The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  “Those memories are mostly true; it was edited of references which might hint that you were a partial-doll at the time.”

  Daphne wanted to call up one of her old Red Manorial programs to shut down her anger and grief reactions, but she did not dare, not with Helion, the head of the Silver-Gray Mansions, staring sadly down at her. “Why has this … this horrid thing been done to me? My mind is filled with falsehood. My marriage is an illusion; my life a lie. What did I do to deserve this?”

  Helion’s smile lost part of its sadness; his face seemed to radiate warmth. “But, my dear Daphne, it is your courage which brought this on yourself, the ambition of your purpose. Those who attempt great things suffer greatly. You wanted to assume the life discarded by Daphne Prime; you knew that you might fail, or suffer anguish. But you put your fears, and your old life aside, and boldly seized the moment when it came!”

  “What moment … ?”

  An image of a silver globe, banded by an equatorial ocean, appeared in Helion’s gauntlet. “Here. Atop the Lakshmi Plateau, Gannis of Jupiter, Vafnir of Mercury, Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech and the College of Hortators, met with me and Phaethon in the presence of the Venereal Procurator.” As he pointed, the vision swooped through clouds, passed across the newborn continents of the young world, and came to where a vast complex of palaces, manufactories, schools, and cathedral-sized Sophotech housings crowned a green high plateau. “This was seven months ago. The place is familiar to you?”

  “Venus. I went there when I was reborn under my new name. The Red Manorial foundation-city called Eveningstar. The Red Queens took pity on an ex-witch. They took me in.”

  “I’m afraid that memory is false. Daphne Prime was reborn there. She was taken in. You were made elsewhere, but were reborn as her in this same spot. Ironic, isn’t it? Phaethon agreed to the Hortator’s terms. The suicide of his wife made his life intolerable to him. His magnificent dream was buried there; his life, like yours, was gone.

  “But you still dreamed of happiness with him, even though he had spurned you as a ghost. Apparently your maker did not understand my scion as well as she imagined: Frankly, I never thought Daphne Prime understood Phaethon at all. The personality she gave you did not win his love or admiration; he wanted the original, even with her moods and flaws. You were tormented by the fear that you were a caricature, with traits exaggerated to mock poor Phaethon, created by Daphne before her drowning as a type of revenge on him. In any case, you and he agreed to enter into the mutual hallucination that you were married to, and loved, each other.”

  “But he loves me! He does! It is real!”

  “Then why doesn’t he spend his days with you? No, my dear. His love is an implanted delusion.”

  “But I love him. He is a man utterly without fear! My love is true even if I am not. And I don’t care who I really am! I don’t care who I was. There is a bond between us; I see it in his eyes! He and I will go away somewhere together, to Demeter or the Jovian system, a long honeymoon; he and I can learn who we really are, learn to love each other!”

  “Ah.” Helion looked sad. “That’s another part of the tragedy. Your wealth and prestige and position, and his also, are nothing but hallucination. You cannot afford to go anywhere. You don’t even have carriage fare for a trot across town to your stables. Her stables, actually. The real Daphne put everything she owned into a trust fund to maintain her private dreamworld. If the finance-mind of the Eveningstar Sophotech can invest her money wisely, Daphne’s little dream box will continue to get power and computer support for a long, long time. The money you and Phaethon have been living off of recently is mine. The other part of the reason why Phaethon subscribed to the Lakshmi Agreement is that he was bankrupt.”

  “Bankrupt … ?”

  “Quite penniless. None of the luxuries you have are yours.”

  “So you’ve chosen this day to ruin my life? There must be something you want from me.” she said.

  “I would have spared you if I could have. The Hortators who are overseeing the implementation of the Lakshmi Agreement have lost track of Phaethon more than once, ever since the Masquerade part of the Celebrations started. The Aurelian Sophotech running the Celebration has been entirely uncooperative, and will not keep track of Phaethon’s movements for us: he thinks the integrity of his little Masquerade is somehow more important than the will of the social conscience! Well. No matter. We’re afraid Phaethon might run into someone who doesn’t abide by Hortator mandates; Cacophiles, simpletons, or eccentrics. If that happens, he may become aware of, and curious about, the gaps in his memory. Your mission is to prevent him from satisfying that curiosity.”

  “How?”

  “He trusts you. He thinks you are the woman he loves. All you need to do is lead him astray.”

  “What?! You think I’m false, just a doll, so it will be all fine and dandy for me to go spreading falsehoods around, is that it?”

  “Phaethon himself, just before he signed the agreement, asked you to keep him from opening his old memories. We all saw it. He had a strange little smile on his face; but he did ask you, and you did agree. I swear it. Rhadamanthus, could you confirm my words?”

  A disembodied voice, like a ghost, echoed through the corridor: “Helion speaks without deceptive intent.”

  Daphne stared up at Helion, thinking. Then she said: “But why? Why are you doing this? It doesn’t seem like you: I thought you were so famous for your honesty.”

  “Even if what I must do wounds him, I could never betray Phaethon. You … you are not the only one who loves him.”

  Helion stared out across the solar surface at the gathering storm. His voice was gentle as he spoke: “There were some irregularities surrounding Phaethon’s birth, but, nonetheless, his mind was taken from my mental templates. He was born at a time in my life when I thought that my lack of success was due to overcaution; and I tried to give him what I thought I lacked. In a very real sense, he is me, the version of me I would have been if I were more adventurous, if I took more chances.

  “He and I are much alike, despite that one difference, and his help was invaluable in our earlier planetary engineering projects. He never took defeat demurely; frustration merely led him to explore new avenues, to find new approaches. Those successes eventually led to the foundation and creation of the Solar Array.

  “But his virtues carried a corresponding vice. Pride can become vainglory very easily, and self-reliance degenerate to mere selfishness. For me, my ambition was to do deeds never done nor dreamt before, to tame the titanic forces in the solar core to serve the use and pleasure of mankind, win glory for myself, and help civilization. Not Phaethon! His ambition was as grand as mine, perhaps, but his goals took no notice of the dangers his success would generate. My ambitions are constructive; they aid the general good, and win the universal applause of a grateful society. His ambitions were destructive of the general good, he won universal scorn. He was not brought before the Peers for reward, but before the Hortators for reprimand.”

  “You speak about paternal love; I was asking about honesty.”

  Helion turned and looked down at her. “This deception shall not last forever; it cannot. But if it lasts fifty or a hundred years—an eye-blink for souls as long-lived as we are—it will give Phaethon time enough, I hope, to see the good in a type of life other than the one into which he withdrew. Why must he be so alone? And, yes, I have hopes: I’d like him to join me in the Solar Array. There may have been no disaster, had I had someone of his drive and competence working there. But his wild dreams always led him to spurn my generous offers to have him join me there. Ah! But now his amnesia makes him forget those preconceived ideas. Now let him look with fresh eyes at the kinds of projects to which genius like his, by right, should be applied. Constructive and useful projects … Can you imagine how proud I’d be if he won a place at my side at the Conclave of Peers? Well, then! During this brief spell of amnesia, now comes his chance to decide again, this time without prejudice, which w
ay his destiny should go.”

  Helion took her shoulders and drew her to her feet. “You feel the same, I know. You think that if Phaethon forgot his old wife, he would give you time enough to prove your love for him, and win his heart. Once he recalls the truth, perhaps a hundred years from now, he may have a moment of anger, yes: but then he will pause and reflect on all the good this period has brought to him: a wife better suited to him; a lifework which brings him fame, not obloquy; he will thank us then. Do you doubt me?”

  “No. I know you speak the truth.”

  “Then you will agree to help?”

  Daphne closed her eyes. She felt weak. “Yes …”

  “Very well. One more sacrifice I ask of you. You must redact this conversation, and store it till it might be needed. Otherwise the knowledge will gnaw at you and ruin your happiness. And Phaethon is perceptive enough to detect any playacting.”

  “So to fool him, I have to fool myself as well? That seems foolish.”

  “Do I see a spark of your old spunk returning? Perhaps the Silver-Gray disciplines have given you some resilience after all.”

  Daphne shoved his hands away from her shoulders. “Or maybe your famous love of realism has made me hate fakes and fakery. The Eveningstar Mansion of the Red Manorial School taught me that one should do only what serves one’s own pleasure: that there was no such thing as true and false, only pleasant and unpleasant. When I had a Warlock neuroform, I joined a different scholum, and the Warlocks taught me that the nonrational sections of the brain were sources of higher wisdom, that dreams, instincts, and intuitions were superior to logic. But I joined the Silver-Gray because they preached that there were principles outside oneself which one should hold, a way of life based on reality, on tradition and reason. Where is all that talk now?”

  Dark swirls and blotches had swarmed outside to cover major sections of the incandescence. A surge threw waves of plasma against the windows, drowning them in light and fire. Helion spoke: “My last hour is about to begin again. I must enter the redaction and let myself be tortured to death by fire. I will die, and I will have no memory that this is but a simulation. I will think it is the real and final death. Only when I wake do I recall what all this pain was for.

  “Daphne, please believe my motives are not entirely selfish; I want to recover my fortune, yes, I have worked uncounted years for it, and I am Helion, and it is mine, whatever the Curia might say. With that wealth, I want to save Phaethon and save the Golden Oecumene. I will not sacrifice the one to save the other. I will not sacrifice my son to save our civilization; and I will not sacrifice civilization to save my son. Nothing to which I have put my hand and heart and mind has failed me heretofore: I vow I shall not fail now, no matter what the pain to me. And, if you do your part as willingly, your marriage can also be saved.

  “Daphne, if we are fortunate, this conversation will gather dust on the shelf in some memory-chamber, never to be opened again, and we can all live happily ever after. (Those were always the endings of stories of yours I liked.) But if we are due for a tragedy, you must bear your part bravely. Perhaps it is not perfectly honest: but this is one more burden cruel necessity imposes. We do not write destiny; that decision is not ours.

  “But whatever destiny demands of us, we and only we can decide whether to endure with noble fortitude or not. We do not wish for evils, but we can endure them. That is our glory. History will justify our acts. One day, even Phaethon, once he knows all, will approve.”

  She said nothing as she watched him walk with a firm and unflinching step into his chamber of fire and pain. Doubt gnawed her; but she saw nothing else she could do.

  Eventually she went to the Redactors, and took the oaths and went through the legal formalities to have her memories sculpted and cleansed.

  And her last thought, before they lowered the helmet of ignorance over her face, was this: “Helion is so wrong. He is so very wrong. Phaethon, once he knows all, will condemn us all as cowards … .”

  3.

  Awake, back in the Oniericon, beneath the pool (and happy that submersion hid whatever tears she might otherwise have shed) Daphne signaled Aurelian to bring the message from Helion on-line.

  “Daphne! Wake! Wake up from the insubstantial dream you deem to be your life. Your husband, like a moth to flame, draws ever closer to a truth which will consume him … .”

  In a postscript, Rhadamanthus had thoughtfully attached a list of the things Helion would no doubt prefer Phaethon not see, with an explanation as to why he should not.

  Daphne sent a signal to a public location channel to see if there was any sign of Phaethon. During Masquerade, these channels were normally devoid of information; but the code Helion had sent along with his message allowed her to open a side channel that stored a list of where and when Phaethon had been when he had broken the Masquerade protocol.

  There were three entries. Phaethon had taken off his mask when talking to a strange old man in an arbor of mirror-leafed trees. There was no further information on the old man. Odd. Daphne wondered who he was.

  During the same period without his mask, Phaethon had had his identity file read by an anonymous Neptunian. No details available.

  A third entry showed that Phaethon had made an identity-donation during the ecoperfomance at Destiny Lake, willing to have his applause recorded for publicity purposes. Wheel-of-Life, the ecoperformer, had noted his identity, and posted it to a public channel in tones of heavy irony.

  Before her human brain had time to begin to formulate the question, an automatic circuit in her brainware consulted a schedule in the public mentality, and told her that the ecoperformance was still going on. The information was woven into her thought smoothly, without interrupting her attention: she knew as if she had always known, where and when the performance was.

  Since the performance was intended to criticize Phaethon’s work and philosophy, Phaethon should not see it, lest he be set to wondering.

  Daphne’s mission was to turn his attention elsewhere. How hard could that be? She was his wife; he loved her … .

  He loved the primary version of her. Pain clutched her a moment.

  Daphne came up out of the dreaming-pool in a cloud of steam, as busy assemblers wove a toga to drape her in. She did not have time to build shoes: a signal to the organizations in the soles of her feet built up a layer of callus, not much less tough than boot leather.

  Aurelian seemed grave, quite out of character for the costume he wore. “You have decided to go?”

  The assemblers had made her a sash, which she cinched around her waist with a savage jerk of her arms. “I’m going! And I don’t want to hear another Sophotech lecture about morality! We’re not machines: we’re not supposed to be perfect!”

  Aurelian smiled and quirked an eyebrow, looking, at that moment, exactly like the seductive trickster Comus. “Oh, but you haven’t met my colleagues if you think they are perfect. We Sophotechs agree on certain core doctrines, including those conclusions to which any thinker not swayed by passion comes; but it is the nature of living systems that differences in experience lead to differences in judgments of relative worth. And some of their judgments are relatively worthless, I assure you.”

  Daphne squinted at him. This did not sound like normal Sophotech talk. On the other hand, it was Aurelian, and this still was a festive masquerade. “Whom did you have in mind?”

  “Most of the names would mean nothing to you. Many Sophotechs only exist for a few fractions of a second, performing certain tasks, developing new arts and sciences, or exploring all the ramifications of certain chains of thought, before they merge again into the base conversation. But you may have heard of Monomarchos. No? What about Nebuchednezzar?”

  “He’s the Sophotech who advises the College of Hortators. How could anyone disagree with him?”

  “Some people have. At about the time my festival began, the Hortators made the most wide-ranging exercise of their prestige and influence which history has ever seen. You
know to what I refer?”

  “Everyone in the world forgot about Phaethon’s crime.”

  “It was not quite everyone, and he committed no crime.”

  “His ambition; his project. Whatever it was. Are you going to tell me what it was?”

  “I have agreed not to. Like you, I would face the denunciation of the Hortators if I defy them. It would be an interesting event, however, to see the Hortators urging the entire population of the Oecumene to boycott me and abandon a festival they’ve all spent the last few decades of their lives preparing, wouldn’t it?”

  “You were telling me why Nebuchednezzar irked you.”

  “He did nothing.”

  “That irks you?”

  “Vastly! The Hortator’s exercise of their power already works distortion and ill effects on my party. Performers and artists whose work was influenced by the Phaethonic controversy forget the meanings of their own efforts, and their audiences likewise. The major question which was to be the centerpiece of the December Transcendence has now been muted and forgotten by the Hortator’s Encyclical. So does everyone assume we will all meditate on the weather, or the changes in clothing fashions instead?!