“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.
3.
Phaethon slanted down through the air to land on the lawns at the lake-side. 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 senechal’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’s 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.
With them was a figure whose meaning was still masked. He wore a ship-suit of symbiotic living black and super-adamantine gold, was dark haired, harsh faced, and he carried a small star in one hand instead of a weapon. His helmet was an absurd-looking bullet-shaped affair with a needle crown, like the prow of an aircraft, made of gleaming golden admantium. When Phaethon signaled for identification, the response was “Disguised as a certain rash manorial with whom we are all far too familiar!”
4.
In the middle of Helion’s joy, only one false note rang.
Wheel-of-Life sent him a private signal by having one of her pigeons, which only contained a very small part of Wheel-of-Life’s mind, land on his mannequin’s lap and initiate a quiet interface.
“Helion will weep to hear that Phaethon is gone from his place. Phaethon beholds the drowned garden of my sister, Green-Mother, to watch the life and dying there. This was one of the things Phaethon agreed not to see, not to remember, was it not?”
Helion could not leave the Conclave, but, with another independent section of his mind, he opened a channel and sent out a message, encrypted and perhaps undetected: “Daphne! Wake! Wake up from the insubstantial dream you deem to be your life. Your husband, like a moth to flame, draws ever closer to a truth which will consume him. Open your casket of memories; remember who you are,
remember your instructions. Find Phaethon, deceive him, allure him, distract him, stop him. Save him.—And save us from him.”
For a moment, he felt the grief and sorrow any father might feel, hearing that his son was on the verge of self-destruction. But then he remembered his part in all of this, and a sense of shame made all the crystal-clear certainties in his heart seem cloudy.
Despite that, he sent an emphasis appended to the first message: “Daphne, from the doom he will bring on himself, I beg of you, preserve my son.”
5.
Phaethon turned toward Rhadamanthus to ask a question, but smiled instead, ignoring what he had been about to ask, because now he recognized Rhadamanthus’s costume. The identification channel thrust the knowledge silently into Phaethon’s brain: Polonius, a character from the revenge-play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon, realistic-simulation linear-progression author, circa Second Mental Structure.
There was also a recital of the play, a working knowledge of the English language, and notes and memories on the lives of various peoples reconstructed from Queen Elizabeth’s court, enough to allow anyone glancing at Rhadamanthus to appreciate the humor, the allusions, and the references in the play.
“Oh, very amusing,” said Phaethon, “I suppose this means you’re going to give me advice which I’ll ignore?”
Rhadamanthus handed him a skull. “Just don’t kill me by accident.”
“Don’t hide behind any tapestries.” Phaethon glanced down at the skull. “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of excellent fancy …” He looked up again. “I never quite understood this play. Why didn’t they resurrect Yorick out of his recordings, if he was so well-liked?”
“The noumenal recording technology was not developed until the end of the Sixth Mental Structure Era, young master.”
“But Hamlet’s father had a recording. It came up as a projection on the battlements … .”
They were interrupted by a blare of trumpets, sounding from the center of the lake waters. The organisms at the lake bottom had entered a higher and grander growth phase, and, like the horns of a kraken, branches of the flaming coral began rising above the boiling surface.
“What is it we are here to see, young master?”
“Whatever it is they don’t want me to see.”
“But I can replace your stored memories at your command, sir.”
“And exile me from my home. No, thank you. But if I wander around the border of an area I cannot enter, I might learn the size and shape of the boundaries … .”
And he stepped one step deeper into mentality, into the condition called Penultimate Dreaming.
6.
An ecoperformance was meant, by its very nature, to be understood by people with Cerebelline neural structures. The whole challenge of this art form was to produce a complex system of interactions—an ecology—which would appear beautiful from every point of view of each acting element simultaneously, but would also be, taken as a whole, sublime. Usually, in living ecologies, the beauty was tragic from the point of view of starving predators or fleeing prey, but transcendentally beautiful, not tragic at all, viewed globally.
In the Penultimate Dreaming, Phaethon’s brain was rocked by sensations radiating from the strange creations growing along the lake. He was seeing not a lake but a universe. The lives and memories of the myriad creatures swarming there came into him like a thousand strands of music, predator and prey, complex as a kaleidoscope, a pattern too dazzling to grasp. He was, at once, one and all of the darting shelled creatures forming an interlocking colony; and also each one of a hive-group wrapping around those shells; and also the scavenger-hooks who competed for dropped hive husks; and the refashioners who brought recycled energy from the scavengers back, in another form, to the shell beds.
The Cerebelline Life-mistress who constructed these microforms had outdone herself. There were a thousand variations, each beautiful with weird beauty, but small, very small. She had invented a new way of coding genetic material, like DNA, but containing eighty-one chemical compounds, instead of the four classic amino acids. Complex genetic information could be compressed into very small cells, as small as viral cells, and complex forms of life were swarming and multiplying along the coral arms at a size that usually only simple protozoa used. The speed of their growth and decay was so high, their atoms combining and recombining so quickly, that the waste-heat was boiling the lake water. The initial high energy to start these reactions came from widely scattered pebbles of special living crystal.
The coral trees that sprang out from these life-pebbles were made up of thousands and millions of individuals, each one contributing to and being fed by the whole structure. The branches and limbs of coral seemed rigid only because each microform who darted away left chemical energy behind which only microforms who took up that exact position in the hierarchy, the same place and stance and posture, could fully enjoy. Like a spinning wheel seeming to form a solid disk, the illusion of stability was caused by the continuous effort of each part in motion.
Surrounding each coral tree was a very wide area of desolation, which the microforms could not cross. Each coral tree was centered only on its life-pebble, and all parts operated in magnificent harmony.
But only in isolation was the tree structure symbiotic. While a mother tree could send seeds to start other trees, these new daughter trees could not reach all the way across the desolation to rejoin the mother tree in a peaceful symbiosis.
At the point in the performance when Phaethon joined it, the greatest tree growing from the oldest life-pebble had just learned how to carry water to higher parts, and was lifting shining branches into the air.
This eldest tree had discovered how to use steam pressure through its capillaries to fling seeds through the air. The seeds skipped like tossed stones across the lake surface, passing the desolate zones, and sank into rich lake-bottom soils near other life-pebbles, there to start tree-organisms of their own.
This eldest tree, once it had colonized the immediate circle of closest life-pebbles, flung a second wave of seed-colonists, which, competing with the daughter trees that had grown up from the first wave, made the water boil with an intense and deadly competition.
In order to avoid further destructive competition, the central eldest tree now tried to grow to higher and higher branches, in order to fling its seeds farther. The base of the structure complained; signals flashed like fire among the swarming microforms; the warnings were ignored.
In a slow and terrifying crash, the central tree collapsed under its own weight. A plume of steam, like a ghost, swelled up over the lake surface.
Phaethon, who had a base-neuroform, could only understand part of what he was seeing. The symmetries, the timings, the nuances, were forever beyond him. He could follow the life experience of a few of the struggling microforms as they poured into his brain, but only one after another. The meaning of the whole was never clear.
This was not to say he was not stirred by the beauty of what he saw. A blind man listening to an opera might not see the pageantry of the sets and costumes, but the music could profoundly move him, even if the language was strange.
7.
Phaethon glanced back up into Middle Dreaming, turned toward the nearest waitress and signaled for a libretto. Smiling, the Canal Dryad looked toward him, paused, and knelt gracefully to pick up a seeing-ring the wind had blown from her tray. She straightened again, tucked her hair behind her ear, came toward him, and proffered the card containing the libretto.
Many men found Martian Dryads quite attractive; they had the deep chests required by the thin air Mars had once had (Dryads dated from the middle of the Second Terraforming Interrum), and a long-legged delicacy lesser Martian gravity permitted. And they did not have the rough hide of a south-hemisphere drylander. But they were not usually clumsy or shy. Why had the waitress paused?
Phaethon deactivated his sense-filter and saw a man dressed as an As
tronomer from First-Century Porphyrogen Cosmic Observatory at 500 AUs, of the Undeterred Observationer School, a Scholum now defunct. It had been a period of hardship, before the construction of the artificial ice-planetoid, and the costume reflected the hardness of those times. He had thick radiation-proof skin, with the internal recyclers and extra layers of fat that allowed him to stand long watches without taking air or water from the common stores. His face was disfigured with multiple eye-jacks, plugs, and extensions, as the Observationers of that period could not afford to abide by the Consensus Aesthetic.
The waitress must have paused to hand a libretto to the Observationer, a man Phaethon’s sense-filter had censored from view. The filter could not let him see her hand the card to nobody, and so had invented an action for her to do. Her dropping and stooping and picking up was mere waste motion to account for the missing time.
Phaethon recalled that his sense-filter had been programmed to keep hidden from him a certain disaster in near-Mercury space, brought on solar storms. If the man costumed as an ancient astronomer were an astronomer in truth, he may have ready access to a channel or an index containing information.
Phaethon took the libretto but only pretended to study it as he stepped toward the man. The astronomer was watching the burning collapse of the supertree with several eyes.
Phaethon said, “The life-artist creates a scene of grim disaster.”
Phaethon detected signal actions on Channel 760, the translation matrix. There was a moment while the man adjusted to Phaethon’s language forms, downloading grammars and vocabularies into himself.
“Truly said,” the man replied with a smile. “Though not so grim, I think, as Demontdelune’s final hours on the Moon’s far side.”
Phaethon did not bother to explain he was dressed as Hamlet. He said, “Life can be grim, even these days. Consider the disaster near Mercury.”