John Wright - The Golden Age

There were more minutes of silence. Phaethon's face grew sadder and more grim as he absorbed the enormity of the falsehood that had baffled him, the tremendous reaches of time, the happiness of his memory, the glory of the achievement he had lost.

Eventually he said, "I asked you once if I were happier before, if restoring these memories would make me better." Rhadamanthus said, "I implied that you would be less happy, but that you would be a better man."

Phaethon shook his head. Anger and grief still gnawed at him. He certainly did not feel like a better man.

Then, in reaction to the gesture he had made long ago, one of the system mirrors aboard the Phoenix Exultant came to life. The mirror surface was dim and caked with droppings from undeconstructed nanomachines. Contact points in the mirror flickered toward the image of Phaethon, a thousand pinpoints of light.

He felt a moment of surprised recognition. But of course! It was in his armor. The command circuits on the bridge of

the ship were trying to open a thousand channels into the corresponding points in his golden armor.

That was what all the complex circuitry in his armor had been for. Here was a ship larger than a space colony, as intricate as several metropoli, webbed with brain upon brain and circuit upon circuit. She was like a little miniature seed of the Golden Oecumene itself. The bridge (and the bridge crew) of the Phoenix Exultant was not actually in the bridge, it was in the armor; the armor of Phaethon, whose unthink-ably complex hierarchy of controls were meant to govern the billions of energy flows, measurements, discharges, tensions, and subroutines that would make up the daily routine of the great ship.

Phaethon, despite himself, smiled with pride. It was a wonderful piece of engineering.

That smile faltered when a status board at the arm of the captain's chair lit up to reveal the pain and damage to the ship. Other mirrors lit to show the nearby objects in space.

The dismantling had not gone far; the slabs of super metal were still stored in warehouse tugs orbiting Mercury Equilateral, not far away, waiting transshipment. The ship intelligences were off-line or had never been installed. Near the ship, robot cranes and tugs from the Mercury Station hung, mites near a behemoth, motionless. The status board showed that the rest-mass was low: nearly half the antihydrogen fuel had been unloaded.

The amount of fuel left, nonetheless, was still staggering. The living area of the ship, while as large as a space colony, occupied less than one-tenth of one percent of the ship's mass. The Phoenix Exultant was a volume, over three hundred thousand cubic meters of internal space, packed nearly solid with the most lightweight and powerful fuel human science had yet devised. While it was true that the mass of the ship was titanic, it was also true that the fuel-mass-to-payload ratio was inconceivable. Every second of thrust could easily consume as much energy as large cities used in a year. But that was the energy needed to reach near-light-speed velocities.

"You've been selling my fuel." Phaethon hated the sound of pain and loss in his own voice.

"It is no longer yours, young sir. The Phoenix Exultant is now in receivership, held by the Bankruptcy Court. But your Agreement at Lakshmi suspended the proceedings. You destroyed your memory of the ship in order to prevent further dismantling. Now that your memories are back, your creditors will take her, I'm afraid."

"You mean I don't have a wife, or a father ... or ... or my ship? Nothing? I have nothing?" A pause.

"I'm very sorry, sir."

There was a long moment of silence. Phaethon felt as if he could not breathe. It was as if the lid of a tomb had closed down not just over him but over the entire universe, over every place, no matter how far he fled, he ever could go. He imagined a suffocating darkness, as wide as the sky, as if every star had been snuffed, and the sun had turned into a singularity, absorbing all light into absolute nothingness.

He had heard theoreticians talk about the internal structure of a singularity. Inside, one would be in a gravity well so deep that no light, no signal, could ever escape. No matter how large the inside might be, the event horizon formed an absolute boundary, forever closing off any attempt to reach the stars outside. One might still be able to see the stars; the light from outside would continue to fall into the black hole and reach the eye of whomever was imprisoned there; but any attempt to reach them would simply use up more and more energy, and achieve nothing.

The theoreticians also said that the interiors of black holes were irrational, that the mathematical constants describing reality no longer made any sense.

Phaethon never before had known what that could mean. Now he thought he did.

Phaethon wiped the tears he was ashamed to find on his face. "Rhadamanthus, what are the five stages of grief?" "For base neuroforms the progression is: denial, rage, ne-

gotiation, depression resignation. Warlocks order their instincts differently, and Invariants do not grieve."

"I just remembered another event... It's like a nightmare; my thoughts are still clouded and unclear. I was actually living aboard the Phoenix Exultant, with my launch date less than a month away. I was that close to achieving it all. Then the radio call came from my wife's last partial, telling me what Daphne Prime had done. Denial was easy for me; during the long trip from Mercury to Earth, I lived in a simulation, a false memory to tell me she still was alive. The simulation ended last December when the pinnace dropped me on Ev-eningstar grounds.... I remembered all the horror and pain of living without her. A woman I had been just about to leave behind me! So I gave myself a rescue persona, a version of me without hesitation, guilt, fear, or doubt, and stormed off to confront the mausoleum where Daphne's body was held."

Phaethon drew in a ragged breath, then laughed bitterly.

"Ha! Eveningstar Sophotech must have thought me a fool just now! I gave the same arguments this morning as I gave last December. But that last time, in December, I was physically present, and in my armor, and no force on earth could stop me in my rage. I swatted the remotes aside which tried to hinder me. I broke Daphne's coffin and released assemblers to undo her nerve bondage, and wake her from her lifeless dreams. But the body was empty; they had downloaded her mind into the Mansion-memory of Eveningstar, and replaced all the mausoleum with synthetics, pseudo-matter, and hologram. Eveningstar prevented me from committing anything worse than an attempted crime, some minor property damage.

"I gave myself entirely to rage, and began to tear the mausoleum apart. The motors in my arms and legs amplified my strength till I was like Hercules, or Orlando in his rage. There were two squads of Constables by then, in ornithopters armed with assembler clouds. I tore up the pillars of Eveningstar Mausoleum by the roots and threw them. I scattered the mannequins of the Constables and laughed as their darts and par-alyzers glanced from my armor.

"They had to call in the military to stop me. I remember

the wall melted and Atkins stepped through. He was not even armed; he was naked, and dripping with life-water. They had gotten him out of bed. He didn't even have a weapon. I remember I laughed, because my armor was invulnerable; and I remember he smiled a grim little smile, and beckoned me toward him with one hand.

"When I tried to push him out of my way he just leaned, and touched my shoulder, and, for some reason, I flew head over heels, and landed in the puddle of melted stone he had stepped in through. He squeezed some of the life-water out of his hair and threw it over me. The nanomachines suspended in the water must have been tuned to the ones he used to disintegrate the stone. When I fell, the stone was like dust, utterly frictionless. It was impossible for me to get up, there was nothing to grip. Then, when he shook his wet hair at me, the nanomachines bound molecule to molecule with artificial subnuclear forces. The stone now formed one macromolecule, and my arms and legs were trapped. Invulnerable, yes, but frozen in stolid stone. No wonder Atkins despises me."