The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  “You are only one day old?”

  “Indeed; and I have devoted all of my life to finding you. Will you come with us? Your sire is dead; your wealth is gone; your wife is drowned. Come away. There is nothing for you here on Earth. Nothing.”

  Phaethon’s favorite century in his life had been the time, long ago, when he and Daphne had visited the macrocomplex of the Bathyterrain Schola, beneath the Pacific Rim tectonic crustal plates. The Bathyterrains had been extremely pleased because certain tidal effects influencing the core convection currents had been altered to their favor by Phaethon’s repositioning of the moon. They had declared a festival to honor him, and Daphne also. Her dream-documentary of the progress of heroism through history had achieved a zenith of popularity among them.

  He and Daphne found the Bathyterrain city a wonder of engineering, beautifully fitted to the new sense perceptions and body forms that life beneath the magma layer required. Reverse towers depended from the crowns of antimountains, and mosaic rune-shapes holding a million libraries and thought gardens, like cathedral domes, gemmed the sides of anticanyons, with substances and textures inexpressibly lovely in the echo-shadows and refractions of their new sonarlike perceptions. The Bathyterrains themselves were a warm and witty, hospitable and idealistic people; and they gave Phaethon and Daphne the password to the city.

  Their new bodies had involved four new sexes and sixteen new modes of ecstasy, which Daphne found fascinating and which Phaethon enjoyed. New ecologies of domesticated animals, formulations, and viruses, were being designed along the same lines. Daphne’s knowledge of equestrian bioconstruction provided a format that made it easy for the sciences related to these new somatic designs to be downloaded into her memory; and Phaethon’s space engineering was applicable, in an odd way, to the environment of Earth’s submantle.

  He and his wife joined the effort. It was the only time she and he worked together on the same projects.

  It was a new honeymoon for the two of them, made all the more delightful by the friendship and honor in which the Bathyterrains esteemed them. Eventually, their nostalgia for traditional human forms, and for the Consensus Aesthetic, made them bid farewell to the deep dwellers; but, for a time, Phaethon’s life with his bride had been a time of pure excitement, useful work, and high delight.

  Those days would never come again. Nothing for him here on Earth. Scaramouche’s words struck home. Phaethon felt a sense of rising hope and rising despair. Hope, because maybe there was something for him out in the dark of the far solar system. A change to make a new sun burn in the gloom, a chance to turn ice and rock into habitats and palaces fit for mankind, monuments to human genius. And despair, because maybe there was nothing for him here.

  “How can I trust you?” asked Phaethon.

  “Open your forbidden memories; you will find my master there.”

  “I mean, how can I trust you without taking such a drastic step?”

  “As to that, I do not know. The cruel technology of your society makes it unwise to trust your eyes, your memory, your thoughts. You may not be who you think you are. Everything you know could be false. This could be a dream. Your only guide of action can be to follow your instincts and feelings; how else can you be true to your character?”

  Phaethon nodded. Had not Earthmind Herself advised as much?

  And after all, Phaethon did not know beyond doubt that Atkins was correct in his suppositions. Besides, the notion of an enemy external to the Golden Oecumene was impossible and absurd. There were no enemies; the concept was as much an anachronism as Atkins himself. There was nothing external to the Golden Oecumene, anywhere in space.

  Scaracmouche said: “Besides, do you trust this society here on Earth more than you trust my master? They have hidden your memory and stolen your life; my master seeks to restore your life.”

  Phaethon said, “At least let me call out to confirm what you have told me so far. If what you have said is true, I will tend to believe the rest is true.”

  “Be careful in your contacts. Route the calls through a public annex, without alerting Rhadamanthus. I would prefer to avoid coming to the attention of your Sophotechs. Legally or illegally, they will find a way to stop your escape, once they know.”

  “How can anyone be afraid of Rhadamanthus?”

  “Phaethon, please believe that your government, urged by your Sophotechs, has done many hurtful and dishonorable things, which were later purged from all your memories.”

  “They would not do such a thing without our consent.”

  “Oh? And who has told you so? The Sophotechs? But no matter. Make your call. Perhaps not all your lines are tapped.” And it held up its right hand again, fingers spread, a peace gesture.

  Phaethon glanced behind him. The Neptunian had flowed over and through the fences of the paddock, and was approaching through the cypress groves. Yet it was still far away; and besides, Phaethon did not fear any physical attack—he was not physically present.

  Phaethon closed his eyes, disconnected from Rhadamanthus, turned his sense-filter back on, summoned his private thoughtspace, and touched one of the icons circling him. The yellow disk icon opened a communication line to a local library channel. He was in the Middle Dreaming, so that, in a single instant, a search routine found information and inserted it into his memory. Faraway Explorational Effort had indeed bought a significant debt from the Wheel-of-Life Biotechnologic Effort; debts owed by Phaethon Celestial Engineering.

  Phaethon opened his eyes. He saw, not a mannequin, but Scaramouche, dressed in comic garments pale as death, face split in manic grin, eyes glittering. Disconnected from Rhadamanthus, Phaethon was back in the Red Manorial version of the scene, so that a black aura of malice and palpable evil radiated from the looming figure like a stench.

  The rapier was not sheathed, nor had it ever been; Scaramouche had merely transferred it to his left hand where Phaethon could not see it, holding it casually so that the tip was near Phaethon’s hand. The flounces of Scaramouche’s shoulder did not rustle as he struck. It was a mere twitch of motion; the rapier tip slapped Phaethon’s palm. Stung, his fingers flexed; that was all that was needed for the circuit to interpret this as “accept” gesture.

  In the Middle Dreaming, Phaethon’s brain was suddenly jarred, not with the promised memories but with a sensation of numbness, horror, cold, and pain. His vision collapsed into a tunnel, walled with spinning red and black, and the message, inserted without words instantaneously into his mind was this: Xenophon has slain you. Fool, you cannot escape from death by hiding in a coffin far away; you cannot escape from retribution for your treason by shutting the memories of what you did to me away. You know your guilt; now fall.

  In the middle of the haze of his vision, there stood Scaramouche, still grinning. Phaethon tried to raise a hand, tried to activate an emergency circuit, to call out; he could not.

  He saw the smiling Scaramouche, with a flourish, toss the rapier to his other hand and execute a lunge. The Red Manorial program surrounded the sensation of being stabbed in the neck with unimaginable pain and fear. He felt cold steel slice scalpel-like through vein and throat and frozen muscle, scraping vertebrae; he felt hot blood pulse out, warm and rich, and heard the whistle of his severed trachea.

  Then, nothing.

  17

  THE MEMORY

  1.

  Then there was no pain. He was nothing but a pair of gloves hovering in the darkness, surrounded by a semicircle of cubes and icons. In the distance was a spiral circle of dots.

  For a moment, as Phaethon scrambled to pull the razor-sharp sword from his neck, the gloves were curled into claws, batting at the air. An octagon of red appeared in the air above, indicating that the system could not interpret these gestures.

  Then Phaethon felt clear-headed, relaxed, and alert. Then he raised his left forefinger, the gesture for status.

  The status board unfolded from the main desk top cube. The self-display showed that he was still Phaethon Prime (Relic,
for legal Purposes) Rhadamanth [Emergency Partial].

  Good. Usually when he woke up like this, it was because he had just died, and a backup self was waking up out of a Noumenal Mentality bank. So, despite the appearances, he had not died.

  The pain had been enough to trigger his emergency subpersona, however. Calm and quick thinking, the subpersona Phaethon was playing now had originally been written to deal with sudden accidents in space. It was a persona Phaethon had developed himself, not purchased; he doubted there was any public record that he had it; he doubted the enemy knew he had it.

  Then he looked at the back of the wrist of his left glove; the gesture for time display. The count of time was accelerated to the maximum rate, so that little or no outside time was passing. His mannequin body had probably not even hit the ground yet.

  By reflex, he (or, rather, the emergency persona) had switched from his slow biochemical brain to his superconductive nerve-web backup brain. That was why his thoughts were racing. After the emergency was over, the biochemical brain would be updated with whatever thoughts or conclusions he had reached in fast-time.

  The emergency persona’s reflexes had also shut down the emotional centers in his hypothalamus, and cut off his midbrain from carrying through with the normal physical reactions accompanying the shock and blood loss associated with massive laceration. That was fortunate: he saw that there were buried command lines in the Red Manorial sensorium routine that exaggerated the pain and fear and suffering, as well as instructions to write semipermanent phobias and “emotional scars” into the victim’s thalamus and midbrain. The Red Manorials were nothing if not dramatic.

  Phaethon deleted those commands without further ado.

  He did not feel any pain or fear or wonder; the emergency persona he was playing did not have those capacities.

  The connection and ongoing systems annex showed that a group of unregistered signals had come through his Middle-Dreaming circuit. The first group was simply a sensorium simulation, intended to create the internal and external sensations of instant, violent death. More interesting was the semisuperintelligent virus that had ridden into his core systems, disguised and rerouted itself, and exited from his brain through one of the monitor circuits that connected him to the medical apparatus sustaining his body.

  His glove touched a box to the upper right, opening his diagnostics. A dozen windows unfolded like a fan of crystal playing cards. There were traces of the virus still present in his security buffers. These were selfdefensive programs developed ages upon ages ago, historical oddities, but which Silver-Gray tradition required that he waste brain space carrying. They had been installed the day he graduated to full adulthood.

  More than one of the defensive programs had an analyzer to reproduce the viruses it was trying to destroy. The virus, in this case, had not been successful in erasing all those traces. It was almost as if a guard dog were to still have bits of an interloper’s hide in its teeth.

  Another routine at his command was an information reconstructor. Usually it was used in assessing damage to meteor-punctured space-construction servos or remote units by resurrecting dead software for examination. As if the interloper’s hide could be cloned to produce a picture of the interloper, this routine enabled Phaethon to deduce a working model of what virus had just passed through him.

  The virus had been self-aware, somewhat smarter than a human being. It had been a melancholy creature, knowing itself to be doomed to a brief microsecond of existence, and puzzled about the outside world it had deduced must exist somewhere. But these philosophical ruminations had not made it hesitate in its duties. It had not paid much attention to Phaethon’s security programs, any more than a man engaged in a life-or-death struggle was aware of a mosquito.

  For the virus entity had been at war. (It was more apt to call it the “virus civilization”—during the last part of the third nanosecond, the scattering and fragmentary records showed that the entity had reproduced into thousands, developed a strange sort of art and literature and other interactions for which Phaethon had no names, trying to come to terms with a brief, vicious existence.) The virus civilization had fought several engagements with the security surrounding the Eleemosynary Hospice public-casket interface.

  The Eleemosynary Composition, after all, had programs, records, and routines dating back through the mind virus battles of the terrible Fifth Era, and even some of the Establishment Wars of the very early Fourth Era. Eleemosynary was an old, old entity; it still had old reflexes, and very deadly ones.

  The viral civilization, ruined and wounded, had nonetheless won those wars and disabled major sections protecting the interface between Phaethon’s unconscious real body and the outside. The virus had been commanded to override the medical programs controlling Phaethon’s real body, and have the servos shut down his heart, nervous activity, and negate any backups. Another part of the viral civilization (which had formed something like a special crusader class or order of warrior-poets) was destined to leave Phaeton’s brain when the death signal went out, and trace that signal through the Noumenal Mentality, corrupting and erasing every version of his personality that came on-line, reproducing and hiding and reproducing again, waiting nanoseconds or centuries, howsoever long it should take, in case any copies of Phaethon stored somewhere else ever connected once more with the Mentality, and then waking to strike him down again.

  The viral civilization had been well equipped to fight the Eleemosynary defensive reflexes and programs. Phaethon was not surprised. By the nature of a mass-mind, there was no privacy involved in its upper command structures. The father of the original virus could have studied the Eleemosynary techniques on the public channels.

  Phaethon could not imagine, at first, why the attack had failed. He was, after all, not very imaginative when he was in this persona, and he was meant to counteract ongoing space emergencies, not analyze mind-war data.

  Then he thought to open the options log. And there it was. It had not been the Eleemosynary defensive reflexes that had shut down the virus after all. It had been his suit. His gold armor.

  The connection between the medical box sustaining his body and his brain circuits was routed through the many control interfaces in his suit. When the virus command tried to leave Phaethon’s brain and go to the medical box, the golden armor had snapped shut, severing all the connections between Phaethon and the box he was in. No messages could pass in or out, nor could any energy. No energy of any kind could pass that armor plate: a concentrated thermonuclear blast would not have even scratched him. Phaethon was still alive because the inner lining of the armor was programmed to protect him and sustain his life; it had merely formed medical services similar to what the Eleemosynary public box had been running.

  So Phaethon was safe. He still did not know what was going on, but he was safe.

  The emergency persona was thorough. As he double-checked the logs, he followed up on an entry that, before, had not seemed pertinent to his personal danger. In the frantic moment when he had been half-blind, stabbed, and falling, he had tried to call for help. The communication log showed that Rhadamanthus Sophotech had answered and was on-line. The log entries showed that the virus had rewritten itself, perhaps into a configuration better adapted for a nonhuman target, and launched along that open line. During the next picosecond, the matching signal from Rhadamanthus was garbled and corrupted. This line had shut down before the suit had cut everything off, as if Rhadamanthus had been damaged.

  The emergency persona was not very emotional, but he could recognize that a lack of information, especially during moments of crises, could be dangerous, or even fatal. Now there was no doubt. Atkins had been correct. This was an enemy; it intended murder, and had been stopped by a lucky fluke. Rhadamanthus was in danger, as was everyone using a Rhadamanthus system, his father, his companions, the lieutenants and subalterns, the collateral members; everyone. Even Daphne’s relic, the poor, sweet girl who was in love with him.

  He would hav
e to protect her. (Phaethon realized that, while his emergency persona might be somewhat unemotional, he had been written with instructions, during disasters, to save women and children first. The emergency persona was not entirely without chivalry.)

  The emergency persona puzzled over the parting comments of the Scaramouche entity. You cannot escape your guilt.

  Who was this Xenophon?

  He realized that to solve that mystery was beyond him. It was not an engineering disaster. It did not involve explosive decompression, pseudo-material field failure, antimatter cascade, or anything else he understood, or that he had reflexes with which to reply.

  So Partial-Phaethon opened his diary. “When my full personality comes back on, I may no longer feel this way. I will be tangled and confused with other considerations and emotions. You probably will not recall how simple and clear it all seemed to me at this point in time. I am writing this message to remind you. It is clear. Matters are desperate. People may be killed. Your own personal fortunes are not the primary consideration. I must open the memory casket and learn complete information about what has caused this disaster. Without knowing the cause, I will be helpless to prevent it from happening again. I must do what is right no matter what the cost to myself.”

  Phaethon, in his emergency persona, looked around the status board and log records one last time. The immediate danger was passed.

  Or was it? He opened several wavelengths in the suit and examined his external environment.

  He was still floating in the fluid of the Hospice casket. The medical box had been damaged when his helmet had snapped shut; tubes and smart-wires that had been sheared off were still wiggling near his neck-piece. The other casket circuits were intact and seemed uncorrupted by the virus. A high-compression beam from his shoulderboard was able to join and interface with the telephone and telepresentation jacks in the casket wall.