The Phoenix Exultant

by John C. Wright

The record unfolded, and the dream changed to images of horror. He saw a great city in space, peopled with philosophers and savants from the Fifth Era, an elegant and adventurous race, strolling along wide boulevards, leaning from the tiers of graceful cafés and thought-shops, minds entwined in a well-choreographed harmony of several Compositions, one for each of the neuroforms, Warlocks, Cerebellines, Invariants, and Basics.

  Then he saw the lights go dark, the air fall still. Nanomachine substances, pouring like black oil, came out from walls, bubbling up from floors. Some of the well-dressed savants threw themselves into the surface willingly; others with grim resignation; others were pushed.

  Bald men in white robes and armor, Invariants all, armed themselves with cutting-torches and modified communication lasers, and made a last stand in a sea of rising black filth. The black material formed clouds and waves of swarming semiorganic material to overwhelm them; the men fought calmly, with machine-like precision, and, at the moment when defeat became mathematically certain, with no change of expression or sign of fear, they methodically turned their weapons against themselves and slew each other.

  The black corruption spread. It flooded streets; it reached into windows; it sought out hiding places.

  Lovers embracing were drenched by waves of the substance, and clung to each other as they sank, their flesh dissolving, their limbs and faces melting into each other. Mothers with babies in their arms tried to shield their infants as black waves swallowed them, and one watched in horror as the little child, limbs waving, was absorbed back into her own melting flesh. Whoever was thrown into the substance began to dissolve, limbs and organs floating free as they were assimilated, snake nests of wires reaching into their severed heads, thrusting with spasmodic jerks up the holes in their torn necks, till the material bonded to their brains.

  The black substance grew more active and more clever in its attacks the more victims it absorbed. The most intimate knowledge of captured loved ones was used to deceive those still at large into touching the black goo. Private data systems were overwhelmed and their secrets plundered. If one group member in a composition was caught, he found, to his horror, his unguarded thoughts betraying his fellows.

  The city soon was entirely bathed in blackness. In this ocean of material, human brains floated, helpless and disembodied, the balls of their eyes still connected by nerve fibers to their forebrains. The brains were opening and unraveling. Layer by layer of cortex material, still intact, was now interconnecting all the disembodied people with stands and webs of nervous tissue, to form one huge homogenous mass.

  Black tentacles reached from the substance, rose and formed the twin lines of black pyramids on the dark side of the space city, the side facing the singularity, and created a series of numenal thought-antennae. Now, above the apex of each pyramid, in orbit there hovered a rapidly spinning ring of crystallized neutronium pseudomatter, rotating at near-light speed. Gravitic distortions appeared at the hubs of each disk. The pyramids hummed with power; in the dream, he heard a million screams of utmost panic and despair; and the thought-information, the living souls, of all those helpless people, was beamed through those disk hubs and then down into the event horizon of the black hole.

  Whatever is sent into a black hole does not emerge again.

  In the dream, one who seemed to be himself now turned, overwhelmed in fear and horror, and opened deep channels in his mind. He uttered the secret commands, the codes and combinations needed to open wide space in the mentality to hold his message, to warn other colonies and planets, as many people as he could at once.

  But it was all in vain. The blood he had touched had contaminated his glove and hand and nervous system. His thoughts were twisted into strange shapes. With dark exaltations he rejoiced at how he had been tricked, how he was now to be absorbed. He smiled, as his flesh dissolved into the black muck at his feet, to think of how his attempted warning, broadcast so far and wide, would carry viruses destroying the very one he had, a moment before, desired to save.

  And, as the dream ended, he thought he saw, all around him in space, city after city like the one on which he stood, also overwhelmed with black corruption, their populations raped and beheaded by attacking tendrils of neural nanomaterial, their souls sucked out, and sent, like a river of screams, down into the bottomless well of the singularity. Four burning gas giants, their odd atmospheres of hydrogen and methane aflame, fell from their orbits, were pulled like taffy as they fell ever lower into the singularity’s gravity well, scattered into asteroids and waste heat, and were consumed.

  This star system also had a second sun, a source of light and warmth. It disintegrated into flaming nebula as it fell, elongating into monstrous streamers of fire, as it was consumed by the black sun.

  All the energy sources and points of light from the many beautiful cities went dark; all the radio signals, throughout this once-great Oecumene, fell silent.

  So the dream had ended.

  5

  THE DROWNED HOUSE

  1.

  Phaethon opened his eyes and stared at the black gloom of the sea around him. He was alone. There was no sign of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea.

  To his intense joy, he saw the parts of his golden armor lying in a wide circle around him, resting among the silt and weed and coral. He stood, startling a school of darting fish, and he thought a command. Tendrils reached from the black nanomachine lining he wore, took up the golden plates, and fitted them in place around him.

  There was still a throbbing pain in his head, still fatigue. Old-Woman-of-the-Sea had allowed him to sleep, and he could sleep normally hereafter, but he still needed to find a self-consideration circuit, to cure what damage had already been done.

  The extent of that damage he did not know.

  Where was this place?

  He looked up.

  Here, at the bottom of a long subsea slope, the end of a trail of debris, Phaethon found his drowned house. It had rolled all the way out of the bay and down this long slope after Ironjoy had scuttled it. There it lay on its side on the rocks, in deep waters where the light was no more than a murky hint.

  He climbed the spiral grooves of the toppled house. Phaethon found a spot where a receiving dish had been pulled free from its housing, leaving a comfortable cup for a seat.

  He was still weary, still dazed. Sleep had not refreshed him; the damage to his nervous system caused by sleep deprivation needed curing. The joy at recovering his armor, like a fire among dry leaves, had flashed and faded, leaving him dull. Hadn’t he been promised the tools he needed to allow him to live? What was here except the wreckage of this house?

  No. She said he would live if he thought. Only if he thought.

  First, he thought of what he had dreamed.

  2.

  It was obvious and, perhaps, had always been perfectly obvious who his enemy was.

  There had only ever been one colony sent out from the Solar System. Of course that colony was the first suspect. The only problem was that it had perished thousands of years ago, before Phaethon was ever born.

  The scenes Phaethon’s dream reflected came from scenes in life. During his (brief and reluctant) studies of history, he had seen the last broadcast from the Silent Oecumene; as most people had. He had seen the broadcast showing Earth’s only daughter civilization among the stars destroying herself in a paroxysm of insanity.

  The faint signal had been detected by orbital trans-Neptunian observatories. No one knew who that viewpoint character had been, who stood wondering on that plain of blood; no one knew whom he had been trying to warn. And no one knew if the broadcast had been fiction, exaggeration, misunderstanding.

  Later, Sophotech-manned slow probes, sent despite that they had not enough fuel to decelerate, had done a fly-by of the Silent Oecumene system, using extreme long-range detectors, and had found the same conditions, which the last broadcast had depicted. Deserted space-cities, destroyed planetoids, cold and empty ships, and a residue of blood and black nanomaterial as
h coating all the inner surfaces of every habitat. No energy, no motion, no radio noise. A Silent Oecumene.

  3.

  Only the fascination, and the hope of an infinite energy supply, had tempted Fifth-Era civilization to the vast expense of an interstellar mission, to explore the area surrounding the black hole at Cygnus X-1. And the first radio-laser broadcasts back from the Second Oecumene (as it had been then called) had been quite favorable. Their society seemed strange to the Sixth-Era generation that received those broadcasts, but the Second Oecumene had achieved great things.

  The scientific-industrial teams of the Second Oecumene had discovered a method to send energy-bonded paired particles glancingly through the near-event-horizon space of the singularity, so that the inward particle, consumed by the event horizon, would release into the other particle more energy than had been originally found in the paired system. From the frame of reference of normal space outside the black hole, it was as if entropy had been reversed.

  The energy from the escaping particle could be used to create another pair, with energy to spare; the effect fed on itself, producing more and more energy each cycle, with the theoretical limits being only the gravitational rest-energy or the mass of the black hole’s singularity. And mass could be added to the singularity simply by dropping more matter into it, asteroids or small planets.

  The Second Oecumene’s broadcasts had depicted a golden age, as every member had more energy at his disposal than could be counted or conceived. Suddenly, no resources were scarce, and no normal rules of economics applied any longer. There was little or no need for Courts of Law, since there was no common property over which to have disputes. Any object, any habitat, any piece of information, could—with sufficient energy—be duplicated. And the energy was more than sufficient; it was unlimited.

  Ironically, it had been the example of the peaceful anarchy of the Second Oecumene which inspired the Golden Oecumene, during the late Fifth Era and early Sixth Era, to imitate that success. The people of the Sixth Era, led by the newly born Sophotechs, attempted to train themselves to such an unprecedented level of self-control and public self-discipline so as to render government by force almost unnecessary. Government by persuasion, by exhortation, largely had replaced it.

  Utopia had come not by any magic, or technical advance (although technical advances certainly had helped); it came because the people’s tolerance for evil and dishonorable conduct vanished, while their toleration for lack of privacy grew. At one end of the spectrum, the manorials, like Phaethon, were rare only in the high amount of supervision and advice they received from Sophotechs; but at the other and of the spectrum, Antiamaranthine Purists and Ultra-Primitivists and people who had no Sophotechnology in their life at all, or who had never suffered a noetic examination of their thoughts, or a correction of natural insanity, were even more rare—so rare as to be unprecedented. With very few exceptions, then, the Sophotechs in the Golden Oecumene watched everyone and protected everyone.

  So it was, at least, in the Solar System. In the Cygnus X-1 system, where the Second Oecumene was based, the technology to create self-aware electrophotonic super-intelligences was banned by public distaste. That distant utopia without laws now had one law it adopted: Thou shalt not create minds superior to the mind of man. By Golden Oecumene standards, the Fifth-Era people of the Second Oecumene were peculiar indeed.

  Several thousand years passed. No ships traveled the reach between the two Oecumenes; the distance was too great. And the Second Oecumene, indefinitely wealthy, had no physical goods she needed from the home system. Radio was sufficient to carry messages, information, and the lore of new scientific accomplishments.

  But, at the beginning of the Seventh Era, when the Golden Oecumene made the transition from mortal to immortal beings, and the technology that allowed thoughts to be recorded, edited, and manipulated was discovered, the radio traffic fell silent. The Fifth-Era people of the Second Oecumene apparently had nothing more to say; no scientific accomplishments about which to boast; no new works of art or music or literature to share with their brethren across the void.

  What was most odd was that, with so much energy at their disposal, not one Second Oecumene citizen bothered to spare the power to point an orbital radio-laser at the Home Star; whereas, in the Golden Oecumene, the wealthiest of universities and business efforts had to combine much of their capital to buy the prodigious power required to send an undistorted broadcast so far. It was done infrequently; and, when the years turned, and there never came any return signal, all such projects were eventually abandoned. Investors, hoping for patents and copyrights on discoveries or arts flowing from received return signals were frustrated, and the money dried up. The name “Silent Oecumene” came into vogue.

  Two last broadcasts came. The first was a garbled message, a screaming paean to insanity, some sort of weird, worldwide suicide note, a few words, a line of indeterminate mathematical symbols, and no explanation. The second and last broadcast had included records depicting the scenes Phaethon had just dreamed. From all appearances, a fine and splendid culture, one with every advantage of resources, and civility, art, learning, and brilliance, had consumed itself in some grotesque civil war, using frightful nanomachine weapons, and then the victors had committed a baroque form of ritual mass suicide.

  Had some survived? But if so, how had they made the journey all the way across the abyss, back to the Golden Oecumene, without a civilization to build a ship and to power it? Why come silently and secretly?

  And why attack Phaethon?

  4.

  The few last words broadcast by the Silent Oecumene ran (as best as translators could calculate) thus:

  ALL WORDS ARE FALSE. ALL SPEECH IS IRRATIONAL. THAT WE SPEAK NOW DISPLAYS ONLY HOW MUCH STRONGER WE ARE THAN SANITY.

  OBSERVE: RATIONAL EFFORT ENDS IN FUTILITY WITH THE END OF TIME, OR IS DROWNED IN FUTILE ETERNITY IF TIME ENDS NOT. THEREFORE CONCLUDE: RATIONAL EFFORT REQUIRES THAT THE BASIC AND UNALTERABLE CONDITIONS OF REALITY MUST BE ALTERED. YET THIS IS IRRATIONAL.

  Then came a break in the text. A second data-grouping, when the broadcast resumed, read:

  SANITY IS SUBMISSION TO REALITY. FREEDOM IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH SUBMISSION. THEREFORE FREEDOM REQUIRES INSANITY. THIS FREEDOM SHALL BE IMPOSED.

  TO COMPEL FREE ASSENT TO THIS PROPOSITION ADDUCE AS FOLLOWS:

  0/0 Zero divided by naught

  ∞/∞ Infinity divided by infinity

  0×∞ Zero multiplied by infinity

  lex.∞ Unit raised to the infinite power

  0ex.0 Zero raised to the naught power

  ∞ex.0 Infinity raised to the naught power

  ∞ – ∞ Infinity less infinity

  KNOW THAT IT IS INSANE TO ASSERT THAT THERE IS NO UNIT NUMBER, NOR NO ZERO, NOR NO INFINITY; IRRATIONAL TO ASSERT THAT RATIONAL MATHEMATICAL OPERATIONS BECOME IRRATIONAL WHEN APPLIED TO THESE VALUES; IRRATIONAL TO ASSERT THE RATIONALITY OF THE INDETERMINATE. YET THUS REALITY IS.

  A third and final grouping, broadcast, read:

  SANITY IS SUBMISSION TO REALITY. REALITY IS IMPERFECT. SUBMISSION TO IMPERFECTION IS INSANE. WE DO NOT SUBMIT TO YOU. WE REFUSE TO ENDURE A REALITY WHICH FAVORS YOU.

  The most prevalent scholarly theory was that the word translated as “sanity” embraced the meaning “moral goodness” “self-consistent integrity,” and “intellectual superiority.” If so, this last broadcast was not directed to the humanity in the Golden Oecumene, but to the Sophotechs. By that time, apparently, the authors of this message were nothing more than a mass-mind constructed out of a worldwide sea of black nanomachinery, and the corrupted or dominated brains of its many victims. No one was certain what compelled these latter-day Silent Ones to destroy themselves.

  Perhaps they suffered from a philosophical conviction that Sophotechnology was evil, and this conviction was so profound, that they committed general and racial suicide rather than admit the existence of the Golden Oecumene. Perhaps they believed that they could survive the interior c
onditions of a black hole, or escape to another universe, another cosmic cycle, or to an afterlife.

  Phaethon pondered morosely on these things. What did the nightmare mean? Why attack him? What threat was Phaethon to them? Why did they fear his dream?

  Phaethon speculated (and this was merely a guess piled on a guess) whether the authors of this last broadcast, whatever they were, were creatures who did not want to see the rise or the supremacy of the Golden Oecumene, or Golden Oecumene Sophotechnology. If Phaethon sailed the heavens, he would not be the last. They did not want Phaethon’s way of life to spread to the stars.

  It was no speculation, however, that some elements of the dead civilization, perhaps machines, perhaps biological, had avoided the mass suicide, and had been overlooked by (or had hidden from) the Golden Oecumene’s fly-by probes; for, somehow, some of them had returned in secret to the Golden Oecumene.

  Perhaps they had been here for years. Certainly the Golden Oecumene maintained no watch to guard against such an unheard-of eventuality. And they were the remote descendants of an Earth colony. This would explain how they were able to understand Golden Oecumene systems and technologies well enough to mount an attack on Phaethon.

  But why? Why go to such great lengths? If someone or something had escaped the horror of the mass suicide, why not turn to the Golden Oecumene for help and rescue? Wouldn’t they be friends? Unless they were the perpetrators who had arranged the mass suicide; in which case they had cause to fear the remorseless justice of the Earthmind.

  Well, for the sake of argument, assume they had a reason, which seemed valid to them, to go to any lengths to prevent Phaethon’s star flight. Assume they are courageous, undaunted, highly intelligent, infinitely patient. Perhaps a form of machine life … ? This so-called Nothing Sophotech (as Scaramouche had dubbed it) … ?