John Wright - The Golden Age

The picture was this: Helion, dressed in armor white as ice, with a dark gorget covering his throat and shoulders, stood proud and tall on stairs of blue lapis lazuli. Behind him rose doors of burnished gold, tall and shining, inset with panels of black marble. The panels were carved with eight symbols of the rights and duties of manhood: a sheathed sword, an open book, a sheaf of ripe grain, a bundle of rods containing an ax, a cogwheel, a floral wedding trellis, a stork, a Gnostic eye.

Phaethon remembered those doors well. These symbols represented the right and duty of self-defense, freedom from censorship and the duty to learn, the obligation to labor and the right to keep the fruits thereof, civil rights and civic duties, and the rights and duties associated with cybernetic progress, sexual alliances, reproduction, and self-mutagenesis.

Those who passed through those doors, and passed the Noetic philosophic and psychiatric integration of their memory paths and thought chains, were recorded as full members of the Rhadamanthine mind structure, granted communion and ascendance. While they might have been voting adults in the eyes of the law and of the Parliament long before, the scholum of the manor-born did not accept that a child was fully adult until he was proven to be fully sane and honest. That took longer.

On the day when he had turned five-and-seventy years of age, Phaethon had reached his majority.

He and Helion had been staying on Europa at the time,

negotiating some last details of the Circumjovial Moon effort. The ceremony had been somewhat rough and impromptu, but no less stirring to Phaethon for all that. Helion's Lieutenants and the High Vavasors of Rhadamanth had radioed updated copies of themselves across the solar system to be present; the copies could be later reintegrated with the primary memories, to create the illusion that Helion's friends, employees and allies had attended. The palace they used had been grown overnight out of smart-crystal, not properly adjusted for Europa's light gravity, so that the spires and towers emerged as elongated fairy shapes, lacy and fantastic; irregularities were masked with morphetic illusions or pseudo-matter. There had been no Yule tree, so the gifts were recorded on disks and ornaments hanging from a squat detoxification bush one of Phaethon's remotes found in their drop-ship. And there had not been enough time to give the chorus properly thought-out pseudo-personalities for the comic reenactments of Phaethon's youth which traditionally preceded the Noetic submergence ceremony, so Helion had peopled the play stages with characters from popular novels, Jovian history, and ancient myth, and whomever else he could find cheaply on the local area channels. The reenactments, normally austere with a restrained dry wit, turned into bizarre, anachronistic buffoonery. Phaethon loved it nonetheless, every minute.

In his memory, he saw once again how Helion had looked as he stood before the golden doors of the submergence chamber. The semi-Helions, his partials, had bowed and stepped aside, and there was Helion himself, the original, standing on the stairs, gleaming in his white armor. (This armor, at that point, was still an extrapolation; completion of the Solar Array project was still five hundred years in the future. No one really knew what architecture of interfaces would have to be built into such armor, or what the solar deep-station environment would be like.)

Helion had put one hand on Phaethon's shoulder and, with his other hand, had stopped the official count of time. The partials and computer-generated people around them froze.

Helion had leaned and said, "Son, once you go in there, the full powers and total command structures of the Rhadamanth Sophotech will be at your command. You will be invested with godlike powers; but you will still have the passions and distempers of a merely human spirit. There are two temptations which will threaten you. First, you will be tempted to remove your human weaknesses by abrupt mental surgery. The Invariants do this, and to a lesser degree, so do the White Manorials, abandoning humanity to escape from pain. Second, you will be tempted to indulge your human weakness. The Cacophiles do this, and, to a lesser degree, so do the Black Manorials. Our society will gladly feed every sin and vice and impulse you might have; and then stand by helplessly and watch as you destroy yourself; because the first law of the Golden Oecumene is that no peaceful activity is forbidden. Free men may freely harm themselves, provided only that it is only themselves that they harm."

Phaethon knew what his sire was intimating, but he did not let himself feel irritated. Not today. Today was the day of his majority, his emancipation; today, he could forgive even He-lion's incessant, nagging fears.

Phaethon also knew that most Rhadamanthines were not permitted to face the Noetic tests until they were octogener-ians; most did not pass on their first attempt, or even their second. Many folk were not trusted with the full powers of an adult until they reached their Centennial. Helion, despite criticism from the other Silver-Gray branches, was permitting Phaethon to face the tests five years early. Phaethon had been more than pleased to win his sire's validation and support; but now, perhaps, Helion was wondering if his critics after all had been correct.

"Are you suggesting I sign a Werewolf Contract, Father?" A Werewolf Contract appointed someone with an override, and authorized them to use force, if necessary, to keep the subscribing party away from addictions, bad nanomachines, bad dreams, or other self-imposed mental alterations. (The actual legal term for this document was "a Confessed Judg-

ment of Conditional Mental Incompetence and Appointment of Guardian.")

"I am not suggesting that," said Helion, "but, now that you bring it up ... have you thought about it? Perhaps you ought. Many eminent people, well respected in their communities, have signed such things. No one else need know." But he looked down when he said it, unable to meet Phaethon's gaze.

"Are you thinking of signing such a thing, Father?" Phaethon asked with a wry half smile.

Helion straightened up, his eyes bright, glaring down at Phaethon. Helion said nothing, but there was such a look of august majesty, of haughty pride, shining in his face, that there was no need to say anything.

Phaethon let his smile inch wider, and he spread his hands, and quirking one eyebrow, as if to say, So you see?

Then Phaethon said, "It's a paradox, Father. I cannot be, at the same time and in the same sense, a child and an adult. And, if I am an adult, I cannot be, at the same time, free to make my own successes, but not free to make my own mistakes."

Helion looked sardonic. " 'Mistake' is such a simple word. An adult who suffers a moment of foolishness or anger, one rash moment, has time enough to delete or destroy his own free will, memory, or judgment. No one is allowed to force a cure on him. No one can restore his sanity against his will. And so we all stand quietly by, with folded hands and cold eyes, and meekly watch good men annihilate themselves. It is somewhat... quaint... to call such a horrifying disaster a 'mistake.' "

Phaethon said, "If fools wish to abuse their freedom, let them. So long as they only harm themselves, who cares?"

Helion said, "Aha. Proudly spoken. But what human is entirely immune from foolishness?"

Phaethon was impatient to continue the ceremony and step beyond those golden doors. He shrugged, and said, "The So-photechs are unimaginably wise! We can trust their advice to protect us."

"Are they, indeed?" Helion looked very displeased. "Did I

ever tell you what happened to Hyacinth-Subhelion Septimus Gray? He and I were friends once. We were closer than friends. We entered a communion exchange."