The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  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, 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.

  2.

  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. Whomever attracted the most people away from his com
petitors 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 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 oppositions. 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 parach
uted 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 Hyperboria 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 allow 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 … .

  12

  THE MASTER OF THE SUN

  1.

  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.