"So you are Phaethon, eh? No, no, I think not. He is not welcome at parties."
Not welcome? Him? Rhadmanthus House was the oldest mansion of the Silver-Gray, and the Silver-Gray was, in turn, the third oldest scholum in the entire manorial movement. Rhadamanthus boasted over 7,600 members just of the elite communion, and not to mention tens of thousands of collaterals, partials and secondaries. Not welcome? Phaethon's sire and gene-template was Helion, founder of the Silver-Gray and archon of Rhadamanthus. Phaethon was welcome everywhere!
The strange old man was still speaking: "You could not be him: Phaethon wears grim and brooding black and proud gold, not frills like those."
(For a moment, oddly enough, Phaethon could not quite recall how he usually dressed. But surely he had no reason to dress in grim colors. Had he? He was not a grim man. Was he?)
He tried to speak calmly: "What do you say I have done to make me unwelcome at celebrations, sir?"
"What has he done? Hah!" The white-haired man leaned back as if to avoid an unpleasant smell. "Your joke is not appreciated, sir. As you may have guessed, I am a Antia-maranthine Purist, and I do not carry a computer in my ear telling me every nuance of your manor-born protocols, or which fork to use, or when to hold my tongue. Maybe I speak out of turn to say that the real Phaethon would be ashamed to show his face at a festival like this! Ashamed! This is a celebration of those who love this civilization, or who, like
me, are urged to try to improve it by constructive criticism. But you!"
"Ashamed? ... I have done nothing!"
"No, no more! Do not speak again! Perhaps I should get a brain filter like you machine-pets, so I could merely blot out stains like you from my sight and memory. That would be ironic, wouldn't it? Me, shrouded in a little silvery tissue of my own. But irony is perhaps more fit to an age of iron than to an age of gold."
"Sir, I really must insist you tell me what"
"What?!! Still here, you interloper! If you want to look like Phaethon, maybe I should treat you like him, and have you thrown out of my grove on your ear!"
"Tell me the truth!" Phaethon stepped toward the man.
"Fortunately, this grove, and even the surrounding dream-space, are my own, not part of the party grounds proper, and so I can throw you out, can't I?"
He cackled, and waved his walking stick.
The man, and the grove, disappeared. Phaethon found himself standing on green hilltop in the sunlight, overlooking the palaces and gardens of the celebration shining in the distance. An overture of music came faintly from the distant towers.
This was a scene from the first day of the celebration, one of the entrance scenarios. The old man had deleted his grove scene from Phaethon's sensorium, throwing him back into his default setting. An unthinkable rudeness! But, perhaps, allowed under the relaxed protocols and standards of the festival time.
A moment of cold anger ran through Phaethon. He was surprised at the vehemence of his own emotion. He was not normally an angry manwas he?
Perhaps it would be wise to let the matter drop. There were entertainments and delights enough to engage his attention at the Celebrations without pursuing this.
But... unlike everything he had seen, this was real. Phae-thon's curiosity was piqued, and perhaps his pride was stung. He would discover the answers.
He raised his fingers to his eyes and made the restart ges-
ture. He was back in the scene, at night, in the silvery grove, but alone. The man was either gone or he was hiding behind Phaethon's sense-filter.
With another gesture, Phaethon lowered his sense-filter and opened his brain to all the sensations in the area, so he could look upon "reality" without any interpretation-buffer.
The shock of the noise and music, the screams of the Advertisements, startled him.
Panels and banners of lightweight film hung or floated grandly in the air. Each one flashed with colors brighter and more gaudy than its neighbor; every image was twice as dizzying, alluring, and hypnotic as the one before. Some of the Advertisements had projectors capable of directing stimulation into any brain equipped to receive it.
When they noticed Phaethon staring (perhaps they had registers to note his eye movements and pupil dilationsuch information was, after all, in the public domain) they folded and swooped, clamoring, pressing around him, squawking, urging him to try, just once, free trial offer, their profferred stimulants and additions, false memories, compositions, and thought schemes. They swarmed like angry sea gulls or hungry children from some historical drama.
The music was, if anything, worse. A group from the Red Manorial School on one hillside in the distance were having a combination scream-feast, Bacchanalia, and composition-symphony analogue. Emancipated partials of the Psycho-asymmetric Insulae-Composition were on the other hillside, having a noise duel. Their experimental 36- and 108-tone scale music, subsonic and hypersonic, trembled in Phaethon's teeth. They made no effort to muffle the sound for the sake of those who did not share their extensive ear/auditory lobe modifications, their peculiar subjective time-scale alterations, or their even more peculiar aesthetic theories. Why should they? Every civilized person was assumed to have access to some sort of sense-filter to allow them to block or to tolerate the noise.
And there was no sign of the white-haired man. Perhaps
he had been a projection after all, or some fiction, part of the art statement of the grove?
The flash and glamour of the transparent Advertisements did not block his view. The trees were widely spaced, nor was there brush. And, unless the man had hidden behind the walking iceberg thing looming above the grape trellises nearby, there was simply no place to hide.
Phaethon threw his hands before his face and gestured for his sense-filter to resume.
Peace and silence crashed into place around him. It was not, perhaps, the perfect truth he saw. But the groves were quiet now, and starlight and moonlight slanted through the strange silver-mirrored leaves, and falling blossoms. A routine calculated how the scene would look (and sound and feel and smell) were the disturbing objects not present. The representation was close to real, "Surface Dreaming" as it was called. The machine intelligences creating the illusion, able to think a million times faster than a man, or a billion, could cleverly and symmetrically account for all inconsistencies and cover up any unwanted errors.
His ears still rang with echoes; his eyes were still dazzled by floating half shapes, colors reversed. He could have waited for his ears to stop ringing naturally, or blinked his eyes clear. But he was impatient; the man he sought was no doubt getting away. He merely signaled for his eyes to reset to perfect night adaptation, for this ears to restore.
Phaethon started to jog toward the grape trellises where ...
The iceberg thing was gone. Phaethon saw nothing.
Iceberg? Phaethon's augmented memory could re-create an exact image of what he had-seen. It had loomed, gigantic, over the area, moving on myriad legs of semiliquid, which solidified, elephantine, then liquefied again as the creature drifted forward. Likewise, it had had a dozen arms or tentacles of ice flowing and freezing around objects in the area, careful not to disturb the trees, but holding objects (eyes? remote sensors?) near the garden plants, as if to study them from every angle.
It was, of course, a member of the Tritonic Neuroform
Composition School, the so-called Neptunians. The technology of their nerve-cell surface allowed them thought-speeds approaching that of some of the slower Sophotechs; but the crystals of the cell surface exhibited their peculiar electrosu-perconductive and micropolymorphetic characteristics only under the near-absolute-zero temperatures and near-metallic-hydrogen-forming pressures of the Neptunian atmosphere. The icy body Phaethon had seen was armorliving, shape-changing armor, but armor nonetheless, and a triumph of molecular and submolecular technology. That armor allowed the Neptunian brain substances inside to withstand the unbearable heat and (relative to Neptune) near-vacuum conditions of the earthly atmosphere.