La Edad De Oro (64 page)

He turned just as a dark-haired woman with vivid features stepped past Rhadamanthus and into the room. She was wearing a long black coat with a ruffle of lace at her throat, and in one hand she carried her mask like a lorgnette.

She had eyes of luminous, dancing green, which blazed, perhaps with mirth, perhaps with fear or ire, as she called:

“Phaethon! Drop the box! You don’t know where it’s been!”

Phaethon removed the key, so that the red letters faded, but he kept the box in his hand. “Hello, dear. Who are you supposed to be?”

“Ao Enwir the Delusionist. See?” Throwing back her head, she held open a flap of her coat to display her pinch-waisted vest, spiderwebbed with Warlock signs and studded with responders. The masculine cut of the garment had been rounded somewhat to accommodate her. Only her shoes were feminine; a projection or spike from the heel forced her to walk tiptoed.

“Enwir was a man.”

Her head nodded forward with a sway of hair. “Only when he wrote his Discourses. He arranged the March of Ten Figments as a woman. Are you supposed to be Demontdelune?”

“Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”

“Oh.”

A silence hung in the air for a moment.

Unlike other women he knew, his wife did not change body shapes or styles when fashions changed. She had kept the same face for centuries: fine-boned, small of chin, wide of brow. Her skin was a lustrous golden brown; her hair was black and shining as jet, and fell just past her shoulders.

But her personality was displayed in the glitter and motion in her wide and flashing eyes, mischievous or dreamy by turns. Her lips were a trifle wide, and her mouth quirked from moment to moment impish grins, solemn dryad pouts, or sensual nymphic smiles, one after another in restless succession.

Now her face was still and calm, except for the skeptical twitch that raised one eyebrow.

Then she shrugged and waved her mask at Phaethon’s casket. “And just what in the world did you imagine you were thinking you were doing?”

“I was curious…”

“Let’s just call you Mr. Pandora from now on!” She sniffed and tossed her hair and rolled her eyes to heaven. “Didn’t fat Rhadamanthus here warn you that you’ll get tossed out like wet garbage if you open those old memories?”

Rhadamanthus in the doorway muttered, “Mm. I don’t think I used quite that wording, mistress…”

Phaethon hefted the casket thoughtfully, pursed his lips.

His wife took a step forward, saying, “I don’t like that look on your face, lover. You’re thinking rash, rash thoughts!”

Phaethon’s eyes narrowed. “I’m just wondering why, when I beat the bush to flush out whoever was behind my amnesia, I got you…”

She put her little fists on her hips and stared up at him, her mouth a red O of outrage. “Suspicious of me, are you now?! Well, I like that! You’re the one who wanted me to keep you away from the casket! Just see if I do you any favors anymore!” And, arms folded across her breast, she tossed her head angrily, making an exasperated noise in her nose: “Hmph!”

“What I want to know,” said Phaethon, a little impatiently, “Is how long you were going to let me live my life without telling me my life is false? How long were you going to lead me around blindfolded?”

She stamped her foot. “False?! And you think I’d just live with a copy of my own husband? If you love someone, real love, you can’t love their copy.” But she could not hide a strange look of guilt and uncertainty that crossed her features at that moment.

Phaethon’s voice was grim and remote: “Is my love real? Or was that a false memory too?”

“You’re the same as you were before; nothing important is in that damn box!” She turned to face Rhadamanthus. “Tell him!”

Rhadamanthus said, “No false memories were added. Your personality has undergone no major change; your basic values and attitudes are the same; the memories which that casket-icon represents are surface-structure memories only.”

Phaethon shook the box toward her. “That’s not the point!”

“Well, what is the point?” she asked challengingly.

“What’s in this box? You know and I don’t. You were never going to tell me?”

“You know! Exile and dispossession are in that box! Isn’t that enough for you? Isn’t anything ever enough? You open that box and you lose me. Isn’t that enough?”

“Lose?… You wouldn’t come with me? Into exile?”

“N—uh. Are you asking me? Do you want me to come? No! That’s a stupid idea! What would we live on?”

“Well—” Phaethon blinked. “I was assuming they would let me take my own property, or that I could sell or convert some of my holdings, to…”

Now Daphne’s face grew quiet and still as a winter pond. She spoke softly, “Lover, you don’t have any holdings. You sold them all. The two of us are living on Helion’s charity. We’re only staying here because he hasn’t thrown us out.”

“What are you saying? I’m one of the richest men in the Oecumene.”

“Were, honey. You were.”

Phaethon looked at Rhadamanthus, who nodded sadly.

Phaethon said, “What about my work?! For three thousand years, I’ve been alive, and I was not idle all that time. I remember my apprenticeships, and the memory grafts to learn terrestrial and transcendental finances; engineering, philosophy, persuasion, and thought-craft. My effort helped fix the new orbit of the moon; that was one of my first! When Helion opened a project on Oberon, no one but me was willing to go to Uranus! I condoned the studies of ring-city orbital mechanics, and made the simulation for the project to put a ring-city around the equator of the Sun! That study led to the present Solar Array! And then I… then I…”

His face went blank.

He said, “What did I do between Epoch 10165 and 9915? That’s a two-hundred-fifty-year gap.”

No one spoke.

Phaethon said: “Funny. I remember the news and the gossip. Epoch 10135. That was the year when the Meta-mathematical Supercomposition came out of its meditation, and announced the solution to the Ouryinyang’s Information Compression Paradox. I remember other things. But not what I did. I was living in my high castle called Aloofness, at Mercury L-5 equilateral, a home I carved myself out of an unclaimed asteroid, thrown in-system by the Neptunians. I had twelve hundred square miles of solar converters, like the sails of a clipper ship, drinking in the sun. Tremendous energy. But what was I doing with my life then? I was too far away from Earth to maintain a telepresence or a mannequin. Was I retired from the Silver-Gray? I wasn’t poor then.”

Phaeton’s eyes shifted back and forth, looking at nothing.

“And what did I do between 10050 and 10200 during the entire First and Second Reconsiderations? Everyone remembers where they were standing or what they were doing when Jupiter Ignited. That was in Epoch 7143, right after my centennial. Or when they heard the first song from Ao Ainur, the Lament for the Black Swans, in 10149. Everyone, but not I. Why would that have been chosen for erasure, not the events but my reactions to them? Where was I standing? What was I doing? Is that information in this box, too? How much of my life did you take?!”

The blankness in his face grew even more hollow. “Daphne… Why don’t we have any children?… I do not remember the reason why we decided that. The most important decision any couple can have, whether or not to start a family. And I don’t remember it. My life was erased.”

Silence lay like a stone.

“Darling—I just want you to listen to me—” Daphne leaned forward. Her face was frozen; her eyes were staring at the box as if it were a poisonous import sheet, ready to download some deadly virus. “Don’t do anything rash—you’re just the same as you ever were—you’re still the man I was born to love and marry—there’s nothing in that box you need—”

Phaethon’s hand tightened on the lid. But he said, “Rhadamanthus, can we freeze this scene? I need time to think.”

Everything in the chamber froze in place. All sound was hushed. Not a dust mote falling through the light from the window changed position.

The voice of Rhadamanthus came directly into his brain: “You will have to log entirely off the system, so as not to prejudice Mistress Daphne or any other users. Log back on when you wish to resume.”

Phaethon made the gesture of ending, and the world disappeared.

Phaethon was surprised to find himself in blank thought-space. His self-image was gone; his body was nothing but a pair of floating gloves, here. In front of him was a spiral wheel shape made of points of light. To his left and right were red and blue icon cubes, representing basic routines; engineering, mathematics, ballistics, environmental sciences. A half-dozen black slabs, like shields, represented security, anti-intrusion and privacy-guarding routines. There was a yellow disk-shaped icon representing communication circuits.

And that was all. Was this Phaethon’s innermost thinking area? If so, he certainly did not coddle himself.

The barren emptiness was oppressive. And it certainly ignored Silver-Gray traditions of detailed utter realism. There wasn’t even a “wallpaper” image here—no room, no desktop.

Phaethon had his glove jab the yellow disk. A blood red disconnect cube appeared. He put his glove inside it and made the ending gesture.

Words appeared unsupported in the air: “WARNING. You are about to disconnect from all Rhadamanthine systems and support. Do you wish to proceed?”

He touched finger to thumb, spreading his other fingers: the yes signal.

A moment of disorientation floated through him. For a moment, his mind was clouded; the sensations in his body changed, slowed, became somewhat numb, and yet more painful. He opened his eyes and winced.

Phaethon was awake in the real world.

The medical tubes and organs wrapping him were made of hydrocarbons, and slid aside, re-forming themselves into water and diamond plates for easy storage. Phaethon stood up slowly from his coffin, surprised and shocked.

The room was small and ugly. To one side was a large window opening on a balcony. Above the medical coffin was a crystal containing the routines and biotics to keep his slumbering body intact. The crystal was huge, a crude out-of-date informata, fixed to the ceiling with awkward globs of adhesion polymer. The walls were dumb-walls, not made of pseudo-matter, not able to change shape or perform other functions. When he put his foot over the edge of the coffin and swung himself to his feet, he made two other unpleasant discoveries.

Despite Silver-Gray promises of total realism, his self-image in mentality was represented as being stronger and more agile than his real body in reality. Phaethon climbed slowly and clumsily to his feet.

The second surprise was that the floor was cold. Furthermore, it stayed cold. It did not anticipate his orders, did not automatically adjust or react to his presence; it did not conform its texture to soothe his feet. He thought several peremptory commands at it, but nothing happened.

Then he remembered to speak aloud. “Carpeting! Foot massage!”

The floor adjusted to carpet, and warm pulses caressed his feet, but irregularly, slowly. The carpeting was irregular and tattered, ugly looking. The fact that he had to speak his orders drove home to him how impoverished these quarters were.

He looked around slowly, noticing the crooked tension in his neck; perhaps his spine had become misaligned while he slept.

He looked up; there was grime on the ceiling and upper walls. Phaethon could not even recall the last time he had seen grime.

A second shock came when he looked down at his body. The skin was a dull, leathery substance; it looked very much like inexpensive artificial skin. He pressed his fingers against his chest, his stomach, his groin. Beneath the flesh, he felt, or perhaps he imagined, that some of the organs under his fingers had the hard, unyielding texture of cheap synthetic replacements.

His senses were duller. Distant objects were blurred; his hearing was restricted in pitch and range, so sounds were dull and flat. Perhaps his skin was slightly numb as an aftereffect of the crude medical care he had been under. Or, what was more likely, the sense impressions directed by the computer stimulated his nerves more thoroughly and precisely than his natural organs. And he was blind on every wavelength except on narrow visible-light range.

There was a door, but no knob. He stepped into it and bumped his nose. Now he jumped back in alarm, wondering for a moment why the door had failed to move.

What shocked him was that he had lost some of his sanity. Normally, when he made a discovery, or realized something, Rhadamanthus made adjustments in Phaethon’s midbrain, sculpting whatever habits or patterns of behavior Rhadamanthus thought Phaethon might need directly into Phaethon’s nerve paths. This decreased learning time; Phaethon normally did not have to remind himself to do things twice.

Then Phaethon said, “Open…”

The door slid open slowly. Behind was not an exit but a wardrobe. A strange garment was hanging from a cleaning levitator. A few bottles of life-water were hanging, weightlessly, in a magnetic suspension rack.

Phaethon took one of the bottles in hand. At his touch, information appeared in the glassy bottle’s surface. Reading the label, one word and icon at a time, was painful, and Phaethon got a headache after slowly picking through the first few menu pages hovering in the depths of the label. The bottle could not put the knowledge of its contents directly into his brain; Phaethon was disconnected from Middle Dreaming. It was a low-quality manufacture, with only a few formations and reactions recorded by the microbe-sized nanomachines suspended in the liquid. He put the bottle back in place.

On a low shelf was a box of dust cloud. Phaethon picked up the box, and said, “Open box.”

Nothing happened. Phaethon pushed open the lid with his hand. The amount of dust material inside was minor, a few grams.

“I really am poor after all,” he muttered sadly. Where had all his money gone? After twenty-nine or thirty centuries of useful work, investment and reinvestment, he had accumulated considerable capital.

With the box tucked under one arm, Phaethon wandered back into the pathetic room. He looked back and forth. It was ghastly.