He had not planned on being attacked by Xenophon, or by a virus that could have only been concocted by some non-Earth-mind Sophotech, a Sophotech that logic and history said could not possibly exist.
He glanced out the broken window. The image of the Phoenix Exultant hung against the darkness of the night sky, her golden hull like fire in the glare from the nearby giant sun. A dead hull.
Hadn’t he had a backup plan? Wasn’t there anything to salvage from this mess?
Phaethon raised his eyes from the circle of cubes.
In the background of his personal thoughtspace was a wheel of stars. It had been there every time he had turned on his personal thoughtspace. The fact that he hadn’t recognized the background content of his personal area here should have been a clue that it was important.
The wheel of stars: it was impossible to believe he had not recognized it.
He reached out his hand. The galaxy was both smaller and closer than it appeared. He took it in his hand.
Like veins made of light was the umbrella of possible travel routes he had planned through the nearby stars. Where his finger touched a route, images unfolded to the left and right, showing acceleration and deceleration calculations, estimates of local densities of space, notations of possible sources of volatiles for refueling in-flight, notes on where previous unmanned probes had gone (including summaries of scientifically significant discoveries and observations) and, more important, notes on places where unmanned probes had never gone.
The galaxy lay like a jewel in his hand. The stars were turning slowly, as the map ran through time adjustments for various periods in the projected voyage. Like a path of fire burned the trace of his first planned expedition. Branching world-lines for alternate routes reached out across stars and light-years.
It was beautiful. He would not give it up.
“Previous Phaethon, whoever you were: I remember you; I forgive you; I am you,” he whispered. “I hated you for banishing my memory. I could not imagine what could have prompted me to butcher my mind in that way, what could have urged me to accept so much pain. Now I remember. Now I know. And I was right. It was worth the risk.”
Somehow he would still save his plan. Somehow he would still save his dream … .
Rhadamanthus, in his shape as a butler, cleared his throat. Phaethon looked up from the galaxy he held.
It was Helion.
Helion stood at the threshold of the memory chamber. His face was stern and sad. He was dressed out of period for Victorian England; instead, his self-image wore his snow white ablative armor of solar-station environment. He wore no helmet; Helion’s hair shone like spun gold. The activity of Phaethon’s deletions made red light flow across the scene like flame; the reflections burned in his armor.
Helion stepped into the chamber. Phaethon’s private thoughtscape was excluded; the red flashes vanished, and the galaxy disappeared from his hand. The image of near-Mercury space disappeared from the window next to Phaethon. Instead, the broken window now let in sunlight, warm summer air, the smell of flowers, the drone of bees, the scents and sounds of the ordinary daylit world.
“Son,” said Helion, “I’ve come for any last words we might have with each other.”
18
THE WARLOCK
1.
Phaethon pointed two fingers. This was Helion himself, not a recording, a message persona, or a partial. “What do we have to say to each other, Father? Isn’t it too late? Too late for everything?” Bitterness and irony showed on Phaethon’s face. “You may be exiled yourself, just for speaking with me.”
“Son—I had hoped it would never come to this. You are a fine and brave man, intelligent and upright. The boycotts and shunnings of the Hortators were meant to stop indecencies, deviations from acceptable behavior, acts of negligence and cruelty. They were meant to restrain the worst among us. They surely were not meant for you!” Sorrow was deeply graven on Helion’s face. “This destiny is worse than we deserve.”
The chamber seemed more real as Helion entered. It was a subtle change, one Phaethon might not normally have noticed. The colors were now brighter, the shadows of finer texture. The sunlight entering the many windows took on a rich and golden hue. Individual dust motes were now visible in the bright sunbeams, as was the wood grain of the polished wainscoting where the light fell, bringing rich glints and highlights from caskets and cabinets on the surrounding shelves.
Not only sense impressions were brighter and sharper in Helion’s presence. Phaethon felt more alert, at ease, and awake. Perhaps the circuits in Phaethon’s brain stem and midbrain had not been receiving very much computer time from Rhadamanthus; certainly the simulated sensations fed into Phaethon’s optic nerve had not been of as high a quality as what Helion could afford for himself. Helion had been paying for Phaethon’s computer time, but, quite naturally, reserved more time for his own use.
It was as if Helion’s wealth and power surrounded him like an aura of light. Phaethon doubted that Helion was even aware of the effect on other people.
“Much of this destiny is of your making, Relic of Helion,” said Phaethon bitterly. “I now remember that when they resurrected you, it was your voice who urged the Hortators to condemn my voyage; it was you who tried to kill my beautiful Phoenix Exultant. Why do you hate her so?”
“Perhaps I did dislike your ship at one time. But no longer. You know the reason why … or do you?” Helion peered at Phaethon.
Phaethon said, “I cannot imagine. Gannis, perhaps, has motives I can guess. He wanted my ship for scrap. He thought it clever both to sell me the hull and foreclose on the lien. The College of Hortators had a deeper and more wicked purpose. The future I propose, one of humanity expanding through the universe, is one whose outcomes even Sophotechs cannot foresee. Even should there always be a core of worlds, centered on Earth, perfectly civilized and perfectly controlled, in my future, there will always be a frontier, a wilderness, a place which no Sophotech controls, a place where danger, adventure, and greatness still has scope. The Hortators’ fear of war is mere excuse. It is life they fear, for life is change and turmoil and uncertainty. But you—I cannot believe you share their moral cowardice.”
“We had this conversation before, my son. At Lakshmi, on Venus …” He looked into Phaethon’s eyes. “You don’t remember yet, do you?”
Phaethon said in a voice of anger: “More of my life was robbed from me than from you; and you had access to these forbidden memories since before you met with the Peers. It will take me longer to adjust.”
Helion was silent for a moment before he spoke.
“Your ship killed me, son.”
Phaethon remembered what the man dressed as a Porphyrogen Observationer had said, that Helion had sacrificed himself for a worthless boy. He had stayed at the Solar Array, when everyone else had fled, attempting to erect shields to protect certain areas of near-Mercury space. The Phoenix Exultant herself had been the “equipment” at Mercury Equilateral that Helion had tried to save from the fury of the solar storms.
“You saved my ship … .” whispered Phaethon, as the memory suddenly returned to him.
The hull armor had still been in sections at that time. The wash of particles from the sun would have disrupted the magnetic containment fields holding the antihydrogen, which, heated, would have expanded explosively, as a plasma. Every particle of the antimatter gas, encountering a particle of normal matter, would have totally converted its mass to energy, disrupting further magnetic containments, and igniting the most concentrated mass of antimatter ever gathered in one place. The superadmantium hull, invulnerable to all normal forms of energy, was still made of matter, and would have been converted to energy at the touch of antimatter.
“Damn your ship.” Helion’s voice grated. “It was you. You were aboard at that time. Outside of the range of the Mentality, beyond the reach of any resurrection circuit.”
Phaethon turned away. He felt the hot blush of shame rising to his face.
&nbs
p; Helion stepped over and sat in one of the tall-backed ceremonial chairs flanking the doorway. He waited while Phaethon stood, staring at nothing, trying to grapple with the enormity of what he had heard, with what his memory was still bringing back to him.
“I—I’m so sorry, Father. I did not mean for any of this to happen.”
Helion clasped his hands and leaned with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor for a moment. Then, raising his head, he gave Phaethon a direct and earnest look. “No one meant for any of this to happen. But each of us was required by our consciences to do as he thought best. Even the College of Hortators might have been less quick to condemn your venture had you been willing to compromise, to wait, to listen to the opinions of others. The Hortators are neither villains nor fools nor cowards. They are honest men, attempting to cure our society of the one great fault which surrounds us; the danger, now that we all have so much power and freedom at our command, that reckless action will bring us to harm. Mostly they try to use social pressure to keep self-indulgent folk from harming themselves. Yours is the first case in hundreds of years of someone who threatened another.”
“The worlds I intended to create would have been peaceful.”
“The College might have believed that; had you not lost control of yourself in December, at the Eveningstar Mausoleum. You smashed the building, and broke the remotes and mannequins of the Constables.”
Again Phaethon felt heat in his face. His voice was low: “I am very sorry, Father. And the more I remember, the less and less heroic my actions seem to have been. Maybe living since January without my memories has been good for me after all; my old anger seems childish to me now. But I still believe my dream to be a good one.”
Helion said, “I once dreamed as you did.”
“Yes … ?”
“I have never told you the details surrounding your birth, Phaethon.”
A stillness seemed to come into the chamber. Phaethon realized he was holding his breath. He had heard rumors. He had never heard the truth.
“You know you are taken from my mental templates, a version of me more brave than I have ever been, do you not? But what you don’t recall—the origin you agreed to forget—is that you were created during one of the earlier Millennial Celebrations. One of the worlds constructed in dreamspace by Cuprician Sophotech (who hosted that Celebration then as Aurelian does now) was my vision of a far future where mankind had expanded across the local volume of stars, some four hundred light-years in diameter. You were one of the characters in that story. You were the version of me, as Cuprician predicted I should be, should I live to see such an age.”
Helion fell silent. He was staring out the windows, perhaps at the mountains of Wales; perhaps at something more distant.
Phaethon said, “Is there more to my story … ?”
Helion stirred and brought his gaze back to Phaethon. “Not really. I was not famous nor well liked at that time. In fact, people called me a crackpot. During that Festival’s Transcendence (they were held earlier in the year, at that time, in November) other Sophotechs recalculated Cuprician’s premises and found them absurdly optimistic. When they reran the scenario, they found the distant colonies growing more and more inhuman, rash, and unreasonable. They concluded that even the most sane and stable of men, when there was no government to keep them all in awe, had no choice but to settle serious disputes by force. The scenario evolved into interstellar piracy and war. Many people were plugged into the dreamscape when their characters on Earth were destroyed by the colonial war. Vividly, seeming perfectly real, they died. They experienced their own death, and the death of everything they knew and loved. It only took one soldier aboard one single ship. He was armed with a few metric tons of antimatter. He burned the world. Naturally, the participants were horrified. I was horrified. Even the computer-generated character of the colonial warrior was horrified, to such an extent that he fell into a deep reverie, pondering himself and his place in the world, questioning all his basic values and beliefs. When the public outcry demanded that I erase the scenario, I was happy to comply; but the Sophotech stopped me.”
Phaethon could see what was coming. “You’ve got to be joking, Father.”
“No. The colonial soldier, the world burner, had made himself from a recording to a self-aware entity. By our laws, anyone who makes a self-aware being by any means whatever, natural or artificial, deliberately or accidentally, becomes that parent of that child, and must raise and care for that child, and must have the appropriate natural paternal or maternal instincts inserted into his or her midbrain and hindbrain complex. That is why I made and married your mother, Galatea, may she rest in peace.”
Galatea was not dead. At the age of four hundred she had divorced herself from Helion, left the Silver-Gray, and tuned her sense-filter and adjusted her memory to exclude him. Helion, at first, in the old days, often went to her, but, to her, he was no more visible than a ghost. Then one day, for reasons she had explained to no one, Galatea put her memories in archive, and descended into the sea, abandoning her flesh and merging her mind with the strange, old, unfriendly mass-minds that live scattered in a million microscopic cell bodies far below the waves.
Helion’s face had the stiff look of sorrow it always had at the mere mention of Phaethon’s mother’s name. The sight of that sadness angered Phaethon, for now Phaethon was being told his mother had not been his at all.
“So I was born. I remember a youth and childhood. Where those false?”
“No. You were incarnated as a boy when you entered the real world.”
“Why do I not remember the fictional life which came before my birth? Your pretended future? Don’t tell me I agreed to forget that also!” Phaethon felt a sense of wonder and disgust. Was there anything at all in his life that was real?
“Everyone was afraid of you. You had the memory, skills, and personality of a planet killer. And once you learned who and what you were, you were happy to erase your past. Surely you can guess why?”
He knew the reason. “Because it was false.”
Helion nodded. “No one has been more in love with naked truth than you.”
“Is that why I was named Phaethon? To remind me that I had burned the earth?”
Helion shook his head. “You picked that name yourself, after you joined the Consensus Aesthetic. But you adopted a slightly alternate version of the myth. You said that—”
A distant gong note rang. Rhadamanthus said, “Pardon me, Master Helion, but you asked to be interrupted whenever the channels cleared and the Hortators came on-line. They are arriving now.”
Phaethon heard distant sounds: the opening of the main doors, the murmur of voices, and, beyond that the clatter of carriages arriving at the front portico. These fictional noises where provided by the mansion dreamscape to represent the “arrival” of the members of the College of Hortators.
Helion stood. “Out of deference to me, the College has agreed to adopt the Consensus Aesthetic for the official record of the upcoming Inquest. Naturally, everyone’s personal sense-filter can reorganize the information in whatever forms they would like, but the core document will record that the meeting took place in my version of Rhadamanthus Mansion. Will you come with me, Phaethon?”
He gestured toward the door.
Phaethon took one last look at the memory chamber. The caskets were either open and empty, or displayed as if they had been burnt. The broken window no longer held a view of the glorious starship, the only one of her kind, which was no longer his.
There was nothing for him here.
The two men started down the stairs together. Phaethon saw that Helion’s version of the mansion was somewhat larger and more splendid than Phaethon’s. The staircase was a wide, sweeping semicircle leading down to an enormous entrance hall paved with white flagstones.
There were windows everywhere, wide and filled with light.
Phaethon said, “If they remembered my origin, no wonder they were afraid when I bought an i
nvulnerable ship and filled it with antimatter. But couldn’t they tell reality from fantasy?”
Phaethon stopped on the stair, and took Helion’s arm, drawing him up short. Helion looked back curiously, and saw the beginning of fear on Phaethon’s face.
“Tell me quickly. Does Daphne know? All our lives she called me a heroic character—a character—she didn’t fall in love with me because of—because of that?!”
“I doubt she knew. Daphne was born of natural parents, actually womb born, the old-fashioned way, and raised in a Primitivist School that did not even have reincarnation. She ran away from her convent and joined the Warlocks of the Cataleptic Oneiromancer School when she was sixteen. It was not that many centuries ago; I doubt she has ever even heard of Cuprician.”
Phaethon breathed a sigh and released Helion’s arm.
They continued down the stair and across the bright hall. Their footsteps echoed on the marble.
Then Phaethon asked: “Why did you give up on the dream, Father? You know our sun only has a limited period of time in which to live.”
“Longer, thanks to my effort.”
“But still limited. We cannot stay in one small solar system forever. It’s because you see yourself in my old character, don’t you? The colonial warrior who killed the earth. That was a simulated extrapolation of you, wasn’t it? And it scared you.”
Helion did not answer the question. “Simulation technology is much better now. There is less guesswork involved … .”
They passed a rank of empty suits of armor, enameled in white. Here were two tall doors of oak, inscribed with an open book crossed with a flail, and, beneath, a grail from which a fountain flowed; this was the emblem of the College of Hortators. This door had not been here before; Helion’s version of the mansion now included an Inquest Hall. The murmur of voices came dimly from behind the doors.
The Golden Age Page 31
