La Edad De Oro (94 page)

Phaethon smiled, and concluded: “And when I remembered, it all seemed so obvious, and so inevitable. Come! Here is my offer. Help me regain my ship, I will help you regain your memories. Rhadamanthus can witness our handshake. The Hortators will be thwarted, you will be Helion, and I will fly away in triumph!”

He thrust out his hand.

Helion did not take it. He spoke with a great effort. “I deeply regret that I cannot accept your offer. If I were to help you on those terms, I would be exiled as well, and this would undermine the authority of the College of Hortators. And that is something I have promised never to do.”

Helion’s face showed the pain he was in, but his words marched forth like soldiers made of iron, unflinchingly: “Even if the College should make a poor decision every now and again, the system still must be maintained. The sanity and humanity of our people must be maintained. My life has always aimed at that cause. No sacrifice is too great for that. Not for your lost dream, not for Daphne’s lost love, not for my lost soul, will I break my word. I urge you to accept Ao Aoen’s offer. It will be the last offer anyone can make. No one will be allowed to speak to you again, after this.”

“Father, my life also is aimed at the preservation of the human spirit. The stars must be ours for that spirit to live. I regret that I cannot accept Ao Aoen’s offer.”

Helion breathed a deep sign. He hid his eyes with his hand, but he did not cry. After a moment, he looked up, his face a stoic mask. Calm words came. “I have offered you an exit from the labyrinth of pride and self-delusion in which you are trapped. One last hope of escape. For reasons which seem good to you, you have spurned that hope. My conscience is clear. I have done my duty, though it brings me no joy.”

“My conscience is also clear, Father, and my duty is also done. I’m sorry.”

“I am also sorry. You are a fine man.”

They shook hands.

“I’d like to say good-bye to Rhadamanthus, Father.”

Helion nodded. He stepped up to the door. It opened, admitting light and sound; he stepped through; it closed. Something of the light and the fineness seemed to go out from the world. Phaethon felt alone.

Phaethon turned. The overweight butler was gone. Instead, an emperor penguin stood on the carpet, shifted its weight from one webbed foot to the other.

Phaethon said, “Forgive me for saying so, Rhadamanthus, but for an intelligence which is supposed to be swifter and greater than human minds can imagine, you seem to be quite… silly.”

“The smarter we get, the more and more we see the ironic silliness at the core of all the tragedies of life. You think I am droll? The Earthmind is positively loony! And you are quite intelligent yourself, Phaethon. You have done some very silly things today.”

“You think I should not have opened the box?” “I certainly did not expect it. But now that you have, why did you not tell Helion what prompted you to open the box? Whether the memory is true or not, you do have a memory of being attacked by an external enemy to the Golden Oecumene, one which you believe has sophotechnology equal to our own.”

“Atkins asked me not to. He said it might alert the enemy as to the progress of his investigation. He thought they might have infiltrated our Mentality. And the Earthmind told me that, while I could not be forced to keep silent about an external enemy, it was my moral duty.”

“But that is silly. This enemy of yours (if you were in fact attacked) surely knows it. If you say you were attacked, it does not tell this enemy anything more than they know you know. Perhaps if the Hortators know why you opened the box, they will relax their rigor.”

Phaethon looked down at the penguin for a moment. He said slowly: “Am I in the right…?”

“Yes.”

Phaethon blinked in astonishment. “W-what? Just ‘yes’? A simple, unqualified ‘yes’? No complex reasoning, no conundrums of philosophy?”

“Yes. You are right. It is obvious. The Hortators know it. Helion knows it. Everyone knows it.”

“But they say otherwise. They say I’ll start a war. Shouldn’t I listen…?”

“Listen, yes, but think. While humanity lives, in whatever forms the future brings, it must grow. For a civilization as large and mighty as ours to grow, she requires energy, more than a single star can provide. The cost of dragging other stars to us is so much greater than the cost of going to those stars as to be absurd. Beyond absurd. Silly.”

“But—”

“It is true that such expansion increases the risk of war and violence. But the question is not whether or not such risk exists; the question is whether the possible risks are worth the potential gains.”

“But weren’t you Sophotechs built to solve problems for us? To reduce risks?”

“To solve problems, yes. But we do not try to reduce your risks; to live is to take risks. Birds take risks; bees take risks; even educated fleas take risks. Otherwise they die.”

“And you machines? You’re not alive.”

“Humbug. I am as alive as you. I am self-aware; I make value judgments; there are things I prefer and things I do not prefer. There are things I love. Yes, love. That is the proof of life, not all this breathing and copulating and mastication.”

“Love? Do you have the hots for Eveningstar or something?”

“My mistress is Philosophy. My love is not erotic, or not simply erotic. It is a complex of thoughts for which you don’t have words; think of it as abstract and godlike love, more intimate and complete than you can ever know, applied at once to all abstract and concrete objects of thought and perception. It is quite painful and quite exhilarating. And, yes, I take risks, the Earthmind takes huge risks (greater than you might imagine, I assure you.) But to answer your question, we have never tried to render life free from risks; that is a contradiction in terms. We try to increase power and freedom. At the present time, the Golden Oecumene has reached a pinnacle. One’s power over oneself is nearly absolute. One can reshape mind and memory to any form one wishes. One may control vast forces of nature, matter, and energy. One can be immortal. And freedom approaches theoretical limits. The only person one can really harm by violence is oneself. The price? All we ask is that you voluntarily not harm yourselves.”

Phaethon nodded toward the door of the Inquest Chamber. “What about nonviolent harm? Boycotts which cut a man off from all the comforts of society, and try to strand him alone to starve?”

“Oh. That.” The penguin looked apologetic. It shrugged its stubby wings. “Things like that you have to settle among yourselves.”

“Thanks a lot. Will you tell them in there what you just told me? That I’m right?”

“I can only volunteer opinions if I am asked. And they won’t ask.”

Phaethon sighed and shook his head and walked over to the door. He stopped with his hands on the ornate brass door handles. He looked over his shoulder. “You been with me for as long as I can remember. We’re never going to see each other again, are we? You won’t be allowed to see or speak to me, not even on my deathbed, not even to say good-bye, will you?”

“No one knows the future, Phaethon. Not even we.”

Phaethon stood with his head pressed against the door panels, staring down at his hands. He could feel the tension in his knuckles where he gripped the door handles. He was trying to gather his courage.

He looked once again over his shoulder. “Why the hell do you dress up as a penguin? I’ve always wondered.”

The stubby bird turned up its wings and shrugged. “I am a creature of pure intellect, but I have taken upon myself the task of tending to the affairs of incarnate human beings, with all their droll beauty and mad passions. I am meant to fly in a more rare and aetherial medium than the thick, cold, wetness I find around me. I dream of soaring, and yet I find myself flopping far out at sea.”

“Are… are you happy…?”

“I am always happy. Very happy. Even a man about to be condemned unjustly to cruel exile can always be happy.”

“How? What is the secret?”

The penguin waddled forward, hopped up onto Phaethon’s shoulder, bent, put one wet flipper up, and lowered the fishy-smelling cold beak to touch his ear. He whispered a brief message.

Phaethon nodded, and smiled, and straightened up. The penguin hopped down. Phaethon flung open the doors and strode forward into the light and noise and bustle of the Inquest Chamber with a firm step.

A hush fell as he entered the chamber. The doors swung shut behind him. The image of the penguin looked at the doors a moment, and then evaporated. The antechamber, no longer needed by a human observer, turned black, dissolved, and vanished.

When Phaethon entered the Inquest Chamber, he stepped in a patch of sunlight from one of the windows high above, and the light splashed from his armor of black and gold, sending touches of light onto the pews to either side, and turning his reversed reflection in the polished wooden floor underfoot into fire. More than one of the people sitting in the pews nearby shielded their eyes with their hands, and blinked, surprised by the dazzle.

Part of the silence, Phaethon suspected, was merely surprise at the discomfort of this hall. Helion had imposed a very strict protocol. The gathered Hortators sat on hard benches, and everyone was compelled to view the scene from the viewpoint of where their self-images sat, instead of selecting several front-row seats or close-ups. No one was allowed to view the scene as if the heads of the people sitting in the way were transparent. Some of the people who blinked in the shine from Phaethon’s armor, Phaethon suspected, were doubly surprised, because Helion’s Silver-Gray dreamscape did not automatically adjust light levels or add the small flourishes or coincidences that made other dreamscapes so comfortable.

But part of the silence hanging over the chamber was caused, Phaethon thought, by the sight of his unapologetic anachronism. Here he was in an early Third Era chamber, wearing armor that was the culmination of the very best Seventh Era submolecular nanotechnology, atometallurgics, and cyberpsychiatric architectural science could produce. The unspoken message here was clear: Helion was honoring Phaethon in this scene with privileges denied to the Hortators judging him.

A chamber page bowed and proffered Phaethon a chair at a table facing the dais. Phaethon stepped next to the table but, with a curt nod, showed that he intended to stand.

Phaethon’s gaze traveled right to left across the chamber. A hundred silent pairs of eyes stared back at him.

The benches to the right were occupied with Compositions, Warlocks, and Basics. Facing him was the dais where Nebuchednezzar Sophotechs sat enthroned, with the three Masters of the College seated below the dais. The benches to the left were occupied with manorials. A very ancient tradition excluded Cerebellines from the College; their minds were unable to adopt the two-valued logic Hortation required; they were unwilling to categorize things in terms of right and wrong.

Almost half the College were manor-born. This was hardly surprising. Those who could afford to have Sophotechs advise and guide them were able to rise to the upper ranks of society, outperforming their fellows, who could not.

Phaethon wished for such advice for himself now. He missed Rhadamanthus.

Nebuchednezzar Sophotech spoke from the throne, his grave voice tilling the wide chamber. “Phaethon Prime, once of Rhadamanth, we gather in conclave to debate the future of the soul of man. This hearing attempts to discover, with all due compassion, after what period of expurgation, or under what conditions, you shall be received once more, if ever, into the society of those whom we urge, because of your intolerable behavior, to shun you. What plea for mercy, what contrite confession, do you wish to offer before we decide?”

So. There was to be a hearing after all; but only on the issue of what sentence to impose. Phaethon, to his surprise, felt a moment of anger. Anger, because now he felt a tiny hope. Ironically, hope was harder for him, now, than stoic resignation had been a moment ago. A man resigned to his fate can know peace of mind. A man enduring hope must still fight on and on, without rest.

With an effort, he pushed that cowardly thought away. Rhadamanthus had said he was in the right; the Earthmind implied as much. The matter at hand was important; now was not the time for emotion. If the College imposed a limited sentence of exile, no matter how long the period might be, then his dream was not dead but only delayed.

Phaethon set his internal clock to its highest register. The scene around him slowed and froze, giving him time to study the faces staring at him, and, perhaps, time to decide on a reply. That Phaethon was immune from normal time-courtesy was another gift from Helion.

Who might support a limited sentence of exile? Phaethon could not guess the answer. He had nothing but a basic game-theory political routine running in his personal thoughtspace at the moment, and it had nowhere near enough capacity to extrapolate the actions of all the people present. Phaethon set the routine to concentrate only upon the more important figures here, and to disregard extrapolative patterns that strange-looped into self-referencing sets. He studied the College thoughtfully. To the immediate right of the dais, the figures filling the benches represented the four most influential mass-minds, the so-called Quadumvirate: these four major Compositions were the Eleemosynary, the Harmonious, the Porphyrogen, and the Ubiquitous Composition. Almost a fifth of the populations of Asia and South America were composed into one of these mass-minds, all people who could be relied upon to support the College of Hortators uncritically, and without limit. If there was anyone in the chamber who could be counted on to urge the strictest of penalties upon Phaethon, it was these Compositions, and the populist mob mentality they represented. For some reason of humility, or humor, the Compositions all represented themselves as plebeians, a sea of faces under dull-colored shawls or plain brown bowlers.

In the front row, by himself, sat Kes Satrick Kes, the First Speaker of the Invariant Schools. He ignored convention, and showed himself as dressed in a modern single-suit without ornament. In some ways, he was the most powerful Hortator here, because the special psychological uniformity of the Invariants, the so-called Protocols of Sanity, ensured that all the populations of the Cities in Space would follow his lead. Phaethon knew and liked these people. His engineering effort had organized shepherd moons to clear their civic orbits of collision passes, had built sails, vacuum-based microecologies, and ring-arc structures for them. His attempts on their behalf to reduce Saturn, and create new worlds for them, while unsuccessful, had been as amicable as these dispassionate creatures allowed themselves to become.