The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  In his mind, he touched the yellow disk with his disembodied glove.

  “Rhadamanthus, are you injured?”

  The familiar voice—he thought of it as the penguin voice—sounded in his ears. “Why, of course not, my dear boy. Why on earth should anything be the matter?”

  Phaethon relaxed. The emergency was over after all. He put the emergency persona back to sleep, reentered his normal, slow-time brain, and felt the wash of rage and fear and anxiety rush over him.

  “Someone’s tried to kill me!”

  “In this day and age, dear boy? That’s simply not possible!”

  “I’m coming home.” He opened more communication circuits in his armor, till the telepresentation arrangement was fully engaged. Then he stepped past the Middle Dreaming into the Deep Dreaming, and, in his mind, shoved open the door to Rhadamanthus Mansion, stepping onto the flagstones of the main hall, and looking around wildly.

  Rhadamanthus, looking like an overweight butler, stood blinking in surprise. “What in the world is wrong?!”

  Phaethon pushed past him and ran through the door and up the stairs. Rhadamanthus, panting, breathless, jogged after him, gasping, “What?! What is it?”

  Phaethon paused at the threshold of the memory chamber to catch his breath. It was morning here, and sunlight yellow as gold came slanting from behind him in through windows still cold with dew. Open windows let in a morning chill. The silver and brass fittings of the cabinets to the left and right twinkled like ice. Phaethon saw his breath steaming.

  There, on a low shelf near the window, in a pool of sunlight, was the casket.

  Even from across the room he could see the words on the lid. Sorrow, great sorrow, and deeds of renown without peer, within me sleep; for truth is here.

  Rhadamanthus touched his shoulder. “Phaethon—please tell me what has happened.”

  2.

  Phaethon took a step into the chamber, and looked at Rhadamanthus across his shoulder. The note to himself, written when he was only playing a partial personality, was still ringing in his ears. (It is clear. I must do what is right, no matter what the cost to myself.)

  “You have no recollection of having been attacked by a Neptunian virus-entity?” Phaethon asked Rhadamanthus.

  “Anticipating your orders, sir, I have called the Constabulary, who have constructed a new type of Sophotech based on historic records, named Harrier. Harrier has conducted several investigations based on available information, but finds no probable cause to continue. I have downloaded a copy of myself to be examined by the Southwest Overmind, who is one of the Ennead; likewise, they have detected no evidence that I have been tampered with. Was I correct in assuming you believe yourself to be under an attack by a violent aggressor?”

  “You think I’m suffering pseudomnesia? This is all delusion … ?”

  “That would be the logical implication. Otherwise we have to assume the existence either of a traitor Sophotech among the Earth mind community or of a highly industrialized technical civilization external to our own, aware of us and among us, familiar with our systems, and yet a civilization which, so far, has produced no sign detectable to us that it exists.”

  “The other alternatives are equally unimaginable, Rhadamanthus. When is the last time you heard of a crime taking place in our society? Yet if someone has invaded my nervous system without my consent, we have a thought-rape, something the world has not seen since the nightmare days of the Fifth Era. On the other hand, if it was done with my consent, therefore I must have known then that I would open the casket now. Either way, I must carry through. And it won’t just be me who remembers what I did; everyone else’s casket locked by the Lakshmi Agreements will pop open. Even if I cannot unknot this mystery, someone should. And don’t talk to me of penalties to myself! The whole Golden Oecumene could be at risk!”

  In one step he was across the chamber. The casket was in his hand.

  “Daphne is on the line—she is asking you to stop. The young lady is quite frantic.”

  Phaethon hesitated, his face eager for hope. “My Daphne?” (Could it be?)

  “No. Daphne Tercius Emancipated.” The doll-wife.

  And one of the many people who lived with the Rhadamanthus system woven into their brains. If the system were corrupted …

  Phaethon’s face went cold again. “Tell her she’s one of the people I’m trying to save.”

  He turned the key. Letters flamed blood red. “WARNING: This contains mnemonic templates … .”

  “Harrier Sophotech is also on-line. He wishes to conduct a Noetic examination of your brain for evidence of tampering, but only a narrow bandwidth of the circuits in the Hospice box you are in can reach your brain. Take off your armor.”

  “I’m not doing that. You could be possessed by the enemy Sophotech for all I know.”

  “Immortals should not make rash decisions. Take a century or two to think this over, young master …”

  Xenophon’s message was still in his mind. (You know your guilt; now fall.) Except that Phaethon knew nothing. Nothing made sense; nothing was clear. (It is clear. I must do what is right, no matter the cost to myself.)

  He said, “No one is immortal when someone is about to kill him. And we don’t have time. I must act before evidence is erased. The Neptunian’s real body cannot have traveled far from Eveningstar’s mausoleum.”

  “There is no such creature there, nor any evidence that there has ever been.”

  “Then the evidences are already being erased! Once I remember who Xenophon is, I’ll know what is going on!”

  But Rhadamanthus reached out, putting his hand very near Phaethon’s hand, which tensed on the casket lid, not quite touching.

  “Sir! You should know that Daphne is asking me to disobey orders and not to release your memories. She claims she has the privilege as your wife, and that you are not in your right mind; she says, if I would use force now to stop you, you will understand and will exonerate my actions later, once you have recovered.”

  Phaethon looked at him in infinite surprise. Then his expression grew stern.

  Nothing was said.

  Rhadamanthus shrank back and dropped his hand away from the box. He smiled sadly and seemed to shrug. “I just wanted you to know what it’s like, sir.”

  Phaethon opened the box.

  3.

  There was something mysterious, like a pearl of distant light, very far at the bottom of the box. It stirred and, like a petal opening, reached up as if with arms of fire, swelling to fill the universe and beyond … .

  It was like waking from a dream.

  The physical reaction was extreme. There was a burning point of pressure in his stomach; he doubled over; the taste of gall stung his throat.

  Phaethon, his face slick with sweat, looked up at Rhadamanthus. “What it this?”

  “These are the visceral and parasympathetic reactions accompanying hatred and helpless anger.”

  “But I don’t remember … whom do I hate so much … ?” Phaethon was staring in dismay at his trembling fingers. Then he whispered: “She was so beautiful. So beautiful and fine. They killed her. Killed who? Why can’t I remember … ?”

  “Your mind is taking a moment to adjust, young sir. It is not an abnormal reaction for neurostructures with multilevel consciousness like yours. Your mind is trying to reestablish broken associational memory paths, both conscious and subconscious, including emotional and symbolic correlation. Since you are Silver-Gray, your brain is attempting to go into dreaming sleep, which is the traditional neural structure for correlating experiences into a meaningful associations.”

  Phaethon put his hands on his knees and forced himself upright. He was talking to himself. “The Invariants don’t need time to adjust to shock! The Warlock rides his dreams like wild stallions! Why is it only we who suffer such pain? Is this what being human means … ?”

  “It is a violation of Silver-Gray protocol for me to falsify your reactions, softening or stopping them. Nonethel
ess, now that you are no longer a member of the Silver-Gray, I am allowed to—”

  Phaethon drew a tissue of black nanomachinery out of his gauntlet and mopped his brow. “No. I’m fine. I just did not think I would despise them so much … a little unmanly of me, don’t you think?” He uttered a weak laugh. “Its just that—they were taking her apart, weren’t they? Dismantling the corpse! Like cannibals! Like maggots!” He struck his armored fist into the window lintel. Apparently the simulation of the memory-chamber interpreted Phaethon’s armor as having strength-amplifying motors at the joints, for the oak beam forming the windowframe broke, glass panes cracked, plaster dust trickled from the walls.

  “Please do not upset yourself, young sir! Your physiological reactions show a highly unstable state. Should I summon a psychiatric or somatic health module?”

  Phaethon felt his emergency partial persona stir in its sleep. But this was not physical pain he was in.

  “No,” he said. “Show her to me. Show me her corpse.”

  “If the young sir is certain he is in health enough to—”

  A bitter laugh escaped his lips. “What’s wrong? My health is a simulation. I’m not really here, so I cannot faint and I cannot die. Only my dreams can die. Well, if my dreams die, I want to see the corpse!”

  The broken window in front of him cleared. It was as if the night sky had surged down from the heavens and filled the room. Phaethon tore the broken window from the frame with a slap of his armored hand; a useless gesture, since the image filled the window, and his eyes, despite any obstructions.

  He was surrounded by a sky never seen from the surface of Earth. Perfect and airless dark immensity displayed a myriad of stars. Near him, as if rising from underfoot, glinting in the light of a giant nearby sun, like a leviathan coming to the surface of black waters, was a shape like the head of a javelin. It was made of a golden material, which looked like metal, but was not metal.

  Along the major axis, where a shaft would have been fitted had it been a spearhead, the major drive core opened. Port and starboard were secondary drives, and dozens of tertiary drives and maneuvering jets dotted the stern, creating an impression of immense potential, power, and speed. Above and below this, the leaves of the aft armor, like the valves of a clamshell, hung half-opened. They could be lowered to cover some or all of the drive ports, separately or in combination. These armor plates where streamlined like the tail of a bird of prey, tapering to a rear-facing point, and their lines made the slim shape of the ship seem already in motion.

  Phaethon reached out toward the ship. As if in a dream, his viewpoint moved inside the golden hull. The triangular space inside was hollow, filled with a latticework of tetrahedrons. In the center of each tetrahedron was a geodesic sphere. Each sphere housed a containment field intended to carry antihydrogen, which, frozen to absolute zero, entered a magnetizable metallic state. There were countless spheres, as far as the eye could reach, inside the great ship.

  For great she was. At the center of the ship, along the axis, was a torus. The inner, the middle, and the outer bands of the torus could revolve at different speeds to produce one standard gravity. Phaethon realized, or perhaps remembered, that this torus, the living quarters of the vessel, were as large as a moderate-sized space colony. A quick calculation, or perhaps another memory, revealed the astonishing magnitude of this titanic vessel.

  She was at least a hundred kilometers from stem to stern. The three main drive ports had apertures that could swallow a small moon. Had every other space ship, the combined tugs and shuttles and slowboat fleets of Earth and Jupiter combined, had all been gathered in one spot and laid end to end, they could not have measured the length of her keel.

  His memories were like a crowd of ghosts around him, half-familiar, half-unseen. Had such a ship as this been his?

  He raised his hand and pointed. With the speed of thought, he was outside the hull again, as if floating near the blade of her sharp prow. There were no call letters or series numbers, for there was no other ship like her. But blazoned in dragon signs four hundred meters high was her name. He remembered her name the moment before he looked upon it. The letters seemed to blur. There were tears of pride in his eyes.

  The Phoenix Exultant.

  The hull was made of Chrysadmantium, like his armor. There were tons upon tons, and miles upon miles of the supermetal, built one artificial atom at a time. No wonder he had owed Gannis. He must have bought the entire energy output of Jupiter for decade after decade. Had there been only a 250-year gap in his memory? Had he spent one of the ten most enormous fortunes history had ever seen gathered by one man? It hardly seemed as if it could have been enough.

  Phaethon spoke in a voice of wonder.

  “Streamlined … aerodynamic … Why in the world did I build a streamlined spaceship? There is no reason to build anything streamlined in space. Is there? The medium is empty—there is no resistance … .”

  The voice of Rhadamanthus seemed to come from all points of the night sky at once. “This is not a spaceship.”

  “What is she?”

  “Spaceships are designed for interplanetary travel.”

  “Then she is a starship,” said Phaethon softly.

  His starship, the only one of her kind.

  Rhadamanthus said: “At near light-speed velocities, interstellar dust and gas strike the ship with relative energy sufficient to warrant the heavily shielded bow; the streamlining is designed to minimize the shockwave. At those velocities, the mass of all other objects in the universe, from the shipboard frame of reference, approaches infinity.”

  “I remember. Why is she the only one?”

  “Your fellow men are all afraid. The only other expedition launched to establish another Oecumene, the civilization at Cygnus XI, vanished and fell silent, apparently destroying itself. Sophotechs, no matter how wise we are, cannot even police the outer Neptunian habitats in the cometary halo. Other stars and systems would be beyond our eyes, and be attractive only to dissidents and rebels. They would possess our technology without our laws. Threats would grow. Perhaps not in ten thousand years, or even in a million, but eventually. This is what the College of Hortators states as its argument.”

  “Who was it who said, ‘Endless life breeds endless fears’? I must be the only immortal who is not a coward. War between stars is inconceivable. The distances are too great; the cost too high!”

  “It was Ao Enwir the Delusionist, in his formulary titled: ‘On the Sovereignty of Machines.’ The saying is often misquoted. What Enwir actually recorded was: ‘Endless life, unless accompanied by endless foresight, will breed an endless fear of death.’ And it is not war they fear, but crime. Even a single individual, accompanied by a sufficiently advanced technology, and attacking a peaceful civilization utterly unprepared for conflict, could render tremendous damage.”

  Phaethon was not listening. He reached out. His gaze-viewpoint, like a ghost, flew toward the stern. There, at the base of the drive mouths, were discolorations. Closer, and Phaethon saw gaps. Square scars marred the surface of the hull. Plates of the golden admantium had been stripped away. The ship was being dismantled.

  He clicked his heels together three times. This was the “home” gesture. This scene had its default “home” identified as the bridge of the ship. The bridge appeared around him.

  The bridge was a massive crystalline construction, larger than a ballroom. In the center, like a throne, the captain’s chair overlooked a wide space, like an amphitheater, surrounded by concentric semicircles of rising tiers. It was gloomy, half-ruined and deserted. The energy curtains were off, the mirrors were dead; the thought boxes were missing from their sockets.

  He gestured toward the nearest command mirror. But this was not merely a request for change of viewpoint; Phaethon was trying to activate circuits on the real ship. And the real ship was far away.

  Time began to crawl by, minute after minute. During that time, Phaethon hung, like a wraith, disembodied and insubstantial. Ins
ubstantial, because whatever mannequins or televection remotes might once have been on the bridge were long gone. Next to him, an empty throne, was the captain’s chair in which he would never sit. The chair crowns’ interfaces and intention circuits were crusted with erratic diamond growths, a sign that the self-regulators in the nanomachinery were disconnected. Like a bed of coral, the growth had spread halfway down the chair back, entwining the powerless gridwork that had once been an antiacceleration field cocoon.

  “Sir,” said Rhadamanthus. “The ship is nowhere near Earth. It will take at least fifteen minutes for a signal to go and to return. There will be a quarter hour delay between every command and response.”

  Phaethon’s arms were at his sides; his face was blank, his eyes haunted. Whatever emotion raged in him, now he showed little outward sign.

  He spoke only three times as the fifteen minutes passed.

  The first time he asked: “How long will it take before I remember everything? I feel like I’m surrounded by nameless clouds, shapes without form … .”

  Rhadamanthus said, “You must sleep and dream before the connections reestablish themselves. If you can find someone to aid you, you should consult a professional onieriatric thought-surgeon; the redaction you suffered is one of the largest on record. Most people erase unpleasant afternoons or bad days. They do not blot out century after century of their most important memories.”

  A little while later, Phaethon stiffened. Another memory had struck. He said, “I don’t remember Xenophon. He’s not a brother of mine. I never met him. My contact among the Neptunians was an avatar named Xingis of Neriad. He began to represent himself in a human shape after he met me; because of me, he subscribed to the Consensus Aesthetic, adopted a basic neuroform, and changed his name to Diomedes, the hero who vanquishes the gods. There’s no guilt I’m supposed to remember; there’s no crime. There’s no Sophotech I was building. And Saturn—I wasn’t trying to develop Saturn. I had just been thwarted from doing anything with Saturn. I was frustrated with Saturn. That’s what gave birth to the Phoenix Exultant. That’s why I built the ship. My beautiful ship. I was sick of living in the middle of a desert of stars. One small solar system surrounded by nothing but wasteland. And I thought there were planets out there that could be mine, ripe and rich, ready for the hand of man to change from barren rock to paradise. Planets, but no Hortators to hinder me. No one to claim that lifeless rings of rock and dust and dirty ice were more sublime than all the human souls who would live in the palaces I could make out of those rings … . Rhadamanthus! It was all a lie. Everything Scaramouche said was a lie. But why?”