John Wright - The Golden Age

"Tell me simply, what would you think of Phaethon, whom you claim to love, if you found he was fooling you with a fraud as large as the one you hope to play on him?"

"Oh?! You seemed eager enough to have me open these terrible memories! Now you want me not to act on them?!"

Aurelian spoke in a mild tone: "I did not think you would necessarily carry out the dishonest purpose to which you had once agreed. You have the opportunity now to change your mind."

"It won't do Phaethon any harm! I'll be doing him a favor!"

"Oh? Define 'harm.' "

Daphne was fed up: "Listen, you machine! Why don't you

just stick to the purposes you were designed to do! Go run your festival!"

"Of course. And I hope you will be true to your own nature as well. But part of my festival function is to inform people as to their results. Do you wish to know your present standing in the dream-universe contest? You are third. You would win the Bronze."

"No. You're lying." She looked around at the wide, un-walled space of the Oneirocon, at the floating dreamers deep in their trances, sunk below the pool. Famous amateurs all; all brought here by the same hope of fame, a hope only two or three might reach.

She looked back up at Aurelian's eyes. In a very small voice she said: ".... Me?"

"Yes. There is a certain innocent optimism to your drama which is conspicuously absent in the rather cynical art forms of your competition; this has made it very popular among the players, even if the art critics dismiss it. The universe of your nearest rival, for example, Typhoenus of the Clamour, has worlds of great love collapse into singularities; and warfare has erupted in several of his galaxies, by races attempting to avoid the Blue-Shift collapse of his universe. Under our new popularity-rating method, many players abandoned his unhappy ending and flooded to your world. Also, you have the highest marks for external relevance."

"Relevance? I'm running a magical fairy-tale world!"

"Hm. Perhaps the judges see something magical in the real world. Something of which you remind them. Reenter the game, Daphne! Everyone wants to know what your protagonist will find beyond his last barrier."

Daphne closed her eyes in an expression of pain.

She thought about Phaethon. She thought about her hopes.

Without a further word she turned and walked away, leaving everything behind.

THE MASS MIND

The next group of memories recorded in the diary told how Daphne had gone to the nearest public box, climbed inside, and projected an image of herself to the ecoperformance at Destiny Lake.

Daphne thought she could find Phaethon rather easily, since she knew he was dressed as Harlequin. And while the Masquerade had disenabled her locator circuit, she could program her sensorium to tell her who was really there and who was telepresent.

And so she wandered through the crowd for what seemed an endless time. She passed a man dressed as Imhotep, and Lord Admiral Nelson; she passed Arjuna and Faust and Babbit; she saw Neil Armstrong talking to Christopher Columbus; she passed a group dressed as the Eleemosynary Composition who called on her to join them. (A jest—she was dressed as Ao Enwir, who had been a bitter political rival of the Old Eleemosynarians during the Sixth Era.) She even passed someone dressed as a Neptunian, a mass of blue translucent parathermal substances, aswim with high-speed neurocircui-try, crouching in a low dell, with only a few eyestalks thrust up over the edge. The lines of potential radiating from these eyes showed that the Neptunian was staring at a man in a black Demontdelune costume talking to someone dressed as

a Porphyrogen Astronomer. But there was no sign of her husband.

If he were her husband at all.

Daphne sat on a rock, staring at the grass between her feet, sinking lower and lower in misery, and wondering if it were worth the risk to employ a Red Manorial mind-control routine to snap her out of her depression. But it didn't seem worth it.

Behind her, in the distance, trees were burning under the lake, collapsing, dying. Daphne knew just how they felt.

A three-legged walking cart of some kind approached her. The machine was not much taller than she was. Beneath the hood sat a rounded bulk, larger than a bear, with skin that glistened like wet leather. It had two luminous, disklike eyes, and splay-fingered hands, with yard-long fingers that writhed like tentacles. A little V-shaped mouth quivered and slattened. Atop its head was a silk top hat.

A loud mechanical ululation issued from the machine, rising and falling. Daphne clapped her hands to her ears and looked up in annoyance. "Do you mind?!" she asked.

"Sorry, mistress," came a familiar voice. "I just thought this was an appropriate costume, considering what the ecoperformance here is really trying to say."

"Rhadamanthus, is that you?"

The ugly, big-headed monster tipped his silk top hat. "Mistress, I did not mean to intrude, but you left orders with me to tell you the results of the dream competition as soon as the final judging was recorded."

Her misery increased. Had it been only an hour ago that she had been dream-weaving? It seemed like another life. Maybe the real Daphne would have cared. "Never mind. I don't want to know."

"As you prefer, mistress."

"And who do you imagine you're supposed to be?"

"An intelligence immeasurably superior to man's, but as mortal as his own. I'm scrutinizing you as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the tiny creatures which swarm and multiply in a drop of water." Rhadamanthus leaned from his

three-legged cart, thrust his noseless face forward toward her, frowning and squinting with exaggerated motions of his goggle eyes.

She raised her hand and pushed on his face, forcing him backward. "Oh, please! I'm in no mood for your jokes!"

"Just don't sneeze on me."

"Why do you have a sense of humor anyway? You're a machine."

"Oh? I always thought humor was related to the ability to see things from more than one perspective at once, a matter of the intellect. Is it a bodily function? You should tell me which gland or organ secretes good humor; I know of some members of our mansion who could use an injection."

"Speaking of which, do you know where Phaethon is?"

"Hm. There's a section of me with him, but their location is masked by the Masquerade protocol. I wonder if it breaks protocol merely to have me figure out who other-me might be, based on my knowledge of how I tend to dress?"

A tall funnel rose from the hood of the tripod cart, and a beam, like the beam of a warship's searchlight, swept back and both across the people gathered on the grass near the lakeshore. Then it focused and pointed. "Aha!"

Daphne jumped to her feet. "Do you see him?"

"No, mistress. But I see a fat man dressed as Polonius. Do you see him, next to the public pool? Unless I miss my guess, that's the segment of me who is with Phaethon."

"It doesn't look like one of your icons ..."

"Ah, but look at where his robes touch the grass."

"Webbed feet?"

"Any man with penguin feet must be me! I'd recognize myself anywhere! Shall I blast him with my heat ray?"

"No."

"You're right! The black smoke should take out more of the crowd."

"The man who was with him—Phaethon—he's gone into the staging pool to enter to another scene—"

"He's going into the Rhadamanthus Manor House in the Deep Dreaming. I think he's going to the memory chamber."

"Then I'm too late!" Daphne's voice hit a shrill note.

"It's never too late to do the right thing."

"You've got to help me find him."

"This way." And the tripod cart started scuttling across the grass. Daphne followed. There was activity in her sensorium: new elements were introduced into the scene, trees, bushes, flowers. She rounded a tall stand of (nonexistent) trees, and suddenly stood facing the towers of Rhadamanthus Mansion. The windows gleamed cherry red in the sunset.