The Golden Age

A Romance of the Far Future

VOLUME I

By John C. Wright

PROLOGUE: CELEBRATIONS OF THE IMMORTALS

It was a time of masquerade.

It was the eve of the High Transcendence, an event so solemn and significant that it could be held but once each thousand years, and folk of every name and iteration, phenotype, composition, consciousness and neuro-form, from every school and era, had come to celebrate its coming, to welcome the transfiguration, and to prepare.

Splendor, feast, and ceremony filled the many months before the great event itself. Energy-shapes living in the north polar magnetosphere of the sun, and Cold Dukes from the Kuiper belts beyond Neptune, had gathered to Old Earth, or sent their representations through the mentality; and celebrants had come from every world and moon in the Solar System, from every station, sail, habitat and crystal-magnetic latticework.

No human or post-human race of the Golden Oecumene was absent from these festivities. Fictional as well as actual personalities were invited. Composition-assisted reconstructions of dead or deleted paladins and sages, magnates and philosophers, walked by night the boulevards of the Aurelian palace-city, arm-in-arm with extrapolated demigoddesses from imagined superhuman futures, or languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized alternatives, and strolled or danced among the monuments and energy-sculptures, fountains, dream-fixtures, and phantasms, all beneath a silver, city-covered moon, larger than the moon past ages knew.

And here and there, shining like stars on the active channels of the mentality, were recidivists who had returned from high trans-human states of mind, bringing back with them thought-shapes or mathematical constructions inexpressible in human words, haunted by memories of what the last Transcendence had accomplished, feverish with dreams of what the next might hold.

It was a time of cheer.

And yet, even in such golden days, there were those who would not be satisfied.

CHAPTER ONE: THE OLD MAN

On the hundred-and-first night of the Millennial Celebration, Phaethon walked away from the lights and music, movement and gaiety of the golden palace-city, and out into the solitude of the groves and gardens beyond. In this time of joy, he was not at ease himself; and he did not know why.

His full name was Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Grey Manorial Schola, Era 7043 (the 'Reawakening').

This particular evening, the West Wing of the Aurelian Palace-city had been set aside for a Presentation of Visions by the elite of Rhadamanthus Mansion. Phaethon had been extended an invitation to sit on the panel of dream-judges, and, eager to experience the future histories involved, had happily accepted. Phaethon had been imagining the evening, perhaps, would be in miniature, for Rhadamanthus House, what the High Transcendence in December would be for all mankind.

But he was disappointed. The review of one drab and uninspired extrapolation after another had drained his patience.

Here was a future where all men were recorded as brain-information in a diamond logic crystal occupying the core of the Earth; there was one where all humanity existed in the threads of a plantlike array of sails and panels forming Dyson Sphere around the sun; a third promised, larger than worlds, housings for trillions of minds and super-minds, existing in the absolute cold of trans-Neptunian space -- cold was required for any truly precise subatomic engineering -- but with rails or elevators of unthinkably dense material running across hundreds of AU, across the whole width of the solar system, and down into the mantle of the sun, both to mine the hydrogen ash for building matter, and to tap the vast energy of Sol, should ever matter or energy in any amount be needed by the immobile deep-space mainframes housing the minds of mankind.

Any one of them should have been a breath-taking vision. The engineering was worked out in loving detail. Phaethon could not name what it was he wanted, but he knew he wanted none of these futures being offered him.

Daphne, his wife, who was only a collateral member of the House, had not been invited; and, Helion, his sire, was present only as a partial-version, the primary having been called away to a conclave of the Peers.

And so it was that in the center of a loud, happy throng of brightly-costumed telepresences, mannequins, and real-folk, and with a hundred high windows in the Presence Hall busy and bright with monotonous futures, and with a thousand channels clamoring with messages, requests, and invitations for him, Phaethon realized that he was entirely alone.

Fortunately, it was masquerade, and he was able to assign his face and his role to a back-up copy of himself. He donned the disguise of a Harlequin-clown, with lace at his throat and mask on his face, and then slipped out of a side entrance, before any of Helion's lieutenants or squires-of-honor thought to stop him.

Without a word or signal to anyone, Phaethon departed, and he walked across silent lawns and gardens by moonlight, accompanied only by his thoughts.

He wandered far, to a place he had not seen before. Beyond the gardens, in an isolated dell, he entered a grove of silver-crowned trees. He paced slowly through the grove, hands clasped behind his back, sniffing the air and gazing up at the stars between the leaves above. In the gloom, the dark and fine- grained bark was like black silk, and the leaves had mirror-tissues, so that when the night-breeze blew, the reflections of moonlight overhead rippled like silver lake-water.

It took him a moment to notice what was odd about the scene. The flowers were open, even though it was night, and their faces were turned toward one bright planet above the horizon.

Puzzled, Phaethon paused and pointed two fingers at the nearest trunk, making the identification gesture. Evidently the protocols of the masquerade extended to the trees as well, and no explanation of the trees, no background was forthcoming.

"We live in a Golden Age, the age of Saturn," said a voice from behind him. "Small wonder that our humor should be saturnine as well."

One who appeared as a wrinkle-faced man, wearing a robe as white as his hair and beard, stood not far away, leaning on a walking stick. During masquerade, Phaethon had no recognition file available in mind, and thus could not tell what dream-level, composition, or neuro-form this old man was. Phaethon was not sure how to act. There were things one could say or do to a computer-fiction which a real person, a telepresence, or even a partial, would find shockingly rude.

He decided on a polite reply, just in case. "Good evening to you, sir. Then there is a hidden meaning to this display?" His gesture encompassed the grove.

"Aha! You are not a child of this present age, then, since you seek to look below the surface beauty of things."

Phaethon was not certain how to take this comment. It was either a slight against the society in which he lived, or else against himself. "You suspect me to be a simulacrum? I assure you, I am real."

"So simulacra must seem to themselves, I suppose, should anyone ask them," said the white-bearded man with a wide-armed shrug.

Then he seated himself on a mossy rock with a grunt. "But let us leave the question of your identity -- this is a masquerade, after all, and not the right time to inquire, eh? -- and study instead the instruction of the trees here. I do not know if you detect the energy-web grown throughout the bark- layers; but a routine calculates the amount of light which would shine, and the angle of its fall, were the planet Saturn to ignite like some third sun. Then, true to these calculations, the energy-web triggers photosynthesis in the leaves and flowers, and, naturally, favors the side and angles from which the light would come, you see?"

"Thus they bloom at night," Phaethon said softly, impressed by the intricacy of the work.

"Day or night," the white-bearded man said, "Provided only that Saturn is above the horizon.

Phaethon thought it ironic that the white-haired man had picked Saturn as the position for his fictitious new sun. Phaethon knew Saturn would never be improved, the huge atmosphere never be mined for volatiles. He himself had twice headed projects to re-engineer Saturn, and render that barren wasteland more useful to human needs, or to clear out the cluttered navigational hazards for which near-Saturn space was notorious. In both cases public outcry had halted his efforts and driven away his financial support. Too many people were in love with the majestic (but utterly useless) ring- system.

The white-haired man was still speaking: "Yes, they follow the rise and fall of Saturn. And -- listen! here is the curious part -- over the generations, the flowers have evolved complex reactions so that their heads can turn to follow that wandering planet, through cycle and epicycle, opposition, triune and conjunction. Thus they thrive. They are not one wit disaccommodated by the fact the sun they follow with such effort is a false one."

Phaethon looked back and forth across the grove. It was extensive. The cool night-breeze tingled with the scents of eerie mirrored blossoms.

Perhaps because the man looked so odd, white-bearded, wrinkled and leaning on a stick, just the sort of way a character from an old novel or reproduction might look, Phaethon spoke without reflection. "Well, the artist here did not use flint-napped knives for his gene-splicing, and he didn't run his calculations in Roman numerals on an abacus, eh? Rather a lot of effort for a pointless jest."

"Pointless?" The white-haired man scowled.

Phaethon realized his blunder. Perhaps the man was real after all. Probably he was the very artist who made this place. "Ah... Pardon me! 'Pointless' I admit, may be too strong a word for it!"

"Oh? And what is the right word, then, eh?" Asked the man testily.

"Well, ah... But this grove is meant to criticize the artificiality of our society, is it not?"

"Criticize?! It is meant to draw blood! It is Art! Art!"

Phaethon made an easy gesture. "No doubt the point here is too subtle for me to grasp. I fear I do not understand what it means to criticize civilization for being artificial. Civilization, by definition, must be artificial, since it is man-made. Isn't 'Civilization' the very name we give to the sum total of man-made things?"

"You are being obtuse, sir!" shouted the odd man, drumming his cane sharply into the moss underfoot. "The point is! The point is that our civilization should be simpler."

Phaethon realized then that this man must be a member of one of those primitivist schools, whom everyone seemed to revere but no one wanted to follow. They refused to have any brain-modifications whatsoever, even memory-aids or emotion-balancing programs. They refused to use telephones, televection, or motor-transport.

And some, it was said, programmed the nanomachines floating in their cell-nuclei to produce, as years passed, the wrinkled skin, hair defects, osteoarthritis, and general physical decay which figured so prominently in ancient literature, poems, and interactives. Phaethon wondered in horror what could prompt a man to indulge in such slow and deliberate self-mutilation.

The man was speaking: "You are blind to what is plain before your eyes! Behold the mirrored layer of tissue growing over all these leaves. It is to block the true sun from the knowledge of these plants. Tracking a sun, which merely rises and sets, is easier than anticipating retrograde motion, I assure you. Complex habits, painfully learned through generations, would be instantly thrown aside in one blast of true sunlight. And therefore these little flowers have a mechanism to keep the truth at bay. Strange that I've made the blocking tissue look mirrored; you can see your own face in it... if you look."

This comment verged on insult. Phaethon replied hotly: "Or perhaps the tissue merely protects them from irritants, good sir!"

"Hah! So the puppy has teeth after all, eh? Have I irked you, then? This is Art also!"

"If Art is an irritant, like grit, good sir, then spend your genius praising the society cosmopolitan enough to tolerate it! How do you think simple societies maintain their simplicity? By intolerance. Men hunt; women gather; virgins guard the sacred flame. Anyone who steps outside their stereotypic social roles is crushed."

"Well, well, young manor-born -- you are a manorial, are you not? Your words sound like someone taught by machines -- what you don't know, young manor-born, is that cosmopolitan societies are sometimes just as ruthless about crushing those who don't conform. Look at how unhappy they made that reckless boy, what's-his-name, that Phaethon. There are worse things in store for him, I tell you!"

"I beg your pardon?" Strange. The sensation was not unlike stepping for a nonexistent stair, or having apparently solid ground give way underfoot. Phaethon wondered if he had somehow wandered into a simulation or a pseudomnesia-play without noticing it. "But... I am Phaethon. I am he. What in the world do you mean?" And he took off the mask he wore.

"No, no. I mean the real Phaethon. Though you are quite bold to show up at a masquerade like this, dressed in his face. Bold. Or tasteless!"

"But I am he!" A bewildered note began to creep into his voice.

"So you are Phaethon, eh? No, no, I think not. He is not welcome at parties."

Not welcome? Him? Rhadmanthus House was the oldest mansion of the Silver-Grey, and the Silver-Grey was, in turn, the third oldest Scholum in the entire Manorial movement. Rhadamanthus boasted over 7600 members just of the elite communion, and not to mention tens of thousands of collaterals, partials and secondaries. Not welcome? Phaethon's sire and gene-template was Helion, founder of the Silver-Grey and archon of Rhadamanthus. Phaethon was welcome everywhere!

The strange old man was still speaking: "You could not be him: Phaethon wears grim and brooding black and proud gold; not in frills like those."

(For a moment, oddly enough, Phaethon could not quite recall how he usually dressed. But surely he had no reason to dress in grim colors. Did he? He was not a grim man. Was he?)

He tried to speak calmly: "What do you say I have done to make me unwelcome at celebrations, sir?"

"What has he done? Hah!" The white-haired man leaned back, as if to avoid an unpleasant smell. "Your joke is not appreciated, sir. As you may have guessed, I am a Antiamaranthine Purist, and I do not carry a computer in my ear telling me every nuance of your manor-born protocols, or which fork to use, or when to hold my tongue. Maybe I speak out of turn to say that the real Phaethon would be ashamed to show his face at a festival like this! Ashamed! This is a celebration of those who love this civilization, or who, like me, are urged to try to improve it by constructive criticism. But you!"

"Ashamed..? I have done nothing!"

"No, no more! Do not speak again! Perhaps I should get a brain-filter like you machine-pets, so I could merely blot stains like you out from my sight and memory. That would be ironic, wouldn't it? Me, shrouded in a little silvery tissue of my own. But irony is perhaps more fit to an age of iron than to an age of gold."

"Sir, I really must insist you tell me what -- "

"What?!! Still here, you interloper! If you want to look like Phaethon, maybe I should treat you like him, and have you thrown out of my grove on your ear!"

"Tell me the truth!" Phaethon stepped toward the man.

"Fortunately, this grove, and even the surrounding dream-space, are my own, not part of the party- grounds proper, and so I can throw you out, can't I?"

He cackled, and waved his walking-stick.

The man, and the grove, disappeared. Phaethon found himself standing on green hill-top in the sunlight, overlooking the palaces and gardens of the celebration shining in the distance. An overture of music came faintly from the distant towers.

This was a scene from the first day of the celebration, one of the entrance scenarios. The old man had deleted his grove-scene from Phaethon's sensorium; throwing him back into his default setting. An unthinkable rudeness! But, perhaps, allowed under the relaxed protocols and standards of the festival-time.

A moment of cold anger ran through Phaethon. He was surprised at the vehemence of his own emotion. He was not normally an angry man -- was he?

Perhaps it would be wise to let the matter drop. There were entertainments and delights enough to engage his attention at the Celebrations without pursuing this.

But, unlike everything he had seen, this was real. Phaethon's curiosity was piqued, and perhaps his pride was stung. He would discover the answers.

He raised his fingers to his eyes and made the restart gesture. He was back in the scene, at night, in the silvery grove, but alone. The man was either gone, or he was hiding behind Phaethon's sense- filter.

With another gesture, Phaethon lowered his sense-filter and opened his brain to all the sensations in the area, so he could look upon 'reality' without any interpretation-buffer.

The shock of the noise and music, the screams of the Advertisements, startled him.

Panels and banners of lightweight film hung or floated grandly in the air. Each one flashed with colors brighter and more gaudy than its neighbor; every image was twice as dizzying, alluring and hypnotic as the one before. Some of the advertisement had projectors capable of directing stimulation into any brain equipped to receive it.

When they noticed Phaethon staring (perhaps they had registers to note his eye movements and pupil dilation -- such information was, after all, in the public domain) they folded and swooped, clamoring, pressing around him, squawking, urging him to try, just once, free trial offer, their proffered stimulants and false-memories, additions, compositions, and thought-schemes. They swarmed like angry sea- gulls or hungry children from some historical drama.

The music was, if anything, worse. A group from the Red Manorial school on one hillside in the distance were having a combination scream-feast, Bacchanalia, and composition-symphony-analogue. Emancipated partials of the Psycho-asymmetric Insulae-Composition where on the other hillside, having a noise-duel. Their experimental 36 and 108-tone scale music, subsonic and hypersonic, trembled in Phaethon's teeth. They made no effort to muffle the sound for the sake of those who did not share their extensive ear/auditory lobe modifications, their peculiar subjective time-scale alterations, or their even more peculiar aesthetic theories. Why should they? Every civilized person was assumed to have access to some sort of sense-filter, to allow them to block or to tolerate the noise.

And there was no sign of the white-haired man. Perhaps he had been a projection after all, or some fiction, part of the art-statement of the grove?

The flash and glamour of the transparent Advertisements did not block his view. The trees were widely spaced, nor was there brush. And, unless the man had hidden behind the walking ice-berg thing looming above the grape-trellises nearby, there was simply no place to hide.

Phaethon threw his hands before his face and gestured for his sense-filter to resume.

Peace and silence crashed into place around him. It was not, perhaps, the perfect truth he saw. But the groves were quiet now, and starlight and moonlight slanted through the strange silver-mirrored leaves, and falling blossoms. A routine calculated how the scene would look (and sound and feel and smell) were the disturbing objects not present. The representation was close to real, 'surface dreamspace' as it was called. The machine intelligences creating the illusion, able to think a million times faster than a man, or a billion, could cleverly and symmetrically account for all inconsistencies and cover up any unwanted errors.

His ears still rung with echoes; his eyes were still dazzled by floating half-shapes, colors reversed. He could have waited for his ears to stop ringing naturally, or blinked his eyes clear. But he was impatient; the man he sought was no doubt getting away. He merely signaled for his eyes to reset to perfect night-adaptation; for this ears to restore.

Phaethon started to jog toward the grape-trellises where...

The iceberg-thing was gone. Phaethon saw nothing.

Iceberg? Phaethon's augmented memory could recreate an exact image of what he had seen. It had loomed, gigantic, over the area, moving on myriad legs of semi-liquid, which solidified, elephantine, then liquefied again as the creature drifted forward. Likewise, it had had a dozen arms or tentacles of ice flowing and freezing around objects in the area, careful not to disturb the trees, but holding objects (eyes? remote sensors?) near the garden-plants, as if to study them from every angle.

It was, of course, a member of the Tritonic Neuroform Composure school, the so-called Neptunians. The technology of their nerve-cell surface allowed them thought-speeds approaching that of some of the slower Sophotechs; but the crystals of the cell-surface exhibited their peculiar electro- superconductive and micro-polymorphetic characteristics only under the near-absolute-zero temperatures and near-metallic-hydrogen-forming pressures of the Neptunian atmosphere. The icy body Phaethon had seen was armor; living, shape-changing armor, but armor nonetheless, and a triumph of molecular and submolecular technology. That armor allowed the Neptunian brain- substances inside to withstand the unbearable heat and (relative to Neptune) near-vacuum conditions of the Earthly atmosphere.

That he had programmed his sense-filter to block images of Advertisements or raucous music, Phaethon could understand. But he did not remember (and his memory was photographically perfect) ordering the filter to block views of Neptunians. Merely that one of that strange, remote school, the most distant members of the Golden Oecumene, should come physically to Earth was cause for wonder and comment.

Why in the world would Phaethon have ordered himself not to see, or to avoid remembering seeing, such a being? It was true that Neptunians were thought of as reckless, innovative, untrustworthy, and yet...

Phaethon took a moment to examine his sense-filter's censor. Only three of the command-lines struck him as odd. Very odd. One was meant to prevent him seeing the Cerebelline Green-Mother's ecoformance being held on Channels 12-20 at Destiny Lake. The second was to edit out sights and references to the visiting Neptunian legates. A third was meant to distract him from studying astronomical reports or information concerning a recent disaster in Mercurial space, brought on by Solar prominence and irregularities of unusual violence.

Why? What was the connection?

And why had he done this to himself? And then ordered himself to forget that he had done it?

Phaethon adjusted his sense-filter to allow himself to see the Neptunian (without hearing the music or seeing those dreadful Advertisements) and was surprised to behold the gigantic creature was picking its way up the grassy slope toward him, moving like a pale cloud-bank.

As it came closer, Phaethon saw, within the ice, several concentric shells or spheres of crystalline armor. Deep in the smoky depths was a web of nerve-tissue connecting four major brains, and at least a hundred lesser sub-brains, nerve-knobs, ganglia, synthetic cells, relays, and augmentation- clusters.

The nerve-tissue within the ice was in motion, some tendrils of brain-matter expanding, forming new nodes and knobs; and others contracting, creating an impression of furious mental activity.

Closer it came.

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The nerve-tissue within the ice was in motion, some tendrils of brain-matter expanding, forming new nodes and knobs; and others contracting, creating an impression of furious mental activity.

Closer it came.

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