The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  First, they were large and they were many. Not just years and decades, but whole centuries of his life were missing; and they were the ones nearer to the present day. Whatever had been removed had occupied a great deal of his time. If it were a crime he had been contemplating, it had been in his imagination for a long time, and it had roots all the way back to his childhood. And, if it were a crime, he had been working at it full-time for most of the last century. His memory of the last 250 years, reaching up to the beginning of the masquerade, was blank.

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

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

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

  There were more clues: The holes in his memory tended to be gathered around his engineering work; the blanked-out events were more frequent off Earth than on. He recalled long trips to the Jupiter moon system, Neptune, and a place called Faraway in the Kuiper belt; but not what he had done there.

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

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

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

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

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

  His suit. The stranger had been mocking him.

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

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

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

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

  This was not inanimate fabric but a complex of nanomachines. Phaethon, despite his instinct, was reluctant to trust an unknown bio-organization of such complexity. He pulled his hand back; the fabric released him reluctantly.

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

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

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

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

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

  The black material, now inside the suit, was cyclic nanomachinery, which would form a self-contained and self-sustaining symbiosis with the wearer: a miniature and complete ecosystem.

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

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

  Phaethon touched the shoulder again. “Open up. I’d like to try you on, please.”

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

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

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

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

  The Armor of Phaethon.

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

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

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

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

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

  And biological material. Phaethon had bought so many metric tons of viral and recombinant bodies that the number was beyond belief. It was enough material to wipe out the biosphere of Earth and replace it with new forms. Had Phaethon been gathering an army? Was his black-and-gold armor actually “armor” in the old sense of the word, like the responders of ancient Warlocks, a system to deflect enemy weapons? The idea was insane.

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

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

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

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

  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 amnesia 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 re-establish 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.”

  7

  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.

  “‘1. 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 whe
re 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.”