The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  There were more minutes of silence. Phaethon’s face grew sadder and more grim as he absorbed the enormity of the falsehood that had baffled him, the tremendous reaches of time, the happiness of his memory, the glory of the achievement he had lost.

  Eventually he said, “I asked you once if I were happier before, if restoring these memories would make me better.”

  Rhadamanthus said, “I implied that you would be less happy, but that you would be a better man.”

  Phaethon shook his head. Anger and grief still gnawed at him. He certainly did not feel like a better man.

  Then, in reaction to the gesture he had made long ago, one of the system mirrors aboard the Phoenix Exultant came to life. The mirror surface was dim and caked with droppings from undeconstructed nanomachines. Contact points in the mirror flickered toward the image of Phaethon, a thousand pinpoints of light.

  He felt a moment of surprised recognition. But of course! It was in his armor. The command circuits on the bridge of the ship were trying to open a thousand channels into the corresponding points in his golden armor.

  That was what all the complex circuitry in his armor had been for. Here was a ship larger than a space colony, as intricate as several metropoli, webbed with brain upon brain and circuit upon circuit. She was like a little miniature seed of the Golden Oecumene itself. The bridge (and the bridge crew) of the Phoenix Exultant was not actually in the bridge, it was in the armor; the armor of Phaethon, whose unthinkably complex hierarchy of controls were meant to govern the billions of energy flows, measurements, discharges, tensions, and subroutines that would make up the daily routine of the great ship.

  Phaethon, despite himself, smiled with pride. It was a wonderful piece of engineering.

  That smile faltered when a status board at the arm of the captain’s chair lit up to reveal the pain and damage to the ship. Other mirrors lit to show the nearby objects in space.

  The dismantling had not gone far; the slabs of super metal were still stored in warehouse tugs orbiting Mercury Equilateral, not far away, waiting transshipment. The ship intelligences were off-line or had never been installed. Near the ship, robot cranes and tugs from the Mercury Station hung, mites near a behemoth, motionless. The status board showed that the rest-mass was low: nearly half the antihydrogen fuel had been unloaded.

  The amount of fuel left, nonetheless, was still staggering. The living area of the ship, while as large as a space colony, occupied less than one-tenth of one percent of the ship’s mass. The Phoenix Exultant was a volume, over three hundred thousand cubic meters of internal space, packed nearly solid with the most lightweight and powerful fuel human science had yet devised. While it was true that the mass of the ship was titanic, it was also true that the fuel-mass-to-payload ratio was inconceivable. Every second of thrust could easily consume as much energy as large cities used in a year. But that was the energy needed to reach near-light-speed velocities.

  “You’ve been selling my fuel.” Phaethon hated the sound of pain and loss in his own voice.

  “It is no longer yours, young sir. The Phoenix Exultant is now in receivership, held by the Bankruptcy Court. But your Agreement at Lakshmi suspended the proceedings. You destroyed your memory of the ship in order to prevent further dismantling. Now that your memories are back, your creditors will take her, I’m afraid.”

  “You mean I don’t have a wife, or a father … or … or my ship? Nothing? I have nothing?”

  A pause.

  “I’m very sorry, sir.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Phaethon felt as if he could not breathe. It was as if the lid of a tomb had closed down not just over him but over the entire universe, over every place, no matter how far he fled, he ever could go. He imagined a suffocating darkness, as wide as the sky, as if every star had been snuffed, and the sun had turned into a singularity, absorbing all light into absolute nothingness.

  He had heard theoreticians talk about the internal structure of a singularity. Inside, one would be in a gravity well so deep that no light, no signal, could ever escape. No matter how large the inside might be, the event horizon formed an absolute boundary, forever closing off any attempt to reach the stars outside. One might still be able to see the stars; the light from outside would continue to fall into the black hole and reach the eye of whomever was imprisoned there; but any attempt to reach them would simply use up more and more energy, and achieve nothing.

  The theoreticians also said that the interiors of black holes were irrational, that the mathematical constants describing reality no longer made any sense.

  Phaethon never before had known what that could mean. Now he thought he did.

  Phaethon wiped the tears he was ashamed to find on his face. “Rhadamanthus, what are the four stages of grief?”

  “For base neuroforms the progression is: denial, rage, negotiation, resignation. Warlocks order their instincts differently, and Invariants do not grieve.”

  “I just remembered another event … It’s like a nightmare; my thoughts are still clouded and unclear. I was actually living aboard the Phoenix Exultant, with my launch date less than a month away. I was that close to achieving it all. Then the radio call came from my wife’s last partial, telling me what Daphne Prime had done. Denial was easy for me; during the long trip from Mercury to Earth, I lived in a simulation, a false memory to tell me she still was alive. The simulation ended last December when the pinnace dropped me on Eveningstar grounds … . I remembered all the horror and pain of living without her. A woman I had been just about to leave behind me! So I gave myself a rescue persona, a version of me without hesitation, guilt, fear, or doubt, and stormed off to confront the mausoleum where Daphne’s body was held.”

  Phaethon drew in a ragged breath, then laughed bitterly.

  “Ha! Eveningstar Sophotech must have thought me a fool just now! I gave the same arguments this morning as I gave last December. But that last time, in December, I was physically present, and in my armor, and no force on earth could stop me in my rage. I swatted the remotes aside which tried to hinder me. I broke Daphne’s coffin and released assemblers to undo her nerve bondage, and wake her from her lifeless dreams. But the body was empty; they had downloaded her mind into the Mansion-memory of Eveningstar, and replaced all the mausoleum with synthetics, pseudo-matter, and hologram. Eveningstar prevented me from committing anything worse than an attempted crime, some minor property damage.

  “I gave myself entirely to rage, and began to tear the mausoleum apart. The motors in my arms and legs amplified my strength till I was like Hercules, or Orlando in his rage. There were two squads of Constables by then, in ornithopters armed with assembler clouds. I tore up the pillars of Eveningstar Mausoleum by the roots and threw them. I scattered the mannequins of the Constables and laughed as their darts and paralyzers glanced from my armor.

  “They had to call in the military to stop me. I remember the wall melted and Atkins stepped through. He was not even armed; he was naked, and dripping with life-water. They had gotten him out of bed. He didn’t even have a weapon. I remember I laughed, because my armor was invulnerable; and I remember he smiled a grim little smile, and beckoned me toward him with one hand.

  “When I tried to push him out of my way he just leaned, and touched my shoulder, and, for some reason, I flew head over heels, and landed in the puddle of melted stone he had stepped in through. He squeezed some of the life-water out of his hair and threw it over me. The nanomachines suspended in the water must have been tuned to the ones he used to disintegrate the stone. When I fell, the stone was like dust, utterly frictionless. It was impossible for me to get up, there was nothing to grip. Then, when he shook his wet hair at me, the nanomachines bound molecule to molecule with artificial subnuclear forces. The stone now formed one macromolecule, and my arms and legs were trapped. Invulnerable, yes, but frozen in stolid stone. No wonder Atkins despises me.”

  “I don’t think he despises you, sir,” said Rhadamanthus. “If anything, he is gra
teful that you allowed him to exercise his skills.”

  Phaethon pressed his aching temples with his fingertips. “What did you say the third stage of grief was? Bargaining? The Eveningstar Sophotech did not press charges—she was delighted to have been the victim of the only half-successful attempt at violent crime in three centuries; the Red Manorials loved the drama, I suppose; all they wanted was a copy of my memories during the fight.”

  Phaethon remembered now the notoriety that had surrounded him. It was not just for the violence he had attempted. (As long as human passions were still legally permitted to exist in the human nervous system, there would always be violent impulses. Many people attempted crimes. There were six or seven attempts every century.) Phaethon’s notoriety sprang from his position in society. Other men who gave in to moments of rage were usually primitivists or emancipated partials, people without resources, whom the Constables, guided by Sophotechs, easily could stop before they hurt anything.

  But Phaethon was manor-born, who were considered the elite; and the Silver-Gray, in many ways, were the elite of the elite. The manorials had Sophotechs present in their minds, able to anticipate their thoughts, able to defuse violent problems long before they ever arose. No manor-born had ever committed a violent crime. Phaethon was the first.

  In his armor, Phaethon could shut off all contact with the Sophotechs; his thoughts could not be monitored; his violent impulses could not be hindered by a police override. In his armor, Phaethon could act independently of any social restrictions. He was in his own private world; a small world, true, but it was all his own.

  “The Red Manorials, perhaps, forgave me. But the Curia was not so amused. The penalty they imposed was forty-five minutes of direct stimulation of the pain center of my brain …” (Phaethon winced at the memory) “ … but the Court suspended fifteen minutes from my sentence because I agreed to erase the rescue persona. Afterwards, the Curia ordered me to experience the memories and lives of the Constables I had humiliated, so that all their anger and frustration and pain happened to me. The fight did not seem so glorious any longer … .

  “That punishment I was glad to suffer; I knew I was in the wrong. The Curia and Eveningstar did not bargain, no. But the College of Hortators did.

  “It was a devil’s bargain. They found me during a moment of weakness. I destroyed my memory. Was I trying to commit suicide?”

  “And what about now, young sir? Have you reached the state of resignation and acceptance?”

  Phaethon straightened, wiped his face, squared his shoulders. He drew a deep breath. “I will never be resigned. Perhaps everything is not lost yet. Unless …” Phaethon looked troubled. “Am I just fooling myself again? A recurrence of the denial part of the grief cycle?”

  “You know I cannot take a Noetic reading of you at this time. I do not know the state of your mind. You must avoid both giving into fear or despair … but you also must avoid giving in to false hopes.”

  “Very well, then. Maybe there are steps I can still take. Put a call in to that girl who is impersonating Daphne. She seems like a good person. Ask her if—”

  “I am sorry sir, but she is no longer receiving your calls, nor am I allowed to transmit them.”

  “What … ?!”

  “None of the major telecommunication or telepresentation services will accept your patronage hereafter. Daphne Tercius has left instructions with her seneschal to refuse your calls, lest she be accused of aiding or comforting you, and therefore fall under the same prohibition under which you now fall.”

  It took a moment for the implications of that to sink in. Phaethon closed his eyes in an expression of pain. “I thought that I would have some time to prepare, or that there would be some ceremony, or leavetaking.”

  “Normally there would be such, and all the participants in the boycott would exclude you at once. But things are in confusion.”

  “Confusion … ?”

  “You must recall that every other memory casket sealed by the Lakshmi Agreement, all across the planet, has opened up. Large sections of the memories of billions of people are returning to them; many are still confounded. All the channels are crowded with signals, young sir. Everyone is sending messages and questions to their friends and comensals; you have stirred the clamor of the world, I’m afraid.”

  Phaethon made a fist, but, insubstantial to his present scene on the Phoenix Exultant bridge, had nothing to strike, not even to make a dramatic gesture. “Scaramouche or Xenophon or Nothing or whoever is behind this is using the confusion to hide more evidence and release more viruses, no doubt. More evidence is being erased or falsified. And they must have predicted this would happen once I opened the memory box. But why? We are all taught that Earthmind is wise enough to foresee and counteract all dangers of this type before they arise. Their plan must be premised on the idea that that is not the case. They must have a Sophotech as wise as Earthmind, but not part of the Golden Oecumene Mentality. How else could they have done this? Is there no one we can warn?”

  Rhadamanthus’s voice: “I feel I should caution you, young sir, that no evidence exists that any attack of any kind has taken place. I am not presently capable of determining whether or not you are experiencing a hallucination or pseudomnesia.”

  Phaethon said, “If the Hortators have not officially decreed their boycott of me in effect as yet, can you give me an indication of which efforts, merchant combines, or services will still accept my patronage?”

  “Obviously the Eleemosynary Composition has not yet excluded you from the Hospice thoughtspace. Helion is continuing to pay the transaction costs and computer time for you connections with me, and for my conversation with you. The Eleemosynary Composition has left a message, to be given you should you inquire, to the effect that the previous agreement you had discussed has lapsed, and the offer withdrawn. Helion would like to have one last word outside before he shuts you out of my system. You might want to take this opportunity to have anything stored in my mansion-mind recorded into your own private thoughtspace; take any books or memories or proprietary information, alternate personalities, records, or anything else that is yours.”

  The image of the Phoenix Exultant bridge began to slip away. It flowed like water, out of the broken window of the memory chamber. Phaethon’s hands tried to grasp the corner of the nearest control mirror, the arms of the thronelike captain’s chair. His chair. But his insubstantial fingers passed through the images and could not grasp them.

  He seemed to stand in the chamber of memory, but his private thoughtspace, reacting to a command he had placed in it, long ago, at Lakshmi, had turned on. Cubes appeared in a circle around him. The two scenes were superimposed; the cube icons seemed to float in midair among the shelves and sunlight of the memory chamber.

  One of the cubes, a master program, near Phaethon’s head, had a window floating in its upright face, showing the checklist of Phaeton’s properties that he had planned to remove from the mansion memory.

  Whatever sorrow had been on Phaethon’s face was gone. His expression was stern, without being grim; it was not free from pain, but it was free from any acceptance of pain. His face might have been from an ancient statue from the monument of a king.

  He nodded to the checklist and raised a finger in the “run program” gesture.

  Lesser memory caskets to the left and right of Phaethon, as if of their own accord, opened, and the cube icons flashed green colors to signal they were absorbing the information. The cubes turned black when they were full.

  Much of the material was too long or too complex to be fitted into Phaethon’s merely personal thought space; files were being deleted. A little flash of red light accompanied every deletion, as Phaethon had to approve the order each time. There were so many memory files being destroyed, and so many flashes of red light, coming faster and faster, that soon the room seemed as if it were burning around him, as if, without heat or noise, Phaethon were burning his old life.

  Here were thought works, centuri
es dormant, for which he would never have use again; memories of youthful tedium, or scenes redundant with other recollections, which afforded him no amusement, instruction, nor even nostalgia to retain; sciences now out-of-date; rough drafts for contemplation forms no longer practiced; the litter and rubbish of a long, long life at Rhadamanthus Mansion. There was no reason at all for tears to sting his eyes. He told himself it was all trash.

  And the checklist was one he remembered from Venus, from Lakshmi. He had made it before he signed the Agreement. He had made it knowing the Agreement would break. He had guessed this exile might come. He had planned …

  He had planned on this, on all of this.

  But he had planned on an orderly exit, a withdrawal, perhaps after prevailing on his law case against Helion Secundus. With Helion’s fortune, with entire income of the Solar Array in his hands, he could have bought the Phoenix Exultant out of hock, paid off his debts, and bought the few remaining supplies he needed, restocked his antihydrogen supplies, and departed.

  No wonder the threat of the Hortator’s exile had held no terror for him. He had been planning to leave the Golden Oecumene on a journey of centuries, or tens of centuries.

  But his plan had been to have himself wait till after the Grand Transcendence in December was concluded, not to open the memory box prematurely, not to fall under the Hortator’s boycott. Were he ostracized, Vafnir would not sell him antihydrogen, nor would Gannis sell Chrysadmantium.