La Edad De Oro (76 page)

Her hesitant, soft steps carried her to the door. All was dark and quiet. The door-leaves fell open silently at her slightest touch.

Leaping red light shone from the crack, and the roaring noise of alarms, sirens, explosions, screams. Daphne came forward, squinting, her elbow up to shield her face from the heat. She smelled burnt flesh.

A gallery of transadamantine supermetal stretched infinitely ahead of her. The ceiling was wider than the floor on which she stood, so that the windows or screens paneling the walls slanted down, and overlooked a sea of seething incandescence. This sea was roiled and torn by spiral storms of some darker matter churning; and from these blots rose arching arms of flame, intolerably bright, prominences flung endlessly upward into black void above.

Daphne saw the gallery’s lines of perspective dwindle to the vanishing point as straightly as if drawn with a geometer’s rule, with no curve or deflection; likewise, the horizon of the infinite storm outside the windows was much farther than the horizon of any Earth-sized planet would allow.

A gasp of pain, half a scream, half a laugh, came from behind her. She turned. This gallery met several others in a large rotunda, where banks of tiered controls overlooked rank upon rank of windows, holding views of the flaming storm from many angles and directions, cast in several models, flickering with multiple layers of interpretation.

Along the floor of the rotunda, huge cubes of some machinery Daphne did not recognize were melting; through red-lipped gaps and holes in the armored housing, white-hot funnels of incandescent air erupted. There were darts of light and sparks, but no flames; everything which might have been flammable had been consumed.

In the center of the rotunda, at the top of the burning ziggurat of machinery, blood dripping from the cracks where the white ablative of his armor had melted, sat Helion on a throne. Through the transparent face-shield of his helmet, the right half of his face had been scalded to the bone. His right eye was gone; cracked black tissue webbed his cheek and brow. Medical processors, unfolding from the interior of the helmet, gripped Helion’s face with claws and tubes, or crawling drops of biotic nanomachinery.

A dozen emergency wires ran from his crown to the control caskets to either side of him. It looked absurdly crude and old-fashioned. Evidently the thought control had failed, or the static in the room did not allow signals to pass through the air from the circuits in his brain to those in the boards.

Hovering between his hands, above his knees, was the orb of the sun, webbed with gold lines to indicate the Solar Array stations, pockmarked and scabbed with dark splotches to indicate the storms. Funnels of darkness reached from the sun-spots down toward the stellar core. The orb radiated multicolored lights, each color symbolizing a different combination of particles streaming from the storm centers.

Some screens showed a furious activity, calculations and solarological data streaming past. Others showed a slow and vast disaster; magnetic screen after screen overloading and failing; sections of the Array losing buoyancy and descending toward the interior, toppling and disintegrating.

The safety interlocks were gone from all power couplings, nodes and transfer points; speed-of-reaction restrictions had been removed from the nanomachinery. Consequently, the machinery inside the array was heating up, driven past safe operating levels, and being allowed to burn, provided that one more second of functional life could be forced from its self-immolated corpse.

Helion was attempting to position screens or to release charges into the core to deflect some of the storm-particles. The volumes of matter involved were incredible; Helion’s machines threw masses of controllants fifty times the size of Jupiter from the photosphere into the mantle like so many grains of sand.

The status board showed the Solar Sophotech-Mind had been lobotomized by loss of power. Helion was wrestling with the storm alone.

He looked up, wide-eyed, as she stepped in: his look was one of hope, or vast and godlike mirth, of guiltlessness and fearlessness.

“I see it now.” His voice trembled over the station loudspeakers. “What else can be the cure for the chaos at the core of the system? It is so simple!”

But a breach in his suit bubbled open at that point; superheated air rushed in. He screamed and screamed, jerking to his feet, arms writhing. The gush of pure oxygen as some internal tank erupted turned the flame inside his suit into a pure white light. The light grew red as blood, was baked against the inside of the face-plate into a semiopaque layer.

The same armor meant to protect him now held the flames against the dying man’s skin. The figure on the throne shivered violently, burnt lungs unable to scream, until nerves and muscles were likewise unable to react. A long-drawn-out moan issued from the loudspeakers. It is possible that Helion’s consciousness lingered for a long and horrible moment in his neurocybernetic interface, before the melting point of the artificial brain-fibers and circuits were reached.

Daphne retreated. She had to push through a half-melted rack of machine organisms, wading molten adamantium, stepping through white-hot washes of fire, to reach the gallery. (The small amount of heat she felt was merely symbolic, to show her what was represented here. She appeared in a mode called “audit,” able to view, but not to be affected by, the scenario. Had she been truly involved, unprotected, unarmored, her self-image would have been instantly burnt to ash.) She shoved through the mess out of the rotunda, and back down the gallery. Daphne found she had no curiosity whatsoever about the scene of hellish death and incineration she had just witnessed. In fact, she was disturbed by it, or even frightened.

But, before she could escape, the sirens fell silent, and the rotunda stopped glowing and burning. Footsteps sounded. Here came Helion, alive again, face whole and unburnt, armor white as snow, undamaged.

He came toward her. The face-plate of his helmet was thrown back. His expression was strange to her, clear-eyed, yet haggard, eyes heavy with unspeakable inner sorrow.

Daphne ceased her retreat and Helion stepped into the gallery.

“Why did you call me? What does all this mean?” she asked. She spoke softly, half hypnotized by the look of grief in Helion’s eye, the sad half smile on his face.

Helion turned from her. He gripped the rail and looked down at the surface of the sun below. The incandescent sea was calm; only a few far specks showed the gathering of the storm. The scenario had evidently been reset to the beginning.

“Ironic that I, of all people, must now violate Silver-Gray protocols.” he said, his voice measured and dignified, almost kind. “To have a solar catastrophe in the west wing of a Victorian mansion, I grant you, is questionable visual continuity. But we have always been dedicated to realistic images and simulations, always said that the plague of illusion consuming our society cannot be fought except by strict adherence to realism. And this scenario is real. Would that it were not!”

“You died?” Daphne spoke in a horrified whisper.

“For an hour I was out of contact with the Noumenal Mentality. What happened in that hour? What was I thinking? Some partial records were saved, some of my thoughts, most voice-video records. There are readings from the black boxes from the core-diver units. The Probate Court, for obvious reasons, will not let me examine the thought they deem to be crucial. But there were records enough, nonetheless, to construct this scenario. My own private torture chamber…”

Daphne wondered if it were a full-simulation scenario. If so, Helion had just suffered all the real pain and anguish of a man burning to death.

He banged his armored fist, ringing, against the rail. “I don’t know what they’re looking for! I can see the expression on my face: I know what I said. What was I thinking? What one thought made such a difference? Some sort of epiphany, some thought so bold and great that it would have changed my life forever, had I lived!”

“Then Prime Helion is dead? You are Helion Secondus?” She laid a hand against his shoulder, a touch of sympathy.

He turned and looked down at her. “It would be easier if it were so clear as that. My identity is in doubt. I will have to struggle to prove who I am.”

“I don’t understand. Rhadamanthus must accept that you are Helion; otherwise you would not still be considered the manorial archon. Would you be? Do the other members of the schola know?”

There was something in his gaze that made her drop her hand and step away. It wasn’t sorrow in his gaze that scared her; it was pity. Pity for her.

He spoke: “Brace yourself, Daphne. I have something dreadful for you. I was awake for many days before they told me I was a ghost. You have been awake for half a year.”

“I’m a recording?”

“No. It is worse. You are a construction. Listen to me.”

And it only took him a few short words to destroy her life.

Helion explained. Some project of Phaethon’s threatened catastrophe to the Golden Oecumene; but the danger was not immediate, so the Curia and the Constables were forced to allow him to continue. The Hortators, however, led by Gannis of Jupiter, were able to have the project condemned as immoral, socially unacceptable. Phaethon was threatened with being ostracized and expelled.

Then Helion, the Prime Helion, died in the solar disaster on the array. Phaethon’s grief at his sire’s death was great, but he refused to give up his dangerous project. The original Daphne was faced with the prospect of either joining Phaethon in exile or joining his foes to shun him; which meant: betraying him, never speaking with him, never seeing him again.

She chose instead a type of suicide. Daphne “drowned” herself, entering a dreamworld, redacting her memories of reality, and destroying the encryption keys that would allow her to return again to life and sanity. She was lost forever in a fiction of her own imagining. Perhaps it was a world that held a Phaethon who would not leave her.

Helion’s voice was gentle and terrible:

“Her last act was to emancipate a partial duplicate of herself, equipped with false memories, and armed with the type of personality she imagined Phaethon wanted or deserved. You used to be her ambassador, her doll. She used you as her off-planet representative, because she was afraid to leave the earth, afraid that if she would ever go outside of the range of the Noumenal Mentality system, she might die without a backup copy. Which is exactly what happened to me. I think the morbid fear she had of outer space was exacerbated by news of my death.”

Daphne felt exhausted. She had knelt, collapsing, and was resting her head against the cool upright of the gallery railing. She muttered: “But I met him in space. On Titania. A diamond dome grown of carbon crystal rose on spider legs above a glacier of methane… I remember it exactly. He was standing on the tower top, gazing up at a crescent Uranus, and at the wide night sky, and smiling to himself as if it all belonged to him. He invited me to swim, but there were no intoxicants in the pool, just nutrients, which was the first thing I liked about him. While we soaked up food, we talked by means of Dolphinoid sonar weaving. It was funny because he kept mis-interlacing his verb pulses. We just chatted, erecting one lacy tapestry of ideograms after another, with no concern for spacing or end structure, whatever we felt like. Real Dolphinoids would have been so horrified! We talked about the Silent Ones…”

“Those memories are mostly true; it was edited of references which might hint that you were a partial-doll at the time.”

Daphne wanted to call up one of her old Red Manorial programs to shut down her anger and grief reactions, but she did not dare, not with Helion, the head of the Silver-Gray Mansions, staring sadly down at her. “Why has this… this horrid thing been done to me? My mind is filled with falsehood. My marriage is an illusion; my life a lie. What did I do to deserve this?”

Helion’s smile lost part of its sadness; his face seemed to radiate warmth. “But, my dear Daphne, it is your courage which brought this on yourself, the ambition of your purpose. Those who attempt great things suffer greatly. You wanted to assume the life discarded by Daphne Prime; you knew that you might fail, or suffer anguish. But you put your fears, and your old life aside, and boldly seized the moment when it came!”

“What moment…?”

An image of a silver globe, banded by an equatorial ocean, appeared in Helion’s gauntlet. “Here. Atop the Lakshmi Plateau, Gannis of Jupiter, Vafnir of Mercury, Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech and the College of Hortators, met with Phaethon and me in the presence of the Venereal Procurator.” As he pointed, the vision swooped through clouds, passed across the newborn continents of the young world, and came to where a vast complex of palaces, manufactories, schools, and cathedral-sized Sophotech housings crowned a green high plateau. “This was seven months ago. The place is familiar to you?”

“Venus. I went there when I was reborn under my new name. The Red Manorial foundation-city called Eveningstar. The Red Queens took pity on an ex-witch. They took me in.”

“I’m afraid that memory is false. Daphne Prime was reborn there. She was taken in. You were made elsewhere, but were reborn as her in this same spot. Ironic, isn’t it? Phaethon agreed to the Hortator’s terms. The suicide of his wife made his life intolerable to him. His magnificent dream was buried there; his life, like yours, was gone.

“But you still dreamed of happiness with him, even though he had spurned you as a ghost. Apparently your maker did not understand my scion as well as she imagined: Frankly, I never thought Daphne Prime understood Phaethon at all. The personality she gave you did not win his love or admiration; he wanted the original, even with her moods and flaws. You were tormented by the fear that you were a caricature, with traits exaggerated to mock poor Phaethon, created by Daphne before her drowning as a type of revenge on him. In any case, you and he agreed to enter into the mutual hallucination that you were married to, and loved, each other.”

“But he loves me! He does! It is real!”

“Then why doesn’t he spend his days with you? No, my dear. His love is an implanted delusion.”