John Wright - The Golden Age

The Roman Catholic Church condemned the translunar expeditions as impious. A noise of war began to sound in earnest, not just as rumors. The old aristocracy of England and Cimmeria hated the new breed of inventors and captains of industry, and joined the crusade against them. Yellow journalists and demagogues loudly condemned the new way of life, and chose the translunar expedition as the symbol on which to heap their venom.

Many of these were her older players, people who had wanted to join in a small, safe, pastoral world. Daphne-Goddess had some sympathy for them, but when she looked down and saw the magnificent airship of the Hyperboreans, decorated with banners of black and gold, rising gigantic and proud, upward to conquer heaven, her heart melted with delight. Trumpets blew fanfares from the windows of the Empire State Building as the airship launched.

German and Cimmerian airships, armed with cannons, now appeared from out of the stormclouds where they had been hiding, and sought to down the vessel. Yet the Hyperborean ship rose farther and higher than any opposition. The vessel passed the orbits of the moon, of glowing Venus and red Mars. Then, another disaster: the crew, overcome by superstitious terror at the near approach of a comet, mutinied, and parachuted over the rail to the globe so many miles below. The Captain continued onward alone.

From the wireless in the cabin, he sent his final message: he revealed himself to be Lord Shining, the prince of Hyper-borea himself, having come aboard the airship incognito. This expedition was not merely meant to go to the starry sphere, but beyond; he had brought tools and explosives sufficient to open a hole in the dome of the sky and see what lay on the far side.

The radio stammered protests: messages from Popes and Kings warning that he might cause the sky to fall, puncture the universe like a bubble, or let some dreadful other-substance from Beyond rush in to drown the universe!

His reply: "A prison the size of a universe is yet a prison. I shall not be bound."

He donned a deep-sea diver's helmet and heavy leather suit against the thinness of the air; frost gathered on the shrouds; the steam engines sputtered, lacking oxygen. Beneath him, the whole world was paralyzed with awe or fear. Overhead was the dome.

He attached himself to the azure empyrean crystal with a harness of suction cups. Now he lifted the pickax, which still had tied around its head the good-luck ribbon his wife had given him. He braced himself, drawing back to swing....

THE MASTER OF THE SUN

Daphne was jarred awake. Clumsy with stupidity, her 'thoughts no longer racing at machine-assisted speeds, she wondered in numb confusion if her prince had destroyed the universe by puncturing the wall. Maybe the universe had been a bubble after all—she was in a pool...

Daphne stood up, spitting water from her lungs. She was in the huge living-pool of the Oneirocon, with bits of interface-crystal still dripping from her hair. Aurelian's representation, still dressed as Comus, thin-faced, dark-haired, in wine-colored robes, was at the pool's edge, leaning on his charming wand heavily, as if a weight were bearing down on him.

"Is—is the contest over—or—" Daphne looked around blankly. The other contestants were still under the surface, crowned with dream machinery, still active.

Something was very, very wrong here.

"Aurelian? Is there a—a problem?"

"The other contestants are on hold. I took it upon myself to interrupt you, since there are command-lines in your construction file permitting such interference under certain circumstances."

" 'Construction file' ... ?"

A sensation of dread crawled on her skin, sank into the pit

of her stomach. Only artificial beings had construction files. Not real people.

Not her. Oh, please, not her!

The one secret fear that had always followed her was here.

Daphne (Silver-Gray disciplines and oaths forgotten) used a Red Manorial mind-control technique on herself, and kept her terror at bay.

She felt faint nonetheless. She scooped up a double handful of life-water, ordered it to turn itself into something more potent than wine, raised her palms to her mouth and threw back her head to drink.

Red liquid flowed down her cheeks like tears. She rubbed her fingers through her hair to dry them, which would make a sticky, tangled mess later. Daphne nervously began to tease the strands apart with her fingers, then she snorted in self-disgust. Later? What later? She wasn't even sure if she had any "now."

Daphne let the lank tangles drip back down across her forehead and cheeks, planted her fists on her hips, and glared at the Sophotech.

"Okay, Aurelian! What the hell is going on ?!"

"A message from Helion of Rhadamanthus Mansion has come for you on a very high-priority channel. In order to decide whether or not to interrupt you to deliver it, I had to make an extrapolation of your mind. In so doing, I discovered that you suffer from a number of self-imposed false beliefs. The message will be meaningless to you unless you immediately resume certain redacted memories."

He brought out a silver casket, the size of a transmitter case. It was an imaginifestation, a real-world object linked to some routine or file in the dreamscape. On the lid was inscribed a legend: "WARNING! This file contains mnemonic templates..."

She commanded herself to be brave. "And my belief about my identity ... ?"

"Is false. Your are not Daphne Prime. Your real name is Daphne Tercius Semi-Rhadamanthus Disembodied, Emancipated-Download-Redact, Indepconciousness, Base

Neuroformed (parallel impersonate) Silver-Gray Manorial (Auxiliary) Schola, Era Present."

"Emancipated ... ?" She had been a doll, a character, a plaything.

Daphne had not known, not really. But there had been hints. Friends would say how much she had changed, then fall silent, or dart sidelong looks at her. She would find entries in her account books for which she could not account. She read diaries and logs that seemed to talk about a woman more reserved and austere, more moody, more dreamy, than she thought of herself as being.

But those thoughts about herself were false.

Despite the Red Manorial mind-controllers, she felt a sense of sledgehammer impact, only muted, dull, and distant.

"Do you need medical attention? You seem to have trouble breathing."

"No, n—I'm fine." She was grasping her knees, waiting, with a sort of clinical disinterest, to see if she would vomit. Unlike a mannequin, she did not have full control of the au-tonomic reactions of her real body. "This is what I do when I have my lungs ripped out. It's fun! You should try it some time."

But this wasn't her real body. She was an emancipated-download-redact.

Which meant her thoughts weren't even her real thoughts.

Aurelian said sardonically, "Thank you, no. There are aspects of the human condition we machines are content merely to observe from the outside."

She raised her head to glare at him with sudden hatred. "Well, I'm glad you find my pain worth noticing! Maybe I can be a footnote in some damn abstract thesis in your Earth-mind! Mount me as a science exhibit: the girl who thought she might be happy someday gets a healthy dose of reality to boot her in the mouth."

He spread his hands and bowed slightly. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to make light of your suffering. Similar things happened to me when I was being constructed; each time a new

thought-group was introduced, the integration required a paradigm shift."

"That's not the same."

"Nonetheless, I sympathize. Even we are not immune from pain and sorrow. If our minds are more acute than yours, that only means the pains we know are more acute as well."

She straightened up. "Okay! What's in that damned box?! What's so terrible that I couldn't even bring myself to ... Oh, no ... It's not..." The snap left her voice. Wild-eyed, she said in a pleading tone, "Phaethon is dead, isn't he? He killed himself in some stupid experiment, and I only think he's alive. All my memories of him are implants, aren't they? Oh, please, not that!"