John Wright - The Golden Age

The College of Hortators led the massive campaign to raise money to purchase the rights to Saturn. At the point at which it became mathematically unlikely to generate a profitable return on investment, the Invariants, without any emotion or slightest sign of discontent, withdrew their investment, and resigned themselves to living more centuries, without children, in the gray and claustrophobic corridors of their crowded habitats.

Phaethon's amnesia began shortly thereafter. What had his next project been? Whatever it was, he had begun to work on it full-time at that point.

There were more clues: The holes in his memory tended to be gathered around his engineering work; the blanked-out events were more frequent off Earth than on. He recalled long trips to the Jupiter moon system, Neptune, and a place called

Faraway in the Kuiper belt; but not what he had done there.

He could not recall any extravagant expenses from recent years. Perhaps he had been living frugally. He had not gone to parties or fetes or commissionings or communions. He had dropped out of all his sporting clubs and correspondence salons. Had he actually been grim? Perhaps the white-haired old man, the Saturn-tree artist, had described Phaethon as wearing black only because Phaethon's sartorial effects budget was exhausted.

Phaethon straightened up in the chair. Not black. Black and gold. The strange old man had said Phaethon wore "grim and brooding black and proud gold."

Phaethon started to his feet and threw the white thermal silk to the balcony floor, where the wind snatched it away into space. He entered the room. He almost bumped his nose again, almost forget to order aloud the door aside. The wardrobe opened.

The suit that hung there (how had he not noted this before?): it was black and gold.

And it looked the same as the suit that the stranger at the ecoperformance had worn, the third member of a group including Bellipotent Composition, and Caine, the inventor of murder.

His suit. The stranger had been mocking him.

It was cut like a ship-suit, but heavier than most ship-suits, so that it looked like armor.

There was a wide circular collar. Finely crafted as jewels, the shoulderboards carried jacks, energy couplings, small powercast antennae, mind circuits.

The sense of familiarity was strong. This suit was his; it was somehow important. Phaethon reached out and touched the fabric.

The black fabric stirred under his touch. It puckered, sent strands like silk threads across his fingers and wrist, and began bonding to his palm. Immediately a sense of warmth, of well-being, of power, began to throb in his hand.

This was not inanimate fabric but a complex of nanoma-chines. Phaethon, despite his instinct, was reluctant to trust

an unknown bio-organization of such complexity. He pulled his hand back; the fabric released him reluctantly.

Some drops of the fabric material, shaking from his fingers, fell to the floor. The boots of the outfit—everything was all one piece—sent out strands toward the fallen droplets, which inched across the wardrobe floor back toward the main garment. The drops were reabsorbed into the material, which trembled once, then was still.

Curious, he touched a shoulderboard. Nothing happened. He thought: Show me what you do, please. Then he snatched back his hand and stepped away.

This was one command he did not need to speak aloud. Here was an expensive and well-made organism. The gold segments snapped open, forming an armored breastplate; extended to cover the leggings in greaves; vambraces and gauntlets expanded over the arms; a helmet unfolded from the collar. The helmet had a wide neckpiece, extending smoothly from the shoulders to the ears, ribbed with horizontal pipings. The coifs of Pharaohs in Egyptian statues had similar patterns of horizontal stripes.

Phaethon touched the gold material in awe. If this were space armor, it was the thickest and most well-made he had ever seen or imagined. This gold substance was not an ordinary metal. There was a large island of stable artificial elements, the so-called "continent of stability," above atomic weight 900, which required so much energy to produce that they could not exist in nature. One in particular, called Chry-sadmantium, was so refractory, durable, and stable, that even the fusion reactions inside of a star could not melt it. This suit was made of that.

The expense of this suit was staggering. The material was rare; only the supercollider that orbited the equator of Jupiter could generate sufficient energy to create the artificial atoms, and even that required a major percentage of the output of the small star that Gannis had made by igniting Jupiter. This suit had been constructed one atom at a time.

The black material, now inside the suit, was cyclic nano-machinery, which would form a self-contained and self-

sustaining symbiosis with the wearer: a miniature and complete ecosystem.

But what in the world was it for? Swimming among the granules of the sun? Walking into the core chambers of plasma reactors? It wasn't necessary for space travel.

The radiation dangers in space were of two types; ambient radiation, and radiation produced by striking particles or dust motes at high speeds. But the amount of radiation one encountered in interplanetary travel, even if one flew the diameter of Neptune's orbit, from one side of the Golden Oecumene to another, was minor, and grew less each century. Ships' armor against meteors or meteoritic dust decreased every year, as more and more of the solar system was cleaned. Also, as the immortals got older, they tended to become more patient, so that slower speeds, more time-consuming orbits, seemed a smaller and smaller price to pay for safer and safer journeys. With Sophotech-designed techniques and equipment, even the smallest dust motes orbiting in the inner system were mapped, anticipated, deflected.

Phaethon touched the shoulder again. "Open up. I'd like to try you on, please."

But nothing happened. Perhaps there was a special command-phrase needed, or some cost in energy required.

"Isn't that fine!" he sighed. "I have the most expensive supersuit ever imagined, one which no power on Earth can mar or scratch or open ... and now I've locked myself out."

Phaethon wondered why, if he were so poor, hadn't he sold this suit? He looked around again at the squalid quarters here, attached to the shaft of a space elevator, quarters no one else would want. Here? A ship-suit like this, kept here? As if a Victorian gentlemen were living in a woodcutter's hut, but had the Crown Jewels of England in a shabby crate under the dirt floor.

The thought came to him: I was such a man, at one time, worthy to wear such armor as this.

The Armor of Phaethon.

And whatever I may have done to make myself unworthy, I shall undo.

He went back over to the medical coffin, lowering himself carefully himself into it, waited for the liquid to crawl up over him, and made himself gulp a mouthful into his lungs without flinching. The pillow embraced his head; contact points buried in his skull were met by a thousand intricacies of energy and information flow. His sensory nerves were artificially stimulated; he began to see things that existed only in computer imagination. His motor-nerve impulses were read; the matrix of an imaginary body moved accordingly. Even his thalamus and hypothalamus were affected, so the emotional-visceral reactions, bodily sensations, and the unconscious interplay of body language and deep neural structures were perfectly mimicked.

For a moment he was back in his blank and private thoughtspace, a pair of hands hovering near a wheel of stars. He touched the cube icon to the right and brought up his accountant. Here were lists of purchases, in the hundreds of millions of seconds, or billions, from Gannis of Jupiter and Vafnir of Mercury. The amount of money spent was comparable to what nations and empires used to spend on their military budgets.