John Wright - The Golden Age

Helion said, "The Hortators have no legal status." Ao Aoen smiled. All his teeth had been capped with gold, so that his smile was startling and odd. "The majesty of law is immense, all the more for being so little used. The Curia will not notice our private agreement among ourselves to boycott those on whom the Hortators frown, any more than your Queen Victoria of the Third Era British Empire cares what rules a group of schoolboys make among themselves to exclude their little sisters from a tree house planted in a back yard in Liverpool. The College can urge all to ignore you, good villainous Phaethon; but they will not be permitted to take by force, not one computer-second second, not one an-tigram, not one ounce of gold, of what blind law reckons to be yours." Ao Aoen turned his half-lidded eyes toward He-lion, "You see the implications, do you not? No tower can stand which is built on sand."

Helion's expression grew remote. He said in a distant voice, "In other words, if I concede the lawsuit, the Curia passes all my wealth to an exiled man. How much commerce do I affect, by keeping solar-radiation background levels clear enough to permit long-range broadcast traffic between distant points in the Golden Oecumene? Four percent of the entire economy? Six? This does not take into effect secondary industries which have grown up in my shadow; microwave powercasts, unshielded space assemblies, orbital dust farms, macroelectronics, or cheap counterterragenesis. How many of them could survive if we have sunspots again, or did not have bands of solar maser energy beamed directly across the Inner System to fixed industrial points?" Helion drew his eyes down. "Now picture all that in the hands of someone with whom only Neptunians, solitudarians, outcasts, crooks, and cacophiles can deal. How long will those of us who promised to abide by the Hortator's mandates keep our promises?"

Ao Aoen said, "You are manor-born. Ask your pet machine who owns your soul and who pretends to serve you." He nodded to where Rhadamanthus, represented as a butler, stood

in the background.

"I do not need to ask," said Helion. "The power of the

College would be destroyed, one way or the other. It would defeat everything I have tried to build in this life. And yet it might be a fitting revenge against the Hortators who took my son from me. Gentlemen, if you will excuse me ... ?" And he stepped behind a Chinese screen and opened the door to a wardrobe.

This was not the reaction Ao Aoen had expected. He stood with his fingertips rubbing against each other, eyes swinging left and right.

Instead of merely restarting his self-image in a different costume, Helion went through the motions of disassembling and discarding his solar armor, and putting on the linens, shirt, and trousers, waistcoat, coat, cuff links and ornaments of historical garb. The mansion created an image of a valet who entered the chamber and crossed over behind the screen to assist him.

Ao Aoen looked sidelong at Phaethon. "Why does he dress a computer-generated self-illusion?"

Phaethon spared him an irritated glance. "It is an exercise in self-discipline."

"Aha. Will that selfsame discipline allow Helion's social conscience to slumber? He will not pull down the pillars of our society, and lay flames to the toppling wreckage, not even to make a monument to the memory of his once-loved son. A delightful image, I agree, but it would make a poor reality."

"What is the point and purpose of this comment, sir?"

The Warlock smiled, gold teeth bright against dark skin. "Do you know why Helion will stand by and watch you starve? Because he gave his word. He is as proud as you. Do you admire him?"

Phaethon was staring at the Chinese screen. He answered without reflection. "I love my father."

Ao Aoen touched Phaethon on the shoulder. "Then drop your law case against him. You know it is unfair. Your father is a living man, there he stands; and you know a living man cannot have an heir."

Phaethon shrugged Ao Aoen's hand from his shoulder. There was a look of petulant anger on his face. But that look

soon faded. He stood straight, drew a deep breath, and a calm and severe look came into his eye. "You are right. It is dishonorable of me to stand in Court and take his money. I don't believe one hour of memory can make such a difference. And if I cannot use the wealth to forward my dream, it is no use

to me."

Ao Aoen looked satisfied, and his lips curved in a smile as he bowed again. "Then perhaps you are the hero of this romance after all, and perhaps you deserve a happier end! Listen: the term of your ostracism is not fixed." Phaethon said, "I thought it was permanent." "No. The purpose of Hortatory is to exhort men to virtue, not to punish crime. They need only cast you out from society long enough to discourage those who might be tempted to follow your example; and, since it would require a private fortune as massive as the one you have amassed to do as you have threatened, the possibility that another will arise to imitate your act is remote."

"Our society—pardon me, your society—continues to grow in wealth and power. In a relatively short time, four thousand years or less, the average income of a private citizen may be equal to what mine is now. That is only four more Transcendences away."

"Ah. But the Peers hope to persuade the spirit of the coming age to adopt a version of society tied to tradition and conformity. Your mansion extrapolations predict civilization tied to immobile and massive sources of power, Dyson Sphere within Dyson Sphere, with citizens existing in separate bodies only in their dreams. The ultimate triumph of the Manorial way of life! While individual wealth will grow, mobile sources of energy will no longer be produced; there will be no fit fuels to move a starship. Individual consciousness will be housed perhaps in expanses of thin solar-energy tissue, perhaps in ultrafrozen computer mainframes, larger than worlds, existing beyond the Oort clouds. Too big to get aboard a ship. We shall all be like a crust of corals, fixed in place. But in no case will star colonization ever again be affordable or practical."

"And when the sun dies of old age? What then? To men like us, that time is not so very far away!"

"We should be able to replenish its fuel almost indefinitely by directing interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas, and streams and floods of particles which move, like unseen rivers, through the local area of space, into the sun. Eventually we shall have to reengineer the local motions of stars and nearby nebulae, perhaps by forming a set of black holes large enough to attract sufficient dust and gas and stars to us; but we will not be required to leave our home."

"And you do not find this vision repulsive?"

"I saw the look of eagerness in your eye when I spoke of engineering the local area of space-time, and of rendering the orbits of nearby stars more useful to mankind."

It was true. Phaethon's imagination was stirred by the thought, the magnitudes involved. With a few quick calculations in his private thoughtspace, he began to explore the possibility that, by shepherding the star motions with neutron stars, the stars of the local area could be fed into a central reaction, a supersun, at a rate sufficient to sustain nova-O levels of energy output. A continuous supernova. A Dyson Sphere to capture that output would pay for the energy cost of the star shepherds. Any stars exhausted in the shepherding project (if the excess matter were blown off to make new planets) could be reduced to brown dwarves or neutronium cores to make more star shepherds.

Ao Aoen spoke softly: "You will be able to participate in that project; it is only a few billion years in our future; you, Phaethon, famous for organizing these little moons and worlds which swing around this one small-sun of ours. Can you not devote your talents to a project truly worth ambition?"