The Golden Age

THE GOLDEN AGE

Copyright © 2002 by John C. Wright

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 0-812-57984-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001058468

First edition: April 2002

First mass market edition: April 2003

Printed in the United States of America 098765432 1

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

grouped by nervous system formation (neuroform)

Biochemical Self-Aware Entities

Base neuroform

PHAETHON PRIME of RHADAMANTH, Silver-Gray

Manorial School HELION RELIC of RHADAMANTH, Phaethon's sire,

founder of the Silver-Gray Manorial School, and a

peer DAPHNE TERCIUS SEMI-RHADAMANTH, Phaethon's

wife GANNIS HUNDRED-MIND GANNIS, Synergistic-

Synnoint School, a peer ATKINS VINGT-ET-UN GENERAL-ISSUE, a soldier

Nonstandard neuroforms

VAFNIR of MERCURY EQUILATERAL STATION, a peer

XENOPHON of FARAWAY, Tritonic Neuroform Composure School, called the Neptunians

XINGIS of NEREID, also called DIOMEDES, Silver-Gray School

Alternate Organization neuroform, commonly called

Warlocks

AO AOEN, the Master-Dreamer, a peer

NEO-ORPHEUS the Apostate, protonothary and chair

of the College of Hortators ORPHEUS MYRIAD AVERNUS, founder of the Second

Immortality, a Peer

Cortial-Thalamically Integrated neuroform, commonly called Invariants

KES SENNEC the Logician, a peer

Cerebelline neuroform

WHEEL-OF-LIFE, an Ecological Mathematician, a peer GREEN-MOTHER, the artiste who organizes the ecological performance at Destiny Lake

Mass-Mind Compositions

The ELEEMOSYNARY COMPOSITION, a Peer

The HARMONIOUS COMPOSITION, of the College of

Hortators The BELLIPOTENT COMPOSITION (disbanded)

Electrophotonic Self-Aware Entities

Sophotechs

RHADAMANTHUS, a manor-house of the Silver-Gray School, million-cycle capacity

EVENINGSTAR, a manor-house of the Red school, million-cycle capacity

NEBUCHEDNEZZAR, advisor to the College of Hortators, ten-million-cycle capacity

HARRIER, consulting detective, one-hundred-thousand-cycle capacity

MONOMARCHOS, a barrister, one-hundred-thousand-cycle capacity

AURELIAN, host of the Celebration, fifty-thousand-million-cycle loose capacity

The ENNEAD consists of nine Sophotech groups, each of over a billion-cycle capacity, including Warmind, Westmind, Orient, Austral, Boreal, Northwest, Southwest, and others.

EARTHMIND, the unified consciousness in which all terrestrial machines, and machines in Near-Earth-Orbit, from time to time participate: trillion-cycle capacity

PROLOGUE

CELEBRATIONS OF THE IMMORTALS

It was a time of masquerade. It was the eve of the High Transcendence, an event so solemn and significant that it could be held but once each thousand years, and folk of every name and iteration, phe-notype, composition, consciousness and neuroform, from every school and era, had come to celebrate its coming, to welcome the transfiguration, and to prepare.

Splendor, feast, and ceremony filled the many months before the great event itself. Energy shapes living in the north polar magnetosphere of the sun, and Cold Dukes from the Kuiper belts beyond Neptune, had gathered to Old Earth, or sent their representations through the mentality; and celebrants had come from every world and moon in the solar system, from every station, sail, habitat and crystal-magnetic latticework.

No human or posthuman race of the Golden Oecumene was absent from these festivities. Fictional as well as actual personalities were invited. Composition-assisted reconstructions of dead or deleted paladins and sages, magnates and philosophers, walked by night the boulevards of the Aurelian palace-city, arm-in-arm with extrapolated demigoddesses from imagined superhuman futures, or languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized alternatives, and strolled or danced among the monuments and energy sculptures, fountains, dream fixtures, and phantasms, all beneath a silver, city-

covered moon, larger than the moon past ages knew.

And here and there, shining like stars on the active channels of the mentality, were recidivists who had returned from high transhuman states of mind, bringing back with them thought-shapes or mathematical constructions inexpressible in human words, haunted by memories of what the last Transcendence had accomplished, feverish with dreams of what the next might hold.

It was a time of cheer.

And yet, even in such golden days, there were those who would not be satisfied.

THE OLD MAN

On the hundred-and-first night of the Millennial Celebration, Phaethon walked away from the lights and music, movement and gaiety of the golden palace-city, and out into the solitude of the groves and gardens beyond. In this time of joy, he was not at ease himself; and he did not know why.

His full name was Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodi-fied (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconciousness, Base Neu-roformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043 (the "Reawakening").

This particular evening, the west wing of the Aurelian Palace-city had been set aside for a Presentation of Visions by the elite of Rhadamanthus Mansion. Phaethon had been extended an invitation to sit on the panel of dream-judges, and, eager to experience the future histories involved, had happily accepted. Phaethon had been imagining the evening, perhaps, would be in miniature, for Rhadamanthus House, what the High Transcendence in December would be for all mankind.

But he was disappointed. The review of one drab and uninspired extrapolation after another had drained his patience.

Here was a future where all men were recorded as brain-information in a diamond logic crystal occupying the core of the earth; there was one where all humanity existed in the

threads of a plantlike array of sails and panels forming a Dyson Sphere around the sun; a third promised, larger than worlds, housings for trillions of minds and superminds, existing in the absolute cold of trans-Neptunian space—cold was required for any truly precise subatomic engineering— but with rails or elevators of unthinkably dense material running across hundreds of AU, across the whole width of the solar system, and down into the mantle of the sun, both to mine the hydrogen ash for building matter, and to tap the vast energy of Sol, should ever matter or energy in any amount be needed by the immobile deep-space mainframes housing the minds of mankind.

Any one of them should have been a breathtaking vision. The engineering was worked out in loving detail. Phaethon could not name what it was he wanted, but he knew he wanted none of these futures being offered him.

Daphne, his wife, who was only a collateral member of the House, had not been invited; and, Helion, his sire, was present only as a partial-version, the primary having been called away to a conclave of the Peers.

And so it was that in the center of a loud, happy throng of brightly costumed telepresences, mannequins, and real-folk, and with a hundred high windows in the Presence Hall busy and bright with monotonous futures, and with a thousand channels clamoring with messages, requests, and invitations for him, Phaethon realized that he was entirely alone.

Fortunately, it was masquerade, and he was able to assign his face and his role to a backup copy of himself. He donned the disguise of a Harlequin clown, with lace at his throat and mask on his face, and then slipped out of a side entrance before any of Helion's lieutenants or squires-of-honor thought to stop him.

Without a word or signal to anyone, Phaethon departed, and he walked across silent lawns and gardens by moonlight, accompanied only by his thoughts.

He wandered far, to a place he had not seen before. Beyond the gardens, in an isolated dell, he entered a grove of silver-crowned trees. He paced slowly through the grove, hands clasped behind his back, sniffing the air and gazing up at the stars between the leaves above. In the gloom, the dark and fine-grained bark was like black silk, and the leaves had mirror tissues, so that when the night breeze blew, the reflections of moonlight overhead rippled like silver lake water.

It took him a moment to notice what was odd about the scene. The flowers were open, even though it was night, and their faces were turned toward one bright planet above the horizon.

Puzzled, Phaethon paused and pointed two fingers at the nearest trunk, making the identification gesture. Evidently the protocols of the masquerade extended to the trees as well, and no explanation of the trees, no background was forthcoming.

"We live in a golden age, the age of Saturn," said a voice from behind him. "Small wonder that our humor should be saturnine as well."

One who appeared as a wrinkle-faced man, wearing a robe as'white as his hair and beard, stood not far away, leaning on a walking stick. During masquerade, Phaethon had no recognition file available in mind, and thus could not tell what dream-level, composition, or neuroform this old man was. Phaethon was not sure how to act. There were things one could say or do to a computer fiction that a real person, a telepresence, or even a partial, would find shockingly rude.

He decided on a polite reply, just in case. "Good evening to you, sir. Then there is a hidden meaning to this display?" His gesture encompassed the grove.

"Aha! You are not a child of this present age, then, since you seek to look below the surface beauty of things."

Phaethon was not certain how to take this comment. It was either a slight against the society in which he lived, or else

against himself. "You suspect me to be a simulacrum? I assure you, I am real."

"So simulacra must seem to themselves, I suppose, should anyone ask them," said the white-bearded man with a wide-armed shrug.

Then he seated himself on a mossy rock with a grunt. "But let us leave the question of your identity—this is a masquerade, after all, and not the right time to inquire, eh?—and study instead the instruction of the trees here. I do not know if you detect the energy web grown throughout the bark layers; but a routine calculates the amount of light which would shine, and the angle of its fall, were the planet Saturn to ignite like some third sun. Then, true to these calculations, the energy web triggers photosynthesis in the leaves and flowers, and, naturally, favors the side and angles from which the light would come, you see?"

"Thus they bloom at night," Phaethon said softly, impressed by the intricacy of the work.

"Day or night," the white-bearded man said, "provided only that Saturn is above the horizon."

Phaethon thought it ironic that the white-haired man had picked Saturn as the position for his fictitious new sun. Phaethon knew Saturn would never be improved, the huge atmosphere never be mined for volatiles. He himself had twice headed projects to reengineer Saturn and render that barren wasteland more useful to human needs, or to clear out the cluttered navigational hazards for which near-Saturn space was notorious. In both cases public outcry had halted his efforts and driven away his financial support. Too many people were in love with the majestic (but utterly useless) ring-system.

The white-haired man was still speaking: "Yes, they follow the rise and fall of Saturn. And—listen! here is the curious part—over the generations, the flowers have evolved complex reactions so that their heads can turn to follow that wandering planet through cycle and epicycle, opposition, triune and conjunction. Thus they thrive. They are not one whit disaccom-

modated by the fact the sun they follow with such effort is a false one."

Phaethon looked back and forth across the grove. It was extensive. The cool night breeze tingled with the scents of eerie mirrored blossoms.

Perhaps because the man looked so odd, white bearded, wrinkled, and leaning on a stick, just the way a character from an old novel or reproduction might look, Phaethon spoke without reflection. "Well, the artist here did not use flint-napped knives for his gene-splicing, and he didn't run his calculations in Roman numerals on an abacus, eh? Rather a lot of effort for a pointless jest."

"Pointless?" The white-haired man scowled.

Phaethon realized his blunder. Perhaps the man was real after all. Probably he was the very artist who had made this place. "Ah... Pardon me! 'Pointless,' I admit, may be too strong a word for it!"

"Oh? And what is the right word, then, eh?" asked the man testily.

"Well, ah ... But this grove is meant to criticize the artificiality of our society, is it not?"

"Criticize?! It is meant to draw blood! It is Art! Art!"

Phaethon made an easy gesture. "No doubt the point here is too subtle for me to grasp. I fear I do not understand what it means to criticize civilization for being artificial. Civiliza-tion, by definition, must be artificial, since it is manmade. Isn't 'civilization' the very name we give to the sum total of manmade things?"

"You are being obtuse, sir!" shouted the odd man, drumming his cane sharply into the moss underfoot. "The point is! The point is that our civilization should be simpler."

Phaethon realized then that this man must be a member of one of those primitivist schools, whom everyone seemed to revere but no one wanted to follow. They refused to have any brain modifications whatsoever, even memory aids or emotion-balancing programs. They refused to use telephones, televection, or motor transport.

And some, it was said, programmed the nanomachines

floating in their cell nuclei to produce, as years passed, the wrinkled skin, hair defects, osteoarthritis, and general physical decay that figured so prominently in ancient literature, poems, and interactives. Phaethon wondered in horror what could prompt a man to indulge in such slow and deliberate self-mutilation.

The man was speaking: "You are blind to what is plain before your eyes! Behold the mirrored layer of tissue growing over all these leaves. It is to block the true sun from the knowledge of these plants. Tracking a sun, which merely rises and sets, is easier than anticipating retrograde motion, I assure you. Complex habits, painfully learned through generations, would be instantly thrown aside in one blast of true sunlight. And therefore these little flowers have a mechanism to keep the truth at bay. Strange that I've made the blocking tissue look mirrored; you can see your own face in it... if you look."

This comment verged on insult. Phaethon replied hotly: "Or perhaps the tissue merely protects them from irritants, good sir!"

"Hah! So the puppy has teeth after all, eh? Have I irked you, then? This is Art also!"

"If Art is an irritant, like grit, good sir, then spend your genius praising the society cosmopolitan enough to tolerate it! How do you think simple societies maintain their simplicity? By intolerance. Men hunt; women gather; virgins guard the sacred flame. Anyone who steps outside their stereotypic social roles is crushed."

"Well, well, young manor-born—you are a manorial, are you not? Your words sound like someone taught by machines—what you don't know, young manor-born, is that cosmopolitan societies are sometimes just as ruthless about crushing those who don't conform. Look at how unhappy they made that reckless boy, what's-his-name, that Phaethon. There are worse things in store for him, I tell you!"

"I beg your pardon?" Strange. The sensation was not unlike stepping for a nonexistent stair, or having apparently solid ground give way underfoot. Phaethon wondered if he had

somehow wandered into a simulation or a pseudomnesia-play without noticing it "But... I am Phaethon. I am he. What in the world do you mean?" And he took off the mask he wore.

"No, no. I mean the real Phaethon. Though you are quite bold to show up at a masquerade like this, dressed in his face. Bold. Or tasteless!"

"But I am he!" A bewildered note began to creep into his voice.

"So you are Phaethon, eh? No, no, I think not. He is not welcome at parties."

Not welcome? Him? Rhadmanthus House was the oldest mansion of the Silver-Gray, and the Silver-Gray was, in turn, the third oldest scholum in the entire manorial movement. Rhadamanthus boasted over 7,600 members just of the elite communion, and not to mention tens of thousands of collaterals, partials and secondaries. Not welcome? Phaethon's sire and gene-template was Helion, founder of the Silver-Gray and archon of Rhadamanthus. Phaethon was welcome everywhere!

The strange old man was still speaking: "You could not be him: Phaethon wears grim and brooding black and proud gold, not frills like those."

(For a moment, oddly enough, Phaethon could not quite recall how he usually dressed. But surely he had no reason to dress in grim colors. Had he? He was not a grim man. Was he?)

He tried to speak calmly: "What do you say I have done to make me unwelcome at celebrations, sir?"

"What has he done? Hah!" The white-haired man leaned back as if to avoid an unpleasant smell. "Your joke is not appreciated, sir. As you may have guessed, I am a Antia-maranthine Purist, and I do not carry a computer in my ear telling me every nuance of your manor-born protocols, or which fork to use, or when to hold my tongue. Maybe I speak out of turn to say that the real Phaethon would be ashamed to show his face at a festival like this! Ashamed! This is a celebration of those who love this civilization, or who, like

me, are urged to try to improve it by constructive criticism. But you!"

"Ashamed? ... I have done nothing!"

"No, no more! Do not speak again! Perhaps I should get a brain filter like you machine-pets, so I could merely blot out stains like you from my sight and memory. That would be ironic, wouldn't it? Me, shrouded in a little silvery tissue of my own. But irony is perhaps more fit to an age of iron than to an age of gold."

"Sir, I really must insist you tell me what—"

"What?!! Still here, you interloper! If you want to look like Phaethon, maybe I should treat you like him, and have you thrown out of my grove on your ear!"

"Tell me the truth!" Phaethon stepped toward the man.

"Fortunately, this grove, and even the surrounding dream-space, are my own, not part of the party grounds proper, and so I can throw you out, can't I?"

He cackled, and waved his walking stick.

The man, and the grove, disappeared. Phaethon found himself standing on green hilltop in the sunlight, overlooking the palaces and gardens of the celebration shining in the distance. An overture of music came faintly from the distant towers.

This was a scene from the first day of the celebration, one of the entrance scenarios. The old man had deleted his grove scene from Phaethon's sensorium, throwing him back into his default setting. An unthinkable rudeness! But, perhaps, allowed under the relaxed protocols and standards of the festival time.

A moment of cold anger ran through Phaethon. He was surprised at the vehemence of his own emotion. He was not normally an angry man—was he?

Perhaps it would be wise to let the matter drop. There were entertainments and delights enough to engage his attention at the Celebrations without pursuing this.

But... unlike everything he had seen, this was real. Phae-thon's curiosity was piqued, and perhaps his pride was stung. He would discover the answers.

He raised his fingers to his eyes and made the restart ges-

ture. He was back in the scene, at night, in the silvery grove, but alone. The man was either gone or he was hiding behind Phaethon's sense-filter.

With another gesture, Phaethon lowered his sense-filter and opened his brain to all the sensations in the area, so he could look upon "reality" without any interpretation-buffer.

The shock of the noise and music, the screams of the Advertisements, startled him.

Panels and banners of lightweight film hung or floated grandly in the air. Each one flashed with colors brighter and more gaudy than its neighbor; every image was twice as dizzying, alluring, and hypnotic as the one before. Some of the Advertisements had projectors capable of directing stimulation into any brain equipped to receive it.

When they noticed Phaethon staring (perhaps they had registers to note his eye movements and pupil dilation—such information was, after all, in the public domain) they folded and swooped, clamoring, pressing around him, squawking, urging him to try, just once, free trial offer, their profferred stimulants and additions, false memories, compositions, and thought schemes. They swarmed like angry sea gulls or hungry children from some historical drama.

The music was, if anything, worse. A group from the Red Manorial School on one hillside in the distance were having a combination scream-feast, Bacchanalia, and composition-symphony analogue. Emancipated partials of the Psycho-asymmetric Insulae-Composition were on the other hillside, having a noise duel. Their experimental 36- and 108-tone scale music, subsonic and hypersonic, trembled in Phaethon's teeth. They made no effort to muffle the sound for the sake of those who did not share their extensive ear/auditory lobe modifications, their peculiar subjective time-scale alterations, or their even more peculiar aesthetic theories. Why should they? Every civilized person was assumed to have access to some sort of sense-filter to allow them to block or to tolerate the noise.

And there was no sign of the white-haired man. Perhaps

he had been a projection after all, or some fiction, part of the art statement of the grove?

The flash and glamour of the transparent Advertisements did not block his view. The trees were widely spaced, nor was there brush. And, unless the man had hidden behind the walking iceberg thing looming above the grape trellises nearby, there was simply no place to hide.

Phaethon threw his hands before his face and gestured for his sense-filter to resume.

Peace and silence crashed into place around him. It was not, perhaps, the perfect truth he saw. But the groves were quiet now, and starlight and moonlight slanted through the strange silver-mirrored leaves, and falling blossoms. A routine calculated how the scene would look (and sound and feel and smell) were the disturbing objects not present. The representation was close to real, "Surface Dreaming" as it was called. The machine intelligences creating the illusion, able to think a million times faster than a man, or a billion, could cleverly and symmetrically account for all inconsistencies and cover up any unwanted errors.

His ears still rang with echoes; his eyes were still dazzled by floating half shapes, colors reversed. He could have waited for his ears to stop ringing naturally, or blinked his eyes clear. But he was impatient; the man he sought was no doubt getting away. He merely signaled for his eyes to reset to perfect night adaptation, for this ears to restore.

Phaethon started to jog toward the grape trellises where ...

The iceberg thing was gone. Phaethon saw nothing.

Iceberg? Phaethon's augmented memory could re-create an exact image of what he had-seen. It had loomed, gigantic, over the area, moving on myriad legs of semiliquid, which solidified, elephantine, then liquefied again as the creature drifted forward. Likewise, it had had a dozen arms or tentacles of ice flowing and freezing around objects in the area, careful not to disturb the trees, but holding objects (eyes? remote sensors?) near the garden plants, as if to study them from every angle.

It was, of course, a member of the Tritonic Neuroform

Composition School, the so-called Neptunians. The technology of their nerve-cell surface allowed them thought-speeds approaching that of some of the slower Sophotechs; but the crystals of the cell surface exhibited their peculiar electrosu-perconductive and micropolymorphetic characteristics only under the near-absolute-zero temperatures and near-metallic-hydrogen-forming pressures of the Neptunian atmosphere. The icy body Phaethon had seen was armor—living, shape-changing armor, but armor nonetheless, and a triumph of molecular and submolecular technology. That armor allowed the Neptunian brain substances inside to withstand the unbearable heat and (relative to Neptune) near-vacuum conditions of the earthly atmosphere.

That he had programmed his sense-filter to block images of Advertisements or raucous music, Phaethon could understand. But he did not remember (and his memory was photographically perfect) ordering the filter to block views of Neptunians. Merely that one of that strange, remote school, the most distant members of the Golden Oecumene, should come physically to Earth was cause for wonder and comment.

Why in the world would Phaethon have ordered himself not to see, or to avoid remembering seeing, such a being? It was true that Neptunians were thought of as reckless, innovative, untrustworthy, and yet...

Phaethon took a moment to examine his sense-filter's censor. Only three of the command lines struck him as odd. Very odd. One was meant to prevent him seeing the Cerebelline Green-Mother's ecoperformance being held on Channels 12-20 at Destiny Lake. The second was to edit out sights and references to the visiting Neptunian legates. A third was meant to distract him from studying astronomical reports or information concerning a recent disaster in Mercurial space, brought on by solar prominences and irregularities of unusual violence.

Why? What was the connection?

And why had he done this to himself? And then ordered himself to forget that he had done it?

Phaethon adjusted his sense-filter to allow himself to see

the Neptunian (without hearing the music or seeing those dreadful Advertisements) and was surprised to behold the gigantic creature picking its way up the grassy slope toward him, moving like a pale cloud bank.

As it came closer, Phaethon saw, within the ice, several concentric shells or spheres of crystalline armor. Deep in the smoky depths was a web of nerve tissue connecting four major brains, and at least a hundred lesser subbrains, nerve knobs, ganglia, synthetic cells, relays, and augmentation clusters.

The nerve tissue within the ice was in motion, some tendrils of brain matter expanding, forming new nodes and knobs; and others contracting, creating an impression of furious mental activity.

Closer it came.

Elsewhere, Helion was also discontented.

In Aurelian mansion, seven entities of very different schools, life principles, neuroforms, and appearance were meeting privately. They had three things in common: wealth, age, and ambition.

The Seven Peers were actually sitting in a tall, many-windowed library, with thought-icons on the oak-paneled walls. Each Peer saw the chamber differently.

The most recently admitted Peer was named Helion Relic (undetermined) Rhadamanth Humodified (augment, with multiple synnoetic sensory channels) Self-composed, Radial Hierarchic Multipartial (multiple parallel and partial, with subroutines), Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial School, Era 50 (The Time of the Second Immortality).

He was the only manor-born present, and was more than a little pleased that his school, the Silver-Gray, was singled out from among the other schools of the manorials for this dignity.

Helion's self-image wore the costume of a Byzantine im-

perator from the time of the Second Mental Structure, with a many-rayed diadem of pearly white and robe of Tyrian purple.

"My Peers, it is with great pride and honor I take my place among you. I trust that the legal issues surrounding the question of my continuity of identity are acceptable to everyone here?"

There was a signal of concurrence from the Peers, which Helion's sensorium interpreted as nods and murmurs of assent.

"Gentlemen, we are the Peers and Paramounts of this civilization. The Golden Oecumene has given us every benefit she can give. Now we must protect her. We must make certain that the events that so recently shook our society to her roots—events that only we Seven now recall—never recur.

"We Seven represent the wealthiest nonmachine fortunes ever to exist in time or space. If we do not act—then who?

"I submit that we have reached a golden age, a time of perfection and Utopia: to maintain it, to sustain it, no further changes can be allowed. Adventures, risks, rashness, must receive no further applause from any voice in our Oecumene. Only then will we all be able to keep our wayward sons at home, safe from harm.

"At your leisure, you may examine my detailed findings; how many people we can influence, what the possible results are of various forms of art and persuasion we can bring forth during the celebration. I draw your attention, for example, to the ecoperformance at Destiny Lake, formulated by the sister-mates of our Peer, Wheel-of-Life. Even those who do not apprehend the direct analogy involved there will be sublimi-nally made uneasy by the type of erratic and selfish heroism which that work of art condemns.

"This is merely one example of thousands. The computer time available to my Manor house can generate specific anticipations running to many orders of magnitude. Merely human minds will not be able to outwit the kind of persuasive campaign I envision. If enough people are persuaded of the truth of a proposition before the Transcendence, surely that

will be remembered during the Transfiguration, surely that will shape the outcome after.

"The Age of Tranquility, dreamed of for so many aeons of so much turmoil and pain, has come! My Peers, history must be called to an end!

"Examine my proposal, my Peers. Look at the future I have drafted. It is one where the College of Hortators is backed by the full power of the Seven Peers."

THE NEPTUNIAN

Phaethon addressed the giant being: "Pardon me, sir, if I am intruding, but could you tell me, please, if you saw a man come by here just now? He looked like this...." and he opened up channel 100, the common-use channel, and downloaded a few hundred frames of images and sensoru-media from his recent memory into a public temporary file. He had an artistic subroutine add background music, narrative comments, and some dramatic editing for theme and unity, and then he transmitted the images.

Phaethon felt the tingle of his nape hairs as his name was read (he still had not put his mask back on), and then a signal came in on a high-compression channel, saying: "This is the translator. My client is attempting to convey a complex of memory files and associational paths which you either do not have the ability to receive or which I do not have authority to transmit. The amount of information involved may be more than one brain can apprehend. Do you have stored noumenal personalities, backups, or augments?"

Phaethon signaled for identity, but the Neptunian was masked. "You have me at a disadvantage, sir. I am not accustomed to revealing the locations of my mind-space to strangers, and certainly not my resurrection copies." Phaethon wanted an answer to his question, and would have preferred

to remain polite, but the request that he open his private thoughts was extraordinary, almost absurd. Not to mention that the Neptunian reputation for eccentric pranks was too well known.

"Very well. I will attempt to convey my client's communication in a linear format, by means of words, but only on the understanding that much substantial content, and all secondary meanings, nuances, and connotations will be lost."

"I will be tolerant. Proceed."

"My initial data burst consists of four hundred entries, including multidimensional image arrays, memory respondents and correlations, poetry, and instructions on nerve alterations for creating novel emotional receiving structures in your brain. These structures may be of use later for appreciating the emotions (which have no names as yet in your language) which other parts of the communication will then attempt to arouse. The initial burst contains other preliminary minutia.

"Then follows a contextual batch of six thousand entries, including volumes of art and experience, memories and reconstructed memories, real and fictional, intended to give you and him a common background of experience, a context in which certain allusions and specifics will be best understood. Other greetings and salutations follow.

"The first entry of the core message contains rote formalities of time-sense and identity continuity, establishing that you are, in fact, the same Phaethon of my client's acquaintance, or, in case you are a copy, reconstruction, or simulation, to ascertain the relative degree of emotional and mental correspondence with which my client must regard you. The core message itself—"

"Pardon me," said Phaethon. "Did I know your client before he joined your Composition?" He amplified his vision (opening additional wavelengths) to look curiously at the several brains and brain groups floating in the icy substance.

"The Neptunian legate produces an emotion-statement of three orders of complexity, with associated memory trees to show correspondence, but otherwise does not respond to your question, which he regards as fantastic, disorienting, and not

at all funny. Pause: Should I explain further about the emotional reaction, or shall I continue with the central message of the first datagroup? The process could be considerably sped if you will impart your command codes and locks to give me direct access to your neurological and mnemonic systems; this will enable me to add files directly into your mind, and alter your temperament, outlook, and philosophy to understand my client in the way he himself would like to be understood."

"Certainly not!"

"I was required to ask."

"Can you make your summary more brief? The man I'm asking about is someone who—well, perhaps he offended me, or—this man said some confusing things, and he—well, I'm trying to find him," Phaethon finished lamely.

"Very well. My client says: I (he forwards, as an appendix, a treatise on the meaning of the word 'I,' the concept of selfhood, and a bibliographical compendium of his life experiences and changes in his self-notions in order to define this term to you) greet (he also has side comments on the history and nature of greetings, the implications in this context of what is meant, including the legal implications of violating the ban placed on his initiating any contact with you) you (and he postulates a subjunctive inquiry that, should you not be the individual that he deems you to be, that all this be placed in a secondary memory-chain, and be regarded as a less-than-real operation, similar to a pseudomnemia. He also requests sealed and notarized confirmation on his recorded memorandum documenting that you initiated the contact without his prompting)."

"Stop! You are only three words into the first message, and already everything is obscure. What prohibition has been placed on him? By whom? The human race is finally mature, wise enough to reject coercion as a means to deal with each other. Where is there any institution, any curia, that is not voluntary, not based on subscription? Our militia was supported by donations from historical trusts. Who has any right to prevent your client from speaking with me? Who is your client? Tell him to remove his mask."

"My client responds with an emotion-action statement of four orders of complexity, all in the hypothetical-subjunctive mode, which states, in brief, that were he forbidden to speak with you, there may be (granting for the sake of argument) monitors or directives eavesdropping, which, were there such a thing, would not interfere as long as this discourse is kept within the general boundaries of polite and innocuous discourse. Of the seventy-four thousand million possible outcomes of this conversation which my client has examined in predictive scenarios, over fourteen of them conclude by some sort of interruption or reaction from the Aurelian Sophotech. Would you care to examine the full text of my client's reply, examine the extrapolation scenarios which he has calculated, or should I continue with my disquisition of the core message?"

This was the most fantastic yet. Phaethon put his mask back on, which acted as a signal to restore a zone of privacy around him, even hiding such information as was normally public, such as his name and appearance.

"Surely no one would be so rude as to intrude on our private conversation, not without some good reason!"

"My client wishes to download a philosophical question-and-debate routine to attempt to convince you that, even in the most enlightened and civilized of societies, reasonable men can differ as to what constitutes the good. For example (and here he once again indicates that he speaks only hypo-thetically) those who place a higher value on freedom than on the alleged security and meaningfulness which adherence to tradition provides, might be willing to tolerate, or even encourage, a certain small amount of crime and riot, danger and uncertainty."

Phaethon knew Greek and Latin, English and French, and half a dozen other dead languages, and so he knew what the word "crime" meant; but he had never heard it used except as a metaphor for unacceptable rudeness, or for poorly executed works of art. A paleolinguistic routine from the Rhad-amanthus Mansion-mind had confirmed the original meaning

of the word and had inserted it into Phaethon's short-term memory.

He had his memory replay the last message over more than once to reassure himself that there had been no error. Was this creature actually advocating that the use of violence or fraud against innocent beings was, in some measure, justified?

The translator persisted: "Will you open, at least, a holding space where he can put some of the conversation trees he has constructed on this topic for you?"

"Sir, forgive me if I seem abrupt. But my main question, about the man who accosted me, lingers unanswered. Could you return to your core message, and, if you please, summarize the summary?"

"Here is a severely reduced summation of the core message:

"Phaethon, I greet you once again, though you have passed into the shadow of our enemy, have been wounded in your soul and mind, and have forgotten me. One day, I pray, we shall be whole again. Crippled now in your mind, you have perhaps no strength to sustain the belief in that great dream which once shook the worlds and empires of the Golden Oec-umene to its rotten base; nor would you believe in what high esteem I and my comrades still hold you, despite your treasonous weakness of will. But believe this: You are trapped in a labyrinth of illusion; and yet the scruples, or the folly, of our foes allows you one hope of escape, one weak chink, a loophole, in an otherwise all-embracing prison wall.

"You must come with me now to the outer world, to cold and distant Neptune, in the dark, where the power of the sunlight, and of the Golden Oecumene's machines, fall short. After long struggles and contests of will, we have forced Golden Oecumene law to grant to the distant exiles there a measure of mental privacy and freedom undreamed here; our thoughts are not monitored by the benevolent tyranny of machines. Once there, you can become one of us. Your soul and memory can be cured of their great wound. Your body will be changed, and become like unto ours, and your mind will be embraced into our all-encompassing communion.

"But you must come at once, with no delay. Leave your wife, your life, your dreams of wealth, your mansion-home. Leave all. Say farewell to warmth and sun, but come!' "

Phaethon's mind was blank. It was all too bizarre. He knew what the word "enemy" was; the term referred to something like a competitor, but a vicious and uncivil one. The idea that the Golden Oecumene structure, however, could be such a thing was patently absurd, like thinking the sky was made of iron. Phaethon knew what insanity was, from his historical simulations, the same way he knew what a flint hand ax or a disease was; he was able to understand the idea that the Neptunian might be insane. He just was not able, not really, to believe it.

In his mental blankness, all he could think to say was: "If I wake my real body, to travel outside the range of the Nou-menal Mentality, my brain information could not, in the case of a physical accident, be recorded and stored. Important segments of my life experience might be lost; I could even lose continuity and die the true and final death."

"But I tell you that you shall not die, but shall mingle with the Tritonic Composition and achieve a finer and higher life!"

The other six Peers, each with different thinking-speed and thinking processes, absorbed, pored over, or examined over 9,200 projections of the effect of the next Transcendence on the upcoming Millenium, either directly, or (for those without permanent mental augmentations on staff), through auxiliary minds.

A gap in Helion's memory edited out this wait, and brought his time and time sense current to the next point in the conversation. To him, there was no pause. It may have been hours, or merely seconds, later.

The undisputed informal leader of the Peers, Orpheus Myriad Avernus, was not physically present, there or anywhere. He was the eldest and wealthiest of the Seven. He presented

himself to Helion's senses as a dark-haired, pale-skinned youth, whose face had a haunting lack of expression, but with eyes unblinking, inward looking, deeply self-absorbed. He wore a long black Plutonian thermal cape of a style so quaint and so far out of fashion that only during a masquerade would it pass without comment. The wide neckpiece rose almost to his ears, and the pauldrons extended past his shoulders, making his head seem small and childlike.

Orpheus spoke in a very soft voice: "We applaud the sentiment expressed by our newest Peer. When conditions are optimal, any change, by definition, is decay. And Helion knows all too well how chaos, disloyalty, and recklessness can be found within our own households and holdings, and even within the hearts of those nearest to us."

For a moment, no one spoke. All eyes were fixed on He-lion. An embarrassed silence hung over the room.

Gannis (or one of him) was physically present in the library chamber in Aurelian House where the meeting was "actually" taking place. Gannis was disguised as a character from First Mental Structure mythology, in robes of sky blue and white, crowned in rays, and with a lightning bolt for a scepter. He held the copyright on a rather striking face: black bearded, with deep-set eyes spaced far apart, beneath a wide and kingly brow. An eagle and a she-eagle were perched on his chair back, one over either shoulder. Gannis's eyes were as bright and fierce as those of his pets, but his voice was an agreeable, cheerful boom.

He now spoke to break the tension: "Elder Orpheus! Here you are opening old wounds. Helion has Phaethon well under control; why bring up an episode we all agreed to forget? I thought we were not going to speak any further it."

Orpheus spoke softly, as if he were talking only to himself, without moving his eyes: "We did not speak on that subject. Except we note that Helion has good reason, now, to display uncompromising zeal in the defense of tradition and orthodoxy."

Orpheus was a member of the small, ancient, peculiar school called the Aeonites. Their practice was to record an

unchanging idealized version of themselves into permanent computer space. This template, at regular intervals, created an emanation or eidolon of itself, which came to life. New eidolons absorbed the information any prior active or living eidolons had acquired since the time the template was absorbed, but rejected any changes of personality, philosophy, or basic values. Members of this school were frozen and unalterable.

It was only by the narrowest margins that the Curia determined Aeonite legal status to be that of self-aware entities rather than ghosts or recordings. Public opinion did not necessarily agree.

(Helion, watching with part of his multiple mind on another channel, saw that Orpheus had no sensorium in operation. Orpheus saw no room at all; the dialogue was merely text; face expressions and nonverbal signs appeared in frames nearby, like the faces on playing cards. There was no other extension or background in Orpheus's scene. Everything else was black. Helion, disturbed, lowered the attention-value of that view, and paid attention to his own version of the scene.)

For a moment, Phaethon was silent, caught in a spell of wonder. He should have been repelled, but he was not. It all sounded as splendid and strange as anything one of his wife's deep-dreamscape dramas might portray.

The Neptunian was speaking: "Even now, I have called my surface-to-orbit pinnace down from Cernous Roc, my vessel. A partial-vacuum generator is among the capabilities in my base layer which grants me flight, and my subsurface fluids can sustain your life cycles in suspension till the midair rendezvous is accomplished. Retrieve your true body from its crypt—I assume it is nearby, for the material housings of Rhadamanth Mansion are not far away. Wake, come here, then step within the circle of my arms; put your face into the surface substance of my body; it will part before you and

flow around you, bonding cell with cell, to encase you in a protective vacuole."

Phaethon spoke softly: "But... but... I would need several years, at least, to set my affairs in order, and to create and educate a partial-duplicate of me to see to my duties in my absence. In any case I could not leave the festival before the Final Transcendence in December."

"No. You must come without any delay whatsoever. If you send a message, or even a signal, the labyrinth may close again, and, this time, any loose stones be bricked over!"

Leave immediately? Phaethon imagined his wife, giddy on imagination amplifiers, emerging from her pseudomnesia womb, eagerly seeking him out to talk about her dream-victories, all her newly made computer-generated friends and wonders.

But he would not be there. Impatient, then angry, then frantic, she would seek among the images on the promenade, or in the feast-cities, ballrooms, or game halls, seeing a thousand costumes, all in masks. The location channel was disenabled during masquerade. It would be eight months or more before her fears could be confirmed. Till then, she would not know if he was no longer in this world rather than merely hiding or ignoring her.

The thought sobered him. He laughed. "I'm quite sorry, my dear sir, but you must realize what a ridiculous offer you are extending—"

And he stopped. Because it was beyond ridiculous. Go to Neptune?

Neptune was the farthest outpost of civilization, and, with two notable exceptions, the farthest any colony of humanity had ever reached: The actual last outpost of the Golden Oec-umene was at 500 AUs, at the focal point of the gravity lens created by Sol. Here, elements of the Porphyrogen Composition mass-mind had created an artificial ice planet for themselves, and for the other visitors and staff of the Cosmic Observatory Effort. Beyond that, the nearer stars were barren of life. But at Cygnus XI, a small colony founded to study the effects of the singularity there had discovered a source of

infinite energy, and, with that wealth, had expanded to a mighty civilization. Yet the distance was so far, the costs of travel so very great, that all communication with that society was lost; for that reason, it was known as the Silent Oecu-mene.

Neptune was unthinkably closer even than the nearest star, and yet was still unthinkably remote. Even ships with fairly high fuel-mass-to-payload ratios required very long times to make the journey, months, sometimes years.

Ridiculous? The thought was impossible.

In the palace:

"Come!" said Gannis heartily, slapping the tabletop with his palm. "Helion has spent more computer time than any of us—millions of seconds for one study alone—to extrapolate which visions the Aurelian-mind may present during the December Transcendence. His devotion is beyond question.

"His dream is a grand one, I admit! Cease the motions of society, and freeze it into its present state! (Fortunate for us, when the waves freeze, those of us now at the crest will be at the tip of the iceberg forever after.) And yet—your pardon, friend Helion—allow me to introduce a note of caution. The Hortator College is a group of populist moralizers; their pinch-nostriled, squint-eyed overzealousness—hah? Is that what we need more of? Or less of? Augmenting their power will increase their power over us, even over us Seven Peers. What then, eh? What egalitarian nonsense will we be forced to stomach then? And I speak not just for myself but for all of me when I say that!"

Gannis's view of the room was the same as Helion's, but his sense of humor required him to introduce a slight difference. In Gannis's view, every object had two shadows, a dark black and a faint gray, for he had placed a second, smaller sun, a mere pinpoint of dazzling brightness, rising in the East.

Orpheus said in his cold, soft whisper of a voice: "Peer

Gannis perhaps has cause to fear any close inquiry into the recent events. It is a fine coincidence that he earned so much advantage by the Hortator's most recent deliberations."

Gannis should have looked angry at the accusation, but instead he threw wide his arms and laughed. "I am complimented that you think me cunning enough to have arranged these recent debacles! Not so. I fear that mere dumb luck has saved the Jovian Engineering Effort once again. Do you recall when bad investments by my overself brought me to such penury that I was asked to leave my peerage behind? Why, yes, you surely must, for it was you yourself who ask me to depart."

Gannis turned to the others, and continued: "And you wanted to have no more to do with funny, dumb, lovable, affable old Gannis, did you, my Peers? But then my other selves made back our fortune with the establishment of the Jupiter Equatorial Grand Collider. We did not predict the existence of the continent of stabile transadamantine elements beyond atomic number nine hundred; in fact, the standard model predicted against it.

"Chrysadmantium! What could not be done with this wonder metal? It elevated me back to my due position—others were enticed to dreams more wild, perhaps.

"I am better for my days of loss. More generous. Generous to the point of folly! I am as free with my advice as I am with my bounty. Is it my fault my advice was ignored? Is it my fault the wealth I spent so freely returned to me? This is the reward of fate, who cherishes the magnanimous. Clever lawyers merely help the process....

"But for all my generosity, good Helion, I cannot see what more I can do for the College of Hortators. The contracts and covenants we make with all of our clients provide that anyone shunned by the College of Hortators we also must shun. For my clients, this means they can enter no structures, ships, or space elevators made from my supermetal; for the customers of Vafnir, this means no power; of the Eleemosynary Composition, no understanding; of Ao Aoen, no dreams; of Orpheus, no life. What more is wanted?"

Helion answered: "Nebuchednezzar Sophotech, who had been advising the College, has sequestered himself. The College presently has little or no sophotechnology at its command; that can be remedied. If they had sufficient computer-time resources, the Hortators could be omnipresent, omniscient: We, my Peers, who are the wealthiest entities ever to live, have no lack of resources to donate."

Grannis made an expansive gesture. "But why spend so much? Dangerous matters have been resolved—"

Helion said darkly, "There are still those who would overthrow all we have built and done. Do you gentlemen have the word 'enemy' in your archives?"

In the garden:

"What is your true motive here?" asked Phaethon. "What is the meaning of this?"

"That same restriction which prevented me from first approaching you prevents me from bringing up the interdicted topic. Though my legal counsel parapersonality suggests that, if you and you alone bring up the topic, I may be able tq answer questions about it without overstepping the letter of the law."

"Very well. Does this have anything to do with the man I saw?"

"The tree artist? He is nothing. He escaped you by yanking down a low-hanging Advertisement and wrapping himself in it, cloaklike, and your sense-filter blinded you to him till he was gone."

Phaethon thought such things happened only in comedies. Wryly, he realized that the tree artist, being a Puritan, had worn no sense-filter. He would have been exposed naked to all the clamor and commotion of the Advertisements, the roar of the music. Small wonder, then, that he had been in a testy mood.

"He implied I had done something shameful or dreadful,

something showing hatred or contempt for the Golden Oecumene. Is this related to your forbidden topic?"

"Directly related."

"Hm. It is well-known that the Neptunians love to test the boundaries of reason and good taste, and forever chafe and complain at the protocols and polite customs—one can hardly call them 'laws'—with which we voluntarily bind ourselves. And before you used the obscure word 'crime.' Were we partners, you and I, in some criminal attempt?"

"Not criminal. Neptunians experiment with unusual mind forms, but we are not insane. And yet, you and I were partners in an attempt which was not well loved by your small-souled people here, not well loved at all."

"Some Neptunian prank or trick or fraud, was it, then?"

"You repeat the slanders of our detractors. The Tritonic Composition explores the boundaries of mental effort, unhindered by the ponderous moral posturing of your leaden machine-minds! Allow me to transmit my stored compendia into your brain space. Time is short, and the Neptunian philosophy is complex, and is based on value judgments which only experience, not logic, can convey."

"Load them onto a semipublic channel, and I will peruse them at leisure, without danger of mind-to-mind contamination or manipulation."

"I am not permitted to undertake the insecurity or expense of placing valuable and private thought templates from my life experience into a public box."

"Expense?" This was ridiculous. Why, the expense of shipping Phaethon to Neptune—or, saving on mass, of shipping Phaethon's brain in a lightweight life support—was astronomical. Phaethon consulted an almanac in the Rhadamanthus Mansion-Mind. Neptune and Earth were not in favorable positions for any fuel-efficient flight paths. Phaethon calculated how the increased payload of his weight would affect the mass-energy costs of even a low-boost orbit. The cost in energy-currency was roughly equal to a several thousand seconds of time-currency. In other words, a small fortune.

"The expense is nothing compared to what you've already offered in transportation costs."

At first, it looked as if the iceberg shape were melting. But no, it was flattening, the high crown dropping, and the wide base growing wider and wider. Fluid flowed from the base, thickening and freezing into leg pillars. Under the ice at each foot of these pillars, Phaethon could see, dimly, complex machines being quickly made out of neurocomposite crystal and ceramic. The bulbs and globes and insulated tubes seemed to be energy batteries and field manipulators.

"You have acted against my advice and signaled to your mansion. I must flee before I am discovered."

Signaled? Phaethon had retrieved one almanac file and run a calculation routine, almost automatic functions. Phaethon. had thought the Neptunian had only not wanted him to talk to his mansion. "Don't be absurd! No one would dare to listen in on my private communications."

"Even your vaunted Sophotechs will bend their precious laws to serve a purpose they call higher. But I shall use their own laws against them. They allow you some privacy during the distractions and masquerades meant to appease you. Behold. I shall construct a masquerader for you; he shall hold the files you will not receive from me; when you are strong enough to face truth, strong enough to defy this world of illusions, my messenger shall come for you."

Phaethon saw, in the depth of the armored crystal, a shape like a naked body floating to the surface. It was complete with bones, muscles, nerves, veins. Only the skin of the face and neck had not been wholly grafted on; and the skull was opened like a flower of bone, and strands and lines of nerve fiber were still being packed into place, with umbilicuslike channels still leading back to the main Neptunian brain-group. The lower body had a costume being woven around it, bulky and ill-fitting, but it was recognizable as the costume of Scar-amouche, a character from the same period and operetta cycle as Phaethon's Harlequin.

"Phaethon, come now. This is the final second."

"Forgive me, sir, but I am not satisfied with your various

mystifications and hints. I suspect a deception, for which your kind are notorious. You have not even yet told me your name."

"How should I tell you my name when you do not even recall the meaning of your own!"

"Phaethon? The name dates from the Time of the Second Mental Structure. The myth is of the sun god's bastard child who dared to drive his father's chariot...." Phaethon's voice trailed off.

There was a final surge and broil in the depth of the Neptunian body substance, as structural elements were formed and grown into place. A gush of wind announced the creature was activating its lift generators, joined by whistling screams from compression-jets.

The Neptunian's voice, channeled into Phaethon's senso-rium, did not need to get any louder to speak over the rush and rumble of the liftoff. "You named yourself for a demigod whose ambition burned a world. Not the name a man content with his lot in life would choose. But you don't recall why you chose it, do you? Can you begin to guess now how much of your memory is missing? They did not even let you keep the meaning of your name."

Phaethon backed up as pressure exploded from the feet of the Neptunian. Its low, flat shape was now in an aerodynamic configuration. With ponderous grace, it raised its nose to the sky, and moved upward.

Phaethon adjusted his sense-filter so that, instead of the roar of jets and the whine of magnetics, he still only heard the chirruping of night insects in the Saturn-grove. Amplifying his vision to the highest extent he could, he saw the body of the masquerader, wrapped in some sort of cocoon or buoyancy chute ejected from the Neptunian as it rose. He attempted to encompass the satellite and ground-based location routines within his vision, and to open more sense-channels. But apparently the same protocol that disabled the location routines during masquerade extended to escaping aircraft as well. Phaethon was not able to track the body as it fell.

As for the Neptunian, it flashed like distant ice, gained

altitude. Then the light twinkled and receded, one star lost among many.

In the palace:

Wheel-of-Life was a Cerebelline ecoperformer of the De-central Spirit School, as well as trustee for all copyrighted biotechnology based on the Five Golden Rings mathematics. She appeared as a matron of serene beauty and grave demeanor, seated on a throne of living flowers, grass, and hedge, in which a dozen species of birds and insects nested. She was also physically present (insofar as that word had meaning for Decentral Spiritualists), but her great cloak of interwoven living fibers ran from her shoulders out the window to where the other plants and animals that formed her corporate body and mind components reposed.

Cerebellines were a neuroform whose hindbrain and cortex were interconnected in the pattern called "global," from their ability to resolve multiple simultaneous interrelationships. They could think in a timeless meditation, and from many points of view at once. This avoided set-theory paradoxes, and linear-thought limitations. It was one of the least popular neuroforms in the Golden Oecumene, however, since it fell prey too easily to mystical conundrums and nonverbalisms.

(Helion was not able to maintain a translation from her point of view for any length of time. The plantlike parts of her were aware of the room only as motion, pressure, sunlight, moisture, but also as computer movements, information flows. The birds and rodents gave so many small, scattered pictures and sounds of the Conclave that Helion was perplexed; and the thoughts were so tangled with sharp, bright shards of instinct, lust, hunger, fear, that Helion's brain-structure could not assimilate or index the perceptions.)

Wheel-of-Life indicated an objection. She expressed herself by holding up her hands and creating a miniature ecosystem in its globe. Microbes, plankton, brightly colored fish-shaped

darts swam in the globe; triangular shark things fought many-tentacled cephalopods in relentless subsea wars.

She shattered the globe on the table surface into many globes. In each of the lesser globes, one species and only one rose to dominance, destroyed all competition, overgrazed, died back, and lost its throne. In every case the single dominant life form subdivided into new avenues as evolution continued.

Ao Aoen, the Master Dreamer, owner of a vast entertainment empire, spoke up: "I agree with Wheel-of-Life. Helion's vision will create a future of monochromatic conformity; events will narrow toward simplicity. Yet our society is diverse. Solutions are diverse. Within the mind are webs of interconnections, laws of thought; between minds are webs of social relation, laws of institutions. Turn one inside out and you have the other. Yet which of us is simple enough to be understood by, or complex enough to understand, ourselves?!"

Helion responded by inventing a mathematical game of geometric solids and spaces within a three-dimensional grid. The rules of the game allowed the solids, if surrounded by spaces, to reproduce; but the solids evolved their shapes due to pressure from the other solids.

He held it up like a glass box in his hand, and ran it, in compressed time, a dozen or a thousand times. In all but one case, the shapes bowed to the pressure of the surrounding solids, eventually formed cubes, and consumed all the available empty spaces.

The one nonstandard case was a beautiful snowflake-shaped system, with octahedrons and tetrahedrons radiating out from the single central dodecahedron. Ao Aoen thoughtfully reached across the table with his extremely long fingers, picked up that system, saved it, and handed it to Wheel-of-Life, who sent several birds and insects to gaze at it with joy.

"I'd like to disagree with Peer Wheel-of-Life," said Helion. "The diversity in nature is sustained because the beasts and plants must solve their disputes in inefficient life-or-death competitions. Rational creatures can create treaties, laws, and

social mechanisms to channel aggression into peaceful competition. Competition encourages efficiency. Efficiency encourages uniformity. Even a society as diverse as ours has certain rules and mores which we must enforce against those who deviate."

Gannis murmured: "And here I had thought we were agreed not to speak about Phaethon again...."

Helion hid a frown in a backup file, were no one could see it. Yet he frowned.

Vafnir, the energy magnate, said, "The same argument implies, Peer Helion, that those society employs to enforce its rules against deviations are justified in their use of force. Is this consistent with the arcadian ease and Utopian peace we all have known?"

Helion said, "There are warriors even in paradise. And even in Arcadia, death comes."

THE SOLDIER

In the garden: As Phaethon stood and stared at the receding glimmer of the Neptunian, something came floating in on the night breeze.

Phaethon looked. A gaggle of little black bubbles swirled, windblown, across the grass under the trees and stars. Phaethon did not see from whence these machine organisms came. The bubbles swirled and swooped, circling the spot where the Neptunian just had been.

"Now what?" muttered Phaethon.

Some spheres dropped to roll across the grass, uphill and downhill. The main group of them slowly went back and forth along the path toward the grape trellises where Phaethon had first seen the Neptunian. The black spheres paused frequently to insert a slender probe or proboscis into the ground. Nearer to Phaethon, at the spot from which the Neptunian had launched, the spheres gathered into several rounded tetrahedrons and drove more probes into the ground.

It did not look very beautiful; the sphere movements were at once too slow and methodical, and too quick and efficient, to be an animation dance, nor was there music. Unless it was meant for an audience with senses not like his? Setting his hearing to a search routine, Phaethon found only high-

frequency encrypted signals coining from the spheres, all squawks and stuttering whines, with no trace of rhythm or grace.

Phaethon pointed a finger and made the identification gesture, knowing it would be blocked by the masquerade. To his surprise, it was not. To his eyes, it looked as if a window had opened in midair, or a scroll unfurled, and in the frame was a dragon glyph radiating four ideograms in an archaic style: Honor, Courage, Fortitude, Obedience.

"Preliminary array, hostile organism detection and counteraction system identifies itself. Copyright information (Security Clearance required). Public Ownership. This unit is assigned to: Marshal-General Atkins Vingtetun, General-Issue Humaniform (multiple battle augmentations) Military Hierarchy, Semicompilation (ghosthaunted, and combat-reflexes), Warmind, Staff Command, Base Neuroform, Unschooled, Era Zero (the Creation)."

Phaethon was truly amused that someone would come to a masquerade disguised as Atkins. Atkins was the soldier. The last soldier. Phaethon was under the vague impression that Atkins had long ago, centuries upon centuries ago, killed himself or gone to stand-by or been stored in a museum, or something.

The impersonation was in questionable taste, however. A soldier? No one liked to be reminded of their barbaric past. And, unless Phaethon had misunderstood the masquerade guidelines, identity and location information could be masked but not actually falsified. But it seemed as if someone were nonetheless impersonating Atkins. Wouldn't the Hortators consider this a breach of propriety?

On the other hand, falsifications of fictional people, or people whose identities were retired, or whose memory copyrights had expired, must be permissible. Such identities were in the public domain, were they not? After all, no one was going to object to Phaethon, for example, impersonating Harlequin.

But Phaethon was still curious. For what were the spheres so diligently searching? Had the Neptunian (assuming it had

been real) left behind some clue or trace of its origins or goals?

Well, if the false Atkins was going to be so gauche as to imitate a long-retired war hero, Phaethon could overstep politeness also. (This was a party, after all, and the standards of behavior were relaxed.)

After all, it was also in very bad taste to intrude icon-objects (like this midair window and dragon glyph) into Phae-thon's field of view without any attempt whatever to blend the objects into the real environment, so as not to disturb Phaethon's previously established visual-continuity aesthetic. So perhaps it was in equally bad taste to tap into another person's private communication link, decode it, and find out what information all the spheres were sending back to their base point. But Phaethon did it anyway.

He caught only a fragment of the many messages: "... an information-deception-and-avoidance routine more complex—-magnitude eight—than a nonmechanical intelligence can produce. ... Sophotechnology of origin unknown ..."

"... artificial viral bodies introduced into grass DNA where subject stepped. Excessive information strand-coding—unknown data-compression techniques—grass will spore microorganisms of highly complex systematology—intelligence level 100—seeking out raw materials and creating larger organizations ..."

And also: "... deduces (from the enemy success against civilian countermeasures) electron and quantum-state manipulation technologies comparable to those produced by Oecumenical civilization, based on the same history-development up through to late-period Fifth Mental Structure, but deviating thereafter in a fashion no member schola, or group embraced within the Golden Oecumene, could theoretically produce. Conclusion: .. ."

Then, an interruption: "Who the hell is on this line? Sir— hey, you! Excuse me, sir! But what do you think you are doing?"

The window in midair changed, and the dragon sign was replaced by an image of a man-shape in streamlined black

power-armor of a style dating from the Sixth Mental Structure. The helmet turned toward Phaethon (who had his mask back on by then) and, somehow, Phaethon nonetheless felt that nape-hair prickling sensation which was his cue from Rhadamanthus that his name file was being read.

Phaethon was shocked beyond words. Then: "Who, if I may ask, are you, sir, that you just trample on the protocols of the masquerade without a word?"

"Sorry, sir," the man in the floating window replied. "Atkins. I'm acting on orders from the partial-Parliament extrapolation of the Warmind. You're tapping into a secured channel. May I ask what you're doing in this area?"

In the palace:

Ao Aoen was a Warlock neuroform. His brain had interconnections between the temporal lobes, nonverbal left-brain lobes, and the thalamus and hypothalamus, seats of emotion and passion. Consequently, the relationships between his conscious and subconscious were nonstandard, and allowed him to perform accurately what base neuroforms could do only infrequently: acts of insight, intuition, inspiration, pattern recognition, lateral thinking. He could script his dreams. And dreams were merely one of several overlaps between conscious and unconscious realms that he had mastered, or to which he had surrendered.

He was physically present in a hideously beautiful body, patterned with scales like a colored cobra. Extra skull extensions gave his head the shape of a manta ray, shadowing his shoulders and reaching down his back. He had a half a dozen hands and arms, with fingers a yard or more in length. Between his fingers and his arms, like butterfly wings, tissues carrying a dozen delicate sensory-membranes stretched. This gave him scores of sensual sensations beyond the normal ranges.

(Ao Aoen saw the standardized version of the library scene, but overlaid with several dreams and half-dreams, so that every object seemed charged with mysterious and profound symbolism. Ao Aoen had superimposed a webwork of lines, glyphs, astrological notations, indicating loyalties and emotional, or, perhaps, magical-symbolic, sympathies or affiliations. Each Peer was represented by the self-image they projected, so that Orpheus, for example, who projected none, looked to Ao Aoen like an empty black cube.)

Ao Aoen said in a voice like a hollow woodwind, "I see patterns within patterns here. Let our society step outside itself and let us watch ourselves with awe and curious fear, as if we were strangers. The first thing we see is that most of our population (population measured only as information use) are Sophotech machine-minds. The whole rest of our society, our empires and efforts, are like the Amish who refused Fourth Era assimilation, like an animal preserve to be sustained while the Sophotechs spend their efforts contemplating abstract mathematics."

Orpheus said softly: "Distraction. Ao Aoen strays from the topic."

Ao Aoen made an eye-dazzling wave with his meter-long finger-fans. "All parts reflect the whole, Peer Orpheus. And yet, bluntness is art also, therefore I will be blunt. Attempts to herd human destiny oft times produce stampedes, which trample would-be shepherds.

"My Peers, the Hortators are a private organization, whose sole power comes from the popular esteem and respect they have earned. They cannot dare to be seen arm-in-arm with us, the ill-famed plutocrats, not as long as we Peers are wealthy enough to defy tradition, to ignore popular sentiment, and, yes, wealthy enough to suborn the Hortators."

Helion said coldly: "Recent events have proven that even the wealthiest and bravest of the manor-born are not beyond their reach. The best of us must bow to public opinion; no one can afford to offend the Hortators, not anymore."

In the garden, Phaethon felt offended.

A soldier? It was preposterous. There still were some crimes these days; computer frauds, time thefts. Usually by very young rogues, not yet octogenarians. They were always eventually caught, and public outrage was always severe. Such matters were handled by the Hortators, or, in rare occasions when no one answered the call to give themselves up, by the Subscription Constabulary.

But Constables were always unfailingly polite and deferential. Phaethon had not been aware that it was even possible for someone to read one of Phaethon's masked files (and the name file had, in fact, been masked) without permission. Perhaps a Constable had that right, but only after due notice and service of a warrant. This man was certainly not a Constable!

Phaethon said as much. "You may ask, Mister Whatever-you-are, but I need not answer. You have no right. And, dammit! Could you at least have the decency to manifest your image properly, without jarring my scene to bits!"

The floating window blinked out, and the armored shape appeared next to Phaethon. The grass blades did seem to bend under the black metal boots, and a moon shadow did fall, in proper perspective, across the lawn; but that was about the only concession to manorial notions of propriety this man gave. The highlights and reflections within the armored breastplate were all wrong, and the vision tracking and correction was crude, since the image wavered if Phaethon turned his head too quickly.

The helmet disassembled into a cloud of fingernail-sized scales, which spread and opened, and hovered motionless around the man's head like a black halo. The face underneath was unremarkable, except in its uncomeliness. Phaethon couldn't remember in face symbology what lines around thin lips, or crow's-feet at the corners of the eyes were supposed to represent. Wisdom? Grimness? Determination? But he had

a crew cut, and an even, unblinking gaze that spoke of ten millennia of military tradition. The face looked much like old archive pictures of Atkins.

One of the black spheres not far from Phaethon sent a signal: "Subject Phaethon shows no present contamination. Examination of communication logs and thought-buffers fails to show any data packages received, except for low-level, speech-linear communication. Insufficient to hide any organism construction or self-aware memory data systems."

"What?!!" exclaimed Phaethon. "Have you been going through my files and logs without a warrant? Without a word? You didn't even ask—!"

The man in black armor spoke to Phaethon. His tone was serious and brisk: "Sir, we didn't know whether you had been compromised or not. But you're clean. I'd like you to keep this quiet. The opposition may have constructions, by now, in all our public channels, and I don't want to give him—or them—any hints about where the investigation is. But don't worry. This is probably just another false alarm, or a drill. That's all I ever do nowadays anyway. So there's really no need for concern. You are free to go." And he turned to look toward where the black spheres where congregating.

Phaethon stared at him blankly. Were these lines from a play or something? "I think this really has gone on far enough. Tell me what's going on."

The man spoke without turning around. "Sir, that's no concern of yours right now. If I need more cooperation from you, or if we need to do some follow-up examination, you'll be contacted. Thank you for your cooperation."

"What is all this?!! You can't talk to me that way! Do you know who I am?!"

The man turned. There was a slight twitch in the tense lines around the soldier's mouth. It looked as if he were trying not to smile. "Ah—sir, the Service doesn't allow me to play tricks with my memory. I just don't have that luxury, I guess, sir. I'm, ah, sure at least one of us remembers who you are, there, sir. Ahem. But for now ..." And the trace of humor vanished

as if it had never been. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave. I'm required to secure the area."

"I beg your pardon—!" Phaethon spoke in an outraged tone.

They were interrupted by a fanfare of silver-voiced trumpets.

In the palace:

Vafnir, the energy magnate, like Gannis, was also physically present, but, in order to demonstrate the vast wealth of his holdings, he had had his mind recorded into a high-speed energy matrix, which hung above the table and burned like a pillar of fire. The amount of computer time spent recalculating his nerve paths and magnetic envelope shape every time the slightest energy change occurred in the room was tremendous. The pillar of flame was burning hundreds of seconds a second.

(An aspect of Helion's mind watched Vafnir's view of the scene. Vafnir held to an utterly nonstandard aesthetic. Words and thoughts seemed to him like notes or crescendos of light; sound was force, puncturing, trembling; emotions or innuendoes appeared as smells or vibrations in sixteen radiant hues. To him the Peers were like seven balls of music hanging in space, issuing voices of fire; Helion an eager yellow-white, Gannis a pinching and sarcastic green, Orpheus a cold, drear fugue.)

Vafnir spoke: "My Peers, Helion does not propose an alliance to support the Hortators. He proposes that we appease them. He is telling us we have been forced to this extreme."

Helion said, "What is your objection? We represent the eldest generation. The invention of safe and repeatable personal immortality ensures that no generation after us will necessarily supplant us. We have given mankind endless life-— is it not our due to ask, in return, that our lives be allowed to continue in the forms to which we are accustomed, sur-

rounded by the institutions and society we prefer?"

Vafnir replied, "I do not object. I merely wish things stated clearly, without dazzle or smoke. I'm one of the richest men in the Oecumene, well-respected, influential. A million, a billion, and a trillion years from now, barring mishaps, I should still be here. And, long after Earth is gone, when the universal night has extinguished all the stars, and all the cosmos dies of final entropy, the entities with the most wealth and stored-up energy shall be the very last to go. I hope to be among them. If the cost of that is that we must tame society, make it predictable, break its spirit, and kills its dreams, aha! So be it! I only spoke to let us all be aware that we are doing this for self-centered and ignoble reasons."

Orpheus spoke softly, "Pointless to debate the matter of morality, my Peers. There is no right, no wrong, in this world, not any longer. The machine-minds watch us, and they take care that we do not harm each other. Morality means nothing, now."

"Just so," said Gannis. "The machine-minds watch us, and they are watched by the Earthmind, no? They only thing we need fear is loss of our positions, eh?"

When no one was looking, Gannis sent his she-eagle out the window, scattering Wheel-of-Life's flocks, and catching a pigeon in her talons.

Down the slope and across the moonlit lawn approached a stately figure surrounded by nine floating luminaries. She was garbed in a gown of flowing emerald green, and her golden braids were twined to hold an emerald crown in place. Hers was a face of regal beauty, kindly, dignified, smiling with sad wisdom. In one hand she held a wand of living applewood, adorned with apple blossoms and fruit.

Her body shape was like that of an ancient lunarian; very tall and slender, graceful with unearthly grace, and with a

magnificent sweep of condor wings folded across her shoulders and down her back.

The man who looked like Atkins then did a very Atkins-like thing. He drew his ceremonial katana and saluted, holding the blade point-upright, guard level with his eyes.

Not to be outdone, Phaethon performed an elegant courtly bow, crooking his back leg and sweeping out his hands in flourishes just as Harlequin himself might have done for the queen of France.

"Hail to thee!" cried Phaethon. "If you are She, an Avatar of the Earthmind, whose unlimited omniscience sustains us all, then, for the sake of all the blessings with which infinite intelligence has showered the earth, I greet you and give you praise; or if you merely are one who honors Her by presenting yourself adorned with Her symbols, hail nonetheless! And I bow to honor the visible signs of the One thus represented."

"I am not wholly She; only the smallest fraction of Her mind is bonded with me. For now, I am merely your fellow guest at this Celebration." She smiled warmly, eyes twinkling, and nodded, saying: "You are true to the comic-opera character you seem, and you amuse me with your comic-opera greeting. Dear Phaethon! Earthmind has thought much on you of late, and She trusts you will be as true to your own character as you have been to the characters you have assumed."

Phaethon signaled for identification, and then was shocked to understand that this was an Avatar of the Earthmind indeed, an emanation from the Ennead.

He had never in all his life spoken to one of the Nine Intelligences, who were the highest of the Sophotech machine-minds; but this was a representative of a Mind even more exalted, the One whom the Nine combined their mental power to sustain.

To Atkins, the Avatar said, "Please do not salute me, Mr. Atkins. I am not your superior officer. We are fellow servants in the same cause."

The man's left gauntlet folded back. In one perfect, well-practiced motion, he cut a painful line across his palm, bloodied the sword and sheathed the blade. He squinted, folding

his left hand into a fist to prevent the little cut from seeping.

Phaethon realized that this must indeed be Atkins.

"Thank you, ma'am," Atkins said. "Can you help me out, here? If not, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

She smiled sadly. "There's not much I can do, Mr. Atkins. Even a very quick intelligence is helpless without information to manipulate. So I shall leave you in peace to do your work. Ah! But I do have an idea for a new science of analysis and forensics which, with your permission, I can load into your system. I have a clearance from the Parliament scenario."

"Be my guest, ma'am." And the black spheres began sprouting fantastic spiral shells, nautiluslike, and spinning strands of thread across the grass. The luminaries circling the Avatar now left their orbits and went to go help the black spheres at their task.

The Avatar turned to Phaethon.

"Dear son, as a courtesy to Atkins, I ask you to leave as well. You are under no legal obligation to keep quiet about what you have seen, but there is a moral obligation even deeper and more compelling. Our laws and our institutions have grown accustomed to centuries of peace and pleasure; and our civilization can sustain herself through danger only by the voluntary devotion of her citizens."

Phaethon spoke: "I love the Golden Oecumene, and would never do anything to cause her harm!"

Atkins looked skeptical when he said that, snorted, and turned away. The Avatar said, "Do not compromise your principles, Phaethon, lest you do yourself and your world an ill."

"What ill? Madame—please tell me what is going on—"

"Your old memories are in storage, but not destroyed. Whether you take their burden once more on yourself, I cannot advise. I may be wise, but I am not Phaethon." The Avatar stepped forward, put her soft hands on Phaethon's shoulders, stooped (Phaethon had not realized how tall the lunar body shape was till she stood over him), and she kissed him on the forehead.

"Will you receive this gift from me? I grant you flight. I mean this as an honor to display that the Machine Intelli-

gences do not regard you, Phaethon, with any unkindliness. It also may remind you of old dreams you have put aside."

"Madame—this mannequin I am in is much too heavy to fly—I would need a different..." But a buoyancy suddenly tingled in him, starting with his head where he'd been kissed, and spreading, like warm wine, into his trunk and limbs. Surprised, blinking, Phaethon thrust with a toe. Weightlessly the grass fell away from him.

He shouted in fear, but then smiled, and tried to pretend he was shouting for joy. A moment later, a freak wind blew him head over heels like a balloon. Phaethon grabbed a passing tree branch, and he was tangled in the silvery leaves, laughing.

"Quite extraordinary, Madame!" he gasped. "But—excuse me, there are several important questions about what's happened tonight, which I—"

But when he looked over his shoulder, down at the ground, the Avatar was gone. There was only Atkins, face grim, still in his armor, pacing slowly across the grass with his black machines.

There was nothing for him here. Atkins was not going to answer any questions. And he had sneered at Phaethon's expression of loyalty to the Golden Oecumene; whatever Phaethon's forgotten crime had been, it had been enough to make honest men regard him as a traitor.

Phaethon let go of the branch and floated up into the night sky. The silvery Saturn-trees shimmered mirrorlike underfoot, and then were lost, one grove among the garden tapestries of shades and shadows below.

Kes Sennec the Logician spoke in even and uninflected tones. "Peer Vafnirs's comment, spoken just now, calling all of our actions 'ignoble' and 'self-centered' contains inaccuracies and semantic nonentities. Assuming that I do not presently misunderstand his intent, I presently disagree, on the grounds that

the statement is overbroad, stereotypical, and inaccurate."

Kes Sennec was also actually present, a bald, large-headed man in a gray single-suit. A row of control points ran along the left closure of the tunic; he wore no other ornamentation. His skin color was gray, adjusted to local light-radiant levels, as were his eyes. His body shape was unremarkably standardized, with special organs and adaptations for zero-gravity environment, and his nervous system was highly modified with monitors, correctives', and gland overrides to ensure emotional stability and sanity.

"If a critical number of the individuals in society cooperate in actions which lead, deliberately or as a side effect, to conditions which, to an effective number of individuals, appear to favor the use of aggression and deception (as opposed to peaceful strategies of social cooperation) for the achievement of what they at that time perceive to be their goals, then every necessary and sufficient condition for the breakdown of the social order is present, and the pressure favoring the breakdown grows in rough proportion as the effective number of individuals grows. By 'breakdown' I mean both that individuals resort to violence and that they believe they must do so for fear that other individuals will do so.

"Logically, to avoid this, a sufficient uniformity of operative decision-making mores and values above a threshold level of participants must obtain; these decision values must include, at least, a priority placed on the preservation of the peaceful resolution of perceived and real conflicts. The term 'conformity' is not necessarily inappropriate to depict this uniform decision structure."

Kes Sennec was of the Invariant neuroform, a highly integrated unicameral nervous system. His brain had accessible subroutines, habits, and reflexes, but no subconsciousness properly so called. The Invariant neuroform was the second least popular among the Golden Oecumene, since all people with such uniform brains tended to think and act with startling uniformity. The Invariants had no emotional difficulties or internal conflicts.

(Kes Sennec's view of the room was entirely stark and real,

with no filter, no editing. He saw Helion's body as a human-oid mannequin; he saw the tiny dull-colored plugs and antennae along Gannis's neck that connected with the Gannis Over-mind; he saw the electronic activity surrounding all Wheel-of-Life's pets and pseudo-plants. He could see the wires and nodes swirling among Vafnir's column of flame, and the mechanism producing the field effects where Vafnir's consciousness was actually stored. To Kes Sennec, Orpheus was merely a remote on treads, skeletal, equipped with waldo-hands, lenses, and speakers. It all was unappealing, plain, colorless.

(Also, the outside noise, distant music, yells, and odors coming in through the window, were part of Kes Sennec's all-embracing attention. Once again, Helion could not tolerate the other's scene. Helion's brain structure required him to rate sense impressions by priority, and to ignore sensations of low importance. Kes Sennec's Invariant brain saw everything, paid attention to everything, judged everything with inhuman, unemotional precision.)

Kes Sennec concluded: "Those who act to prevent war and violence from occurring cannot properly be called 'selfish' and 'ignoble' even if they act in a way which benefits their self-interest."

Ao Aoen said, "As always, Peer Kes Sennec's comments daze me with their precision, and I cannot follow them. Unselfish? Why have none of us said aloud what secretly motivated Peer Helion's proposal? Is it a dream we seek to kill, perhaps the greatest of dreams ever? What is this dream? Can any tell me? Do any outside this chamber yet recall?"

No one answered him. There was silence.

Phaethon rode the night wind.

For several minutes, he hung, going whichever way the wind pushed him. Then he floated on his back, looking up at the stars. He activated an internal regulator to slow his time

sense, till he could see the movements of the stars as visible, grandly turning in their paths across the sky. Slower still, and the North Star was ringed with concentric haloes as the hours, compressed into a moment or two, hung before him. In a moment, most of the night had passed.

"What if I've done something which actually is horrible, unthinkable, or even endangered the Golden Oecumene? Do I really want to know? Curiosity nags me; it whips me on. And yet I did this to myself: the ignorance is self-imposed. Perhaps the alternative is worse.

"Is ignorance so hard to bear, then? There is so very much in life we do not know...."

Staring up at the night sky, Phaethon opened his hearing to include ground-based and satellite radio. Information from a thousand sources, a hundred thousand, flowed into his brain. There were countless signals and communications radiating from Earth, from the satellite city-ring, the houses of the moon, and green Venus in her new cooler orbit, already shining with the radio noise of civilization. The collected asteroids of the remade planet Demeter had fewer cities, but brighter, as the scientific communities and experimental modes of life there used more energy than sober, older Terra. The Jovian moons, a solar system in miniature, were a beacon of immeasurable energy, life, motion, and noise; some people considered it the real center of the Golden Oecumene. At the Leading and Trailing Trojan points, the million space-metropoli of the Invariants pulsed with calm and steady rhythms. At the edge of night, the Neptunian energy-webs and communication systems extended out to the Oort and Kuiper belts. There were a few distant flickers from remote stations beyond that; one beacon from the Porphyrogen observatory at 500 AUs, like a last spark in the dark.

And then, nothing. The roar of the stars, the whisper of background radiations, was meaningless, like the noise of a storm at sea. Nowhere were there intelligent patterns. There were no other colonies, no outposts. The Silent Oecumene, perhaps, might still exist near Cygnus XI; but, if so, it was a civilization without light or energy or any transmission.

Nothing was in the night. There was only empty noise and empty abyss.

Phaethon restored his time sense and the stars froze in place.

"No," he said. "I will not be false."

He recalled that the Neptunian had called the Golden Oec-umene a world of illusions. Maybe it was. "But I will not be deceived. I swear it. If there is anything out there in the stars to hear me: you have heard. I have made my vow."

The stars were pale, and a red rim of light touched the East. He had floated higher than he thought, and, at this altitude, it was nearly daybreak. Now he turned to right himself, and, like a diver plunging into a deep blue, down he fell toward the land below. The winds rushed in his ears like the loud, wild noise of many voices.

In the Palace:

"If this dream is one we can kill, we should kill it, O my Peers," said, or sang, Ao Aoen, and several voices and images of light flowed from his figure. "Our own self-preservation, and the protection of our beloved Golden Oecumene from the horror of war—a horror only we are old enough to recall— both urge us to the tourney against this archangel of fire whom we so fear that we dare not say his name. Our cause is just; but is our strength equal to the task?

"Convince me, O Peers, that the Hortators will aid rather than oppose our efforts to smother the fire of the soul of man—and my fickle convictions may change again. My empire of dreams can reach into the thoughts and smiles of millions; convince me it can be done, O Helion, that you can wrestle with this spiritual fire as you once tamed the fires of the sun. With—oh, of course!—a happier outcome than that event brought forth!"

Phaethon put in a call to his mansion. "Rhadamanthus! Rhad-amanthus! I know the Silver-Gray protocols don't let you manifest in a way that jars the scenery; but this is an emergency. Something odd happened to me this night; I need your help to find the answers."

His sensorium signaled to admit a new object. A moment later, out of the high clouds behind him, surrounded with a roaring engine noise, a small black shape darted on wings. It did a snap-roll and came closer, till it paralleled Phaethon's plunging descent.

It was a penguin wearing bow tie, aviator goggles, and a long white scarf. The penguin's stubby wings were spread, its bullet head thrown back, its little beak cutting the air. A contrail of vapor issued from its little webbed feet.

"Oh, come now, Rhadamanthus! This blends?!"

The penguin cocked it head. "It is a bird, young master."

"Realistic images or none at all! That's the motto of our manor. Penguins do not fly!"

"Hmm. I hate to say it, young master, but neither do young men."

"But—a contrail—?"

"Ah, sir, you may check my math if you like, but a penguin-shaped object traveling at this speed through this atmosphere—"

Phaethon interrupted. "Be realistic!"

"If the young master would care to look behind himself, I think he will see he has a condensation trail not unlike my own—"

"Good heavens!" Phaethon checked his sense-filter again. The penguin and its contrail were illusions, existing only in mentality. But Phaethon's contrail was a real object. "How am I doing this? Flying without a suit, I mean." He checked the properties value on his sense-filter again. It was real.

"If master would care to direct his attention upward, in the extremely high frequency range? ..."

"I see a latticework of energy lines across the sky, from horizon to horizon.... A levitation array? But the scale is grandiose. It extends for miles. Ah... hundreds of miles. Was this all built since last night?"

"It was constructed in orbit and lowered into place, young master. A surprise for the guests!" The penguin pointed with a stubby black wing.

He continued: "The wire is buoyant, made of a newly developed material of great tensile strength and high conductivity. The dome extends over the entire Celebration grounds, from the forty-fifth to the fiftieth parallel. If the dome were permitted to relax to its natural hemispheric shape, the apex would be in the stratosphere. It is by no means the largest artificial structure on Earth—the Antarctic Winter Garden is much larger; but it will reduce the expense and trouble of air transport. I deduce the Earth-mind's Avatar introduced microscopic assemblers into your mannequin-frame—I see traces running from your forehead into your central body— and used them to construct magnetic anchor points and induction generators. A present man could do the same with a heavy jacket of special material."

"I'm impressed. But you sound sort of nasal, Rhadaman-thus, even for a penguin."

"It saddens me to see a way of life I like pass on, even though I am not myself alive. The new ease of air transport may decrease the advantages of telepresentation, and, over the next four centuries, reduce the prestige of the various manorial and cryptic ways of life. Including mansions like me. Heh. Ironic, isn't it sir?"

"What's ironic?"

"That Earthmind should give the technology to you. Not of the levitation array, of course, I just mean the anchor-and-antennae system which allows one to fly with it."

"Give? Did you say give?"

"Yes. I've examined the legal channels, and there is no patent on the hardware, no copyright on the software. I've

taken the liberty of making out an intellectual property claim in your name, sir, giving you copyright ownership."

"Do you think She is a testing me to see if I will suppress the technology?"

"Sir, the human mind may not easily grasp the difference between a million and a trillion, but if I have the honor of being able to calculate and correlate a million times faster than a human brain; and if the Earthmind calculates at a trillion times your rate; then, quite honestly, sir, She is as incomprehensible to me as I must seem, at times, to you. I have not the faintest idea why She does anything."

The one Peer who had not spoken was an emissary for the Communication and Financial planning subroutine of the Eleemosynary Composition. The Eleemosynary was a group-mind with thousands of members, founded during the turmoils of the Fifth Mental Structure, with memory chains and records reaching back over eighty thousand years. The Eleemosynary Composition was one of the first to include peoples of different nervous system structures into one combination. In the far past, he-they had been a powerful political force, one of the founding architects of the Sixth Mental Structure and the age of the machine-minds. Now, all political power evaporated, the Eleemosynary Composition made his-their fortunes in interpretation and translation and arbitration between different groups and mind-sets in the Golden Oec-umene.

The Emissary was embodied and costumed as a figure from Eleemosynary mythopoetry, a winged-lion chimera who wore three heads: monkey, hawk, and serpent. Each head held a separate brain, one of each of the three neuroforms of which the Eleemosynary group-mind was composed: the basic, the Invariant, and the Warlock. (Helion saw that, like Helion, the Emissary viewed the room from the other peers' viewpoints, but, unlike him, he-they did not have any private viewpoint

of his-their own. Also unlike him, his-their nervous systems could understand the views coming from Kes Sennec and Wheel-of-Life.)

The Emissary said, "Whoever wishes to serve the Good should embrace long-term as well as short-term considerations into his councils. In less than one hundred billion years, Sol passes to other phases of stellar decay, and no longer will be serviceable. Forethought requires that provision be made to evacuate, but civilization not be jarred or disturbed. Technologies should be developed to accommodate the movement of all worlds and world-habitats elsewhere, social institutions adapted to preserve peace and orderliness, with philosophies to supply ideological justification. Chaos, violence, terror, should be, at all costs, avoided. Only thus can the service of all to all be maintained. Humbly, it is wondered if, in the vision presented by Peer Helion, society, by the time star colonization is needed, will have sufficient genius, foresight, and resolve to attempt the abyss between the stars. Stable societies are not known for these virtues."

"You see?" said Ao Aoen, "The great Eleemosynary Composition is willing to oppose a society of strict conformity; and he-they are the very soul of union and unselfishness! What does that make us, we who urge the plan?"

"There is, perhaps, misinterpretation," replied the Emissary, turning his-their three heads to stare at Ao Aoen. "It was meant to say that the star-colonization question should be raised long after Helion's efforts to extend Sol's useful lifes-pan have run their course. If raised before then, conflict and chaos may result. The occupation by colonists of nearby star systems may preclude peaceful evacuation at Sol's death. Peace is supreme; only thus can the service of all to all be maintained. Change one day will be needed and welcomed, when time is complete, and Sol's power is exhausted. But before that time, what need has peace and contentment to be disturbed by innovators and adventurers?"

In the air, with stars above and cloud below, Phaethon contemplated his meeting with the Earthmind.

"Maybe She's trying to teach me something, not test me...."

"I wouldn't care to speculate, sir."

"Well. I won't fail this test at least. Release the information on the public channels. No good can come from trying to hide the truth."

"So you've always said, young master. But I see there is something else, yes?"

"Rhadamanthus—" Phaethon steeled himself. "The things I saw tonight—were real? This all isn't some part of a masquerade game? I'm not inside some pseudomnesia-play?"

"May I perform a Noetic reading to experience what occurred from your point of view?"

"I don't keep secrets from you, Rhadamanthus. You don't need to ask to read my mind."

"Yes, I do, sir. It's protocol. And what you thought was real was indeed quite real."

"The Golden Oecumene is under some sort of attack. And I'm a criminal, or a collaborator, just like my Neptunian friend, helping to destroy our paradise." Phaethon tasted bitterness like bile in his throat.

"With respect, sir, that conclusion is not warranted by the evidence you've seen so far."

Phaethon spread his arms and stopped his descent. He turned a fierce glare toward the penguin image.

"Oh, come now! I'm not stupid! We have a society of immortals. Our neural technology gives us, when we wish, perfect eidetic memory. Every past wrong, no matter how small, can be recalled many thousands of years after the fact. And there is no place to go to hide from those whom you have offended or who offend you. Here, to prevent even the possibility of crime, we manorials have no privacy, not even

in our thoughts, except that which we, out of politeness, extend to each other. And so what else is there to do? I did something—I don't know what, and frankly, at the moment I don't care—which shamed and offended my equals. So we all agreed to forget it. Pretend it never happened!"

The penguin stood in midair, long scarf flapping slightly in the breeze, looking at Phaethon through large, round goggles. It rubbed its little white tummy with a stubby wing, and said, "Are you asking me a question, young master? You gave me specific orders not to bring the gap in your memory to your attention; nor can I tell you what you forgot."

"I did it to myself then? I was not compelled?"

"It was voluntary. We Sophotechs would have acted to stop it, otherwise."

"And if I countermand the order?"

"Your old memories are in my archives back at Rhada-manthus Mansion, in the chamber of memory, in third level of mentality, the deep-layer nonrealistic dreamscape."

"And should I?"

Even Rhadamanthus could not answer right away. There was a pause as the machine-mind examined every foreseeable future consequence of every possible combination of actions and responses for all the individuals in the Golden Oecumene (Rhadamanthus had mindspace enough to know them all intimately). This complexity was measured against the eternal philosophical dialogue structure the Sophotechs maintained. Rhadmanthus answered:

"It would be nobler and braver of you to know the truth, I think, young sir. But I also should warn you that there would be a cost. One which you yourself, earlier, were not willing to pay."

"The cost? What is the cost?"

"Look down, sir, and tell me what you see below you here."

Phaethon looked.

Everywhere was splendor. To the north were open glades, cool secret pools, fragrant hedges, walled arbors, tree-lined lanes, mountains, clefts, murmuring streams falling to a blue

sea. East was forest, deep and dark, invested with bioformu-lations less traditional: weird coral-like growths, fairy-tale energy shapes, luminous bubbles, or strange miles of intertwisting lucent tendril vines. South were palaces, museums, thought-cathedrals, living-pools and amnesia wombs. West was the sea, where, in the light of the newly risen sun, Phaethon saw silhouettes of guests in newly altered bodies like his own, shouting with delight, soaring and diving and dancing in the sky, or plunging from high midair into the waves to rise again in glittering spray.

"There are people there flying like me—!"

"News travels quickly. You did tell me to put the information out. What else do you see?"

Phaethon looked not just with his eyes.

On the surface-level of dreamspace, were a million channels open to conversation, music, emotion display, neural stimulation; deeper interfaces beckoned from beyond, synnoetisms, computer synergetics, library organisms and transintellectualisms no unaugmented brain could comprehend.

Below them, in the center of the Celebration grounds (and in the "center" also of the mind-space) was the Aurelian Mansion, like a golden flower, with spires and domes shining in the light of dawn, with a hundred thought paths (in mentality) and four great boulevards (in reality) coming together into Aurelian's city.

"I see Aurelian's House. What point are you trying to make, Rhadamanthus?"

"The cost. I am showing you what you would lose. The cost of opening those old memories is that you would be thrown out."

"Thrown out of the Celebration?!" Phaethon was taken aback. Then he was horrified.

He thought about all the work and hopes, all the long years of preparation which he and so many myriad others had put into this effort to make the Celebration a success. Their host, the Aurelian-mind, had been created just for this occasion

(even as Argentorium, a thousand years ago, had been created for the last Millennial Ball.)

Aurelian was born by a marriage between the Westmind-group, famed for their audacity, and the Archivist, whose nature was more saturnine. The combination of these qualities had already proven inspiring.

One of Aurelian's best effects—audacious, almost cruel— had been to invite both past and future to attend. Phaethon had seen paleopsychological reconstructions, brought to life and self-awareness to gaze in awe at the works their descendants had wrought. With them were personalities constructed from Aurelian's models of many possible futures, inhabitants of fictional worlds set a million or a billion years yet-to-come, strolling with droll smiles amidst what, to them, was past.

Aurelian, at high-compression thinking-speeds, had been studying every possible combination of the guests (and that guest list was large; everyone on Earth had been invited) and all of their possible interactions for 112 years before the January Feast commenced.

Had Aurelian foreseen one of his guests accidentally recovering a buried memory, creating a scene, offending his dear wife, ruining the pageants and plans for the entire Silver-Gray School? Was the tragedy of Phaefhon one which had been engineered for the edification of the other guests, a warning, perhaps, not to inquire too closely into what was better left unknown?

If Phaethon left now, he would miss the Final Transcendence in December. All the art and literature, industry and mental effort for the next thousand years would be established and determined, or, at least, heavily influenced, by the experience of that Transcendence. He would not contribute to it; none of what he had done over the last thousand years would be part of it. And after the culmination of the Transcendence, almost every conversation, every meeting, and every grand affair would be conducted in the shadow of that shared memory.

A memory Phaethon would not have. An experience every-

one but he would share. Phaethon thought about all the jokes he would not get, all the allusions he would not catch, if he missed this. Not to mention the gifts and vastenings he would lose.

After all, why should he create a scene? Couldn't he wait till the party was over to dig up buried unpleasantness? Wouldn't that be more practical, make more sense?

Phaethon stood in midair, frowning, staring down. Like a smaller, second sun, the bright point of what had once been Jupiter rose in the East, casting double shadows across the Aurelian palace grounds underfoot.

Happily, the fanfare of the Jovian Aubade rang from tower to tower. White-plumed birds, all singing gloriously, flew up in flocks from aviaries and the groves, a thunder of wings. The doves carried fruit, or delicacies, or decanters of wine, and they sought out guests who hungered or thirsted.

A white bird flew up, and landed on his shoulder, cooing. The bird was a new species, designed just for the occasion. Phaethon took a crystal of smart-wine. The taste was perfectly conveyed through sensors in his mannequin to the taste glands and pleasure centers of wherever Phaethon's real body and real brain were stored, sound asleep, and safe beyond all danger.

The taste was like summer sunshine itself, and the bouquet changed from moment to moment as tiny assemblers in the liquid combined and recombined the chemical elements even as he lifted the crystal. He sipped in pure delight, and no two sips were the same; each was an individual, not to be repeated. But he shooed the bird away, opened his hand, and dropped the drink unfinished. He made himself feel no regret as it fell away from him.

He dialed his costume from Harlequin to Hamlet. Now he wore bleak, grim, sober colors.

Phaethon said: "If the cost is that I be excluded from this Celebration, I can tolerate that. Somehow, I can. It's only a party, after all. I can pay that cost. It's better that I know the truth."

"Forgive me, young master, but you misunderstand me. You will not be excluded from the Celebration. You will be exiled from your home. Those memories will cast you out of paradise."

THE STORM-SCULPTOR

For a few moments, the Peers debated with calm intent solar evolution and decay, and other events to happen many millions or billions of years in the future.

Helion (who was a devoted antiquarian) knew how his distant ancestors would have been nonplussed to hear sane folk speaking of such remote eventualities; just as ancestors more distant yet, the primitive hunter-gatherers of the Era of the First Mental Structure, who lived from hunt to hunt and hand to mouth, would have been equally perplexed to hear the farmers destined to replace them speaking so casually of harvests and seasons months and years away.

"Why do we need a sun?" Vafnir said. "This is premised on the assumption that we will not find a satisfactory substitute source of energy after the sun is extinguished: a premise I, for one, do not accept without question."

Ao Aoen said airily, "The Silent Oecumene sought a novel source of energy. They had no sun either. You recall, before their Silence fell, what horrors we heard from them."

Vafnir said coldly: "Horrors they brought on themselves. The wisdom of the machine-intelligences could have saved them; they preferred to hate and fear all Sophotechs."

"The vaunted Sophotechs were not wise enough to save the only extrasolar colony of man!"

Helion said patiently: "Peer Ao Aoen recalls, surely, that the Cygnus XI system is a thousand light-years distant; hence the death message was a thousand years outdated by the time we received it."

Ao Aoen said: "For us immortals, the space of time equal to one celebration of our Transcendence. A trifle! Why was no manned expedition ever sent to the dark swan system?"

Gannis, breaking in, said, "Aha! What futility that would be! To spend unimaginable wealth to go pick among ruins and graveyards, cold beneath a black neutron-sun. Gah! The idea has merit only for its ironic pathos!"

Ao Aoen had an odd look to his eyes. "The idea has haunted several dreams of mine these past years, and a quarter-mind brother of mine saw an ominous shape once in the frozen clouds of methane in the liquid atmosphere of Neptune. The horoscopes of several of my cultmates tremble with unintelligible signs! All this points to one conclusion: it has now been shown, beyond doubt, that if a ship of sufficient mass and sufficiently well-armored to achieve near light-speed can be—"

Peer Orpheus raised a thin hand. "Enough! This is irrelevant to our discourse."

Ao Aoen made a wild gesture with his many arms and fingers, and sank back in his chair, sulking.

Orpheus said softly: "We must resign ourselves to fact. Helion is correct about this, and about many matters. Of the visions of the future that the Transcendence will contemplate, one of more conformity, less experimentation, serves both our selfish interests, and, at the same time, supports the public spirit of the College of Hortators. Practical and altruistic minds both have equal cause to fear what leads to war. The College of Hortators and the Conclave of Peers must ally. Helion's insight will form the basis of the next great social movement of the next Millennium. It is the vision the Peers will support."

Helion had to use a mind trick to keep his joy in check. He was astonished; this was a signal honor far beyond anything Rhadamanthus had predicted, far beyond what he'd

dreamed. If his vision of the future was adopted by the Transcendence, then he himself, Helion, would be the central figure whose philosophy would shape society for the next thousand years. His name would be on every tongue, every marriage list, every guest-password file of every party and convocation....

It was dazzling. Helion decided not to record the joy he felt now, for fear that future replays of this wild emotion would dull it.

There would be more talk, of course, and more debate, and each of the Peers would consult with their advisors, or issuing authorities, or (in the case of Ao Aoen) spirit guides. There would be more talk.

But Orpheus had spoken, and the matter was fairly well decided.

Soaring, with clouds above and clouds below, Phaethon let the joy of flight erase his worries for the moment.

He and Rhadamanthus penguin played in mock dogfights, doing snap rolls, barrel rolls, loops.

Phaethon was closing in on the penguin when the fat bird did an Immelmann, toppling over on one wing, and righting itself to flash toward Phaethon, and on past, shouting "Rata-tatatat! Gotcha!"

Phaethon didn't know what the word Ratatatat meant, but it seemed to imply some sort of victory or counting-coup. Phaethon slowed and stood in the air, hands on hips.

"My dear Rhadamanthus, you're surely cheating!" The bird, of course, only existed as an image in Phaethon's sen-sorum.

"By my honor, sir, I'm only doing what a bird this size could do. You can check my math if you wish."

"Aha? And what are you postulating for your acceleration tolerance in those turns?"

"Well, sir, penguins are sturdy birds! When is the last time

you have ever heard of a Sphenisciforme blacking out, eh?"

"Point well taken!" Phaethon spread his arms and fell backward onto a nearby cloud. Mist spilled upward around him as he sank, smiling.

"My wife would love this, wouldn't she? Glorious things attract her—wide vistas, grand emotions, scenes of wonder!"

The cloud got darker around him. On another level of vision, he detected electropotentials building in the area.

"... It's just too bad that we live at a time when everything glorious has already been done for us. The only really impressive things she can ever find are in her dream universes."

"You disapprove?"

"Well... I hate to say it, but... I mean, why can't she write those things? She got an award for one oneiroverse she made up once, a Ptolemaic universe thing, some sort of magic planet. I think there were flying balloons in it, or something." He pursed his lips. "But instead of writing them, she just drifts in and out of other peoples' ideas."

"Sir—excuse me, but I think we're floating into someone's claimed space—"

"Someday I'll do something to awe the world, Rhadaman-thus. Once she sees how impressive the real world can be, she won't be so—"

Through the darkening cloud, a figure in a golden boat, dressed as falcon-headed god character from pre-Ignition Jovian storm-poetry, swam up through the cloud, and made an impatient gesture with his long black pole. He wore ornate robes of white and gold and blue, with a complex helmet-crown. "Sir! I say, Demontdelune!"

"I'm not Demontdelune; this is Hamlet."

"Ah. As you wish. In any case, please move aside; I'm trying to sculpt a thunderstorm here, and your fields are interfering with my nanomachines."

Phaethon looked around him, switching his perception to a finer level, and shutting off his sense-filter. The illusionary penguin vanished, but now Phaethon could see extraordinarily small machines attached to each and every water droplet, generating repulsive and attractive fields, herding them. There

were more nanomachines per cubic inch in this area than he had ever seen before.

Phaethon was severely impressed. This man could control the shape and density of the cloud down to the finest level. By arranging the flows of cloud drops, he could create static, or trigger condensation. "But—this is an extraordinary effort!"

"Quite so—especially since I cannot control the wind. I have to play the cloud like a harp whose billion strings all change in length and pitch from moment to moment. My So-photech can speed my perception of time to a point I need to render the performance—I should begin a minute or so from now, as soon as the winds are right—but, to me, at that time-speed, my performance will seem to last a hundred years."

"Fantastic! What is your name, sir, and why do you make such sacrifices to your art?"

"Call me Vandonnar." This was the name in Jovian poems of the captain of a mining-diver, lost in the clouds, and said to be circling eternally the Great Red Spot Storm, a ghost, so lost that he was unable to find his way to the afterlife. The poem dated from the days when there still was such a Great Red Spot. "My true name I must keep to myself. I fear my friends would disapprove if they knew how much Sophotech time I've spent just for this one storm-song. And Aurelian, our host, has not announced the storm beforehand. Those who don't look up in time to see, or who run inside, will miss the performance, I am not allowing this to be recorded."

"Good heavens, sir, why not?!"

"How else to escape the stifling control of the Sophotechs? Everything is recorded for us here, even our souls. But if this can be played only once, its power is all the greater."

"And yet—forgive for so saying, but without the Sophotechs, you could not possibly do the mathematics to control each raindrop in a storm, or to direct where the lightning will fall!"

"You miss my whole point, Mr. Hamhock."

"Hamlet."

"Whatever. This is a statement of third-order chaos math-

ematics. You see? Even with the finest control in the world, even with the wisest Sophotech, where the lightning strikes next cannot be predicted. Some one ambitious raindrop will brush against its neighbors more boldly than anticipated, irritating them, raising more electric charge than guessed; the threshold is crossed; the electrons ionize; in a single instant the discharge path is determined; crooked or straight; and ful-gration flashes! And all because that one little drop could not keep still....

"Wait! The winds are changing.... Go now, please, while

I can still compensate for your passage through my cloud-----

No, that direction! Go there! Otherwise you tangle my strings!..."

Without a word, Phaethon darted away, swift as a salmon. His clothes were moist with mist as he broke free of the storm-cloud, and nanomachines, thick as dust, stained his shoulders and hair.

Phaethon triggered his sense-filter again. The image of the Penguin reappeared.

"Rhadamanthus, you Sophotechs always deny that you are wise enough to arrange everything we do, to arrange coincidences."

"Our predictions of humanity are limited. There is an uncertainty which creatures with free will create. The Earthmind Herself could not beat you every time in a game of paper-scissors-rock, because your move is based on what you think she might choose for her move: and She cannot predict her own actions in advance perfectly."

"Why not? I thought Earthmind was intelligent beyond measure."

"No matter how great a creature's intelligence, if one is guessing one's own future actions, the past self cannot outwit the future self, because the intelligence of both is equal. The only thing which alters this paradox is morality."

Phaethon was distracted. "Morality?! What an odd thing to say. Why morality?"

"Because when an honest man, a man who keeps his word,

says he will do something in the future, you can be sure he will try."

"So you machines are always preaching about honesty just for selfish reasons. It makes us more predictable, easier to work into a calculation."

"Very selfish—provided you define the word 'selfish' to mean that which most educates, and most perfects the self, making the self just and true and beautiful. Which is, I assume, the way selves want themselves to be, yes?"

"I cannot speak for other selves; I will not be satisfied with anything less than the best Phaethon I can Phaethon."

"My dear boy, are you using yourself as a verb?"

"I'm feeling fairly intransitive at the moment, Rhadamanthus."

"What brought all this odd topic up, Phaethon?"

"I feel as if that meeting—" he nodded toward the storm-cloud growing dark behind them—"As if it were . .. were arranged to give me and me alone a message. I wanted to know if you or Earthmind or someone were behind it."

"Not I. And I cannot predict the Earthmind any more than you."

"Can she arrange coincidences of that magnitude?"

"Well, she could easily have hired that man to ride up and say those things. Good heavens, boy, that could have been Her, in disguise. This is a masquerade, you know. What's the coincidence, though?"

"Because just at that moment, I was thinking of dropping this whole thing, forgetting this whole mystery. I was perfectly happy before I found that there was a hole in my memory; perfectly happy to be who I thought J was. I want to live up to my wife's good opinion of me, to go beyond it, if I can."

"I don't follow you, sir."

Phaethon altered his vision so that the daytime sky, to him, no longer seemed blue but was transparent, as if it were night. He pointed toward the moon.

"My wife told me once she thinks of me every time she looks up at the moon, and sees how much bigger it looks,

these days, from Earth. That was one of my first efforts. More fame than I deserved, perhaps, just because it was close to Earth, right there for everyone to see ...

"She sought me out after that; she wanted me to sit for a portrait she was incorporating for a heroic base-formality dream sculpture. Imagine how flattered I was; having hundreds of students going into simulation to forget themselves awhile and turn into a character based on me! As if I were a hero in a romance. We met on Titania, during my Uranus project. She had sent a doll of herself because she was afraid to travel out of mind-range with the earth. I fell in love with the doll; naturally I had to meet the archetype from which she sprang."

"And?..."

"Well, damn it, Rhadamanthus, you know my mind better than I do; you know what I'm going to say!"

"Perhaps, sir. You actually wanted to be the heroic figure she fell in love with. I suspect you fell in love with the heroic ideal too. To do acts of greatness and wonder! Is that why you suspect the Earthmind had you meet that storm sculptor? To show you that impressive deeds—and I think that that man and his effort certainly were impressive—could still be done here on Earth, with your memory left just as it is? You thought the better part of valor might be contentment? That a true hero is moderate, temperate, and lives within his means? Well, that is by no means an ignoble sentiment...."

Phaethon made a noise of vast disgust. "Ugh! Oh, come now! That's not it at all! I only agreed to take a year off work and come to this frivolous masquerade because my wife told me it might inspire me to decide on my next project. As I was trying to think of what I could do that was impressive, I began to wonder if the act of uncovering some old crime or misdeed of mine might not interfere with that? If so, this little mystery is just a distraction, so I should forget it. But then I met that foolish man, and I realized what real distraction is. Finding the truth about myself is not distraction; I have to know all about me before I can decide how I can best be used

for my purposes. Real distraction is doing the kind of work he does!"

The penguin looked back toward the dark cloud, now far behind them. A rumble of thunder sounded, like the flourish of a trumpet before a battle.

"I don't understand. What's so wrong with his work?"

"Not recording what he does?! Perhaps its good enough for him. I want my accomplishments to be permanent! Permanent!"

Phaethon did not pay attention to the gathering storm behind him. Instead, from his high vantage, he looked back and forth across the wide view below, gardens and forests, mountains and mansions, turning his sense-filter on and off, off and on.

"There it is."

"There what is, sir?"

"Something I wasn't supposed to see." One of the things his sense-filter had been programmed to block out. "I wonder what is down there?"

On the wide horizon far behind, with a dazzle of blue lightning, and with curtains of gray water softening the colors below, a magnificent storm began, wonderful to see by daylight, it would be a storm like no other before or since; but Phaethon did not spare a glance for it.

Phaethon flew swiftly toward the east.

In a short time, he traveled through the air till he was above an object which, with his sense-filter up, was blotted from his perception.

It was a very large object. It was a mountain. It was flat-topped like a mesa, and had been constructed by applications of artificial volcanic forces. In the center of the tableland, a crater lake fifty miles across or more gleamed with strange lights.

Phaethon slanted down through the air to land on the lawns at the lakeside. Not far away, tables and chair shapes grown

out of living wood were scattered across the fragrant lawn. Here were parasols, water fountains, nightstands holding sobering-helmets, formulation rods holding ornaments of dreams, staging pools, and deep-interfaces shaped like covered wells. A cluster of guests had gathered, resplendent in the costumes of a thousand ages and nations. Waiters dressed as Oberonid Resumptionists, like walking statues of blue ice, circulated with trays of drink, thought boxes, remembrance chips, and sprays. Slender waitresses dressed like Martian Highlander Canal-Dryads passed out librettos and seeing-rings.

A waitress swayed over to him and offered him the seeing-ring, used to translate the performance into a format suited to his neuroform. She smiled and curtseyed.

Another figure—either imaginary or real, Phaethon could not determine—dressed as a master of ceremonies, bedecked with ribbons and carrying a long senechal's wand, approached with soft steps across the grass, and, bowing, doffed his cap toward Phaethon, and asked if he wished to contribute.

Phaethon reacted to the signal asking for donations to the performance by opening his mask on one level, and allowing his degree of appreciation to be recorded. A standardized estimator deducted money from his account proportional to that appreciation. He politely added his name to the collection, so that the ecoperformer would discover whose appreciation she had earned.

Phaethon turned to stare in fascination at the lake. Clouds of steam moved across its wide surface; concentric rings of agitation spread across the waters; at these places, knots of bubbling froth fought with jets of flame.

Beneath the water was a forest fire. Something that looked like trees of coral, widely spaced in little circular groves, grew in the cool depths along the lake bed. They changed and shifted like phantoms in a colored dream; bubbles of fire trembled along their limbs.

Meanwhile, Rhadamanthus's penguin image had unfolded into a portly gentleman in Elizabethan garments of white, purple, and rose, puff sleeved and dazzled with ribbons and

flounces. A wide lace collar surrounded a round red face with many chins. He wore a square cap of black felt too large for his head, weighted with ornamental knobs at each corner. A chain of office and a medallion hung over his chest.

Seeing Phaethon's eyes on him, Rhadamanthus smiled an avuncular smile, and creases folded his pudgy jowls. "You are not surprised, I hope. I wanted to fit in with your theme. So here I am!"

"Penguins don't normally turn into fat little men. What happened to your respect for our tradition of realism?"

"Ah, but at a masquerade, who can say what is real? Even Silver-Gray standards are relaxed." So saying, Rhadamanthus donned a domino mask, and his identity response was disabled.

Phaethon stepped one further step into mentality, going from Nearreality to Hypertextual, what was sometimes called the Middle Dreaming level. The filter leading into his direct memory was removed. Everything around him suddenly was charged with additional significance; some objects and icons disappeared from view, others appeared. The sound of a thousand voices, singing in chorus, thundered from the lake bottom, splendid and astonishing, surging in time with the flames. Phaethon felt the music tremble in his bones.

When he glanced at the guests, the meanings attached to their various costumes and appearance were thrust into his brain.

He recognized the gown of Queen Semiramis shining on a strikingly beautiful olive-skinned woman, and the histories of tragic Assyrian wars, and the triumph of the founding of Babylon ran through him.

She was speaking with an entity dressed as a cluster of wide-spread energy bubbles. This costume represented En-ghathrathrion's dream version of the famous First-Harmony Composition Configuration just before it woke to self-awareness, bringing the dawn of the Fourth Mental Structure. Phaethon had never experienced that dream poet's famous cybernativity sonnet-interface cycles before; now he was recalling them as if he had been familiar with them for years.

Beyond them, a group of vulture-headed individuals were dressed in the dull leathery life-armor of the Bellipotent Composition, with Warlock-killing gear. These weapons dated from a few years before the end of the Eon-Long Peace, which ended when the First New War began, during the age of horrors that introduced the Fifth Mental Structure. But Phaethon saw anachronism, since the Bellipotent Composition was not composed until ninety years after the anti-Warlock weapons had been superseded by far deadlier arrangements.

Some of the vulture-headed individuals in the costume tried to keep their voices and gestures in the uniform rhythm for which the Bellipotent group-mind was famous, but others broke up laughing, and the broken mind segments had to be fitted back into the pretend-overmind.

The leader of this group was dressed in a bear pelt and carried a club shaped from an antelope's thighbone; he had a ghastly triple scar burned into his forehead. Phaethon, upon seeing him, knew that this was Cain from Judeo-Christian mythology, a figure in a play by Byron. Another anachronism, but correct as a symbol. The role of the Bellipotent Composition in ending the idyllic and universal peace of the Fourth Mental Structure may have been exaggerated by some historians; but his-their identity as the reinventors of murder made them apt companions for Cain.

With them was a figure whose meaning was still masked. He wore a ship-suit of symbiotic living black and super-adamantine gold, was dark haired, harsh faced, and he carried a small star in one hand instead of a weapon. His helmet was an absurd-looking bullet-shaped affair with a needle crown, like the prow of an aircraft, made of gleaming golden ad-mantium. When Phaethon signaled for identification, the response was "Disguised as a certain rash manorial with whom we are all far too familiar!"

In the middle of Helion's joy, only one false note rang.

Wheel-of-Life sent him a private signal by having one of her pigeons, which only contained a very small part of Wheel-of-Life's mind, land on his mannequin's lap and initiate a quiet interface.

"Helion will weep to hear that Phaethon is gone from his place. Phaethon beholds the drowned garden of my sister, Green-Mother, to watch the life and dying there. This was one of the things Phaethon agreed not to see, not to remember, was it not?"

Helion could not leave the Conclave, but, with another independent section of his mind, he opened a channel and sent out a message, encrypted and perhaps undetected: "Daphne! Wake! Wake up from the insubstantial dream you deem to be your life. Your husband, like a moth to flame, draws ever closer to a truth which will consume him. Open your casket of memories; remember who you are, remember your instructions. Find Phaethon, deceive him, allure him, distract him, stop him. Save him.—And save us from him."

For a moment, he felt the grief and sorrow any father might feel, hearing that his son was on the verge of self-destruction. But then he remembered his part in all of this, and a sense of shame made all the crystal-clear certainties in his heart seem cloudy.

Despite that, he sent an emphasis appended to the first message: "Daphne, from the doom he will bring on himself, I beg of you, preserve my son."

Phaethon turned toward Rhadamanthus to ask a question, but smiled instead, ignoring what he had been about to ask, because now he recognized Rhadamanthus's costume. The iden-

tification channel thrust the knowledge silently into Phaethon's brain: Polonius, a character from the revenge-play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon, realistic-simulation linear-progression author, circa Second Mental Structure.

There was also a recital of the play, a working knowledge of the English language, and notes and memories on the lives of various peoples reconstructed from Queen Elizabeth's court, enough to allow anyone glancing at Rhadamanthus to appreciate the humor, the allusions, and the references in the play.

"Oh, very amusing," said Phaethon, "I suppose this means you're going to give me advice which I'll ignore?"

Rhadamanthus handed him a skull. "Just don't kill me by accident."

"Don't hide behind any tapestries." Phaethon glanced down at the skull. "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of excellent fancy..." He looked up again. "I never quite understood this play. Why didn't they resurrect Yorick out of his recordings, if he was so well-liked?"

"The noumenal recording technology was not developed until the end of the Sixth Mental Structure Era, young master."

"But Hamlet's father had a recording. It came up as a projection on the battlements...."

They were interrupted by a blare of trumpets, sounding from the center of the lake waters. The organisms at the lake bottom had entered a higher and grander growth phase, and, like the horns of a kraken, branches of the flaming coral began rising above the boiling surface.

"What is it we are here to see, young master?"

"Whatever it is they don't want me to see."

"But I can replace your stored memories at your command, sir."

"And exile me from my home. No, thank you. But if I wander around the border of an area I cannot enter, I might learn the size and shape of the boundaries...."

And he stepped one step deeper into mentality, into the condition called Penultimate Dreaming.

An ecoperformance was meant, by its very nature, to be understood by people with Cerebelline neural structures. The whole challenge of this art form was to produce a complex system of interactions—an ecology—which would appear beautiful from every point of view of each acting element simultaneously, but would also be, taken as a whole, sublime. Usually, in living ecologies, the beauty was tragic from the point of view of starving predators or fleeing prey, but tran-scendentally beautiful, not tragic at all, viewed globally.

In the Penultimate Dreaming, Phaethon's brain was rocked by sensations radiating from the strange creations growing along the lake. He was seeing not a lake but a universe. The lives and memories of the myriad creatures swarming there came into him like a thousand strands of music, predator and prey, complex as a kaleidoscope, a pattern too dazzling to grasp. He was, at once, one and all of the darting shelled creatures forming an interlocking colony; and also each one of a hive-group wrapping around those shells; and also the scavenger-hooks who competed for dropped hive husks; and the refashioners who brought recycled energy from the scavengers back, in another form, to the shell beds.

The Cerebelline Life-mistress who constructed these microforms had outdone herself. There were a thousand variations, each beautiful with weird beauty, but small, very small. She had invented a new way of coding genetic material, like DNA, but containing eighty-one chemical compounds, instead of the four classic amino acids. Complex genetic information could be compressed into very small cells, as small as viral cells, and complex forms of life were swarming and multiplying along the coral arms at a size that usually only simple protozoa used. The speed of their growth and decay was so high, their atoms combining and recombining so quickly, that

the waste-heat was boiling the lake water. The initial high energy to start these reactions came from widely scattered pebbles of special living crystal.

The coral trees that sprang out from these !ife-pebbles were made up of thousands and millions of individuals, each one contributing to and being fed by the whole structure. The branches and limbs of coral seemed rigid only because each microform who darted away left chemical energy behind which only microforms who took up that exact position in the hierarchy, the same place and stance and posture, could fully enjoy. Like a spinning wheel seeming to form a solid disk, the illusion of stability was caused by the continuous effort of each part in motion.

Surrounding each coral tree was a very wide area of desolation, which the microforms could not cross. Each coral tree was centered only on its life-pebble, and all parts operated in magnificent harmony.

But only in isolation was the tree structure symbiotic. While a mother tree could send seeds to start other trees, these new daughter trees could not reach all the way across the desolation to rejoin the mother tree in a peaceful symbiosis.

At the point in the performance when Phaethon joined it, the greatest tree growing from the oldest life-pebble had just learned how to carry water to higher parts, and was lifting shining branches into the air.

This eldest tree had discovered how to use steam pressure through its capillaries to fling seeds through the air. The seeds skipped like tossed stones across the lake surface, passing the desolate zones, and sank into rich lake-bottom soils near other life-pebbles, there to start tree-organisms of their own.

This eldest tree, once it had colonized the immediate circle of closest life-pebbles, flung a second wave of seed-colonists, which, competing with the daughter trees that had grown up from the first wave, made the water boil with an intense and deadly competition.

In order to avoid further destructive competition, the central eldest tree now tried to grow to higher and higher branches, in order to fling its seeds farther. The base of the

structure complained; signals flashed like fire among the swarming microforms; the warnings were ignored.

In a slow and terrifying crash, the central tree collapsed under its own weight. A plume of steam, like a ghost, swelled up over the lake surface.

Phaethon, who had a base-neuroform, could only understand part of what he was seeing. The symmetries, the timings, the nuances, were forever beyond him. He could follow the life experience of a few of the struggling microforms as they poured into his brain, but only one after another. The meaning of the whole was never clear.

This was not to say he was not stirred by the beauty of what he saw. A blind man listening to an opera might not see the pageantry of the sets and costumes, but the music could profoundly move him, even if the language was strange.

Phaethon glanced back up into Middle Dreaming, turned toward the nearest waitress and signaled for a libretto. Smiling, the Canal Dryad looked toward him, paused, and knelt gracefully to pick up a seeing-ring the wind had blown from her tray. She straightened again, tucked her hair behind her ear, came toward him, and proffered the card containing the libretto.

Many men found Martian Dryads quite attractive; they had the deep chests required by the thin air Mars had once had (Dryads dated from the middle of the Second Terraforming Interrum), and a long-legged delicacy lesser Martian gravity permitted. And they did not have the rough hide of a south-hemisphere drylander. But they were not usually clumsy or shy. Why had the waitress paused?

Phaethon deactivated his sense-filter and saw a man dressed as an Astronomer from First-Century Porphyrogen Cosmic Observatory at 500 AUs, of the Undeterred Observationer School, a Scholum now defunct. It had been a period of hardship, before the construction of the artificial ice-planetoid, and

the costume reflected the hardness of those times. He had thick radiation-proof skin, with the internal recyclers and extra layers of fat that allowed him to stand long watches without taking air or water from the common stores. His face was disfigured with multiple eye-jacks, plugs, and extensions, as the Observationers of that period could not afford to abide by the Consensus Aesthetic.

The waitress must have paused to hand a libretto to the Observationer, a man Phaethon's sense-filter had censored from view. The filter could not let him see her hand the card to nobody, and so had invented an action for her to do. Her dropping and stooping and picking up was mere waste motion to account for the missing time.

Phaethon recalled that his sense-filter had been programmed to keep hidden from him a certain disaster in near-Mercury space, brought on solar storms. If the man costumed as an ancient astronomer were an astronomer in truth, he may have ready access to a channel or an index containing information.

Phaethon took the libretto but only pretended to study it as he stepped toward the man. The astronomer was watching the burning collapse of the supertree with several eyes.

Phaethon said, "The life-artist creates a scene of grim disaster."

Phaethon detected signal actions on Channel 760, the translation matrix. There was a moment while the man adjusted to Phaethon's language forms, downloading grammars and vocabularies into himself.

"Truly said," the man replied with a smile. "Though not so grim, I think, as Demontdelune's final hours on the Moon's far side."

Phaethon did not bother to explain he was dressed as Hamlet. He said, "Life can be grim, even these days. Consider the disaster near Mercury."

"The solar storm? A moral lesson for all of us."

"Oh? How so?"

"Well, we'd like to think the Sophotechs can predict all coming disasters, warn, and protect us. But in this case, very

minor, perhaps subatomic, variations in the solar core conditions caused the forces to escape Helion's control during one of his agitation runs. Very minor differences between the initial conditions and the predictive model led to disproportionate results; sunspots and solar prominences of truly unusual size and violence erupted all across the affected fields. Joachim Dekasepton Irem has made a rather nice study of the irregular flare patterns, and set the effect to music on channel 880. Have you seen it?"

"I have not," said Phaethon. He did not explain that his sense-filter, on its present setting, would prevent him from viewing any such thing. "But I am given to understand that he ... ah ... portrays certain of the details, ahh ..."

"Inaccurately?" asked the man.

"Perhaps that's the word I'm looking for, yes."

"Well, it's an understatement! Large segments of Helion's sun-taming array wrecked! Interplanetary communications disturbed by the sunspot bursts! And Helion, staying behind, still in the depth of the sun, to try to prevent worse disasters! Much of the collection equipment, orbital stations, and other materials near Mercury was saved only because of Helion's last-ditch effort to restore the magnetic curtains to operation, and to deflect some of the heavier high-speed particles erupting from the sun away from inhabited zones. Great Helion proved his worth a million times and more that hour, I tell you! And to make such a sacrifice for that worthless scion of his house! I wonder at the gall of the Curia! Is there no gratitude left at all in the courts of law? They should just leave Helion alone! But, at least, the Six Peers (well, I suppose they are the Seven Peers now) had the good sense to reward Helion's valor with a Peerage."

"His valor?..."

"Helion stayed when the others fled. The Sophotech's delicate on-board circuitry had broken down; the other members of the Solar crew transmitted their noumenal information, minds and souls and all, out to Mercury Polar Station. Helion did not; the signal time between Mercury and the sun was too far to allow him to guide matters by means of any remote

service. Helion rode the star-storm till he broke its back, then transmitted his brain information out at the last minute, despite the static and the garbled signal!

"Helion predicted that control of internal solar conditions would be an absolute necessity for an interplanetary society like ours. The Sophotechs, for all their wisdom, can't make a way to transmit information from world to world except by radio. They can't invent another electromagnetic spectrum, now, can they? And, for so long as the Golden Oecumene is connected by electromagnetic signals, we will need to moderate the solar output into a steady, even, and predictable background.

"Who listened to Helion when he first said this, so many thousands of years ago? They all mocked him then.

"Well, they won't mock now! Whatever happens during the Final Transcendence, I know my segment of the world-soul will pay close attention to what Helion envisions!"

"I feel much the same way," admitted Phaethon. "Though I have heard that, the same desire to control the uncontrollable which is so to be admired in an Engineer, in Helion's domestic life, makes him somewhat of a tyrant and a bully."

"Nonsense! Slander! Great men always have these envious flies and gnat bites to contend with."

"Even the greatest men can have flaws; even the worse villains can have small virtues. What do you think of Helion's scion, Phaethon?"

"Ah! You see how this performance is a criticism of his work and life."

Phaethon blinked toward the boiling lake, the flash and motion of lights beneath the waters. "Some parts of the analogy are more obscure than others. ..."

"Not so! Phaethon is madman who plans to destroy us all! Who could not be astonished by the bizarre selfishness of Phaethon's scheme? Does the Silence teach us nothing?"

Phaethon, utterly mystified, nonetheless nodded sagely. "An interesting point. But some people have said one thing

and some have said another. Which part of what he has done do you find to be the most reprehensible?"

"Well, now, I can't believe the boy really means to do evil—maybe what you say about villains having a good side has some merit here—but he really should not have—Ah! Wait! I think I see friends signaling to me. Yoo-hoo! Over here! Excuse me, it was a pleasure to talk to you, Demont-delune, or whoever you are. My friends and I are Orthom-nemocists, and our discipline requires that we neither edit nor replay old memories nor take on new ones; so if we miss the climax of the performance now, we will have no chance to see it. With your permission?"

"Of course. But perhaps you could reveal your true identity, so that we could find each other and talk later; I found your comments most stimulating. ..."

"Ah, but this is a masquerade! I might not have been so bold in my opinions if I knew who I was talking to, eh, what?"

The man was hinting that he wanted Phaethon to take off his mask first. Phaethon was loath to do so, for obvious reasons. So, with a sinking sensation in his stomach, Phaethon exchanged meaningless pleasantries with the man, and watched him walk away.

"Damn," he muttered, and looked down at the libretto card. He expected an explanation and commentary on the ecoper-formance. But the card was blank. He had to turn his sense-filter back on to see the symbols and events of Middle Dreaming. Now when he looked at the card it was the same as looking at the costumes of the guests, and an explanation flowed into his brain.

The Cerebelline artist here was trying to demonstrate an example from game-theory mathematics concerning the stability of ecological and economic systems, and the inevitability of conflict.

A criticism of his work? Had Phaethon been involved in some project involving abstract mathematics? Economics? Biotechnology? He could only wonder.

He turned his attention from the libretto, and looked up in time to see the finale of the supertree's death.

The microforms of that tree, having adapted too well to the complexity of the tree hierarchy, now crumbled into the water. Overspecialized, unable to readapt to the primitive circumstance of the treeless existence, they perished horribly.

Phaethon was mildly puzzled and faintly disgusted by the finale of the sequence. He had expected the central tree to fall, but then to rise again as the forces of evolution compelled a new series of adaptations. And why hadn't the factors favoring symbiosis within the trees also operated to favor symbiosis, or, at least, cooperation, between the trees? Any two trees that discovered how, despite the desolation between them, to exchange mutually scarce resources would have mutually benefited; such cooperation was common in nature.

Instead, the epilogue of death led to a new sequence of violent events: other tree organisms now began to fling colony-seeds skipping across the boiling lake surface to claim the abandoned center territory; their conflicts grew in wild fury. As each tree became more daring and more bent on success, the heat of its chemical reactions increased. Very, very slowly, the level of the lake water was dropping, boiling away from the very reactions which created short-term success. The life-pebbles near the shore would eventually be exposed, rendered useless, as the water level dropped, which would no doubt lead to additional excesses on the part of the warring trees, producing more waste-heat. The additional waste-heat increased the evaporation of the lake.

Phaethon studied the libretto reading the mathematics, background information, the statements of purpose. Everything was written in such vague terms that there was no guessing what Phaethon's "work" had been that this was supposed to criticize. On the other hand, the astronomer could

have been mistaken, and nothing about Phaethon had been included here at all.

In any case, Phaethon could see no point in the death of the burning trees. It merely struck him as ugly and pessimistic. If what he had done had been the opposite of this, perhaps he had not been such a bad fellow after all.

He stepped back into Surface Dreaming, to find an image of fat Polonius standing next to him.

"I don't see anything here worth seeing," said Phaethon. "And I certainly don't see what they didn't want me to see. Whoever 'they' are."

"Define 'they,' " asked Rhadamanthus, quirking an eyebrow.

"I never would have 'volunteered' for memory redactions unless some pressure were brought to bear by someone. That someone is 'they.' "

"So you no longer think you committed a crime?"

"Why do you pretend you don't know? You know exactly what happened. So why ask rhetorical questions?"

"Why ask rhetorical questions indeed? But the part of me who talks to you does not know, young sir, nor will I be allowed to know, the substance of the forgotten material, till you know yourself. The other part of me, that part which does know, is not allowed, by any sign or signal, not by a hint, or expression, or even a pregnant pause of silence, to communicate the forbidden knowledge. My orders are clear." He shrugged. "In the meantime, of course, this version of me can remain on good terms with you, and make such comments as any reasonably intelligent superintelligence could make, eh?"

"So you're dropping a hint. If there is a signal or a trigger which will tell you if I recover the forbidden memories, there may be triggers to signal other people too, eh? The question is, when are those triggers activated? When I think about going back for my stolen memories? When I talk about it? Let's see what jumps if I get close."

"How close, young sir?"

"Let me see the memories. I want to get close enough to smell them."

"Phrase that as an order, and I have no proper choice but to obey."

"Open memory archives, please."

"Come, then, young master, if you are so bold. Step deeper into the mentality. Beyond the Middle Dreaming, even Silver-Gray thoughtspace does not necessarily reflect the analogous real surroundings with perfect accuracy. I can make a short way back to your mansion."

Phaethon wandered across the lawn and away from the performance. Not far away was a pleasure ground where guests were arriving or activating. A group of Stratospherians had folded their flying prosthetics like umbrellas, and hung them from the branches of a Nexus oak. Gathered at the roots of the oak were several staging pools.

Phaethon stepped and sank into the liquid. Swarms of tiny machines, smaller than pinpoints, gathered around him, drew carbon out of the water, and solidified it into a protective diamond shell.

He seemed to himself to rise again. When he rose, he was in pure dreamscape, his mannequin left behind] among other sleeping forms, all diamond-shelled at the bottom of the pool.

Rhadamanthus bore an expression of unearthly serenity; he gestured with majestic slowness to the East. Among the clouds beyond the edge of the mountain, Phaethon now saw hints of towers and windows rising above the trees. It was strange, but it was not quite a violation of visual continuity.

Phaethon walked. He passed through a stand of trees and found the mansion was much closer than it had first appeared.

At the end of the path was a portico. Columns of gray, dappled marble held up a porch roof shingled with silver plaques; the Rhadamanthine emblem was carved into the entablature. With the sound of a gong, the tall main doors opened.

THE CHAMBER OF MEMORIES

Phaethon stood, or seemed to stand, in his Chamber of Memory, a casket of recollection hesitating in his hand. A legend ran in letters of gold across the casket lid:

"Sorrow, great sorrow, and deeds of renown without peer, within me sleep; for truth is here. Truth destroys the worst in man; pleasure destroys the best. If you love truth more than happiness, then open; otherwise, let rest."

His curiosity grew. Phaethon turned the key, but he did not open the lid.

Fire flashed on the casket lid. Letters as red as blood appeared:

"WARNING! The following contains mnemonic templates that may affect your present personality, persona, or consciousness. Are you sure you wish to proceed? (Remove key to cancel.)"

Phaethon stood for long time without moving, staring out the windows.

Outside, the architecture and every appearance was authentically Victorian English, dating from the era of the Second Mental Structure, or early period Third.

The windows were peaked arches, set with diamond-shaped panes. Framed in the western window rose the mountains of Wales, cherry red and ethereal against the purple dusk, crowned with the light of the setting sun. Phaethon could see, from the windows opposite, a pale full moon rising, dim as

a ghost in the twilight, floating in the deep evening blue.

In the dreamspace of the Rhadamanthus Mansion, the sun always set in the West, and there was only one. The moon showed no city lights nor garden glass; but, proper to this period, was still a gray, dead world. Outside the windows, every detail of perspective, proportion, and consistency was correct. Each tree leaf and blade of grass cast its shadow at the proper angle, and the play of light and shadow was just as it should have been. The computer model determining the look and texture and color went down to the molecular level of detail.

If he had gone down to the garden and plucked a single leaf from the rosebushes there, that leaf would still be gone at his next visit; if it blew away on the wind, the computer would simulate its path; if it rotted into the mold, the extra weight and consistency of the soil would be measured and accounted for. This was the realistic accuracy for which the mansions of the Silver-Gray School were famous.

The memory chamber was in deep dreamspace. It was as real, and as unreal, as everything else in Rhadamanthus Mansion.

To be sure, somewhere, in reality, there must have been a real housing for the mansion's self-aware sophotechnology; a power supply, cables, neural conduits, computer laminae, in-formata, decision-action boxes, thought nodes, and so on. Somewhere was the real, physical interface machinery that fed carefully controlled patterns of electrons into circuitry actually woven into Phaethon's real auditory and visual nerves, his hypothalamus, thalamus, and cortex.

And somewhere, presumably, in the real world, was his real body.

His real self. But what was his real self?

Phaethon spoke aloud: "Rhadamanthus, tell me."

"Sir?"

"Was I a better man ... back before?"

The Polonius-shape here was replaced by a Victorian-era butler in a stiff-collared black coat showing a double row of well-polished silver buttons. The butler was red-faced,

slightly portly. His chin was clean-shaven, but the handlebar mustache led to enormous muttonchop sideburns, whiskers reaching right and left halfway to his shoulders.

The butler image stood in the doorframe, a white-painted narrow stair curving away behind him, but he did not, or could not, enter the room.

Rhadamanthus spoke in a kindly voice, roughened by a slight Irish brogue. "In many ways, aye, that you were, young master."

"And was I happier... then? ..."

"Indeed you were not."

"Unhappiness in the golden age? In this pure, unsullied Arcadia? How can this be?"

"You did not think our age so perfect then, young master; and it was something else, not happiness, you sought."

"What did I seek?" (But he knew. The words on the casket said it. Deeds of renown without peer.)

"You know I cannot say. You yourself gave the order which silences me." The butler bowed slightly, smiling without mirth, eyes grave. "But the answer lies within the casket you hold."

Phaethon looked at the words on the lid. He tried to make himself feel doubt. Deeds of renown without peer. In this golden age, there was nothing men could do that machines could not do better. So why did this phrase send a chill of pleasure down his spine?

He looked left and right. On shelves and in glass cabinets surrounding him were other memories. But the other memory boxes, caskets, and chests in the Archive Chamber surrounding him all were clearly labeled, marked, and dated. They bore no cryptic riddles.

And they carried seals or affidavits from the Rhadamanthus Law-mind to affirm that the redacted memories had been taken from him with his own informed consent, not to escape some legal debt or obligation, nor for some other unworthy purpose. Most of the boxes bore the green seal of memories saved from his thirty centuries of life, edited out from his organic brain merely to save space and prevent senility over-

load. Others bore the blue seal of a minor oath or voluntary obligation, either thought-work whose copyrights he had sold to another, or else some argument or lover's spat that he and his wife had both agreed to forget.

None of them dangerous. None of them ominous.

"Rhadamanthus, why does this box not say what is in it?"

He heard footsteps, light and quick, tapping up the stairs behind Rhadamanthus.

He turned just as a dark-haired woman with vivid features stepped past Rhadamanthus and into the room. She was wearing a long black coat with a ruffle of lace at her throat, and in one hand she carried her mask like a lorgnette.

She had eyes of luminous, dancing green, which blazed, perhaps with mirth, perhaps with fear or ire, as she called:

"Phaethon! Drop the box! You don't know where it's been!"

Phaethon removed the key, so that the red letters faded, but he kept the box in his hand. "Hello, dear. Who are you supposed to be?"

"Ao Enwir the Delusionist. See?" Throwing back her head, she held open a flap of her coat to display her pinch-waisted vest, spiderwebbed with Warlock signs and studded with re-sponders. The masculine cut of the garment had been rounded somewhat to accommodate her. Only her shoes were feminine; a projection or spike from the heel forced her to walk tiptoed.

"Enwir was a man."

Her head nodded forward with a sway of hair. "Only when he wrote his Discourses. He arranged the March of Ten Figments as a woman. Are you supposed to be Demontdelune?"

"Shakespeare's Hamlet."

"Oh."

A silence hung in the air for a moment.

Unlike other women he knew, his wife did not change body shapes or styles when fashions changed. She had kept the same face for centuries: fine-boned, small of chin, wide of brow. Her skin was a lustrous golden brown; her hair was black and shining as jet, and fell just past her shoulders.

But her personality was displayed in the glitter and motion in her wide and flashing eyes, mischievous or dreamy by turns. Her lips were a trifle wide, and her mouth quirked from moment to moment impish grins, solemn dryad pouts, or sensual nymphic smiles, one after another in restless succession.

Now her face was still and calm, except for the skeptical twitch that raised one eyebrow.

Then she shrugged and waved her mask at Phaethon's casket. "And just what in the world did you imagine you were thinking you were doing?"

"I was curious...."

"Let's just call you Mr. Pandora from now on!" She sniffed and tossed her hair and rolled her eyes to heaven. "Didn't fat Rhadamanthus here warn you that you'll get tossed out like wet garbage if you open those old memories?"

Rhadamanthus in the doorway muttered, "Mm. I don't think I used quite that wording, mistress...."

Phaethon hefted the casket thoughtfully, pursed his lips.

His wife took a step forward, saying, "I don't like that look on your face, lover. You're thinking rash, rash thoughts!"

Phaethon's eyes narrowed. "I'm just wondering why, when I beat the bush to flush out whoever was behind my amnesia, I got you...."

She put her little fists on her hips and stared up at him, her mouth a red O of outrage. "Suspicious of me, are you now?! Well, I like that! You're the one who wanted me to keep you away from the casket! Just see if I do you any favors anymore!" And, arms folded across her breast, she tossed her head angrily, making an exasperated noise in her nose: "Hmph!"

"What I want to know," said Phaethon, a little impatiently, "Is how long you were going to let me live my life without telling me my life is false? How long were you going to lead me around blindfolded?"

She stamped her foot. "False?! And you think I'd just live with a copy of my own husband? If you love someone, real love, you can't love their copy." But she could not hide a

strange look of guilt and uncertainty that crossed her features at that moment.

Phaethon's voice was grim and remote: "Is my love real? Or was that a false memory too?"

"You're the same as you were before; nothing important is in that damn box!" She turned to face Rhadamanthus. "Tell him!"

Rhadamanthus said, "No false memories were added. Your personality has undergone no major change; your basic values and attitudes are the same; the memories which that casket-icon represents are surface-structure memories only."

Phaethon shook the box toward her. "That's not the point!"

"Well, what is the point?" she asked challengingly.

"What's in this box? You know and I don't. You were never going to tell me?"

"You know! Exile and dispossession are in that box! Isn't that enough for you? Isn't anything ever enough? You open that box and you lose me. Isn't that enough?"

"Lose? ... You wouldn't come with me? Into exile?"

"N—uh. Are you asking me? Do you want me to come? No! That's a stupid idea! What would we live on?"

"Well—" Phaethon blinked. "I was assuming they would let me take my own property, or that I could sell or convert some of my holdings, to ..."

Now Daphne's face grew quiet and still as a winter pond. She spoke softly, "Lover, you don't have any holdings. You sold them all. The two of us are living on Helion's charity. We're only staying here because he hasn't thrown us out."

"What are you saying? I'm one of the richest men in the Oecumene."

"Were, honey. You were."

Phaethon looked at Rhadamanthus, who nodded sadly.

Phaethon said, "What about my work?! For three thousand years, I've been alive, and I was not idle all that time. I remember my apprenticeships, and the memory grafts to learn terrestrial and transcendental finances; engineering, philosophy, persuasion, and thought-craft. My effort helped fix the new orbit of the moon; that was one of my first! When Helion

opened a project on Oberon, no one but me was willing to go to Uranus! I condoned the studies of ring-city orbital mechanics, and made the simulation for the project to put a ring-city around the equator of the Sun! That study led to the present Solar Array! And then I... then I..."

His face went blank.

He said, "What did I do between Epoch 10165 and 9915? That's a two-hundred-fifty-year gap."

No one spoke.

Phaethon said: "Funny. I remember the news and the gossip. Epoch 10135. That was the year when the Meta-mathematical Supercomposition came out of its meditation, and announced the solution to the Ouryinyang's Information Compression Paradox. I remember other things. But not what I did. I was living in my high castle called Aloofness, at Mercury L-5 equilateral, a home I carved myself out of an unclaimed asteroid, thrown in-system by the Neptunians. I had twelve hundred square miles of solar converters, like the sails of a clipper ship, drinking in the sun. Tremendous energy. But what was I doing with my life then? I was too far away from Earth to maintain a telepresence or a mannequin. Was I retired from the Silver-Gray? I wasn't poor then."

Phaeton's eyes shifted back and forth, looking at nothing.

"And what did I do between 10050 and 10200 during the entire First and Second Reconsiderations? Everyone remembers where they were standing or what they were doing when Jupiter Ignited. That was in Epoch 7143, right after my centennial. Or when they heard the first song from Ao Ainur, the Lament for the Black Swans, in 10149. Everyone, but not I. Why would that have been chosen for erasure, not the events but my reactions to them? Where was I standing? What was I doing? Is that information in this box, too? How much of my life did you take?!"

The blankness in his face grew even more hollow. "Daphne ... Why don't we have any children? ... I do not remember the reason why we decided that. The most important decision any couple can have, whether or not to start a family. And I don't remember it. My life was erased."

Silence lay like a stone.

"Darling—I just want you to listen to me—" Daphne leaned forward. Her face was frozen; her eyes were staring at the box as if it were a poisonous import sheet, ready to download some deadly virus. "Don't do anything rash— you're just the same as you ever were—you're still the man I was born to love and marry—there's nothing in that box you need—"

Phaethon's hand tightened on the lid. But he said, "Rhad-amanthus, can we freeze this scene? I need time to think."

Everything in the chamber froze in place. All sound was hushed. Not a dust mote falling through the light from the window changed position.

The voice of Rhadamanthus came directly into his brain: "You will have to log entirely off the system, so as not to prejudice Mistress Daphne or any other users. Log back on when you wish to resume."

Phaethon made the gesture of ending, and the world disappeared.

THE ARMOR

Phaethon was surprised to find himself in blank thought-space. His self-image was gone; his body was nothing but a pair of floating gloves, here. In front of him was a spiral wheel shape made of points of light. To his left and right were red and blue icon cubes, representing basic routines; engineering, mathematics, ballistics, environmental sciences. A half-dozen black slabs, like shields, represented security, anti-intrusion and privacy-guarding routines. There was a yellow disk-shaped icon representing communication circuits.

And that was all. Was this Phaethon's innermost thinking area? If so, he certainly did not coddle himself.

The barren emptiness was oppressive. And it certainly ignored Silver-Gray traditions of detailed utter realism. There wasn't even a "wallpaper" image here—no room, no desktop.

Phaethon had his glove jab the yellow disk. A blood red disconnect cube appeared. He put his glove inside it and made the ending gesture.

Words appeared unsupported in the air: "WARNING. You are about to disconnect from all Rhadamanthine systems and support. Do you wish to proceed?"

He touched finger to thumb, spreading his other fingers: the yes signal.

A moment of disorientation floated through him. For a mo-

ment, his mind was clouded; the sensations in his body changed, slowed, became somewhat numb, and yet more painful. He opened his eyes and winced.

Phaethon was awake in the real world.

The medical tubes and organs wrapping him were made of hydrocarbons, and slid aside, re-forming themselves into water and diamond plates for easy storage. Phaethon stood up slowly from his coffin, surprised and shocked.

The room was small and ugly. To one side was a large window opening on a balcony. Above the medical coffin was a crystal containing the routines and biotics to keep his slumbering body intact. The crystal was huge, a crude out-of-date informata, fixed to the ceiling with awkward globs of adhesion polymer. The walls were dumb-walls, not made of pseudo-matter, not able to change shape or perform other functions. When he put his foot over the edge of the coffin and swung himself to his feet, he made two other unpleasant discoveries.

Despite Silver-Gray promises of total realism, his self-image in mentality was represented as being stronger and more agile than his real body in reality. Phaethon climbed slowly and clumsily to his feet.

The second surprise was that the floor was cold. Furthermore, it stayed cold. It did not anticipate his orders, did not automatically adjust or react to his presence; it did not conform its texture to soothe his feet. He thought several peremptory commands at it, but nothing happened.

Then he remembered to speak aloud. "Carpeting! Foot massage!"

The floor adjusted to carpet, and warm pulses caressed his feet, but irregularly, slowly. The carpeting was irregular and tattered, ugly looking. The fact that he had to speak his orders drove home to him how impoverished these quarters were.

He looked around slowly, noticing the crooked tension in his neck; perhaps his spine had become misaligned while he slept.

He looked up; there was grime on the ceiling and upper

walls. Phaethon could not even recall the last time he had seen grime.

A second shock came when he looked down at his body. The skin was a dull, leathery substance; it looked very much like inexpensive artificial skin. He pressed his fingers against his chest, his stomach, his groin. Beneath the flesh, he felt, or perhaps he imagined, that some of the organs under his fingers had the hard, unyielding texture of cheap synthetic replacements.

His senses were duller. Distant objects were blurred; his hearing was restricted in pitch and range, so sounds were dull and flat. Perhaps his skin was slightly numb as an aftereffect of the crude medical care he had been under. Or, what was more likely, the sense impressions directed by the computer stimulated his nerves more thoroughly and precisely than his natural organs. And he was blind on every wavelength except on narrow visible-light range.

There was a door, but no knob. He stepped into it and bumped his nose. Now he jumped back in alarm, wondering for a moment why the door had failed to move.

What shocked him was that he had lost some of his sanity. Normally, when he made a discovery, or realized something, Rhadamanthus made adjustments in Phaethon's midbrain, sculpting whatever habits or patterns of behavior Rhadamanthus thought Phaethon might need directly into Phaethon's nerve paths. This decreased learning time; Phaethon normally did not have to remind himself to do things twice.

Then Phaethon said, "Open ..."

The door slid open slowly. Behind was not an exit but a wardrobe. A strange garment was hanging from a cleaning levitator. A few bottles of life-water were hanging, weight-lessly, in a magnetic suspension rack.

Phaethon took one of the bottles in hand. At his touch, information appeared in the glassy bottle's surface. Reading the label, one word and icon at a time, was painful, and Phaethon got a headache after slowly picking through the first few menu pages hovering in the depths of the label. The bottle could not put the knowledge of its contents directly into his

brain; Phaethon was disconnected from Middle Dreaming. It was a low-quality manufacture, with only a few formations and reactions recorded by the microbe-sized nanomachines suspended in the liquid. He put the bottle back in place.

On a low shelf was a box of dust cloud. Phaethon picked up the box, and said, "Open box."

Nothing happened. Phaethon pushed open the lid with his hand. The amount of dust material inside was minor, a few grams.

"I really am poor after all," he muttered sadly. Where had all his money gone? After twenty-nine or thirty centuries of useful work, investment and reinvestment, he had accumulated considerable capital.

With the box tucked under one arm, Phaethon wandered back into the pathetic room. He looked back and forth. It was ghastly.

Phaethon straightened his shoulders, drew a deep breath. "Phaethon, gather your spirits together, steel yourself, and stop this moping! Look: there is nothing here so vile, nothing which you cannot endure. Princes of past ages could not live like this: they would have called it luxury beyond luxury!"

It was not as easy to change his attitude without computer assistance, but one advantage of the Silver-Gray discipline was that he could do it at all.

He released the contents of the box. The dust cloud rose up to the ceiling, found the dirt, and began dusting. But there was only a small volume to the cloud; Phaethon had to direct a beam from the box against certain patches of filth the cloud was too small and stupid to notice by itself. He knew that, at one time, before the invention of basic robotics, humans had to toil like this all the time.

It seemed grotesque and faintly embarrassing, but, by the time he had directed the cloud to scrub the whole room, Phaethon had a glowing feeling of accomplishment. The room was clean; entropy had been reversed. It was small, but now the universe was different than it had been before his work, and, in a very small way, better.

It was a good emotion, but when he made a mental signal to record it, nothing happened.

Phaethon sighed. Good thing he was not stuck in reality, cut off from the thoughts and systems of the Oecumene. There was no point in trying to get used to this flat, dead, unresponsive world; Phaethon planned to be here only long enough to get some private time to think.

He walked over to the window port, remembered to open it, stepped outside.

Phaethon stood on the balcony of an infinite tower. It stretched above him as far as the eye could see, at least, in his present and limited vision. Below him, it fell into clouds; there was no visible base.

This was a room built into one of the space elevators that led up to the ring-city circling Earth's equator.

Phaethon sat, calling "Chair..." But the balcony surface created a chair very slowly, so he struck his bottom painfully on the rising chair back as he sat. The chair was not smart enough to avoid the blow, nor did any contours change or shape themselves to his particular height.

"Everything here is a clue. If I have forgotten this little room, it's because it's part of what I'm supposed to forget, a reminder. The blankness of my private thoughtspace; that is a clue. That foolish and pessimistic Cerebelline ecoperform-ance, another clue. The strange garment in the wardrobe. All of these things are clues."

Phaethon had not opened the forbidden memory casket. But he had heard no prohibition against deducing the contents of the casket using his unaided powers of reasoning. They could not exile him for that; the laws of intellectual property in the Golden Oecumene were clear. It could be a crime to steal or take knowledge that belonged to another, or that one had agreed not to read. But knowing knowledge in and of itself was never a crime.

The question was, did he have enough information to deduce any conclusions?

Phaethon looked out and up into the infinite expanse of wind. Even his dampened hearing could pick out the thrum-

ming shriek of air moving against the tower, miles above and miles below. It was cold here, this high above the earth. Now, in the distance, like a steel rainbow, he could see the ring-city. The shadow of Earth had crept up about twenty degrees of arc, rendering the city near the horizon invisible. But the equatorial sun was shining where Phaethon was, and shone on the sweep of the ring-city, overhead and to the west. It was a bracing sight.

"I'm cold. Could you do something about that, please?" It took almost a minute for spider-shaped operators (created out of the floor material) walking over his skin, to weave a silk garment around him, loose folds of white cloth with heating elements tuned to comfortable level.

Phaethon began to think about his past. What was missing?

There was no clear way to tell. Did he not recall what he had been doing during the April of Epoch 10179 because the memory was gone, or because he did not associate that memory with that date? Memories were not stored linearly or chronologically but by association. There was no list or index to consult. He could not that notice a memory was missing until he tried to recall it and failed.

When he did come across a blank spot... (What had he been doing after the mensal dinner performance to celebrate the conclusion of the Hyperion Orbital Resonance Correction, for example? He had been impatient to see his wife, and wanted to dance or commune with her, but she had seemed listless and distracted)... he did not know if that particular blank was related to this mystery, or to one of the other, more ordinary memories he had in storage, perhaps an old lover's spat, or work-for-hire he had agreed to forget.

Nonetheless he found enough holes, even after only some minutes of introspection, to detect a pattern.

First, they were large and they were many. Not just years and decades, but whole centuries of his life were missing; and

they were the ones nearer to the present day. Whatever had been removed had occupied a great deal of his time. If it were a crime he had been contemplating, it had been in his imagination for a long time, and it had roots all the way back to his childhood. And, if it were a crime, he had been working at it full-time for most of the last century. His memory of the last 250 years, reaching up to the beginning of the masquerade, was blank.

He could recall his last clear memory. His second attempt to reengineer the planet Saturn had just been frustrated. The Invariants of the Cities in Space had hired him to disintegrate the gas giant, sweeping up and storing the hydrogen atmosphere for antimatter conversions to be powered from the radiation given off during the disintegration. The diamond-metallic core of the world would then be reconstructed by nanomachines into the largest series of space habitats and space ports ever designed. This would have allowed the Invariant populations in the Cities to reproduce, to own their own lands, and to create additional civilizations. Phaethon had seen their plans; they had dreamed, not just of Space Cities, but of continents and worldlets, structures of fantastic beauty and cunning engineering, each one a living organism of infinite complexity.

The College of Hortators led the massive campaign to raise money to purchase the rights to Saturn. At the point at which it became mathematically unlikely to generate a profitable return on investment, the Invariants, without any emotion or slightest sign of discontent, withdrew their investment, and resigned themselves to living more centuries, without children, in the gray and claustrophobic corridors of their crowded habitats.

Phaethon's amnesia began shortly thereafter. What had his next project been? Whatever it was, he had begun to work on it full-time at that point.

There were more clues: The holes in his memory tended to be gathered around his engineering work; the blanked-out events were more frequent off Earth than on. He recalled long trips to the Jupiter moon system, Neptune, and a place called

Faraway in the Kuiper belt; but not what he had done there.

He could not recall any extravagant expenses from recent years. Perhaps he had been living frugally. He had not gone to parties or fetes or commissionings or communions. He had dropped out of all his sporting clubs and correspondence salons. Had he actually been grim? Perhaps the white-haired old man, the Saturn-tree artist, had described Phaethon as wearing black only because Phaethon's sartorial effects budget was exhausted.

Phaethon straightened up in the chair. Not black. Black and gold. The strange old man had said Phaethon wore "grim and brooding black and proud gold."

Phaethon started to his feet and threw the white thermal silk to the balcony floor, where the wind snatched it away into space. He entered the room. He almost bumped his nose again, almost forget to order aloud the door aside. The wardrobe opened.

The suit that hung there (how had he not noted this before?): it was black and gold.

And it looked the same as the suit that the stranger at the ecoperformance had worn, the third member of a group including Bellipotent Composition, and Caine, the inventor of murder.

His suit. The stranger had been mocking him.

It was cut like a ship-suit, but heavier than most ship-suits, so that it looked like armor.

There was a wide circular collar. Finely crafted as jewels, the shoulderboards carried jacks, energy couplings, small powercast antennae, mind circuits.

The sense of familiarity was strong. This suit was his; it was somehow important. Phaethon reached out and touched the fabric.

The black fabric stirred under his touch. It puckered, sent strands like silk threads across his fingers and wrist, and began bonding to his palm. Immediately a sense of warmth, of well-being, of power, began to throb in his hand.

This was not inanimate fabric but a complex of nanoma-chines. Phaethon, despite his instinct, was reluctant to trust

an unknown bio-organization of such complexity. He pulled his hand back; the fabric released him reluctantly.

Some drops of the fabric material, shaking from his fingers, fell to the floor. The boots of the outfit—everything was all one piece—sent out strands toward the fallen droplets, which inched across the wardrobe floor back toward the main garment. The drops were reabsorbed into the material, which trembled once, then was still.

Curious, he touched a shoulderboard. Nothing happened. He thought: Show me what you do, please. Then he snatched back his hand and stepped away.

This was one command he did not need to speak aloud. Here was an expensive and well-made organism. The gold segments snapped open, forming an armored breastplate; extended to cover the leggings in greaves; vambraces and gauntlets expanded over the arms; a helmet unfolded from the collar. The helmet had a wide neckpiece, extending smoothly from the shoulders to the ears, ribbed with horizontal pipings. The coifs of Pharaohs in Egyptian statues had similar patterns of horizontal stripes.

Phaethon touched the gold material in awe. If this were space armor, it was the thickest and most well-made he had ever seen or imagined. This gold substance was not an ordinary metal. There was a large island of stable artificial elements, the so-called "continent of stability," above atomic weight 900, which required so much energy to produce that they could not exist in nature. One in particular, called Chry-sadmantium, was so refractory, durable, and stable, that even the fusion reactions inside of a star could not melt it. This suit was made of that.

The expense of this suit was staggering. The material was rare; only the supercollider that orbited the equator of Jupiter could generate sufficient energy to create the artificial atoms, and even that required a major percentage of the output of the small star that Gannis had made by igniting Jupiter. This suit had been constructed one atom at a time.

The black material, now inside the suit, was cyclic nano-machinery, which would form a self-contained and self-

sustaining symbiosis with the wearer: a miniature and complete ecosystem.

But what in the world was it for? Swimming among the granules of the sun? Walking into the core chambers of plasma reactors? It wasn't necessary for space travel.

The radiation dangers in space were of two types; ambient radiation, and radiation produced by striking particles or dust motes at high speeds. But the amount of radiation one encountered in interplanetary travel, even if one flew the diameter of Neptune's orbit, from one side of the Golden Oecumene to another, was minor, and grew less each century. Ships' armor against meteors or meteoritic dust decreased every year, as more and more of the solar system was cleaned. Also, as the immortals got older, they tended to become more patient, so that slower speeds, more time-consuming orbits, seemed a smaller and smaller price to pay for safer and safer journeys. With Sophotech-designed techniques and equipment, even the smallest dust motes orbiting in the inner system were mapped, anticipated, deflected.

Phaethon touched the shoulder again. "Open up. I'd like to try you on, please."

But nothing happened. Perhaps there was a special command-phrase needed, or some cost in energy required.

"Isn't that fine!" he sighed. "I have the most expensive supersuit ever imagined, one which no power on Earth can mar or scratch or open ... and now I've locked myself out."

Phaethon wondered why, if he were so poor, hadn't he sold this suit? He looked around again at the squalid quarters here, attached to the shaft of a space elevator, quarters no one else would want. Here? A ship-suit like this, kept here? As if a Victorian gentlemen were living in a woodcutter's hut, but had the Crown Jewels of England in a shabby crate under the dirt floor.

The thought came to him: I was such a man, at one time, worthy to wear such armor as this.

The Armor of Phaethon.

And whatever I may have done to make myself unworthy, I shall undo.

He went back over to the medical coffin, lowering himself carefully himself into it, waited for the liquid to crawl up over him, and made himself gulp a mouthful into his lungs without flinching. The pillow embraced his head; contact points buried in his skull were met by a thousand intricacies of energy and information flow. His sensory nerves were artificially stimulated; he began to see things that existed only in computer imagination. His motor-nerve impulses were read; the matrix of an imaginary body moved accordingly. Even his thalamus and hypothalamus were affected, so the emotional-visceral reactions, bodily sensations, and the unconscious interplay of body language and deep neural structures were perfectly mimicked.

For a moment he was back in his blank and private thoughtspace, a pair of hands hovering near a wheel of stars. He touched the cube icon to the right and brought up his accountant. Here were lists of purchases, in the hundreds of millions of seconds, or billions, from Gannis of Jupiter and Vafnir of Mercury. The amount of money spent was comparable to what nations and empires used to spend on their military budgets.

Small payments to the Tritonic Neuroform Composition were recorded, along with inspection receipts. Phaethon had been buying large packages of information from the Neptu-nians. And, unlike every other merchant venture in the Golden Oecumene, goods from the Neptunians had to be inspected for hidden flaws, gimmicks, and pranks.

There were also moderate payments to one of the Cere-belline Life-Mother houses, a daughter of Wheel-of-Life named the Maiden; a very large number of extrapolations, ecological formulae, and bioengineering routines, equipment, and expertise had been purchased.

And biological material. Phaethon had bought so many metric tons of viral and recombinant bodies that the number was beyond belief. It was enough material to wipe out the biosphere of Earth and replace it with new forms. Had Phaethon been gathering an army? Was his black-and-gold armor actually "armor" in the old sense of the word, like the re-

sponders of ancient Warlocks, a system to deflect enemy weapons? The idea was insane.

There were also legal and advisory fees, in large amounts. For smaller matters, Phaethon got his legal advice from the Rhadamanthus Law-mind for free. But here were expenditures showing that Phaethon had approached the Westmind Sophotech, and purchased an extraordinarily expensive advisory, aesthetic, and publicist Mind-set, equipped it with personality-extrapolation programs of the Hortators. The advisory-mind was named Monomarchos.

This was significant. One did not create an attorney, equip him with billions of seconds of intelligence, and give him the ability to anticipate the thoughts and actions of the Hortators, unless one were being called before the Synod for an Inquiry.

A Synod was not a trial; nor did the Hortators possess real legal authority. They were not the Curia. But they did possess social and moral authority. In the modern day, the only way to discourage acts that where socially unacceptable, yet not directly harmful to others, was by means of Hortatory. Hortators could not punish, not directly. The Sophotechs would interfere if men used force or coercion against each other except in self-defense. But men could organize censures, complaints, protests, and, in more extreme cases, boycotts and shunnings. Many business efforts put clauses in all their standard contracts forbidding them from doing business with or selling goods to those whom the Hortators had boycotted, including important food, energy, and communication interests.

The Curia and Parliament, of course, could do nothing to interfere. Contracts were private matters, and could not be dissolved by the interference of the government; and, as long as subscription to the Hortators was not compelled by physical force, it could not be forbidden.