The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  He paused to let that sink in. Then he said, “I wonder if they just kept intact the same discipline and hierarchy they had evolved with captain and crew over the generations of their migration aboard the Naglfar, and the descendants of the captains and officers kept control over the technology, the singularity fountains, which supplied everyone with power. Or maybe they had a monopoly over the information flows and educational software. Or just controlled the money supply. You don’t need to control that much to control everyone’s lives.”

  Phaethon said in dark amazement, “Why didn’t they rebel against such control? Were they disarmed?”

  Aktins shook his head, coldness in his eyes. “Rebellion requires conviction. Once conviction is destroyed, slavery is welcomed and freedom is feared. To destroy conviction, all it takes is a philosophy like the one I heard Ao Varmatyr telling me. Everything else is just a matter of time.”

  The sands in the glass ran out.

  2.

  Phaethon’s face took on that dream-ridden, distant look that people who forget to engage their face-saving routine were wont to take on, when their sense filters are turned to absent things. The overmind formation rods, which reached from deck to dome, showed furious activity as the ship mind divided or recombined itself into several different architectures, rapidly, one after another, attempting to solve the novel problem of detecting the unfamiliar ghost particles in flight. Energy mirrors to the left and right, shining from balconies or rising suddenly from the deck as additional circuits engaged, flowed with changing calculations, drew schematics and maps, argued with each other, compared information, performed rapid tests. Each mirror was filled with stars as different quadrants of the surrounding space were examined.

  Then, silence fell. One energy mirror after another went dark. The various segments of the ship mind, operating independently, all arrived at the same conclusions. All the maps changed until they were iterations the same map; all the schematics vanished except for one; all the screens went dark except the one focused at the center of the Solar System, pointed at the sun.

  There was a cutaway image of the sun’s globe prominent in the mirror nearest the table at which the men sat. A triangulation of lines depicted a spot far below the surface of the sun, at the core, between the helium and hydrogen layers, far deeper than Helion’s probes and bathyspheres had ever gone.

  The men around the table stared. They all three spoke at once, talking aloud to no one in particular.

  Atkins: “You’ve got to be kidding. . . .”

  Diomedes: “My! That looks uncomfortable! How in the world did they get there?”

  Phaethon: “I should have known. It was obvious! Obvious!”

  Atkins: “What kind of weapon can destroy a thing that can swim in the core of a star?”

  Diomedes: “Poor Phaethon! He doesn’t realize what’s coming next. . . .”

  Phaethon: “That’s what tried to kill Father. It manipulated the core currents somehow, created a storm, and maybe even directed a discharge at Mercury Equilateral Station in the attempt (which Helion foiled) to destroy the Phoenix Exultant. Obvious! Where else to hide an object as large as a starship? Where else would mask all energetics, discharges, and broadcasts? But how did they enter the system unchallenged . . . ?”

  Now they started speaking to each other:

  Atkins to Phaethon: “They came in along the sun’s south pole, at right angle to the plane of the ecliptic. That’s where you always come in when you’re sneaking in, and they could not have come in along a line leading to the north pole of the sun, because that’s where a community of those energy-formation dust clouds live, grown up around Helion’s waste-discharge beam. Space Traffic Control would not care about anything so far away from normal shipping lanes, not if it merely looked like a rock or something. A lot of debris falls into the sun. It’s where most of the garbage in the system ends up.”

  Diomedes to Atkins: “You know there is only one ship in the system, perhaps in all the universe, which can chase that enemy ship down into the hellish pressure and infinite fire of the sun, don’t you? But the law may not suit your military convenience. You see, I do not think I am legally the owner of this ship any longer, ever since I stopped being Neoptolemous. Possession of the lien would revert to the version of Neoptolemous still in the Duma. Are you going to ask his permission? Or seize the ship like a pirate, as I know you’re hungering to do? Or fight him in a law case? In either instance, how will you keep this whole thing secret, if it needs be secret?”

  Phaethon to Diomedes: “Secret? What madness has possessed you, friend? Here finally we have found the foe: Let us raise the whole strength of the Oecumene against the enemy! Secrecy, indeed! We should be sounding trumpets from the rooftops! Wait, you don’t have rooftops in Neptune, do you? We should be sending deep echoes against the heavy-band layers, and sending signals reflecting from peak to peak of every iceberg at the bottom of the liquid methane sea!”

  Diomedes to Phaethon (smiling behind his hand): “That’s really not the way we do things in Neptune. That’s only in a scene from Xanthippe’s opera.”

  Atkins to Phaethon (glumly): “And that’s really not the way we do things in the military. In the first place, I . . . am . . . the gathered strength of the whole Oecumene. Just me. And in the second place, I’m not going to expropriate this ship. We don’t seize private goods for public use anymore, thanks to that stupid Nonaggression Accord which should have been repealed long ago, if you ask me. Besides, when Ao Varmatyr’s broadcast went out, if it held the information in Ao Varmatyr’s last memories, then Nothing Sophotech, or whatever is on that ship drowned beneath the sun, already knows we’re onto him.”

  Phaethon to Atkins, warily: “I hate to admit this, Marshal, but no signal was sent out from this ship.”

  “What? Explain.”

  “The broadcast was meant to shine out through the main drive while the ship was under weigh. All I did was lower the aft shield and close the drive. If the ghost particles could have penetrated Chrysadamantium, Ao Varmatyr would not have found it necessary to trick you into opening the thought ports on my armor you were wearing. He would have simply dominated your internal circuit through the armor plate. So I knew lowering the ship’s armor would stop the broadcast. I tracked the projected path of the ghost particles by extrapolating from their reflections along the inside shell of the closed aft shield. No one and Nothing knows we are coming.”

  “ ‘We’ . . . ?”

  Phaethon drew a deep breath. He thought about this mighty ship of his, and the mighty dream that had inspired it. He thought of all he had been willing to leave behind him—wife, father, home. He wondered what duty, if any, he had running to that society which had, because of that dream, ostracized and exiled him.

  He asked, “Marshal—honestly, do you have any ship, any vehicle at all, which might be able to make a run into the outer core of a middle-sized sun? Any weapon which can reach there? Any way to hunt this monster if I do not lend my Phoenix Exultant to you?”

  “The only weapon I have which could reach there would take sixty years to finish its firing action, and it would probably snuff out the sun in the process. That would not be my first choice.”

  “Then it is ‘we’ after all.”

  “Well. I’m not sure I want to take you into a fight. We could just—”

  “No. I saw how badly you played me when you were me. I think you need the real me to run this ship properly. I will ready the ship for flight. But—” Now Phaethon raised his hand. “But I want no part of the killing which will need to be done! I will be there as I was here, hidden in a dog, perhaps, or under a couch. I will bring you to the battlefield, Marshal, but no more. I will do what needs to be done, but war is not my work. I have other plans for my life and other dreams for this ship.”

  Atkins said grimly, “If you do what’s needed, that’s fine. I didn’t expect more from you.”

  Diomedes raised a finger, and said, “I hate to be an obstruction
ist, but we do not have legal title to the ship at the moment. I realize that it is quite heroic and graceful, in the operas, for invigilators and knights-errant merely to seize whatever they need whenever they wish, or to just steal golden fleeces, other men’s wives, parked motor carriages, or communal thoughtspace as the emergency justifies. But this is not an opera.”

  Atkins said to Diomedes, “The threat is real, the need is present. If we can’t use this ship, what do you suggest we do?”

  “Me? I would steal the ship, of course! But, after all, I am a Neptunian, and when my friends send infected files to corrupt my memory or make me drunk, I take it as a joke. A little random vandalism can do a man a world of good. But you? I thought you Inner System people were filled with nothing but endless respect for every nuance of the law. Have you become Neptunians?”

  Phaethon raised his hand, “The point is moot. As pilot of the ship, my instructions from the owner allow me to refuel under what circumstances and conditions I deem necessary. I hereby deem it necessary. Tell the crew to disembark, and that I am taking the ship for a practice run down below the surface of the sun.”

  Diomedes smiled. “You are asking me to lie? I thought, in these days, with so many noetic machines at hand, that type of thing was out of fashion.”

  “I am asking you to trick them. You are a Neptunian, after all, are you not?”

  3.

  Diomedes had gone off to oversee the disembarkation and mass migration of the crew. He had been more than amused by the fact that, in a human body, he could not merely send parts or applications of himself away to do the work. And so he had gone away across the bridge deck, seeking the bathhouse on the lower level of the carousel, to find a dreaming-pool from which he could make telerepresentations. He had gone skipping and leaping and running, much as a little boy might go, having never before been in a body that could skip, or leap, or run.

  The energy mirrors to the left and right displayed the status of the great ship as she prepared herself for flight, redistributing masses among the fuel cells, preparing the drive core, erecting cross-supports both titanic and microscopic, putting some decks into hibernation, dismantling or compressing others.

  These procedures were automatic. Phaethon and Atkins sat at the wide wood-and-ivory table, both reluctant to bring up the topic on which they both, no doubt, were dwelling.

  It was Atkins who broke the embarrassed silence.

  Atkins took out from his pouch two memory cards, and slid them with his fingers across the smooth surface of the table toward Phaethon. “Here,” Atkins said. “These might as well be yours, if you want them.”

  Phaethon looked at the cards without touching them. A description file appeared in his sense filter. They contained the memories Atkins had suffered when he had been possessed by Phaethon’s personality. He was offering, in effect, that Phaethon could graft the memories into his own, so that the events would seem to Phaethon as if they had happened to him, and not to someone else.

  Phaethon’s face took on a hard expression. He looked skeptical, and perhaps a little sad, or bored, or hurt. He put out his hand as if to slide the cards back to Atkins without comment, but then, to his own surprise, he picked them up and turned them over.

  The summary viewer in the card surface lit up, and Phaethon watched little pictures and dragon signs flow by.

  He put the card down. “With all due respect, Marshal, this was not a good depiction of me. I don’t wish for a weapon in my hands the first thing when I wake up in confusion, I can do rapid astronomical calculations in my head, and I would have been very interested, and I still am, in the technical details of the ghost-particle array Xenophon built.”

  Atkins said, “I just thought it would be nice if—” And then he stopped.

  Atkins was not a very demonstrative man. But Phaethon suddenly had an insight into his soul. The person who had defied the Silent One on the bridge of the Phoenix Exultant, the person who had had Phaethon’s memories but Atkins’s instincts, had been denied the right to live, and had been erased, replaced by Atkins when Atkins’s memories were automatically restored.

  And Atkins did not necessarily want that person, that false-Phaethon, that little part of himself, entirely to die.

  Phaethon thought about his sire. A very similar thing had happened to Helion once. And it was not, perhaps, uncommon in the Golden Oecumene. But it had never happened to Phaethon before. No one had ever wanted to be him and stay him before.

  And that Phaethonized version of Atkins, with Daphne’s name on his lips at the last moment of existence, had passed away, still crying out that he wanted to remain as he was. . . .

  Phaethon said, “I’m sorry.”

  Atkins snorted, and said in voice of bitter amusement: “Spare me your pity.”

  “I only meant . . . it must be difficult for you . . . for any man . . . to realize that, if he were someone else, he would not necessarily desire to be himself again.”

  “I’m used to it. I found out a long time ago, that everyone wants an Atkins to be around if there’s trouble, but no one wants to be Atkins. It’s just one more little thing I have to do.”

  Phaethon’s imagination filled in the rest of the sentence: “. . . in order to keep the rest of you safe.”

  The picture in Phaethon’s mind was of a solitary man, unthanked and scorned by the society for which he fought, who, because he was devoted to protecting a utopia, could himself enjoy few or none of its pleasures. The picture impressed him deeply, and an emotion, shame or awe or both, came over him.

  Atkins spoke in a low voice: “If you don’t want those memories, Phaethon, destroy them. I have no use for them. But I have to say not all the emotions and instincts that went on were mine. Those weren’t my instincts talking.”

  “I am not sure I understand your meaning, sir. . . . ?”

  Atkins leaned back in his chair and looked at Phaethon with a careful, hard, judicious expression. He said in an icy-calm tone of voice: “I only met her but once. I was impressed. I liked her. She was nice. But. To me, she was no more than that. I certainly would not have turned back from the most important mission in my life for her. And I wouldn’t break the law for her, and I wouldn’t have tried to ruin my life when I lost her the first time. But I’m not you, am I? Think about it.”

  Atkins stood up. “If you need me, I’ll be in the medical house, preparing myself for the acceleration burn. If the War-mind calls, put it through to me there.” And he turned on his heel smartly and marched off.

  Phaethon, alone, sat at the table for a time, not moving, only thinking. He picked up the cards and turned them over and over again in his fingers, over and over again.

  4.

  The realization should have been swift in coming, but for Phaethon, it was slow, very slow. Why had Atkins, when Atkins was possessed by Phaethon’s memories, cried out his love for Daphne? Was it because Atkins was fond of her, or because someone else was . . . ?

  “But she is not my wife,” muttered Phaethon.

  No matter what he thought of Daphne Tercius, the emancipated doll, no matter what his feelings, no matter how much she looked and acted like his wife, she simply was not his wife.

  His real wife, now, how clearly he recalled her! A woman of perfect beauty, wit, and grace, a woman who made him feel a hero to himself, a woman who recalled the glories of past ages. He remembered well how first the two of them had met on one of the moons of Uranus, when she sought him out to interview him for her dramatic documentary. How unexpectedly she had come into his life, as swiftly and as completely as a ray of light from the moon turns a dismal night into a fairytale landscape of silver-tinted wonder. Always he had been apart from the others in the Golden Oecumene. Always men looked at him askance, or seemed somehow embarrassed by his ambitions, as if they thought it was unseemly, in the age of Sophotechs, for men of flesh and blood to dream of accomplishing great things.

  But Daphne, lovely Daphne, she had a soul in which fire and poetry still lived. Wh
en they were on Oberon, she had urged him never to let a single day escape without some work accomplished on some great thing. She was as brave in her spirit as everyone else still huddling back on Earth had not been. And when the cool reserve of her professional interest in him began to heat to a more personal interest, when she had reached and touched his hand, when he had grown bold enough to ask to see her, not to exchange information but to entertain each other with their mutual company, her sudden smile was as unexpected and as glorious and as full of shy promises as anything his bachelor imagination could hope for. . . .

  But no. Wait. That Daphne, the one who had first met him on Oberon, that had not been the real Daphne. That had been the doll. Daphne Tercius. This Daphne.

  The real Daphne had been afraid to leave the Earth.

  The real Daphne had been a little more cool to his dream, and had smiled, and had murmured words of absentminded encouragement when he had spoken of it. She had been a little more sardonic, a little less demonstrative, than her ambassador-doll had been.

  But she was the one he had married. She had been real.

  She too, believed in heroism, but thought it was a thing of the past, a thing not possible these days . . . not allowed.

  He had entered into full communion with her on many occasions. He knew exactly what she thought. There was no deception or misunderstanding between man and wife, not in the Golden Oecumene, not these days. He knew her love for him was true. He knew that his ambitions made her a little uncomfortable, but not because she thought they were wrong (certainly not!) but because she thought they were so terribly right. And she had slowly grown afraid he would be stopped. Afraid he would be crushed. The years had passed and he had smiled at that fear. Stopped by what? Crushed by whom? In the Golden Oecumene, the most free society history had ever known, no peaceful activity was forbidden.