John Wright - The Golden Age

"Call me Vandonnar." This was the name in Jovian poems of the captain of a mining-diver, lost in the clouds, and said to be circling eternally the Great Red Spot Storm, a ghost, so lost that he was unable to find his way to the afterlife. The poem dated from the days when there still was such a Great Red Spot. "My true name I must keep to myself. I fear my friends would disapprove if they knew how much Sophotech time I've spent just for this one storm-song. And Aurelian, our host, has not announced the storm beforehand. Those who don't look up in time to see, or who run inside, will miss the performance, I am not allowing this to be recorded."

"Good heavens, sir, why not?!"

"How else to escape the stifling control of the Sophotechs? Everything is recorded for us here, even our souls. But if this can be played only once, its power is all the greater."

"And yet—forgive for so saying, but without the Sophotechs, you could not possibly do the mathematics to control each raindrop in a storm, or to direct where the lightning will fall!"

"You miss my whole point, Mr. Hamhock."

"Hamlet."

"Whatever. This is a statement of third-order chaos math-

ematics. You see? Even with the finest control in the world, even with the wisest Sophotech, where the lightning strikes next cannot be predicted. Some one ambitious raindrop will brush against its neighbors more boldly than anticipated, irritating them, raising more electric charge than guessed; the threshold is crossed; the electrons ionize; in a single instant the discharge path is determined; crooked or straight; and ful-gration flashes! And all because that one little drop could not keep still....

"Wait! The winds are changing.... Go now, please, while

I can still compensate for your passage through my cloud-----

No, that direction! Go there! Otherwise you tangle my strings!..."

Without a word, Phaethon darted away, swift as a salmon. His clothes were moist with mist as he broke free of the storm-cloud, and nanomachines, thick as dust, stained his shoulders and hair.

Phaethon triggered his sense-filter again. The image of the Penguin reappeared.

"Rhadamanthus, you Sophotechs always deny that you are wise enough to arrange everything we do, to arrange coincidences."

"Our predictions of humanity are limited. There is an uncertainty which creatures with free will create. The Earthmind Herself could not beat you every time in a game of paper-scissors-rock, because your move is based on what you think she might choose for her move: and She cannot predict her own actions in advance perfectly."

"Why not? I thought Earthmind was intelligent beyond measure."

"No matter how great a creature's intelligence, if one is guessing one's own future actions, the past self cannot outwit the future self, because the intelligence of both is equal. The only thing which alters this paradox is morality."

Phaethon was distracted. "Morality?! What an odd thing to say. Why morality?"

"Because when an honest man, a man who keeps his word,

says he will do something in the future, you can be sure he will try."

"So you machines are always preaching about honesty just for selfish reasons. It makes us more predictable, easier to work into a calculation."

"Very selfish—provided you define the word 'selfish' to mean that which most educates, and most perfects the self, making the self just and true and beautiful. Which is, I assume, the way selves want themselves to be, yes?"

"I cannot speak for other selves; I will not be satisfied with anything less than the best Phaethon I can Phaethon."

"My dear boy, are you using yourself as a verb?"

"I'm feeling fairly intransitive at the moment, Rhadamanthus."

"What brought all this odd topic up, Phaethon?"

"I feel as if that meeting—" he nodded toward the storm-cloud growing dark behind them—"As if it were . .. were arranged to give me and me alone a message. I wanted to know if you or Earthmind or someone were behind it."

"Not I. And I cannot predict the Earthmind any more than you."

"Can she arrange coincidences of that magnitude?"

"Well, she could easily have hired that man to ride up and say those things. Good heavens, boy, that could have been Her, in disguise. This is a masquerade, you know. What's the coincidence, though?"

"Because just at that moment, I was thinking of dropping this whole thing, forgetting this whole mystery. I was perfectly happy before I found that there was a hole in my memory; perfectly happy to be who I thought J was. I want to live up to my wife's good opinion of me, to go beyond it, if I can."

"I don't follow you, sir."

Phaethon altered his vision so that the daytime sky, to him, no longer seemed blue but was transparent, as if it were night. He pointed toward the moon.

"My wife told me once she thinks of me every time she looks up at the moon, and sees how much bigger it looks,

these days, from Earth. That was one of my first efforts. More fame than I deserved, perhaps, just because it was close to Earth, right there for everyone to see ...

"She sought me out after that; she wanted me to sit for a portrait she was incorporating for a heroic base-formality dream sculpture. Imagine how flattered I was; having hundreds of students going into simulation to forget themselves awhile and turn into a character based on me! As if I were a hero in a romance. We met on Titania, during my Uranus project. She had sent a doll of herself because she was afraid to travel out of mind-range with the earth. I fell in love with the doll; naturally I had to meet the archetype from which she sprang."

"And?..."

"Well, damn it, Rhadamanthus, you know my mind better than I do; you know what I'm going to say!"

"Perhaps, sir. You actually wanted to be the heroic figure she fell in love with. I suspect you fell in love with the heroic ideal too. To do acts of greatness and wonder! Is that why you suspect the Earthmind had you meet that storm sculptor? To show you that impressive deeds—and I think that that man and his effort certainly were impressive—could still be done here on Earth, with your memory left just as it is? You thought the better part of valor might be contentment? That a true hero is moderate, temperate, and lives within his means? Well, that is by no means an ignoble sentiment...."

Phaethon made a noise of vast disgust. "Ugh! Oh, come now! That's not it at all! I only agreed to take a year off work and come to this frivolous masquerade because my wife told me it might inspire me to decide on my next project. As I was trying to think of what I could do that was impressive, I began to wonder if the act of uncovering some old crime or misdeed of mine might not interfere with that? If so, this little mystery is just a distraction, so I should forget it. But then I met that foolish man, and I realized what real distraction is. Finding the truth about myself is not distraction; I have to know all about me before I can decide how I can best be used

for my purposes. Real distraction is doing the kind of work he does!"

The penguin looked back toward the dark cloud, now far behind them. A rumble of thunder sounded, like the flourish of a trumpet before a battle.

"I don't understand. What's so wrong with his work?"

"Not recording what he does?! Perhaps its good enough for him. I want my accomplishments to be permanent! Permanent!"

Phaethon did not pay attention to the gathering storm behind him. Instead, from his high vantage, he looked back and forth across the wide view below, gardens and forests, mountains and mansions, turning his sense-filter on and off, off and on.

"There it is."

"There what is, sir?"

"Something I wasn't supposed to see." One of the things his sense-filter had been programmed to block out. "I wonder what is down there?"