La Edad De Oro (69 page)

“What? I thought you—this version of you—weren’t allowed to know what was going on any more than I am.”

“Yes, sir. But I can still make deductions of ordinary logic. Where was Daphne when you left her?”

“In the dream-tank. She was going into one of her games… wait a moment. I was expecting her to be in simulation for several days. She is not a novice at these games.”

“Was she competing for an award?”

“I thought she was.”

“And she was in masquerade, so her location was masked. So: who could have found her, who had the authority to interrupt her game, and who could call upon her to do something which he would know she regarded as more important than her competition; but it had to be someone who also knew where you where…?”

“Daphne and I are penniless, right? If she enters a game, or if I run a routine, or even send a message, Helion gets billed for it. I assume he can figure out certain details from the billing. And… Oh! Good Heavens! He even knows when I talk to you, doesn’t he?”

“It uses computer time, yes. Helion does not know the content of our conversation, but he knows how much of my mind and time I use.”

“And does he know where we’re going now? Does he know for what reason the Curia summoned me?”

“I will be surprised if he has not been summoned also.”

Phaethon came at last into the central cylinder, the one which had been the original space-yard topping the original elevator. It was smaller than Phaethon expected, only a few miles or so along its axis. Overhead and underfoot, along the curving walls, were the famous gardenworks of Ao Nisibus, dating from the era just before the Fifth Mental Structure, when this place was chosen to be one of the seats of Golden Oecumene administration.

The gardens were laid out in graceful and classical designs. Near the axis, in microgravity, floated balls of lunarian air bushes and sphere trees, each with an orb of soil at its center. Vines and lianas, grape and ivy of Martian manufacture inhabited the lesser gravity of the canopy and middle regions. Below, along the walls, were Terran flora; stands of fruit trees laid out, rank and file, in rectangles proportional of the golden mean; or colonnades and trellises; or lily ponds centered on concentric ranks of colorful blooms, from which paths and walkways radiated. Some of the plants, extinct on Earth, existed now only here, to maintain this famous garden’s natural state.

Phaethon, searching for the courthouse, looking into the Middle Dreaming. The symbolic meanings of the floral colors, tree and leaf, shape and placement, came flooding into his brain. The experience was overwhelming, since the architect had woven multiple overlapping layers of symbolism, each part reflecting the whole, throughout the entire garden.

It was doubtful whether any brain (before the invention of sophotechnology) could actually envision and enact a scheme where each part or group of parts could contain its own symbol-message while maintaining integrity taken as a whole; but Ao Nisibus, the designer, certainly made it seem as if he had. (All the more amazing, since Ao Nisibus had not had a Cerebelline neuroform.)

The gardens and lawns of the opposite side of the cylinder shone viridescently in the light of long windows, which, like canals filled with stars, ran along the walls parallel to the cylinder’s axis. The blue Earth, huge and dazzling, was rising through windows spinward of him. Sunlight slanted up through windows in the floor below, striping the gardens opposite with alternating bands of light green and dark green. Phaethon started to see a pattern in all this. His attention was absorbed.

Overhead, the Founder’s Monument and reflecting pool formed signs of Masonic import. Rose gardens, for passion, were hedged about with virtuous lilies; and two walkways, lined with euphrasy and rue, truth and repentance, came together in a cross (for noble sacrifice); but the actual intersection was a carriage circle (representing the world). In the center of the circle was a hillock, shaped like a burial howe, dotted with forget-me-nots. There was a meaning here, a message, a warning, telling Phaethon something about the nature of true memory, ultimate reality, and the universe…

An automatic safety routine in Phaethon’s sense-filter had to interrupt him from going into a beauty trance. He blinked and remembered to concentrate on looking for the court house. There: a walkway lined with a balanced number of majestic oaks and somber ash trees led to a glade. On three sides of the glade were boxwood hedges trimmed into complex labyrinths. In the glade, a circle of olive trees guarded a dark, clear pool. The symbolism would not have been more obvious had he seen blindfolded goddesses armed with swords and balance scales.

Phaethon slanted down through the air and landed lightly on the grass. Closer now, he could see the bottom of the pool was transparent crystal; the pool seemed dark only because there was a large unlit chamber buried beneath.

A slab of rock near the pool must have been made of para-matter, for a man dressed in blue-and-silver chameleon cloth slid up through the solid stone and stepped onto the grass. He wore a braided demicape, and a helmet of blue steel. In one white glove he held upright a pike taller than his helmet plumes. Phaethon recognized the man.

“Atkins! A pleasure to see you again. I swear you are the only man in the Golden Oecumene who can wear a getup like that”—Phaethon was looking at his garters and knee socks—“without looking ridiculous.”

“Good afternoon, sir.” The face was as calm and expressionless as ever; the tone was impersonal, brisk, polite. “I’m Atkins Secundus, his partial.” “Emancipated?”

“No. We’re still considered one person. I don’t really make that much on soldier’s pay, so I’ve sent out my partial copy here for other work. This one here is the bailiff and master-at-arms of the Court. The rule of posse comitatus prohibits the military from doing police functions, so I have to maintain a separate identity, and have any memories related to military security matters cut out.”

Phaethon looked at him with new interest. The two of them might have something in common. “Doesn’t it bother you to have holes and gaps in your memory?”

Atkins did not smile, but the lines to either side of his mouth deepened. “Well, sir, that depends. A serviceman has to assume the higher-ups know what they are doing, even when they don’t. If they monkeyed with my brain, I’m sure it was for a good reason.” “But what if it wasn’t?”

Atkins did not shrug, but a quirk of his eyebrow conveyed the same emotion. “I didn’t make the rules. I do whatever it takes. Someone has to. It might be different for civilians.” His good humor faded and his tone became, somehow, even more brisk and serious: “But for the moment, I’m going to have to ask you to disable your armor circuits. No weapons allowed in the courthouse.”

Phaethon had to get Rhadamanthus to find and insert the meaning of the word “weapon” into his brain. Phaethon was amazed and disgusted. “You have got to be kidding! You don’t actually think that I am capable of—”

Atkins gave Phaethon a thoughtful, disinterested look. “It’s none of my business what you are capable of, sir. I just enforce the rules.”

But Phaethon saw the calculating, professional look in Atkins’s eye. Perhaps it was a look of distrust. Perhaps Atkins was taking the measure of a potential enemy. The stare was offensive.

Rhadamanthus poked Phaethon on the knee with his beak, and whispered: “Hsst! It’s an old tradition. No one goes armed into Court.”

“Well, I cannot counter tradition,” muttered Phaethon. He doffed his helmet and let Atkins insert a disabling probe into the black suit layer. Thought-group after thought-group of the armor-mind went dark; anything even remotely capable of energy manipulation was locked, even simple action-reflex routines. Phaethon swallowed his pride; he did not know if he had a right to be offended.

Because, whatever Phaethon had done in the past, Atkins knew it and Phaethon did not.

Phaethon asked him.

Atkins squinted. “Sir, I’m not sure it’s my place to say. I’m on duty right now. The bailiff of the Curia isn’t supposed to be the one to help you break a legal contract, even if it is a stupid one. Why not just let the matter rest?”

The two of them stepped onto the rock surface. The rock let Phaethon ooze through only slowly and reluctantly, as microscopic and molecule-sized organizations hidden in the para-matter passed through his flesh and armor, probing for secret weapons. The Chrysadmantium supermetal defeated the probe attempts; the organizations had to flow in and out through Phaethon’s neckpiece to scrub the interior. It was not uncomfortable, but it was undignified.

Below were stairs, leading down. The aesthetic protocol was apparently different outside than in. Atkins’s quaint costume was replaced. There was no heat when Atkins’s uniform changed shape; perhaps it was pseudo-matter, not nanomachinery. During the moment of transition, Phaethon saw what the soldier was really wearing beneath; a trim jacket set with many vertical pockets holding discharge cartridges, responders, and preassembled nanoweapons.

And he had a knife and a katana hanging from his belt. Phaethon could not help but wonder at the man’s anachronisms. What sort of fellow was so hypnotized by tradition that he still carried sharp pieces of metal meant for poking and lacerating other men?

The transformation took an eye-blink. Atkins now wore a stiff-collared poncho of stark white, and his pike shrank to a baton from some period of military history Phaethon did not recognize. But he guessed the pale cloak was from the Objective Aesthetic, which dated from the late Fifth Era, long before the Consensus Aesthetic.

In that era, back before Sophotech translation routines existed, the differences in neuroforms made it difficult for the basics, Warlocks, Cerebellines, and Invariants, to understand each other’s thought and speech. It had been impossible to understand each other’s art. Consequently, the so-called Objective Aesthetic was heavily geometrical, nonrepresentational, highly stylized; more like an iconography than an artform. Phaethon did not find it attractive.

At the bottom of the stairs was an antechamber. Here stood another man. It took Phaethon a moment to recognize him in the gloom. “Gannis! Is that you, or one of you?”

He turned. It was indeed Gannis of the Jupiter Effort, but wearing a formal costume and wide headdress of Fifth-Era Europa. A heavy semicylindrical cloak, like the wing casings of a beetle, hung from wide shoulderboards. From those shoulders came a cluster of tassels or tentacles, carrying various thought boxes, note pages and interfacers. Multiple arms had always been a European fashion.

“A pleasure to see you, Phaethon!” There was something blank and stiff in his eye movements. Phaethon realized Gannis was using a face-expression program. He obviously had recognized Phaethon’s armor. Gannis was one of Them.

Phaethon thought to himself: Good grief! Is there anyone in the Golden Oecumene who does not remember what I did except for me?

The financial records had shown many trips to Jovian space. Phaethon also felt a sense of familiarity, of comfort, as if he and Gannis were old friends or business partners.

Like a flash of intuition, certainty entered Phaethon’s mind. Whatever it was Phaethon had done, Gannis had done it also. Or, at least, had helped.

“You are here to face the Curia also?” asked Phaethon politely.

“Face? I’m not sure what you mean. My group-mind is representing Helion.”

“You are his lawyer?” Why in the world would Gannis be helping Helion? Phaethon had been under the impression that the two men were business rivals, and did not really like each other. Certainly the Synnoetic School, with its direct mind-machine interfaces, its groupings and mass-minds, disagreed with the proindividualist traditions of the manorial schools, and yet competed for the same patronage, the same niche in the socioeconomy.

Gannis made an easy gesture. “Perhaps the Hundred-mind of Jupiter thinks it would be a miscarriage of justice to allow your claim to prevail. You’ve obviously already broken your word about the memorial agreements we all made at Lakshmi; none of the Peerage wants to have to do business with a man who cannot be trusted.”

Lakshmi was on Venus. What had Phaethon been doing on Venus? He assumed that the amnesia agreement was made just before the Masquerade’s opening ceremonies in January. Phaethon consulted an almanac routine. Venus had been in triune with Earth at that time, a good position to be used as a gravity sling for any ships bound between Earth, Mars, Demeter, or the Solar Array. Mercury had been in a nonadvantageous orbital position, on the far side of the sun. A footnote in the almanac indicated communications had been disrupted all across the inner system because of solar storms. It was the time of the disaster at the Solar Array. Phaethon eyed Gannis speculatively. The man had a suspicious air to him. And suspicious people had the habit of treating hypotheses as if they were certainties. They could be bluffed.

“Am I to be trusted less than… shall we say… others…?” said Phaethon, nodding ponderously. He favored Gannis with a knowing look.

“Are you saying Helion cannot be trusted with his own wealth? Or that your claim to it is better than his?”

Claim? What claim? Phaethon had no idea whatsoever what Gannis was talking about. Nonetheless, he spread his hands and smiled smugly. “My meaning is self-evident. Draw from it what conclusions you will.”

Gannis became red-faced with anger. Evidently his expression-program had failed, or he was deliberately showing his wrath. “You blame the solar disaster on Helion?! That is grotesque ingratitude, sir, simply grotesque! Considering the sacrifice that version of him made for you! You are a cad, sir! You are a simple, unspotted, pure and perfect cad! Besides, my client disavows everything that happened on the Solar Array! He was not even there!” “Not there? I thought your client was Helion…?” Gannis head jerked back an inch, as if he had been stung. Phaethon saw realization cross Gannis’s features, a second before the expression-program snapped back into place. Gannis realized Phaethon had been fooling him.

Suddenly bland and polite, Gannis said, “I’m sure the Curia will tell you what you have a right to know.”