'Does anything prevent the College of Hortators, once they recall your negligence, from publicly condemning the same project they condemned before, and for the same reasons? No, Phaethon, you pretend you are an isolated individual, separate from the world, from society, and able to defy them. But when that separation became a reality, it was you, you Phaethon, who could not accept what that reality was.'
'What do you mean?!'
'It was you who drove your wife to enter a permanent delirium tantamount to suicide.'
'No! I cannot accept that!'
'An odd comment! It must be assumed you do not mean to reject reality, since you have criticized those who do so heavily.' There was a gentle irony to the human head's tone. The eagle head spoke loudly: 'Does this mean there is a plan for recovering your wife?!' The cobra head was quiet: 'The Eleemosynary Composition is not without sympathy. We are also not without resources.'
Phaethon grew very still. He spoke in soft, leaden tones: 'What are you implying ... ?'
'This is a cruel and callous society in which we live. Those who cannot pay their housing bills are thrown into the streets. Recorded minds of any type who cannot pay the rentals on their computer brain space are deleted. Those who are trapped permanently in the dreamscapes, who cannot pay the fees that service requires, are cut off, and ejected into reality.
'The Eleemosynary Composition offers to manipulate the stock market by altering the buying habits of that percent of the population which comprises our membership, and by using negotiation, buyouts, and other financial maneuvers to either buy the companies in which Daphne's stock has been invested, or to ruin the values of those stocks. The Even-ingstar Sophotech is serving as investment broker for Daphne; an entity very smart and very accomplished in other fields, but utterly lacking the resources which the Seven Peers can bring to bear.'
It was true. Just in terms of consumer goods alone, the Eleemosynary Composition controlled about one-tenth of the human world gross industrial product.
The Chimera said, 'Once Daphne's stock is bankrupt, Ev-eningstar will eject her from her dream coffin and into the real world. She will be utterly unable to cope with a reality she has redacted from all memory. She may not be legally competent to govern her own affairs. By virtue of your marriage communion circuit, you hold join copyright ownership on certain of her intellectual properties, including her personality template. At that point, you may be legally able to insert a temporary memory block to redact all recent memories and personality changes; this would not be a personality-edit or
alteration. She would simply be restored to the condition she was in before she decided to commit delusion- suicide. She will have the legal right, once she is sane again, to open her redacted memories, and let herself go insane again. But you will be present. You will have an opportunity to persuade her to live in reality.'
Phaethon said nothing. His eyes were wide.
The Chimera said, 'Your forgotten project is not the most important thing in life to you. If you agree to cease all investigations into your past, the Eleemosynary Composition will aid you in the fashion we have outlined to recover your wife back to reality and sanity. You should agree not only because you personally shall receive the benefit of her love and gratitude, once she is restored; but also because it is your duty. You are her husband. Your marriage oath requires that you save her.
'You may call the Eleemosynary exchange from any public annex. We will leave you to meditate upon your answer.'
And the Chimera vanished.
THE GOLDEN DOORS
Was it cowardice or prudence that made him hesitate? One impulse was to rush to the nearest Eleemosynary agency and throw himself down, begging, weeping, instantly agreeing to anything and everything it took to recover his wife from her horrible exile, her living death of permanent delusion.
Another impulse, more cautious, told him to investigate further.
Certainly the Eleemosynary Composition had not lied. It was true that, these days, very few people (aside from Nep-tunians) ever even attempted to lie; it was altogether too easy to get caught by all-knowing Sophotechs, too easy for honest men to confirm their statements by public display of their thought records. But it was also true that people could be mistaken, or could indulge in exaggerated (but honest) judgments of relative worth. The Eleemosynary Composition, for example, might judge something to be 'difficult' or 'impossible' which was not.
Was it impossible for Phaethon to wake his dream-trapped wife? Impossible?
He had to be certain. He had to see for himself.
Phaethon reached for the yellow disk icon floating in the glass of the table surface, the communication channel. It
should take only a moment to telepresent himself to the Ev-eningstar Sophotech who had custody of his wife's body. But he did not wish to be further observed; all this prying into his life was beginning to annoy him. Even as he reached, with his other hand he gestured the balcony window closed. Immediately, a panel was covering the view, and the sound and light and movement from outside was shut off.
Phaethon froze, startled. It was suddenly silent, with the total and absolute silence of a vacuum. The panels had not slid or moved to shut; one moment they were not there; the next they were in place. There was no hint or whisper of noise from beyond the panels, such as a Silver-Gray scene would have provided, to maintain the illusion of three dimensions and of consistency of objects.
Phaethon's hand was near the table surface. Still he hesitated.
'Rhadamanthus, why am I hesitating? What am I thinking?' He asked the question aloud before he remembered that he was disconnected from the Rhadamanthine system. (Had he been connected, he would not have forgotten, even for a moment.)
There was an icon for a Noetic self-consideration circuit in the tabletop. It was a crude, old-fashioned model, weeks or months out of date. But Phaethon thought that if he could clean a room manually, he could clean his nervous system of emotional maladjustments manually.
