The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  “If all of you redact your memories again, in time to hide all your thoughts before December, then I’ll have a free hand, unobserved, unopposed, to continue to investigate my past. There’s plenty of evidence floating around, including records which cannot legally be edited or altered, such as finance records or property contracts. If I spent my fortune, there must be a record about what I spent it to buy.

  “You can make me forget what I did. But you cannot make it so that it never had happened. That’s the whole paradox of lies, isn’t it? The problem is that, ultimately, every part of reality is logically connected to every other part. As long as I do not cooperate in my own self-deception, then you cannot lie to me, and reject one part of reality, without trying to reject all of reality.”

  Phaethon, seeing the perplexity of the Chimera, had to laugh aloud. “No wonder my past version had not been frightened by this horrible amnesia Agreement! Its downfall is inevitable, like the downfall of every system not based on reality. My victory is and has always been assured. All I have to do is wait until December, and not open the box.”

  The Chimera said, “Your plan sounds logical.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But logic is not paramount in human affairs.”

  Phaethon uttered a noise, half snort, half laugh. “It is from hearing comments like that one, sir, that I derive that certainty of mine which was puzzling you earlier. Logic is paramount in all things.”

  “Then why did your earlier self consent to the Lakshmi Agreement? If the dangerous project which so obsessed you had actually been your highest concern, you would not have agreed. You speculate that your earlier self had been relying on the December Transcendence to return the lost memories. Your memories are gone for eighteen or nineteen months. But why?”

  Phaethon frowned, displeased. “Perhaps I merely needed a vacation, or—”

  “You were hoping to avoid the penalties imposed by the Hortators for your negligent behavior. You thought you could deceive them into forgetting your offenses for a time. Isn’t this the same type of deception you have just condemned as illogical?”

  “Well, I …” (What had his earlier self been intending, anyway?)

  “Does anything prevent the College of Hortators, once they recall your negligence, from publicly condemning the same project they condemned before, and for the same reasons? No, Phaethon, you pretend you are an isolated individual, separate from the world, from society, and able to defy them. But when that separation became a reality, it was you, you Phaethon, who could not accept what that reality was.”

  “What do you mean?!”

  “It was you who drove your wife to enter a permanent delirium tantamount to suicide.”

  “No! I cannot accept that!”

  “An odd comment! It must be assumed you do not mean to reject reality, since you have criticized those who do so heavily.” There was a gentle irony to the human head’s tone. The eagle head spoke loudly: “Does this mean there is a plan for recovering your wife?!” The cobra head was quiet: “The Eleemosynary Composition is not without sympathy. We are also not without resources.”

  Phaethon grew very still. He spoke in soft, leaden tones: “What are you implying … ?”

  “This is a cruel and callous society in which we live. Those who cannot pay their housing bills are thrown into the streets. Recorded minds of any type who cannot pay the rentals on their computer brain space are deleted. Those who are trapped permanently in the dreamscapes, who cannot pay the fees that service requires, are cut off, and ejected into reality.

  “The Eleemosynary Composition offers to manipulate the stock market by altering the buying habits of that percent of the population which comprises our membership, and by using negotiation, buyouts, and other financial maneuvers to either buy the companies in which Daphne’s stock has been invested, or to ruin the values of those stocks. The Eveningstar Sophotech is serving as investment broker for Daphne; an entity very smart and very accomplished in other fields, but utterly lacking the resources which the Seven Peers can bring to bear.”

  It was true. Just in terms of consumer goods alone, the Eleemosynary Composition controlled about one-tenth of the human world gross industrial product.

  The Chimera said, “Once Daphne’s stock is bankrupt, Eveningstar will eject her from her dream coffin and into the real world. She will be utterly unable to cope with a reality she has redacted from all memory. She may not be legally competent to govern her own affairs. By virtue of your marriage communion circuit, you hold join copyright ownership on certain of her intellectual properties, including her personality template. At that point, you may be legally able to insert a temporary memory block to redact all recent memories and personality changes; this would not be a personality-edit or alteration. She would simply be restored to the condition she was in before she decided to commit delusion-suicide. She will have the legal right, once she is sane again, to open her redacted memories, and let herself go insane again. But you will be present. You will have an opportunity to persuade her to live in reality.”

  Phaethon said nothing. His eyes were wide.

  The Chimera said, “Your forgotten project is not the most important thing in life to you. If you agree to cease all investigations into your past, the Eleemosynary Composition will aid you in the fashion we have outlined to recover your wife back to reality and sanity. You should agree not only because you personally shall receive the benefit of her love and gratitude, once she is restored; but also because it is your duty. You are her husband. Your marriage oath requires that you save her.

  “You may call the Eleemosynary exchange from any public annex. We will leave you to meditate upon your answer.”

  And the Chimera vanished.

  14

  THE GOLDEN DOORS

  1.

  Was One cowadice or prudence that made him hesitate? One impulse was to rush to the nearest Eleemosynary agency and throw himself down, begging, weeping, instantly agreeing to anything and everything it took to recover his wife from her horrible exile, her living death of permanent delusion.

  Another impulse, more cautious, told him to investigate further.

  Certainly the Eleemosynary Composition had not lied. It was true that, these days, very few people (aside from Neptunians) ever even attempted to lie; it was altogether too easy to get caught by all-knowing Sophotechs, too easy for honest men to confirm their statements by public display of their thought records. But it was also true that people could be mistaken, or could indulge in exaggerated (but honest) judgments of relative worth. The Eleemosynary Composition, for example, might judge something to be “difficult” or “impossible” which was not.

  Was it impossible for Phaethon to wake his dream-trapped wife? Impossible?

  He had to be certain. He had to see for himself.

  Phaethon reached for the yellow disk icon floating in the glass of the table surface, the communication channel. It should take only a moment to telepresent himself to the Eveningstar Sophotech who had custody of his wife’s body. But he did not wish to be further observed; all this prying into his life was beginning to annoy him. Even as he reached, with his other hand he gestured the balcony window closed. Immediately, a panel was covering the view, and the sound and light and movement from outside was shut off.

  Phaethon froze, startled. It was suddenly silent, with the total and absolute silence of a vacuum. The panels had not slid or moved to shut; one moment they were not there; the next they were in place. There was no hint or whisper of noise from beyond the panels, such as a Silver-Gray scene would have provided, to maintain the illusion of three dimensions and of consistency of objects.

  Phaethon’s hand was near the table surface. Still he hesitated.

  “Rhadamanthus, why am I hesitating? What am I thinking?” He asked the question aloud before he remembered that he was disconnected from the Rhadamanthine system. (Had he been connected, he would not have forgotten, even for a moment.)

  There was an ic
on for a Noetic self-consideration circuit in the tabletop. It was a crude, old-fashioned model, weeks or months out of date. But Phaethon thought that if he could clean a room manually, he could clean his nervous system of emotional maladjustments manually.

  He touched the icon. Another, smaller window, like a tabletop, opened in the unsupported midair to his left. The new window was lit with the colors, dots and grids of standard psychometric iconography. He saw that his tension levels were high; grief and rancor were burning like a fire in a coal mine, sullen, just below the surface of his thoughts; and the temptation simply to give in to the Eleemosynary’s bargain, to have someone or something else solve this problem for him, was very high.

  The short-term emotional association index was carrying an image from the dream consciousness in his hypothalamus. He reached into the surface of the window, and through it, to open the index box and look at the image list.

  There it was. He was associating the sudden silence of the closed balcony with being trapped in a coffin, the airtight lid slamming shut, inescapable. A second association led to another dream image; that of his wife being locked in a coffin, still alive but asleep, her eyes moving beneath their lids. And, from another branch, a third image led away: the sound from outside had been shut off, not like a door closing but like a communication link being turned off. Which, in fact, it was. Phaethon discovered that this was the unconscious thought that was making him uneasy. Uneasy, because he realized that he actually was in a sort of a casket, namely, in a public hospice telepresence box.

  If he did not go to visit his wife in person, there would be a signal going from his brain to some mannequin or remote, and back again. That signal time would have to be bought with Helion’s money, and the signal content might be recorded.

  Or distorted? Or edited? If and only if he went in person, and saw her with his own eyes, could he be sure the signals entering his brain were unedited.

  What if this forgotten Lakshmi Agreement had put sense-filters on public channels to forbid Phaethon from seeing certain objects? (It had happened to him at Destiny Lake; he almost had not seen the Observationist School astronomer who told him about Helion’s solar disaster.)

  With the index open, Phaethon saw his tension levels jump again. Evidently thoughts about Helion were, at this moment, very upsetting to him. Upsetting, because he really did not know whether the version of Helion who was still alive was his Helion.

  Should he be in mourning over a dead father, grief-stricken? Or should he be laughing with exasperation because a mistake of minor protocol, some fluke of overly zealous law, was trying to cheat Helion out of his entire fortune? There was only an hour missing from the present Helion’s memory: that hardly constituted enough change to consider him a new and separate person, no matter what the law said.

  Phaethon saw in the remote section of the index what he was really thinking, deep down. He wanted to talk to Helion about his problems.

  He wanted fatherly advice and support.

  From the bottom of the index box, where links to deeper brain sections glimmered like strands of smoke, came an image from memory.

  2.

  The picture was this: Helion, dressed in armor white as ice, with a dark gorget covering his throat and shoulders, stood proud and tall on stairs of blue lapis lazuli. Behind him rose doors of burnished gold, tall and shining, inset with panels of black marble. The panels were carved with eight symbols of the rights and duties of manhood: a sheathed sword, an open book, a sheaf of ripe grain, a bundle of rods containing an ax, a cogwheel, a floral wedding trellis, a stork, a Gnostic eye.

  Phaethon remembered those doors well. These symbols represented the right and duty of self-defense, freedom from censorship and the duty to learn, the obligation to labor and the right to keep the fruits thereof, civil rights and civic duties, and the rights and duties associated with cybernetic progress, sexual alliances, reproduction, and self-mutagenesis.

  Those who passed through those doors, and passed the Noetic philosophic and psychiatric integration of their memory paths and thought chains, were recorded as full members of the Rhadamanthine mind structure, granted communion and ascendance. While they might have been voting adults in the eyes of the law and of the Parliament, long before, the scholum of the manor-born did not accept that a child was fully adult until he was proven to be fully sane and honest. That took longer.

  On the day when he had turned five-and-seventy years of age, Phaethon had reached his majority.

  He and Helion had been staying on Europa at the time, negotiating some last details of the Circumjovial Moon effort. The ceremony had been somewhat rough and impromptu, but no less stirring to Phaethon for all that. Helion’s Lieutenants and the High Vavasors of Rhadamanth had radioed updated copies of themselves across the solar system to be present; the copies could be later reintegrated with the primary memories, to create the illusion that Helion’s friends, employees and allies had attended. The palace they used had been grown overnight out of smart-crystal, not properly adjusted for Europa’s light gravity, so that the spires and towers emerged as elongated fairy shapes, lacy and fantastic; irregularities were masked with morphetic illusions or pseudo-matter. There had been no Yule tree, so the gifts were recorded on disks and ornaments hanging from a squat detoxification bush one of Phaethon’s remotes found in their drop-ship. And there had not been enough time to give the chorus properly thought-out pseudo-personalities for the comic reenactments of Phaethon’s youth which traditionally preceded the Noetic submergence ceremony, so Helion had peopled the play stages with characters from popular novels, Jovian history, and ancient myth, and whomever else he could find cheaply on the local area channels. The reenactments, normally austere with a restrained dry wit, turned into bizarre, anachronistic buffoonery. Phaethon loved it nonetheless, every minute.

  In his memory, he saw once again how Helion had looked as he stood before the golden doors of the submergence chamber. The semi-Helions, his partials, had bowed and stepped aside, and there was Helion himself, the original, standing on the stairs, gleaming in his white armor. (This armor, at that point, was still an extrapolation; completion of the Solar Array project was still five hundred years in the future. No one really knew what architecture of interfaces would have to be built into such armor, or what the solar deep-station environment would be like.)

  Helion had put one hand on Phaethon’s shoulder and, with his other hand, had stopped the official count of time. The partials and computer-generated people around them froze. Helion had leaned and said, “Son, once you go in there, the full powers and total command structures of the Rhadamanth Sophotech will be at your command. You will be invested with godlike powers; but you will still have the passions and distempers of a merely human spirit. There are two temptations which will threaten you. First, you will be tempted to remove your human weaknesses by abrupt mental surgery. The Invariants do this, and to a lesser degree, so do the White Manorials, abandoning humanity to escape from pain. Second, you will be tempted to indulge your human weakness. The Cacophiles do this, and, to a lesser degree, so do the Black Manorials. Our society will gladly feed every sin and vice and impulse you might have; and then stand by helplessly and watch as you destroy yourself; because the first law of the Golden Oecumene is that no peaceful activity is forbidden. Free men may freely harm themselves, provided only that it is only themselves that they harm.”

  Phaethon knew what his sire was intimating, but he did not let himself feel irritated. Not today. Today was the day of his majority, his emancipation; today, he could forgive even Helion’s incessant, nagging fears.

  Phaethon also knew that most Rhadamanthines were not permitted to face the Noetic tests until they were octogenerians; most did not pass on their first attempt, or even their second. Many folk were not trusted with the full powers of an adult until they reached their Centennial. Helion, despite criticism from the other Silver-Gray branches, was permitting Phaethon to face the tests five years early. Phaethon had
been more than pleased to win his sire’s validation and support; but now, perhaps, Helion was wondering if his critics after all had been correct.

  “Are you suggesting I sign a Werewolf Contract, Father?” A Werewolf Contract appointed someone with an override, and authorized them to use force, if necessary, to keep the subscribing party away from addictions, bad nanomachines, bad dreams, or other self-imposed mental alterations. (The actual legal term for this document was “a Confessed Judgment of Conditional Mental Incompetence and Appointment of Guardian.”)

  “I am not suggesting that,” said Helion, “but, now that you bring it up … have you thought about it? Perhaps you ought. Many eminent people, well respected in their communities, have signed such things. No one else need know.” But he looked down when he said it, unable to meet Phaethon’s gaze.

  “Are you thinking of signing such a thing, Father?” Phaethon asked with a wry half smile.

  Helion straightened up, his eyes bright, glaring down at Phaethon. Helion said nothing, but there was such a look of august majesty, of haughty pride, shining in his face, that there was no need to say anything.

  Phaethon let his smile inch wider, and he spread his hands, and quirking one eyebrow, as if to say, So you see?

  Then Phaethon said, “It’s a paradox, Father. I cannot be, at the same time and in the same sense, a child and an adult. And, if I am an adult, I cannot be, at the same time, free to make my own successes, but not free to make my own mistakes.”

  Helion looked sardonic. “‘Mistake’ is such a simple word. An adult who suffers a moment of foolishness or anger, one rash moment, has time enough to delete or destroy his own free will, memory, or judgment. No one is allowed to force a cure on him. No one can restore his sanity against his will. And so we all stand quietly by, with folded hands and cold eyes, and meekly watch good men annihilate themselves. It is somewhat … quaint … to call such a horrifying disaster a ‘mistake.’”