or could he? Anyone with access to the Mentality could look up Phaethon's last known location, at the top of the endless tower. It was not hard to calculate his rate of descent; and, every time he had stepped into an area where a no-
trespassing injunction was flagged, his position would be public knowledge again. Temer Lacedaimonius, for example, had dogged his progress.
So the enemies had to be here. Somewhere on the other side of this door. Perhaps very near.