John Wright - The Golden Age

"The Eleemosynary Composition offers to manipulate the stock market by altering the buying habits of that percent of the population which comprises our membership, and by using negotiation, buyouts, and other financial maneuvers to either buy the companies in which Daphne's stock has been invested, or to ruin the values of those stocks. The Even-ingstar Sophotech is serving as investment broker for Daphne; an entity very smart and very accomplished in other fields, but utterly lacking the resources which the Seven Peers can bring to bear."

It was true. Just in terms of consumer goods alone, the Eleemosynary Composition controlled about one-tenth of the human world gross industrial product.

The Chimera said, "Once Daphne's stock is bankrupt, Ev-eningstar will eject her from her dream coffin and into the real world. She will be utterly unable to cope with a reality she has redacted from all memory. She may not be legally competent to govern her own affairs. By virtue of your marriage communion circuit, you hold join copyright ownership on certain of her intellectual properties, including her personality template. At that point, you may be legally able to insert a temporary memory block to redact all recent memories and personality changes; this would not be a personality-edit or

alteration. She would simply be restored to the condition she was in before she decided to commit delusion-suicide. She will have the legal right, once she is sane again, to open her redacted memories, and let herself go insane again. But you will be present. You will have an opportunity to persuade her to live in reality."

Phaethon said nothing. His eyes were wide.

The Chimera said, "Your forgotten project is not the most important thing in life to you. If you agree to cease all investigations into your past, the Eleemosynary Composition will aid you in the fashion we have outlined to recover your wife back to reality and sanity. You should agree not only because you personally shall receive the benefit of her love and gratitude, once she is restored; but also because it is your duty. You are her husband. Your marriage oath requires that you save her.

"You may call the Eleemosynary exchange from any public annex. We will leave you to meditate upon your answer."

And the Chimera vanished.

THE GOLDEN DOORS

Was it cowardice or prudence that made him hesitate? One impulse was to rush to the nearest Eleemosynary agency and throw himself down, begging, weeping, instantly agreeing to anything and everything it took to recover his wife from her horrible exile, her living death of permanent delusion.

Another impulse, more cautious, told him to investigate further.

Certainly the Eleemosynary Composition had not lied. It was true that, these days, very few people (aside from Nep-tunians) ever even attempted to lie; it was altogether too easy to get caught by all-knowing Sophotechs, too easy for honest men to confirm their statements by public display of their thought records. But it was also true that people could be mistaken, or could indulge in exaggerated (but honest) judgments of relative worth. The Eleemosynary Composition, for example, might judge something to be "difficult" or "impossible" which was not.

Was it impossible for Phaethon to wake his dream-trapped wife? Impossible?

He had to be certain. He had to see for himself.

Phaethon reached for the yellow disk icon floating in the glass of the table surface, the communication channel. It

should take only a moment to telepresent himself to the Ev-eningstar Sophotech who had custody of his wife's body. But he did not wish to be further observed; all this prying into his life was beginning to annoy him. Even as he reached, with his other hand he gestured the balcony window closed. Immediately, a panel was covering the view, and the sound and light and movement from outside was shut off.

Phaethon froze, startled. It was suddenly silent, with the total and absolute silence of a vacuum. The panels had not slid or moved to shut; one moment they were not there; the next they were in place. There was no hint or whisper of noise from beyond the panels, such as a Silver-Gray scene would have provided, to maintain the illusion of three dimensions and of consistency of objects.

Phaethon's hand was near the table surface. Still he hesitated.

"Rhadamanthus, why am I hesitating? What am I thinking?" He asked the question aloud before he remembered that he was disconnected from the Rhadamanthine system. (Had he been connected, he would not have forgotten, even for a moment.)

There was an icon for a Noetic self-consideration circuit in the tabletop. It was a crude, old-fashioned model, weeks or months out of date. But Phaethon thought that if he could clean a room manually, he could clean his nervous system of emotional maladjustments manually.

He touched the icon. Another, smaller window, like a tabletop, opened in the unsupported midair to his left. The new window was lit with the colors, dots and grids of standard psychometric iconography. He saw that his tension levels were high; grief and rancor were burning like a fire in a coal mine, sullen, just below the surface of his thoughts; and the temptation simply to give in to the Eleemosynary's bargain, to have someone or something else solve this problem for him, was very high.

The short-term emotional association index was carrying an image from the dream consciousness in his hypothalamus. He reached into the surface of the window, and through it, to

open the index box and look at the image list.

There it was. He was associating the sudden silence of the closed balcony with being trapped in a coffin, the airtight lid slamming shut, inescapable. A second association led to another dream image; that of his wife being locked in a coffin, still alive but asleep, her eyes moving beneath their lids. And, from another branch, a third image led away: the sound from outside had been shut off, not like a door closing but like a communication link being turned off. Which, in fact, it was. Phaethon discovered that this was the unconscious thought that was making him uneasy. Uneasy, because he realized that he actually was in a sort of a casket, namely, in a public hospice telepresence box.

If he did not go to visit his wife in person, there would be a signal going from his brain to some mannequin or remote, and back again. That signal time would have to be bought with Helion's money, and the signal content might be recorded.

Or distorted? Or edited? If and only if he went in person, and saw her with his own eyes, could he be sure the signals entering his brain were unedited.

What if this forgotten Lakshmi Agreement had put sense-filters on public channels to forbid Phaethon from seeing certain objects? (It had happened to him at Destiny Lake; he almost had not seen the Observationist School astronomer who told him about Helion's solar disaster.)

With the index open, Phaethon saw his tension levels jump again. Evidently thoughts about Helion were, at this moment, very upsetting to him. Upsetting, because he really did not know whether the version of Helion who was still alive was his Helion.

Should he be in mourning over a dead father, grief-stricken? Or should he be laughing with exasperation because a mistake of minor protocol, some fluke of overly zealous law, was trying to cheat Helion out of his entire fortune? There was only an hour missing from the present Helion's memory: that hardly constituted enough change to consider him a new and separate person, no matter what the law said.

Phaethon saw in the remote section of the index what he was really thinking, deep down. He wanted to talk to Helion about his problems.

He wanted fatherly advice and support.

From the bottom of the index box, where links to deeper brain sections glimmered like strands of smoke, came an image from memory.