John Wright - The Golden Age

without expression.

At that same moment, however, the butler image of Rhad-amanthus came up from behind Phaethon and stepped to the table. In his hand was a silver card tray with a letter, folded, stamped and sealed, atop.

"Pardon me for intruding, sir, ma'am," said Rhadamanthus in an Irish brogue, nodding a slight bow. "But the young master has been summoned."

Phaethon turned. What was this? "Summoned? By the Hor-

tators?"

"No, sir. By the Curia. This is an official legal communication."

Phaethon picked up the letter, broke the seal, read it. There was no warrant of arrest; no mention of a crime; merely a request to present himself to the Probate Court Circuit, to establish his identity beyond question. It was so politely worded that he could not tell if he were asked or being ordered. The only case name appearing on the document was "In the Matter of Helion."

"What is this, Rhadamanthus?"

"You are being asked to give a deposition, sir. Shall I explain the details of the document to you?"

"I'm somewhat busy with other things right now. ..."

"But you may not access any mnemonic templates or do anything else to change your personality structure until after your identity is established by a Noetic examination."

"Why wasn't I told about this before?"

"No one could serve this summons on you, sir, while you were at masquerade, because no one knew where you were."

"Well. I'll take the call in the morning room. That can be adjusted to look like whatever their aesthetic requires without violating too much of the visual integrity here ..."

"Sir, you may wish to examine that document in more detail. You are ordered to present yourself in your own person, not by mannequin, partial, or telerepresentation. There can be no signal from any remote source affecting your brain during the examination."

"That's damned inconvenient! Where do I need to go?"

"Longitude fifty-one of the ring-city."

"Then let me take care of this immediately and get it out of the way." And he slipped his wife's diary in his pocket.

Phaethon stepped from dreamspace into his private thoughtspace, and turned, once again, into a disembodied pair of floating gloves. The icon of his wife's diary was still "with him"; the act of putting in his pocket had been a sufficient symbol to accomplish that. Here, of course, it looked much simpler and cruder; just a pastel oblong. When his glove let go of it, it did not fall, but hung, fixed, where he left it, to the left of the square cubes representing engineering programs.

Then he woke up in his coffin in the barren little room.

THE SUMMONS

This time Rhadamanthus was still with him when he woke, so the chamber, to his eyes, was suitably furnished and decorated. It looked like a Swiss mountain cabin, perhaps a hunting lodge, with hardwood floors set with bearskin rugs, a fire burning in the grate beneath a mantlepiece bright with trophy cups. A rack of muskets was opposite the window. The wardrobe was now made of tall polished oak, carved with an emblazon of arms. French doors of diamond-shaped lead-crystal panes now led to what was pretty much the same view. Bowing and offering him a trousers, shirt, and jacket was Rhadamanthus, now appearing as a valet. Phaethon slid the silk sheets aside and stepped out of the four-poster bed.

The ugliness of his thick-skinned body was gone; Phaethon now looked pretty much as he should. When he turned toward the wardrobe, the valet stepped and opened the door for him, with no nonsense about having to speak commands aloud. There was the golden armor. "I want to see things as they are," he said. The comfortable quaint little lodge turned into an ugly dull-colored cube. His senses dulled; his skin grew thick and coarse, like heavy plastic. Only the armor was the same. If anything, it looked better.

"Rhadamanthus, can you figure out how to open this armor

again, please?"

Black vertical lines, like streamlines, appeared across the

surface of the armor, and spread wider. The helmet folded. Then the armor was as Phaethon first saw it, black, with side panels of gold, with gold ornaments at collar, shoulder, thigh.

"If I must be hauled before the High Court of the Curia, then let me appear in splendor to awe the world! I will not go unremarked to my fate!"

Rhadamanthus (despite normal Silver-Gray policy) manifested no appearance, but issued a disembodied voice into Phaethon's ear. "Pardon me, sir, if I did not explain. But you are not summoned to the High Court. You are appearing before the Probate Court. I suspect they are gathering, not to fix any penalties on you, but to reward you with a testamentary gift."

Phaethon flung the armor across his shoulders. The black fabric dissolved into flying threads, which swooped around him, wrapping limb and body, pulling the gold adamantium plates and panels into place. The black substance bonded with his skin. Again, he felt a sense of great well-being. The na-nomachines in the armor were interpenetrating his flesh, feeding and sustaining his cells more efficiently than the natural mechanisms that normally carried nutrients and fluids to them.

He stood for a moment, exulting in the sense of soaring vivacity the armor sent through his nerves and muscles. Only then did Rhadamanthus's words penetrate to him. "A gift? The Court of Law is going to decide to give me a gift? What kind of nonsense is this? I thought we kept the Curia around just in case people were ever tempted to commit violent crimes again, or cheat on contracts, or break their word. The Triumvir Judges don't give gifts."

"It is a testamentary gift, young master. The Judges also have the power to resolve disputed ownership of the property of the dead."

"Hm. I would have thought archeologists or museum curators have that duty. What has any of this to do with me, except as a distraction to delay my efforts to discover the truth about myself? No matter! I am impatient to have done with this matter. Can we at least get under way?"

The far wall of the barren apartment was made of pseudo-matter. Pseudo-matter was neither matter nor energy as the ancients would have understood those terms but a third manifestation of timespace. The vibrations of ylem superstrings in the stable geometries called "octaves" produced matter-energy quanta; unstable pulses formed temporary virtual particles. An unnatural but perfectly self-consistent topology (and one not invented by the universe within her first three seconds) was the semistable waveform, dubbed the tritone. Pseudo-matter, built up from these tritone semiquanta, could impersonate shape and extension, but only in the presence of a stabilizing energy field. When that energy field was shut off, the location of pseudo-matter became uncertain, and solidity vanished, until the field was reapplied.

The far wall winked out like a popped soap bubble as Phaethon slid through it, and snapped back into reality behind him. Phaethon knew of schools who disapproved of the use of pseudo-matter for aesthetic and metaphysical reasons; he felt a momentary sympathy for them then. Life would be simpler if solid-seeming things could be trusted.

Phaethon found himself staring through a bank of windows at a wide circular space. It rose overhead, dwindling with perspective to the vanishing point. Underfoot was like a well, dropping, as if bottomless, beyond sight. Rail-guides and tractor-friction field generators studded the vertical walls in a jewel-like tiger-striped pattern. The design seemed more biological than mechanical; the geometry of the architecture was fractal, organic, spiral; nothing was Euclidean or linear.

A car with spider arms and crab legs rushed silently up the side of the wall and jerked to a stop in front of Phaethon's windows. The utter silence proved the wide tube was evacuated of air. A protuberance bubbled from the car and swelled up against the windows, opening wide lips. There was no door. The window-substance writhed and opened like so many flower petals, melding and intermingling with the protuberance. Phaethon was now looking into a short, twisted corridor into the interior of the car. It looked like an esophagus. The inside of the car had no clearly defined walls or