John Wright - The Golden Age

But, before she could escape, the sirens fell silent, and the rotunda stopped glowing and burning. Footsteps sounded. Here came Helion, alive again, face whole and unburnt, armor white as snow, undamaged.

He came toward her. The face-plate of his helmet was thrown back. His expression was strange to her, clear-eyed, yet haggard, eyes heavy with unspeakable inner sorrow.

Daphne ceased her retreat and Helion stepped into the gallery.

"Why did you call me? What does all this mean?" she asked. She spoke softly, half hypnotized by the look of grief in Helion's eye, the sad half smile on his face.

Helion turned from her. He gripped the rail and looked down at the surface of the sun below. The incandescent sea was calm; only a few far specks showed the gathering of the storm. The scenario had evidently been reset to the beginning.

"Ironic that I, of all people, must now violate Silver-Gray protocols." he said, his voice measured and dignified, almost kind. "To have a solar catastrophe in the west wing of a Victorian mansion, I grant you, is questionable visual continuity. But we have always been dedicated to realistic images and simulations, always said that the plague of illusion consuming our society cannot be fought except by strict adherence to realism. And this scenario is real. Would that it were not!"

"You died?" Daphne spoke in a horrified whisper.

"For an hour I was out of contact with the Noumenal Mentality. What happened in that hour? What was I thinking? Some partial records were saved, some of my thoughts, most voice-video records. There are readings from the black boxes from the core-diver units. The Probate Court, for obvious reasons, will not let me examine the thought they deem to be crucial. But there were records enough, nonetheless, to construct this scenario. My own private torture chamber..."

Daphne wondered if it were a full-simulation scenario. If so, Helion had just suffered all the real pain and anguish of a man burning to death.

He banged his armored fist, ringing, against the rail. "I don't know what they're looking for! I can see the expression on my face: I know what I said. What was I thinking? What one thought made such a difference? Some sort of epiphany, some thought so bold and great that it would have changed my life forever, had I lived!"

"Then Prime Helion is dead? You are Helion Secondus?" She laid a hand against his shoulder, a touch of sympathy.

He turned and looked down at her. "It would be easier if it were so clear as that. My identity is in doubt. I will have to struggle to prove who I am."

"I don't understand. Rhadamanthus must accept that you are Helion; otherwise you would not still be considered the manorial archon. Would you be? Do the other members of the schola know?"

There was something in his gaze that made her drop her

hand and step away. It wasn't sorrow in his gaze that scared her; it was pity. Pity for her.

He spoke: "Brace yourself, Daphne. I have something dreadful for you. I was awake for many days before they told me I was a ghost. You have been awake for half a year."

"I'm a recording?"

"No. It is worse. You are a construction. Listen to me."

And it only took him a few short words to destroy her life.

Helion explained. Some project of Phaethon's threatened catastrophe to the Golden Oecumene; but the danger was not immediate, so the Curia and the Constables were forced to allow him to continue. The Hortators, however, led by Gannis of Jupiter, were able to have the project condemned as immoral, socially unacceptable. Phaethon was threatened with being ostracized and expelled.

Then Helion, the Prime Helion, died in the solar disaster on the array. Phaethon's grief at his sire's death was great, but he refused to give up his dangerous project. The original Daphne was faced with the prospect of either joining Phaethon in exile or joining his foes to shun him; which meant: betraying him, never speaking with him, never seeing him again.

She chose instead a type of suicide. Daphne "drowned" herself, entering a dreamworld, redacting her memories of reality, and destroying the encryption keys that would allow her to return again to life and sanity. She was lost forever in a fiction of her own imagining. Perhaps it was a world that held a Phaethon who would not leave her.

Helion's voice was gentle and terrible:

"Her last act was to emancipate a partial duplicate of herself, equipped with false memories, and armed with the type of personality she imagined Phaethon wanted or deserved. You used to be her ambassador, her doll. She used you as her off-planet representative, because she was afraid to leave the earth, afraid that if she would ever go outside of the range of the Noumenal Mentality system, she might die without a backup copy. Which is exactly what happened to me. I think

the morbid fear she had of outer space was exacerbated by news of my death."

Daphne felt exhausted. She had knelt, collapsing, and was resting her head against the cool upright of the gallery railing. She muttered: "But I met him in space. On Titania. A diamond dome grown of carbon crystal rose on spider legs above a glacier of methane ... I remember it exactly. He was standing on the tower top, gazing up at a crescent Uranus, and at the wide night sky, and smiling to himself as if it all belonged to him. He invited me to swim, but there were no intoxicants in the pool, just nutrients, which was the first thing I liked about him. While we soaked up food, we talked by means of Dolphinoid sonar weaving. It was funny because he kept mis-interlacing his verb pulses. We just chatted, erecting one lacy tapestry of ideograms after another, with no concern for spacing or end structure, whatever we felt like. Real Dolphinoids would have been so horrified! We talked about the Silent Ones...."

"Those memories are mostly true; it was edited of references which might hint that you were a partial-doll at the time."

Daphne wanted to call up one of her old Red Manorial programs to shut down her anger and grief reactions, but she did not dare, not with Helion, the head of the Silver-Gray Mansions, staring sadly down at her. "Why has this ... this horrid thing been done to me? My mind is filled with falsehood. My marriage is an illusion; my life a lie. What did I do to deserve this?"

Helion's smile lost part of its sadness; his face seemed to radiate warmth. "But, my dear Daphne, it is your courage which brought this on yourself, the ambition of your purpose. Those who attempt great things suffer greatly. You wanted to assume the life discarded by Daphne Prime; you knew that you might fail, or suffer anguish. But you put your fears, and your old life aside, and boldly seized the moment when it came!"

"What moment... ?"

An image of a silver globe, banded by an equatorial ocean,

appeared in Helion's gauntlet. "Here. Atop the Lakshmi Plateau, Gannis of Jupiter, Vafnir of Mercury, Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech and the College of Hortators, met with Phaethon and me in the presence of the Venereal Procurator." As he pointed, the vision swooped through clouds, passed across the newborn continents of the young world, and came to where a vast complex of palaces, manufactories, schools, and cathedral-sized Sophotech housings crowned a green high plateau. "This was seven months ago. The place is familiar to you?"

"Venus. I went there when I was reborn under my new name. The Red Manorial foundation-city called Eveningstar. The Red Queens took pity on an ex-witch. They took me in."

"I'm afraid that memory is false. Daphne Prime was reborn there. She was taken in. You were made elsewhere, but were reborn as her in this same spot. Ironic, isn't it? Phaethon agreed to the Hortator's terms. The suicide of his wife made his life intolerable to him. His magnificent dream was buried there; his life, like yours, was gone.