by John Wright
Atkins, on channel three, commented, "A bizarre form of suicide. Nothing made of matter can survive that"
Phaethon answered, "With all due respect, Marshal. I am not so sure.... The ship-mind says the residuum here is below the threshold useful limit-not even a Sophotech will be able to reconstruct what happened here." Atkins said, "Think he's alive?"
"As to that, I cannot speculate, Marshal. I am only beginning to realize how much none of us know about the universe outside the Golden Oecumene."
Atkins said curtly, "One more reason to head out, I guess."
Phaethon, bright in his gold armor, hovered in the wreckage of that fragile sphere, once so rich with complex photoelectronics, now just black and blasted rubbish, walls torn and distorted by intense gravitic fields, a snow of floating blood-liquids drifting in the micro-gravity, and he wondered what powers the Silent Ones truly commanded.
He was staring at the last message from Xenophon. It was written in dragon-signs of frozen blood and internal fluids from Xenophon's vanished body.
The signs said only: "The Golden Oecumene must be destroyed."
THE YOUNG WOMAN
Daphne Tercius, wearing a dress of red silk, after the fashion of the Eveningstar, was led into the sitting room. To her it seemed as if a dot of light was leading her, and that the room was a dim-lit oval, plush with sensuous carpeting, fluttering with golden candlelight, with low tables set with fruits and flowers, bright china and silver chopsticks shining against dark wood. Two of her favorite energy-sculptures glowed in round niches to either side of the door, and chirruped cheerfully when they saw her.
The west of the chamber was all window, a smooth curve, which, though seeming solid, allowed the breeze from the lake beyond to bring soft, cool scents into the room, the hint of pine from the far shore. It was before true dawn, but it was Jovian afternoon, and the light of Jupiter spread red-silvery beams glancing along the twilight landscape. Even at his brightest, Jupiter was not much more luminous than a full moon. It was bright enough to distinguish colors, but dim enough to cast the trees and lake into blue mysterious shadow.
At this window, in what seemed a seashell filled with flower petals, lay a woman dressed in pigeon gray and silver. Her face was lit by the soft light of the energy-sculpture that she toyed with, running her fingers along its shimmering curves. It was a sad face, thoughtful, dreamy, and her eyes were half-closed.
She was Daphne Prime Rhadamanth.
Daphne Tercius Eveningstar glanced around the room, smiling. Her air was happy, open, unabashed. Daphne Tercius Eveningstar walked lightly over to the window and sat down on the plush carpet, tucking her feet under her. Daphne Prime Rhadamanth dismissed the floating light with a thank-you and a regal nod.
Daphne Tercius Eveningstar turned to watch the little light that had led her here bob away. She turned back, and said, "Shouldn't we be using the same aesthetic, Mother?"
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth inclined her head. "Think of me as an older sister. And I wanted to make you more comfortable."
"Oh? Why start now?"
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth's red lips compressed slightly, and perhaps there was a smolder in her eyes, but her expression of cool reserve did not otherwise change. She lifted a finger and the chamber now appeared differently. She was now dressed in a more somber tweed jacket, blouse, and skirt, with a tiny French hat pinned to her coiffure, after the style proper for a Silver-Gray. Daphne Tercius Eveningstar was still dressed in sensuously lurid tight silk, the uniform of a Red Manorial.
It was a Victorian room, and they both were seated on a heavy divan of dark red velvet whose feet ended in black claws gripping glass balls. The candles were still there, though now in candlesticks. The rug became white bearskin. The receding dot of light became a footman.
The energy-sculpture in Daphne Prime Rhadamanrh's lap became Fluffbutton, Daphne's long-lost long-haired white cat. But this was a reconstruction, a clone. He was not the slim kitten she had lost so long ago when she was a child. The cat had grown, put on weight, turned into a pampered and round ball of white fur. The cat gazed at Daphne Tercius Eveningstar with lazy green eyes, as if he had never seen her before.
Daphne Tercius Eveningstar found the image slightly offensive. "Mother! That's one of my favorite energy-sculptures you're playing with. Lupercalian Reflection. And you're making it look like Sir Fluffbutton! If you're not going to be reapplying Warlock nerve-paths into your brain, you're not going to be able to read or play with Lupercalian anyway. Or with Lichenplantis. Or Quincunx Impressionario." (These were the two energy sculptures by the door.) "Why not give them to me? They can keep me company on the voyage."
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth favored her with a cool stare, one eyebrow arched. "Little sister, one would think giving up my husband would have been enough to comfort you on your voyage."
Daphne Tercius Eveningstar opened her mouth to issue some scathing rebuttal, but then snapped it shut again, lightly shrugged her delicate shoulders, and stood up. "Well! I'm ever so glad we had this little chat. I would stay longer, but arguing with other versions of yourself gets so tiring after a while, don't you think? Now I can fly off into the night sky, not coming back for a long time, maybe never, secure in the knowledge that it turned out I was a bitch after all. And thank you for bringing me into a cheap and false existence, playing out all the difficult parts of your life you were too ashamed or scared to live through! I would say it had all been fun ... if it had been. Ta-ta!"
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth gave her a level stare. "Please sit."
"Sorry, Mother, but I've got a life to lead. A life you threw away! And now that you're awake again, you have possession of all the things I once thought were mine, my house and funds and even my cat, dammit! My friends. Everything. But I've got Phaethon, and I've got the future. What more do we need to say to each other... ?"
"Please sit." Or did you use the command words I left you to wake me up again, just to berate me? We must come to understand each other before we part. You are the part of myself I am sending into the future, little sister, and I am the part of you which forms your roots and your foundation. If we part badly, it will haunt us both."
For some reason not clear even to herself, Daphne Tercius Eveningstar smoothed her red silk dress, and sat.
But then, neither woman spoke. One sat with her hands folded in her lap, the other petted her half-slumbering cat. Both stared out the window at the twilight landscape, at the smoke-colored trees, the blue shadows of the lake. In the deep of the lake, one or two bright dots of color, like fireflies, softly appeared and disappeared.
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth finally broke the silence. "The masquerade is over. Aurelian Sophotech, so I have heard, has posted advertisements asking for employment as a manorial, just like some low-cycle mind like Rhadamanth or Aeceus. They've dismantled the palaces of gold to the south of here; and the Cerebellines to the southwest are letting the new organisms find their own ecological balance, practically untended, so that those strange gardens are all overgrown now, and filled with wild things. The birds will go back to singing their own songs, instead of arias meant for us, and the flowers will give out nectar now, not wine. The Deep Ones have sunk away again, and no one is allowed to remember their songs, except dimly. The wild things we said and did during the celebrations are put in memory caskets now. We are like the Cerebelline gardens turned opposite; we become tame again. Mystery is banished. The elfin gloaming of the dawn now passes, as all thing must pass, and the ordinary workday begins again."
Daphne Tercius Eveningstar gave her older self an odd sidelong glance, but said nothing.
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth saw that glance, and smiled an opaque smile, and said: "You are wondering, aren't you, little sister, what Phaethon ever saw in me? You have no sympathy for a melancholy spirit."
"Well, actually, Mother, I would have called it phony weepy sickening self-centered affectation. But your sense-filter might not catch it and change it to something more polite."
&n
bsp; The older version only smiled, her eyes dreamy, as if thinking of a sorrow long past. "You were not constructed to admire me or like me. Our basic philosophy and core values have to be different. Antithetical. Which does not make for easy friendships, I fear."
The younger Daphne was still. '"Have to be'? For what purpose?"
The elder stirred as if from a reverie. "I beg your pardon ... ?"
"You implied there was a purpose to all this. Why did you drown yourself? Why did you make me?"
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth sat upright and leaned forward, her level gaze traveling deep into her younger version's eyes. She spoke in a voice of quiet simplicity. "I was in love with Helion." "What?!!"
"It was one of the things I did not add to your memories when I made you. You remember when Sir Fluff-button died."
"He ran away. I was nine...." "I found his body. It was by the stream where I had that fall through the ice the year before, remember?
And Pa came and told me how everything dies. Even mountains wear away. Even the sun gets old and dies, he said. One day, no more sunshine, no more bright fields to play in, nothing."
"You left this out of my memory! Why?"
"It leads to a crucial personality-shaping event. You were meant to have a different personality."
"So? What happened?"
"I didn't believe him. You know Pa."
"I know Pa. 'Only as much truth as a mind can handle.' What a liar he always was!"
"So I sneaked out to talk to Bertram. Bertram had tapped into the root-line of the local thought-system."
"Good old Bertram! What a little thief he was! How come I was so attracted to him?"
They both smiled warmly at that lost memory. Bertram None Peristark had been Daphne's first romantic encounter.
"I always liked strong men. Anyway, he plugged the mirror he had taken from his parent's house into his pirate line, and opened the library for me. The library said, yes, the sun would eventually end; but long before that, it would swell to a Red Giant, and overwhelm the Earth with fire. You cannot imagine how betrayed I felt."
"I can imagine. I used to play beneath the thinking-room window in the afternoons, when my parents were under their caps, asleep, and make-believe the beams of sunlight were suitors come to steal me away from the two snoring ogres. I pretended the sun was kissing me when the heat touched my cheek. I used to think there was a man living in the sun who was watching me when I ran through the tall grass. Betrayed? Sure. The source of light and life on Earth killing her instead of caring for her? I understand."
The elder Daphne leaned forward and touched her younger version's knee. "Then the library told me that there was a man living in the sun. A man who lived in a palace of fire. That he was going to save the sun from old age."
"Helion. Is that the real reason why I became a Silver-Gray? To be near him?"
The elder Daphne leaned back. "It was not till this Transcendence, just now, that I knew where Phaethon had come from. I never knew why Helion had made him. He seemed so wild and reckless compared to his father. And I never believed that Galatea was his real mother; she was obviously an emancipated partial-mind made by Helion to help raise Phaethon. But I studied them both from afar, and it spurred me to try to get famous myself, famous enough that I could ask to see the Master of the Sun, and that he would receive me. And so I wrote, I sculpted horses, I studied all the older things, the Greeks and Romans, the myths of Britain and Pre-Re-Renaissance Mars. I earned the fame and the seconds I needed; Phaethon agreed to be interviewed. My plan was to acquaint myself with the father by seducing the son."
Younger Daphne exclaimed happily: "You scheming bitch!" And pointed her finger. "You're wrong. I think we could be good friends after all. What went wrong?"
"You did, little sister. Oh, you were not serf-aware back then, and it was not your fault. Nor were you exactly like me. But when you fell in love with Phaethon, and became the seduced instead of the seductress, what could I do? When Phaethon returned to Earth, I tried, at first, to put him off. But he... he overwhelmed me. I was helpless in front of a man like that. He never gave up; and he was so... so... it was like he was on fire. But he was never out of control of himself. He was like a man made out of ice. And... he loved me so much... And..." "And Helion was out of your reach."
Daphne Prime Rhadamanth actually blushed. The younger Daphne saw the color in her older version's cheeks and throat, and wondered: Is that what I look like when I do that? It's kind of sexy, somehow.
The older version said, "I didn't like Helion when I actually met him. You know that I left those memories in."
"He's a whiner."
"He's concerned with preserving the old, not with beginning the new. Even saving the sun is a type of preservation, for him. And so I fell in love with Phaethon, so deeply in love, that I..."
"That you tried to ruin his life!"
The older version's eyes flashed, an expression of impatient fire, and for a moment, the two women looked exactly alike. Daphne Prime Rhadamanth said in a voice like a queen: "Fool! I loved him enough to die for him! How can you imagine! How can you know! How can you know what it is like to see yourself in the looking glass and to know you are unworthy of the man you are married to?! Unworthy! Holding him back! Keeping him down! And no matter what you try to do you end up helping the people who hate him!"
The elder Daphne leaned back, smoldering, and petted the cat with such angry strokes that he miaowed, and slithered from her grasp, falling heavily to the floor. The cat gave them both a haughty stare and gracefully waddled off.
The elder Daphne said in a quieter voice, "I saved up my money and bought time from the Eveningstar Sophotech. I did not trust Rhadamanthus for this; he would have just told me to be stoic. And Silver-Grays don't allow radical self-editing in any way. Eveningstar examined me, but she thought I could not make myself into the kind of woman who would be good for Phaethon. Not and still be the same person in the eyes of the law. The change would be too great. It's a question of core values again, a question of fundamental differences. That's what I meant about helping his enemies; everything I thought or said in public reflected a mindset more cautious than his. There were so many times when I humiliated him in public, something I had said, or written, or thought, was published in salons against him"
"And children. How could we have children, if he was going to go away? Away and away, to die in the dark, and never return? And so our marriage was never completed.
"I honestly thought he would fail. But I did not want to think that, because, without me, without my support, he might fail. So I had to leave him. I could not go with him; I don't want to die in the sunless cold of space; but he kept telling me he would not leave without me. So what could I do?
"I had to leave. I made you to take my place. You. The woman I could never become. The same way Phaethon is the man Helion could never become.... Our whole society evolves. We each made the next versions of ourselves more perfect. But we who are less perfect stay behind."
Both women were silent for a moment, looking deeply at each other's eyes. The look was one of sorrow.
But then the younger Daphne laughed. "And just think, older sister, you would have gotten Helion, too, if he hadn't married Lucretia, or whatever it is Un-moiqhotep is calling herself these days!"
The older Daphne leaned her chin on her palm, fingers curled so that her pinkie lightly touched her lips. She nibbled delicately on her fingernail, and said: "Perhaps, daughter. Perhaps. But... You know, it is really sort of odd. First Helion adopts, as his son, a man who turns out to have been a colonial warrior from a Transcendence drama, a burner of worlds. Then he marries the girl who tried, this time, in real life, to destroy as much of the Oecumene as she could. I wonder what his secret obsession with destruction is? He does live, after all, in the most dangerous spot in the Solar System..."
The younger Daphne exclaimed, "I'm sad for you about Lucretia. I would have preferred if the extrapolation had come true, and we could all ha
ve had a lurid trial, with hundreds of weeping girls being sentenced to death, and Atkins shooting down rioters who stormed the Courthouse steps..."
The elder one smiled a faint smile. "I'll write that one up. Especially the rioters. All cacophiles, of course, but, in my story, they'll turn out to have been mind-poisoned by Xenophon, merely tools of the sinister Silent Empire. And for my hero ..." But then her face fell again. "Oh ... But I cannot really use someone like Helion for my hero again, can I? Or Phaethon? Everyone will think I'm copying you. The dream-world you composed for the Oneiromantic Competition ..."
The younger Daphne snorted, and said, "That was your world! I looked in the records! All the work was done, the plots, the setting, all the characters, the laws of nature, everything, years before the competition. While I remembered making it up, those were your memories. The Gold Medal actually belongs to you!"
There was a look of hunger on the older Daphne's face. They both knew how badly she had longed to win the gold. It was a lifelong ambition.
The older Daphne stood up, and turned away, hands folded against her stomach, pretending to stare out the window.
Daphne Tercius Eveningstar said nothing, not wishing to increase her older self's upset. She let a moment of time go past, and then said lightly, "That lake out there. Looks familiar. Where are we?"
"Ah. This used to be part of the exposition grounds. That is Destiny Lake."
"What? The place where Phaethon saw that performance of the burning trees? I was looking all over for him here! You'd think I'd remember every damn rock and stone. Sure looks different. Water level is lower. Guess they tore down part of the mountain. But- say... ? Those little colored lights in the water? Those dots fading in and out like that... ?"
The older Daphne looked over her shoulder and smiled a cryptic smile. "Survivors. Parts of the tree are still growing down there, long after the performance ended. The life adapted to a less energy-wasteful form, and the trees altered and specialized so that they were no longer in direct competition with each other. It's more like a banyan tree now, with long root-systems under the soil, connecting the widely scattered colonies."
