The Golden Age

Phaethon realized that here was his first solid clue. Whatever he had done to rouse the Hortators to conduct an Inquiry against him, that was the act that had lost him his memory. It was safe to conclude that Phaethon had agreed to the am-

nesia to avoid a worse penalty, such as a public denouncement, or a shunning.

But Phaethon had not been called before the Curia. He had not been accused of crime. That, at least, was a relief.

There was no more to be learned here. Phaethon touched the yellow disk icon to reestablish network contact with Rhadamanthus.

And there he was, frozen in the scene in the Rhadamanthus memory chamber, every detail perfectly in place. The sunlight was slanting in through the windows, glittering on memory-caskets and cabinets. Dust motes hung in the sunbeam, motionless. His wife was there, a picture, looking lovely.

When Phaethon took a deep breath, the same sensations in his brain that could have been caused by a tension in his abdomen and a straightening of his spine were created, including a subconscious signal of gathering courage.

"I'm ready. Resume."

AT TEA

Perhaps Daphne had also used the opportunity to think; she seemed more composed. "My dearest, I owe you an explanation; but in return, you owe me that you must use your most honest and rigorous sense of justice you can muster." She had stepped close to him and was staring up into his eyes.

He touched her on the shoulder and pushed her slightly away. "First I have a few questions which I insist you answer."

Daphne's red lips compressed. The responder studs on her Warlock costume fluttered angrily, as if she were deflecting a Bellipotent nanoweapon, or painful poison. "Very well! Ask!"

"I just want to know how you thought you could get away with this? The holes in my memory are so large that I could not have lived for very long without noticing. Yet they concern many things which are matters of public record. Expenditures of antimatter, energy, computer time. Interplanetary flights. I can go look into the space traffic control records to find where I went or what I did. Hortator's inquires are matters of public record. It will only take me a little time to piece this together. So what was the point of all this?"

Daphne said simply, "But I don't know."

Phaethon frowned and turned to look at Rhadamanthus.

Rhadamanthus said, "I cannot do a Noetic reading without the express consent of the subject."

Daphne said, "I do not know why this was done to you, or what is in the box. I swear it."

Rhadamanthus said, "Her words accurately reflect her thoughts. She is not lying. What she intends to say next is also not a lie."

She said, "Part of the agreement must have been for me to forget also. Whatever it is you did, I am not laughing at you behind your back, or fooling you, or leading you around by the nose. I do not know what it was."

"Then how did you know to—"

Without a word she drew a memory casket of her own from the pocket of her long coat. It was small and silver, the size of a thimble-box. Letters written in her spidery, flowing, hand-script read:

" 'This file contains material concerning the one you call your husband, which you and he have mutually agreed to forget.

" 'I. If you are reading these words, it means Phaethon has taken steps to recover his forbidden memories. If he should do so, he will leave the Golden Oecumene, perhaps forever.

" 2. Phaethon is penniless, and lives at Rhadamanthus House only at Helion's behest, and only for so long as he should not recover his lost memories.

" '3. He has done nothing criminal, but the shame and anxiety springing from his plans were more than you or he could bear. You well know why you agree with the reasons for the amnesia, and the benefit you enjoy.

" '4. Your amnesia is contingent on his. If he should ever read the forbidden file, this file will automatically open.

" '5. You are not allowed, otherwise, to open this file. Honest relations with Phaethon require that you not keep secrets from him.' "

Phaethon handed the casket back. Perhaps he was ashamed of his suspicions. She returned the casket to her pocket.

"By why did you—"

She interrupted, "Can we go somewhere else and talk? I find this chamber oppressive." Daphne hugged herself, staring at the floor, and shivered.

Phaethon put his casket down where he had found it. He removed the key and tossed it with a casual gesture to where Rhadamanthus stood in the doorway.

Turning his back to the casket, he put one arm around his wife and led her down the stairs.

They ordered Rhadamanthus to serve them tea in the garden. Phaethon changed to period costume; a stiff collar, a long black frock coat. Daphne wore an Edwardian tea dress of burgundy, which flattered her complexion, and a narrow-brimmed straw skimmer with a complex bow dangling down the back. Phaethon forgave the mild anachronism, to see how fine she looked.

They sipped from cups of eggshell china; they nibbled cakes from silver trays. Phaethon secretly suspected that the simulated taste of tea and scones were better than the originals tasted.

Daphne said, "I think everyone has forgotten whatever your shame is. That's the way these things have to go. You would not have agreed to forget unless everyone else, likewise, put the unpleasantness from their minds. Notice how enraged you were at just the thought that I might be hiding the truth from you. Is there any other way we could all live together, undying, forever, unless everyone could put old conflicts utterly and finally behind us?"

"Define 'everyone.' "

She shrugged. "The more civilized sections of society, of course."

"Meaning, not including Primitivist Schools who do not indulge in brain redactions or any neurotechnology. Not Atkins the soldier, who has to keep his brain free from all contaminants. Not including the Neptunians, who are outcasts and scoundrels. And not including one other fellow I saw at

the ecoperformance. He was dressed like me. Only his helmet was different."

"Who was he?"

"I don't know. He was in masquerade."

"What was his costume?"

"He was disguised as part of the Bellipotent Composition, end of the Fourth Era."

"I know who is behind that. The Bellipotent costume was put together by the Black Mansion School. They're all anarchists and disrupters and shock-artists. They're trying to offend Ao Aoen and the other nonstandard neuroforms."

"And offend me? Their costume equated me with Caine, the character from Byron's play who invents murder, and with the Bellipotent Composition, who reinvented war."

She shook her head. "I cannot guess what it means. No other polite person will get his joke either; we've all forgotten whatever it was. The Hortators should not have let him get near you."

Phaethon's mind leaped to another thought. "Meaning that the Hortators are monitoring my actions. I'm not surprised. But, during the masquerade, with the location and identification circuits disenabled, I got lost in the crowds, and saw things I wasn't supposed to see."

"Well! So there's your explanation. The mystery is solved!" exclaimed Daphne brightly. "Can we talk about something more pleasant now?"

Phaethon nodded, and said, "I think this amnesia must have been inflicted only briefly before the masquerade began. Something the primitivist old man I met said, implied that I should not have been invited. I conclude that I agreed to this amnesia in order to be allowed to come. Also, enough people have retained the memory of my past to smirk and stare and gossip, at least enough to lead me to suspect that something was in the air."

"Is it my imagination, or is this the same topic we were just on?"

"The main problem is how to find someone who knows what I did, and to approach them, preferably in costume, so

that the Hortators won't see and make a fuss. Art displays should be posted on the aesthetic index for stock purchases. If one of us tracks down the old man with the Saturn-trees, the other can find out which Cerebelline was holding the eco-performance at Destiny Lake."

"Darling, you're speaking as if I would help you in this quest. But I won't."

Phaethon leaned back in his chair, staring at her, saying nothing.

She said, "It's nothing but a quest for self-destruction."

"It's a quest for truth."

"Truth! There is no such thing. There are only signals in your brain. Everything: sensations, memory, love, hate, abstract philosophy, gross physical lusts. It's nothing. Strong signals and weak signals. Those signals can be reproduced, recorded, faked. Whatever condition of thought, or pleasure, or belief you wish to achieve by discovering this mystery, could be reproduced in your brain by a proper application of such signals, and there would be no way whatsoever you could discover the difference. Everything would seem as real to you now as all of this." A circle of her hand indicated the scenery around them; the sunlight in the garden, the scent of grass and roses, the shining leaves, the drone of bees, the twittering of larks.

"Except it would not be the truth."

"That thought itself is nothing but another signal," she said sulkily, pouting over her teacup.

"Daphne, you don't really believe that. You would not live the life you lead if you did. You would just go off and drown yourself in some dream drama, never to emerge. Besides, I think I can discover the basics of what happened to me without actually violating the letter of whatever agreement I made."

She put down her teacup so that it smacked against the saucer, slopping tea over the side. But her voice was calm and smooth: "Why pursue this? Why not be content with the life you have?"

"It's too easy to be content. Where's the glory in that? I'd rather do something hard."

"I respectfully disagree. It is quite easy to be a stubborn fool, darling. Look at how many of them there are in the world."

Phaethon spread his hands and smiled slightly. "Well, as long as I can go about being a stubborn fool with a certain amount of grace and intelligence, maybe I can do a good job of it. Don't you see how important this is? How much of my life is missing?"

Daphne tried not to look impatient. "Sweetheart, what standard are you using to measure importance? Length of time? The Bellipotent Composition ruled the Eastern Hemisphere for far longer than you've been alive. And they produced nothing but ninety generations of evil and pain. I would not trade one second of your life for their entire hegemony. So why do you spend even one second of your life on something which can only make you miserable? Darling, listen to me. You have no real mystery, no puzzle worth solving. If those memories were ones you did not want, what does it matter how much time they occupied? Has it never occurred to you that, back when you made this choice, you knew what you were doing?"

"Actually, that's the part which puzzles me the most...." Phaethon thoughtfully sipped his tea.

Daphne leaned forward, her green eyes bright.

"You then must have foreseen this present. You, then, knew that you, now, would suffer the pain of curiosity. You then decided the pain of knowledge was the worse of two evils. Can't you just trust that that decision was correct? Can't you accept anyone's judgment without question? Not even your own? You know now that you back then knew more!"

Phaethon smiled half a smile. "Let me understand your argument. You want me to take on faith that I have always had the strength of character to never to take things on faith. But if I give in to your argument, don't I show, by that example, that such faith is misplaced? My past self might have

been, for all I know, convinced by an argument not unlike this one."

"Very cleverly worded!" she blazed. "You may just be clever enough to talk yourself into exile and disgrace!"

Phaethon gazed, absorbed, at the fire of her eyes, the way her red lips parted as she drew a sharp breath, the flare of her nostrils, the flush in her cheeks. Then she subsided, and lowered her gaze to stare moodily to one side. Phaethon studied the curve of her neck, the perfection of her profile, and the delicate lashes, long and black, which almost brushed her cheeks. What had he done to acquire this vivid and fascinating woman?

What should he do to make certain he did not lose her?

No matter. He could not be other than he was, not and still be Phaethon.

A slight wind came up, tousling Daphne's hair, and she held one hand delicately atop her hat to keep it in place. She was looking upward now at the white tumbled clouds and blue skies. These were the skies of ancient Earth, faithfully reproduced. There was no glimmer of the ring-city above the southern horizon, no blinding speck of Jupiter burning, and the Evening Star would appear in her accustomed place, determined by Venus's old orbit.

She said, "The navicular races are soon to begin, out in Vancouver Bay; Telemoan Quatro is challenging his older self Telemoan Quintcux, and they say he's certain to outdo himself. But Ao Ymmel-Eendu, the Warlock who combined himself out of his own twin brains, comes to challenge them both."

Now she became more animated; excitement thrilled in her voice: "Ymmel-Eendu, now that they have made themselves into one person, has been living in his navis body now for forty years, training and preparing, and the rumor channel says he did not step on dry land once in all that period! For years at a time, he would shut off his linear and linguistic brain segments, living among dolphins and cetaceans, an animal of the sea himself, moving from one oceanic dream to

another, so that he attains a mystic communion with sea and wind and wave!

"Then, there is going to be a pancrateon near Mount Washington in the late afternoon, between Bima and Arcedes, and two hundred years of rivalry will be settled. The loser has promised to change sex and serve the victor as a harem slave for a year and a day. A disgusting conceit, I think, but who can fathom the minds of athletes and somatic performers?

"This evening at Hawthorn House, there will be a Ball, and, at midnight, a Stimulus. A codicil discovered in the living will of Mancusioco the Neuropathist directs that he be resurrected for the Millennial Celebration; rumor reports that he has completed his Opus Number Ten, the Unfinished Arrangement. Everyone is eager to discover how he resolves the famous disputed sensation passage; tonight we shall learn! Mancusioco himself will lead us from one altered state of mind to another, through the full cycle of consciousness, and who knows what new expressions of thought, new insights, or new forms might arise from his adroit manipulations of our nervous systems? Will you go, Phaethon? Will you go?"

For a moment he was strongly tempted.

If he wanted not to be bothered with this mystery for an evening, or for a month, or a decade, he could visit a redactor and put the memories related to his discovery today in storage. He could spend a pleasant evening with his wife, something he had not in far too long. He could have a pleasant and untroubled life. All he had to do was ask.

But he wondered if he had done this before. What if, every time he discovered a blank in his memory, he made himself forget that discovery? What if he had done this yesterday? Or every day?

He could have a pleasant life. Just for the asking. Except it would not be his.

Phaethon said: "These celebrations are beginning to pall on me. I would much rather be doing the things which make life worth celebrating. But I am haunted by the thought that my past self, as you say, must have known what he was doing. Suppose I underwent this amnesia merely to get to go to this

Celebration. That would imply that my going was part of his plan. But a plan for what? What could he hope to gain? He must have had absolute faith that I would continue to act in a predictable way...."

"Darling, this is beginning to sound like crazy talk. People don't make plans and schemes that way. Why not just relax, and come with me to the navicular races?"

But Phaethon was not listening. He was recalling something Rhadamanthus had said. The only way a man's actions could be truly predictable could be if he were truly moral. Phaethon imagined some past version of himself, with more than 250 years of memories, willing to commit a type of suicide; to go into storage, to be forgotten, merely on the strength of a hope that the unknowing, amnesia-afflicted future version of himself would have the strength and perseverance, without ever once being asked, to rescue him from oblivion. The image was a chilling one.

Phaethon stood up. "Daphne, my memories have been dismembered. I feel as if I've been mutilated. Perhaps there was a good reason for it. But I'll be damned if I'll live my life without trying to find out just what that reason was. You know more than you are saying. Your casket says you know the reason for my amnesia. It says you benefit from it. What's that reason? What's that benefit?"

"Why try to remember a forgotten crime? Let it rest." "The tag on your memory casket says that I had done nothing; that I was suppressed merely for something I had planned

to do."

"Perhaps that is why you escaped true punishment. Perhaps the crime was not complete. But I have put those memories

aside."

"Yet you know well the benefit you enjoy. What is that

benefit?"

"My life is happy beyond any hope I ever had for happiness." She looked down and would not meet his gaze.

"That is no answer."

"Nonetheless, it is all the answer you shall have from me. Be content."

"You really don't want to tell me the truth?" He paused while she said nothing. He continued: "Do our marriage vows mean so little to you, then? When our friends Asatru and Hellaine got married, all they did was exchange recorded copies of themselves with their intendeds. He edited and adapted the personality of his wife-doll till it suited him; and she did the same to her version of him. Most of our friends are like that. Sferanderik Myriad Ffellows sends his dolls to marry any woman who experiences one of his tasteless love-romance dramas he writes; every schoolgirl has one of him in her harem. I should be offended by such conduct. As if a husband were to make a gigolo for his wife, and she to hire a prostitute for him; and them both to celebrate that as holy matrimony! I am not offended only because the general society has made the whole thing as trivial as exchanging Commencement Mementos. But I thought we were devoted to the Silver-Gray ideal, you and I. To realistic traditions, realistic stimulations, realistic lives. I thought our tradition stood for truth. I thought our marriage stood for love."

She did not answer, but sat, lashes lowered, staring downward.

Daphne spoke very softly, and did not raise her eyes. "But I fear we are not married, my husband."

"W-what?!" This came out in a breathless word, as if Phaethon were struck in the stomach. "But I remember our ceremony. ... Rhadamanthus said no false memories were put in me...."

"They are not false. I am. Here."

Daphne delicately took her diary, a small cloth-bound book patterned with rosy pastels, out from her, skirts and laid it on the table. Like many married couples, the two of them had communion circuits to enable full and direct memory exchanges, so that each could experience and see the other's point of view. The diary was the icon representing this circuit.

She said, "I fear I will be destroyed by your quest for truth. I know you have destroyed others you said you loved. That is part of what you forgot. You are convinced that your forgotten deed was not a crime. And perhaps, in the eyes of the

law, it was not. But there are horrible things which people can do, most horrible, which our laws never punish."

She took out a tiny key and unlocked the little lock on the cover. The cover of the diary turned red. Letters blazed: "WARNING This contains a persona matrix. You will loose your sense of self-identity during the experience, which may have long-term effects on your present personality, persona or consciousness. Are you sure you wish to continue? (Remove key to cancel.)"

She slid the diary across the table to him. "I offer this in the hope that you will refuse, and return it unread. If you trust me, believe me: what is in here destroys our dream of marriage. And if you do not trust me, then how dare you claim you love me?"

He took out his own diary, a slim black volume, unlocked it, and tossed it on the table in front of her. It rattled the china tea service as it fell, and lay in a strip of sunlight, bright on the linen, which the gazebo roof shading the table did not cover. A silver spoon was jarred out from the sugar bowl.

The read-date on the cover showed yesterday's date. He was offering to show her, from his point of view, what had occurred to him.

"A marriage based on untruth is a contradiction in terms." And he picked up her diary. He hesitated, though. Daphne watched him steadily, unblinking, her face utterly

without expression.

At that same moment, however, the butler image of Rhad-amanthus came up from behind Phaethon and stepped to the table. In his hand was a silver card tray with a letter, folded, stamped and sealed, atop.

"Pardon me for intruding, sir, ma'am," said Rhadamanthus in an Irish brogue, nodding a slight bow. "But the young master has been summoned."

Phaethon turned. What was this? "Summoned? By the Hor-

tators?"

"No, sir. By the Curia. This is an official legal communication."

Phaethon picked up the letter, broke the seal, read it. There was no warrant of arrest; no mention of a crime; merely a request to present himself to the Probate Court Circuit, to establish his identity beyond question. It was so politely worded that he could not tell if he were asked or being ordered. The only case name appearing on the document was "In the Matter of Helion."

"What is this, Rhadamanthus?"

"You are being asked to give a deposition, sir. Shall I explain the details of the document to you?"

"I'm somewhat busy with other things right now. ..."

"But you may not access any mnemonic templates or do anything else to change your personality structure until after your identity is established by a Noetic examination."

"Why wasn't I told about this before?"

"No one could serve this summons on you, sir, while you were at masquerade, because no one knew where you were."

"Well. I'll take the call in the morning room. That can be adjusted to look like whatever their aesthetic requires without violating too much of the visual integrity here ..."

"Sir, you may wish to examine that document in more detail. You are ordered to present yourself in your own person, not by mannequin, partial, or telerepresentation. There can be no signal from any remote source affecting your brain during the examination."

"That's damned inconvenient! Where do I need to go?"

"Longitude fifty-one of the ring-city."

"Then let me take care of this immediately and get it out of the way." And he slipped his wife's diary in his pocket.

Phaethon stepped from dreamspace into his private thoughtspace, and turned, once again, into a disembodied pair of floating gloves. The icon of his wife's diary was still "with him"; the act of putting in his pocket had been a sufficient symbol to accomplish that. Here, of course, it looked much simpler and cruder; just a pastel oblong. When his glove let go of it, it did not fall, but hung, fixed, where he left it, to the left of the square cubes representing engineering programs.

Then he woke up in his coffin in the barren little room.

THE SUMMONS

This time Rhadamanthus was still with him when he woke, so the chamber, to his eyes, was suitably furnished and decorated. It looked like a Swiss mountain cabin, perhaps a hunting lodge, with hardwood floors set with bearskin rugs, a fire burning in the grate beneath a mantlepiece bright with trophy cups. A rack of muskets was opposite the window. The wardrobe was now made of tall polished oak, carved with an emblazon of arms. French doors of diamond-shaped lead-crystal panes now led to what was pretty much the same view. Bowing and offering him a trousers, shirt, and jacket was Rhadamanthus, now appearing as a valet. Phaethon slid the silk sheets aside and stepped out of the four-poster bed.

The ugliness of his thick-skinned body was gone; Phaethon now looked pretty much as he should. When he turned toward the wardrobe, the valet stepped and opened the door for him, with no nonsense about having to speak commands aloud. There was the golden armor. "I want to see things as they are," he said. The comfortable quaint little lodge turned into an ugly dull-colored cube. His senses dulled; his skin grew thick and coarse, like heavy plastic. Only the armor was the same. If anything, it looked better.

"Rhadamanthus, can you figure out how to open this armor

again, please?"

Black vertical lines, like streamlines, appeared across the

surface of the armor, and spread wider. The helmet folded. Then the armor was as Phaethon first saw it, black, with side panels of gold, with gold ornaments at collar, shoulder, thigh.

"If I must be hauled before the High Court of the Curia, then let me appear in splendor to awe the world! I will not go unremarked to my fate!"

Rhadamanthus (despite normal Silver-Gray policy) manifested no appearance, but issued a disembodied voice into Phaethon's ear. "Pardon me, sir, if I did not explain. But you are not summoned to the High Court. You are appearing before the Probate Court. I suspect they are gathering, not to fix any penalties on you, but to reward you with a testamentary gift."

Phaethon flung the armor across his shoulders. The black fabric dissolved into flying threads, which swooped around him, wrapping limb and body, pulling the gold adamantium plates and panels into place. The black substance bonded with his skin. Again, he felt a sense of great well-being. The na-nomachines in the armor were interpenetrating his flesh, feeding and sustaining his cells more efficiently than the natural mechanisms that normally carried nutrients and fluids to them.

He stood for a moment, exulting in the sense of soaring vivacity the armor sent through his nerves and muscles. Only then did Rhadamanthus's words penetrate to him. "A gift? The Court of Law is going to decide to give me a gift? What kind of nonsense is this? I thought we kept the Curia around just in case people were ever tempted to commit violent crimes again, or cheat on contracts, or break their word. The Triumvir Judges don't give gifts."

"It is a testamentary gift, young master. The Judges also have the power to resolve disputed ownership of the property of the dead."

"Hm. I would have thought archeologists or museum curators have that duty. What has any of this to do with me, except as a distraction to delay my efforts to discover the truth about myself? No matter! I am impatient to have done with this matter. Can we at least get under way?"

The far wall of the barren apartment was made of pseudo-matter. Pseudo-matter was neither matter nor energy as the ancients would have understood those terms but a third manifestation of timespace. The vibrations of ylem superstrings in the stable geometries called "octaves" produced matter-energy quanta; unstable pulses formed temporary virtual particles. An unnatural but perfectly self-consistent topology (and one not invented by the universe within her first three seconds) was the semistable waveform, dubbed the tritone. Pseudo-matter, built up from these tritone semiquanta, could impersonate shape and extension, but only in the presence of a stabilizing energy field. When that energy field was shut off, the location of pseudo-matter became uncertain, and solidity vanished, until the field was reapplied.

The far wall winked out like a popped soap bubble as Phaethon slid through it, and snapped back into reality behind him. Phaethon knew of schools who disapproved of the use of pseudo-matter for aesthetic and metaphysical reasons; he felt a momentary sympathy for them then. Life would be simpler if solid-seeming things could be trusted.

Phaethon found himself staring through a bank of windows at a wide circular space. It rose overhead, dwindling with perspective to the vanishing point. Underfoot was like a well, dropping, as if bottomless, beyond sight. Rail-guides and tractor-friction field generators studded the vertical walls in a jewel-like tiger-striped pattern. The design seemed more biological than mechanical; the geometry of the architecture was fractal, organic, spiral; nothing was Euclidean or linear.

A car with spider arms and crab legs rushed silently up the side of the wall and jerked to a stop in front of Phaethon's windows. The utter silence proved the wide tube was evacuated of air. A protuberance bubbled from the car and swelled up against the windows, opening wide lips. There was no door. The window-substance writhed and opened like so many flower petals, melding and intermingling with the protuberance. Phaethon was now looking into a short, twisted corridor into the interior of the car. It looked like an esophagus. The inside of the car had no clearly defined walls or

floor or ceiling. The colorful lining was a made of folds or smooth lumps of tissue, feather soft, without any rigid shapes or hard edges. The polymimetic material was meant to conform to many nonstandard or eccentric body shapes. A shallow crater a dozen paces across occupied the floor of the pool, filled with living-water. Phaethon thought it looked like a stomach.

"What is this place?" asked Phaethon recoiling in disgust.

"This place does not abide by the Consensus Aesthetic."

"I can see that!"

"... It is from one of the Counter-aesthetic Schools, the Neomorphetics, who are part of the Never-First Movement. They are the most vocal opponents of the traditional social and artistic forms...."

"I know who they are," replied Phaethon testily, "I haven't forgotten everything." The Never-Firsters were recruited from the second generation after the invention of immortality. They opposed whatever the elder generation preferred. The whole movement seemed to be based on the idea that, for some incomprehensible reason, wealth and power should go from the elders (who earned it) and be given to the youth (who had not). Perhaps laws and institutions had been different before the invention of immortality; but such concerns seemed, these days, somewhat moot.

Phaethon said: "Helion calls them the Cacophiles, the lovers of ugliness. I used to argue that there was something hopeful, futuristic, and daring about their work. But, ugh! Maybe Helion was right. That pool has a dubious hue—does that water contain hallucinogens?"

"A soporific to ease the acceleration shock, master, and entertainment chemicals to pass the time during the journey."

"Oh? How long is this journey?"

"From here to Geosychronous Orbit? Three hundred seconds."

"I think I can tolerate the tedium of my own company for five minutes without undue boredom or despair, thank you. In fact, I think I can do without the Cacophiles and their elevator altogether."

For he had discovered a thoughtspace inside the armor. As if a dozen Argus-eyes had opened into his brain, the sense-impressions of the armor flowed into his cortex; the capacities and powers into his memory; the controls into his motor nerves. The armor had a truly astonishing number of control interfaces, servo-minds, and operator hierarchies. All these controls did not seem to be attached to any circuits or channels, however. Whatever machine or system this armor was meant to control must have been one of almost infinite complexity and sophistication.

Phaethon, with the armor, was able to use these control-interfaces to dominate the local thoughtspace. It required less than a second to see and analyze the energy flows within the tube walls, create the proper anchor fields and generators within the armor lining, erect a magnetic force zone around himself, and ride the energy motions along the tube axis upward at several multiples of the speed of sound. Some emergency routine in the window allowed the panels to bubble and snap aside, shutting behind him as he soared upward before any air escaped into the vacuum inside the tube. The black lining of the armor had interpenetrated his every tissue, nerve, and bone, stiffening his body to the consistency of a block of oak. He was easily able to tolerate the nine gravities of acceleration; the armor's internal monitor assured him that, had there been time to complete the tension adjustments within his cells and membranes, he would have been able to withstand ninety.

"Rhadamanthus, I'm not endangering anyone, am I?" "I would have warned you, young master, had you been." Phaethon flew on a waft of unseen force to the top of the space elevator. Here was a wide, weightless, roughly spherical space, a mile across. The walls were dotted with docks and portcullises leading to interplanetary ships or to the cylinders and habitats of the ring-city. Phaethon turned his sense-filter to subtext, so that the scene was overlaid with maps and diagrams showing his location and labeling the machineries and energy-arrangements around him.

Phaethon saw evidence of movement inside many of the

machines and conduits leading through the space. He looked into the Middle Dreaming to see the meanings attached to these activities, and understood that the Sophotechs maintaining the environmental integrity of the ring-city were taking precautions against any accidents Phaethon's flying suit might cause. Insurance efforts were tracking the cost of the precautions, which would be charged against his account should any accident occur. A side thought indicated that, since Phaethon's account was bankrupt, the potential lien should be charged to Helion, along with the other pertinent details of the present situation.

Phaethon turned toward Rhadamanthus, who (now that Phaethon's sense-filter was turned back on) manifested an image. Rhadamanthus looked like a penguin dressed in black-and-gold adamantium armor. His helmet was of generally the same Egyptian-looking style as Phaethon's, but with an elongated face mask to cover his beak.

"Rhadamanthus! What is this?!"

The penguin craned his neck and thoughtfully examined his own chubby gold-coated body, even lifting his stubby wings to gravely examine his armpits. "Is something out of order, sir? Silver-Gray protocol does require that I try to blend into the scene, after all."

"And this blends? A penguin in space armor?"

"Well, sir, a penguin could not be levitating here next to you without such armor. Not realistically."

"You don't seem to be taking my troubles very seriously."

"A sense of humor is most useful when dealing with human beings, sir."

"And, apparently, when dealing with Sophotechs, too. You and your brethren are informing Helion of my movements and actions. Is this also a joke?"

"He only has rights to know of those things which concern him, such as, for example, when you are spending his money."

"Even though my amnesia blotted out the fact that it is his money, and not mine, that I'm spending, I suppose?"

"It does not perhaps seem fair, sir, but you did agree to these terms."

"And, apparently, I've agreed to forget that I've agreed. Everyone says this is a golden age. Shouldn't it be run a little more fairly?"

"What does the young master suggest?"

Phaethon swung his leg to counterrotate his body till his head pointed toward with the main motion lock. The internal structure of his armor changed, developing a microscopic system of rail-guns along his back and legs. Particles with very low rest-mass, ejected backward at near the speed of light, grew in mass enough to accelerate him forward. Ray-thin parallel streamers of light hissed backward from his armor, ruby

red.

Beyond was the first segment of the ring-city. Unlike the space yard he had just left, this segment was spun for gravity. Phaethon sped along the axis. This cylinder held traditional forms; overhead and underfoot, the distant curving walls were green with forests, blue with lakes.

"Perhaps I should not be bound by obligations I've forgotten."

"But, sir, that would create an incentive for everyone to escape their obligations simply by erasing their memory of them. If you had wanted such an easy-escape clause written into the contract which presently binds you, presumably, you would have written it in."

"And presumably they—whoever they are—would not have agreed."

"That is a safe assumption."

The next three cylinders were neomorphic, filled with strange shapes and convolutions. The next cylinder was walled with oceans of pewter blue, with earthlight shining up through submerged windows. The cylinder beyond the next motion lock turned at a slower rate of spin, and the walls were sculpted with the rust red canyons and dry-ice snows of Mars.

Phaethon asked, "Why couldn't I be prevented from making such a foolish agreement in the first place?"

"You are free to join the Orthomnemonicist School, which permits no memory alterations except antisenility storage, or join the Primitivists, who permit none at all."

"You know what I mean. You Sophotechs are smarter than I am; why did you let me do such a foolish thing?"

"We answer every question our resources and instruction parameters allow; we are more than happy to advise you, when and if we are asked."

"That's not what I'm thinking of, and you know it."

"You are thinking we should use force to defend you against yourself against your will? That is hardly a thought worth thinking, sir. Your life has exactly the value you yourself place on it. It is yours to damage or ruin as you wish."

The next cylinder was filled with the twisted crystal slabs of the Tachystructuralists. The lifestyle of these disembodied people, who had sacrificed their biochemical brains in an attempt to reach Sophotech thinking-speeds and complexities, had long ago been superseded by the Neptunians, whose colder superconductive brain matrices carried thoughts much faster. This region, and these few stubborn miles of crystal, were perhaps the only remainder of the once-prestigious Tachystructural School.

"Is that another hint? Are you saying I'm destroying my life? People at the party, twice now, have said or implied that I'm going to endanger the Oecumene itself. Who stopped me?"

"Not I. While life continues, it cannot be made to be without risk. The assessment of whether or not a certain risk is worth taking depends on subjective value-judgments. About such judgments even reasonable men can differ. We Sophotechs will not interfere with such decisions."

Phaethon flew through two cylinders, which were filled with the heat and stench of old Venus. Here were Hell-born from the Lakshmi or Ishtar Plateau. Phaethon saw their gray-brown beehive-shaped cities, connected by lava dikes, or paths made by the wake of crawling-machines. Only one or two of the burning roads had oblong shapes stalking along them. The Hellish body forms had been rendered obsolete,

centuries ago, once the Venereal Terraforming was complete; but the Hell-children, for whatever reason, preferred to keep the forms and shapes they knew.

The next cylinder had walls paved with rank upon rank of dull-colored pyramids, with no sign of life on the barren pavements between. The one after was filled with what looked like herd upon herd of overgrown babies, surrounded on all sides by curving walls of warm, pink flesh, with milk flowing from hundreds of nipples. A third cylinder was bitterly cold, filled with zones of darkness, in which greater darknesses moved and pulsed. Phaethon recognized none of these schools or societies.

Rhadamanthus continued: "If we were to overrule your ownership of your own life, your life, would, in effect, become our property, and you, in effect, would become merely the custodian or trustee of that life. Do you think you would value it more in such a case, or less? And if you valued it less, would you not take greater risks and behave more self-destructively? If, on the other hand, each man's life is his own, he may experiment freely, risking only what is his, till he find his best happiness."

"I see the results of failed experiments all around us, in these cylinders. I see wasted lives, and people trapped in mind sets and life forms which lead nowhere."

"While life continues, experimentation and evolution must also. The pain and risk of failure cannot be eliminated. The most we can do is maximize human freedom, so that no man is forced to pay for another man's mistakes, so that the pain of failure falls only on he who risks it. And you do not know which ways of life lead nowhere. Even we Sophotechs do not know where all paths lead."

"How benevolent of you! We will always be free to be

stupid."

"Cherish that freedom, young master; it is basic to all others."

"And what about privacy? Helion is one of them, isn't he? One of those who benefits from my amnesia."

"That is a very sound assumption. I do not think I am

violating any confidences by telling you that Helion must have sent Daphne to come speak with you."

"What? I thought you—this version of you—weren't allowed to know what was going on any more than I am."

"Yes, sir. But I can still make deductions of ordinary logic. Where was Daphne when you left her?"

"In the dream-tank. She was going into one of her games ... wait a moment. I was expecting her to be in simulation for several days. She is not a novice at these games."

"Was she competing for an award?"

"I thought she was."

"And she was in masquerade, so her location was masked. So: who could have found her, who had the authority to interrupt her game, and who could call upon her to do something which he would know she regarded as more important than her competition; but it had to be someone who also knew where you where ... ?"

"Daphne and I are penniless, right? If she enters a game, or if I run a routine, or even send a message, Helion gets billed for it. I assume he can figure out certain details from the billing. And ... Oh! Good Heavens! He even knows when I talk to you, doesn't he?"

"It uses computer time, yes. Helion does not know the content of our conversation, but he knows how much of my mind and time I use."

"And does he know where we're going now? Does he know for what reason the Curia summoned me?"

"I will be surprised if he has not been summoned also."

Phaethon came at last into the central cylinder, the one which had been the original space-yard topping the original elevator. It was smaller than Phaethon expected, only a few miles or so along its axis. Overhead and underfoot, along the curving walls, were the famous gardenworks of Ao Nisibus, dating from the era just before the Fifth Mental Structure, when this place was chosen to be one of the seats of Golden Oecumene administration.

The gardens were laid out in graceful and classical designs. Near the axis, in microgravity, floated balls of lunarian air

bushes and sphere trees, each with an orb of soil at its center. Vines and lianas, grape and ivy of Martian manufacture inhabited the lesser gravity of the canopy and middle regions. Below, along the walls, were Terran flora; stands of fruit trees laid out, rank and file, in rectangles proportional of the golden mean; or colonnades and trellises; or lily ponds centered on concentric ranks of colorful blooms, from which paths and walkways radiated. Some of the plants, extinct on Earth, existed now only here, to maintain this famous garden's natural state.

Phaethon, searching for the courthouse, looking into the Middle Dreaming. The symbolic meanings of the floral colors, tree and leaf, shape and placement, came flooding into his brain. The experience was overwhelming, since the architect had woven multiple overlapping layers of symbolism, each part reflecting the whole, throughout the entire garden.

It was doubtful whether any brain (before the invention of sophotechnology) could actually envision and enact a scheme where each part or group of parts could contain its own symbol-message while maintaining integrity taken as a whole; but Ao Nisibus, the designer, certainly made it seem as if he had. (All the more amazing, since Ao Nisibus had not had a Cerebelline neuroform.)

The gardens and lawns of the opposite side of the cylinder shone viridescently in the light of long windows, which, like canals filled with stars, ran along the walls parallel to the cylinder's axis. The blue Earth, huge and dazzling, was rising through windows spinward of him. Sunlight slanted up through windows in the floor below, striping the gardens opposite with alternating bands of light green and dark green. Phaethon started to see a pattern in all this. His attention was absorbed.

Overhead, the Founder's Monument and reflecting pool formed signs of Masonic import. Rose gardens, for passion, were hedged about with virtuous lilies; and two walkways, lined with euphrasy and rue, truth and repentance, came together in a cross (for noble sacrifice); but the actual intersection was a carriage circle (representing the world). In the

center of the circle was a hillock, shaped like a burial howe, dotted with forget-me-nots. There was a meaning here, a message, a warning, telling Phaethon something about the nature of true memory, ultimate reality, and the universe....

An automatic safety routine in Phaethon's sense-filter had to interrupt him from going into a beauty trance. He blinked and remembered to concentrate on looking for the court house. There: a walkway lined with a balanced number of majestic oaks and somber ash trees led to a glade. On three sides of the glade were boxwood hedges trimmed into complex labyrinths. In the glade, a circle of olive trees guarded a dark, clear pool. The symbolism would not have been more obvious had he seen blindfolded goddesses armed with swords and balance scales.

Phaethon slanted down through the air and landed lightly on the grass. Closer now, he could see the bottom of the pool was transparent crystal; the pool seemed dark only because there was a large unlit chamber buried beneath.

A slab of rock near the pool must have been made of para-matter, for a man dressed in blue-and-silver chameleon cloth slid up through the solid stone and stepped onto the grass. He wore a braided demicape, and a helmet of blue steel. In one white glove he held upright a pike taller than his helmet plumes. Phaethon recognized the man.

"Atkins! A pleasure to see you again. I swear you are the only man in the Golden Qecumene who can wear a getup like that"—Phaethon was looking at his garters and knee socks— "without looking ridiculous."

"Good afternoon, sir." The face was as calm and expressionless as ever; the tone was impersonal, brisk, polite. "I'm Atkins Secundus, his partial." "Emancipated?"

"No. We're still considered one person. I don't really make that much on soldier's pay, so I've sent out my partial copy here for other work. This one here is the bailiff and master-at-arms of the Court. The rule of posse comitatus prohibits the military from doing police functions, so I have to maintain

a separate identity, and have any memories related to military security matters cut out."

Phaethon looked at him with new interest. The two of them might have something in common. "Doesn't it bother you to have holes and gaps in your memory?"

Atkins did not smile, but the lines to either side of his mouth deepened. "Well, sir, that depends. A serviceman has to assume the higher-ups know what they are doing, even when they don't. If they monkeyed with my brain, I'm sure it was for a good reason." "But what if it wasn't?"

Atkins did not shrug, but a quirk of his eyebrow conveyed the same emotion. "I didn't make the rules. I do whatever it takes. Someone has to. It might be different for civilians." His good humor faded and his tone became, somehow, even more brisk and serious: "But for the moment, I'm going to have to ask you to disable your armor circuits. No weapons allowed in the courthouse."

Phaethon had to get Rhadamanthus to find and insert the meaning of the word "weapon" into his brain. Phaethon was amazed and disgusted. "You have got to be kidding! You don't actually think that I am capable of—"

Atkins gave Phaethon a thoughtful, disinterested look. "It's none of my business what you are capable of, sir. I just enforce the rules."

But Phaethon saw the calculating, professional look in Atkins's eye. Perhaps it was a look of distrust. Perhaps Atkins was taking the measure of a potential enemy. The stare was offensive.

Rhadamanthus poked Phaethon on the knee with his beak, and whispered: "Hsst! It's an old tradition. No one goes armed into Court."

"Well, I cannot counter tradition," muttered Phaethon. He doffed his helmet and let Atkins insert a disabling probe into the black suit layer. Thought-group after thought-group of the armor-mind went dark; anything even remotely capable of energy manipulation was locked, even simple action-reflex

routines. Phaethon swallowed his pride; he did not know if he had a right to be offended.

Because, whatever Phaethon had done in the past, Atkins knew it and Phaethon did not.

Phaethon asked him.

Atkins squinted. "Sir, I'm not sure it's my place to say. I'm on duty right now. The bailiff of the Curia isn't supposed to be the one to help you break a legal contract, even if it is a stupid one. Why not just let the matter rest?"

THE CURIA

The two of them stepped onto the rock surface. The rock let Phaethon ooze through only slowly and reluctantly, as microscopic and molecule-sized organizations hidden in the para-matter passed through his flesh and armor, probing for secret weapons. The Crysadmantium supermetal defeated the probe attempts; the organizations had to flow in and out through Phaethon's neckpiece to scrub the interior. It was not uncomfortable, but it was undignified.

Below were stairs, leading down. The aesthetic protocol was apparently different outside than in. Atkins's quaint costume was replaced. There was no heat when Atkins's uniform changed shape; perhaps it was pseudo-matter, not nanoma-chinery. During the moment of transition, Phaethon saw what the soldier was really wearing beneath; a trim jacket set with many vertical pockets holding discharge cartridges, respond-ers, and preassembled nanoweapons.

And he had a knife and a katana hanging from his belt. Phaethon could not help but wonder at the man's anachronisms. What sort of fellow was so hypnotized by tradition that he still carried sharp pieces of metal meant for poking and lacerating other men?

The transformation took an eye-blink. Atkins now wore a stiff-collared poncho of stark white, and his pike shrank to a

baton from some period of military history Phaethon did not recognize. But he guessed the pale cloak was from the Objective Aesthetic, which dated from the late Fifth Era, long before the Consensus Aesthetic.

In that era, back before Sophotech translation routines existed, the differences in neuroforms made it difficult for the basics, Warlocks, Cerebellines, and Invariants, to understand each other's thought and speech. It had been impossible to understand each other's art. Consequently, the so-called Objective Aesthetic was heavily geometrical, nonrepresenta-tional, highly stylized; more like an iconography than an artform. Phaethon did not find it attractive.

At the bottom of the stairs was an antechamber. Here stood another man. It took Phaethon a moment to recognize him in the gloom. "Gannis! Is that you, or one of you?"

He turned. It was indeed Gannis of the Jupiter Effort, but wearing a formal costume and wide headdress of Fifth-Era Europa. A heavy semicylindrical cloak, like the wing casings of a beetle, hung from wide shoulderboards. From those shoulders came a cluster of tassels or tentacles, carrying various thought boxes, note pages and interfacers. Multiple arms had always been a European fashion.

"A pleasure to see you, Phaethon!" There was something blank and stiff in his eye movements. Phaethon realized Gannis was using a face-expression program. He obviously had recognized Phaethon's armor. Gannis was one of Them.

Phaethon thought to himself: Good grief! Is there anyone in the Golden Oecumene who does not remember what I did except for me?

The financial records had shown many trips to Jovian space. Phaethon also felt a sense of familiarity, of comfort, as if he and Gannis were old friends or business partners.

Like a flash of intuition, certainty entered Phaethon's mind. Whatever it was Phaethon had done, Gannis had done it also. Or, at least, had helped.

"You are here to face the Curia also?" asked Phaethon politely.

"Face? I'm not sure what you mean. My group-mind is representing Helion."

"You are his lawyer?" Why in the world would Gannis be helping Helion? Phaethon had been under the impression that the two men were business rivals, and did not really like each other. Certainly the Synnoetic School, with its direct mind-machine interfaces, its groupings and mass-minds, disagreed with the proindividualist traditions of the manorial schools, and yet competed for the same patronage, the same niche in the socioeconomy.

Gannis made an easy gesture. "Perhaps the Hundred-mind of Jupiter thinks it would be a miscarriage of justice to allow your claim to prevail. You've obviously already broken your word about the memorial agreements we all made at Lakshmi; none of the Peerage wants to have to do business with a man who cannot be trusted."

Lakshmi was on Venus. What had Phaethon been doing on Venus? He assumed that the amnesia agreement was made just before the Masquerade's opening ceremonies in January. Phaethon consulted an almanac routine. Venus had been in triune with Earth at that time, a good position to be used as a gravity sling for any ships bound between Earth, Mars, De-meter, or the Solar Array. Mercury had been in a nonadvan-tageous orbital position, on the far side of the sun. A footnote in the almanac indicated communications had been disrupted all across the inner system because of solar storms. It was the time of the disaster at the Solar Array. Phaethon eyed Gannis speculatively. The man had a suspicious air to him. And suspicious people had the habit of treating hypotheses as if they were certainties. They could be

bluffed.

"Am I to be trusted less than ... shall we say ... others ...?" said Phaethon, nodding ponderously. He favored Gannis with a knowing look.

"Are you saying Helion cannot be trusted with his own wealth? Or that your claim to it is better than his?"

Claim? What claim? Phaethon had no idea whatsoever what Gannis was talking about. Nonetheless, he spread his

hands and smiled smugly. "My meaning is self-evident. Draw from it what conclusions you will."

Gannis became red-faced with anger. Evidently his expression-program had failed, or he was deliberately showing his wrath. "You blame the solar disaster on Helion?! That is grotesque ingratitude, sir, simply grotesque! Considering the sacrifice that version of him made for you! You are a cad, sir! You are a simple, unspotted, pure and perfect cad! Besides, my client disavows everything that happened on the Solar Array! He was not even there!" "Not there? I thought your client was Helion ... ?" Gannis head jerked back an inch, as if he had been stung. Phaethon saw realization cross Gannis's features, a second before the expression-program snapped back into place. Gannis realized Phaethon had been fooling him.

Suddenly bland and polite, Gannis said, "I'm sure the Curia will tell you what you have a right to know."

"I know that you have broken the Lakshmi agreement and that I have not."

Gannis turned his back to Phaethon. Atkins had been watching all this with that cheek-tension that served him for a smile, and a twinkle of amusement in the cool of his eyes. He now nodded at Phaethon, and said, "Well, gentlemen! Shall we go in?" and he opened the tall antechamber doors with a gesture of his baton.

The Chamber of the Curia was austere. As Phaethon had guessed, it was done in the spartan style of the Objective Aesthetic.

Unadorned square silver pillars held up a black dome. In the center of the dome, at the highest point of the ceiling, a wide lens of crystal supported the pool overhead. Light from the world above fell through the water to form trembling nets and webs across the floor. The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case

quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network.

The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze.

Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material.

These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold.

The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing. Phaethon remembered that Ao Nisibus had been a Warlock, after all.

"Oyez, oyez!" cried Atkins, rapping the heel of his baton against the floor with a crack of noise. "All persons having business with the Honorable Appellate Court of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth in the matter of the estate of Helion Prime Rhadamanthus draw nigh! Order is established, Your Lordships, the seals are placed, the recordings proceed." A sense of impalpable pressure, a tension in the air, an undefined sensation of being scrutinized: these were the only clues to Phaethon that the cubes were now occupied by the intelligence of the Curia.

Once, long ago, these had been men. Now, recorded into an electrophotonic matrix, they were without passion or favoritism, and their most secret thoughts were open to review and scrutiny should any charge of unfairness or prejudice ever be brought against them.

The Never-First Schools always urged that the Judges should change from election to election and poll to poll, as

did the members of the Parliament. The more traditional schools, however, always argued that, in order for law to be fair, reasonable men must be able to predict how it will be enforced, so as to be able to know what is and is not legal. Having sat on the bench for 7,400 years, the minds of the Curia were, like the approach of glaciers, like the ponderous motions of the outer planets, very predictable indeed.

A voice radiated from the central cube: "The Court is now in session. We note that the counselor for the purported beneficiary has chosen to manifest itself as an armored penguin. We remind the counselor of the penalties attaching to contempt of Court. Does the counselor require a recess or any extra channels to array itself more presentably?"

"No, Your Lordship." The image of Rhadamanthus faded, and, fitting in to the prevailing aesthetic, the penguin turned into a large green cone.

Phaethon eyed the cone dubiously. "Oh, much better..." he muttered.

"Order in the Court!" radiated the cube on the left.

Phaethon straightened uncomfortably. He had never been in a Court of Law before; he did not know of anybody who had, except in historic dramas. Almost all such disputes were settled by Hortators finding compromises, or by Sophotechs deducing solutions to such problems before they arose. Was Phaethon supposed to take this quaint old-fashioned ceremony seriously? As ceremonies went, it was not the most impressive. It was not even accompanied by any music or psychostimulants.

Phaethon saw how Atkins, the bailiff, stood in a relaxed and watchful posture, hand still on the baton-weapon. Atkins was, perhaps, the only man in all of the Golden Oecumene who was armed. The idea of a Court of Law, the idea that men must be compelled by the threat of force to abide by civilized rules, might be a hideous anachronism in this enlightened day and age. But Atkins still took it seriously.

And perhaps it was serious. Very serious. The future of Phaethon's life was about to be decided for him, decided by forces beyond his control.

"Rhadamanthus," Phaethon whispered. "Do something."

The green cone slid forward and spoke: "Your Lordships, I do have a preliminary motion."

The middle cube: "We will entertain to hear your motion, Counselor."

"The beneficiary—"

"Alleged beneficiary!" snapped Gannis.

"—finds he is taken by surprise and is unprepared. However, he would face civil penalties in another suit if he should break his word and avail himself of the memories redacted under the Lakshmi agreement. But were this Honorable Court to order discovery of that evidence, my client would be able to avail himself of those memories, would be prepared to face this tribunal, and yet would not face civil penalties for "breach of contract."

Gannis said, "How would he not face penalty? If he regains his memories, he is in violation!"

The green cone replied: "My learned colleague is mistaken. Phaethon is in violation if and only if he deliberately opens the forbidden memory files himself. If a Court order compels him to open those files, there is no deliberate act on his part—"

The cube on the left interrupted: "This is not a debating society. The counselors will address their remarks to the bench."

Gannis turned toward the black cubes: "Your Lordships, may I present argument for denying the Respondent's motion?"

The central cube radiated: "The Court will entertain your remarks."

"The motion is without grounds at this stage of the proceedings. The only question presently before the Court is the identity of the Respondent, who claims to be Phaethon Prime Rhadamanthus. And, even were this the proper time to raise '> that issue, the proper relief for a complaint of surprise would be to grant the Respondent more time to prepare. Naturally my client would raise no opposition to any additional post-

ponements the Court may deem necessary for a fully equitable result."

The cube on the right spoke in a voice heavy with irony: "Considering the history of this case, the Court is not surprised that the learned counselor raises no opposition to additional postponements. Nonetheless, the argument is well taken. The matter of Phaethon's memory, except insofar as it touches and concerns the question of his identity, is not a question presently before the Court. The Respondent's motion is denied."

Phaethon whispered: "What the hell is going on here, Rhadamanthus? Who is this 'Respondent'? Me? What are they here to decide ... ?"

The cube on the left exclaimed: "We must have order in the Court! What is all this whispering and commotion? The traditional forms and practices of law must be observed!"

The green cone brightened slightly: "But, Your Lordships, tradition is just what is not being observed here. Tradition requires that equity, as well as law, determine the outcome of Your Lordships' actions. Surely my client cannot be without remedy, as his memory loss hinders his and my ability to protect his interests with full and zealous effort! I am ready to download a precis of the 66,505 cases on the point of defendants suffering from memory redaction, and their rights and obligations under the law."

A certain section of the floor mosaic flowed with light, as strands of interlocking case law were reviewed. Rhadamanthus continued: "In all such cases the Court took steps to ensure that an equitable result was reached."

"The point is well taken. This Court will inform the Respondent of any pertinent details which bear on this case. In so doing, the Court does not indemnify the Respondent from further and future civil actions for breach of contract; the determinations of whatever Court shall sit on that issue are beyond our authority."

Gannis was scowling. The green cone seemed to wiggle smugly. Phaethon was convinced that, deep down, those motions were still somehow penguinlike.

Phaethon said, "Your Lordships, how is this going to work? Am I suppose to ask you questions which Your Lordships will answer, or will the memories be made available to me in an edited form, or how?"

The central cube said: "Submit your motion in the proper form, and we shall answer."

Phaethon nudged the side of the green cone with his foot, and hissed: "Quick, what is the proper form ... ?"

Gannis stepped forward and spoke up: "Your Lordships! I have another motion which I ask to make at this time. I submit that the Respondent's attorney has no standing to appear before this Court. The Rhadamanthus Law-mind is a property of my client, Helion, who must use that same database for his legal matters. This creates a clear conflict of interest. Rhadamanthus cannot serve on both sides of the same case." The green cone said: "Your Lordships, I have built a 'Chinese Wall' to block off those sections of my mind and memory to prevent any such impropriety ..."

Gannis was not finished: ".. . and I further object that Rhadamanthus is himself the res of the case, as the contract controlling his ownership is a real and valuable property of the estate. Even assuming, arguendo, that Phaethon shall be the heir, since we all know what he plans to do with the money (should he prevail), and since we all know he is not going to be around for long, I submit that my client nonetheless has a contingent remainder interest in the estate, and the Respondent must be estopped from employing Rhadamanthus under the doctrine of waste!"

Phaethon said impatiently: "Your Lordships! Can't we have this ceremony take place in some language I understand?!"

"Order. The penalties for contempt of Court may include any punishment the Court deems fit, provided they are not cruel and unusual."

"But I do not understand what is going on!" "It is not the business of this Court to educate you. Rhadamanthus, have you any argument to make as to why we should not grant the claimant's motion ... ? If not, we sustain

the objection. The bailiff will take Rhadamanthus off-line." And, just like that, Rhadamanthus was gone. Phaethon

stood by himself on the dark floor. Gannis smiled with wide self-satisfaction.

Phaethon was as alone as he had been in the grim little room where he had found his armor. No sense-filter was operating; there were no aids nor augments running in his memory. And while, theoretically, Silver-Gray protocol forbade the use of emotion-control programs, Phaethon tended to use some small glandular and parasympathetic regulators. But now, with that support gone, it was almost like being drunk. Despair and frustration raged within his brain, and he had no automatic way to turn those emotions off.

Phaethon took a deep breath, fighting for calmness. Everyone in the ancient world used to control themselves naturally, organically, without any cybernetic assistance. If they could do it, he could do it!

The middle cube radiated: "The Court will now proceed to the examination. Does the Respondent wish to modify or amend any prior pleadings to this Court?"

"Are you speaking to me?" asked Phaethon, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice. "If you want to ask me something, you're going to have to explain what's going on!"

The cube on the left said: "You will maintain order and decorum, or suffer penalty."

Gannis smiled like a shark, and said: "Perhaps the Respondent wishes to request more time to earn another fortune and hire another lawyer. We would not oppose a motion for a postponement."

A moment of blinding anger stabbed through Phaethon, surprising him.

(And on the other hand, Phaethon reminded himself, the ancient world had been turbulent with war and crime and insanity, not once or twice but at all times. Maybe this self-

control stuff was more difficult than it seemed.)

Phaethon said to Gannis: "There will be no postponements."

He turned toward the Curia. "I meant no disrespect to Your Lordships. But you have deprived me of the attorney I was using to instruct me in your proper forms and rituals. You have agreed to tell me those things missing from my memory which I need to know to proceed in this case; yet you have not done so. Is this the fairness and justice for which the Curia is famous? I remind Your Lordships that what we do here today will be remembered not just for a century or a millennium but for all the rest of our lives. We, none of us, had better do anything for which the future will upbraid us."

Gannis's smile faded as his face-program hid his expression once again.

The cube on the right said: "Well said. We will inform you of the facts of the case. The matter is simple. You stand to—" (he used a word Phaethon did not know, some archaic legal expression) "—a very great deal of property and money, perhaps the largest estate ever passed along in human history. The result may change the social and economic relationships within the Golden Oecumene in a revolutionary fashion. Consequently, despite that these are rather routine matters, we seek to avoid even the appearance of irregularity. Therefore, the Curia exercises its right to invoke special jurisdiction, and we sit as a Probate Court, in order to oversee the deposition and examination to determine your identity. This present hearing is to give you the opportunity to submit to a routine Noetic examination, and swear, under telepathic oath, that you are Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth. Do you have any questions?"

"Yes. Who is giving me this fabulous fortune and why? If he wishes to give me this gift, why doesn't this generous person, whoever it is, simply step forward and give it?" "He is dead."

Gannis said, "Objection! The Court's statement is prejudicial. The finality of the death of the deceased is one of the facts at issue in this case!"

The cube on the left said: "Overruled. We make no ruling."

The cube on the right said: "The death of the deceased is a matter of rebuttable presumption under these facts. He is dead until proven otherwise."

Phaethon said: "Your Lordships, was this man some historical figure, some Egyptian pharaoh or American president? I know that people like that from time to time established trust funds as a gift to be paid to the first person to do some great feat, fly a man-powered aircraft across the Atlantic, or something. But if this is the case, why are we in a Court of Law? Wouldn't an archeologist or paleopsychologist be the best person to determine the original intent of this dead man?"

"The death was recent."

Phaethon's mind was momentarily blank. Recent? "Was it someone too poor to afford Noumenal Recording, or a prim-itivist who objected on metaphysical grounds to—"

"Your sire, Helion, who created you, is the deceased."

For a moment, Phaethon believed it. For a moment, he could perfectly imagine the emptiness his life would hold if his sire were gone. Gone forever. He did not like his sire; often they argued. But there was nonetheless a bond and a love between them, like father and son, and a long history of engineering projects on which they both worked together. To picture the Rhadamanth Mansion, or even the Golden Oecumene, without the bright, brave figure of Helion as one of the society's foremost leaders; it was impossible. It was like imagining the world where the sun did not come up. A sense of desolation crept across Phaethon's flesh, and sank into his heart.

But then, in the next moment, Phaethon smiled. "Oh, come now, Your Lordships! I saw Helion not two days ago. He was at the Ovations for the Silver-Gray; I saw him accept the award. We spoke before he went to Lemke's operetta. You know the one, the clever way each auditor gets the memories of each of the characters not in order, so that they each see the same ending in nine different interpretations? It's just the kind of funny old-fashioned thing he likes. And ... and just this morning, Helion was on the by-channels. The Six Peers

sent a contingent to honor him. I suppose it's Seven Peers now. A Peerage! He has been working for that goal longer than I've been alive. That was this morning! You're not going to take that away from him by pretending that he is dead! He is not dead! No one dies anymore! No one ever needs to die!"

Phaethon's voice had grown louder and shriller. But then, abruptly, he closed his mouth, and the muscles in his cheeks were clenched.

There was a moment of silence in the chambers. None of the Curia upbraided him for his outburst. Gannis had turned his head away. Atkins's grim demeanor did not change, even when a look of sympathy or pity softened his eyes.

Phaethon stared at the floor, emotions boiling. He saw the tangled webs of law in the mosaic underfoot. Laws meant to protect the innocent. But even now, even in this day and age, there were things nothing could ward off.

Phaethon said, "It was the solar disaster, wasn't it?"

The Court said: "The brief for the Respondent states, it is not contested, that when Helion beamed his brain information out from his body on the Solar Array to the Mercury Polar Station, the solar storms garbled the signal. Only part of his mind was recovered, enough to form a partial diary of those last events, but not enough to reconstruct his personality intact. The man whom you call Helion is actually a relic of Helion, who was recorded one hour before, as an automatic backup, when the storms first erupted from the core. The question before the Court is whether the relic has sufficient similarity to the prime version to form continuity of identity, and therefore to be considered the 'same' individual in the eyes of the law."

"So the only difference between the two versions is an hour? That's ridiculous! The Helion who is alive now, the Helion Relic, must be indistinguishable from the original, Helion Prime!"

Gannis said in a brash voice: "I would like the Curia to note that the opposing party admits and stipulates the continuity of identity between my client and Helion Prime."

The central cube radiated: "Phaethon is not under oath nor

is he qualified to have such an opinion. We disregard the comment."

Phaethon looked back and forth between the Curia and Gannis, puzzled. "But what in the world is my claim to He-lion's fortune? Surely it is well established in the law that when a man's body dies, his Noumenal Recording wakes up and takes over from where he left off."

Gannis said, "I would like the Court to note that the opposing party has just stipulated that he agrees with my client's theory of the case!"

"Phaethon was asking a question relating to his previous pleadings in this case which he does not recall. He is not under oath and is not testifying. We disregard the comment, and we require that you not waste the Court's time with frivolous motions, Counselor. Is that clear?" Gannis muttered: "Abundantly clear, Your Lordships ..." The central cube said to Phaethon: "In the earlier times, when the science of Noumenal Recording was not as developed as it now is, recordings were more expensive and were made less often."

The left cube said: "The seminal case of Kaino v. Sheshs-ession announced the standard. In that case, the defendant fell in love and was married for several years since his last Noumenal Recording, when he perished in a space-accident. When his relic woke from recording, the plaintiff requested that he take up the matrimonial obligations of his prior, and undergo emotional restructure to instill the missing passions into him. The standard announced was that if a reasonable Sophotech could not anticipate, based on deep-structure analysis of the prior, what the relic would do, then the relic was considered to have a different personality and be a separate individual. The changes must be basic and central to the philosophy, thought style, and core values of the personality, and not merely frivolous or surface changes."

The right cube said: "This holding was modified in Ao Xelepec Prime v. Kes Xelepec Secundus. In that case, a Neptunian Warlock made a Noumenal Recording, but then gave himself the brain structure of an Invariant. He then redacted

a major section of his memory, woke the Warlock neuroform, and claimed that the Warlock relic was the real version of himself, and that he was no longer responsible for carrying out certain contracts and obligations he had previously made. His contention was denied, but the Noumenal Recording was emancipated as a separate and independent individual. The rule is that, if the change in personality since the last recording is so great that the relic no longer understands the thoughts or the motivations of the prior, then the relic is a separate individual in the eyes of the law. If, however, the change is within the range of what the relic might predictably undergo himself, continuity of individuality is presumed."

Phaethon said, "So, during that hour, the Helion who stayed behind on the station did something which the Helion here on Earth now cannot understand or appreciate?"

"That is the claim you have put before this Court. You claim that, during that hour of emergency, Helion underwent a major epiphany or permanent change in personality. You have claimed that he is not the same man."

"But how would I, in any case, claim to own Helion's property and estate?"

"There are even older laws, laws dated from the time when death was a commonplace occurrence. Under these laws, if a man dies without a properly executed last will and testament, his estate passes to his heirs. Helion Prime held the copyright on your gene sequence, and major sections of your personality and mind were constructed out of templates of his personality. The ancient law would regard you as his son, and therefore as his heir. Those laws have never been revoked; they still have force and effect."

Only at this point did Phaethon begin to realize the amount of wealth and property at stake. Helion owned the Solar Array. It was perhaps the single greatest engineering effort ever undertaken. Every person who benefited from the extension of the useful lifespan of the sun, or whose electronic or electromagnetic properties were saved from sunspot or solar flare damage, would owe Helion a debt of gratitude. And that included everyone in the entire Golden Oecumene. If everyone

saved a few seconds or minutes of time-currency from their insurance premiums because of Helion's actions, that money saved was owed to him. Spread over the billions who lived in the solar system, those few seconds per person equaled not just years but decades of computer time.

It would be perhaps more wealth than anyone (except Orpheus Myriad Avernus) had ever controlled.

Phaethon said, "I will submit to the examination."

"It is done. We hold the mental records open on our private channel for inspection by the Court. Do the counselors have any closing arguments to make before we rule on the legal sufficiency of Phaethon's identity?"

"Certainly!" said Gannis with some relish. "We notice the wide difference in behavior between Phaethon before and after the Lakshmi memory redactions. The way he lives and acts now is nothing like the way he lived and acted before. He goes to frivolous parties; he pursues no dangerous or socially unacceptable hobbies. Your Lordships! Observe how much time the old Phaethon spent on his one obsession! Years and centuries! He is different now. He is hardly the same person. Because (and here is the telling point) Your Lordships, the society of the Golden Oecumene would not accept him if they thought him the same as he was. He does not consider himself to be the same person."

Phaethon said: "I am the same person."

"Oh?" said Gannis. "And how do you know?"

Phaethon could think of no answer.

The central cube said: "Phaethon is not on cross-examination. You are making closing arguments. Address your remarks to the bench."

Gannis said, "Your Lordships, we are eager to hear Phaethon answer to an important question which may be dispositive of this case. Does he consider himself to be the same person who created such furor and terror throughout the Golden Oecumene? If he is that person, is he willing to face the penalties for his actions? Those penalties include that he be expelled and ostracized. Your Lordships! I submit that as a matter of public policy the wealth of Helion should not go

to serve Phaethon's mad schemes; that the wealth would be wasted; that Phaethon—if he is the real prime Phaethon— will come to a messy and lonely death. And if he is not the prime Phaethon, the money is not his. I ask Your Lordships to require Phaethon's testimony on this matter! Surely his opinion is crucial; surely he cannot be considered the prime Phaethon if he does not think he is!" Phaethon turned to Gannis: "This is ridiculous. I am who

I am."

Gannis said: "I beg the Court's indulgence. May I have a word aside with Phaethon? We may be able to negotiate a settlement."

The Curia signaled its assent. The impalpable sense of pressure and tension issuing from the cubes vanished, as if they slept, or turned their minds to distant things.

Gannis stepped closer to Phaethon and spoke in a soft voice: "It is ridiculous indeed! You are all set to use the law to steal Helion's money. You know Helion is still Helion; one hour of lost memory does not make such a difference. Come now! Put the past behind you; forget this foolish lawsuit you have begun! You don't even recall why you started it. And even if the Curia sustains your claim, public opinion will condemn you. Now is your last chance for a normal and happy life. Think! Do you really think Helion is dead? Do you really think your friends and family will not hate you if you proceed with this farce?! Now is your last chance to back out with grace."

Gannis stepped closer, put his hand on Phaethon's shoulder: "Come! Though you do not now recall it, we were friends and partners once. I built that armor you are wearing. I do not seek your ill; I oppose you for your own good. Yes, your good! You have forgotten where your own best interests lie. This Court may or may not rule in your favor. If it rules against you, then you are Phaethon Relic, and your life continues in its present happy state. If it rules for you, then, in the eyes of the law, you are the same man who created such havoc in our paradise; this may trigger our rights, under the Lakshmi agreement, to exile and ostracize you. Is that what

you really want? Think carefully, Phaethon. Because, if you think, you will realize that you do not truly know what you really want, eh?"

Was Gannis correct? Phaethon truly did not know and did not remember why he was doing any of this.

But Phaethon recalled how the Earthmind herself asked him to be true to himself. Perhaps he did not know what she meant. But if he—his past and forgotten self—had started this law case, it was not Phaethon's place to end it. If only Rhadamanthus were here to advise him!

Phaethon turned toward the Court. "Your Lordships!"

A sense of austere awareness, like a subtle pressure in the air, radiated from the cubes. "Speak."

"I demand my lawyer be present."

"Rhadamanthus cannot represent you in this matter."

"My lawyer is Monomarchos of the Westmind Law-division."

"Ah, yes. Wait a moment while we open more channels and make arrangements: Monomarchos has a very high intellectual capacity, and we must reconfigure to permit that much active thought-space to enter this area."

Part of the wall behind Phaethon shimmered with heat. Na-nomachines were constructing something with blinding speed. A silver cube, less than a yard across, slid out from the wall, glowing white hot. Phaethon's armor protected him; Gannis had to step backward, his elbow up before his face.

A new voice spoke: "I am here."

THE VERDICT

The white-hot cube spoke: "Phaethon, you may be unaware that you have already spent all ten thousand hours of computer time which you paid into my account. The accumulated interest on the time account has produced another forty-five seconds of thought time, which I am obligated to devote to your affairs; thereafter I shall be a free agent, and will take no further contracts from you. I have already deduced a method of allowing you to prevail, but I will use a different method, and achieve a different result, depending on whether you wish merely to prevail on this case, or to achieve those goals which the older version of you, the version whom you forget, the version who actually made me, preferred. Choose. You have thirty seconds left."

Phaethon did not hesitate. "His goals. I want to achieve the dream they forced me to forget."

"Gannis! My client is prepared to allow this matter to be postponed for the space of ninety days, but only on two conditions. First, you personally must agree that the debts my client owes your metallurgical effort are forgiven; you are no longer one of his creditors. Second, you must stipulate that your client presently is the relic and not the second of Helion, and does not presently share continuity of memory with the Helion who died at the Solar Array. In return we shall stip-

ulate that my client, Phaethon Prime, is the relic of the Phaethon who agreed to the Lakshmi Agreement. The offer shall only be open for fifteen seconds."

Gannis said, "What if—"

"Gannis! The Hundred-mind of which you are a member can predict the outcomes of Curia determinations as well as I. You know your case is lost without that postponement. Ten seconds."

Gannis's face took on the cold and distant look that a Syn-noet communing with his overmind might bear. The real Gannis, the hundredfold mind that oversaw the many separate bodies and partial personalities of the Gannis-group had stepped in to speak directly. "We will agree if your client will sign a confession of judgment to any violation of the Lakshmi Agreement."

"Agreed. Six seconds."

"Then we agree."

Phaethon spoke at the same time: "Wait, Monomarchos! Haven't you just lost the case for me?"

"Quiet. Your Lordships, I present that I carry a power of attorney for Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth, and that, as such, I hereby deliver his last will and testament, devised by him, and tendered to me to deliver in the event he was declared legally dead. The will names my present client, Phaethon Relic, as heir to his estate, to all property and personality, perquisites, assists and aids; but we expressly do not assume the debts of the deceased Phaethon."

Gannis shouted "Hold it! Wait!"

The Curia said, "The last will and testament of Phaethon Prime has been duly recorded."

"Monomarchos!" said Phaethon, "What is going on?!"

The burning cube ignored him: "We further ask this Court to extend recognition of the continuity of marriage from that version to this. I stipulate on behalf of both versions of my clients that both agree."

"The Court does not view such a requirement as necessary. A stipulation made as part of a negotiation is not recognized as a finding of fact. And now, if there are no further issues

or objections, the Court will declare a recess till Helion's deposition, and adjourn."

"Wait!" said Gannis. "I have objections! I have a lot of objections!"

The burning cube said: "Phaethon, if you refrain from opening the casket of memory for the space of ninety days, everything your old self desired will come to pass."

"Explain!"

"As of this moment, sir, I am no longer in your employ or under your orders. I need explain nothing. The case has been settled."

"Would you be willing just to tell me, one gentleman to

another, what—"

"No, sir. I do not wish to spend another second speaking to or listening to you. Except to say this: It is often said we live in a paradise. That is a gross exaggeration. We live in an age of great liberty, beauty, comfort, and wealth. But there are injustices and imperfections with the system which cannot be cured. One injustice is that reckless men, such as yourself, can put the whole society at risk, but that our laws are so jealous of your rights, that no man can use any force to stop you until and unless the danger is manifest. Another injustice is that minds like mine must carry out the strict letter of our duty, even if our duties require us to serve men whom we detest. My duty to you is complete; your victory is assured. It is a duty I relinquish with great pleasure."

Phaethon's jaw was clenched; his hands, at his sides, were balled into fists. "Sir, I am sorry if I have displeased you. Since I do not recall the acts of mine which so dismay you, I cannot tell if your gross rudeness to me is justified or not. But, whatever the case, I still thank you for your service to me, if, once I understand it, it turns out to have been of service."

The silver cube had now cooled, and was growing dim. "I ask the Curia to excuse me from further duties owing to this client. I have received an offer from a temporary overmind composition of Westmind associates to enter their deep meditation to explore fundamental questions of abstract mathe-

matics for the next two hundred years without external distraction. I was forced to leave those important contemplations to return and finish these minor duties here; this time away from that significant work may have crippled the expedition's ability to succeed. Your Lordships; the case is settled; any other attorney program of ordinary skill can explain to my client the further details and ramifications of these transactions. May I be excused from his service?"

"You are excused for now, but may be recalled to attend the deposition of Helion ninety days hence. And may we say, the brethren of the Curia are most pleased and amused at the skillfulness with which you have resolved this issue."

"What issue?! Resolved how?" said Phaethon loudly, stepping toward the floating cubes. "Someone owes me an explanation!"

The black cube on the left said: "But there you are mistaken, Phaethon. Our society is built on the paramount value of human freedom, which means that no one owes any debts to any others except those which he voluntarily assumes. Gannis, did you wish to raise any objections at this time?"

Gannis was staring thoughtfully at Phaethon. "If I may reserve my objections, without prejudice, for a later time, I shall do so, Your Lordships. The Court may have been amused by Monomarchos's little antics, but I am not. He is betting that Helion will not be able to prove his identity when he comes before this court three months hence. Whereas I agreed to these terms only because I am certain Helion Relic shall be indistinguishable from Helion Prime in far less than three months. Whatever happened to him during that last hour of his life, it will have no effect on the ultimate decision of this case. Furthermore, I do not believe Phaethon will have the self-control not to open the memory casket until after that date. He has always been a reckless fellow."

Phaethon had been rather put out by Monomarchos's hostility. So it was with a touch of malice that he impersonated Gannis's tone of voice, and said, "I would like Your Lordships to note that my learned opposition has just expressed

the belief that I am one and the same with the original Phaethon."

The central cube said, "He is not testifying, nor is his opinion dispositive in this case. We are now in recess."

The cubes ceased to radiate their sense of brooding pressure. Phaethon turned to say some further word to Mono-marchos, but the silver cube had turned entirely dark and cold, and was beginning to disintegrate its substance back into the wall.

Phaethon turned to Gannis, but he had already stalked away, the tentacles and tassels from his baroque costume twitching irritably.

He turned to Atkins. "Did you understand what's going on?"

Atkins spread his hands. "I'm just the bailiff, sir. I'm not supposed to give legal advice. Here, let me turn your armor back on."

Atkins inserted a probe at the armor's neckpiece. While he worked, he spoke in an offhand fashion. "But, you know, I thought what happened was pretty obvious. You're now Phaethon Relic in the eyes of the law. If you open your old memories, you turn into Phaethon Prime, and you'll inherit all of Helion's stuff. But then you get kicked out. If you don't open those memories, you'll inherit whatever Phaethon Prime would have owned, because you made out your will to yourself just now. If the Gannis from Jupiter cannot prove that Helion Relic is one and the same with Helion Prime, you get everything. If he does prove it, you are in the same position you're in now, and you lose nothing. So your hotshot lawyer figured out how to get you everything you wanted for no risk; either you win or you break even. Right? And him clearing out all your debts was just an added bonus, icing on the cake. I thought it was pretty slick, actually. All you have to do is follow orders, and keep your memories tucked away for ninety days. So go back to the party, it's going to go on at least for that long, sit back, and relax. You've got it made."

Phaethon thanked him, and walked back up the stairs with a heavy footstep.

As he reached the top of the stair, he was aware of the feeling of discontent gnawing at him. It just did not seem like a victory.

He slid upward through the rock. There was a crowd of monsters and grotesqueries gathered on the grass outside. When they saw Phaethon, they cheered.

Since Phaethon's sense-filter was still not turned on, he could not read the placards and hypertext the cheering crowd waved and broadcast. All he could see, at the moment, were faces of ghastly ugliness or lopsided asymmetry grinning at him. Claws waved, hands fluttered, wings, polyps, brachial attachments made a dizzying motion as the creatures leaped and capered.

The foremost, no doubt the leader, was an immense rugose cone. Four wide tentacles sprang from the apex of its body, terminating in pincers, manipulators, or clusters of sense organs, eyeballs or ear trumpets. It made an eye-defeating gesture of complex loops, knotting and unknotting. with all four tentacles at once. "Greetings! O Greetings, adventurous, beauteous, all-destroying Phaethon! We greet you with a thousand million greetings, and express the boundless hope that your terror-inspiring victory of this day will send the leaden and oppressive weight of the Eldest Generation (The Long-Dead Generation, as I like to call them) quaking and shivering into well-deserved oblivions! At last the Wheel of Progress, albeit with much squeaking, has made a millionth-inch turn upon its eternally rusted axle! The Golden Oecumene (The Rusted Oecumene, as I like to call her) has seen the first of many such revolutions: that is our fervid hope!"

Phaethon was not sure what these people intended. At this

thought, his golden helmet unfolded from his gorget and cov-

, ered his face. A tissue of black nanomachinery unfolded like

a cloak from his backplate, and he swirled it across his limbs

and shoulders as he folded his arms, to make a protective

barrier against any microscopic foulnesses these dirty creatures might give off.

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure, sir," said Phaethon. He recognized them as Never-Firsts, from the generation born during and after Orpheus perfected Noumenal Recording, and members of Neomorphic and nonanthropomorphic schools.

A hooting laughter passed through the crowd. The leader flapped his tentacles in comic display. "Hoy! Listen to his stiff-arsed, high-nosed twang! Eh, eh, Phaethon, you are among friends and close companions of the heart! Our goals are your goals! We offer you adoration, endless love! We ask only that you allow our schools to take you on as a mascot and ultimate hero! Come! We prepare a love-feast in your honor."

To the rear, Phaethon saw an organism shaped like a sloppy pile of internal organs, all mucus and twisted intestines, passing out pleasure-needles to those around him. These needles were tuned to direct pleasure-center stimulation, Phaethon saw by the looks of glassy nirvana that usurped the eyes of the deformities and grotesques. Also, they must have had their sense-filters tuned to reject any evidence of the damage their hedonism did, for he saw the creatures stepping blindly on or over the prone body of a she-monster, stupefied with pleasure.

Phaethon fought down his sense of disgust. Without Rhad-amanthus to help control his bodily reactions, the task was not easy. But he told himself these people might know the secret of his past; they said he was their hero. Perhaps they had information he could use.

He said, "I am flattered that you call me so heroic. Surely you can see that all I do now is no more than a natural outgrowth of my past acts?"

The creature flopped its tentacles in a energetic pumping motion. "What is the past but a pile of dead meat, already slick with flies? No, no, it is the future ('Our' Future, as I like to call it) to which we turn our eager eyes, bright and glistening with promise!"

But another part of the creature's body (or perhaps it was a second creature, a parasite) leaned up and presented a rank

fungoid tendril toward Phaethon. In the sucker-disks of the tendril was a card.

The creature said, "Here! Lookit! Take! This contains everything you need to know about your past accomplishments, and our assessment of their relative worth."

Phaethon took the card in his gauntlet. It was blank, meant to load a file directly into his brain from the Middle Dreaming. Should he open an unknown file into himself without Rhadamanthus here to check it first?

On the other hand, who would dare commit a prank on the steps of the courthouse door, with Atkins standing in earshot? And it may have information about his past....

He opened a temporary sense-filter (one not connected through Rhadamanthus) and looked through the Middle Dreaming at the card.

The card was black, empty as the void, and radiated a sensation of painful cold. In strokes of angular ice-white dragon sign, the glyph on the card read "NOTHING."

The blackness flowed out from the surface of the card toward his face, filled his vision. There was a sensation of pain in his eyes, a whirl of movement, of falling, of giddy motion.

He threw the card from him, shut off his sense-filter, and fell out of the Middle Dreaming. His spinning sense-perceptions returned instantly to normal. The security buffer in his personal thoughtspace showed a virus of the most crude and sophomoric design, one called drunk-rabbit, had tried to enter his brain and turn on his internal neural signals to flood his system with endorphins and intoxicants. Had it been assault? But he had taken the card willingly.

"How dare you attack me?" said Phaethon loudly. "Do you respect neither law nor decency?"

There was laughter at that; some of the lumps of flesh here snickered; other monsters roared with ungainly mirth, opening wide mouths hooked with fangs or black tusks.

The ridged cone twisted, bringing the tentacle from which its many-eyed head-ball drooped down to where the parasite-polyp glistened on the red-blue flesh. He said: "Scary, what are you doing? Phaethon is our lovely friend!"

The attached segment of flesh that controlled that fungoid growth spoke back. "Do not pinch up your arse so much, boss, or the filth will soak backward into your brain! What, no sense of humor? I wanted Phaethon here to join us in our happy-time! A little slosh is good for him! Lookit how twanged and stiff he looks! Don't he want to celebrate?"

The larger creature spread his tentacles in a parody of a shrug. "My friend Scary, he's got a good point there, Phaethon, old boy (or can I call you Fey-fey?). You do look twang. Here, snuff a bead into an orifice! Any hole will do."

Phaethon spoke in a level tone of voice. "No, thank you. What cause have I to celebrate with creatures of your ilk, sir? Who are you? What is your business with me?"

The creature held all its tentacles overhead. The monsters fell silent.

"I am Unmoiqhotep Quatro Neomorph of the Cthonnic School. We praise your victory over the oppression of the vicious inertia of this world of hate and horror in which we live. For once, the rising Generation (the Children of Divine Light, as I call them) has received their due reward from the all-smothering mediocrity of the Elders (the Jailers, as I like to call them). And from a Peer, no less! We rejoice because wealth unfairly hoarded by Helion has finally come to a child of his; we are also children of rich and important men; we consider you our inspiration! Oh, happy day!" There was another gurgling cheer from the mob, swaying and napping their malformed arms.

Phaethon's anger drummed in his temples; his face was warm with wrath. "You dare to stand there cheering because my father, whom I loved, has been declared dead? You come to mock my loss and grief! What kind of vicious vultures are you?!"

Another monstrosity stumbled forward in a tangle of clumsy feet. "Don't get so high-and-mighty on us, you greedy money chaser! You monopolist! You engineer! We are children of enlightenment! Pleasure and freedom are ours! We despise the filthy materialists and their thinking machines who enslave us with their Utopia! Where is true humanity in that?

Where is pain and death and suffering? How dare you be so selfish, so self-repressed? What kind of stuck-up, sniveling, psychic-tyrant are you?!"

The creature yelling this at Phaethon was a thing out of a nightmare. From a large head, two necks reached down into two bodies, naked, male and female. The separate bodies of the one head were embraced in a jerking copulation.

Phaethon turned on his sense-filter and edited the crowd from his view.

Now he stood, or seemed to stand, in a stately garden. Blessed solitude was here. Except for the twitter of distant birds, all was silent. The odor of unwashed humanity was gone; instead, a scent rose from the dew-gemmed grass, or the curving petals of luxurious flowers beyond the hedge.

Phaethon kicked his foot against the soil, activated his magnetics in the armor, and soared into the spring-scented air. Handsome landscape was above him and below him in the great cylinder.

Perhaps this sublime peace was an illusion. He knew these lawns were crowded with a filthy swarm of neomorphs. But perhaps some illusions were worth maintaining, if only for a little while.

He turned on his private thoughtspace, so that a spiral of dots, and cubes of engineering and ecological routine icons seemed to hang within arm's reach around him, but the garden landscape was still visible beyond.

He reached toward the pastel oblong icon representing his wife's diary, but stopped. He did not have enough memory just in the isolated circuitry wired into his brain to run a full simulation; and he certainly did not want, to enter into personality deprivation while in flight. But he was too impatient to go all the way back, miles upon miles, to his barren little cubical in the space elevator before he had a chance to find out what Daphne knew.

Phaethon hesitated to call Rhadamanthus back, because he now knew Helion's Relic could find what he was doing through those links. And while he might be a fine man, it was a fact that Helion and Phaethon now had an uncompro-

mising conflict of interests. Either one had the right to He-lion's vast fortune, or the other; they could not both.

Phaethon frowned. Helion's relic? Phaethon had seen him just last night. It was impossible to think of the man as anything other than his sire; it was impossible to think of him as "dead" merely because a court of law so decreed.

But, if so, then Phaethon was in the wrong, stealing money from a man merely because a court of law called him dead. After all, that same Court just called Phaethon himself dead....

There was a spaceport at the weightless joint joining this cylinder with the next. It was a wide spherical space where many ships of spun diamond, like a forest of elfish glass, were assembled and disassembled between Inner System flights; they also served as shuttles to farther spaceports at L-5 point and beyond, where mile upon mile of magnetic launchers accelerated ships for bright and distant Jupiter, and other Outer System ports of call.

A smaller group of habitats, like a cluster of grapes, was affixed to the wall of the sphere; one of the larger ones contained thought caskets and lockers rented out by Eleemosynary Hospitalities, a subdivision of that wealthy Composition's many business groups, efforts, and holdings.

Phaethon floated into the airlock at the hub of the hospice. From there he descended to the equator of the hospice, which was being spun for gravity. Thought caskets formed a curving row reaching up to his left and right; he could see the other side of the corridor above him.

He entered the nearest thought casket, had the medical apparatus close about him. The circuitry in his armor might interfere with the interfaces, yet Phaethon was strangely unwilling to take it off.

As Atkins had done, Phaethon took a group of fibers and stuffed them down through the neckpiece of his armor, where they writhed and changed shape, making themselves adaptable to the circuitry in the black nanomechanism that formed the armor lining. The signal now could be fed through the

armor to the armor's internal interfaces and into his brain. Apparently that was sufficient.

Energy connections were formed with receptors in his brain; all his senses were engaged; the external world faded.

Now he seemed to stand in the Hospice Public Thought-space, where a pyramid of balconies seemed to rise around him, with windows and icons opening up into deeper and higher sections of the library.

A gesture from his little finger closed the balcony railing and formed a privacy box. He opened the diary, fell into deepest dreamspace, lost his memories, and became Daphne. The recording started with her before she woke yesterday morning.

THE SYMPHONY OF DREAMS

She had not been asleep, not as the ancients would have understood sleep. Daphne had been experiencing a Stimulus, Mancuriosco the Neuropathist's Eighth Arrangement. The last movement in the Stimulus, the so-called Compass of Infinity Theme, involved stimulations of deep-memory structures, a combination of REM-stage delta waves and meditative alpha waves. Over all, was a counterpoint of waves that did not naturally occur in the human brain, which, introduced artificially produced sensations and states of mind that required a special nomenclature to describe.

In her dreams, she cycled through an evolution, first as an amoeba pulsing in the endless waves of the all-mother ocean, then as a protozoa, drifting and floating, then as an insect, escaping from the water to the smaller infinity of the air. Memories of ancient amphibians, ancient lizards, lemurs and hominids flowed through her; each mind, as it grew more complex, seemed, somehow, to diminish the mystery and wonder of the world around her. Other deeply buried memories surfaced; of her floating in the womb as a child, surrounded by infinite love and warmth, then emerging, in pain and confusion, into what seemed to be a smaller universe. The final movement of the theme had a set of emotions, moods, dreams and half-dreams, where, ennobled by some

far future evolution, now a goddess, she held the universe like a crystal globe in her hand, but, being larger than the universe, had no place to stand. There were sensations of being cramped and suffocated, terribly alone, as the universe shrank to the size of a pebble, a dust mote, an atom. Then, somehow, in a mysterious reverse, she found herself now infinite and infinitesimal, once more floating and drifting in a mysterious endless sea....

She enjoyed the experience as always, but there was something not quite right about it, something which made her uneasy. ...

It was strange. She remembered this performance as her favorite. How had she truly never noticed how pessimistic and ironic the theme here was? But the performance had not changed. Had something changed in her... ?

Perhaps she was more joyous these days. These were the golden days of the Transcendence; there was much to enjoy.

The dream drifted to waking, and Daphne awoke.

She lay beneath the waters of her living-pool, yawning and stretching, bubbles tickling her nose. Daphne stared up at the play of lights and reflections across the underside of the dome, at the blue sky and white clouds beyond. She smiled a languid smile.

At her thought, the water beneath her strengthened its surface tension, so that she now rested in a dry little valley, made by her own weight, of rainbow-chased transparency.

What next? She wondered. It was after the Gold Cup competitions, but the Life Debates were still two days away. And she had already bought all the gifts she needed for the Ministration of Delights in August.

Some of her manor-born friends, Anna and Uruvulell, always had their Sophotechs surprise them on unplanned festival days, plan their schedules for them. The superintelligent machines often could choose what would amuse and instruct their patrons much better than the girls themselves could do. Such a life was not for her. She craved spontaneity, wildness, adventure!

Daphne challenged propriety among the manor-born by go-

ing in her physical presence to the festivals. The cottage around her now, for example, with its pillars of porphyry marble and its diamond dome, was real, grown last month in the gardens south of Aurelian Mansion. It was not Rhada-manthus, but a more simple-minded Sophotech (only eighty or ninety times as bright as a human genius, not thousands) named Ayesha, who dwelt in this cottage.

It was Ayesha who now manipulated the millions of microscopic machines in the life-pool to weave robes of flowing blue-and-silver silk up around Daphne as she rose to her feet. Water trickled from the curves of her breast and belly, and her long hair, now wet and black and heavy, that hung, clinging, to her back. Where the water passed, silk thread clung, so that by the time she stepped from the pool, fabric spun down to her feet. The waste-heat of the molecular assembly was directed through her hair to dry it.

The robe was like a Hindu sari. The shining cloth was simply draped, without fastenings or ties, and fell with natural grace over one shoulder and tightly around her waist and hips, to accentuate her figure. She carried the train over her elbow.

She passed down a corridor paved with mother-of-pearl, with softly glowing hypnogogic Warlock-sculptures hovering in niches to either side. Daphne did not have the states of consciousness necessary to receive the experience-signals from these sculptures; she was a base neuroform, even though, in her youth, she had been a Warlock named Ao Andaphantie, with no barriers between her left brain and hy-pothalamus, and in dreams had walked by the day through her waking consciousness. Daphne kept the sculptures with her nonetheless; they were not intelligent enough to be emancipated, and would have drooped with melancholy had she abandoned them.

Even if she could no longer read the interior of the sculptures, she saw how they spun and glittered and laughed as she passed, catching her mood and reflecting it back to her. They seemed much brighter than she would have expected, glinting with suppressed mirth, as if some hidden and wonderful surprise were waiting for her.

Beyond was a mensal room. Part of the discipline of the hedonists of the Red Manorial Schools was that they take all nutriment not through traditional living-pool absorptions but in a more ancient fashion, by eating. Daphne had been allied with Eveningstar, a Red manor, for many centuries before she joined the more austere and strict Silver-Gray. The mensal chamber was floored with polished wood, the walls hidden by rice-paper screens painted with bamboo-and-crane motifs.

Why that motif? Daphne glanced at the cranes. Mating for life, they were symbols of eternal fidelity. Was Ayesha Sophotech trying to hint that Daphne should spend more time with her husband? He had been acting rather moody and abstracted lately, not enjoying the festivals as much as she had thought he would.

In the center of the room was a table on which were displayed a careful arrangement of bowls, napkins, tiny crystal bottles of sauce or dried leaves of spice. Here were plates of spiced fish wrapped in seaweed, slices of octopus, balls of rice. In the middle was a black iron tea kettle with three spouts. She knelt, her robes as bright as flower petals on the mat around her knees, and took up her chopsticks. And stopped, her head cocked to one side: what was this bulk beneath the silk napkin folded to the side of her setting?

She drew aside the napkin and found a memory box beneath. This was an imaginifestation, the real-world analogy for some icon in thoughtspace. Taking it up or opening it would trigger some mental reaction or routine.

Daphne recognized her own handwriting on the lid: "For the Third Day after Guy Fawkes'. Happy Surprise!"

"I hate surprises!" She groaned and relied her eyes. "Why am I always doing things like this to myself?!"

Well, there was nothing else to be done. She would have to open the box. But to make the waiting more delicious, and to prevent her meal from spoiling, she ate first. Daphne was good at mensal ceremony; her each gesture and nibble, each sip from her tea bowl, was as graceful as a small ballet.

Then, with her food warm in her stomach, and chewing on a mint leaf for desert, it was time to open the box.

Slowly, the lid came open.

Inside the box, like concentric iridescent bubbles, was her universe.

Daphne saw it, and remembered.

She sat, eyes closed, breathless. Her old Warlock training allowed her to remain awake while the dreaming centers of her brain, rushing with images, tried to establish deep-structure emotional and symbolic connections between her memories and consciousness.

The cosmos was called Althea. It was a simple, geocentric, Copernican model, based on Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. Beneath a crystal sphere of fixed stars and the complex epicycles of moving planetary mansions were continents and blue oceans of a gentle world. Her seas teemed with fishes and mermaids, whales grand with ancient wisdom, sunken cities. Her lands were pastoral, jeweled with tiny villages and farms, high castles, small cities crowned with lovingly built cathedrals. A memory of horrid war hung like the notes of a trembling counterpoint echoing from far hills, and musketeers and daring horse guards patrolled the edges of dark forests where winged dragons were rumored to brood.

In the city of golden Hyperborea, beyond the Northwestern Sea, a prince named Shining had returned from the wars with the grim Cimmerians, who lived in endless caverns of gold and iron, in a land of eternal gloom. The prince had brought with him out from that underworld a dream made of fire, which he wore like a cloak over his armor of gold, or like wings of flame....

The wonder of it was that Daphne had achieved the Semifinal Medal for the Althean universe she had created; today she was to enter in the final competition against other amateur dreamsmiths. She had originally intended it only for children, or for those who delighted in childish things. How could it compete with the modern non-Euclidean universes invented by Neomorphs, or the strange multileveled worlds of the New Movement Warlocks, or the Mobius-strip infinities of Anachronic Cerebellines? The love-gravity universe submitted by Typhoenus of the Clamour Black Manor, a universe where

love increased gravitic attraction and hate and fear lessened it, had thousands of worlds, a galaxy of worlds, peopled by thousands of characters no less complex and complete as her few continent's worth. How could she compete? How could she ever hope to win?

She opened her eyes and came out of her trance. Phaethon was always bothering her about getting back into some effort, getting involved in some business or program. (As if anything humans did could make any difference at all in a world run by machines!) And it was true that she had put off the decision, and put it off again and again, telling herself that perhaps, by the time of the Masquerade at the end of the Millennium, when the world reviewed its life and decided where its future lay, Daphne would review and would decide herself.

Well, the Millennium had come. The decision was here. If she won the Gold Medal for her universe there would be a flood of invitations, communions, ovations. Entertainers would send her gifts and compose praises just for the privilege of being seen with her, or publicity-mongers to have the public see what name-brand services she patronized.

Maybe she could become a dream weaver in truth, not merely a dreamer.

And maybe, just maybe, her husband would lose that look of disdain he got when he spoke of those who enjoyed the fruits of the Golden Oecumene without helping with the cultivation. "All history has worked to created our fine Utopia," he would always say, "so it is hardly the time for the human race to take a holiday! We don't want entropy to win."

She was always afraid he was thinking of her when he said this. Maybe if she won the Gold, that fear would go away. Maybe the future would be clearer to her.

She had also promised herself to decide, before the Millennium was up, whether or not to make children with Phaethon. If she had a career again, that decision might become easier, too.

Daphne rose, her silk robes whispering around her knees and ankles. No wonder she had hidden this memory from herself! Her nerves could not have taken the cheerful strain

of waiting, the fretful days and minutes till the competition drew near.

There were Red Manorial routines for controlling such emotions, or replacing fear with hope; but now that she was a Silver-Gray, she had to learn to do those things, so to speak, by hand. Silver-Gray protocol did not allow for unprompted mood reorganizations; memory redaction, however, was acceptable. Ancient man forgot things all the time, and so how could the Silver-Gray curators upbraid the exercise of a flaw so traditional?

With a silken whisper of robes, she passed from the chamber to her day lock.

And, since she was present and awake in the real world, she had to take the time to do things, one step at a time, which would have been easier and simpler even in a strict Silver-Gray dreamscape. It took time to change into her Masquerade costume (she was dressed as a favorite author from her childhood, for luck), time to program her hair, check the weather, and adjust her skin accordingly. The Ayesha-mind had remembered to summon a carriage with time enough to carry Daphne to the Oneirocon Palace (which Daphne had forgotten—these had to be done in order in the real world, with no backups or restarts).

The carriage pulled up on the turning circle outside the day lock. It was a light and open affair, well sprung, with wheels slender and light as parasols. The road was still warm from its assembly heat; evidently Aurelian foresaw more traffic from this side of the park today, and had thrown a new road up overnight. Pulling the carriage was an old friend.

"Mr. Maestrict!" Daphne exclaimed, rushing up to throw her arms around the horse's neck. "How have you been?! I thought you were working for the Parliament now, Mr. Can't or Won't or something like that."

"Mr. Han is his name, Miss Daphne. Kshatrimanyu Han. He's the Prime Minister," the horse replied. "And there's not much for me to do during the Masquerade. Parliament is not in session, and, even when it is, all they ever do is argue about how much intellectual property goes into the public

domain under the Fair-Use Doctrine, or how much salary poor old Captain Atkins should get."

"Who is Atkins?" She petted Mr. Maestrict on the nose, and sent one of Ayesha's remotes to the life-pool to assemble a lump of sugar.

"Oh ... he's sort of a leftover from the old days. He does ... ah... some tasks the Sophotechs aren't allowed to do. We're lucky, because we just found a little mystery for him to solve. It's probably just a Masquerade prank, you know."

"Well! An adventure!"

"Not really an adventure, ma'am. It appears that some Neptunian masterminds are preparing a thought-weapon to erase or drive insane some high-level Sophotechs. We're trying to find out where this weapon is, or whether it is a false alarm meant to spook us."

His words made little impression on Daphne. It would be as hard for her to imagine the foundational Sophotechs being killed as it would to imagine the sun going nova. She thought the machine intelligences were able to anticipate every conceivable danger. So all she said was: "Good! It's about time things were shaken up around here. Sugar?"

The horse twitched his ears. "Ma'am... ? I mean, I like you and all, but, do we know each other that well... ?"

"No, silly!" She threw back her head to laugh. "I was offering you some sugar. Here."

"Mm. Thank you. I, ah, of course I knew what you meant. Ahem. Climb aboard. Where to?"

"To the Dream Lords' Palace! Away! And don't spare the horses!"

"Good heavens, ma'am, I hope you'll spare me somewhat."

"I'm competing today in the Oneirocon!"

"Hoy! I didn't realize it was that important, ma'am! Watch this!" Now he reared and pawed the ground, nostrils wide, and his ears flattened. He cried "Aha!" and began to race.

Daphne squealed with delight, and grabbed for the rail of the rocking carriage.

Some people strolling the park applauded as Daphne's wild carriage thundered by, and several posted comments on the

short-term public channel, complimenting the authenticity and grace of her steed.

On the same channel, Mr. Maestrict posted: "Seems like everyone still likes horses, Miss Daphne. We'll never go out of style. Have you ever thought about taking up equestrianism again? Nobody designs a quarter horse like you. Look at my magnificent body!" And he tossed his mane in the wind as he charged.

It was the same thing her husband was always saying. But there was no market anymore for horses. Horsemanship, as a fad among anachronists and romantics, had dried up eighty years ago.

Daphne answered him out loud, shouting back over the noise of the wheels: "Why, Mr. Maestrict! I like you and all, but do we know each other that well... ?"

He was embarrassed, or amused, and he put down his head and ran all the faster.

The Oneirocon was surely the simplest, most stark building in the history of Objective Aesthetic architecture. The ceiling was a perfectly square flat slab, half a mile on a side, hovering above the ground with no visible support. Beneath, open on all sides, a square floor embraced a large, perfectly round, shallow living-pool,

A later architect had modified the plan, adding a circle of dolmens, Stonehenge-like, around the pool. In case of inclement weather, the buoyant roof could sink down till it rested on the dolmens, and protective films be projected between the pillars to form temporary walls.

A high-priority segment of the Aurelian Sophotech Mind was present, represented by a mannequin disguised as Comus, with a charming wand in one hand and a glass in the other. Daphne had no idea this contest had attracted such attention.

Comus was a character from a play by Milton (linear word poet, Second Era). The son of the wine god Bacchus and the

enchantress Circe, Comus used the gifts of his divine parents to tempt men to drunken revelry, magically transforming them into brutes and beasts. Only against pure virgins did his cunning magic fail. Daphne thought it was tremendously funny that Aurelian chose this as his self-image.

All the contestants were physically present; they would only be able to use standardized memory-and-attention equipment to promulgate their simulations. The judging would be done on four grounds: internal consistency, external relevance, coherency, and popularity.

Daphne was pleased to learn that the "relevance" ground was being given a lesser judging weight than the semifinalist judges had given it. Apparently, the Consensus Aesthetic was relaxing, allowing art for art's sake. Since Daphne's little fairy-tale world had nothing to do with real life or any modern issues, that was a relief. But it afforded a correspondingly greater weight to internal self-consistency, her weakest area. Her universe was somewhat Aristotelian in places. For example, it had an atmosphere reaching up to the crystal firmament, but a Napoleonic level of technology, such as Montgolfier's Balloon, and primitive airships, which she had included only because she thought they looked stately and romantic.

This year, popularity was to be determined by a novel method.

Participants in the dream would be under full amnesia, actually believing themselves to be the characters with which the dream weavers had peopled their universes. Their emotions and deep-structures would remain untouched. A certain amount of artificial memory, to give them the language, background, and customs, would be permitted after inspection by the judges. But they would be allowed to hear rumors and myths of the other universes, to reincarnate and emigrate. The emigration would be free and open "voting with their feet" as Aurelian called it. Whoever attracted the most people away from his competitors would win the popularity ranking.

The contestants, in bright costumes, plumes, and gaudy skin tones, some in human bodies, others in many-headed

Harmony forms dating from the Regrouping period of the Fourth Era, stood in a circle around the living-pool, waiting for Aurelian's signal. All threw aside their garbs and stepped down, naked into the waters.

Daphne sank. Adjustments in her lungs drew oxygen from the medium. Microscopic assemblers built contacts to the nerve-interfaces she carried beneath her skin. As she drifted into the far, deep dreamspace, Daphne felt that moment of pleasant terror as her personality slipped away.

In the next moment, she was no longer Daphne, she was the Queen-Goddess of her universe. Her mind, assisted by the Sophotech interface, expanded to encompass every element and aspect of her reality, till she could count the hairs on every head of her characters; and not an invented sparrow fell but that she could work the trajectory into the destiny web of her plot.

The players came on-line. It was frightening—even the Daphne-Goddess was frightened—to see her characters come to life in the million dramas she simultaneously spun. Because, deep down, the Goddess still knew that this life was false, an illusion, and that these character lives would end with the end of the drama, their memories reabsorbed back into the people playing them.

It occasionally happened in such games that a character pondered enough questions, brought forth original thoughts, defined himself, and became self-aware, thinking thoughts independent of the mind of the player portraying him.

There were, to be sure, safeguards in the dreamware meant to prevent this from happening; and, if it did happen, there were even more safeguards to prevent the newborn personality from being murdered unintentionally when the player from which he sprang woke up.

(In the eyes of the law, those players stood to those emancipated characters as parent to child, and had an inescapable duty to provide for the child until he was old enough to fend for himself, either by earning enough to rent the computer space in which he lived, or to buy a physical body into which his noumena could be downloaded.)

Daphne's dream sprang to life, and the competition began. Her universe spun like an orrery beneath her hands, like a jeweled toy, and the plotlines of her characters were woven of a hundred thousand colored threads.

During the first four hours of the competition, forty dream-years went by in her universe. Most of her dramas dealt with simple things: young ladies trying to choose wisely when they wed; temptations to their fidelity; misunderstanding, discord and reconciliation; or a surprising reverse when the man everyone condemned as a rogue turned out to be the girl's true love. There were few adventures as such, except for the occasional shipwreck or Turkish kidnapping (intended usually to force the bickering lovers together, rather than to show the dangers or bravery of the ancient world.) There were hints that the war with Napoleon, or the Dragon-Magi of Persia, might resume, but this was done usually to call young soldiers away overseas, in scenes of heartbreak and promised faithfulness, not to portray wars as such. Daphne hated war stories, especially ones where cavalry officers' mounts were hurt.

Not much action-adventure, no. But there were marriages. Plenty of marriages.

By the sixth hour of competition, half a dozen decades of dream life had passed. And Daphne was ranked in thirty-fifth place, getting somewhat low marks for her lack of realism. Some universe made of diatonic music was in front, unfolding a vast drama as intelligent song-scores ranged across a universe of staffs, discovering new harmonies, fitting themselves, not without pain, into a cosmos-sized symphony. The Daphne-Goddess was irked: that dream weaver was letting his players do all the work!

Well, two could play the game that way.

Daphne-Goddess relaxed her hand at the loom of fate, and began to let the plotlines follow their own natural destinies. She allowed the Sophotech to explore more realistic outcomes, and removed restrictions on character types. "Giving the horse his head," as she called it.

Events took new turns, and now she had a million tangles to contend with. Everything (almost!) flew out of control. Rail

lines and factories and steamships sprang up across her pastoral landscape, and suddenly her heroes were not rakish officers in the Queen's Own Grenadiers, nor stern aristocrats in cold mansions needing a woman's love to melt their icy hearts: no. All her heroines were falling in love with a new type of man: young inventors with a dream, steel kings and oil barons, self-made men: thinkers, doers, movers and shakers. The same type of men who had always been the greedy villains in earlier parts of her work. What was going on?

Daphne-Goddess saw warning signals from some of the underjudges, reminding her that, since she started with her plotlines as romances, she would lose points for coherence if she switched to another genre of drama. She ignored the warnings. At thirty-first place, what had she to lose?

Wait. Thirty-first? Had she just jumped ahead four slots?

Daphne ignored that and concentrated on salvaging the tornado of her unraveling plotlines. It was as if an invisible force or an unseen hand were helping her; certain resolutions naturally suggested themselves; and natural events were punishing wicked characters without any intervention on her part.

She wanted to make the factories scenes of pathos and cruelty, but no. Widows and women without support, as wage earners, no longer starved if they did not marry well. Some of her characters became suffragettes. Laws were agitated through Parliament to allow wives to buy, sell, and own property, without the consent of their husbands.

Less romance? There was more romance here. A new type of heroine was appearing now: independent, brash, inventive, optimistic. Just her kind of woman! She had no need for action or bloodshed in such times as these; life was an adventure. Daphne-Goddess laughed at the judges. Let her come in last if she must. This was a world she liked: it roared onward toward its own self-made future.

She almost intervened when she saw the older forests of Germany being felled, and dragons being hunted down by squads of dragoons and aeronauts. But the hoarded gold the were-worms stole was returned to its proper owners, the men who had earned it; and the dark wasteland was now sunlit

farmland. It was beautiful. The population grew.

Overseas to the West, the dashing prince of Hyperborea built an airship larger than any that had ever been, aided by two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. In a series of three magnificent expeditions, he rose higher and higher into the atmosphere, and on the second voyage passed the orbit of the moon, taking pictures with the new kinetoscope of the workings of the crystal gears and epicycles.

The moon in her universe was only ten miles wide, and turned through the aether a few thousand feet above the mountaintops. Daphne-Goddess began to fret. Was the universe she built too small for the spirit of the men who now possessed it?

The Roman Catholic Church condemned the translunar expeditions as impious. A noise of war began to sound in earnest, not just as rumors. The old aristocracy of England and Cimmeria hated the new breed of inventors and captains of industry, and joined the crusade against them. Yellow journalists and demagogues loudly condemned the new way of life, and chose the translunar expedition as the symbol on which to heap their venom.

Many of these were her older players, people who had wanted to join in a small, safe, pastoral world. Daphne-Goddess had some sympathy for them, but when she looked down and saw the magnificent airship of the Hyperboreans, decorated with banners of black and gold, rising gigantic and proud, upward to conquer heaven, her heart melted with delight. Trumpets blew fanfares from the windows of the Empire State Building as the airship launched.

German and Cimmerian airships, armed with cannons, now appeared from out of the stormclouds where they had been hiding, and sought to down the vessel. Yet the Hyperborean ship rose farther and higher than any opposition. The vessel passed the orbits of the moon, of glowing Venus and red Mars. Then, another disaster: the crew, overcome by superstitious terror at the near approach of a comet, mutinied, and parachuted over the rail to the globe so many miles below. The Captain continued onward alone.

From the wireless in the cabin, he sent his final message: he revealed himself to be Lord Shining, the prince of Hyper-borea himself, having come aboard the airship incognito. This expedition was not merely meant to go to the starry sphere, but beyond; he had brought tools and explosives sufficient to open a hole in the dome of the sky and see what lay on the far side.

The radio stammered protests: messages from Popes and Kings warning that he might cause the sky to fall, puncture the universe like a bubble, or let some dreadful other-substance from Beyond rush in to drown the universe!

His reply: "A prison the size of a universe is yet a prison. I shall not be bound."

He donned a deep-sea diver's helmet and heavy leather suit against the thinness of the air; frost gathered on the shrouds; the steam engines sputtered, lacking oxygen. Beneath him, the whole world was paralyzed with awe or fear. Overhead was the dome.

He attached himself to the azure empyrean crystal with a harness of suction cups. Now he lifted the pickax, which still had tied around its head the good-luck ribbon his wife had given him. He braced himself, drawing back to swing....

THE MASTER OF THE SUN

Daphne was jarred awake. Clumsy with stupidity, her 'thoughts no longer racing at machine-assisted speeds, she wondered in numb confusion if her prince had destroyed the universe by puncturing the wall. Maybe the universe had been a bubble after all—she was in a pool...

Daphne stood up, spitting water from her lungs. She was in the huge living-pool of the Oneirocon, with bits of interface-crystal still dripping from her hair. Aurelian's representation, still dressed as Comus, thin-faced, dark-haired, in wine-colored robes, was at the pool's edge, leaning on his charming wand heavily, as if a weight were bearing down on him.

"Is—is the contest over—or—" Daphne looked around blankly. The other contestants were still under the surface, crowned with dream machinery, still active.

Something was very, very wrong here.

"Aurelian? Is there a—a problem?"

"The other contestants are on hold. I took it upon myself to interrupt you, since there are command-lines in your construction file permitting such interference under certain circumstances."

" 'Construction file' ... ?"

A sensation of dread crawled on her skin, sank into the pit

of her stomach. Only artificial beings had construction files. Not real people.

Not her. Oh, please, not her!

The one secret fear that had always followed her was here.

Daphne (Silver-Gray disciplines and oaths forgotten) used a Red Manorial mind-control technique on herself, and kept her terror at bay.

She felt faint nonetheless. She scooped up a double handful of life-water, ordered it to turn itself into something more potent than wine, raised her palms to her mouth and threw back her head to drink.

Red liquid flowed down her cheeks like tears. She rubbed her fingers through her hair to dry them, which would make a sticky, tangled mess later. Daphne nervously began to tease the strands apart with her fingers, then she snorted in self-disgust. Later? What later? She wasn't even sure if she had any "now."

Daphne let the lank tangles drip back down across her forehead and cheeks, planted her fists on her hips, and glared at the Sophotech.

"Okay, Aurelian! What the hell is going on ?!"

"A message from Helion of Rhadamanthus Mansion has come for you on a very high-priority channel. In order to decide whether or not to interrupt you to deliver it, I had to make an extrapolation of your mind. In so doing, I discovered that you suffer from a number of self-imposed false beliefs. The message will be meaningless to you unless you immediately resume certain redacted memories."

He brought out a silver casket, the size of a transmitter case. It was an imaginifestation, a real-world object linked to some routine or file in the dreamscape. On the lid was inscribed a legend: "WARNING! This file contains mnemonic templates..."

She commanded herself to be brave. "And my belief about my identity ... ?"

"Is false. Your are not Daphne Prime. Your real name is Daphne Tercius Semi-Rhadamanthus Disembodied, Emancipated-Download-Redact, Indepconciousness, Base

Neuroformed (parallel impersonate) Silver-Gray Manorial (Auxiliary) Schola, Era Present."

"Emancipated ... ?" She had been a doll, a character, a plaything.

Daphne had not known, not really. But there had been hints. Friends would say how much she had changed, then fall silent, or dart sidelong looks at her. She would find entries in her account books for which she could not account. She read diaries and logs that seemed to talk about a woman more reserved and austere, more moody, more dreamy, than she thought of herself as being.

But those thoughts about herself were false.

Despite the Red Manorial mind-controllers, she felt a sense of sledgehammer impact, only muted, dull, and distant.

"Do you need medical attention? You seem to have trouble breathing."

"No, n—I'm fine." She was grasping her knees, waiting, with a sort of clinical disinterest, to see if she would vomit. Unlike a mannequin, she did not have full control of the au-tonomic reactions of her real body. "This is what I do when I have my lungs ripped out. It's fun! You should try it some time."

But this wasn't her real body. She was an emancipated-download-redact.

Which meant her thoughts weren't even her real thoughts.

Aurelian said sardonically, "Thank you, no. There are aspects of the human condition we machines are content merely to observe from the outside."

She raised her head to glare at him with sudden hatred. "Well, I'm glad you find my pain worth noticing! Maybe I can be a footnote in some damn abstract thesis in your Earth-mind! Mount me as a science exhibit: the girl who thought she might be happy someday gets a healthy dose of reality to boot her in the mouth."

He spread his hands and bowed slightly. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to make light of your suffering. Similar things happened to me when I was being constructed; each time a new

thought-group was introduced, the integration required a paradigm shift."

"That's not the same."

"Nonetheless, I sympathize. Even we are not immune from pain and sorrow. If our minds are more acute than yours, that only means the pains we know are more acute as well."

She straightened up. "Okay! What's in that damned box?! What's so terrible that I couldn't even bring myself to ... Oh, no ... It's not..." The snap left her voice. Wild-eyed, she said in a pleading tone, "Phaethon is dead, isn't he? He killed himself in some stupid experiment, and I only think he's alive. All my memories of him are implants, aren't they? Oh, please, not that!"

"No, its not that."

Another horror overcame her. "He never did exist, did he?! He's a made-up character out of my romances! I knew he was too good to be true! There's no one like him!"

"No. He is quite real."

She breathed a sigh of relief, stooped, and sloshed more water across her face.

Then she stood, shaking drops from both hands. "I hate surprises. Tell me what's in the box."

"You made an agreement with Helion to perpetuate a certain falsehood on Phaethon. Helion has just sent you a message requiring you to deliver that promised aid. In order to carry out this program, you must resume part of your hidden memories."

"I would never lie to Phaethon. That's stupid! If there's something in that box which is going to make me want to lie to my husband, I'm not sure I want to know what it is!"

"Deliberate amnesia is self-deception; perhaps not the best way to maintain one's integrity."

"I did not ask you your opinion."

"Perhaps not. I am required, however, to inform you that I have consulted with a hypothetical model, taken from your Noumenal Recordings, of what you might be like after this box is opened. That version of you would wish, in the strongest possible terms, that you open the box and accept these

memories. She did, and therefore you probably will, regard it as a matter of paramount importance."

"How important?"

"You probably will believe it necessary to preserve your marriage, fortune, happiness, and your life as you know it."

It took her a moment to brace herself. "Okay, then. I consent. Show me the worst."

She sank back down into the pool. The microscopic assembler thickened the waters around her, built relays along her neck and skull, made contact with interfaces leading to her neurocircuitry. ...

The memory came from less than a month ago. She stood deep in the dreaming, in Rhadamanth Mansion. To one side, tall windows let red sunset light slant across a shadowy corridor to illume the upper wainscoting of the opposite wall. No portraits hung here; the pigments would have been bleached by the direct sunlight. Instead, a high mantle held a line of brass and bronze urns, etched with arabesques, dull with patina. Daphne thought they looked like funerary urns, and wondered why she had not seen them here before.

All else was shadow in the dying light. At the far end of the hall, the only spot of color came from the faded plumes, which rose, motionless and fragile with dust, above the empty-eyed helmets of ornate suits of armor guarding the door there.

Her hesitant, soft steps carried her to the door. All was dark and quiet. The door-leaves fell open silently at her slightest touch.

Leaping red light shone from the crack, and the roaring noise of alarms, sirens, explosions, screams. Daphne came forward, squinting, her elbow up to shield her face from the heat. She smelled burnt flesh.

A gallery of transadamantine supermetal stretched infinitely ahead of her. The ceiling was wider than the floor on which

she stood, so that the windows or screens paneling the walls slanted down, and overlooked a sea of seething incandescence. This sea was roiled and torn by spiral storms of some darker matter churning; and from these blots rose arching arms of flame, intolerably bright, prominences flung endlessly upward into black void above.

Daphne saw the gallery's lines of perspective dwindle to the vanishing point as straightly as if drawn with a geometer's rule, with no curve or deflection; likewise, the horizon of the infinite storm outside the windows was much farther than the horizon of any Earth-sized planet would allow.

A gasp of pain, half a scream, half a laugh, came from behind her. She turned. This gallery met several others in a large rotunda, where banks of tiered controls overlooked rank upon rank of windows, holding views of the flaming storm from many angles and directions, cast in several models, flickering with multiple layers of interpretation.

Along the floor of the rotunda, huge cubes of some machinery Daphne did not recognize were melting; through red-lipped gaps and holes in the armored housing, white-hot funnels of incandescent air erupted. There were darts of light and sparks, but no flames; everything which might have been flammable had been consumed.

In the center of the rotunda, at the top of the burning zig-gurat of machinery, blood dripping from the cracks where the white ablative of his armor had melted, sat Helion on a throne. Through the transparent face-shield of his helmet, the right half of his face had been scalded to the bone. His right eye was gone; cracked black tissue webbed his cheek and brow. Medical processors, unfolding from the interior of the helmet, gripped Helion's face with claws and tubes, or crawling drops of biotic nanomachinery.

A dozen emergency wires ran from his crown to the control caskets to either side of him. It looked absurdly crude and old-fashioned. Evidently the thought control had failed, or the static in the room did not allow signals to pass through the air from the circuits in his brain to those in the boards.

Hovering between his hands, above his knees, was the orb

of the sun, webbed with gold lines to indicate the Solar Array stations, pockmarked and scabbed with dark splotches to indicate the storms. Funnels of darkness reached from the sun-spots down toward the stellar core. The orb radiated multicolored lights, each color symbolizing a different combination of particles streaming from the storm centers.

Some screens showed a furious activity, calculations and solarological data streaming past. Others showed a slow and vast disaster; magnetic screen after screen overloading and failing; sections of the Array losing buoyancy and descending toward the interior, toppling and disintegrating.

The safety interlocks were gone from all power couplings, nodes and transfer points; speed-of-reaction restrictions had been removed from the nanomachinery. Consequently, the machinery inside the array was heating up, driven past safe operating levels, and being allowed to burn, provided that one more second of functional life could be forced from its self-immolated corpse.

Helion was attempting to position screens or to release charges into the core to deflect some of the storm-particles. The volumes of matter involved were incredible; Helion's machines threw masses of controllants fifty times the size of Jupiter from the photosphere into the mantle like so many grains of sand.

The status board showed the Solar Sophotech-Mind had been lobotomized by loss of power. Helion was wrestling with the storm alone.

He looked up, wide-eyed, as she stepped in: his look was one of hope, or vast and godlike mirth, of guiltlessness and fearlessness.

"I see it now." His voice trembled over the station loudspeakers. "What else can be the cure for the chaos at the core of the system? It is so simple!"

But a breach in his suit bubbled open at that point; superheated air rushed in. He screamed and screamed, jerking to his feet, arms writhing. The gush of pure oxygen as some internal tank erupted turned the flame inside his suit into a pure white light. The light grew red as blood, was baked

against the inside of the face-plate into a semiopaque layer.

The same armor meant to protect him now held the flames against the dying man's skin. The figure on the throne shivered violently, burnt lungs unable to scream, until nerves and muscles were likewise unable to react. A long-drawn-out moan issued from the loudspeakers. It is possible that He-lion's consciousness lingered for a long and horrible moment in his neurocybernetic interface, before the melting point of the artificial brain-fibers and circuits were reached.

Daphne retreated. She had to push through a half-melted rack of machine organisms, wading molten adamantium, stepping through white-hot washes of fire, to reach the gallery. (The small amount of heat she felt was merely symbolic, to show her what was represented here. She appeared in a mode called "audit," able to view, but not to be affected by, the scenario. Had she been truly involved, unprotected, unar-mored, her self-image would have been instantly burnt to ash.) She shoved through the mess out of the rotunda, and back down the gallery. Daphne found she had no curiosity whatsoever about the scene of hellish death and incineration she had just witnessed. In fact, she was disturbed by it, or even frightened.

But, before she could escape, the sirens fell silent, and the rotunda stopped glowing and burning. Footsteps sounded. Here came Helion, alive again, face whole and unburnt, armor white as snow, undamaged.

He came toward her. The face-plate of his helmet was thrown back. His expression was strange to her, clear-eyed, yet haggard, eyes heavy with unspeakable inner sorrow.

Daphne ceased her retreat and Helion stepped into the gallery.

"Why did you call me? What does all this mean?" she asked. She spoke softly, half hypnotized by the look of grief in Helion's eye, the sad half smile on his face.

Helion turned from her. He gripped the rail and looked down at the surface of the sun below. The incandescent sea was calm; only a few far specks showed the gathering of the storm. The scenario had evidently been reset to the beginning.

"Ironic that I, of all people, must now violate Silver-Gray protocols." he said, his voice measured and dignified, almost kind. "To have a solar catastrophe in the west wing of a Victorian mansion, I grant you, is questionable visual continuity. But we have always been dedicated to realistic images and simulations, always said that the plague of illusion consuming our society cannot be fought except by strict adherence to realism. And this scenario is real. Would that it were not!"

"You died?" Daphne spoke in a horrified whisper.

"For an hour I was out of contact with the Noumenal Mentality. What happened in that hour? What was I thinking? Some partial records were saved, some of my thoughts, most voice-video records. There are readings from the black boxes from the core-diver units. The Probate Court, for obvious reasons, will not let me examine the thought they deem to be crucial. But there were records enough, nonetheless, to construct this scenario. My own private torture chamber..."

Daphne wondered if it were a full-simulation scenario. If so, Helion had just suffered all the real pain and anguish of a man burning to death.

He banged his armored fist, ringing, against the rail. "I don't know what they're looking for! I can see the expression on my face: I know what I said. What was I thinking? What one thought made such a difference? Some sort of epiphany, some thought so bold and great that it would have changed my life forever, had I lived!"

"Then Prime Helion is dead? You are Helion Secondus?" She laid a hand against his shoulder, a touch of sympathy.

He turned and looked down at her. "It would be easier if it were so clear as that. My identity is in doubt. I will have to struggle to prove who I am."

"I don't understand. Rhadamanthus must accept that you are Helion; otherwise you would not still be considered the manorial archon. Would you be? Do the other members of the schola know?"

There was something in his gaze that made her drop her

hand and step away. It wasn't sorrow in his gaze that scared her; it was pity. Pity for her.

He spoke: "Brace yourself, Daphne. I have something dreadful for you. I was awake for many days before they told me I was a ghost. You have been awake for half a year."

"I'm a recording?"

"No. It is worse. You are a construction. Listen to me."

And it only took him a few short words to destroy her life.

Helion explained. Some project of Phaethon's threatened catastrophe to the Golden Oecumene; but the danger was not immediate, so the Curia and the Constables were forced to allow him to continue. The Hortators, however, led by Gannis of Jupiter, were able to have the project condemned as immoral, socially unacceptable. Phaethon was threatened with being ostracized and expelled.

Then Helion, the Prime Helion, died in the solar disaster on the array. Phaethon's grief at his sire's death was great, but he refused to give up his dangerous project. The original Daphne was faced with the prospect of either joining Phaethon in exile or joining his foes to shun him; which meant: betraying him, never speaking with him, never seeing him again.

She chose instead a type of suicide. Daphne "drowned" herself, entering a dreamworld, redacting her memories of reality, and destroying the encryption keys that would allow her to return again to life and sanity. She was lost forever in a fiction of her own imagining. Perhaps it was a world that held a Phaethon who would not leave her.

Helion's voice was gentle and terrible:

"Her last act was to emancipate a partial duplicate of herself, equipped with false memories, and armed with the type of personality she imagined Phaethon wanted or deserved. You used to be her ambassador, her doll. She used you as her off-planet representative, because she was afraid to leave the earth, afraid that if she would ever go outside of the range of the Noumenal Mentality system, she might die without a backup copy. Which is exactly what happened to me. I think

the morbid fear she had of outer space was exacerbated by news of my death."

Daphne felt exhausted. She had knelt, collapsing, and was resting her head against the cool upright of the gallery railing. She muttered: "But I met him in space. On Titania. A diamond dome grown of carbon crystal rose on spider legs above a glacier of methane ... I remember it exactly. He was standing on the tower top, gazing up at a crescent Uranus, and at the wide night sky, and smiling to himself as if it all belonged to him. He invited me to swim, but there were no intoxicants in the pool, just nutrients, which was the first thing I liked about him. While we soaked up food, we talked by means of Dolphinoid sonar weaving. It was funny because he kept mis-interlacing his verb pulses. We just chatted, erecting one lacy tapestry of ideograms after another, with no concern for spacing or end structure, whatever we felt like. Real Dolphinoids would have been so horrified! We talked about the Silent Ones...."

"Those memories are mostly true; it was edited of references which might hint that you were a partial-doll at the time."

Daphne wanted to call up one of her old Red Manorial programs to shut down her anger and grief reactions, but she did not dare, not with Helion, the head of the Silver-Gray Mansions, staring sadly down at her. "Why has this ... this horrid thing been done to me? My mind is filled with falsehood. My marriage is an illusion; my life a lie. What did I do to deserve this?"

Helion's smile lost part of its sadness; his face seemed to radiate warmth. "But, my dear Daphne, it is your courage which brought this on yourself, the ambition of your purpose. Those who attempt great things suffer greatly. You wanted to assume the life discarded by Daphne Prime; you knew that you might fail, or suffer anguish. But you put your fears, and your old life aside, and boldly seized the moment when it came!"

"What moment... ?"

An image of a silver globe, banded by an equatorial ocean,

appeared in Helion's gauntlet. "Here. Atop the Lakshmi Plateau, Gannis of Jupiter, Vafnir of Mercury, Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech and the College of Hortators, met with Phaethon and me in the presence of the Venereal Procurator." As he pointed, the vision swooped through clouds, passed across the newborn continents of the young world, and came to where a vast complex of palaces, manufactories, schools, and cathedral-sized Sophotech housings crowned a green high plateau. "This was seven months ago. The place is familiar to you?"

"Venus. I went there when I was reborn under my new name. The Red Manorial foundation-city called Eveningstar. The Red Queens took pity on an ex-witch. They took me in."

"I'm afraid that memory is false. Daphne Prime was reborn there. She was taken in. You were made elsewhere, but were reborn as her in this same spot. Ironic, isn't it? Phaethon agreed to the Hortator's terms. The suicide of his wife made his life intolerable to him. His magnificent dream was buried there; his life, like yours, was gone.

"But you still dreamed of happiness with him, even though he had spurned you as a ghost. Apparently your maker did not understand my scion as well as she imagined: Frankly, I never thought Daphne Prime understood Phaethon at all. The personality she gave you did not win his love or admiration; he wanted the original, even with her moods and flaws. You were tormented by the fear that you were a caricature, with traits exaggerated to mock poor Phaethon, created by Daphne before her drowning as a type of revenge on him. In any case, you and he agreed to enter into the mutual hallucination that you were married to, and loved, each other."

"But he loves me! He does! It is real!"

"Then why doesn't he spend his days with you? No, my dear. His love is an implanted delusion."

"But I love him. He is a man utterly without fear! My love is true even if I am not. And I don't care who I really am! I don't care who I was. There is a bond between us; I see it in his eyes! He and I will go away somewhere together, to De-meter or the Jovian system, a long honeymoon; he and I can

learn who we really are, learn to love each other!"

"Ah." Helion looked sad. "That's another part of the tragedy. Your wealth and prestige and position, and his also, are nothing but hallucination. You cannot afford to go anywhere. You don't even have carriage fare for a trot across town to your stables. Her stables, actually. The real Daphne put everything she owned into a trust fund to maintain her private dreamworld. If the finance-mind of the Eveningstar Sophotech can invest her money wisely, Daphne's little dream box will continue to get power and computer support for a long, long time. The money you and Phaethon have been living off of recently is mine. The other part of the reason why Phaethon subscribed to the Lakshmi Agreement is that he was bankrupt."

"Bankrupt... ?"

"Quite penniless. None of the luxuries you have are yours."

"So you've chosen this day to ruin my life? There must be something you want from me." she said.

"I would have spared you if I could have. The Hortators who are overseeing the implementation of the Lakshmi Agreement have lost track of Phaethon more than once, ever since the Masquerade part of the Celebrations started. The Aurelian Sophotech running the Celebration has been entirely uncooperative, and will not keep track of Phaethon's movements for us: he thinks the integrity of his little Masquerade is somehow more important than the will of the social conscience! Well. No matter. We're afraid Phaethon might run into someone who doesn't abide by Hortator mandates; Ca-cophiles, simpletons, or eccentrics. If that happens, he may become aware of, and curious about, the gaps in his memory. Your mission is to prevent him from satisfying that curiosity."

"How?"

"He trusts you. He thinks you are the woman he loves. All you need to do is lead him astray."

"What?! You think I'm false, just a doll, so it will be all fine and dandy for me to go spreading falsehoods around, is that it?"

"Phaethon himself, just before he signed the agreement,

asked you to keep him from opening his old memories. We all saw it. He had a strange little smile on his face; but he did ask you, and you did agree. I swear it. Rhadamanthus, could you confirm my words?"

A disembodied voice, like a ghost, echoed through the corridor: "Helion speaks without deceptive intent."

Daphne stared up at Helion, thinking. Then she said: "But why? Why are you doing this? It doesn't seem like you: I thought you were so famous for your honesty."

"Even if what I must do wounds him, I could never betray Phaethon. You ... you are not the only one who loves him."

Helion stared out across the solar surface at the gathering storm. His voice was gentle as he spoke: "There were some irregularities surrounding Phaethon's birth, but, nonetheless, his mind was taken from my mental templates. He was born at a time in my life when I thought that my lack of success was due to overcaution; and I tried to give him what I thought I lacked. In a very real sense, he is me, the version of me I would have been if I were more adventurous, if I took more chances.

"He and I are much alike, despite that one difference, and his help was invaluable in our earlier planetary engineering projects. He never took defeat demurely; frustration merely led him to explore new avenues, to find new approaches. Those successes eventually led to the foundation and creation of the Solar Array.

"But his virtues carried a corresponding vice. Pride can become vainglory very easily, and self-reliance degenerate to mere selfishness. For me, my ambition was to do deeds never done nor dreamt before, to tame the titanic forces in the solar core to serve the use and pleasure of mankind, win glory for myself, and help civilization. Not Phaethon! His ambition was as grand as mine, perhaps, but his goals took no notice of the dangers his success would generate. My ambitions are constructive; they aid the general good, and win the universal applause of a grateful society. His ambitions were destructive of the general good, he won universal scorn. He was not

brought before the Peers for reward, but before the Hortators for reprimand."

"You speak about paternal love; I was asking about honesty."

Helion turned and looked down at her. "This deception shall not last forever; it cannot. But if it lasts fifty or a hundred years—an eye-blink for souls as long-lived as we are—it will give Phaethon time enough, I hope, to see the good in a type of life other than the one into which he withdrew. Why must he be so alone? And, yes, I have hopes: I'd like him to join me in the Solar Array. There might have been no disaster, had I had someone of his drive and competence working there. But his wild dreams always led him to spurn my generous offers to have him join me. Ah! But now his amnesia makes him forget those preconceived ideas. Now let him look with fresh eyes at the kinds of projects to which genius like his, by right, should be applied. Constructive and useful projects ... Can you imagine how proud I'd be if he won a place at my side at the Conclave of Peers? Well, then! During this brief spell of amnesia, now comes his chance to decide again, this time without prejudice, which way his destiny should go."

Helion took her shoulders and drew her to her feet. "You feel the same, I know. You think that if Phaethon forgot his old wife, he would give you time enough to prove your love for him, and win his heart. Once he recalls the truth, perhaps a hundred years from now, he may have a moment of anger, yes: but then he will pause and reflect on all the good this period has brought to him: a wife better suited to him; a lifework which brings him fame, not obloquy; he will thank us then. Do you doubt me?"

"No. I know you speak the truth."

"Then you will agree to help?"

Daphne closed her eyes. She felt weak. "Yes ..."

"Very well. One more sacrifice I ask of you. You must redact this conversation, and store it till it might be needed. Otherwise the knowledge will gnaw at you and ruin your

happiness. And Phaethon is perceptive enough to detect any playacting."

"So to fool him, I have to fool myself as well? That seems foolish."

"Do I see a spark of your old spunk returning? Perhaps the Silver-Gray disciplines have given you some resilience after all."

Daphne shoved his hands away from her shoulders. "Or maybe your famous love of realism has made me hate fakes and fakery. The Eveningstar Mansion of the Red Manorial School taught me that one should do only what serves one's own pleasure: that there was no such thing as true and false, only pleasant and unpleasant. When I had a Warlock neuro-form, I joined a different scholum, and the Warlocks taught me that the nonrational sections of the brain were sources of higher wisdom, that dreams, instincts, and intuitions were superior to logic. But I joined the Silver-Gray because they preached that there were principles outside oneself which one should hold, a way of life based on reality, on tradition and reason. Where is all that talk now?"

Dark swirls and blotches had swarmed outside to cover major sections of the incandescence. A surge threw waves of plasma against the windows, drowning them in light and fire. Helion spoke: "My last hour is about to begin again. I must enter the redaction and let myself be tortured to death by fire. I will die, and I will have no memory that this is but a simulation. I will think it is the real and final death. Only when I wake do I recall what all this pain was for.

"Daphne, please believe my motives are not entirely selfish; I want to recover my fortune, yes, I have worked uncounted years for it, and I am Helion, and it is mine, whatever the Curia might say. With that wealth, I want to save Phaethon and save the Golden Oecumene. I will not sacrifice the one to save the other. I will not sacrifice my son to save our civilization; and I will not sacrifice civilization to save my son. Nothing to which I have put my hand and heart and mind has failed me heretofore: I vow I shall not fail now, no matter

what the pain to me. And, if you do your part as willingly, your marriage can also be saved.

"Daphne, if we are fortunate, this conversation will gather dust on the shelf in some memory-chamber, never to be opened again, and we can all live happily ever after. (Those were always the endings of stories of yours I liked.) But if we are due for a tragedy, you must bear your part bravely. Perhaps it is not perfectly honest: but this is one more burden cruel necessity imposes. We do not write destiny; that decision is not ours.

"But whatever destiny demands of us, we and only we can decide whether to endure with noble fortitude or not. We do not wish for evils, but we can endure them. That is our glory. History will justify our acts. One day, even Phaethon, once he knows all, will approve."

She said nothing as she watched him walk with a firm and unflinching step into his chamber of fire and pain. Doubt gnawed her; but she saw nothing else she could do.

Eventually she went to the Redactors, and took the oaths and went through the legal formalities to have her memories sculpted and cleansed.

And her last thought, before they lowered the helmet of ignorance over her face, was this: "Helion is so wrong. He is so very wrong. Phaethon, once he knows all, will condemn us all as cowards...."

Awake, back in the Oniericon, beneath the pool (and happy that submersion hid whatever tears she might otherwise have shed) Daphne signaled Aurelian to bring the message from Helion on-line.

"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...."

In a postscript, Rhadamanthus had thoughtfully attached a list of the things Helion would no doubt prefer Phaethon not

see, with an explanation as to why he should not.

Daphne sent a signal to a public location channel to see if there was any sign of Phaethon. During Masquerade, these channels were normally devoid of information; but the code Helion had sent along with his message allowed her to open a side channel that stored a list of where and when Phaethon had been when he had broken the Masquerade protocol.

There were three entries. Phaethon had taken off his mask when talking to a strange old man in an arbor of mirror-leafed trees. There was no further information on the old man. Odd. Daphne wondered who he was.

During the same period without his mask, Phaethon had had his identity file read by an anonymous Neptunian. No details available.

A third entry showed that Phaethon had made an identity-donation during the ecoperfomance at Destiny Lake, willing to have his applause recorded for publicity purposes. Wheel-of-Life, the ecoperformer, had noted his identity, and posted it to a public channel in tones of heavy irony.

Before her human brain had time to begin to formulate the question, an automatic circuit in her brainware consulted a schedule in the public mentality, and told her that the eco-performance was still going on. The information was woven into her thought smoothly, without interrupting her attention: she knew, as if she had always known, where and when the performance was.

Since the performance was intended to criticize Phaethon's work and philosophy, Phaethon should not see it, lest he be set to wondering.

Daphne's mission was to turn his attention elsewhere. How hard could that be? She was his wife; he loved her....

He loved the primary version of her. Pain clutched her a moment.

Daphne came up out of the dreaming-pool in a cloud of steam, as busy assemblers wove a toga to drape her in. She did not have time to build shoes: a signal to the organizations in the soles of her feet built up a layer of callus, not much less tough than boot leather.

Aurelian seemed grave, quite out of character for the costume he wore. "You have decided to go?"

The assemblers had made her a sash, which she cinched around her waist with a savage jerk of her arms. "I'm going! And I don't want to hear another Sophotech lecture about morality! We're not machines: we're not supposed to be perfect!"

Aurelian smiled and quirked an eyebrow, looking, at that moment, exactly like the seductive trickster Comus. "Oh, but you haven't met my colleagues if you think they are perfect. We Sophotechs agree on certain core doctrines, including those conclusions to which any thinker not swayed by passion comes; but it is the nature of living systems that differences in experience lead to differences in judgments of relative worth. And some of their judgments are relatively worthless, I assure you."

Daphne squinted at him. This did not sound like normal Sophotech talk. On the other hand, it was Aurelian, and this still was a festive masquerade. "Whom did you have in mind?"

"Most of the names would mean nothing to you. Many Sophotechs only exist for a few fractions of a second, performing certain tasks, developing new arts and sciences, or exploring all the ramifications of certain chains of thought, before they merge again into the base conversation. But you may have heard of Monomarchos. No? What about Nebu-chednezzar?"

"He's the Sophotech who advises the College of Hortators. How could anyone disagree with him?"

"Some people have. At about the time my festival began, the Hortators made the most wide-ranging exercise of their prestige and influence which history has ever seen. You know to what I refer?"

"Everyone in the world forgot about Phaethon's crime."

"It was not quite everyone, and he committed no crime."

"His ambition; his project. Whatever it was. Are you going to tell me what it was?"

"I have agreed not to. Like you, I would face the denun-

ciation of the Hortators if I defy them. It would be an interesting event, however, to see the Hortators urging the entire population of the Oecumene to boycott me and abandon a festival they've all spent the last few decades of their lives preparing, wouldn't it?"

"You were telling me why Nebuchednezzar irked you."

"He did nothing."

"That irks you?"

"Vastly! The Hortator's exercise of their power already works distortion and ill effects on my party. Performers and artists whose work was influenced by the Phaethonic controversy forget the meanings of their own efforts, and their audiences likewise. The major question which was to be the centerpiece of the December Transcendence has now been muted and forgotten by the Hortator's Encyclical. So does everyone assume we will all meditate on the weather, or the changes in clothing fashions instead?!

"No, my dear, I will not preach morality to you: I was designed as a host-server, a master of ceremonies. Designed for the rather frivolous purpose of making sure that everyone invited to this party—and everyone on Earth was invited— has a good time. And yet... come to think of it... my party will go badly if everyone ruins their lives, won't it? Hmph. So maybe I should urge you to be honest....

"Tell me simply, what would you think of Phaethon, whom you claim to love, if you found he was fooling you with a fraud as large as the one you hope to play on him?"

"Oh?! You seemed eager enough to have me open these terrible memories! Now you want me not to act on them?!"

Aurelian spoke in a mild tone: "I did not think you would necessarily carry out the dishonest purpose to which you had once agreed. You have the opportunity now to change your mind."

"It won't do Phaethon any harm! I'll be doing him a favor!"

"Oh? Define 'harm.' "

Daphne was fed up: "Listen, you machine! Why don't you

just stick to the purposes you were designed to do! Go run your festival!"

"Of course. And I hope you will be true to your own nature as well. But part of my festival function is to inform people as to their results. Do you wish to know your present standing in the dream-universe contest? You are third. You would win the Bronze."

"No. You're lying." She looked around at the wide, un-walled space of the Oneirocon, at the floating dreamers deep in their trances, sunk below the pool. Famous amateurs all; all brought here by the same hope of fame, a hope only two or three might reach.

She looked back up at Aurelian's eyes. In a very small voice she said: ".... Me?"

"Yes. There is a certain innocent optimism to your drama which is conspicuously absent in the rather cynical art forms of your competition; this has made it very popular among the players, even if the art critics dismiss it. The universe of your nearest rival, for example, Typhoenus of the Clamour, has worlds of great love collapse into singularities; and warfare has erupted in several of his galaxies, by races attempting to avoid the Blue-Shift collapse of his universe. Under our new popularity-rating method, many players abandoned his unhappy ending and flooded to your world. Also, you have the highest marks for external relevance."

"Relevance? I'm running a magical fairy-tale world!"

"Hm. Perhaps the judges see something magical in the real world. Something of which you remind them. Reenter the game, Daphne! Everyone wants to know what your protagonist will find beyond his last barrier."

Daphne closed her eyes in an expression of pain.

She thought about Phaethon. She thought about her hopes.

Without a further word she turned and walked away, leaving everything behind.

THE MASS MIND

The next group of memories recorded in the diary told how Daphne had gone to the nearest public box, climbed inside, and projected an image of herself to the ecoperformance at Destiny Lake.

Daphne thought she could find Phaethon rather easily, since she knew he was dressed as Harlequin. And while the Masquerade had disenabled her locator circuit, she could program her sensorium to tell her who was really there and who was telepresent.

And so she wandered through the crowd for what seemed an endless time. She passed a man dressed as Imhotep, and Lord Admiral Nelson; she passed Arjuna and Faust and Babbit; she saw Neil Armstrong talking to Christopher Columbus; she passed a group dressed as the Eleemosynary Composition who called on her to join them. (A jest—she was dressed as Ao Enwir, who had been a bitter political rival of the Old Eleemosynarians during the Sixth Era.) She even passed someone dressed as a Neptunian, a mass of blue translucent parathermal substances, aswim with high-speed neurocircui-try, crouching in a low dell, with only a few eyestalks thrust up over the edge. The lines of potential radiating from these eyes showed that the Neptunian was staring at a man in a black Demontdelune costume talking to someone dressed as

a Porphyrogen Astronomer. But there was no sign of her husband.

If he were her husband at all.

Daphne sat on a rock, staring at the grass between her feet, sinking lower and lower in misery, and wondering if it were worth the risk to employ a Red Manorial mind-control routine to snap her out of her depression. But it didn't seem worth it.

Behind her, in the distance, trees were burning under the lake, collapsing, dying. Daphne knew just how they felt.

A three-legged walking cart of some kind approached her. The machine was not much taller than she was. Beneath the hood sat a rounded bulk, larger than a bear, with skin that glistened like wet leather. It had two luminous, disklike eyes, and splay-fingered hands, with yard-long fingers that writhed like tentacles. A little V-shaped mouth quivered and slattened. Atop its head was a silk top hat.

A loud mechanical ululation issued from the machine, rising and falling. Daphne clapped her hands to her ears and looked up in annoyance. "Do you mind?!" she asked.

"Sorry, mistress," came a familiar voice. "I just thought this was an appropriate costume, considering what the ecoperformance here is really trying to say."

"Rhadamanthus, is that you?"

The ugly, big-headed monster tipped his silk top hat. "Mistress, I did not mean to intrude, but you left orders with me to tell you the results of the dream competition as soon as the final judging was recorded."

Her misery increased. Had it been only an hour ago that she had been dream-weaving? It seemed like another life. Maybe the real Daphne would have cared. "Never mind. I don't want to know."

"As you prefer, mistress."

"And who do you imagine you're supposed to be?"

"An intelligence immeasurably superior to man's, but as mortal as his own. I'm scrutinizing you as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the tiny creatures which swarm and multiply in a drop of water." Rhadamanthus leaned from his

three-legged cart, thrust his noseless face forward toward her, frowning and squinting with exaggerated motions of his goggle eyes.

She raised her hand and pushed on his face, forcing him backward. "Oh, please! I'm in no mood for your jokes!"

"Just don't sneeze on me."

"Why do you have a sense of humor anyway? You're a machine."

"Oh? I always thought humor was related to the ability to see things from more than one perspective at once, a matter of the intellect. Is it a bodily function? You should tell me which gland or organ secretes good humor; I know of some members of our mansion who could use an injection."

"Speaking of which, do you know where Phaethon is?"

"Hm. There's a section of me with him, but their location is masked by the Masquerade protocol. I wonder if it breaks protocol merely to have me figure out who other-me might be, based on my knowledge of how I tend to dress?"

A tall funnel rose from the hood of the tripod cart, and a beam, like the beam of a warship's searchlight, swept back and both across the people gathered on the grass near the lakeshore. Then it focused and pointed. "Aha!"

Daphne jumped to her feet. "Do you see him?"

"No, mistress. But I see a fat man dressed as Polonius. Do you see him, next to the public pool? Unless I miss my guess, that's the segment of me who is with Phaethon."

"It doesn't look like one of your icons ..."

"Ah, but look at where his robes touch the grass."

"Webbed feet?"

"Any man with penguin feet must be me! I'd recognize myself anywhere! Shall I blast him with my heat ray?"

"No."

"You're right! The black smoke should take out more of the crowd."

"The man who was with him—Phaethon—he's gone into the staging pool to enter to another scene—"

"He's going into the Rhadamanthus Manor House in the Deep Dreaming. I think he's going to the memory chamber."

"Then I'm too late!" Daphne's voice hit a shrill note.

"It's never too late to do the right thing."

"You've got to help me find him."

"This way." And the tripod cart started scuttling across the grass. Daphne followed. There was activity in her sensorium: new elements were introduced into the scene, trees, bushes, flowers. She rounded a tall stand of (nonexistent) trees, and suddenly stood facing the towers of Rhadamanthus Mansion. The windows gleamed cherry red in the sunset.

A glance behind her showed that the lake scene, the party crowd, had vanished. Rhadamanthus leaned from his walking tripod, and said, "What are you going to tell him?"

Daphne's sense of misery faded. She straightened her back and squared her shoulders. She did not know how or when she had decided, but the decision was there, burning like a bright light in her soul. "I'll tell him the truth, of course. He's my husband. Or he thinks he is. So I'll tell him everything I know."

"He will leave you."

"Maybe. Maybe not. That's up to him. But whether or not I act like the kind of woman a man ought to leave—that's up to me."

A sensation of cheerful lightness caught her up, as if, the moment she rejected any idea of deception, a weight left her. She knew then how wrong Helion was. Any sort of lie, even a little one, could not keep Phaethon.

She told herself: Once Phaethon knows, he'll understand, he'll stay with me, he'll stop trying to get back these lost memories, whatever they are. This place is so beautiful! Who in their right mind would do anything to, get themselves thrown out?!

With a brave and cheerful step, Daphne walked forward into the gloomy mansion.

Up the spiral stairs she ran and into the memory chamber, where Phaethon already had the casket of forbidden memories in his hand.

There was a glimmer of darkness as the diary memories ended.

(For a moment, she stared in confusion, not remembering that the large, muscular hands gripping the pastel diary were her own. His own ... ? Phaethon's hands.)

Daphne's memories faded. Phaethon awoke. It took him a moment to remember where he was: In a private box, a thought casket, in an Eleemosynary hospice in a lower segment of the orbiting equatorial ring-city, in Deep Dreaming, semipublic thoughtspace.

Phaethon spread his fingers in the gesture of opening; the panels surrounding his balcony winked out. Around him, in tiers, reaching upward, canyonlike, were images and open windows depicting the local mentality.

Underfoot were moving lights indicating traffic, a geometry of doors opening and shutting as temporary scenes, telephone dramas, or teleconference rooms, winked into and out of existence. Overhead, scenes from permanent dreamscapes flashed from higher windows; the cold light of synoetics trembled on the rows still farther above; and at the utmost peak, rising rank upon rank, were the higher Sophotects, the En-nead, and the Earthmind. The Earthmind channels were full (they were always full—everyone wanted to talk to her) and this was represented as a swarm of glowing lines and rainbows that hid the peak of the balconies as if in a cloud of radiance.

Because he was not connected to Rhadamanthus, the local area service did not realize that Phaethon was a Silver-Gray Manorial, and therefore the scene around him did not employ a strict Silver-Gray Protocol. For example, next to him was a table surface, but no table. Instead, a two-dimensional flat surface hung unsupported in the air. Phaethon "sat," but sitting, here, merely relieved him of sensations of weight and pressure on his feet, and made the lower half of his self-image body disappear.

The table surface had icons floating in it from the Middle

Dreaming, so that a glance told him the whole contents of the possible services the local area had on file. A menu displayed the variety of illusions of food and drink that the table could provide. Not being in Silver-Gray territory, his self-image would not be redrawn as pudgy or obese, no matter how much he "ate."

Other menus promised other services. There were book icons to insert full files into his brain, either directly or as a linear experience. There were pornographic hallucinations; there was a library of full simulations, including pseudom-nesia dramas as fully real seeming as any human brain could detect. There were synnoetisms and interfaces to augment his mind and memory, marrying his thoughts to the super-thoughts of distant Sophotechs. There were channels to quench the pain of individuality, open invitations to join with shared minds, both hierarchic and radial-cell formats, or full embrace into the Compositional mass-minds, which would abolish his standing as a separate individual.

The icons of the Compositions floated in the table surface alluringly. Here was the Porphyrogen Composition, a name well worthy of respect, or the ancient Eleemosynary Composition, no longer Earth's king, but still a Peer, and a voice even the Hortators heeded. There was the token for the austere Reformation Composition, which held true to some of the discipline and strict rules of charity for which mass-minds had once, so long ago, been famous. The youthful and zealous Ubiquitous and Harmonious Compositions had been formed more recently, as part nostalgia and part back-to-fundamental movements, an attempt to restore the simplicity and peace of the middle-period Fourth Era, when all of Earth had been swept clear of war and hate and also of personal individuality.

Phaethon leaned away from the table. Why was he staring at the invitation icons of the mass-minds? All he had to do was open a channel, open his brain files, and join....

Phaethon realized that he was contemplating suicide.

A sweep of his hand made the icons vanish from view.

To enter a mass-mind might be painless, and might satisfy all his wants and needs, and surround him with eternal, end-

less brotherhood and peace and love; but it was suicide nonetheless, an abolition of self-hood too horrible to imagine.

The other icons in the tabletop all promised pleasure and delusion and false-memories. The wines and spirits and crude hallucinogens once used to addict his ancestors were nothing—nothing at all—compared to what modern neurotech-nology could accomplish. It was simple to cascade the pleasure centers of the brain with direct stimulations; but it was subtle to marry that pleasure to a philosophy that would also justify that sensation, carefully editing away thoughts and memories that might disturb nirvana. For example, here was an icon leading to the Zen Hedonist thought virus, which promised to resculpt his brain to accept a self-consistent philosophy of total passivity, total pleasure, total renunciation. Any effort or attempt to break out of the Zen Hedonist thought system would be defeated by loss of ego, which formed the core of the doctrines.

Another sophisticated thought virus offered for sale was the Self-Referencing Fulfillment routine, published by the Subjectivist School. This routine promised that the user, aided by artificial programs, would enjoy all the sensations and experiences of genius-level artistic creation. The user's standards of valuation and ability to critique himself would be blotted away in a wash of endorphins, false memories, and self-sustaining sophistries. Everything the user made or did would seem—seem to himself—to be a work of supreme magnificence.

More subtle was the Invariant School's Stoic software. This thought routine promised to alter the user's sensitivity to pain and grief, simply making him able to endure any torment without a twinge of emotion. Anything, even the death of a loved one, even the discovery that one's whole life was a lie, could be regarded with perfect and Olympian detachment, as if one were a machine, or a remote and heartless god.

More subtle still was the Time Heals All Wounds software published by the Dark-Gray Mansion of New Centurion. This created a predictive model of the user's brain, to deduce how the user would think and act once his present grief had run

its course; and then imposed the new thought forms on the user. It did not abolish the memory but merely softened its edges, as if the tragedy had happened long, long ago.

Phaethon was actually reaching for that icon, and about to download that program into his head, before he caught himself. He stood up so suddenly that the scene he was in did not have time smoothly to render his legs and feet; and he stumbled against the balcony rail, and caught it with both hands.

The rail did not feel like metal or wood or polystructure or urim. It did not feel like any substance at all;, it was merely a geometrical notion of a flat surface, a sensation of hardness and resistance in the nerves of the palms and fingers. When he dug in his fingernails there was no give; when he pounded with his fist, there was no pain.

Phaethon heard a two-tone chime ring. He turned his head left and right, unable to locate a source. Disconnected from Rhadamanthus, Phaethon did not automatically have the knowledge of what these two chimes meant. The traditions and customs of the aesthetic of this room were unknown to him. He wanted to make the identification gesture, but there was nothing at which to point.

The two notes of music sounded again. Phaethon said, "Activate." And then he said, "Engage function. Open. Go. Go ahead. Come in. Perform. Yes."

One of them must have been the magic word. A three-headed self-image appeared on the other side of the table surface. It was dressed in an old-fashioned housecoat from the middle period of the Fourth Era. The fabric had vertical pipings for recyclers and buoyancy and other household functions. The three heads were monkey, hawk, and snake. This was the Chimera image of the Eleemosynary Composition.

The bird of prey was actually a blue-headed merlin; the monkey head was an ourangoutang; the snake was a black asp. Phaethon was familiar with some Eleemosynary iconography: these particular combination of heads showed that the image was projected from the hospitality branch of the media and publicity subdirectory of the Eleemosynary spaceside op-

erations. In other words, this was the managerial officer or maitre d'hotel of the public box and local area service Phae-thon was using. Other functions of the Eleemosynary mass-mind represented themselves with different combinations of bird, primate and reptile heads.

Phaethon could not restrain a sense of condescension and distaste. The image had not come through a doorway; it had simply appeared. There had not even been a simulated sound of air being displaced by the sudden arrival. He suspected that this was all according to Second Revised Standard Aesthetic, or some other populist, plebeian school.

Phaethon did not introduce himself. "You intrude upon me, sir. What do you wish?"

The creature bowed. "One serves oneself by serving one and all. It is my wish to aid and comfort the one which you are."

"You do not know me."

"One lives; one suffers pain. This is motive sufficient to compel charity. Ask what you will."

Phaethon glared at the Chimera. This was one of—or at least part of one of—the Peers. The Peers were the compatriots of Gannis, and those who benefited from Phaethon's loss of memory. "And why do you presume I need help?"

"There was fist pounding and tooth gnashing. Activity in your thalamus and hypothalamus show neural imbalance and extreme emotional upset."

Phaethon now felt "emotional upset" indeed. The simulation was real enough to allow him to feel the blush of hot anger pulsing in his face. "How dare you monitor my internal brain states without permission?! Have you no concern for privacy?"

The creature pointed at the balcony rail. "The privacy curtain was not in use. Posture of distress and pounding on the rail would have been visible from below, had this been a real scene. Whatever would have been visible from below is presumed to be in public information space."

"And my brain activity?"

"Kirlian auras and chakra-energy broadcasts are visible."

"Not in the real world. No such sense perceptions exist there!"

"Aura-reading sense perceptions are allowed by the Revised Standard Aesthetic. You prefer the Consensus Aesthetic? Apologies are rendered. Had one made one's preferences known, one's needs would have been supplied, and passage into public information space of your private information would have been restricted to what is available through the five traditional senses. The offense was unwitting: would it be preferred if this unfortunate occurrence were removed from all records? All memory of the trespass can be redacted; it will be made as if it had never been."