"John C. Wright - Golden Age 1 - The Golden Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

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 man -- was 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. Phaethon'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 gesture. 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
dilation -- such 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.