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 En-ghathrathrion'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since the Bellipotent Composition was not composed until ninety years after the anti-Warlock weapons had been superseded by far deadlier arrangements.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 ad-mantium. When Phaethon signaled for identification, the response was "Disguised as a certain rash manorial with whom we are all far too familiar!"
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."
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 iden-
tification 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.
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 interactionsan ecologywhich 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 tran-scendentally 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.