La Edad De Oro (89 page)

The voice of Rhadamanthus seemed to come from all points of the night sky at once. “This is not a spaceship.”

“What is she?”

“Spaceships are designed for interplanetary travel.”

“Then she is a starship,” said Phaethon softly.

His starship, the only one of her kind.

Rhadamanthus said: “At near light-speed velocities, interstellar dust and gas strike the ship with relative energy sufficient to warrant the heavily shielded bow; the streamlining is designed to minimize the shockwave. At those velocities, the mass of all other objects in the universe, from the shipboard frame of reference, approaches infinity.”

“I remember. Why is she the only one?”

“Your fellow men are all afraid. The only other expedition launched to establish another Oecumene, the civilization at Cygnus X-l, vanished and fell silent, apparently destroying itself. Sophotechs, no matter how wise we are, cannot even police the outer Neptunian habitats in the cometary halo. Other stars and systems would be beyond our eyes, and be attractive only to dissidents and rebels. They would possess our technology without our laws. Threats would grow. Perhaps not in ten thousand years, or even in a million, but eventually. This is what the College of Hortators states as its argument.”

“Who was it who said, ‘Endless life breeds endless fears’? I must be the only immortal who is not a coward. War between stars is inconceivable. The distances are too great; the cost too high!”

“It was Ao Enwir the Delusionist, in his formulary titled: ‘On the Sovereignty of Machines.’ The saying is often misquoted. What Enwir actually recorded was: ‘Endless life, unless accompanied by endless foresight, will breed an endless fear of death.’ And it is not war they fear, but crime. Even a single individual, accompanied by a sufficiently advanced technology, and attacking a peaceful civilization utterly unprepared for conflict, could render tremendous damage.”

Phaethon was not listening. He reached out. His gaze-viewpoint, like a ghost, flew toward the stern. There, at the base of the drive mouths, were discolorations. Closer, and Phaethon saw gaps. Square scars marred the surface of the hull. Plates of the golden admantium had been stripped away. The ship was being dismantled.

He clicked his heels together three times. This was the “home” gesture. This scene had its default “home” identified as the bridge of the ship. The bridge appeared around him. The bridge was a massive crystalline construction, larger than a ballroom. In the center, like a throne, the captain’s chair overlooked a wide space, like an amphitheater, surrounded by concentric semicircles of rising tiers. It was gloomy, half-ruined and deserted. The energy curtains were off, the mirrors were dead; the thought boxes were missing from their sockets.

He gestured toward the nearest command mirror. But this was not merely a request for change of viewpoint; Phaethon was trying to activate circuits on the real ship. And the real ship was far away.

Time began to crawl by, minute after minute. During that time, Phaethon hung, like a wraith, disembodied and insubstantial. Insubstantial, because whatever mannequins or televection remotes might once have been on the bridge were long gone. Next to him, an empty throne, was the captain’s chair in which he would never sit. The chair crowns’ interfaces and intention circuits were crusted with erratic diamond growths, a sign that the self-regulators in the nanomachinery were disconnected. Like a bed of coral, the growth had spread halfway down the chair back, entwining the powerless grid-work that had once been an antiacceleration field cocoon.

“Sir,” said Rhadamanthus. “The ship is nowhere near Earth. It will take at least fifteen minutes for a signal to go and to return. There will be a quarter hour delay between every command and response.”

Phaethon’s arms were at his sides; his face was blank, his eyes haunted. Whatever emotion raged in him, now he showed little outward sign.

He spoke only three times as the fifteen minutes passed.

The first time he asked: “How long will it take before I remember everything? I feel like I’m surrounded by nameless clouds, shapes without form…”

Rhadamanthus said, “You must sleep and dream before the connections reestablish themselves. If you can find someone to aid you, you should consult a professional onieriatric thought-surgeon; the redaction you suffered is one of the largest on record. Most people erase unpleasant afternoons or bad days. They do not blot out century after century of their most important memories.”

A little while later, Phaethon stiffened. Another memory had struck. He said, “I don’t remember Xenophon. He’s not a brother of mine. I never met him. My contact among the Neptunians was an avatar named Xingis of Neriad. He began to represent himself in a human shape after he met me; because of me, he subscribed to the Consensus Aesthetic, adopted a basic neuroform, and changed his name to Diomedes, the hero who vanquishes the gods. There’s no guilt I’m supposed to remember; there’s no crime. There’s no Sophotech I was building. And Saturn—I wasn’t trying to develop Saturn. I had just been thwarted from doing anything with Saturn. I was frustrated with Saturn. That’s what gave birth to the Phoenix Exultant. That’s why I built the ship. My beautiful ship. I was sick of living in the middle of a desert of stars. One small solar system surrounded by nothing but wasteland. And I thought there were planets out there that could be mine, ripe and rich, ready for the hand of man to change from barren rock to paradise. Planets, but no Hortators to hinder me. No one to claim that lifeless rings of rock and dust and dirty ice were more sublime than all the human souls who would live in the palaces I could make out of those rings… Rhadamanthus! It was all a lie. Everything Scaramouche said was a lie. But why?”

There were more minutes of silence. Phaethon’s face grew sadder and more grim as he absorbed the enormity of the falsehood that had baffled him, the tremendous reaches of time, the happiness of his memory, the glory of the achievement he had lost.

Eventually he said, “I asked you once if I were happier before, if restoring these memories would make me better.” Rhadamanthus said, “I implied that you would be less happy, but that you would be a better man.”

Phaethon shook his head. Anger and grief still gnawed at him. He certainly did not feel like a better man.

Then, in reaction to the gesture he had made long ago, one of the system mirrors aboard the Phoenix Exultant came to life. The mirror surface was dim and caked with droppings from undeconstructed nanomachines. Contact points in the mirror flickered toward the image of Phaethon, a thousand pinpoints of light.

He felt a moment of surprised recognition. But of course! It was in his armor. The command circuits on the bridge of the ship were trying to open a thousand channels into the corresponding points in his golden armor.

That was what all the complex circuitry in his armor had been for. Here was a ship larger than a space colony, as intricate as several metropoli, webbed with brain upon brain and circuit upon circuit. She was like a little miniature seed of the Golden Oecumene itself. The bridge (and the bridge crew) of the Phoenix Exultant was not actually in the bridge, it was in the armor; the armor of Phaethon, whose unthinkably complex hierarchy of controls were meant to govern the billions of energy flows, measurements, discharges, tensions, and subroutines that would make up the daily routine of the great ship.

Phaethon, despite himself, smiled with pride. It was a wonderful piece of engineering.

That smile faltered when a status board at the arm of the captain’s chair lit up to reveal the pain and damage to the ship. Other mirrors lit to show the nearby objects in space.

The dismantling had not gone far; the slabs of super metal were still stored in warehouse tugs orbiting Mercury Equilateral, not far away, waiting transshipment. The ship intelligences were off-line or had never been installed. Near the ship, robot cranes and tugs from the Mercury Station hung, mites near a behemoth, motionless. The status board showed that the rest-mass was low: nearly half the antihydrogen fuel had been unloaded.

The amount of fuel left, nonetheless, was still staggering. The living area of the ship, while as large as a space colony, occupied less than one-tenth of one percent of the ship’s mass. The Phoenix Exultant was a volume, over three hundred thousand cubic meters of internal space, packed nearly solid with the most lightweight and powerful fuel human science had yet devised. While it was true that the mass of the ship was titanic, it was also true that the fuel-mass-to-payload ratio was inconceivable. Every second of thrust could easily consume as much energy as large cities used in a year. But that was the energy needed to reach near-light-speed velocities.

“You’ve been selling my fuel.” Phaethon hated the sound of pain and loss in his own voice.

“It is no longer yours, young sir. The Phoenix Exultant is now in receivership, held by the Bankruptcy Court. But your Agreement at Lakshmi suspended the proceedings. You destroyed your memory of the ship in order to prevent further dismantling. Now that your memories are back, your creditors will take her, I’m afraid.”

“You mean I don’t have a wife, or a father… or… or my ship? Nothing? I have nothing?” A pause.

“I’m very sorry, sir.”

There was a long moment of silence. Phaethon felt as if he could not breathe. It was as if the lid of a tomb had closed down not just over him but over the entire universe, over every place, no matter how far he fled, he ever could go. He imagined a suffocating darkness, as wide as the sky, as if every star had been snuffed, and the sun had turned into a singularity, absorbing all light into absolute nothingness.

He had heard theoreticians talk about the internal structure of a singularity. Inside, one would be in a gravity well so deep that no light, no signal, could ever escape. No matter how large the inside might be, the event horizon formed an absolute boundary, forever closing off any attempt to reach the stars outside. One might still be able to see the stars; the light from outside would continue to fall into the black hole and reach the eye of whomever was imprisoned there; but any attempt to reach them would simply use up more and more energy, and achieve nothing.

The theoreticians also said that the interiors of black holes were irrational, that the mathematical constants describing reality no longer made any sense.

Phaethon never before had known what that could mean. Now he thought he did.

Phaethon wiped the tears he was ashamed to find on his face. “Rhadamanthus, what are the five stages of grief?” “For base neuroforms the progression is: denial, rage, negotiation, depression resignation. Warlocks order their instincts differently, and Invariants do not grieve.”

“I just remembered another event… It’s like a nightmare; my thoughts are still clouded and unclear. I was actually living aboard the Phoenix Exultant, with my launch date less than a month away. I was that close to achieving it all. Then the radio call came from my wife’s last partial, telling me what Daphne Prime had done. Denial was easy for me; during the long trip from Mercury to Earth, I lived in a simulation, a false memory to tell me she still was alive. The simulation ended last December when the pinnace dropped me on Eveningstar grounds… I remembered all the horror and pain of living without her. A woman I had been just about to leave behind me! So I gave myself a rescue persona, a version of me without hesitation, guilt, fear, or doubt, and stormed off to confront the mausoleum where Daphne’s body was held.”

Phaethon drew in a ragged breath, then laughed bitterly.

“Ha! Eveningstar Sophotech must have thought me a fool just now! I gave the same arguments this morning as I gave last December. But that last time, in December, I was physically present, and in my armor, and no force on earth could stop me in my rage. I swatted the remotes aside which tried to hinder me. I broke Daphne’s coffin and released assemblers to undo her nerve bondage, and wake her from her lifeless dreams. But the body was empty; they had downloaded her mind into the Mansion-memory of Eveningstar, and replaced all the mausoleum with synthetics, pseudo-matter, and hologram. Eveningstar prevented me from committing anything worse than an attempted crime, some minor property damage.

“I gave myself entirely to rage, and began to tear the mausoleum apart. The motors in my arms and legs amplified my strength till I was like Hercules, or Orlando in his rage. There were two squads of Constables by then, in ornithopters armed with assembler clouds. I tore up the pillars of Eveningstar Mausoleum by the roots and threw them. I scattered the mannequins of the Constables and laughed as their darts and paralyzers glanced from my armor.

“They had to call in the military to stop me. I remember the wall melted and Atkins stepped through. He was not even armed; he was naked, and dripping with life-water. They had gotten him out of bed. He didn’t even have a weapon. I remember I laughed, because my armor was invulnerable; and I remember he smiled a grim little smile, and beckoned me toward him with one hand.

“When I tried to push him out of my way he just leaned, and touched my shoulder, and, for some reason, I flew head over heels, and landed in the puddle of melted stone he had stepped in through. He squeezed some of the life-water out of his hair and threw it over me. The nanomachines suspended in the water must have been tuned to the ones he used to disintegrate the stone. When I fell, the stone was like dust, utterly frictionless. It was impossible for me to get up, there was nothing to grip. Then, when he shook his wet hair at me, the nanomachines bound molecule to molecule with artificial subnuclear forces. The stone now formed one macromolecule, and my arms and legs were trapped. Invulnerable, yes, but frozen in stolid stone. No wonder Atkins despises me.”

“I don’t think he despises you, sir,” said Rhadamanthus. “If anything, he is grateful that you allowed him to exercise his skills.”

Phaethon pressed his aching temples with his fingertips. “What did you say the third stage of grief was? Bargaining? The Eveningstar Sophotech did not press charges—she was delighted to have been the victim of the only half-successful attempt at violent crime in three centuries; the Red Manorials loved the drama, I suppose; all they wanted was a copy of my memories during the fight.”