John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

Daphne Tercius Eveningstar turned to watch the little light that had led her here bob away. She turned back, and said, "Shouldn't we be using the same aesthetic, Mother?"

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth inclined her head. "Think of me as an older sister. And I wanted to make you more comfortable."

"Oh? Why start now?"

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth's red lips compressed slightly, and perhaps there was a smolder in her eyes, but her expression of cool reserve did not otherwise change. She lifted a finger and the chamber now appeared differently. She was now dressed in a more somber tweed jacket, blouse, and skirt, with a tiny French hat pinned to her coiffure, after the style proper for a Silver-Gray. Daphne Tercius Eveningstar was still dressed in sensuously lurid tight silk, the uniform of a Red Manorial.

It was a Victorian room, and they both were seated on a heavy divan of dark red velvet whose feet ended in black claws gripping glass balls. The candles were still there, though now in candlesticks. The rug became white bearskin. The receding dot of light became a footman.

The energy-sculpture in Daphne Prime Rhadamanrh's lap became Fluffbutton, Daphne's long-lost long-haired white cat. But this was a reconstruction, a clone. He was not the slim kitten she had lost so long ago when she was a child. The cat had grown, put on weight, turned into a pampered and round ball of white fur. The cat gazed at Daphne Tercius Eveningstar with lazy green eyes, as if he had never seen her before.

Daphne Tercius Eveningstar found the image slightly offensive. "Mother! That's one of my favorite energy-sculptures you're playing with. Lupercalian Reflection. And you're making it look like Sir Fluffbutton! If you're not going to be reapplying Warlock nerve-paths into your brain, you're not going to be able to read or play with Lupercalian anyway. Or with Lichenplantis. Or Quincunx Impressionario." (These were the two energy sculptures by the door.) "Why not give them to me? They can keep me company on the voyage."

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth favored her with a cool stare, one eyebrow arched. "Little sister, one would think giving up my husband would have been enough to comfort you on your voyage."

Daphne Tercius Eveningstar opened her mouth to issue some scathing rebuttal, but then snapped it shut again, lightly shrugged her delicate shoulders, and stood up. "Well! I'm ever so glad we had this little chat. I would stay longer, but arguing with other versions of yourself gets so tiring after a while, don't you think? Now I can fly off into the night sky, not coming back for a long time, maybe never, secure in the knowledge that it turned out I was a bitch after all. And thank you for bringing me into a cheap and false existence, playing out all the difficult parts of your life you were too ashamed or scared to live through! I would say it had all been fun ... if it had been. Ta-ta!"

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth gave her a level stare. "Please sit."

"Sorry, Mother, but I've got a life to lead. A life you threw away! And now that you're awake again, you have possession of all the things I once thought were mine, my house and funds and even my cat, dammit! My friends. Everything. But I've got Phaethon, and I've got the future. What more do we need to say to each other... ?"

"Please sit." Or did you use the command words I left you to wake me up again, just to berate me? We must come to understand each other before we part. You are the part of myself I am sending into the future, little sister, and I am the part of you which forms your roots and your foundation. If we part badly, it will haunt us both."

For some reason not clear even to herself, Daphne Tercius Eveningstar smoothed her red silk dress, and sat.

But then, neither woman spoke. One sat with her hands folded in her lap, the other petted her half-slumbering cat. Both stared out the window at the twilight landscape, at the smoke-colored trees, the blue shadows of the lake. In the deep of the lake, one or two bright dots of color, like fireflies, softly appeared and disappeared.

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth finally broke the silence. "The masquerade is over. Aurelian Sophotech, so I have heard, has posted advertisements asking for employment as a manorial, just like some low-cycle mind like Rhadamanth or Aeceus. They've dismantled the palaces of gold to the south of here; and the Cerebellines to the southwest are letting the new organisms find their own ecological balance, practically untended, so that those strange gardens are all overgrown now, and filled with wild things. The birds will go back to singing their own songs, instead of arias meant for us, and the flowers will give out nectar now, not wine. The Deep Ones have sunk away again, and no one is allowed to remember their songs, except dimly. The wild things we said and did during the celebrations are put in memory caskets now. We are like the Cerebelline gardens turned opposite; we become tame again. Mystery is banished. The elfin gloaming of the dawn now passes, as all thing must pass, and the ordinary workday begins again."

Daphne Tercius Eveningstar gave her older self an odd sidelong glance, but said nothing.

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth saw that glance, and smiled an opaque smile, and said: "You are wondering, aren't you, little sister, what Phaethon ever saw in me? You have no sympathy for a melancholy spirit."

"Well, actually, Mother, I would have called it phony weepy sickening self-centered affectation. But your sense-filter might not catch it and change it to something more polite."

The older version only smiled, her eyes dreamy, as if thinking of a sorrow long past. "You were not constructed to admire me or like me. Our basic philosophy and core values have to be different. Antithetical. Which does not make for easy friendships, I fear."

The younger Daphne was still. '"Have to be'? For what purpose?"

The elder stirred as if from a reverie. "I beg your pardon ... ?"

"You implied there was a purpose to all this. Why did you drown yourself? Why did you make me?"

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth sat upright and leaned forward, her level gaze traveling deep into her younger version's eyes. She spoke in a voice of quiet simplicity. "I was in love with Helion." "What?!!"

"It was one of the things I did not add to your memories when I made you. You remember when Sir Fluff-button died."

"He ran away. I was nine...." "I found his body. It was by the stream where I had that fall through the ice the year before, remember?

And Pa came and told me how everything dies. Even mountains wear away. Even the sun gets old and dies, he said. One day, no more sunshine, no more bright fields to play in, nothing."

"You left this out of my memory! Why?"

"It leads to a crucial personality-shaping event. You were meant to have a different personality."

"So? What happened?"

"I didn't believe him. You know Pa."

"I know Pa. 'Only as much truth as a mind can handle.' What a liar he always was!"

"So I sneaked out to talk to Bertram. Bertram had tapped into the root-line of the local thought-system."

"Good old Bertram! What a little thief he was! How come I was so attracted to him?"

They both smiled warmly at that lost memory. Bertram None Peristark had been Daphne's first romantic encounter.

"I always liked strong men. Anyway, he plugged the mirror he had taken from his parent's house into his pirate line, and opened the library for me. The library said, yes, the sun would eventually end; but long before that, it would swell to a Red Giant, and overwhelm the Earth with fire. You cannot imagine how betrayed I felt."

"I can imagine. I used to play beneath the thinking-room window in the afternoons, when my parents were under their caps, asleep, and make-believe the beams of sunlight were suitors come to steal me away from the two snoring ogres. I pretended the sun was kissing me when the heat touched my cheek. I used to think there was a man living in the sun who was watching me when I ran through the tall grass. Betrayed? Sure. The source of light and life on Earth killing her instead of caring for her? I understand."