John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

The elder Daphne leaned forward and touched her younger version's knee. "Then the library told me that there was a man living in the sun. A man who lived in a palace of fire. That he was going to save the sun from old age."

"Helion. Is that the real reason why I became a Silver-Gray? To be near him?"

The elder Daphne leaned back. "It was not till this Transcendence, just now, that I knew where Phaethon had come from. I never knew why Helion had made him. He seemed so wild and reckless compared to his father. And I never believed that Galatea was his real mother; she was obviously an emancipated partial-mind made by Helion to help raise Phaethon. But I studied them both from afar, and it spurred me to try to get famous myself, famous enough that I could ask to see the Master of the Sun, and that he would receive me. And so I wrote, I sculpted horses, I studied all the older things, the Greeks and Romans, the myths of Britain and Pre-Re-Renaissance Mars. I earned the fame and the seconds I needed; Phaethon agreed to be interviewed. My plan was to acquaint myself with the father by seducing the son."

Younger Daphne exclaimed happily: "You scheming bitch!" And pointed her finger. "You're wrong. I think we could be good friends after all. What went wrong?"

"You did, little sister. Oh, you were not serf-aware back then, and it was not your fault. Nor were you exactly like me. But when you fell in love with Phaethon, and became the seduced instead of the seductress, what could I do? When Phaethon returned to Earth, I tried, at first, to put him off. But he... he overwhelmed me. I was helpless in front of a man like that. He never gave up; and he was so... so... it was like he was on fire. But he was never out of control of himself. He was like a man made out of ice. And... he loved me so much... And..." "And Helion was out of your reach."

Daphne Prime Rhadamanth actually blushed. The younger Daphne saw the color in her older version's cheeks and throat, and wondered: Is that what I look like when I do that? It's kind of sexy, somehow.

The older version said, "I didn't like Helion when I actually met him. You know that I left those memories in."

"He's a whiner."

"He's concerned with preserving the old, not with beginning the new. Even saving the sun is a type of preservation, for him. And so I fell in love with Phaethon, so deeply in love, that I..."

"That you tried to ruin his life!"

The older version's eyes flashed, an expression of impatient fire, and for a moment, the two women looked exactly alike. Daphne Prime Rhadamanth said in a voice like a queen: "Fool! I loved him enough to die for him! How can you imagine! How can you know! How can you know what it is like to see yourself in the looking glass and to know you are unworthy of the man you are married to?! Unworthy! Holding him back! Keeping him down! And no matter what you try to do you end up helping the people who hate him!"

The elder Daphne leaned back, smoldering, and petted the cat with such angry strokes that he miaowed, and slithered from her grasp, falling heavily to the floor. The cat gave them both a haughty stare and gracefully waddled off.

The elder Daphne said in a quieter voice, "I saved up my money and bought time from the Eveningstar Sophotech. I did not trust Rhadamanthus for this; he would have just told me to be stoic. And Silver-Grays don't allow radical self-editing in any way. Eveningstar examined me, but she thought I could not make myself into the kind of woman who would be good for Phaethon. Not and still be the same person in the eyes of the law. The change would be too great. It's a question of core values again, a question of fundamental differences. That's what I meant about helping his enemies; everything I thought or said in public reflected a mindset more cautious than his. There were so many times when I humiliated him in public, something I had said, or written, or thought, was published in salons against him"

"And children. How could we have children, if he was going to go away? Away and away, to die in the dark, and never return? And so our marriage was never completed.

"I honestly thought he would fail. But I did not want to think that, because, without me, without my support, he might fail. So I had to leave him. I could not go with him; I don't want to die in the sunless cold of space; but he kept telling me he would not leave without me. So what could I do?

"I had to leave. I made you to take my place. You. The woman I could never become. The same way Phaethon is the man Helion could never become.... Our whole society evolves. We each made the next versions of ourselves more perfect. But we who are less perfect stay behind."

Both women were silent for a moment, looking deeply at each other's eyes. The look was one of sorrow.

But then the younger Daphne laughed. "And just think, older sister, you would have gotten Helion, too, if he hadn't married Lucretia, or whatever it is Un-moiqhotep is calling herself these days!"

The older Daphne leaned her chin on her palm, fingers curled so that her pinkie lightly touched her lips. She nibbled delicately on her fingernail, and said: "Perhaps, daughter. Perhaps. But... You know, it is really sort of odd. First Helion adopts, as his son, a man who turns out to have been a colonial warrior from a Transcendence drama, a burner of worlds. Then he marries the girl who tried, this time, in real life, to destroy as much of the Oecumene as she could. I wonder what his secret obsession with destruction is? He does live, after all, in the most dangerous spot in the Solar System..."

The younger Daphne exclaimed, "I'm sad for you about Lucretia. I would have preferred if the extrapolation had come true, and we could all have had a lurid trial, with hundreds of weeping girls being sentenced to death, and Atkins shooting down rioters who stormed the Courthouse steps..."

The elder one smiled a faint smile. "I'll write that one up. Especially the rioters. All cacophiles, of course, but, in my story, they'll turn out to have been mind-poisoned by Xenophon, merely tools of the sinister Silent Empire. And for my hero ..." But then her face fell again. "Oh ... But I cannot really use someone like Helion for my hero again, can I? Or Phaethon? Everyone will think I'm copying you. The dream-world you composed for the Oneiromantic Competition ..."

The younger Daphne snorted, and said, "That was your world! I looked in the records! All the work was done, the plots, the setting, all the characters, the laws of nature, everything, years before the competition. While I remembered making it up, those were your memories. The Gold Medal actually belongs to you!"

There was a look of hunger on the older Daphne's face. They both knew how badly she had longed to win the gold. It was a lifelong ambition.

The older Daphne stood up, and turned away, hands folded against her stomach, pretending to stare out the window.

Daphne Tercius Eveningstar said nothing, not wishing to increase her older self's upset. She let a moment of time go past, and then said lightly, "That lake out there. Looks familiar. Where are we?"

"Ah. This used to be part of the exposition grounds. That is Destiny Lake."

"What? The place where Phaethon saw that performance of the burning trees? I was looking all over for him here! You'd think I'd remember every damn rock and stone. Sure looks different. Water level is lower. Guess they tore down part of the mountain. But- say... ? Those little colored lights in the water? Those dots fading in and out like that... ?"

The older Daphne looked over her shoulder and smiled a cryptic smile. "Survivors. Parts of the tree are still growing down there, long after the performance ended. The life adapted to a less energy-wasteful form, and the trees altered and specialized so that they were no longer in direct competition with each other. It's more like a banyan tree now, with long root-systems under the soil, connecting the widely scattered colonies."