John Wright - The Golden Age

What shocked him was that he had lost some of his sanity. Normally, when he made a discovery, or realized something, Rhadamanthus made adjustments in Phaethon's midbrain, sculpting whatever habits or patterns of behavior Rhadamanthus thought Phaethon might need directly into Phaethon's nerve paths. This decreased learning time; Phaethon normally did not have to remind himself to do things twice.

Then Phaethon said, "Open ..."

The door slid open slowly. Behind was not an exit but a wardrobe. A strange garment was hanging from a cleaning levitator. A few bottles of life-water were hanging, weight-lessly, in a magnetic suspension rack.

Phaethon took one of the bottles in hand. At his touch, information appeared in the glassy bottle's surface. Reading the label, one word and icon at a time, was painful, and Phaethon got a headache after slowly picking through the first few menu pages hovering in the depths of the label. The bottle could not put the knowledge of its contents directly into his

brain; Phaethon was disconnected from Middle Dreaming. It was a low-quality manufacture, with only a few formations and reactions recorded by the microbe-sized nanomachines suspended in the liquid. He put the bottle back in place.

On a low shelf was a box of dust cloud. Phaethon picked up the box, and said, "Open box."

Nothing happened. Phaethon pushed open the lid with his hand. The amount of dust material inside was minor, a few grams.

"I really am poor after all," he muttered sadly. Where had all his money gone? After twenty-nine or thirty centuries of useful work, investment and reinvestment, he had accumulated considerable capital.

With the box tucked under one arm, Phaethon wandered back into the pathetic room. He looked back and forth. It was ghastly.

Phaethon straightened his shoulders, drew a deep breath. "Phaethon, gather your spirits together, steel yourself, and stop this moping! Look: there is nothing here so vile, nothing which you cannot endure. Princes of past ages could not live like this: they would have called it luxury beyond luxury!"

It was not as easy to change his attitude without computer assistance, but one advantage of the Silver-Gray discipline was that he could do it at all.

He released the contents of the box. The dust cloud rose up to the ceiling, found the dirt, and began dusting. But there was only a small volume to the cloud; Phaethon had to direct a beam from the box against certain patches of filth the cloud was too small and stupid to notice by itself. He knew that, at one time, before the invention of basic robotics, humans had to toil like this all the time.

It seemed grotesque and faintly embarrassing, but, by the time he had directed the cloud to scrub the whole room, Phaethon had a glowing feeling of accomplishment. The room was clean; entropy had been reversed. It was small, but now the universe was different than it had been before his work, and, in a very small way, better.

It was a good emotion, but when he made a mental signal to record it, nothing happened.

Phaethon sighed. Good thing he was not stuck in reality, cut off from the thoughts and systems of the Oecumene. There was no point in trying to get used to this flat, dead, unresponsive world; Phaethon planned to be here only long enough to get some private time to think.

He walked over to the window port, remembered to open it, stepped outside.

Phaethon stood on the balcony of an infinite tower. It stretched above him as far as the eye could see, at least, in his present and limited vision. Below him, it fell into clouds; there was no visible base.

This was a room built into one of the space elevators that led up to the ring-city circling Earth's equator.

Phaethon sat, calling "Chair..." But the balcony surface created a chair very slowly, so he struck his bottom painfully on the rising chair back as he sat. The chair was not smart enough to avoid the blow, nor did any contours change or shape themselves to his particular height.

"Everything here is a clue. If I have forgotten this little room, it's because it's part of what I'm supposed to forget, a reminder. The blankness of my private thoughtspace; that is a clue. That foolish and pessimistic Cerebelline ecoperform-ance, another clue. The strange garment in the wardrobe. All of these things are clues."

Phaethon had not opened the forbidden memory casket. But he had heard no prohibition against deducing the contents of the casket using his unaided powers of reasoning. They could not exile him for that; the laws of intellectual property in the Golden Oecumene were clear. It could be a crime to steal or take knowledge that belonged to another, or that one had agreed not to read. But knowing knowledge in and of itself was never a crime.

The question was, did he have enough information to deduce any conclusions?

Phaethon looked out and up into the infinite expanse of wind. Even his dampened hearing could pick out the thrum-

ming shriek of air moving against the tower, miles above and miles below. It was cold here, this high above the earth. Now, in the distance, like a steel rainbow, he could see the ring-city. The shadow of Earth had crept up about twenty degrees of arc, rendering the city near the horizon invisible. But the equatorial sun was shining where Phaethon was, and shone on the sweep of the ring-city, overhead and to the west. It was a bracing sight.

"I'm cold. Could you do something about that, please?" It took almost a minute for spider-shaped operators (created out of the floor material) walking over his skin, to weave a silk garment around him, loose folds of white cloth with heating elements tuned to comfortable level.

Phaethon began to think about his past. What was missing?

There was no clear way to tell. Did he not recall what he had been doing during the April of Epoch 10179 because the memory was gone, or because he did not associate that memory with that date? Memories were not stored linearly or chronologically but by association. There was no list or index to consult. He could not that notice a memory was missing until he tried to recall it and failed.

When he did come across a blank spot... (What had he been doing after the mensal dinner performance to celebrate the conclusion of the Hyperion Orbital Resonance Correction, for example? He had been impatient to see his wife, and wanted to dance or commune with her, but she had seemed listless and distracted)... he did not know if that particular blank was related to this mystery, or to one of the other, more ordinary memories he had in storage, perhaps an old lover's spat, or work-for-hire he had agreed to forget.

Nonetheless he found enough holes, even after only some minutes of introspection, to detect a pattern.

First, they were large and they were many. Not just years and decades, but whole centuries of his life were missing; and

they were the ones nearer to the present day. Whatever had been removed had occupied a great deal of his time. If it were a crime he had been contemplating, it had been in his imagination for a long time, and it had roots all the way back to his childhood. And, if it were a crime, he had been working at it full-time for most of the last century. His memory of the last 250 years, reaching up to the beginning of the masquerade, was blank.

He could recall his last clear memory. His second attempt to reengineer the planet Saturn had just been frustrated. The Invariants of the Cities in Space had hired him to disintegrate the gas giant, sweeping up and storing the hydrogen atmosphere for antimatter conversions to be powered from the radiation given off during the disintegration. The diamond-metallic core of the world would then be reconstructed by nanomachines into the largest series of space habitats and space ports ever designed. This would have allowed the Invariant populations in the Cities to reproduce, to own their own lands, and to create additional civilizations. Phaethon had seen their plans; they had dreamed, not just of Space Cities, but of continents and worldlets, structures of fantastic beauty and cunning engineering, each one a living organism of infinite complexity.