Phaethon, alone, sat at the table for a time, not moving, only thinking. He picked up the cards and turned them over and over again in his fingers, over and over again.
The realization should have been swift in coming, but for Phaethon, it was slow, very slow. Why had Atkins, when Atkins was possessed by Phaethon's memories, cried out his love for Daphne? Was it because Atkins was fond of her, or because someone else was ... ?
"But she is not my wife," muttered Phaethon.
No matter what he thought of Daphne Tercius, the emancipated doll, no matter what his feelings, no matter how much she looked and acted like his wife, she simply was not his wife.
His real wife, now, how clearly he recalled her! A woman of perfect beauty, wit, and grace, a woman who made him feel a hero to himself, a woman who recalled the glories of past ages. He remembered well how first the two of them had met on one of the moons of Uranus, when she sought him out to interview him for her dramatic documentary. How unexpectedly she had come into his life, as swiftly and as completely as a ray of light from the moon turns a dismal night into a fairytale landscape of silver-tinted wonder. Always he had been apart from the others in the Golden Oec-umene. Always men looked at him askance, or seemed somehow embarrassed by his ambitions, as if they thought it was unseemly, in the age of Sophotechs, for men of flesh and blood to dream of accomplishing great things.
But Daphne, lovely Daphne, she had a soul in which fire and poetry still lived. When they were on Oberon, she had urged him never to let a single day escape without some work accomplished on some great thing. She was as brave in her spirit as everyone else still huddling back on Earth had not been. And when the cool reserve of her professional interest in him began to heat to a more personal interest, when she had reached and touched his hand, when he had grown bold enough: to ask to see her, not to exchange information but to entertain each other with their mutual company, her sudden smile was as unexpected and as glorious and as full of shy promises as anything his bachelor imagination could hope for....
But no. Wait. That Daphne, the one who had first met him on Oberon, that had not been the real Daphne. That had been the doll. Daphne Tercius. This Daphne.
The real Daphne had been afraid to leave the Earth.
The real Daphne had been a little more cool to his dream, and had smiled, and had murmured words of absentminded encouragement when he had spoken of it. She had been a little more sardonic, a little less demonstrative, than her ambassador-doll had been.
But she was the one he had married. She had been real.
She too, believed in heroism, but thought it was a thing of the past, a thing not possible these days ... not allowed.
He had entered into full communion with her on many occasions. He knew exactly what she thought. There was no deception or misunderstanding between man and wife, not in the Golden Oecumene, not these days. He knew her love for him was true. He knew that his ambitions made her a little uncomfortable, but not because she thought they were wrong (certainly not!) but because she thought they were so terribly right. And she had slowly grown afraid he would be stopped. Afraid he would be crushed. The years had passed and he had smiled at that fear. Stopped by what? Crushed by whom? In the Golden Oecumene, the most free society history had ever known, no peaceful activity was forbidden.
Years and decades passed, and Phaethon told himself that his wife's fear for him was a sign of her love for him. He told himself that, as time proved he could accomplish the great deeds for which he had always longed, she would grow to understand; he told himself that, on that bright sunlit day, her fears would melt like nightmares upon waking.
And then he had failed at the Saturn project, defeated by the desertion of his financial backers. At the same time, the Hortators started to take notice of him. Neo-Orpheus and Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne had begun circulating public epistles condemning "those who take the settled opinions and sensibilities of the majority of mankind lightheartedly" and upbraiding "any reckless adventurers who would, for the sake of mere self-aggrandizement, create disharmony or raise controversy within the restful order of our eternal way of life." He was not mentioned by name (he doubted the Hortators were brave enough for that), but everyone knew whom they were condemning. During his trip back to Earth, many of the speaking engagements, thought-distribution sequences, and colloquies to which he had formerly been invited were suddenly canceled without explanation. Certain of the social clubs and salons his wife had insisted he join returned his membership fees and expelled him. He was informed of their decisions by radio, given no chance to speak. There was nothing official, no, it was all silent pressure. But it exasperated Phaethon beyond words.
He remembered how, on his first day back on Earth, he had returned to the Rhadamanth Mansion outbuildings in Quito, and his wife had been waiting in a pool of sunlight just inside the main door.
Daphne was reclining on a daybed, wearing a Red Manorial sensation-amplification suit, which hugged the curves of her body like a second skin. Atop the sensitive leathery surface of the suit, a gauze of white silken material floated, ignoring gravity, a sensory web used by Warlocks to stimulate their pleasure centers during tantric rituals. In one leather-gloved hand she held a memory casket half-open, set to record whatever might happen next. Her sultry eyes and pouting lips were also half-open.
"Well, hero"-she had smiled a sly and wicked smile-"I was sent to make your homecoming back to poor old Earth memorable, so maybe this day won't be all bad news. Ready for your hero's welcome?"
It was that day, that afternoon, in fact, when he had determined to build the Phoenix Exultant. This was sparked by something Daphne had said: that giants never noticed obstacles, they just stepped over them. And when Phaethon had replied in bitter tones: "I did not make this world," she had answered back that all he needed to make a world of his own was space un-crowded enough in which to make it. If the Hortators were in his way, he should just step over them into some wide place where they could not be found....
That small speech of Daphne's had planted the seed from which the Phoenix Exultant, over the next three centuries, had grown.
He recalled her smile on that day, the look of love and admiration in her eyes.... "She was not my wife."
It was true. That had not been his wife, not that day. That day, it had been the doll again. She had been sent to welcome him home and to keep him happy, while his real wife, away at a party thrown by Tawne House, had been trying to placate Tsychandri-Manyu, trying to minimize and mask the damage done to Phaethon's standing in polite society, and to her own. That, to her, was more important.
"But I love my wife___"
That also was true. He loved her for her many accomplishments, her beauty, and for that secret core of hers, a spirit unlike the placid spirit of this tame age, an heroic spirit, a spirit that...
A spirit that she praised in her dramas and her writings, but never displayed in her personal life. A spirit that she knew he had, but never supported, never encouraged, never praised.
"That's not true! She always wanted the best in Me for me! She always urged me upward!"
Didn't she ... ? Phaethon recalled many pillow conversations, or secret lovers' files, filled with worried words, urging caution, reconciliation, warning him to worry about his good name and his precious reputation....
"But underneath it all, she wanted what I wanted out of life! Didn't she just this week demand that I stir myself out from the slumber and seductive dreaming in that canister, when she and I were on our way from Earth to Mercury Equilateral? I was ready to forswear it all, in that weak moment, but it was she who steeled my resolution! It was she who reminded me of what I truly was! It is she who loves me, not for my reputation, which I've lost, not for the shallow things in me, my status and wealth and fine position, but for what is best in me! It was she, in that canister with me, who told me I had to ..."