Daphne saw it, and remembered.
She sat, eyes closed, breathless. Her old Warlock training allowed her to remain awake while the dreaming centers of her brain, rushing with images, tried to establish deep-structure emotional and symbolic connections between her memories and consciousness.
The cosmos was called Althea. It was a simple, geocentric, Copernican model, based on Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. Beneath a crystal sphere of fixed stars and the complex epicycles of moving planetary mansions were continents and blue oceans of a gentle world. Her seas teemed with fishes and mermaids, whales grand with ancient wisdom, sunken cities. Her lands were pastoral, jeweled with tiny villages and farms, high castles, small cities crowned with lovingly built cathedrals. A memory of horrid war hung like the notes of a trembling counterpoint echoing from far hills, and musketeers and daring horse guards patrolled the edges of dark forests where winged dragons were rumored to brood.
In the city of golden Hyperborea, beyond the Northwestern Sea, a prince named Shining had returned from the wars with the grim Cimmerians, who lived in endless caverns of gold and iron, in a land of eternal gloom. The prince had brought with him out from that underworld a dream made of fire, which he wore like a cloak over his armor of gold, or like wings of flame....
The wonder of it was that Daphne had achieved the Semifinal Medal for the Althean universe she had created; today she was to enter in the final competition against other amateur dreamsmiths. She had originally intended it only for children, or for those who delighted in childish things. How could it compete with the modern non-Euclidean universes invented by Neomorphs, or the strange multileveled worlds of the New Movement Warlocks, or the Mobius-strip infinities of Anachronic Cerebellines? The love-gravity universe submitted by Typhoenus of the Clamour Black Manor, a universe where
love increased gravitic attraction and hate and fear lessened it, had thousands of worlds, a galaxy of worlds, peopled by thousands of characters no less complex and complete as her few continent's worth. How could she compete? How could she ever hope to win?
She opened her eyes and came out of her trance. Phaethon was always bothering her about getting back into some effort, getting involved in some business or program. (As if anything humans did could make any difference at all in a world run by machines!) And it was true that she had put off the decision, and put it off again and again, telling herself that perhaps, by the time of the Masquerade at the end of the Millennium, when the world reviewed its life and decided where its future lay, Daphne would review and would decide herself.
Well, the Millennium had come. The decision was here. If she won the Gold Medal for her universe there would be a flood of invitations, communions, ovations. Entertainers would send her gifts and compose praises just for the privilege of being seen with her, or publicity-mongers to have the public see what name-brand services she patronized.
Maybe she could become a dream weaver in truth, not merely a dreamer.
And maybe, just maybe, her husband would lose that look of disdain he got when he spoke of those who enjoyed the fruits of the Golden Oecumene without helping with the cultivation. 'All history has worked to created our fine Utopia,' he would always say, 'so it is hardly the time for the human race to take a holiday! We don't want entropy to win.'
She was always afraid he was thinking of her when he said this. Maybe if she won the Gold, that fear would go away. Maybe the future would be clearer to her.
She had also promised herself to decide, before the Millennium was up, whether or not to make children with Phaethon. If she had a career again, that decision might become easier, too.
Daphne rose, her silk robes whispering around her knees and ankles. No wonder she had hidden this memory from herself! Her nerves could not have taken the cheerful strain
of waiting, the fretful days and minutes till the competition drew near.
There were Red Manorial routines for controlling such emotions, or replacing fear with hope; but now that she was a Silver-Gray, she had to learn to do those things, so to speak, by hand. Silver-Gray protocol did not allow for unprompted mood reorganizations; memory redaction, however, was acceptable. Ancient man forgot things all the time, and so how could the Silver-Gray curators upbraid the exercise of a flaw so traditional?
With a silken whisper of robes, she passed from the chamber to her day lock.
And, since she was present and awake in the real world, she had to take the time to do things, one step at a time, which would have been easier and simpler even in a strict Silver-Gray dreamscape. It took time to change into her Masquerade costume (she was dressed as a favorite author from her childhood, for luck), time to program her hair, check the weather, and adjust her skin accordingly. The Ayesha-mind had remembered to summon a carriage with time enough to carry Daphne to the Oneirocon Palace (which Daphne had forgotten?these had to be done in order in the real world, with no backups or restarts).
The carriage pulled up on the turning circle outside the day lock. It was a light and open affair, well sprung, with wheels slender and light as parasols. The road was still warm from its assembly heat; evidently Aurelian foresaw more traffic from this side of the park today, and had thrown a new road up overnight. Pulling the carriage was an old friend.
'Mr. Maestrict!' Daphne exclaimed, rushing up to throw her arms around the horse's neck. 'How have you been?! I thought you were working for the Parliament now, Mr. Can't or Won't or something like that.'
'Mr. Han is his name, Miss Daphne. Kshatrimanyu Han. He's the Prime Minister,' the horse replied. 'And there's not much for me to do during the Masquerade. Parliament is not in session, and, even when it is, all they ever do is argue about how much intellectual property goes into the public
domain under the Fair-Use Doctrine, or how much salary poor old Captain Atkins should get.'
'Who is Atkins?' She petted Mr. Maestrict on the nose, and sent one of Ayesha's remotes to the life-pool to assemble a lump of sugar.
'Oh ... he's sort of a leftover from the old days. He does ... ah... some tasks the Sophotechs aren't allowed to do. We're lucky, because we just found a little mystery for him to solve. It's probably just a Masquerade prank, you know.'
'Well! An adventure!'
'Not really an adventure, ma'am. It appears that some Neptunian masterminds are preparing a thought- weapon to erase or drive insane some high-level Sophotechs. We're trying to find out where this weapon is, or
