by John Wright
During the little Transcendence in Jupiter, Gannis threw more than one fortune away, trying to maintain, by himself, the type of infrastructure and thought-speeds necessary to reach Transcendent thoughtspace.
He looked for a solution. He sought a future where his daughter could be saved.
And he found a copy of Ungannis still in the circuits of Io, still lingering in the Transcendence. She was staring in disbelief, running over and over again, a certain extrapolation that predicted the reaction for her gallows speech.
The fiery death-speech she thought would shock the Golden Oecumene to its foundations elicited little more than cool mockery, perhaps a touch of faint contempt.
Gannis came flooding through the wires, bringing the little Transcendence with him. It only lasted a second or two-even he, with all his wealth, could not maintain such a sustained effort for long-but during that second, his daughter had a moment to think.
And to think with all the brain power of millions helping her.
The option was still open to her that, instead of fleeing, her memories could be preserved inside a person, somewhat like herself, but without her fixed values. The change would be so radical that the Curia would consider her, legally, to be a different person. She would adopt the comforting belief that she was the same person. But one irony of this would be that she (a different legal person) would no longer be in line to be the heir of Gannis even if all of him should die. Her attempt at escape, her attempt to confound the morality of the Curia by presenting her captors with hundreds of innocent or repentant copies or herself, would not have to take place, if she chose that it would not.
It was not too late. Ungannis could choose another future than this one.
Would she?
And the little Transcendence refused to predict or decide that outcome.
AND AGES YET UNGUESSED COME
Helion was the last man on Earth to leave the High Transcendence. In it, he saw a vision of the future. His future. While it lasted, he was the center of attention, of controversy, of comment, of censure, of praise. It was his time.
During the High Transcendence, Helion was not aware of himself as his own person, any more than a man whose whole concentration is focused on some task of exacting skill, or on some sense-dissolving ecstasy, is self-aware. Instead, all the awareness of thought was composed of thought. And even in the same way as a work of art, or an excited conversation among close friends, can take on a life of itself, the thought of thought took on its own life. Helion's dream radiated out into the thoughtspace like the rays of a sun. He found his thoughts and half-thoughts picked up by others and completed, others whose thoughts, in turn, were fulfilled by others yet, reflected upon, brightened, polished, returned better than they left, the way responding planets, filled with life, send back then-bright reflections to the central sun, who, without those green planets, is barren himself.
Each participant was justly proud of his contribution to the overall result, no one able to claim credit for the whole, in the same way that a school of thought or a movement in the arts or sciences has no one author, but neither is the genius of the founders of that school obscured or made anonymous.
Within the vision, Helion, a thousand years from now, stood on the balconies of his Solar Array, housed in a body unimaginable to modern science, one in which the singularity science of the Second Oecumene could weave neutronium into his bones, and power bis nervous system from a heart like a black hole. In this time to come, the folded origami of space itself would be one more tool affecting the science, art, philosophy, of those few human-shaped beings left.
For in that age, a thousand years hence, with the war with the Second Oecumene still just beginning, Helion was among the few who could afford the affectation of continued human appearance. By the graceful standards of the modern age, that future time would be an age of lead, colorless and drab, with flamboyance and frivolity long dead, all sacrificed to the needs of war.
Necessity, grim necessity, would harass and haunt each step and thought of the citizens of the next Transcendence, to be held under the guidance of a Sophotech not yet designed, to be called, no doubt, Ferric Sophotech.
Helion stood and looked out upon the many parallel rows of supercolliders, hanging like bridges of gold, like highways of light, across the surface of the photosphere, the solar equator ringed not once, but many times, with machines of prodigious power, creating strips of golden adamantium.
Raising eyes equipped with senses not yet discovered, which could penetrate, by means of ghost-particle echoes, all opacities of darkness or of blinding light, Helion sent his gaze on high, and saw, towering infinitely above him, space-elevators, rising like beanstalks out from the unthinkable gravity of the sun, extending upward, endlessly, past the orbits that had once held Mercury and Venus. From the cities at the "tops" of those towers, more towers reached out, these made of energy, not neutronium, and ran entirely across the system. These rivers of light ran to positions in the ice belts and Oort clouds, where truly massive spheres, more than planets in diameter, housed Sophotechs of new design. These Sophotechs were utterly cold, constructed of subatomic particles held in superdense matrixes in vast blocks of "material" in the state of absolute zero temperature. Only this icy perfection was dense enough and rigid enough and predictable enough to house the new generation of thinking machines.
Along these towers was more surface area than the present of the whole Golden Oecumene. Land cubic was cheaper than air. The cores of the towers would contain Second Oecumene singularity fountains, so that energy was cheaper than either. Helion, looking up, was able to "see" the great vessels of gold, hundreds of kilometers in length, piloted by his further scions, braver versions of himself, Bellerophon and Icarus. The sons of Helion were eager to follow into the abyss of space their eldest brother, Phaethon, of whom no report had yet returned, for Phaethon maintained strict radio silence during his many long voyages.
The shining ships of the sons of Helion each held worlds in their memories, endless menageries, transcripts of all minds and souls of any in the Golden Oecumene who volunteered to be recorded. In this way. should enemy assault somehow elude the complex protections, and the Solar System be destroyed, the Golden Oecumene, as long as a single ship survived, would live again. And what Helion of that day and age used for eyes turned outward again, seeing distant stars and constellations, hearing the pulse of music, the mathematics of rational conversation, not from one, but from scores of worlds.
Some colonies were decoys, entire invented civilizations, dreamed to the last detail and nuance, but existing only in Sophotechnic imaginations. These were decoys meant only to lure Silent Oecumene soldiers down to worlds that seemed populated but which were, in fact, merely Atkins, Atkins in endless numbers, waiting with endless patience to destroy any who dared make war.
But other colonies were colonies in truth, called by fanciful names: the Silver Oecumene and the Quick-Silver, founded at Proxima and Wolf 359; and the Oecumenes of Bronze or Orachilcum near Tau Ceti; or the warlike Oecumene of Adamantium, circling the dragon star Sigma Draconis; and the Nighted Oecumene, founded by the Neptunians in the deep of space, far from any sun, but seething with activity, noise, and movement.
These colonies were those brave enough or foolish enough to taunt the Silent Lords, by revealing their locations in signs of fire, allowing to escape into the void the radio noise and activities of industry, of planetary engineering, and the establishment of further Solar.
But there would be more colonies than this, several civilizations-younger artificial worlds and systems, not yet ready to face the Silent Lords in combat.
Each younger, quiet Oecumene relied, at first (not unlike her foe) on silence to mask her activities; she would wait for some future day to erupt into a First Transcendence of her own. On that day, the new Oec-umene would end her long childhood, raise her radio arrays, and sing out to the surrounding stars of what accomplishments, arts, sciences, and advancements she had made
during her long centuries of quiet. And she would have her version of Atkins, as if with trumpets sounding from a battlement, send out a general challenge to the Silent Lords, daring them to combat, warning them away. But each would also have their version of Ariadne Sophotech singing like a siren to the stars, inviting the Silent Ones to give up their sick, insane crusade, to rejoin the body of mankind, to rest from the weariness of war and hate.
As Helion stood and looked out, an image of Rhadamanthus stepped up quietly behind Helion on his balcony, appearing like a color sergeant from a regiment of British riflemen. Rhadamanthus asked: "Well, sir, Ferric Sophotech will soon begin the next Transcendence. Looking back over the past thousand years, is milord satisfied with what the future turned out to have held?"
Helion reflected. "I am pleased that the cacophile movement failed. When Ungannis repudiated all her beliefs, and became Lucretia, my wife (and finally got all the wealth she wanted), I think it was my influence which helped, once and for all, to put down that selfish mess of whiners. I think it was because I was the cen-ter of the last Transcendence, and everyone who saw my vision of the future was inspired. That satisfies me. But..."
"But what?"
"Rhadamanthus, we should have disbanded the Hor-tators when we had the chance! I loved them, I fought for them, and it disheartens me to see them now. The force of conscience and tradition, even in the moat easy of times, is often too critical, too meddling, too harsh. But in times of war and public danger, that same force is invested with an aura of sanctity, of patriotic piety, which renders it a terrible and unreasonable weapon."
Rhadamanthus said gently: "Of all the Hortators, only that single one who voted against Phaethons ban, Ao Prospero Circe of the Zooanthropic Incarnation coven, was seated in the next session. All the others were exposed to public humiliation. But abolish the College altogether as an institution? No, sir. Without it, the Parliament would have arrogated to itself dangerous privileges, as is often the case in time of war, ordering all citizens to military service; seizing control of the money supply; requiring that no disloyal communications be spoken or written, thought, or said; and commanding all citizens to program their emotions to unalterable patriotism. Surely such things must be done, for the sake of the necessities of war; but surely it is a nightmare to allow such things to be done on anything other than a voluntary basis."
Helion looked downcast. His melancholy spirit brought a solemn quiet to his eyes. "And yet, we may take comfort in this war. It is so remote, so long be-tween thrust and parry, and operates across such dis-tances, that whole ages flow by without rumor of the flames and pain and death which have taken place, now here, now there. And further, the languid spirit which might have otherwise descended on mankind is startled awake by the sound of battle trumpets in our half-slumbering ear. We might all have sunk down into dreams, by now, had not something real, and cruel, and necessary, forced us all to action."
Rhadamanthus looked politely nonplussed. "Well, milord, that is not quite true. Actually, not true at all. Wars cost. Industry suffers; innovation lags; the spirit of joy is quelled; delight is replaced by fear. Respect for life is cheapened. Hatred (which is the universal enemy of all things) is no longer despised; instead, hatred is now welcomed and applauded and justified, and called patriotic.
"Even a war as distant and slow and strange as this one, has harmed us all, and cheated us of many fine delights and freedoms we would otherwise enjoy. It is tragedy, mere tragedy, with no such benefits as milord would like to pretend."
Helion looked at him. "And yet there is glory in it also, and many brave acts. Humanity at its finest."
Rhadamanthus said; "If milord will forgive me, I must say, there are certain things about mankind which we machines will never understand. I truly hope we never understand. Would you like to see humanity at its finest? Look up." And the image raised its hand to point. There was one particular star to which he pointed.
Music, many years in transit, from that distant star, at this moment fell around Helion, and his many unimaginable senses came awake. The star herself shifted in her spectral characteristics and apparent luminosity, as if a Dyson's sphere, transparent until that moment, suddenly took on a gemlike hue or polarized all the radiation output into coherent communication-laser pulses; or as if some Solar Array, vast beyond dream, webbing the entire surface of the star, tamed all the light shed into one huge symphony of signals.
The star trumpeted with challenges, and a new Oecumene blared her name out into the wide night, boasting of her accomplishments, shining in the radio light shed by her First Transcendence: the Phosphorescent Oecumene, she called herself, the Civilization of Light, founded by Phaethon and Daphne and their children.
This star was farther than any other colony had been, and safer, for no ship of the Silent Oecumene.
cold, slow, quiet ships, would reach so far for centuries to come.
Even at this point in history, the Silent Ones had no such technology to allow them to build a Phoenix Exultant. How could they? Such a thing required a supercollider and energy source the size of Jupiter to make the metal (and the Silent Ones, long ago spread from Cygnus X-l, living in hiding, nomads, would never dare to reveal their positions by building such a thing). And, even if they did build one, any ships whose drives were kept baffled and cold would never reach the velocities required to catch the bright, loud, roaring, fiery Phoenix Exultant in her flight.
Helion squinted and called more senses to his aid, and delicate instrumentation. For there, in the halo of sudden radio noise and song and motion and light surrounding what had been, till now, merely one other uncivilized star, he saw (or thought he saw) that bright sharp signature, intensely Doppler-shifted, which comes of massive amounts of antimatter totally converting to energy, receding at nearly the speed of light.
Helion said, "This is the sign of Phaethon."
Rhadamanthus said, "Now, perhaps, now he finds more joy in life, having survived so many strange adventures, and the odd horrors of the discovered colonies of Cygnus X-l. But he is forever beyond their reach now. The tiny mote of light which depicts his most recent acceleration burn has taken hundreds of years to reach our eyes. Phaethon flies so far, so swiftly, that even the light which carries news of him is left behind."
Helion said, "Phaethon paused in his flight, far beyond the reach of his foes, to wait for the wakening of this, his latest child. Now she is grown, and calls herself the Oecumene of Light; and on he fares again, blazing!"
So he stood on the balcony, gazing upward, hoping this group of Transcendence messages from the Oecumene of Light would contain messages, also, from Phaethon, to him.
"How I miss him, Rhadamanthus. How I regret..."
Rhadamanthus now leaned and touched Helion's shoulder, wakening him from his dream. "Sir. That was only a projection. It is the Month of Resumption, now, when everyone must return to the burden of being no more than himself for another thousand years. Phaethon has not departed yet. Even before leaving this system, he begins the task that will occupy him for countless thousands of years; already he is chasing enemies."
"No, that was a vision. The war I saw has not yet begun. ..."
"Once Phaethon is done, the Phoenix Exultant shall return from her refitting at Jupiter one last time to Mother Earth, to pick up Daphne Tercius. Sir, it is not too late."
Helion sat up in bed and looked around his bedchamber in Rhadamanthus House. Outside the window, a rose garden, blooms gone, lifted empty thorns beneath a slate gray English winter sky. Shadows softened the dark rafters above. There was a fire in the grate, but little could it dispel the cold, the gloom of the January day.
"Not too late ... ?" muttered Helion.
"To go. To go with him, sir. To follow your son to the stars."
The Phoenix Exultant was in trans-Neptunian space. At 350 AUs the sun was only one of the brighter stars. The ship's three-kilometer-wide main dish had been deployed, hanging in space nearby, and was pointed back toward the Inner
System, synchronized with orbital radio-lasers near Jupiter. More ship fuel was being used to maintain radio communication than to decelerate the hundred-kilometer-long vessel.
Those aboard who were still within the Transcendence had slowed their personal times to a mere snail crawl. Hours passed between a signal sent from this distance and any reply from the Inner System Sophotechs. There was a slightly shorter lag-time during communion with the Invariant populations in the cities in space at the leading and trailing Trojan points in Jupiter's orbit.
Phaethon had undergone naval vastening, and was one with the ship. He was in four-on four-off, spending every other watch in the transhuman state of consciousness. However, as the ship approached her goal, Phaethon was finding the memory-distractions too great, the transitions too jarring, and woke up.
There he was, in his specially designed high-acceleration body, in his Chrysadamantium armor, in the captain's chair, on the main bridge.
Exactly where he was meant to be.
Aboard in the ship's mindspace were the two wardens from the Dark-Gray Mansion, Temer Lacedai-mon, and Vidur-yet-to-be. For legal purposes, and to fill out the memory of Vidur Lacedaimon once he was born, this partial was standing in the place of his unborn principle.
