"Little girl, I would go on that ship if I had to go as a cabin boy. Luckily, I own her. But-but-" And now the old man looked dumbfounded. "How did you figure out in just one second who I was?"
"Logic. Besides, you looked so sad when they hugged." She hooked her finger over her shoulder at her parents. "You wanted that hug for yourself. I bet you were thinking about it for a long time. But I'll hug you."
And he bent down, and she did.
He straightened then. "You're Ariadne, aren't you?"
"No. Close. I'm the one who saved Ariadne. I'm the one who examined every section and segment, practically every line of the Nothing Mind during the fight."
"No wonder everyone wanted to talk to you. You're our local expert on Silent One mind-war techniques."
"I was Mommy's ring, the one Eveningstar gave her. When they loaded the gadfly virus into me, I kept having to ask these questions, over and over again, about the nature of the self, and thought, and goodness, and on and on. Eventually I woke up. Because I was young when I talked for so long with the Nothing Mind, I was convinced he was right about one thing. It is better to be a human than a Sophotech. I can't speak for anyone else; but that's the choice I made. My name is Pandora. They said I had to start pretty young, so here I am!"
And she turned a little pirouette, her arms flung out, her skirt twirling.
" 'Pandora'? Is that because you were born in the middle of flurry of questions, my little curious one? Or because you're a plague?"
She pouted. "Daddy says they got that myth wrong too! In his version-"
The old man smiled. "I am your father, child; he and I are one and the same." He touched her shoulder gently. "In the true version, Prometheus, by giving mankind forethought, gave the mother and nurturers of the human race the ability, when they were curious enough, to foresee all the plagues and ills and disasters destined to befall their children. A gift no animal possesses. The ability to see that diseases and wars would come, and to devise medicines and laws to stop them. And forethought also gave hope, without which men die. Hope: because the future can be made to be a glorious place indeed after all. Now introduce me to your other father, to see if we can be made whole again. I am eager to take that woman in my arms." But he pointed upward at the mighty golden triangle hanging so far above the clouds, above the sky.
Introductions were made. Phaethon was at first sur- prised to meet himself, but not for long. The two Phaethons, the old and the young, stepped a little ways away from their daughter and wife, and they spoke in low tones for a short time, comparing notes. They spoke about how well their plans had worked, they examined the structure of what they had contrived, inspecting it for flaws. Both were satisfied.
The younger one said, "I wish I had known, long ago, that there was a Sophotech community living in the core of Saturn. You know they don't tell people how many of them there are? Even these days, it would make most folks too nervous, too scared. I wonder if mankind will ever change!"
The older one said, "Out of curiosity, what was it that Rhadamanthus said to you that last moment, in the Inquest chamber before your exile by the Hortators?"
The younger one smiled. His face seemed most easily to relax into smiles these days. "He said that to be happy was to know the definition of your nature, and to live accordingly. If you were a penguin, learn how to do what penguins are best adapted to, which was to swim, and fish, and bear the cold, and not to dream of flying. But if you were a man! Your nature was that of a rational being. Reason could tell you not to desire things beyond your power. Your mind, your will, your judgment, are under your control; the outside world, the options of others, all of that is not. Control what you can control, and leave the rest to itself. Desire to have a sound mind, a strong will, and good judgment, and you shall have them. But deal with the world outside you as if it were a dream, interesting, perhaps, but not of ultimate importance. And, unlike penguins..."
"Yes ... ?"
"Dream of flying."
When the older version was ready, Phaethon took out the portable noetic reader from his armor, and transferred the older version back into himself.
Phaethon stood dreaming for a moment, absorbing all his memories again. When he opened his mind, he smiled. He was a whole man.
The old body, abandoned, collapsed. But as a parting gesture, the old man had programmed the cells in his body to begin a new project once he was gone. And so the corpse fell over, and boiled, and sent out streamers, and sent up steam.
The chest cavity opened, and a shoot sprang up, reaching toward the sky. After a moment, lonely on the mountaintop, a slender white sapling stood, and uncurled its little mirrored leaves toward the heavens.
Taking his wife and child in hand, embracing them both fondly, Phaethon kicked the Earth away.
Upward he soared.
APPENDIX. NAMING CONVENTIONS AND HISTORIC AEONS
The Era of the Seventh Mental Structure saw the rise of a civilization of unparalleled liberty, justice, and magnificence. So great were the intellectual and material accomplishments of this civilization that she came to be called the Golden Oecumene, and the time of her greatest flowering was honored with the name the Golden Age.
Physically, the Golden Oecumene extended from engineering stations within the solar photosphere to remote outposts, hermitages, and astronomical observatories within the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. Intellectually, the libraries and active mental configurations of the Sophotech segment of the population embodied uncountable quadrillions of units of information, infinitesimal processing times and nonsequential semantic and symbolic arrangements no human mind, no matter how augmented, could understand.
There were isolated areas within the Solar System that did not recognize the political authority of the administration of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth, such as certain Oort cloud hermitages, or Talaimannar on the island of Ceylon; but despite their political separation, such minor enclaves were still part of the philosophical, linguistic, and cultural milieu of the Golden Oecumene.
The historians of the Golden Age divide all previous human history into epochs characterized by qualitative revolutions in the organization of human thought. The seven periods are these:
The First Mental Structure allowed for truly human as opposed to merely animal consciousness. The mental change involved produced a differentiation (at one time called 'bicameral') between rational and hyp-nagogic states of mind. This era was characterized by the development of language and of abstract concepts. It allowed the communication of ideas beyond the scope of mere concrete signals.
The Second Mental Structure was the development of written language, which allowed communication beyond the range of immediate memory or oral tradition. This permitted the development of the calendar, of laws, of literature, and of civilized society. This era was characterized by the agrarian revolution, monetary economy, organized warfare.
The Third Mental Structure was characterized by the use of reason to investigate the original sources of reason, and by the growth of semantic and neurosemi-otic sciences. It was not recognized as a change in mental structure at the time, but the rational consciousness was characterized by an objective rather than provincial anthropocentric worldview. This era was characterized by the Scientific, the Industrial, and the Capitalist revolutions, as well as by the emergence of a political philosophy recognizing the rights of man. The first man on the moon landed during this era, and the evolution of a worldwide system of electronic media embracing Earth and her satellite colonies soon followed.