La Edad De Oro (61 page)

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

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

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

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

“Good heavens, sir, why not?!”

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

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

“You miss my whole point, Mr. Hamhock.”

“Hamlet.”

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

“Wait! The winds are changing… Go now, please, while I can still compensate for your passage through my cloud----No, that direction! Go there! Otherwise you tangle my strings!…”

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

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

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

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

“Why not? I thought Earthmind was intelligent beyond measure.”

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

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

“Because when an honest man, a man who keeps his word, says he will do something in the future, you can be sure he will try.”

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

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

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

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

“I’m feeling fairly intransitive at the moment, Rhadamanthus.”

“What brought all this odd topic up, Phaethon?”

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

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

“Can she arrange coincidences of that magnitude?”

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

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

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

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

“My wife told me once she thinks of me every time she looks up at the moon, and sees how much bigger it looks, these days, from Earth. That was one of my first efforts. More fame than I deserved, perhaps, just because it was close to Earth, right there for everyone to see …

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

“And?…”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t understand. What’s so wrong with his work?”

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

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

“There it is.”

“There what is, sir?”

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

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

Phaethon flew swiftly toward the east.

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

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

Phaethon slanted down through the air to land on the lawns at the lakeside. Not far away, tables and chair shapes grown out of living wood were scattered across the fragrant lawn. Here were parasols, water fountains, nightstands holding sobering-helmets, formulation rods holding ornaments of dreams, staging pools, and deep-interfaces shaped like covered wells. A cluster of guests had gathered, resplendent in the costumes of a thousand ages and nations. Waiters dressed as Oberonid Resumptionists, like walking statues of blue ice, circulated with trays of drink, thought boxes, remembrance chips, and sprays. Slender waitresses dressed like Martian Highlander Canal-Dryads passed out librettos and seeing-rings.

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Rhadamanthus’ penguin image had unfolded into a portly gentleman in Elizabethan garments of white, purple, and rose, puff sleeved and dazzled with ribbons and flounces. A wide lace collar surrounded a round red face with many chins. He wore a square cap of black felt too large for his head, weighted with ornamental knobs at each corner. A chain of office and a medallion hung over his chest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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