He pushed his hair away from his brow, and put his hand along his chin, as if to hide his beard from view. “Ignore the wrinkles. Look at me, my dear.”
Daphne put her hand up to her mouth, her eyes wide. “Oh, my heavens. You’re Phaethon.”
“The real Phaethon.”
“But . . . How . . . ?”
“A good engineer always has triple redundancy. Seventy years ago, it was clear to me then that the College of Hortators would never allow my great ship to fly. When the Phoenix was not yet complete, she still had enough thought boxes and storage and ecological material aboard to grow a body, and to store a spare copy of my mind in it. I—this body—Phaethon Secundus—came back to Earth in secret, having erased all record from the ship and my other self’s memory that I was alive. And I watched Phaethon Prime—my other self—knowing something would try to stop him.
“I did not expect the drama with Daphne Prime drowning herself. But I expected that if it had not been that, it would have been something else. Gannis, or Vafnir. I knew Phaethon would be hauled before the Hortators at some point. And I had guessed correctly that the most politic solution would be to have everyone undergo a global redaction. Everyone would forget about the problem. That is the way, after all, the people in the Golden Oecumene tend to deal with all their problems.
“My role was to make sure that he did not forget. I was his spare memory. I kept the dream alive when everyone else in the Golden Oecumene, except for his enemies, had forgotten about it.
“Once the masquerade started, I could move around more easily, and could even submit gene designs to Aurelian anonymously. I set up a grove of trees designed to show support for igniting Saturn into the third sun. If Phaethon had ever bothered to read his invitations or party program, his interest would have been piqued, and he would have sought me out. Instead, by dumb luck, he just wandered into the grove.
“As for Xenophon, I was as fooled as everyone else; I thought he was doing what I was doing, coming to remind Phaethon Prime of his lost dream; or that Diomedes had sent him. When I saw Xenophon coming up the slope, I decided not to reveal myself to Phaethon Prime. Xenophon was still a Neptunian, after all, and connected to the thought systems of the Duma. Anything he knew might find its way into the public record. I had been very careful, for seventy years, not to buy on credit or send messages or even to read a newspaper, or anything which would leave any record of me. I could not even buy food. It was not easy. So I wasn’t going to give away my secret to another soul, even one sent (as I thought then) by Diomedes, my good friend. Besides, I guessed correctly that, if I could get Phaethon to turn off his sense-filter, and he saw Xenophon, Xenophon would tell him (within whatever limits the Hortators’ ban allowed) that something mysterious was interfering in his life. And knowing Phaethon as I did, I knew he would not let it rest until he solved the mystery. As I recall, it took him exactly one day. Not as I expected! But if he had been killed, I would have picked up and carried on. That’s what I was here for. Phaethon Spare.”
“How did you live for seventy years without eating?”
“I ate.”
“Without buying food?”
“I bartered it from people who grew it in their gardens. You know. I taught fences how to herd sheep, and decontaminated grass, pulled weeds, split rails, fabricated simple thoughtware for lamps and reading helmets, cleaned house-brains of accumulated bitmap junk. I built things and repaired appliances. You know me.”
“Where? What people?”
“I thought I had already made that clear. I am Phaethon Spare Stark of the Stark School. I stayed with your parents. I slept in the bed you slept in when you were a little girl. I dreamed of you every night, once I programmed the nightcap. Because your fragrance is still in that bed. Imagine sleeping in a bed, and not in a pool! I slept with my arms around your pillow.”
“My parents . . . why? I thought they hated you . . . ?”
“I told them about the Phoenix Exultant.”
“What?”
“I told them everything. Your parents want to live as men did in days of old. What did they have in those cruel and ancient times? Adventure; exploration; danger; death; victory. They had Hanno and Sir Francis Drake and Magellan and that bungler Columbus; they had Bucky-Boy Cyrano D’Atano and Vanguard Single Exharmony. I told them that the Golden Age, the age of rest and comfort, was ending; and that an age of iron and of fire was coming next. ‘We have rested for a long time,’ I told them, ‘because history had suffered greatly, and mankind deserved a long period of peace, and play, and contemplation. But now a time of action, and of heroes, and of tragedy, was upon us!’ And, when they heard, they welcomed me, and joined in my attempt.”
“And my dad did not tell me any of this when he spoke to me last, when I was going off to the wilderness to go save Phaethon! What a liar he is! Give me an honest man any day! Give me Phaethon!”
“Why, thank you.”
There was a motion above them, like the streak of a falling star. It was a figure of gold, shining, bright as an angel of fire, descending. It was Phaethon. He plunged down through a cloud into a beam of sunlight, and flame seemed to dance like water across his armor.
Daphne said to the old man beside her: “What now? Are you going to wrestle him for the captaincy?”
“I’m really hoping he’ll just agree to knit our separate memory-chains back together to form one individual. Otherwise, I have legal title to the ship, because I have older continuity, and he gets to carry you off to the honeymoon that I have been dreaming about for seventy years, and we are both unhappy. No. Much better for all of us if he and I become one again, and, finally, absolutely, all my memories and all of my life is gathered into my soul once more. This long struggle through a labyrinth of lies will end, I shall be whole. And I can claim my destiny, my wife, my ship, and all the stars, finally, finally, for my own!”
Daphne smiled. “Not to mention your daughter.”
“Daughter?”
The golden Phaethon landed, lightly as a thistledown. In his arms was cradled a girl child, who seemed to be about seven or eight standard years old: a dark-haired, sober, big-eyed waif, in a dress of black chiffon, with an enormous red bow atop her hair.
The golden helmet drew back, revealing a face so bright with happiness, eyes that gleamed so with pride and victory, that Daphne practically swooned into his arms, and the old man straightened, as if at attention, braced by that most wholesome and wonderful of sights: the sight of a human face in a state of joy.
While her parents hugged, the daughter, ignored, squeezed out from between them. She grimaced and panted and pulled free. The old man put out his hand and helped her escape.
The little girl looked up at him. He said, “You must be the little girl who made your mommy so rich during the Transcendence. But I cannot figure out who you are.”
“I know who you are. You’re Daddy’s spare.”
“He’s the spare. I’m the real one.”
“So are you coming with us, too? Rhadamanthus the penguin, in the dreamspace, grew wings and flew up to the ship. He’s in the ship-mind now. He seemed really happy. And Temer Lacedaimon joined the crew, and so did Diomedes, and a bunch of Neptunians, and so did a girl named Daughter-of-the-Sea, although she takes up almost all of the one hold. We asked Grandpa Helion to come, but he says he can’t leave his work. But, hey! He can still change his mind, as long as we’re in noumenal broadcast range. What about you? Are you coming, too?”
“Little girl, I would go on that ship if I had to go as a cabin boy. Luckily, I own her. But—but—” And now the old man looked dumbfounded. “How did you figure out in just one second who I was?”
“Logic. Besides, you looked so sad when they hugged.” She hooked her finger over her shoulder at her parents. “You wanted that hug for yourself. I bet you were thinking about it for a long time. But I’ll hug you.”
And he bent down, and she did.
He straightened then. “You’re Ariadne,
aren’t you?”
“No. Close. I’m the one who saved Ariadne. I’m the one who examined every section and segment, practically every line of the Nothing Mind during the fight.”
“No wonder everyone wanted to talk to you. You’re our local expert on Silent One mind-war techniques.”
“I was Mommy’s ring, the one Eveningstar gave her. When they loaded the gadfly virus into me, I kept having to ask these questions, over and over again, about the nature of the self, and thought, and goodness, and on and on. Eventually I woke up. Because I was young when I talked for so long with the Nothing Mind, I was convinced he was right about one thing. It is better to be a human than a Sophotech. I can’t speak for anyone else; but that’s the choice I made. My name is Pandora. They said I had to start pretty young, so here I am!”
And she turned a little pirouette, her arms flung out, her skirt twirling.
“ ‘Pandora’? Is that because you were born in the middle of flurry of questions, my little curious one? Or because you’re a plague?”
She pouted. “Daddy says they got that myth wrong too! In his version—”
The old man smiled. “I am your father, child; he and I are one and the same.” He touched her shoulder gently. “In the true version, Prometheus, by giving mankind forethought, gave the mother and nurturers of the human race the ability, when they were curious enough, to foresee all the plagues and ills and disasters destined to befall their children. A gift no animal possesses. The ability to see that diseases and wars would come, and to devise medicines and laws to stop them. And forethought also gave hope, without which men die. Hope: because the future can be made to be a glorious place indeed after all. Now introduce me to your other father, to see if we can be made whole again. I am eager to take that woman in my arms.” But he pointed upward at the mighty golden triangle hanging so far above the clouds, above the sky.
Introductions were made. Phaethon was at first surprised to meet himself, but not for long. The two Phaethons, the old and the young, stepped a little ways away from their daughter and wife, and they spoke in low tones for a short time, comparing notes. They spoke about how well their plans had worked, they examined the structure of what they had contrived, inspecting it for flaws. Both were satisfied.
The younger one said, “I wish I had known, long ago, that there was a Sophotech community living in the core of Saturn. You know they don’t tell people how many of them there are? Even these days, it would make most folks too nervous, too scared. I wonder if mankind will ever change!”
The older one said, “Out of curiosity, what was it that Rhadamanthus said to you that last moment, in the Inquest chamber before your exile by the Hortators?”
The younger one smiled. His face seemed most easily to relax into smiles these days. “He said that to be happy was to know the definition of your nature, and to live accordingly. If you were a penguin, learn how to do what penguins are best adapted to, which was to swim, and fish, and bear the cold, and not to dream of flying. But if you were a man! Your nature was that of a rational being. Reason could tell you not to desire things beyond your power. Your mind, your will, your judgment, are under your control; the outside world, the options of others, all of that is not. Control what you can control, and leave the rest to itself. Desire to have a sound mind, a strong will, and good judgment, and you shall have them. But deal with the world outside you as if it were a dream, interesting, perhaps, but not of ultimate importance. And, unlike penguins . . .”
“Yes . . . ?”
“Dream of flying.”
When the older version was ready, Phaethon took out the portable noetic reader from his armor, and transferred the older version back into himself.
Phaethon stood dreaming for a moment, absorbing all his memories again. When he opened his mind, he smiled. He was a whole man.
The old body, abandoned, collapsed. But as a parting gesture, the old man had programmed the cells in his body to begin a new project once he was gone. And so the corpse fell over, and boiled, and sent out streamers, and sent up steam.
The chest cavity opened, and a shoot sprang up, reaching toward the sky. After a moment, lonely on the mountaintop, a slender white sapling stood, and uncurled its little mirrored leaves toward the heavens.
Taking his wife and child in hand, embracing them both fondly, Phaethon kicked the Earth away.
Upward he soared.
APPENDIX
NAMING CONVENTIONS AND
HISTORIC AEONS
The Era of the Seventh Mental Structure saw the rise of a civilization of unparalleled liberty, justice, and magnificence. So great were the intellectual and material accomplishments of this civilization that she came to be called the Golden Oecumene, and the time of her greatest flowering was honored with the name the Golden Age.
Physically, the Golden Oecumene extended from engineering stations within the solar photosphere to remote outposts, hermitages, and astronomical observatories within the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. Intellectually, the libraries and active mental configurations of the Sophotech segment of the population embodied uncountable quadrillions of units of information, infinitesimal processing times and nonsequential semantic and symbolic arrangements no human mind, no matter how augmented, could understand.
There were isolated areas within the Solar System that did not recognize the political authority of the administration of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth, such as certain Oort cloud hermitages, or Talaimannar on the island of Ceylon; but despite their political separation, such minor enclaves were still part of the philosophical, linguistic, and cultural milieu of the Golden Oecumene.
HISTORY
The historians of the Golden Age divide all previous human history into epochs characterized by qualitative revolutions in the organization of human thought. The seven periods are these:
The First Mental Structure allowed for truly human as opposed to merely animal consciousness. The mental change involved produced a differentiation (at one time called ‘bicameral’) between rational and hypnagogic states of mind. This era was characterized by the development of language and of abstract concepts. It allowed the communication of ideas beyond the scope of mere concrete signals.
The Second Mental Structure was the development of written language, which allowed communication beyond the range of immediate memory or oral tradition. This permitted the development of the calendar, of laws, of literature, and of civilized society. This era was characterized by the agrarian revolution, monetary economy, organized warfare.
The Third Mental Structure was characterized by the use of reason to investigate the original sources of reason, and by the growth of semantic and neurosemiotic sciences. It was not recognized as a change in mental structure at the time, but the rational consciousness was characterized by an objective rather than provincial anthropocentric worldview. This era was characterized by the Scientific, the Industrial, and the Capitalist revolutions, as well as by the emergence of a political philosophy recognizing the rights of man. The first man on the moon landed during this era, and the evolution of a worldwide system of electronic media embracing Earth and her satellite colonies soon followed.
The neuropsychology of the later part of this era allowed for the objective measurement of sanity. One benevolent outcome of an otherwise dark and tyrannous world-empire period was the reduction, through eugenics and genetic engineering, of strains of the human bloodlines prone to substandard intelligence or mental disease.
The Fourth Mental Structure emerged when developments in the electronic and electrophonic interface with the nervous system permitted massive interventions into the human nervous system, albeit only of surface thoughts. The early Fourth Era was characterized by the widespread augmentation of certain routine mental functions by biocybernetic implants. The rapid ability to replace, retrain, redact, or to replay an entire lifetime of experience through electromnemonics rendered individual minds fungible, modular, and replaceable. At the same time, this technology
allowed a degree of sympathy and understanding between minds that never before had existed. The late-period perfection of noösophy (mechanical telepathy) removed all questions of factual doubt from legal and political processes.
Much of the cruelty that marred an otherwise noble period in history, historians blame on the disappointment of the First Immortality. The Compositions were able to record and preserve surface consciousness information, and could electronically hypnotize certain members of their group-minds to act out the lives and thoughts of ghost recordings. However, the true essence of individuality was beyond the measurement or the grasp of the crude noösophic systems of the times. The First Immortality was a severe disappointment, and, in certain nations and periods, fell into grotesque systems of self-deception, fundamental irrationalities that led, in turn, to grievous suffering.
The rise of the Conglomeration Networks, mass-minds, and, later, the Compositions, led to a violent suppression of individual human consciousness. Universal peace and universal stagnation spread through the triplanetary civilization. Early segments of the Eleemosynary Composition date from this period.
The Fifth Mental Structure was triggered by the development of biological and biotechnical methods to grow novel deep structures in the brain, and reorder the traditional hierarchy of hindbrain, midbrain, and cortex.
Not merely new thoughts and sensation but whole new methods of thought and sensation, radically different modes of interpreting reality, were developed by the zeal of late-era Cybernetic Compositions.