(nonexistent) trees, and suddenly stood facing the towers of Rhadamanthus Mansion. The windows gleamed cherry red in the sunset.
A glance behind her showed that the lake scene, the party crowd, had vanished. Rhadamanthus leaned from his walking tripod, and said, 'What are you going to tell him?'
Daphne's sense of misery faded. She straightened her back and squared her shoulders. She did not know how or when she had decided, but the decision was there, burning like a bright light in her soul. 'I'll tell him the truth, of course. He's my husband. Or he thinks he is. So I'll tell him everything I know.'
'He will leave you.'
'Maybe. Maybe not. That's up to him. But whether or not I act like the kind of woman a man ought to leave?that's up to me.'
A sensation of cheerful lightness caught her up, as if, the moment she rejected any idea of deception, a weight left her. She knew then how wrong Helion was. Any sort of lie, even a little one, could not keep Phaethon.
She told herself: Once Phaethon knows, he'll understand, he'll stay with me, he'll stop trying to get back these lost memories, whatever they are. This place is so beautiful! Who in their right mind would do anything to, get themselves thrown out?!
With a brave and cheerful step, Daphne walked forward into the gloomy mansion.
Up the spiral stairs she ran and into the memory chamber, where Phaethon already had the casket of forbidden memories in his hand.
There was a glimmer of darkness as the diary memories ended.
(For a moment, she stared in confusion, not remembering that the large, muscular hands gripping the pastel diary were her own. His own ... ? Phaethon's hands.)
Daphne's memories faded. Phaethon awoke. It took him a moment to remember where he was: In a private box, a thought casket, in an Eleemosynary hospice in a lower segment of the orbiting equatorial ring-city, in Deep Dreaming, semipublic thoughtspace.
Phaethon spread his fingers in the gesture of opening; the panels surrounding his balcony winked out. Around him, in tiers, reaching upward, canyonlike, were images and open windows depicting the local mentality.
Underfoot were moving lights indicating traffic, a geometry of doors opening and shutting as temporary scenes, telephone dramas, or teleconference rooms, winked into and out of existence. Overhead, scenes from permanent dreamscapes flashed from higher windows; the cold light of synoetics trembled on the rows still farther above; and at the utmost peak, rising rank upon rank, were the higher Sophotects, the En-nead, and the Earthmind. The Earthmind channels were full (they were always full?everyone wanted to talk to her) and this was represented as a swarm of glowing lines and rainbows that hid the peak of the balconies as if in a cloud of radiance.
Because he was not connected to Rhadamanthus, the local area service did not realize that Phaethon was a Silver-Gray Manorial, and therefore the scene around him did not employ a strict Silver-Gray Protocol. For example, next to him was a table surface, but no table. Instead, a two-dimensional flat surface hung unsupported in the air. Phaethon 'sat,' but sitting, here, merely relieved him of sensations of weight and pressure on his feet, and made the lower half of his self-image body disappear.
The table surface had icons floating in it from the Middle
Dreaming, so that a glance told him the whole contents of the possible services the local area had on file. A menu displayed the variety of illusions of food and drink that the table could provide. Not being in Silver-Gray territory, his self-image would not be redrawn as pudgy or obese, no matter how much he 'ate.'
Other menus promised other services. There were book icons to insert full files into his brain, either directly or as a linear experience. There were pornographic hallucinations; there was a library of full simulations, including pseudom-nesia dramas as fully real seeming as any human brain could detect. There were synnoetisms and interfaces to augment his mind and memory, marrying his thoughts to the super-thoughts of distant Sophotechs. There were channels to quench the pain of individuality, open invitations to join with shared minds, both hierarchic and radial-cell formats, or full embrace into the Compositional mass-minds, which would abolish his standing as a separate individual.
The icons of the Compositions floated in the table surface alluringly. Here was the Porphyrogen Composition, a name well worthy of respect, or the ancient Eleemosynary Composition, no longer Earth's king, but still a Peer, and a voice even the Hortators heeded. There was the token for the austere Reformation Composition, which held true to some of the discipline and strict rules of charity for which mass-minds had once, so long ago, been famous. The youthful and zealous Ubiquitous and Harmonious Compositions had been formed more recently, as part nostalgia and part back-to-fundamental movements, an attempt to restore the simplicity and peace of the middle-period Fourth Era, when all of Earth had been swept clear of war and hate and also of personal individuality.
Phaethon leaned away from the table. Why was he staring at the invitation icons of the mass-minds? All he had to do was open a channel, open his brain files, and join....
Phaethon realized that he was contemplating suicide.
A sweep of his hand made the icons vanish from view.
To enter a mass-mind might be painless, and might satisfy all his wants and needs, and surround him with eternal, end-
less brotherhood and peace and love; but it was suicide nonetheless, an abolition of self-hood too horrible to imagine.
The other icons in the tabletop all promised pleasure and delusion and false-memories. The wines and spirits and crude hallucinogens once used to addict his ancestors were nothing?nothing at all?compared to what modern neurotech-nology could accomplish. It was simple to cascade the pleasure centers of the brain with direct stimulations; but it was subtle to marry that pleasure to a philosophy that would also justify that sensation, carefully editing away thoughts and memories that might disturb nirvana. For example, here was an icon leading to the Zen Hedonist thought virus, which promised to resculpt his brain to accept a self-consistent philosophy of total passivity, total pleasure, total renunciation. Any effort or attempt to break out of the Zen Hedonist thought system would be defeated by loss of ego, which formed the core of the doctrines.
Another sophisticated thought virus offered for sale was the Self-Referencing Fulfillment routine, published by the Subjectivist School. This routine promised that the user, aided by artificial programs, would enjoy all the sensations and experiences of genius-level artistic creation. The user's standards of valuation and ability to critique
