The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  “Very well. My client says: I (he forwards, as an appendix, a treatise on the meaning of the word ‘I,’ the concept of selfhood, and a bibliographical compendium of his life experiences and changes in his self-notions in order to define this term to you) greet (he also has side comments on the history and nature of greetings, the implications in this context of what is meant, including the legal implications of violating the ban placed on his initiating any contact with you) you (and he postulates a subjunctive inquiry that, should you not be the individual that he deems you to be, that all this be placed in a secondary memory-chain, and be regarded as a less-than-real operation, similar to a pseudomnemia. He also requests sealed and notarized confirmation on his recorded memorandum documenting that you initiated the contact without his prompting).”

  “Stop! You are only three words into the first message, and already everything is obscure. What prohibition has been placed on him? By whom? The human race is finally mature, wise enough to reject coercion as a means to deal with each other. Where is there any institution, any curia, that is not voluntary, not based on subscription? Our militia was supported by donations from historical trusts. Who has any right to prevent your client from speaking with me? Who is your client? Tell him to remove his mask.”

  “My client responds with an emotion-action statement of four orders of complexity, all in the hypothetical-subjunctive mode, which states, in brief, that were he forbidden to speak with you, there may be (granting for the sake of argument) monitors or directives eavesdropping, which, were there such a thing, would not interfere as long as this discourse is kept within the general boundaries of polite and innocuous discourse. Of the seventy-four thousand million possible outcomes of this conversation which my client has examined in predictive scenarios, over fourteen of them conclude by some sort of interruption or reaction from the Aurelian Sophotech. Would you care to examine the full text of my client’s reply, examine the extrapolation scenarios which he has calculated, or should I continue with my disquisition of the core message?”

  This was the most fantastic yet. Phaethon put his mask back on, which acted as a signal to restore a zone of privacy around him, even hiding such information as was normally public, such as his name and appearance.

  “Surely no one would be so rude as to intrude on our private conversation, not without some good reason!”

  “My client wishes to download a philosophical question-and-debate routine to attempt to convince you that, even in the most enlightened and civilized of societies, reasonable men can differ as to what constitutes the good. For example (and here he once again indicates that he speaks only hypothetically) those who place a higher value on freedom than on the alleged security and meaningfulness which adherence to tradition provides, might be willing to tolerate, or even encourage, a certain small amount of crime and riot, danger and uncertainty.”

  Phaethon knew Greek and Latin, English and French, and half a dozen other dead languages, and so he knew what the word “crime” meant; but he had never heard it used except as a metaphor for unacceptable rudeness, or for poorly executed works of art. A paleolinguistic routine from the Rhadamanthus Mansion-mind had confirmed the original meaning of the word and had inserted it into Phaethon’s short-term memory.

  He had his memory replay the last message over more than once to reassure himself that there had been no error. Was this creature actually advocating that the use of violence or fraud against innocent beings was, in some measure, justified?

  The translator persisted: “Will you open, at least, a holding space where he can put some of the conversation trees he has constructed on this topic for you?”

  “Sir, forgive me if I seem abrupt. But my main question, about the man who accosted me, lingers unanswered. Could you return to your core message, and, if you please, summarize the summary?”

  “Here is a severely reduced summation of the core message:

  “Phaethon, I greet you once again, though you have passed into the shadow of our enemy, have been wounded in your soul and mind, and have forgotten me. One day, I pray, we shall be whole again. Crippled now in your mind, you have perhaps no strength to sustain the belief in that great dream which once shook the worlds and empires of the Golden Oecumene to its rotten base; nor would you believe in what high esteem I and my comrades still hold you, despite your treasonous weakness of will. But believe this: You are trapped in a labyrinth of illusion; and yet the scruples, or the folly, of our foes allows you one hope of escape, one weak chink, a loophole, in an otherwise all-embracing prison wall.

  “You must come with me now to the outer world, to cold and distant Neptune, in the dark, where the power of the sunlight, and of the Golden Oecumene’s machines, fall short. After long struggles and contests of will, we have forced Golden Oecumene law to grant to the distant exiles there a measure of mental privacy and freedom undreamed here; our thoughts are not monitored by the benevolent tyranny of machines. Once there, you can become one of us. Your soul and memory can be cured of their great wound. Your body will be changed, and become like unto ours, and your mind will be embraced into our all-encompassing communion.

  “But you must come at once, with no delay. Leave your wife, your life, your dreams of wealth, your mansion-home. Leave all. Say farewell to warmth and sun, but come!’”

  Phaethon’s mind was blank. It was all too bizarre. He knew what the word “enemy” was; the term referred to something like a competitor, but a vicious and uncivil one. The idea that the Golden Oecumene structure, however, could be such a thing was patently absurd, like thinking the sky was made of iron. Phaethon knew what insanity was, from his historical simulations, the same way he knew what a flint hand ax or a disease was; he was able to understand the idea that the Neptunian might be insane. He just was not able, not really, to believe it.

  In his mental blankness, all he could think to say was: “If I wake my real body, to travel outside the range of the Noumenal Mentality, my brain information could not, in the case of a physical accident, be recorded and stored. Important segments of my life experience might be lost; I could even lose continuity and die the true and final death.”

  “But I tell you that you shall not die, but shall mingle with the Tritonic Composition and achieve a finer and higher life!”

  2.

  The other six Peers, each with different thinking-speed and thinking processes, absorbed, pored over, or examined over 9,200 projections of the effect of the next Transcendence on the upcoming Millenium, either directly, or (for those without permanent mental augmentations on staff), through auxiliary minds.

  A gap in Helion’s memory edited out this wait, and brought his time and time sense current to the next point in the conversation. To him, there was no pause. It may have been hours, or merely seconds, later.

  The undisputed informal leader of the Peers, Orpheus Myriad Avernus, was not physically present, there or anywhere. He was the eldest and wealthiest of the Seven. He presented himself to Helion’s senses as a dark-haired, pale-skinned youth, whose face had a haunting lack of expression, but with eyes unblinking, inward looking, deeply self-absorbed. He wore a long black Plutonian thermal cape of a style so quaint and so far out of fashion that only during a masquerade would it pass without comment. The wide neckpiece rose almost to his ears, and the paudrons extended past his shoulders, making his head seem small and childlike.

  Orpheus spoke in a very soft voice: “We applaud the sentiment expressed by our newest Peer. When conditions are optimal, any change, by definition, is decay. And Helion knows all too well how chaos, disloyalty, and recklessness can be found within our own households and holdings, and even within the hearts of those nearest to us.”

  For a moment, no one spoke. All eyes were fixed on Helion. An embarrassed silence hung over the room.

  Gannis (or one of him) was physically present in the library chamber in Aurelian House where the meeting was “actually” taking place. Gannis was disguised as a character from First Mental Stru
cture mythology, in robes of sky blue and white, crowned in rays, and with a lightning bolt for a scepter. He held the copyright on a rather striking face: black bearded, with deep-set eyes spaced far apart, beneath a wide and kingly brow. An eagle and a she-eagle were perched on his chair back, one over either shoulder. Gannis’s eyes were as bright and fierce as those of his pets, but his voice was an agreeable, cheerful boom.

  He now spoke to break the tension: “Elder Orpheus! Here you are opening old wounds. Helion has Phaethon well under control; why bring up an episode we all agreed to forget? I thought we were not going to speak any further it.”

  Orpheus spoke softly, as if he were talking only to himself, without moving his eyes: “We did not speak on that subject. Except we note that Helion has good reason, now, to display uncompromising zeal in the defense of tradition and orthodoxy.”

  Orpheus was a member of the small, ancient, peculiar school called the Aeonites. Their practice was to record an unchanging idealized version of themselves into permanent computer space. This template, at regular intervals, created an emanation or eidolon of itself, which came to life. New eidolons absorbed the information any prior active or living eidolons had acquired since the time the template was absorbed, but rejected any changes of personality, philosophy, or basic values. Members of this school were frozen and unalterable.

  It was only by the narrowest margins that the Curia determined Aeonite legal status to be that of self-aware entities rather than ghosts or recordings. Public opinion did not necessarily agree.

  (Helion, watching with part of his multiple mind on another channel, saw that Orpheus had no sensorium in operation. Orpheus saw no room at all; the dialogue was merely text; face expressions and nonverbal signs appeared in frames nearby, like the faces on playing cards. There was no other extension or background in Orpheus’s scene. Everything else was black. Helion, disturbed, lowered the attention-value of that view, and paid attention to his own version of the scene.)

  3.

  For a moment, Phaethon was silent, caught in a spell of wonder. He should have been repelled, but he was not. It all sounded as splendid and strange as anything one of his wife’s deep-dreamscape dramas might portray.

  The Neptunian was speaking: “Even now, I have called my surface-toorbit pinnace down from Cernous Roc, my vessel. A partial-vacuum generator is among the capabilities in my base layer which grants me flight, and my subsurface fluids can sustain your life cycles in suspension till the midair rendezvous is accomplished. Retrieve your true body from its crypt—I assume it is nearby, for the material housings of Rhadamanth Mansion are not far away. Wake, come here, then step within the circle of my arms; put your face into the surface substance of my body; it will part before you and flow around you, bonding cell with cell, to encase you in a protective vacuole.”

  Phaethon spoke softly: “But … but … I would need several years, at least, to set my affairs in order, and to create and educate a partial-duplicate of me to see to my duties in my absence. In any case I could not leave the festival before the Final Transcendence in December.”

  “No. You must come without any delay whatsoever. If you send a message, or even a signal, the labyrinth may close again, and, this time, any loose stones be bricked over!”

  Leave immediately? Phaethon imagined his wife, giddy on imagination amplifiers, emerging from her pseudomnesia womb, eagerly seeking him out to talk about her dream-victories, all her newly made computer-generated friends and wonders.

  But he would not be there. Impatient, then angry, then frantic, she would seek among the images on the promenade, or in the feast-cities, ballrooms, or game halls, seeing a thousand costumes, all in masks. The location channel was disenabled during masquerade. It would be eight months or more before her fears could be confirmed. Till then, she would not know if he was no longer in this world rather than merely hiding or ignoring her.

  The thought sobered him. He laughed. “I’m quite sorry, my dear sir, but you must realize what a ridiculous offer you are extending—”

  And he stopped. Because it was beyond ridiculous. Go to Neptune?

  Neptune was the farthest outpost of civilization, and, with two notable exceptions, the farthest any colony of humanity had ever reached: The actual last outpost of the Golden Oecumene was at 500 AUs, at the focal point of the gravity lens created by Sol. Here, elements of the Porphyrogen Composition mass-mind had created an artificial ice planet for themselves, and for the other visitors and staff of the Cosmic Observatory Effort. Beyond that, the nearer stars were barren of life. But at Cygnus XI, a small colony founded to study the effects of the singularity there had discovered a source of infinite energy, and, with that wealth, had expanded to a mighty civilization. Yet the distance was so far, the costs of travel so very great, that all communication with that society was lost; for that reason, it was known as the Silent Oecumene.

  Neptune was unthinkably closer even than the nearest star, and yet was still unthinkably remote. Even ships with fairly high fuel-mass-to-payload ratios required very long times to make the journey, months, sometimes years.

  Ridiculous? The thought was impossible.

  4.

  In the palace:

  “Come!” said Gannis heartily, slapping the tabletop with his palm. “Helion has spent more computer time than any of us—millions of seconds for one study alone—to extrapolate which visions the Aurelian-mind may present during the December Transcendence. His devotion is beyond question.

  “His dream is a grand one, I admit! Cease the motions of society, and freeze it into its present state! (Fortunate for us, when the waves freeze, those of us now at the crest will be at the tip of the iceberg forever after.) And yet—your pardon, friend Helion—allow me to introduce a note of caution. The Hortator College is a group of populist moralizers; their pinch-nostriled, squint-eyed overzealousness—hah? Is that what we need more of? Or less of? Augmenting their power will increase their power over us, even over us Seven Peers. What then, eh? What egalitarian nonsense will we be forced to stomach then? And I speak not just for myself but for all of me when I say that!”

  Gannis’s view of the room was the same as Helion’s, but his sense of humor required him to introduce a slight difference. In Gannis’s view, every object had two shadows, a dark black and a faint gray, for he had placed a second, smaller sun, a mere pinpoint of dazzling brightness, rising in the East.

  Orpheus said in his cold, soft whisper of a voice: “Peer Gannis perhaps has cause to fear any close inquiry into the recent events. It is a fine coincidence that he earned so much advantage by the Hortator’s most recent deliberations.”

  Gannis should have looked angry at the accusation, but instead he threw wide his arms and laughed. “I am complimented that you think me cunning enough to have arranged these recent debacles! Not so. I fear that mere dumb luck has saved the Jovian Engineering Effort once again. Do you recall when bad investments by my overself brought me to such penury that I was asked to leave my peerage behind? Why, yes, you surely must, for it was you yourself who ask me to depart.”

  Gannis turned to the others, and continued: “And you wanted to have no more to do with funny, dumb, lovable, affable old Gannis, did you, my Peers? But then my other selves made back our fortune with the establishment of the Jupiter Equatorial Grand Collider. We did not predict the existence of the continent of stabile transadamantine elements beyond atomic number nine hundred; in fact, the standard model predicted against it.

  “Chrysadmantium! What could not be done with this wonder metal? It elevated me back to my due position—others were enticed to dreams more wild, perhaps.

  “I am better for my days of loss. More generous. Generous to the point of folly! I am as free with my advice as I am with my bounty. Is it my fault my advice was ignored? Is it my fault the wealth I spent so freely returned to me? This is the reward of fate, who cherishes the magnanimous. Clever lawyers merely help the process … .

  “But for all my generosity, good
Helion, I cannot see what more I can do for the College of Hortators. The contracts and covenants we make with all of our clients provide that anyone shunned by the College of Hortators we also must shun. For my clients, this means they can enter no structures, ships, or space elevators made from my supermetal; for the customers of Vafnir, this means no power; of the Eleemosynary Composition, no understanding; of Ao Aoen, no dreams; of Orpheus, no life. What more is wanted?”

  Helion answered: “Nebuchednezzar Sophotech, who had been advising the College, has sequestered himself. The College presently has little or no sophotechnology at its command; that can be remedied. If they had sufficient computer-time resources, the Hortators could be omnipresent, omniscient: We, my Peers, who are the wealthiest entities ever to live, have no lack of resources to donate.”

  Grannis made an expansive gesture. “But why spend so much? Dangerous matters have been resolved—”

  Helion said darkly, “There are still those who would overthrow all we have built and done. Do you gentlemen have the word ‘enemy’ in your archives?”

  5.

  In the garden:

  “What is your true motive here?” asked Phaethon. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “That same restriction which prevented me from first approaching you prevents me from bringing up the interdicted topic. Though my legal counsel parapersonality suggests that, if you and you alone bring up the topic, I may be able to answer questions about it without overstepping the letter of the law.”

  “Very well. Does this have anything to do with the man I saw?”

  “The tree artist? He is nothing. He escaped you by yanking down a low-hanging Advertisement and wrapping himself in it, cloaklike, and your sense-filter blinded you to him till he was gone.”