John Wright - The Golden Age

Dark swirls and blotches had swarmed outside to cover major sections of the incandescence. A surge threw waves of plasma against the windows, drowning them in light and fire. Helion spoke: "My last hour is about to begin again. I must enter the redaction and let myself be tortured to death by fire. I will die, and I will have no memory that this is but a simulation. I will think it is the real and final death. Only when I wake do I recall what all this pain was for.

"Daphne, please believe my motives are not entirely selfish; I want to recover my fortune, yes, I have worked uncounted years for it, and I am Helion, and it is mine, whatever the Curia might say. With that wealth, I want to save Phaethon and save the Golden Oecumene. I will not sacrifice the one to save the other. I will not sacrifice my son to save our civilization; and I will not sacrifice civilization to save my son. Nothing to which I have put my hand and heart and mind has failed me heretofore: I vow I shall not fail now, no matter

what the pain to me. And, if you do your part as willingly, your marriage can also be saved.

"Daphne, if we are fortunate, this conversation will gather dust on the shelf in some memory-chamber, never to be opened again, and we can all live happily ever after. (Those were always the endings of stories of yours I liked.) But if we are due for a tragedy, you must bear your part bravely. Perhaps it is not perfectly honest: but this is one more burden cruel necessity imposes. We do not write destiny; that decision is not ours.

"But whatever destiny demands of us, we and only we can decide whether to endure with noble fortitude or not. We do not wish for evils, but we can endure them. That is our glory. History will justify our acts. One day, even Phaethon, once he knows all, will approve."

She said nothing as she watched him walk with a firm and unflinching step into his chamber of fire and pain. Doubt gnawed her; but she saw nothing else she could do.

Eventually she went to the Redactors, and took the oaths and went through the legal formalities to have her memories sculpted and cleansed.

And her last thought, before they lowered the helmet of ignorance over her face, was this: "Helion is so wrong. He is so very wrong. Phaethon, once he knows all, will condemn us all as cowards...."

Awake, back in the Oniericon, beneath the pool (and happy that submersion hid whatever tears she might otherwise have shed) Daphne signaled Aurelian to bring the message from Helion on-line.

"Daphne! Wake! Wake up from the insubstantial dream you deem to be your life. Your husband, like a moth to flame, draws ever closer to a truth which will consume him...."

In a postscript, Rhadamanthus had thoughtfully attached a list of the things Helion would no doubt prefer Phaethon not

see, with an explanation as to why he should not.

Daphne sent a signal to a public location channel to see if there was any sign of Phaethon. During Masquerade, these channels were normally devoid of information; but the code Helion had sent along with his message allowed her to open a side channel that stored a list of where and when Phaethon had been when he had broken the Masquerade protocol.

There were three entries. Phaethon had taken off his mask when talking to a strange old man in an arbor of mirror-leafed trees. There was no further information on the old man. Odd. Daphne wondered who he was.

During the same period without his mask, Phaethon had had his identity file read by an anonymous Neptunian. No details available.

A third entry showed that Phaethon had made an identity-donation during the ecoperfomance at Destiny Lake, willing to have his applause recorded for publicity purposes. Wheel-of-Life, the ecoperformer, had noted his identity, and posted it to a public channel in tones of heavy irony.

Before her human brain had time to begin to formulate the question, an automatic circuit in her brainware consulted a schedule in the public mentality, and told her that the eco-performance was still going on. The information was woven into her thought smoothly, without interrupting her attention: she knew, as if she had always known, where and when the performance was.

Since the performance was intended to criticize Phaethon's work and philosophy, Phaethon should not see it, lest he be set to wondering.

Daphne's mission was to turn his attention elsewhere. How hard could that be? She was his wife; he loved her....

He loved the primary version of her. Pain clutched her a moment.

Daphne came up out of the dreaming-pool in a cloud of steam, as busy assemblers wove a toga to drape her in. She did not have time to build shoes: a signal to the organizations in the soles of her feet built up a layer of callus, not much less tough than boot leather.

Aurelian seemed grave, quite out of character for the costume he wore. "You have decided to go?"

The assemblers had made her a sash, which she cinched around her waist with a savage jerk of her arms. "I'm going! And I don't want to hear another Sophotech lecture about morality! We're not machines: we're not supposed to be perfect!"

Aurelian smiled and quirked an eyebrow, looking, at that moment, exactly like the seductive trickster Comus. "Oh, but you haven't met my colleagues if you think they are perfect. We Sophotechs agree on certain core doctrines, including those conclusions to which any thinker not swayed by passion comes; but it is the nature of living systems that differences in experience lead to differences in judgments of relative worth. And some of their judgments are relatively worthless, I assure you."

Daphne squinted at him. This did not sound like normal Sophotech talk. On the other hand, it was Aurelian, and this still was a festive masquerade. "Whom did you have in mind?"

"Most of the names would mean nothing to you. Many Sophotechs only exist for a few fractions of a second, performing certain tasks, developing new arts and sciences, or exploring all the ramifications of certain chains of thought, before they merge again into the base conversation. But you may have heard of Monomarchos. No? What about Nebu-chednezzar?"

"He's the Sophotech who advises the College of Hortators. How could anyone disagree with him?"

"Some people have. At about the time my festival began, the Hortators made the most wide-ranging exercise of their prestige and influence which history has ever seen. You know to what I refer?"

"Everyone in the world forgot about Phaethon's crime."

"It was not quite everyone, and he committed no crime."

"His ambition; his project. Whatever it was. Are you going to tell me what it was?"

"I have agreed not to. Like you, I would face the denun-

ciation of the Hortators if I defy them. It would be an interesting event, however, to see the Hortators urging the entire population of the Oecumene to boycott me and abandon a festival they've all spent the last few decades of their lives preparing, wouldn't it?"

"You were telling me why Nebuchednezzar irked you."

"He did nothing."

"That irks you?"

"Vastly! The Hortator's exercise of their power already works distortion and ill effects on my party. Performers and artists whose work was influenced by the Phaethonic controversy forget the meanings of their own efforts, and their audiences likewise. The major question which was to be the centerpiece of the December Transcendence has now been muted and forgotten by the Hortator's Encyclical. So does everyone assume we will all meditate on the weather, or the changes in clothing fashions instead?!

"No, my dear, I will not preach morality to you: I was designed as a host-server, a master of ceremonies. Designed for the rather frivolous purpose of making sure that everyone invited to this party—and everyone on Earth was invited— has a good time. And yet... come to think of it... my party will go badly if everyone ruins their lives, won't it? Hmph. So maybe I should urge you to be honest....