La Edad De Oro (81 page)

Phaethon froze, startled. It was suddenly silent, with the total and absolute silence of a vacuum. The panels had not slid or moved to shut; one moment they were not there; the next they were in place. There was no hint or whisper of noise from beyond the panels, such as a Silver-Gray scene would have provided, to maintain the illusion of three dimensions and of consistency of objects.

Phaethon’s hand was near the table surface. Still he hesitated.

“Rhadamanthus, why am I hesitating? What am I thinking?” He asked the question aloud before he remembered that he was disconnected from the Rhadamanthine system. (Had he been connected, he would not have forgotten, even for a moment.)

There was an icon for a Noetic self-consideration circuit in the tabletop. It was a crude, old-fashioned model, weeks or months out of date. But Phaethon thought that if he could clean a room manually, he could clean his nervous system of emotional maladjustments manually.

He touched the icon. Another, smaller window, like a tabletop, opened in the unsupported midair to his left. The new window was lit with the colors, dots and grids of standard psychometric iconography. He saw that his tension levels were high; grief and rancor were burning like a fire in a coal mine, sullen, just below the surface of his thoughts; and the temptation simply to give in to the Eleemosynary’s bargain, to have someone or something else solve this problem for him, was very high.

The short-term emotional association index was carrying an image from the dream consciousness in his hypothalamus. He reached into the surface of the window, and through it, to open the index box and look at the image list.

There it was. He was associating the sudden silence of the closed balcony with being trapped in a coffin, the airtight lid slamming shut, inescapable. A second association led to another dream image; that of his wife being locked in a coffin, still alive but asleep, her eyes moving beneath their lids. And, from another branch, a third image led away: the sound from outside had been shut off, not like a door closing but like a communication link being turned off. Which, in fact, it was. Phaethon discovered that this was the unconscious thought that was making him uneasy. Uneasy, because he realized that he actually was in a sort of a casket, namely, in a public hospice telepresence box.

If he did not go to visit his wife in person, there would be a signal going from his brain to some mannequin or remote, and back again. That signal time would have to be bought with Helion’s money, and the signal content might be recorded.

Or distorted? Or edited? If and only if he went in person, and saw her with his own eyes, could he be sure the signals entering his brain were unedited.

What if this forgotten Lakshmi Agreement had put sense-filters on public channels to forbid Phaethon from seeing certain objects? (It had happened to him at Destiny Lake; he almost had not seen the Observationist School astronomer who told him about Helion’s solar disaster.)

With the index open, Phaethon saw his tension levels jump again. Evidently thoughts about Helion were, at this moment, very upsetting to him. Upsetting, because he really did not know whether the version of Helion who was still alive was his Helion.

Should he be in mourning over a dead father, grief-stricken? Or should he be laughing with exasperation because a mistake of minor protocol, some fluke of overly zealous law, was trying to cheat Helion out of his entire fortune? There was only an hour missing from the present Helion’s memory: that hardly constituted enough change to consider him a new and separate person, no matter what the law said.

Phaethon saw in the remote section of the index what he was really thinking, deep down. He wanted to talk to Helion about his problems.

He wanted fatherly advice and support.

From the bottom of the index box, where links to deeper brain sections glimmered like strands of smoke, came an image from memory.

The picture was this: Helion, dressed in armor white as ice, with a dark gorget covering his throat and shoulders, stood proud and tall on stairs of blue lapis lazuli. Behind him rose doors of burnished gold, tall and shining, inset with panels of black marble. The panels were carved with eight symbols of the rights and duties of manhood: a sheathed sword, an open book, a sheaf of ripe grain, a bundle of rods containing an ax, a cogwheel, a floral wedding trellis, a stork, a Gnostic eye.

Phaethon remembered those doors well. These symbols represented the right and duty of self-defense, freedom from censorship and the duty to learn, the obligation to labor and the right to keep the fruits thereof, civil rights and civic duties, and the rights and duties associated with cybernetic progress, sexual alliances, reproduction, and self-mutagenesis.

Those who passed through those doors, and passed the Noetic philosophic and psychiatric integration of their memory paths and thought chains, were recorded as full members of the Rhadamanthine mind structure, granted communion and ascendance. While they might have been voting adults in the eyes of the law and of the Parliament long before, the scholum of the manor-born did not accept that a child was fully adult until he was proven to be fully sane and honest. That took longer.

On the day when he had turned five-and-seventy years of age, Phaethon had reached his majority.

He and Helion had been staying on Europa at the time, negotiating some last details of the Circumjovial Moon effort. The ceremony had been somewhat rough and impromptu, but no less stirring to Phaethon for all that. Helion’s Lieutenants and the High Vavasors of Rhadamanth had radioed updated copies of themselves across the solar system to be present; the copies could be later reintegrated with the primary memories, to create the illusion that Helion’s friends, employees and allies had attended. The palace they used had been grown overnight out of smart-crystal, not properly adjusted for Europa’s light gravity, so that the spires and towers emerged as elongated fairy shapes, lacy and fantastic; irregularities were masked with morphetic illusions or pseudo-matter. There had been no Yule tree, so the gifts were recorded on disks and ornaments hanging from a squat detoxification bush one of Phaethon’s remotes found in their drop-ship. And there had not been enough time to give the chorus properly thought-out pseudo-personalities for the comic reenactments of Phaethon’s youth which traditionally preceded the Noetic submergence ceremony, so Helion had peopled the play stages with characters from popular novels, Jovian history, and ancient myth, and whomever else he could find cheaply on the local area channels. The reenactments, normally austere with a restrained dry wit, turned into bizarre, anachronistic buffoonery. Phaethon loved it nonetheless, every minute.

In his memory, he saw once again how Helion had looked as he stood before the golden doors of the submergence chamber. The semi-Helions, his partials, had bowed and stepped aside, and there was Helion himself, the original, standing on the stairs, gleaming in his white armor. (This armor, at that point, was still an extrapolation; completion of the Solar Array project was still five hundred years in the future. No one really knew what architecture of interfaces would have to be built into such armor, or what the solar deep-station environment would be like.)

Helion had put one hand on Phaethon’s shoulder and, with his other hand, had stopped the official count of time. The partials and computer-generated people around them froze.

Helion had leaned and said, “Son, once you go in there, the full powers and total command structures of the Rhadamanth Sophotech will be at your command. You will be invested with godlike powers; but you will still have the passions and distempers of a merely human spirit. There are two temptations which will threaten you. First, you will be tempted to remove your human weaknesses by abrupt mental surgery. The Invariants do this, and to a lesser degree, so do the White Manorials, abandoning humanity to escape from pain. Second, you will be tempted to indulge your human weakness. The Cacophiles do this, and, to a lesser degree, so do the Black Manorials. Our society will gladly feed every sin and vice and impulse you might have; and then stand by helplessly and watch as you destroy yourself; because the first law of the Golden Oecumene is that no peaceful activity is forbidden. Free men may freely harm themselves, provided only that it is only themselves that they harm.”

Phaethon knew what his sire was intimating, but he did not let himself feel irritated. Not today. Today was the day of his majority, his emancipation; today, he could forgive even Helion’s incessant, nagging fears.

Phaethon also knew that most Rhadamanthines were not permitted to face the Noetic tests until they were octogenerians; most did not pass on their first attempt, or even their second. Many folk were not trusted with the full powers of an adult until they reached their Centennial. Helion, despite criticism from the other Silver-Gray branches, was permitting Phaethon to face the tests five years early. Phaethon had been more than pleased to win his sire’s validation and support; but now, perhaps, Helion was wondering if his critics after all had been correct.

“Are you suggesting I sign a Werewolf Contract, Father?” A Werewolf Contract appointed someone with an override, and authorized them to use force, if necessary, to keep the subscribing party away from addictions, bad nanomachines, bad dreams, or other self-imposed mental alterations. (The actual legal term for this document was “a Confessed Judgment of Conditional Mental Incompetence and Appointment of Guardian.“)

“I am not suggesting that,” said Helion, “but, now that you bring it up… have you thought about it? Perhaps you ought. Many eminent people, well respected in their communities, have signed such things. No one else need know.” But he looked down when he said it, unable to meet Phaethon’s gaze.

“Are you thinking of signing such a thing, Father?” Phaethon asked with a wry half smile.

Helion straightened up, his eyes bright, glaring down at Phaethon. Helion said nothing, but there was such a look of august majesty, of haughty pride, shining in his face, that there was no need to say anything.

Phaethon let his smile inch wider, and he spread his hands, and quirking one eyebrow, as if to say, So you see?

Then Phaethon said, “It’s a paradox, Father. I cannot be, at the same time and in the same sense, a child and an adult. And, if I am an adult, I cannot be, at the same time, free to make my own successes, but not free to make my own mistakes.”

Helion looked sardonic. “ ‘Mistake’ is such a simple word. An adult who suffers a moment of foolishness or anger, one rash moment, has time enough to delete or destroy his own free will, memory, or judgment. No one is allowed to force a cure on him. No one can restore his sanity against his will. And so we all stand quietly by, with folded hands and cold eyes, and meekly watch good men annihilate themselves. It is somewhat… quaint… to call such a horrifying disaster a ‘mistake.’ ”

Phaethon said, “If fools wish to abuse their freedom, let them. So long as they only harm themselves, who cares?”

Helion said, “Aha. Proudly spoken. But what human is entirely immune from foolishness?”

Phaethon was impatient to continue the ceremony and step beyond those golden doors. He shrugged, and said, “The Sophotechs are unimaginably wise! We can trust their advice to protect us.”

“Are they, indeed?” Helion looked very displeased. “Did I ever tell you what happened to Hyacinth-Subhelion Septimus Gray? He and I were friends once. We were closer than friends. We entered a communion exchange.”

Against his will, Phaethon was interested. “Sir? I thought you and he were political rivals. Enemies.”

“You are thinking of Hyacinth Sistine. This was another version of his, but a close alternate. What these days would be called a parallel-first close-order brother, emancipated non-partial… though we did not use that terminology at the time.”

“What did you call brothers back then?”

“Real-time clones.”

Phaethon snorted. “Well, no one ever accused people from the Second Immortality period of being overly romantic!”

“Indeed,” said Helion with a small, ironic smile. “Which was why I founded the Romanticism movement among the manorial schools. It wasn’t called the Consensus Aesthetic back then, because there was no consensus and no standard forms. But Orpheus Prime Avernus—who fancied himself a poet, as you can tell from his name—had come out very strongly in favor of the return to classical themes and images. He wasn’t called a Peer back then, because there was only one of him, and he had no peers.” (Phaethon knew Helion had named himself, following that same classical myth tradition the Orphic movement had resurrected.)

“No peers? The Eleemosynary Composition was around at that time.”

“But held in contempt by public opinion. You probably don’t remember—recorded lives from that time usually don’t get posted on the apprentice net or educational channels—that the Eleemosynary Composition at that time was a fervid opponent of the Noumenal technology. And with good reason. Subscription to the Compositions dropped almost to nothing after Orpheus opened his first bank. People would rather be immortal—truly immortal, themselves, as individuals—rather than be a recording in a mass-mind. The Compositions might call it immortality, or ‘First Immortality,’ but without the Noumenal mathematics, without the ability to capture the self-aware and self-defining part of your soul, all Composition recording is, in reality, is other people pretending they are you, or playing out your old thoughts, after you die. Like a playactor reading a diary.”

“What about Vafnir? Surely he was a peer.”

“Vafnir was alive, but he wasn’t human. He had built himself into the power station at Mercury Equilateral. The whole damn station was his body. He was rich, but everyone deemed him a lunatic.” Helion smiled at the memory. “It was a wild age, an age of reckless daring and of high delights, of symphonies and storms of light. We all thought we could not die, and the elation from Orpheus’s breakthrough sang in our souls like summer wine… Ah. Anyway, where was I…?”

Phaethon realized that Helion must have their local, rented version of Rhadamanthus off-line; otherwise he would not have forgotten his place in his speech.