John Wright - The Golden Age

For great she was. At the center of the ship, along the axis, was a torus. The inner, the middle, and the outer bands of the torus could revolve at different speeds to produce one standard gravity. Phaethon realized, or perhaps remembered, that this torus, the living quarters of the vessel, was as large as a moderate-sized space colony. A quick calculation, or perhaps another memory, revealed the astonishing magnitude of this

titanic vessel.

She was at least a hundred kilometers from stem to stern, The three main drive ports had apertures that could swallow a small moon. Had every other space ship, the tugs and shuttles and slowboat fleets of Earth and Jupiter combined, had

all been gathered in one spot and laid end to end, they could not have measured the length of her keel.

His memories were like a crowd of ghosts around him, half-familiar, half-unseen. Had such a ship as this been his?

He raised his hand and pointed. With the speed of thought, he was outside the hull again, as if floating near the blade of her sharp prow. There were no call letters or series numbers, for there was no other ship like her. But blazoned in dragon signs four hundred meters high was her name. He remembered her name the moment before he looked upon it. The letters seemed to blur. There were tears of pride in his eyes.

The Phoenix Exultant.

The hull was made of Chrysadmantium, like his armor. There were tons upon tons, and miles upon miles of the su-permetal, built one artificial atom at a time. No wonder he had owed Gannis. He must have bought the entire energy output of Jupiter for decade after decade. Had there been only a 250-year gap in his memory? Had he spent one of the ten most enormous fortunes history had ever seen gathered by one man? It hardly seemed as if it could have been enough.

Phaethon spoke in a voice of wonder.

"Streamlined ... aerodynamic ... Why in the world did I build a streamlined spaceship? There is no reason to build anything streamlined in space. Is there? The medium is empty—there is no resistance...."

The voice of Rhadamanthus seemed to come from all points of the night sky at once. "This is not a spaceship."

"What is she?"

"Spaceships are designed for interplanetary travel."

"Then she is a starship," said Phaethon softly.

His starship, the only one of her kind.

Rhadamanthus said: "At near light-speed velocities, interstellar dust and gas strike the ship with relative energy sufficient to warrant the heavily shielded bow; the streamlining is designed to minimize the Shockwave. At those velocities, the mass of all other objects in the universe, from the shipboard frame of reference, approaches infinity."

"I remember. Why is she the only one?"

"Your fellow men are all afraid. The only other expedition ¦ launched to establish another Oecumene, the civilization at Cygnus X-l, vanished and fell silent, apparently destroying itself. Sophotechs, no matter how wise we are, cannot even police the outer Neptunian habitats in the cometary halo. Other stars and systems would be beyond our eyes, and be attractive only to dissidents and rebels. They would possess our technology without our laws. Threats would grow. Perhaps not in ten thousand years, or even in a million, but eventually. This is what the College of Hortators states as its

argument."

"Who was it who said, 'Endless life breeds endless fears'? I must be the only immortal who is not a coward. War between stars is inconceivable. The distances are too great; the

cost too high!"

"It was Ao Enwir the Delusionist, in his formulary titled: 'On the Sovereignty of Machines.' The saying is often misquoted. What Enwir actually recorded was: 'Endless life, unless accompanied by endless foresight, will breed an endless fear of death.' And it is not war they fear, but crime. Even a single individual, accompanied by a sufficiently advanced technology, and attacking a peaceful civilization utterly unprepared for conflict, could render tremendous damage."

Phaethon was not listening. He reached out. His gaze-viewpoint, like a ghost, flew toward the stern. There, at the base of the drive mouths, were discolorations. Closer, and Phaethon saw gaps. Square scars marred the surface of the hull. Plates of the golden admantium had been stripped away. The ship was being dismantled.

He clicked his heels together three times. This was the "home" gesture. This scene had its default "home" identified as the bridge of the ship. The bridge appeared around him. The bridge was a massive crystalline construction, larger than a ballroom. In the center, like a throne, the captain's chair overlooked a wide space, like an amphitheater, surrounded by concentric semicircles of rising tiers. It was gloomy, half-ruined and deserted. The energy curtains were off, the mirrors were dead; the thought boxes were missing from their sockets.

He gestured toward the nearest command mirror. But this was not merely a request for change of viewpoint; Phaethon was trying to activate circuits on the real ship. And the real ship was far away.

Time began to crawl by, minute after minute. During that time, Phaethon hung, like a wraith, disembodied and insubstantial. Insubstantial, because whatever mannequins or tele-vection remotes might once have been on the bridge were long gone. Next to him, an empty throne, was the captain's chair in which he would never sit. The chair crowns' interfaces and intention circuits were crusted with erratic diamond growths, a sign that the self-regulators in the nanomachinery were disconnected. Like a bed of coral, the growth had spread halfway down the chair back, entwining the powerless grid-work that had once been an antiacceleration field cocoon.

"Sir," said Rhadamanthus. "The ship is nowhere near Earth. It will take at least fifteen minutes for a signal to go and to return. There will be a quarter hour delay between every command and response."

Phaethon's arms were at his sides; his face was blank, his eyes haunted. Whatever emotion raged in him, now he showed little outward sign.

He spoke only three times as the fifteen minutes passed.

The first time he asked: "How long will it take before I remember everything? I feel like I'm surrounded by nameless clouds, shapes without form...."

Rhadamanthus said, "You must sleep and dream before the connections reestablish themselves. If you can find someone to aid you, you should consult a professional onieriatric thought-surgeon; the redaction you suffered is one of the largest on record. Most people erase unpleasant afternoons or bad days. They do not blot out century after century of their most important memories."

A little while later, Phaethon stiffened. Another memory had struck. He said, "I don't remember Xenophon. He's not a brother of mine. I never met him. My contact among the Neptunians was an avatar named Xingis of Neriad. He began to represent himself in a human shape after he met me; be-

cause of me, he subscribed to the Consensus Aesthetic, adopted a basic neuroform, and changed his name to Dio-medes, the hero who vanquishes the gods. There's no guilt I'm supposed to remember; there's no crime. There's no So-photech I was building. And Saturn—I wasn't trying to develop Saturn. I had just been thwarted from doing anything with Saturn. I was frustrated with Saturn. That's what gave birth to the Phoenix Exultant. That's why I built the ship. My beautiful ship. I was sick of living in the middle of a desert of stars. One small solar system surrounded by nothing but wasteland. And I thought there were planets out there that could be mine, ripe and rich, ready for the hand of man to change from barren rock to paradise. Planets, but no Hortators to hinder me. No one to claim that lifeless rings of rock and dust and dirty ice were more sublime than all the human souls who would live in the palaces I could make out of those rings. ... Rhadamanthus! It was all a lie. Everything Scaramouche said was a lie. But why?"