Phaethon had not opened the forbidden memory casket. But he had heard no prohibition against deducing the contents of the casket using his unaided powers of reasoning. They could not exile him for that; the laws of intellectual property in the Golden Oecumene were clear. It could be a crime to steal or take knowledge that belonged to another, or that one had agreed not to read. But knowing knowledge in and of itself was never a crime.
The question was, did he have enough information to deduce any conclusions?
Phaethon looked out and up into the infinite expanse of wind. Even his dampened hearing could pick out the thrum-
ming shriek of air moving against the tower, miles above and miles below. It was cold here, this high above the earth. Now, in the distance, like a steel rainbow, he could see the ring-city. The shadow of Earth had crept up about twenty degrees of arc, rendering the city near the horizon invisible. But the equatorial sun was shining where Phaethon was, and shone on the sweep of the ring-city, overhead and to the west. It was a bracing sight.
"I'm cold. Could you do something about that, please?" It took almost a minute for spider-shaped operators (created out of the floor material) walking over his skin, to weave a silk garment around him, loose folds of white cloth with heating elements tuned to comfortable level.
Phaethon began to think about his past. What was missing?
There was no clear way to tell. Did he not recall what he had been doing during the April of Epoch 10179 because the memory was gone, or because he did not associate that memory with that date? Memories were not stored linearly or chronologically but by association. There was no list or index to consult. He could not that notice a memory was missing until he tried to recall it and failed.
When he did come across a blank spot... (What had he been doing after the mensal dinner performance to celebrate the conclusion of the Hyperion Orbital Resonance Correction, for example? He had been impatient to see his wife, and wanted to dance or commune with her, but she had seemed listless and distracted)... he did not know if that particular blank was related to this mystery, or to one of the other, more ordinary memories he had in storage, perhaps an old lover's spat, or work-for-hire he had agreed to forget.
Nonetheless he found enough holes, even after only some minutes of introspection, to detect a pattern.
First, they were large and they were many. Not just years and decades, but whole centuries of his life were missing; and
they were the ones nearer to the present day. Whatever had been removed had occupied a great deal of his time. If it were a crime he had been contemplating, it had been in his imagination for a long time, and it had roots all the way back to his childhood. And, if it were a crime, he had been working at it full-time for most of the last century. His memory of the last 250 years, reaching up to the beginning of the masquerade, was blank.
He could recall his last clear memory. His second attempt to reengineer the planet Saturn had just been frustrated. The Invariants of the Cities in Space had hired him to disintegrate the gas giant, sweeping up and storing the hydrogen atmosphere for antimatter conversions to be powered from the radiation given off during the disintegration. The diamond-metallic core of the world would then be reconstructed by nanomachines into the largest series of space habitats and space ports ever designed. This would have allowed the Invariant populations in the Cities to reproduce, to own their own lands, and to create additional civilizations. Phaethon had seen their plans; they had dreamed, not just of Space Cities, but of continents and worldlets, structures of fantastic beauty and cunning engineering, each one a living organism of infinite complexity.
The College of Hortators led the massive campaign to raise money to purchase the rights to Saturn. At the point at which it became mathematically unlikely to generate a profitable return on investment, the Invariants, without any emotion or slightest sign of discontent, withdrew their investment, and resigned themselves to living more centuries, without children, in the gray and claustrophobic corridors of their crowded habitats.
Phaethon's amnesia began shortly thereafter. What had his next project been? Whatever it was, he had begun to work on it full-time at that point.
There were more clues: The holes in his memory tended to be gathered around his engineering work; the blanked-out events were more frequent off Earth than on. He recalled long trips to the Jupiter moon system, Neptune, and a place called
Faraway in the Kuiper belt; but not what he had done there.
He could not recall any extravagant expenses from recent years. Perhaps he had been living frugally. He had not gone to parties or fetes or commissionings or communions. He had dropped out of all his sporting clubs and correspondence salons. Had he actually been grim? Perhaps the white-haired old man, the Saturn-tree artist, had described Phaethon as wearing black only because Phaethon's sartorial effects budget was exhausted.
Phaethon straightened up in the chair. Not black. Black and gold. The strange old man had said Phaethon wore "grim and brooding black and proud gold."
Phaethon started to his feet and threw the white thermal silk to the balcony floor, where the wind snatched it away into space. He entered the room. He almost bumped his nose again, almost forget to order aloud the door aside. The wardrobe opened.
The suit that hung there (how had he not noted this before?): it was black and gold.
And it looked the same as the suit that the stranger at the ecoperformance had worn, the third member of a group including Bellipotent Composition, and Caine, the inventor of murder.
His suit. The stranger had been mocking him.
It was cut like a ship-suit, but heavier than most ship-suits, so that it looked like armor.
There was a wide circular collar. Finely crafted as jewels, the shoulderboards carried jacks, energy couplings, small powercast antennae, mind circuits.
The sense of familiarity was strong. This suit was his; it was somehow important. Phaethon reached out and touched the fabric.
The black fabric stirred under his touch. It puckered, sent strands like silk threads across his fingers and wrist, and began bonding to his palm. Immediately a sense of warmth, of well-being, of power, began to throb in his hand.
This was not inanimate fabric but a complex of nanoma-chines. Phaethon, despite his instinct, was reluctant to trust
an unknown bio-organization of such complexity. He pulled his hand back; the fabric released him reluctantly.
Some drops of the fabric material, shaking from his fingers, fell to the floor. The boots of the outfiteverything was all one piecesent out strands toward the fallen droplets, which inched across the wardrobe floor back toward the main garment. The drops were reabsorbed into the material, which trembled once, then was still.
Curious, he touched a shoulderboard. Nothing happened. He thought: Show me what you do, please. Then he snatched back his hand and stepped away.
This was one command he did not need to speak aloud. Here was an expensive and well-made organism. The gold segments snapped open, forming an armored breastplate; extended to cover the leggings in greaves; vambraces and gauntlets expanded over the arms; a helmet unfolded from the collar. The helmet had a wide neckpiece, extending smoothly from the shoulders to the ears, ribbed with horizontal pipings. The coifs of Pharaohs in Egyptian statues had similar patterns of horizontal stripes.
Phaethon touched the gold material in awe. If this were space armor, it was the thickest and most well-made he had ever seen or imagined. This gold substance was not an ordinary metal. There was a large island of stable artificial elements, the so-called "continent of stability," above atomic weight 900, which required so much energy to produce that they could not exist in nature. One in particular, called Chry-sadmantium, was so refractory, durable, and stable, that even the fusion reactions inside of a star could not melt it. This suit was made of that.