John Wright - The Golden Age

"We had this conversation before, my son. At Lakshmi, on Venus..." He looked into Phaethon's eyes. "You don't remember yet, do you?"

Phaethon said in a voice of anger: "More of my life was robbed from me than from you; and you had access to these

forbidden memories since before you met with the Peers. It will take me longer to adjust."

Helion was silent for a moment before he spoke.

"Your ship killed me, son."

Phaethon remembered what the man dressed as a Porphy-rogen Observationer had said, that Helion had sacrificed himself for a worthless boy. He had stayed at the Solar Array, when everyone else had fled, attempting to erect shields to protect certain areas of near-Mercury space. The Phoenix Exultant herself had been the "equipment" at Mercury Equilateral that Helion had tried to save from the fury of the solar

storms.

"You saved my ship...." whispered Phaethon, as the memory suddenly returned to him.

The hull armor had still been in sections at that time. The wash of particles from the sun would have disrupted the magnetic containment fields holding the antihydrogen, which, heated, would have expanded explosively, as a plasma. Every particle of the antimatter gas, encountering a particle of normal matter, would have totally converted its mass to energy, disrupting further magnetic containments, and igniting the most concentrated mass of antimatter ever gathered in one place. The superadmantium hull, invulnerable to all normal forms of energy, was still made of matter, and would have been converted to energy at the touch of antimatter.

"Damn your ship." Helion's voice grated. "It was you. You were aboard at that time. Outside of the range of the Mentality, beyond the reach of any resurrection circuit."

Phaethon turned away. He felt the hot blush of shame rising

to his face.

Helion stepped over and sat in one of the tall-backed ceremonial chairs flanking the doorway. He waited while Phaethon stood, staring at nothing, trying to grapple with the enormity of what he had heard, with what his memory was still bringing back to him.

"I—I'm so sorry, Father. I did not mean for any of this to

happen."

Helion clasped his hands and leaned with his elbows on

his knees, staring at the floor for a moment. Then, raising his head, he gave Phaethon a direct and earnest look. "No one meant for any of this to happen. But each of us was required by our consciences to do as he thought best. Even the College of Hortators might have been less quick to condemn your venture had you been willing to compromise, to wait, to listen to the opinions of others. The Hortators are neither villains nor fools nor cowards. They are honest men, attempting to cure our society of the one great fault which surrounds us; the danger, now that we all have so much power and freedom at our command, that reckless action will bring us to harm. Mostly they try to use social pressure to keep self-indulgent folk from harming themselves. Yours is the first case in hundreds of years of someone who threatened another."

"The worlds I intended to create would have been peaceful."

"The College might have believed that; had you not lost control of yourself in December, at the Eveningstar Mausoleum. You smashed the building, and broke the remotes and mannequins of the Constables."

Again Phaethon felt heat in his face. His voice was low: "I am very sorry, Father. And the more I remember, the less and less heroic my actions seem to have been. Maybe living since January without my memories has been good for me after all; my old anger seems childish to me now. But I still believe my dream to be a good one."

Helion said, "I once dreamed as you did."

"Yes ... ?"

"I have never told you the details surrounding your birth, Phaethon."

A stillness seemed to come into the chamber. Phaethon realized he was holding his breath. He had heard rumors. He had never heard the truth.

"You know you are taken from my mental templates, a version of me more brave than I have ever been, do you not? But what you don't recall—the origin you agreed to forget— is that you were created during one of the earlier Millennial Celebrations. One of the worlds constructed in dreamspace by

Cuprician Sophotech (who hosted that Celebration then as Aurelian does now) was my vision of a far future where mankind had expanded across the local volume of stars, some four hundred light-years in diameter. You were one of the characters in that story. You were the version of me, as Cuprician predicted I should be, should I live to see such an age."

Helion fell silent. He was staring out the windows, perhaps at the mountains of Wales; perhaps at something more distant. Phaethon said, "Is there more to my story ... ?" Helion stirred and brought his gaze back to Phaethon. "Not really. I was not famous nor well liked at that time. In fact, people called me a crackpot. During that Festival's Transcendence (they were held earlier in the year, at that time, in November) other Sophotechs recalculated Cuprician's premises and found them absurdly optimistic. When they reran the scenario, they found the distant colonies growing more and more inhuman, rash, and unreasonable. They concluded that even the most sane and stable of men, when there was no government to keep them all in awe, had no choice but to settle serious disputes by force. The scenario evolved into interstellar piracy and war. Many people were plugged into the dreamscape when their characters on Earth were destroyed by the colonial war. Vividly, seeming perfectly real, they died. They experienced their own death, and the death of everything they knew and loved. It only took one soldier aboard one single ship. He was armed with a few metric tons of antimatter. He burned the world. Naturally, the participants were horrified. I was horrified. Even the computer-generated character of the colonial warrior was horrified, to such an extent that he fell into a deep reverie, pondering himself and his place in the world, questioning all his basic values and beliefs. When the public outcry demanded that I erase the scenario, I was happy to comply; but the Sophotech stopped

me."

Phaethon could see what was coming. "You've got to be

joking, Father."

"No. The colonial soldier, the world burner, had made himself from a recording to a self-aware entity. By our laws,

anyone who makes a self-aware being by any means whatever, natural or artificial, deliberately or accidentally, becomes that parent of that child, and must raise and care for that child, and must have the appropriate natural paternal or maternal instincts inserted into his or her midbrain and hind-brain complex. That is why I made and married your mother, Galatea, may she rest in peace."

Galatea was not dead. At the age of four hundred she had divorced herself from Helion, left the Silver-Gray, and tuned her sense-filter and adjusted her memory to exclude him. Helion, at first, in the old days, often went to her, but, to her, he was no more visible than a ghost. Then one day, for reasons she had explained to no one, Galatea put her memories in archive, and descended into the sea, abandoning her flesh and merging her mind with the strange, old, unfriendly mass-minds that live scattered in a million microscopic cell bodies far below the waves.

Helion's face had the stiff look of sorrow it always had at the mere mention of Phaethon's mother's name. The sight of that sadness angered Phaethon, for now Phaethon was being told his mother had not been his at all.

"So I was born. I remember a youth and childhood. Where those false?"

"No. You were incarnated as a boy when you entered the real world."

"Why do I not remember the fictional life which came before my birth? Your pretended future? Don't tell me I agreed to forget that also!" Phaethon felt a sense of wonder and disgust. Was there anything at all in his life that was real?