John C. Wright - Golden Age 02 by The Phoenix Exultant

Author:The Phoenix Exultant [Exultant, The Phoenix]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-07T15:17:45+00:00

THE HEROINE-ERRANT

1.

Daphne had tried to forget Phaethon only on the first day. Her new house was a portrayal house, a living work of art built mostly out of pseudomatter and lightweight diamond coral, and it floated like a crystal lotus in a wide lake of azure resistance-water. The ornamentation was built into the walls as overlapping million-fold layers of mathematic arabesques, and a Red Manorial program inserted in her sense-filter allowed her to understand the microscopic complexities of the baroque, rich patterns as if stabs of sublime emotion were being thrust directly into her heart. Gay and carefree, chattering with a dozen conversation balls, which floated lightly around her head, skipping, Daphne danced up the ramp into her new home. She had just come from a dazzling performance of an art called Spectorialism, and had seen two competing masters of the art, Artois Fifth Mnemohyperbolic and Zu-Tse-Haplock Niner Ghast, intermingle their minds and create a new entity, and a new way to reconcile their neo-romantic and cultural-abstractionist schools. It would change the history of Spectorials forever, it would change the way Spector-people ate and wed and formed abstractions for recording. Daphne felt blessed to have been among them when it had happened.

A friend of hers, Lucinda Third of Second-branch Reconstructed Meridian, had already proposed to apply the same philosophy to ancient poetry, and to absorb the lives of fictional heroines from myth, Draupadi and Deirdre-of-the-sorrows, into her persona-base without tagging the memories as false, then to see if new poems could be written into life, fiction and reality combined, the same way Artois and Zu-Tse had written new energy levels into the periodic charts of their artificial spectration systems. It was a daring idea. It was a daring time to be alive.

Daphne, smiling, turned to her calendar table to see what costume or what events Eveningstar Sophotech had planned for her tonight. It was a relief, sometimes, to have a mind superior to your own, someone who knew you better than you knew yourself, choose what entertainment or amusements you should live.

On the calendar table, next to the crystal lumen-helix that represented today’s Spectrations, was a figure of a penguin. Clutched between stubby wings, the penguin held a black iron memory-box.

Odd. Usually she could recall what all the signs and symbols on her calendar table were intended to represent. Like everything else in a Red Manorial house, the placement of every article and ornament was intended to reflect on her. It was supposed to be, in its own small way, a work of art, as casual and graceful as the folded silk hung beside the door, or the elegant hair-flower waiting in a window-bowl for her next Pausing. Everything else on the calendar table was tasteful, exquisite, delicate. A penguin?

She looked into the Middle Dreaming.

Instead of a symbol, she received a message. “Yesterday you were a collateral member of Rhadamanthus Mansion, of the Silver-Grey. Hatred for Helion drove you from his house, back into the arms of the matrons and odalisques of the Red Eveningstar Mansion.

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