La Edad De Oro (60 page)

“I did it to myself then? I was not compelled?”

“It was voluntary. We Sophotechs would have acted to stop it, otherwise.”

“And if I countermand the order?”

“Your old memories are in my archives back at Rhadamanthus Mansion, in the chamber of memory, in third level of mentality, the deep-layer nonrealistic dreamscape.”

“And should I?”

Even Rhadamanthus could not answer right away. There was a pause as the machine-mind examined every foreseeable future consequence of every possible combination of actions and responses for all the individuals in the Golden Oecumene (Rhadamanthus had mindspace enough to know them all intimately). This complexity was measured against the eternal philosophical dialogue structure the Sophotechs maintained. Rhadamanthus answered:

“It would be nobler and braver of you to know the truth, I think, young sir. But I also should warn you that there would be a cost. One which you yourself, earlier, were not willing to pay.”

“The cost? What is the cost?”

“Look down, sir, and tell me what you see below you here.”

Phaethon looked.

Everywhere was splendor. To the north were open glades, cool secret pools, fragrant hedges, walled arbors, tree-lined lanes, mountains, clefts, murmuring streams falling to a blue sea. East was forest, deep and dark, invested with bioformulations less traditional: weird coral-like growths, fairy-tale energy shapes, luminous bubbles, or strange miles of intertwisting lucent tendril vines. South were palaces, museums, thought-cathedrals, living-pools and amnesia wombs. West was the sea, where, in the light of the newly risen sun, Phaethon saw silhouettes of guests in newly altered bodies like his own, shouting with delight, soaring and diving and dancing in the sky, or plunging from high midair into the waves to rise again in glittering spray.

“There are people there flying like me—!”

“News travels quickly. You did tell me to put the information out. What else do you see?”

Phaethon looked not just with his eyes.

On the surface-level of dreamspace, were a million channels open to conversation, music, emotion display, neural stimulation; deeper interfaces beckoned from beyond, synnoetisms, computer synergetics, library organisms and transintellectualisms no unaugmented brain could comprehend.

Below them, in the center of the Celebration grounds (and in the “center” also of the mind-space) was the Aurelian Mansion, like a golden flower, with spires and domes shining in the light of dawn, with a hundred thought paths (in mentality) and four great boulevards (in reality) coming together into Aurelian’s city.

“I see Aurelian’s House. What point are you trying to make, Rhadamanthus?”

“The cost. I am showing you what you would lose. The cost of opening those old memories is that you would be thrown out.”

“Thrown out of the Celebration?!” Phaethon was taken aback. Then he was horrified.

He thought about all the work and hopes, all the long years of preparation which he and so many myriad others had put into this effort to make the Celebration a success. Their host, the Aurelian-mind, had been created just for this occasion (even as Argentorium, a thousand years ago, had been created for the last Millennial Ball.)

Aurelian was born by a marriage between the Westmind-group, famed for their audacity, and the Archivist, whose nature was more saturnine. The combination of these qualities had already proven inspiring.

One of Aurelian’s best effects—audacious, almost cruel—had been to invite both past and future to attend. Phaethon had seen paleopsychological reconstructions, brought to life and self-awareness to gaze in awe at the works their descendants had wrought. With them were personalities constructed from Aurelian’s models of many possible futures, inhabitants of fictional worlds set a million or a billion years yet-to-come, strolling with droll smiles amidst what, to them, was past.

Aurelian, at high-compression thinking-speeds, had been studying every possible combination of the guests (and that guest list was large; everyone on Earth had been invited) and all of their possible interactions for 112 years before the January Feast commenced.

Had Aurelian foreseen one of his guests accidentally recovering a buried memory, creating a scene, offending his dear wife, ruining the pageants and plans for the entire Silver-Gray School? Was the tragedy of Phaethon one which had been engineered for the edification of the other guests, a warning, perhaps, not to inquire too closely into what was better left unknown?

If Phaethon left now, he would miss the Final Transcendence in December. All the art and literature, industry and mental effort for the next thousand years would be established and determined, or, at least, heavily influenced, by the experience of that Transcendence. He would not contribute to it; none of what he had done over the last thousand years would be part of it. And after the culmination of the Transcendence, almost every conversation, every meeting, and every grand affair would be conducted in the shadow of that shared memory.

A memory Phaethon would not have. An experience everyone but he would share. Phaethon thought about all the jokes he would not get, all the allusions he would not catch, if he missed this. Not to mention the gifts and vastenings he would lose.

After all, why should he create a scene? Couldn’t he wait till the party was over to dig up buried unpleasantness? Wouldn’t that be more practical, make more sense?

Phaethon stood in midair, frowning, staring down. Like a smaller, second sun, the bright point of what had once been Jupiter rose in the East, casting double shadows across the Aurelian palace grounds underfoot.

Happily, the fanfare of the Jovian Aubade rang from tower to tower. White-plumed birds, all singing gloriously, flew up in flocks from aviaries and the groves, a thunder of wings. The doves carried fruit, or delicacies, or decanters of wine, and they sought out guests who hungered or thirsted.

A white bird flew up, and landed on his shoulder, cooing. The bird was a new species, designed just for the occasion. Phaethon took a crystal of smart-wine. The taste was perfectly conveyed through sensors in his mannequin to the taste glands and pleasure centers of wherever Phaethon’s real body and real brain were stored, sound asleep, and safe beyond all danger.

The taste was like summer sunshine itself, and the bouquet changed from moment to moment as tiny assemblers in the liquid combined and recombined the chemical elements even as he lifted the crystal. He sipped in pure delight, and no two sips were the same; each was an individual, not to be repeated. But he shooed the bird away, opened his hand, and dropped the drink unfinished. He made himself feel no regret as it fell away from him.

He dialed his costume from Harlequin to Hamlet. Now he wore bleak, grim, sober colors.

Phaethon said: “If the cost is that I be excluded from this Celebration, I can tolerate that. Somehow, I can. It’s only a party, after all. I can pay that cost. It’s better that I know the truth.”

“Forgive me, young master, but you misunderstand me. You will not be excluded from the Celebration. You will be exiled from your home. Those memories will cast you out of paradise.”

For a few moments, the Peers debated with calm intent solar evolution and decay, and other events to happen many millions or billions of years in the future.

Helion (who was a devoted antiquarian) knew how his distant ancestors would have been nonplussed to hear sane folk speaking of such remote eventualities; just as ancestors more distant yet, the primitive hunter-gatherers of the Era of the First Mental Structure, who lived from hunt to hunt and hand to mouth, would have been equally perplexed to hear the farmers destined to replace them speaking so casually of harvests and seasons months and years away.

“Why do we need a sun?” Vafnir said. “This is premised on the assumption that we will not find a satisfactory substitute source of energy after the sun is extinguished: a premise I, for one, do not accept without question.”

Ao Aoen said airily, “The Silent Oecumene sought a novel source of energy. They had no sun either. You recall, before their Silence fell, what horrors we heard from them.”

Vafnir said coldly: “Horrors they brought on themselves. The wisdom of the machine-intelligences could have saved them; they preferred to hate and fear all Sophotechs.”

“The vaunted Sophotechs were not wise enough to save the only extrasolar colony of man!”

Helion said patiently: “Peer Ao Aoen recalls, surely, that the Cygnus XI system is a thousand light-years distant; hence the death message was a thousand years outdated by the time we received it.”

Ao Aoen said: “For us immortals, the space of time equal to one celebration of our Transcendence. A trifle! Why was no manned expedition ever sent to the dark swan system?”

Gannis, breaking in, said, “Aha! What futility that would be! To spend unimaginable wealth to go pick among ruins and graveyards, cold beneath a black neutron-sun. Gah! The idea has merit only for its ironic pathos!”

Ao Aoen had an odd look to his eyes. “The idea has haunted several dreams of mine these past years, and a quarter-mind brother of mine saw an ominous shape once in the frozen clouds of methane in the liquid atmosphere of Neptune. The horoscopes of several of my cultmates tremble with unintelligible signs! All this points to one conclusion: it has now been shown, beyond doubt, that if a ship of sufficient mass and sufficiently well-armored to achieve near light-speed can be—”

Peer Orpheus raised a thin hand. “Enough! This is irrelevant to our discourse.”

Ao Aoen made a wild gesture with his many arms and fingers, and sank back in his chair, sulking.

Orpheus said softly: “We must resign ourselves to fact. Helion is correct about this, and about many matters. Of the visions of the future that the Transcendence will contemplate, one of more conformity, less experimentation, serves both our selfish interests, and, at the same time, supports the public spirit of the College of Hortators. Practical and altruistic minds both have equal cause to fear what leads to war. The College of Hortators and the Conclave of Peers must ally. Helion’s insight will form the basis of the next great social movement of the next Millennium. It is the vision the Peers will support.”

Helion had to use a mind trick to keep his joy in check. He was astonished; this was a signal honor far beyond anything Rhadamanthus had predicted, far beyond what he’d dreamed. If his vision of the future was adopted by the Transcendence, then he himself, Helion, would be the central figure whose philosophy would shape society for the next thousand years. His name would be on every tongue, every marriage list, every guest-password file of every party and convocation…

It was dazzling. Helion decided not to record the joy he felt now, for fear that future replays of this wild emotion would dull it.

There would be more talk, of course, and more debate, and each of the Peers would consult with their advisors, or issuing authorities, or (in the case of Ao Aoen) spirit guides. There would be more talk.

But Orpheus had spoken, and the matter was fairly well decided.

Soaring, with clouds above and clouds below, Phaethon let the joy of flight erase his worries for the moment.

He and Rhadamanthus penguin played in mock dogfights, doing snap rolls, barrel rolls, loops.

Phaethon was closing in on the penguin when the fat bird did an Immelmann, toppling over on one wing, and righting itself to flash toward Phaethon, and on past, shouting “Rata-tatatat! Gotcha!”

Phaethon didn’t know what the word Ratatatat meant, but it seemed to imply some sort of victory or counting-coup. Phaethon slowed and stood in the air, hands on hips.

“My dear Rhadamanthus, you’re surely cheating!” The bird, of course, only existed as an image in Phaethon’s sensorum.

“By my honor, sir, I’m only doing what a bird this size could do. You can check my math if you wish.”

“Aha? And what are you postulating for your acceleration tolerance in those turns?”

“Well, sir, penguins are sturdy birds! When is the last time you have ever heard of a Sphenisciforme blacking out, eh?”

“Point well taken!” Phaethon spread his arms and fell backward onto a nearby cloud. Mist spilled upward around him as he sank, smiling.

“My wife would love this, wouldn’t she? Glorious things attract her—wide vistas, grand emotions, scenes of wonder!”

The cloud got darker around him. On another level of vision, he detected electropotentials building in the area.

“…It’s just too bad that we live at a time when everything glorious has already been done for us. The only really impressive things she can ever find are in her dream universes.”

“You disapprove?”

“Well… I hate to say it, but… I mean, why can’t she write those things? She got an award for one oneiroverse she made up once, a Ptolemaic universe thing, some sort of magic planet. I think there were flying balloons in it, or something.” He pursed his lips. “But instead of writing them, she just drifts in and out of other peoples’ ideas.”

“Sir—excuse me, but I think we’re floating into someone’s claimed space—”

“Someday I’ll do something to awe the world, Rhadamanthus. Once she sees how impressive the real world can be, she won’t be so—”

Through the darkening cloud, a figure in a golden boat, dressed as falcon-headed god character from pre-Ignition Jovian storm-poetry, swam up through the cloud, and made an impatient gesture with his long black pole. He wore ornate robes of white and gold and blue, with a complex helmet-crown. “Sir! I say, Demontdelune!”

“I’m not Demontdelune; this is Hamlet.”

“Ah. As you wish. In any case, please move aside; I’m trying to sculpt a thunderstorm here, and your fields are interfering with my nanomachines.”

Phaethon looked around him, switching his perception to a finer level, and shutting off his sense-filter. The illusionary penguin vanished, but now Phaethon could see extraordinarily small machines attached to each and every water droplet, generating repulsive and attractive fields, herding them. There were more nanomachines per cubic inch in this area than he had ever seen before.