The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  Phaethon, searching for the courthouse, looking into the Middle Dreaming. The symbolic meanings of the floral colors, tree and leaf, shape and placement, came flooding into his brain. The experience was overwhelming, since the architect had woven multiple overlapping layers of symbolism, each part reflecting the whole, throughout the entire garden.

  It was doubtful whether any brain (before the invention of sophotechnology) could actually envision and enact a scheme where each part or group of parts could contain its own symbol-message while maintaining integrity taken as a whole; but Ao Nisibus, the designer, certainly made it seem as if he had. (All the more amazing, since Ao Nisibus had not had a Cerebelline neuroform.)

  The gardens and lawns of the opposite side of the cylinder shone viridescently in the light of long windows, which, like canals filled with stars, ran along the walls parallel to the cylinder’s axis. The blue Earth, huge and dazzling, was rising through windows spinward of him. Sunlight slanted up through windows in the floor below, striping the gardens opposite with alternating bands of light green and dark green. Phaethon started to see a pattern in all this. His attention was absorbed.

  Overhead, the Founder’s Monument and reflecting pool formed signs of Masonic import. Rose gardens, for passion, were hedged about with virtuous lilies; and two walkways, lined with euphrasy and rue, truth and repentance, came together in a cross (for noble sacrifice); but the actual intersection was a carriage circle (representing the world). In the center of the circle was a hillock, shaped like a burial howe, dotted with forget-me-nots. There was a meaning here, a message, a warning, telling Phaethon something about the nature of true memory, ultimate reality, and the universe … .

  An automatic safety routine in Phaethon’s sense-filter had to interrupt him from going into a beauty trance. He blinked and remembered to concentrate on looking for the court house. There: a walkway lined with a balanced number of majestic oaks and somber ash trees led to a glade. On three sides of the glade were boxwood hedges trimmed into complex labyrinths. In the glade, a circle of olive trees guarded a dark, clear pool. The symbolism would not have been more obvious had he seen blindfolded goddesses armed with swords and balance scales.

  Phaethon slanted down through the air and landed lightly on the grass. Closer now, he could see the bottom of the pool was transparent crystal; the pool seemed dark only because there was a large unlit chamber buried beneath.

  A slab of rock near the pool must have been made of para-matter, for a man dressed in blue-and-silver chameleon cloth slid up through the solid stone and stepped onto the grass. He wore a braided demicape, and a helmet of blue steel. In one white glove he held upright a pike taller than his helmet plumes. Phaethon recognized the man.

  “Atkins! A pleasure to see you again. I swear you are the only man in the Golden Oecumene who can wear a getup like that”—Phaethon was looking at his garters and knee socks—“without looking ridiculous.”

  “Good afternoon, sir.” The face was as calm and expressionless as ever; the tone was impersonal, brisk, polite. “I’m Atkins Secundus, his partial.”

  “Emancipated?”

  “No. We’re still considered one person. I don’t really make that much on soldier’s pay, so I’ve sent out my partial copy here for other work. This one here is the bailiff and master-at-arms of the Court. The rule of posse comitatus prohibits the military from doing police functions, so I have to maintain a separate identity, and have any memories related to military security matters cut out.”

  Phaethon looked at him with new interest. The two of them might have something in common. “Doesn’t it bother you to have holes and gaps in your memory?”

  Atkins did not smile, but the lines to either side of his mouth deepened. “Well, sir, that depends. A serviceman has to assume the higher-ups know what they are doing, even when they don’t. If they monkeyed with my brain, I’m sure it was for a good reason.”

  “But what if it wasn’t?”

  Atkins did not shrug, but a quirk of his eyebrow conveyed the same emotion. “I didn’t make the rules. I do whatever it takes. Someone has to. It might be different for civilians.” His good humor faded and his tone became, somehow, even more brisk and serious: “But for the moment, I’m going to have to ask you to disable your armor circuits. No weapons allowed in the courthouse.”

  Phaethon had to get Rhadamanthus to find and insert the meaning of the word “weapon” into his brain. Phaethon was amazed and disgusted. “You have got to be kidding! You don’t actually think that I am capable of—”

  Atkins gave Phaethon a thoughtful, disinterested look. “It’s none of my business what you are capable of, sir. I just enforce the rules.”

  But Phaethon saw the calculating, professional look in Atkins’s eye. Perhaps it was a look of distrust. Perhaps Atkins was taking the measure of a potential enemy. The stare was offensive.

  Rhadamanthus poked Phaethon on the knee with his beak, and whispered: “Hsst! It’s an old tradition. No one goes armed into Court.”

  “Well, I cannot counter tradition,” muttered Phaethon. He doffed his helmet and let Atkins insert a disabling probe into the black suit layer. Thought-group after thought-group of the armor-mind went dark; anything even remotely capable of energy manipulation was locked, even simple action-reflex routines. Phaethon swallowed his pride; he did not know if he had a right to be offended.

  Because, whatever Phaethon had done in the past, Atkins knew it and Phaethon did not.

  Phaethon asked him.

  Atkins squinted. “Sir, I’m not sure it’s my place to say. I’m on duty right now. The bailiff of the Curia isn’t supposed to be the one to help you break a legal contract, even if it is a stupid one. Why not just let the matter rest?”

  9

  THE CURIA

  1.

  The two of them stepped onto the rock surface. The rock let Phaethon ooze through only slowly and reluctantly, as microscopic and molecule-sized organizations hidden in the para-matter passed through his flesh and armor, probing for secret weapons. The Crysadmantium supermetal defeated the probe attempts; the organizations had to flow in and out through Phaethon’s neckpiece to scrub the interior. It was not uncomfortable, but it was undignified.

  Below were stairs, leading down. The aesthetic protocol was apparently different outside than in. Atkins’s quaint costume was replaced. There was no heat when Atkins’s uniform changed shape; perhaps it was pseudo-matter, not nanomachinery. During the moment of transition, Phaethon saw what the soldier was really wearing beneath; a trim jacket set with many vertical pockets holding discharge cartridges, responders, and preassembled nanoweapons.

  And he had a knife and a katana hanging from his belt. Phaethon could not help but wonder at the man’s anachronisms. What sort of fellow was so hypnotized by tradition that he still carried sharp pieces of metal meant for poking and lacerating other men?

  The transformation took an eye-blink. Atkins now wore a stiff-collared poncho of stark white, and his pike shrank to a baton from some period of military history Phaethon did not recognize. But he guessed the pale cloak was from the Objective Aesthetic, which dated from the late Fifth Era, long before the Consensus Aesthetic.

  In that era, back before Sophotech translation routines existed, the differences in neuroforms made it difficult for the basics, Warlocks, Cerebellines, and Invariants, to understand each other’s thought and speech. It had been impossible to understand each other’s art. Consequently, the so-called Objective Aesthetic was heavily geometrical, nonrepresentational, highly stylized; more like an iconography than an artform. Phaethon did not find it attractive.

  At the bottom of the stairs was an antechamber. Here stood another man. It took Phaethon a moment to recognize him in the gloom. “Gannis! Is that you, or one of you?”

  He turned. It was indeed Gannis of the Jupiter Effort, but wearing a formal costume and wide headdress of Fifth-Era Europa. A heavy semi-cylindrical cloak, like the wing casings of a beetle, hung from wide sh
oulderboards. From those shoulders came a cluster of tassels or tentacles, carrying various thought boxes, note pages and interfacers. Multiple arms had always been a European fashion.

  “A pleasure to see you, Phaethon!” There was something blank and stiff in his eye movements. Phaethon realized Gannis was using a face-expression program. He obviously had recognized Phaethon’s armor.

  Gannis was one of Them.

  Phaethon thought to himself: Good grief! Is there anyone in the Golden Oecumene who does not remember what I did except for me?

  The financial records had shown many trips to Jovian space. Phaethon also felt a sense of familiarity, of comfort, as if he and Gannis were old friends or business partners.

  Like a flash of intuition, certainty entered Phaethon’s mind. Whatever it was Phaethon had done, Gannis had done it also. Or, at least, had helped.

  “You are here to face the Curia also?” asked Phaethon politely.

  “Face? I’m not sure what you mean. My group-mind is representing Helion.”

  “You are his lawyer?” Why in the world would Gannis be helping Helion? Phaethon had been under the impression that the two men were business rivals, and did not really like each other. Certainly the Synnoetic School, with its direct mind-machine interfaces, its groupings and mass-minds, disagreed with the proindividualist traditions of the manorial schools, and yet competed for the same patronage, the same niche in the socioeconomy.

  Gannis made an easy gesture. “Perhaps the Hundred-mind of Jupiter thinks it would be a miscarriage of justice to allow your claim to prevail. You’ve obviously already broken your word about the memorial agreements we all made at Lakshmi; none of the Peerage wants to have to do business with a man who cannot be trusted.”

  Lakshmi was on Venus. What had Phaethon been doing on Venus? He assumed that the amnesia agreement was made just before the Masquerade’s opening ceremonies in January. Phaethon consulted an almanac routine. Venus had been in triune with Earth at that time, a good position to be used as a gravity sling for any ships bound between Earth, Mars, Demeter, or the Solar Array. Mercury had been in a nonadvantageous orbital position, on the far side of the sun. A footnote in the almanac indicated communications had been disrupted all across the inner system because of solar storms.

  It was the time of the disaster at the Solar Array.

  Phaethon eyed Gannis speculatively. The man had a suspicious air to him. And suspicious people had the habit of treating hypotheses as if they were certainties. They could be bluffed.

  “Am I to be trusted less than … shall we say … others … ?” said Phaethon, nodding ponderously. He favored Gannis with a knowing look.

  “Are you saying Helion cannot be trusted with his own wealth? Or that your claim to it is better than his?”

  Claim? What claim? Phaethon had no idea whatsoever what Gannis was talking about. Nonetheless, he spread his hands and smiled smugly. “My meaning is self-evident. Draw from it what conclusions you will.”

  Gannis became red-faced with anger. Evidently his expression-program had failed, or he was deliberately showing his wrath. “You blame the solar disaster on Helion?! That is grotesque ingratitude, sir, simply grotesque! Considering the sacrifice that version of him made for you! You are a cad, sir! You are a simple, unspotted, pure and perfect cad! Besides, my client disavows everything that happened on the Solar Array! He was not even there!”

  “Not there? I thought your client was Helion … ?”

  Gannis head jerked back an inch, as if he had been stung. Phaethon saw realization cross Gannis’s features, a second before the expression-program snapped back into place. Gannis realized Phaethon had been fooling him.

  Suddenly bland and polite, Gannis said, “I’m sure the Curia will tell you what you have a right to know.”

  “I know that you have broken the Lakshmi agreement and that I have not.”

  Gannis turned his back to Phaethon.

  Atkins had been watching all this with that cheek-tension that served him for a smile, and a twinkle of amusement in the cool of his eyes. He now nodded at Phaethon, and said, “Well, gentlemen! Shall we go in?” and he opened the tall antechamber doors with a gesture of his baton.

  The Chamber of the Curia was austere. As Phaethon had guessed, it was done in the spartan style of the Objective Aesthetic.

  Unadorned square silver pillars held up a black dome. In the center of the dome, at the highest point of the ceiling, a wide lens of crystal supported the pool overhead. Light from the world above fell through the water to form trembling nets and webs across the floor. The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network.

  The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze.

  Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material.

  These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold.

  The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing. Phaethon remembered that Ao Nisibus had been a Warlock, after all.

  “Oyez, oyez!” cried Atkins, rapping the heel of his baton against the floor with a crack of noise. “All persons having business with the Honorable Appellate Court of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth in the matter of the estate of Helion Prime Rhadamanthus draw nigh! Order is established, Your Lordships, the seals are placed, the recordings proceed.”

  A sense of impalpable pressure, a tension in the air, an undefined sensation of being scrutinized: these were the only clues to Phaethon that the cubes were now occupied by the intelligence of the Curia.

  Once, long ago, these had been men. Now, recorded into an electrophotonic matrix, they were without passion or favoritism, and their most secret thoughts were open to review and scrutiny should any charge of unfairness or prejudice ever be brought against them.

  The Never-First Schools always urged that the Judges should change from election to election and poll to poll, as did the members of the Parliament. The more traditional schools, however, always argued that, in order for law to be fair, reasonable men must be able to predict how it will be enforced, so as to be able to know what is and is not legal. Having sat on the bench for 7,400 years, the minds of the Curia were, like the approach of glaciers, like the ponderous motions of the outer planets, very predictable indeed.

  A voice radiated from the central cube: “The Court is now in session. We note that the counselor for the purported beneficiary has chosen to manifest itself as an armored penguin. We remind the counselor of the penalties attaching to contempt of Court. Does the counselor require a recess or any extra channels to array itself more presentably?”

  “No, Your Lordship.” The image of Rhadamanthus faded, and, fitting in to the prevailing aesthetic, the penguin turned into a large green cone.

  Phaethon eyed the cone dubiously. “Oh, much better …” he muttered.

  “Order in the Court!” radiated the cube on the left.

  Phaethon straightened uncomfortably. He had never been in a Court of Law before; he did not know of anybody who had, except in historic dramas.
Almost all such disputes were settled by Hortators finding compromises, or by Sophotechs deducing solutions to such problems before they arose. Was Phaethon supposed to take this quaint old-fashioned ceremony seriously? As ceremonies went, it was not the most impressive. It was not even accompanied by any music or psychostimulants.

  Phaethon saw how Atkins, the bailiff, stood in a relaxed and watchful posture, hand still on the baton-weapon. Atkins was, perhaps, the only man in all of the Golden Oecumene who was armed. The idea of a Court of Law, the idea that men must be compelled by the threat of force to abide by civilized rules, might be a hideous anachronism in this enlightened day and age. But Atkins still took it seriously.

  And perhaps it was serious. Very serious. The future of Phaethon’s life was about to be decided for him, decided by forces beyond his control.

  “Rhadamanthus,” Phaethon whispered. “Do something.”

  The green cone slid forward and spoke: “Your Lordships, I do have a preliminary motion.”

  The middle cube: “We will entertain to hear your motion, Counselor.”

  “The benenciary—”

  “Alleged beneficiary!” snapped Gannis.

  “—finds he is taken by surprise and is unprepared. However, he would face civil penalties in another suit if he should break his word and avail himself of the memories redacted under the Lakshmi agreement. But were this Honorable Court to order discovery of that evidence, my client would be able to avail himself of those memories, would be prepared to face this tribunal, and yet would not face civil penalties for breach of contract.”

  Gannis said, “How would he not face penalty? If he regains his memories, he is in violation!”