John C. Wright - Golden Age 01 by The Golden Age

Author:The Golden Age [Age, The Golden]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-07T15:17:44+00:00

THE GOLDEN DOORS

Was it cowardice or prudence that made him hesitate? One impulse was to rush to the nearest Eleemosynary agency and throw himself down, begging, weeping, instantly agreeing to anything and everything it took to recover his wife from her horrible exile, her living death of permanent delusion.

Another impulse, more cautious, told him to investigate further.

Certainly the Eleemosynary Composition had not lied. It was true that, these days, very few people (aside from Neptunians) ever even attempted to lie; it was altogether too easy to get caught by all-knowing Sophotechs, too easy for honest men to confirm their statements by public display of their thought records. But it was also true that people could be mistaken, or could indulge in exaggerated (but honest) judgments of relative worth. The Eleemosynary Composition, for example, might judge something to be “difficult” or “impossible” which was not.

Was it impossible for Phaethon to wake his dream-trapped wife? Impossible?

He had to be certain. He had to see for himself.

Phaethon reached for the yellow disk icon floating in the glass of the table surface, the communication channel. It

should take only a moment to telepresent himself to the Eveningstar Sophotech who had custody of his wife’s body. But he did not wish to be further observed; all this prying into his life was beginning to annoy him. Even as he reached, with his other hand he gestured the balcony window closed. Immediately, a panel was covering the view, and the sound and light and movement from outside was shut off.

Phaethon froze, startled. It was suddenly silent, with the total and absolute silence of a vacuum. The panels had not slid or moved to shut; one moment they were not there; the next they were in place. There was no hint or whisper of noise from beyond the panels, such as a Silver-Gray scene would have provided, to maintain the illusion of three dimensions and of consistency of objects.

Phaethon’s hand was near the table surface. Still he hesitated.

“Rhadamanthus, why am I hesitating? What am I thinking?” He asked the question aloud before he remembered that he was disconnected from the Rhadamanthine system. (Had he been connected, he would not have forgotten, even for a moment.)

There was an icon for a Noetic self-consideration circuit in the tabletop. It was a crude, old-fashioned model, weeks or months out of date. But Phaethon thought that if he could clean a room manually, he could clean his nervous system of emotional maladjustments manually.

He touched the icon. Another, smaller window, like a tabletop, opened in the unsupported midair to his left. The new window was lit with the colors, dots and grids of standard psychometric iconography. He saw that his tension levels were high; grief and rancor were burning like a fire in a coal mine, sullen, just below the surface of his thoughts; and the temptation simply to give in to the Eleemosynary’s bargain, to have someone or something else solve this problem for him, was very high.

The short-term emotional association index was carrying an image from the dream consciousness in his hypothalamus.

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