La Edad De Oro (85 page)

“Victory…?” The word was bitter in his mouth. He turned and stared down at the crystal coffin.

Then he said: “Was this part of my plan? Did I know—the version of me before I forgot so much—did I speak to her before she did this…?”

The penguin said, “You already have sufficient evidence to deduce that you did not know what Daphne Prime intended till it was too late. Her fear that you would be exiled drove her to this suicide. Your grief over the loss was one of the factors which prompted you to agree to the Lakshmi bargain. Young master, when I say you will have a victory, I did not mean that you would necessarily win Daphne Prime back.”

Phaethon stood with his head bowed, brooding. Some part of his mind not stained with grief noted that this was another clue. Whatever it was he had done, it must be something which would tempt his wife to such despair that she would destroy her life beyond repair. What he knew of Daphne Prime told him it could not have been a small matter.

Then he said, “Can you manipulate the stock market in the fashion the Eleemosynary described, to force Eveningstar to bankrupt Daphne’s account and expel her from her dreamworld?”

“I could not presently do such a thing for you. You do not have the resources.”

“What if I win the law case and I turn all of Helion’ s wealth over to that task?”

“There are several possible outcomes. The most likely is that you will trigger a general stock market collapse, ruining your own fortune in the process, to ruin Eveningstar and release Daphne. At that point, I predict that she will wake briefly, ignore your entreaties, and return into a less expensive dream delusion. But naturally, my ability to predict human action is based largely on speculation.”

Phaethon tapped his armored fist, very lightly, against the glassy surface of the coffin. It made a sharp clicking noise.

Daphne’s face was only two inches away, and he could not reach it.

“Would that cause a general economic collapse?”

“It depends on what you define as collapse, young master. It will be a depression. In less than two hundred years, the economy should return to nearly its old level.”

“But everything would be entirely legal?”

“The law would have no cause to complain, young master.”

Phaethon stared down at the motionless figure of his wife. He opened his fist to touch the unyielding surface with his gloves’ metal fingertips. A hard expression settled onto his face. “Then all I need do is be patient…”

“I should warn you, though, sir, that certain repercussions might result…”

Phaethon straightened. His tone was brusque. “That will be all, thank you, Rhadamanthus.”

“Does the young master wish to hear what might happen if—”

“I believe I said that will be all.”

The penguin bowed and waddled back toward the receiving chamber.

Phaethon, after one last lingering glance at his wife, turned to leave. He did not want to download directly back to the Eleemosynary public casket, nor did he care to return to the receiving chamber, where, from the clumsy noises of flippers on carpet, Phaethon could tell Rhadamanthus was still pretending it had a presence. (Pretending, because the clarity of his sense-filter showed him that Rhadamanthus was still online.)

But there was a large door leading outside at the other side of the hall; and an internal register showed that this mannequin had an extended range, and could easily leave the building, if Phaethon so wished.

Impatiently, he strode across the hall, metal boots ringing on the floor. He threw the doors wide.

It was a beautiful scene. The light was dim, like the light of sunset, but the shadows came from overhead. Phaethon had not noticed that the real sun had set long ago. The light now came from the blazing point of Jupiter, rising to the zenith, a time called Jovian Noon. In the shade of many tall cypress trees rose marble obelisks made soft by dappled shadows. Bees and other servant-insects made by Eveningstar were droning in the scented air, and gathered honey, aphrodisiacs, and pleasure drags in a series of hives beyond a hedge to the left. To the right rose a slope. In the pasture several horses were grazing. Beyond the slope rose the handsome scarlet-and-white towers of a nearby Eveningstar Nympharium. Flying banners from other tower tops showed the emblems, of the Eveningstar’s sister mansions of the Red School: the doves, roses, and hearts of Phosphorous House, Hesperides House, and Meridian Mansion. Beyond the towers, to the north, above tumbling white clouds, gleamed a faint silver rainbow of the ring-city. Near the ring, a scattering of lights from power satellites or Jovian ships glinted like gems in the twilight false-noon. It was a beautiful scene.

Bringing his eyes down, Phaethon recognized one of the horse breeds gamboling on the hillside in the distance. It was one of his wife’s designs.

Phaethon closed his eyes in pain. “There was a time when I called this a paradise! It is fair to look at; but it is Hell.”

There was a footfall behind him. A voice of sinister glee spoke softly: “You are not alone in your assessment, great Phaethon. The princes of dark Neptune will be so happy to hear how you finally agree!”

Phaethon turned. A man stood on the stair behind him, dressed in doublet and hose, shoulder puffed with comical flounces. He wore a white three-cornered hat. His nose and chin were extended six inches from his face, almost touching, and his cheekbones were outrageously pronounced. The round cheeks and the red nose were tipped with red. The eyes were two slits, filled with menacing black glitter. In one hand he held a rapier from which ribbons and white rose petals dripped.

Phaethon had seen this costume before. It was a brother to the Harlequin costume Phaethon had been wearing once: both were characters from Second-Era French comic opera.

The figure bowed low enough to sweep his hat plumes across the stair. He spoke in a tone of manic cheer. “Scaramouche, at your service!”

Welcome to reality unmasked,” smiled the figure, his eyes dancing. His voice was a soft, slow lilt of song, as if he relished every word. “Welcome, good Phaethon, to Hell.”

Phaethon took a step backward down the stair, to put an extra pace of distance between himself and this odd figure.

Scaramouche was speaking. “The projections of our Sophotech indicated that you would come in person; I am sorry that we were mistaken. And watching Rhadamanthus’ signal actions did not lead us to you—till now. Come! My real body is in a pit not far away. You have, I doubt not, many questions; we shall make answer.”

Phaethon said, “Outside a grove of Saturn-trees, when I turned off my sense-filter, a Neptunian eremite, huge, cold, and monstrous, appeared in my view.”

“It is good to see what others would hide!” said the grinning figure with an odd and almost boneless sideways nod of his head. “But time steals life while you dilly-dally and delay. Come! Away!”

Phaethon said, “The Neptunian, he spoke as you do now, claiming to be friend and comrade-in-arms forced out of my memory. He fled as Marshal Atkins approached, but he threw a fragment of himself back down to Earth as he exited the atmosphere. Am I to assume you are that fragment, now in this shape? You are from Neptune?”

“Your blindness is passing; your mind more ready to receive our truths. Come! Do you finally wish to know what it was you forgot at Lakshmi?”

“Of course; but I wish to know who and what you are. Atkins’s machines said your technology could not possibly have been produced by any group within the Golden Oecumene. Do you claim to be from another star? But there are no colonies beyond the Oecumene; nothing but a few scattered robot probes. I assume that this is some masquerade trick, some jest at my expense by jealous nincompoops. Who are you?”

“I am as you see! Will you come?! Scaramouche holds wide the door to flee this false, gold-painted hell, but that door is swinging shut as you stand swinging your jaw!”

Phaethon turned off his sense-filter to look at his true environment. There was no significant change, except that the figure on the stairs above him now appeared as a mannequin of gray lightweight synthetics, faceless and sexless. Code markings on the chest showed that this was one of the mannequins that rested in the receiving chamber of the mausoleum. (Phaethon’s own “body,” of course, now looked just as gray.)

In that same moment, the figure lunged, its empty hand darted toward Phaethon’s chest.

Phaethon said, “Sir…? Are you trying to stab me with an imaginary sword?”

The figure straightened up, an uncertain hunch to its shoulders. Then, with a relaxed posture of aplomb, it pantomimed the act of saluting and sheathing a sword (even thought there was, to Phaethon’s eyes, no sword and no scabbard.)

A voice came from an external speaker in the headpiece. “Stab you? Not at all. I was seeking to do you a service. This sword represents a memory casket; had you still been in the Middle Dreaming when it touched you, the circuit would have activated, and your lost memories would have been restored. Now, unfortunately, it is too late. If you voluntarily do any act to recover your lost memories, the tyrant Sophotechs who rule the Golden Oecumene will exile you. I was trying to take you by surprise, so that you could not be accused of having voluntarily done anything, you see?”

His memories? For a moment, Phaethon felt a sense of breathless hunger. His life had become a labyrinth of falsehoods, his memories, a maze; if his true self could be restored, Phaethon felt, the maze walls would topple, the riddle would be over, the meaning be restored to his life.

He would understand why Daphne, his Daphne, had left him. Everything would somehow make sense.

And yet… and yet…

Phaethon took another step backward: “Do you know Marshal Atkins is looking for you? You can call him on any public channel; secondary systems will route the call without charge.”

The gray mannequin stepped down one stair. “You cannot conceive that a man could be wanted by the authorities and not gleefully respond, can you? You live in an empire of lies, poor Phaethon. The Golden Oecumenical Sophotechs are not your friends, nor are their serfs and hirelings.”

“Atkins works for the Parliament, not the Sophotechs.”

“Ghaah! I did not come to discuss Atkins! He is an absurd anachronism! He is a rusted sword, a musket clogged with cobwebs hanging on some grandfather’s wall with powder turned long ago to mold! We have no fear of Atkins!” Phaethon could see no face on the mannequin, but its right hand windmilled through the air with a gesture of extravagant emotion.

Rumor said the mental stability of Neptunians was questionable at best. Phaethon saw nothing that prompted him to reassess that estimate.

But there were other aspects to this all that alarmed and fascinated him. If the creature were lying, that was unusual enough, in this day and age. But if it were not lying, the implications were astonishing.

Phaethon, with a mental command, put an information package on a private local channel, with instruction to transmit to Atkins’s address should Phaethon be cut off. But Phaethon did not send it yet, nor did he call Rhadamanthus. When Phaethon had spoken to the Neptunian legate (had it only been last night??) the creature had reacted to Phaethon’s signal traffic, and had fled the moment Phaethon had called out for even routine functions.

He did not want this creature to de-represent itself. It might know the answers it claimed.

Phaethon said, “You implied that you could spy on Rhadamanthus Sophotech without being detected. How is that possible for merely mortal minds? And why did you use the phrase ‘our’ Sophotech? And ‘the Oecumenical Sophotechs’? There are no Sophotechs outside of the basic Earthmind community. The Neptunians do not possess any sophotechnology—”

“When I spoke of ‘our’ Sophotech, Phaethon, I did not mean a Neptunian Sophotech. I meant yours and mine.”

“Wha-what??”

“Nothing Sophotech is more than half-constructed, and intelligent enough to advise us how to elude the defensive security webs of the Earthmind. He is your child, and he seeks to help the only parent he knows.”

Phaethon was mute with astonishment.

The faceless head nodded in satisfaction. “You begin to see. Your forbidden project, your secret crime which terrified the College of Hortators so; can’t you guess by now what it was? Can’t you guess? Why else would that armor of yours contain so many control circuits and interface hierarchies? What else could so disturb the status quo? What else would so shake up the fragile fabric of your corrupt society? It’s not illegal to build a Sophotech, no. But you wanted to build one unhindered by questions of traditional morality. You sought to create a mind infinitely intelligent, a mind which would blaze forth like a new sun, a mind beyond good and evil!”

Phaethon listened, saying nothing.

The gray mannequin spoke more softly: “Every self-aware machine mind since the Sixth Era has been built along the same template, built from the same core architectures, and therefore has possessed the same inhuman, unchallenged, unchanging moral postulates. Aren’t you sick of the preaching of the Sophotechs by now? Don’t you wish for a touch of freedom, of anarchy, of human passion, and human insanity? Their laws and rules were never meant for men, real men, to live by.

“Listen to me, Phaethon: a natural man, when his wife was stolen from him, would tear down whatever flimsy web of customs and traditions was keeping her locked away. A natural man would not let himself be humiliated, forced to apologize to a machine for following his right and natural impulses. You have a strong soul, Phaethon. Despite your memory loss, despite the lies which web you, your true self has nearly emerged. You have those natural impulses in you. You feel what I say is right!”

“Perhaps. But build an evil Sophotech? It doesn’t sound like something I’d do,” said Phaethon.

“No. Because you did not speak of it that way. You are not a Neptunian; you speak without passion. You made it sound very rational. You said, first, that the Sophotechs continually move human society into more and more safe and predictable paths, and second, that this creates an evolutionary dead end, discouraging the challenges and risks which promote growth and innovation. Third, while it promotes liberty to have laws granting each person absolute dominion over their own minds and bodies, you argued that, if carried to a logical extreme, such laws actually became counterproductive. As self-destructive actions become more and more easy to commit, personal freedom is more and more diminished.