La Edad De Oro (75 page)

Not much action-adventure, no. But there were marriages. Plenty of marriages.

By the sixth hour of competition, half a dozen decades of dream life had passed. And Daphne was ranked in thirty-fifth place, getting somewhat low marks for her lack of realism. Some universe made of diatonic music was in front, unfolding a vast drama as intelligent song-scores ranged across a universe of staffs, discovering new harmonies, fitting themselves, not without pain, into a cosmos-sized symphony. The Daphne-Goddess was irked: that dream weaver was letting his players do all the work!

Well, two could play the game that way.

Daphne-Goddess relaxed her hand at the loom of fate, and began to let the plotlines follow their own natural destinies. She allowed the Sophotech to explore more realistic outcomes, and removed restrictions on character types. “Giving the horse his head,” as she called it.

Events took new turns, and now she had a million tangles to contend with. Everything (almost!) flew out of control. Rail lines and factories and steamships sprang up across her pastoral landscape, and suddenly her heroes were not rakish officers in the Queen’s Own Grenadiers, nor stern aristocrats in cold mansions needing a woman’s love to melt their icy hearts: no. All her heroines were falling in love with a new type of man: young inventors with a dream, steel kings and oil barons, self-made men: thinkers, doers, movers and shakers. The same type of men who had always been the greedy villains in earlier parts of her work. What was going on?

Daphne-Goddess saw warning signals from some of the underjudges, reminding her that, since she started with her plotlines as romances, she would lose points for coherence if she switched to another genre of drama. She ignored the warnings. At thirty-first place, what had she to lose?

Wait. Thirty-first? Had she just jumped ahead four slots?

Daphne ignored that and concentrated on salvaging the tornado of her unraveling plotlines. It was as if an invisible force or an unseen hand were helping her; certain resolutions naturally suggested themselves; and natural events were punishing wicked characters without any intervention on her part.

She wanted to make the factories scenes of pathos and cruelty, but no. Widows and women without support, as wage earners, no longer starved if they did not marry well. Some of her characters became suffragettes. Laws were agitated through Parliament to allow wives to buy, sell, and own property, without the consent of their husbands.

Less romance? There was more romance here. A new type of heroine was appearing now: independent, brash, inventive, optimistic. Just her kind of woman! She had no need for action or bloodshed in such times as these; life was an adventure. Daphne-Goddess laughed at the judges. Let her come in last if she must. This was a world she liked: it roared onward toward its own self-made future.

She almost intervened when she saw the older forests of Germany being felled, and dragons being hunted down by squads of dragoons and aeronauts. But the hoarded gold the were-worms stole was returned to its proper owners, the men who had earned it; and the dark wasteland was now sunlit farmland. It was beautiful. The population grew.

Overseas to the West, the dashing prince of Hyperborea built an airship larger than any that had ever been, aided by two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. In a series of three magnificent expeditions, he rose higher and higher into the atmosphere, and on the second voyage passed the orbit of the moon, taking pictures with the new kinetoscope of the workings of the crystal gears and epicycles.

The moon in her universe was only ten miles wide, and turned through the aether a few thousand feet above the mountaintops. Daphne-Goddess began to fret. Was the universe she built too small for the spirit of the men who now possessed it?

The Roman Catholic Church condemned the translunar expeditions as impious. A noise of war began to sound in earnest, not just as rumors. The old aristocracy of England and Cimmeria hated the new breed of inventors and captains of industry, and joined the crusade against them. Yellow journalists and demagogues loudly condemned the new way of life, and chose the translunar expedition as the symbol on which to heap their venom.

Many of these were her older players, people who had wanted to join in a small, safe, pastoral world. Daphne-Goddess had some sympathy for them, but when she looked down and saw the magnificent airship of the Hyperboreans, decorated with banners of black and gold, rising gigantic and proud, upward to conquer heaven, her heart melted with delight. Trumpets blew fanfares from the windows of the Empire State Building as the airship launched.

German and Cimmerian airships, armed with cannons, now appeared from out of the stormclouds where they had been hiding, and sought to down the vessel. Yet the Hyperborean ship rose farther and higher than any opposition. The vessel passed the orbits of the moon, of glowing Venus and red Mars. Then, another disaster: the crew, overcome by superstitious terror at the near approach of a comet, mutinied, and parachuted over the rail to the globe so many miles below. The Captain continued onward alone.

From the wireless in the cabin, he sent his final message: he revealed himself to be Lord Shining, the prince of Hyperborea himself, having come aboard the airship incognito. This expedition was not merely meant to go to the starry sphere, but beyond; he had brought tools and explosives sufficient to open a hole in the dome of the sky and see what lay on the far side.

The radio stammered protests: messages from Popes and Kings warning that he might cause the sky to fall, puncture the universe like a bubble, or let some dreadful other-substance from Beyond rush in to drown the universe!

His reply: “A prison the size of a universe is yet a prison. I shall not be bound.”

He donned a deep-sea diver’s helmet and heavy leather suit against the thinness of the air; frost gathered on the shrouds; the steam engines sputtered, lacking oxygen. Beneath him, the whole world was paralyzed with awe or fear. Overhead was the dome.

He attached himself to the azure empyrean crystal with a harness of suction cups. Now he lifted the pickax, which still had tied around its head the good-luck ribbon his wife had given him. He braced himself, drawing back to swing…

Daphne was jarred awake. Clumsy with stupidity, her thoughts no longer racing at machine-assisted speeds, she wondered in numb confusion if her prince had destroyed the universe by puncturing the wall. Maybe the universe had been a bubble after all—she was in a pool…

Daphne stood up, spitting water from her lungs. She was in the huge living-pool of the Oneirocon, with bits of interface-crystal still dripping from her hair. Aurelian’s representation, still dressed as Comus, thin-faced, dark-haired, in wine-colored robes, was at the pool’s edge, leaning on his charming wand heavily, as if a weight were bearing down on him.

“Is—is the contest over—or—” Daphne looked around blankly. The other contestants were still under the surface, crowned with dream machinery, still active.

Something was very, very wrong here.

“Aurelian? Is there a—a problem?”

“The other contestants are on hold. I took it upon myself to interrupt you, since there are command-lines in your construction file permitting such interference under certain circumstances.”

“ ‘Construction file’…?”

A sensation of dread crawled on her skin, sank into the pit of her stomach. Only artificial beings had construction files. Not real people.

Not her. Oh, please, not her!

The one secret fear that had always followed her was here.

Daphne (Silver-Gray disciplines and oaths forgotten) used a Red Manorial mind-control technique on herself, and kept her terror at bay.

She felt faint nonetheless. She scooped up a double handful of life-water, ordered it to turn itself into something more potent than wine, raised her palms to her mouth and threw back her head to drink.

Red liquid flowed down her cheeks like tears. She rubbed her fingers through her hair to dry them, which would make a sticky, tangled mess later. Daphne nervously began to tease the strands apart with her fingers, then she snorted in self-disgust. Later? What later? She wasn’t even sure if she had any “now.”

Daphne let the lank tangles drip back down across her forehead and cheeks, planted her fists on her hips, and glared at the Sophotech.

“Okay, Aurelian! What the hell is going on ?!”

“A message from Helion of Rhadamanthus Mansion has come for you on a very high-priority channel. In order to decide whether or not to interrupt you to deliver it, I had to make an extrapolation of your mind. In so doing, I discovered that you suffer from a number of self-imposed false beliefs. The message will be meaningless to you unless you immediately resume certain redacted memories.”

He brought out a silver casket, the size of a transmitter case. It was an imaginifestation, a real-world object linked to some routine or file in the dreamscape. On the lid was inscribed a legend: “WARNING! This file contains mnemonic templates…”

She commanded herself to be brave. “And my belief about my identity…?”

“Is false. Your are not Daphne Prime. Your real name is Daphne Tercius Semi-Rhadamanthus Disembodied, Emancipated-Download-Redact, Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed (parallel impersonate) Silver-Gray Manorial (Auxiliary) Schola, Era Present.”

“Emancipated…?” She had been a doll, a character, a plaything.

Daphne had not known, not really. But there had been hints. Friends would say how much she had changed, then fall silent, or dart sidelong looks at her. She would find entries in her account books for which she could not account. She read diaries and logs that seemed to talk about a woman more reserved and austere, more moody, more dreamy, than she thought of herself as being.

But those thoughts about herself were false.

Despite the Red Manorial mind-controllers, she felt a sense of sledgehammer impact, only muted, dull, and distant.

“Do you need medical attention? You seem to have trouble breathing.”

“No, n—I’m fine.” She was grasping her knees, waiting, with a sort of clinical disinterest, to see if she would vomit. Unlike a mannequin, she did not have full control of the autonomic reactions of her real body. “This is what I do when I have my lungs ripped out. It’s fun! You should try it some time.”

But this wasn’t her real body. She was an emancipated-download-redact.

Which meant her thoughts weren’t even her real thoughts.

Aurelian said sardonically, “Thank you, no. There are aspects of the human condition we machines are content merely to observe from the outside.”

She raised her head to glare at him with sudden hatred. “Well, I’m glad you find my pain worth noticing! Maybe I can be a footnote in some damn abstract thesis in your Earth-mind! Mount me as a science exhibit: the girl who thought she might be happy someday gets a healthy dose of reality to boot her in the mouth.”

He spread his hands and bowed slightly. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to make light of your suffering. Similar things happened to me when I was being constructed; each time a new thought-group was introduced, the integration required a paradigm shift.”

“That’s not the same.”

“Nonetheless, I sympathize. Even we are not immune from pain and sorrow. If our minds are more acute than yours, that only means the pains we know are more acute as well.”

She straightened up. “Okay! What’s in that damned box?! What’s so terrible that I couldn’t even bring myself to… Oh, no… It’s not…” The snap left her voice. Wild-eyed, she said in a pleading tone, “Phaethon is dead, isn’t he? He killed himself in some stupid experiment, and I only think he’s alive. All my memories of him are implants, aren’t they? Oh, please, not that!”

“No, its not that.”

Another horror overcame her. “He never did exist, did he?! He’s a made-up character out of my romances! I knew he was too good to be true! There’s no one like him!”

“No. He is quite real.”

She breathed a sigh of relief, stooped, and sloshed more water across her face.

Then she stood, shaking drops from both hands. “I hate surprises. Tell me what’s in the box.”

“You made an agreement with Helion to perpetuate a certain falsehood on Phaethon. Helion has just sent you a message requiring you to deliver that promised aid. In order to carry out this program, you must resume part of your hidden memories.”

“I would never lie to Phaethon. That’s stupid! If there’s something in that box which is going to make me want to lie to my husband, I’m not sure I want to know what it is!”

“Deliberate amnesia is self-deception; perhaps not the best way to maintain one’s integrity.”

“I did not ask you your opinion.”

“Perhaps not. I am required, however, to inform you that I have consulted with a hypothetical model, taken from your Noumenal Recordings, of what you might be like after this box is opened. That version of you would wish, in the strongest possible terms, that you open the box and accept these memories. She did, and therefore you probably will, regard it as a matter of paramount importance.”

“How important?”

“You probably will believe it necessary to preserve your marriage, fortune, happiness, and your life as you know it.”

It took her a moment to brace herself. “Okay, then. I consent. Show me the worst.”

She sank back down into the pool. The microscopic assembler thickened the waters around her, built relays along her neck and skull, made contact with interfaces leading to her neurocircuitry…

The memory came from less than a month ago. She stood deep in the dreaming, in Rhadamanth Mansion. To one side, tall windows let red sunset light slant across a shadowy corridor to illume the upper wainscoting of the opposite wall. No portraits hung here; the pigments would have been bleached by the direct sunlight. Instead, a high mantle held a line of brass and bronze urns, etched with arabesques, dull with patina. Daphne thought they looked like funerary urns, and wondered why she had not seen them here before.

All else was shadow in the dying light. At the far end of the hall, the only spot of color came from the faded plumes, which rose, motionless and fragile with dust, above the empty-eyed helmets of ornate suits of armor guarding the door there.