John Wright - The Golden Age

Another monstrosity stumbled forward in a tangle of clumsy feet. "Don't get so high-and-mighty on us, you greedy money chaser! You monopolist! You engineer! We are children of enlightenment! Pleasure and freedom are ours! We despise the filthy materialists and their thinking machines who enslave us with their Utopia! Where is true humanity in that?

Where is pain and death and suffering? How dare you be so selfish, so self-repressed? What kind of stuck-up, sniveling, psychic-tyrant are you?!"

The creature yelling this at Phaethon was a thing out of a nightmare. From a large head, two necks reached down into two bodies, naked, male and female. The separate bodies of the one head were embraced in a jerking copulation.

Phaethon turned on his sense-filter and edited the crowd from his view.

Now he stood, or seemed to stand, in a stately garden. Blessed solitude was here. Except for the twitter of distant birds, all was silent. The odor of unwashed humanity was gone; instead, a scent rose from the dew-gemmed grass, or the curving petals of luxurious flowers beyond the hedge.

Phaethon kicked his foot against the soil, activated his magnetics in the armor, and soared into the spring-scented air. Handsome landscape was above him and below him in the great cylinder.

Perhaps this sublime peace was an illusion. He knew these lawns were crowded with a filthy swarm of neomorphs. But perhaps some illusions were worth maintaining, if only for a little while.

He turned on his private thoughtspace, so that a spiral of dots, and cubes of engineering and ecological routine icons seemed to hang within arm's reach around him, but the garden landscape was still visible beyond.

He reached toward the pastel oblong icon representing his wife's diary, but stopped. He did not have enough memory just in the isolated circuitry wired into his brain to run a full simulation; and he certainly did not want, to enter into personality deprivation while in flight. But he was too impatient to go all the way back, miles upon miles, to his barren little cubical in the space elevator before he had a chance to find out what Daphne knew.

Phaethon hesitated to call Rhadamanthus back, because he now knew Helion's Relic could find what he was doing through those links. And while he might be a fine man, it was a fact that Helion and Phaethon now had an uncompro-

mising conflict of interests. Either one had the right to He-lion's vast fortune, or the other; they could not both.

Phaethon frowned. Helion's relic? Phaethon had seen him just last night. It was impossible to think of the man as anything other than his sire; it was impossible to think of him as "dead" merely because a court of law so decreed.

But, if so, then Phaethon was in the wrong, stealing money from a man merely because a court of law called him dead. After all, that same Court just called Phaethon himself dead....

There was a spaceport at the weightless joint joining this cylinder with the next. It was a wide spherical space where many ships of spun diamond, like a forest of elfish glass, were assembled and disassembled between Inner System flights; they also served as shuttles to farther spaceports at L-5 point and beyond, where mile upon mile of magnetic launchers accelerated ships for bright and distant Jupiter, and other Outer System ports of call.

A smaller group of habitats, like a cluster of grapes, was affixed to the wall of the sphere; one of the larger ones contained thought caskets and lockers rented out by Eleemosynary Hospitalities, a subdivision of that wealthy Composition's many business groups, efforts, and holdings.

Phaethon floated into the airlock at the hub of the hospice. From there he descended to the equator of the hospice, which was being spun for gravity. Thought caskets formed a curving row reaching up to his left and right; he could see the other side of the corridor above him.

He entered the nearest thought casket, had the medical apparatus close about him. The circuitry in his armor might interfere with the interfaces, yet Phaethon was strangely unwilling to take it off.

As Atkins had done, Phaethon took a group of fibers and stuffed them down through the neckpiece of his armor, where they writhed and changed shape, making themselves adaptable to the circuitry in the black nanomechanism that formed the armor lining. The signal now could be fed through the

armor to the armor's internal interfaces and into his brain. Apparently that was sufficient.

Energy connections were formed with receptors in his brain; all his senses were engaged; the external world faded.

Now he seemed to stand in the Hospice Public Thought-space, where a pyramid of balconies seemed to rise around him, with windows and icons opening up into deeper and higher sections of the library.

A gesture from his little finger closed the balcony railing and formed a privacy box. He opened the diary, fell into deepest dreamspace, lost his memories, and became Daphne. The recording started with her before she woke yesterday morning.

THE SYMPHONY OF DREAMS

She had not been asleep, not as the ancients would have understood sleep. Daphne had been experiencing a Stimulus, Mancuriosco the Neuropathist's Eighth Arrangement. The last movement in the Stimulus, the so-called Compass of Infinity Theme, involved stimulations of deep-memory structures, a combination of REM-stage delta waves and meditative alpha waves. Over all, was a counterpoint of waves that did not naturally occur in the human brain, which, introduced artificially produced sensations and states of mind that required a special nomenclature to describe.

In her dreams, she cycled through an evolution, first as an amoeba pulsing in the endless waves of the all-mother ocean, then as a protozoa, drifting and floating, then as an insect, escaping from the water to the smaller infinity of the air. Memories of ancient amphibians, ancient lizards, lemurs and hominids flowed through her; each mind, as it grew more complex, seemed, somehow, to diminish the mystery and wonder of the world around her. Other deeply buried memories surfaced; of her floating in the womb as a child, surrounded by infinite love and warmth, then emerging, in pain and confusion, into what seemed to be a smaller universe. The final movement of the theme had a set of emotions, moods, dreams and half-dreams, where, ennobled by some

far future evolution, now a goddess, she held the universe like a crystal globe in her hand, but, being larger than the universe, had no place to stand. There were sensations of being cramped and suffocated, terribly alone, as the universe shrank to the size of a pebble, a dust mote, an atom. Then, somehow, in a mysterious reverse, she found herself now infinite and infinitesimal, once more floating and drifting in a mysterious endless sea....

She enjoyed the experience as always, but there was something not quite right about it, something which made her uneasy. ...

It was strange. She remembered this performance as her favorite. How had she truly never noticed how pessimistic and ironic the theme here was? But the performance had not changed. Had something changed in her... ?

Perhaps she was more joyous these days. These were the golden days of the Transcendence; there was much to enjoy.

The dream drifted to waking, and Daphne awoke.

She lay beneath the waters of her living-pool, yawning and stretching, bubbles tickling her nose. Daphne stared up at the play of lights and reflections across the underside of the dome, at the blue sky and white clouds beyond. She smiled a languid smile.

At her thought, the water beneath her strengthened its surface tension, so that she now rested in a dry little valley, made by her own weight, of rainbow-chased transparency.

What next? She wondered. It was after the Gold Cup competitions, but the Life Debates were still two days away. And she had already bought all the gifts she needed for the Ministration of Delights in August.