by John Wright
"The Bellipotent Composition forms again. Other war heroes, Banbeck and Carter and Kinnison, Vidar the Silent and Valdemar the Slayer, are recompiled out of archives, or constructed, or born.
"This New College gathers funds to launch an expedition to follow after the Phoenix Exultant to Cygnus X-l, crewed by militia, and by avatars of the War-mind. This expedition is meant to avenge Phaethon's death (should that be his fate) or, if he lives, then to protect Phaethon's new colony there from counterattack. At Cygnus X-l the New College establishes a shipyard, and an arsenal, and reopens the singularity fountains of the Second Oecumene. With the infinite energy at their command, they are able to construct hulls for a fleet of ships like Phaethon's, but ships devoted to war.
"Meanwhile, here, our New College urges censures against, not merely those who destroy their own humanity, but also those who, through lack of fervor or zeal, erode the confidence of the soldier, or who fail to donate to the war chest, or who, by not defending their civilization, threaten (so the New College characterizes it) all humanity with destruction.
"This New College provokes loud-voiced critics, and schools formed expressly to defeat its goals. The public debate tears at our Golden Oecumene like none before or since; patriots and peace lovers accuse each other of blindness; understanding is lost; both sides mourn the passing of a simpler, finer age.
"Few understand or remember what I will tell them: the Transcendence said that war is the context within which peace exists; and that peace is not possible without it."
Neo-Orpheus said, "Does that mean the Transcendence favored war? Or opposed it?"
Emphyrio merely shook his head. "I cannot express it more clearly than I have said. The matter is simple, yet complex. None can be blamed who kill attackers in self-defense. The blame lies elsewhere."
"Where?"
"The Transcendence revealed to me that our mission, the mission of all mankind, during these coming ages of horror is to recall one deep truth: recall, and do not forget, that the Lords of the Second Oecumene are men like ourselves, who know pain and the surcease of pain, who know what it is to have a dream, and to lose a dream. This is what I came to say."
And he bowed, turned, and walked off through the gathering snow.
Socrates, leaning on his walking stick, rose to his feet with a sigh. "Neo-Orpheus, you fear we shall all turn into machines without souls, unless the censures of the College of Hortators restrain us. I fear war shall turn us all into men without souls."
A bitter little frown tugged at the corner of the mouth of Neo-Orpheus. "No matter. There have been wars before. Wars pass. I shall remain."
"What is your plan, then? For I know even a man as withered as you still keeps a dream of one sort or another in him, my friend."
Neo-Orpheus said, "Ha! Orpheus does not live except to continue his life. He has no desire except for more life, and more. But during a war, the Second Oecumene might destroy the infrastructure here in the Inner System. The Sophotech housings where he and I keep our ten thousand backups all might be destroyed. But the portable noetic reader... you see? ... allows an escape."
Socrates laughed. "So you will join Phaethon? Even you? He holds you in no esteem. Phaethon will surely charge you half your wealth before he will let you store backup copies of yourself on his ship to scatter through the void."
"Wealth well spent. How better to ensure there is always an Orpheus somewhere in the universe?"
He raised his hand and pointed to the motto inscribed over the doors there. It was the only decoration, the only mark, on the otherwise dull, blank walls.
The motto read: I Am the Enemy of Death. I Do Not Intend to Die.
Neo-Orpheus bowed, turned, and reentered his dark house.
Socrates sat on the stair with a sigh. With a wave of his hand he called closer the spiderlike remotes that were meant to dispose of the flesh he wore, once it was empty.
He muttered, "Some do not fear it, my friend."
Out from beneath his cloak, he took up a wooden drinking bowl, and raised it to his lips.
Gannis was waking up in terror.
In the artificial moon, made of adamantium gold, was a large amphitheater; here was a round table, also of adamantium, with a hundred golden thrones on which a hundred versions of himself were kept Some groaned, some wept; others were still in partial Transcendence, eyes glassy, or were stepping down from mind-to-mind, but were not yet restored to normal consciousness.
Through high windows in midair shone the scene from outside the Gannis planetoid: the bright new sun of Jupiter, surrounded by a ring brighter than any star, and this ring cut the window from side to side like a rainbow of pure fire. Usually the image cheered him: this rainbow (as he called it) that had led to the pot of gold for Gannis. This was the equatorial supercollider. The sight did not cheer him now. One of him woke, and saw the confused faces on the thrones to either side of him. The one next to him asked: "Self! Is there any better news from the later sections of the Transcendence? I fell out of the communion two hours ago; the Gannis there has been out for several days. Have the gathered minds of all mind-kind changed their minds?"
The newly-woken Gannis answered: "The judgment is harsh. Our fellow men will not understand. But we did no wrong! The cheating was legal! It was legal!"
A Gannis who had been out of Transcendence for several days called from across the expanse of the table: "Orders are already being canceled! Commer-cialists are withdrawing their advertisements! Patrons are being reprogrammed-and this is from the early risers, just mass-minds and mansion houses, mostly! The Gannis Fifty-group will not answer when we ask for extrapolations of the loss; the accountancy program crashed itself rather than answer."
One of the Gannises from halfway across the table answered, "Brothers! Other selves! It cannot be so bad! I was involved with a mass-mind entangled with the Bellipotent Composition before I woke. They will be making a war fleet of ships like the Phoenix-(hey need our metal! Surely, surely all is not lost.
Another Gannis opened his eyes. His face still was shining with the peace and supreme confidence of a tran-shuman. He was perhaps only partly awake; perhaps be did not know what he was saying, for the words boomed out without any hesitation, and he smiled, despite the gloomy word: "I was with the Orient Overmind-group. I remember the high thoughts: listen!
"We, Gannis, are guilty of no conspiracy against Phaethon. We are not, and never have been, a confidant of Scaramouche or Xenophon. Rejoice, O Gannis, to know our reputations cleansed of all suspicion!
"We, Gannis, have arranged our affairs to profit by Phaethon's eventual bankruptcy and failure. There is no illegality in this; sharp business practice, perhaps; unkindness, maybe. Wrongdoing? Possibly not."
Several of the Gannises who had been out of the Transcendence for hours or days now started timidly to smile at each other: but those who were more recently connected, or who still had intermittent sub-connections, did not smile. Their faces were drawn and pale.
"And yet..."
Now all the faces of all the Gannises at the great round table grew pale.
"And yet, we shall lose business partners, friends. Several of our wives and counterwives will divorce us. Why? Because, during the Transcendence, the inner soul of Gannis was examined... and found wanting.
"No, we had not known anything was amiss with Phaethon, but we had suspected.
"When, during Phaethon's Inquest, the Hortator's records falsely showed Phaethon redacting himself, Gannis knew that this was wildly out of character for Phaethon; yet we said nothing.
"Likewise, earlier, when Phaethon's loans had exceeded all reasonable limit, and his bankruptcy seemed certain, again, Gannis said nothing, made no move to help Phaethon, our alleged partner. Instead, we maneuvered to benefit by his fall.
"Look into your own souls, Gannis. We now see the motive hidden, for a time, from us, from all of us. But now we know it. The Transcendence knows it. All of us know it; all mankind; friends, peers, colleges, colleagues
, artists, thinkers, media, partials, competitors. All."
Silence hung in the chamber.
No Gannis in the chamber met the eye of the Gannis to either side of him. Each knew the unspoken thought.
Fear had led him. Fear of competition from Helion.
Gannis had struggled and taken risks to achieve bis high status: he wanted to rest from the struggle, and enjoy his rewards. Having established a lucrative business empire, Gannis had wanted that empire to be maintained without further effort, to be protected from Helion's challenge to his business interests, to be protected from reality.
One of the members of Gannis who had been lying slumped on the golden tabletop now stirred and raised his head, and said, "Brothers, other selves; we are not as bad as all that! Recall how, last Transcendence, Gannis had been lauded! Under Argento-rium, the gathered minds praised us! We were known then to be daring, innovative, a benefactor of mankind. . . ."
His voice trailed off.
A Gannis who had just come out of Transcendence said bitterly, "I did not realize how much I had changed. How fearful I had grown. Grown? Shrunk. My soul is small, these days."
Another Gannis, one of the earliest ones awake, now opened his mouth to object. He was about to say that everyone, after all, was miserable and fearful and deceptive and afraid. All businessmen did business this way. Everyone did it, right?
The early Gannis closed his mouth. Everyone in the chamber knew what he had been about to say. They all looked at him skeptically.
They all had just seen the souls of all mankind. And they knew, now, that everyone did not do business that way. Not everyone was afraid, sneaky, dishonest. It was amazing how few people were. What a horrible thing to find out!
That Gannis, the early one, slouched in his throne, and said no more.
There was a stir in the chamber.
The main Gannis on the central throne opened his eyes and raised his hand. The other awake Gannis-segments tried to orient with him, and grew dazed by the information overload. By this, they knew this was not the normal over-Gannis talking.
This was the Transcendence itself, or a remnant of it, some segment of the gathered minds of all civilization still interlinked, now speaking through him.
It said:
"Your daughter is fated to die."
His own personal problems forgotten, the Gannis group around the table called on the stored energies and computer space of the Gannis planetoid. Recklessly, without proper preparation, they linked up to the still-partly-Transcended Gannis Overmind.
A fortune in computer time was burned away in a moment. Gannis hardly noticed.
A little sub-Transcendence, consisting only of Gannis, of his associates and colleagues, and of the few millions interlinked through the overmind, now took place in Jupiter space.
This little Transcendence predicted (or decided) that the Never-First leader called Unmoiqhotep, also called Ungannis of Io, who conspired with Xenophon of Far-beyond and the Nothing Machine to make war upon the Golden Oecumene, would be sought and caught, convicted of treason and attempted mass murder, and killed, erased with no possibility of resurrection.
It had been she, in her guise as the tentacled rugose cone, who had accosted Phaethon outside the Curia House. With the help of Scaramouche (who was riding her back in the form of a polyp) she had shown Phaethon the thought card to infect him with the mind virus which, later, made him hallucinate the attack by Scaramouche outside the Red Manorial Mausoleum.
Ungannis had therefore been party to the attempt to seize control of the Phoenix Exultant and to use her as a warship. Ungannis had contemplated, with glee, the coming destruction of Mercury Equilateral, the solar north polar civilization, the orbital Sophotechs near Earth, and the Transcendence itself.
For that, she would be chased, caught, and killed.
Most of the drama of Ungannis's futile attempt to escape had already been played out during a half second of Transcendence time (during which, the union of all minds had been disgusted that they need be distracted by the unpleasant necessity to attend to this distasteful matter).
The remainder was fated (so ran the prediction) to be concluded during the Fourth Month after, the Month of Fading Recollections. At that time, Temer and Intrepid and Sanspeur Lacedaimon of the Dark-Gray (all wardens from the late Sixth Era, and Chiefs-Advocate for the Constabulary), would find the last of the self-replicating information storages where her noumenal self was hidden.
Some copies of herself were coded as parts of a mosaic; another, as changing nonrandom fractals among the shapes of clouds in the Ionian atmosphere; others in places more imaginative yet; every copy making as many copies of herself as her available energy budget allowed.
But the Transcendence knew her plans before she knew them herself. Foolishly, she had been in the Transcendence, too, so self-satisfied that she never imagined anyone would criticize her for her crimes (so she thought) once they understood.
Understand they did. Well enough to find every place she planned to hide. Well enough to spend the effort in time and manpower to track her down, no matter what the cost.
The last copy of Ungannis was found in a hiding place taken from a mystery story composed so long ago that the idea was a cliche: inside the facets of a gemstone, whose altered molecular structure refracted the light to record the thought-patterns.
The Constables gathered them all.
Some of the copies mutated. Others radically redacted themselves, attempting to destroy the guilty memories she held so as to make herself (in her own mind, at least) innocent of wrong when caught. Many would attempt to "redeem" herself, using self-consideration editors to alter opinions and emotions on herself, to program herself to regret her horrid acts. (Many of these self-changes were cosmetic only. She never thought to reprogram her basic philosophy, which gave rise to those opinions.)
The public dismay and anger surrounding the trials of these myriad of copies, would, if anything, be worse than that surrounding the New College's militarism. Ancient legal precedent established that persons could not escape debt or penalty by making themselves forget their past, unless the changes were so global, and so fundamental, as to be legally equivalent to suicide, and the rewritten version was then considered a child, a new entity. This precedent would be cruel when, carried out to its logical extreme, hundreds of young women, copies of Ungannis, innocent, self-ignorant, suspecting nothing amiss, would be hauled before the Curia to stand trial for their lives, and be executed.
Other copies would express their contrition and regret, and would display, on any public channel, how in their inmost thoughts they had no reservations, no desire to do these horrid acts again. All would plead for mercy; mercy would not be shown.
The peaceful and graceful peoples of the Golden Oecumene would wonder, aghast, at this severity, and question: Why did the Transcendence, the culmination of all the wisdom of civilization and history, allow this to happen? Why these pointless deaths, this bitter vengeance?
That question could be answered. Certain copies of Ungannis were here, "now" as part of the Transcendence, for, all memory of her own wrongdoing erased, she had seen no reason not to link minds with all her neighbors. Only as she joined, and all old memories were reviewed, did she see the horrid truth: that she was a would-be mass murderess.
The part of the Transcendence that was Ungannis set aside certain memories to be stored with those who would otherwise be aghast at her multiple executions. In those memories she showed the choices that the supreme intellect and insight of the Transcendence had shown her.
The extrapolation was detailed enough to predict her last oratory word for word: "All those copies of me I have made (will make) still believed my same core values, still knew (will know) that to be human was to be a sick, diseased, failed thing, full of weakness, pride.
and hate. The Transcendence told me (tells me now) that if I change those core values in myself, that if I program my copies to reject the root causes which led me to my
crimes, that I would be spared execution. I refused! (I shall refuse!) I spit upon your mercy!
"My core values cannot be challenged. I would rather die than give up my ideas. Deep in my soul, I know, by mystical intuition not open to question, inspection, or debate, that humanity is a vile disease. The only thing which, once, long ago, made human life tolerable at all, was the glad knowledge that each generation of that disease would be wiped out by old age, and a new generation of children, temporarily innocent, would take its place. Who, now, needs to avenge the destruction of the Knights Templar by King Philip the Fair of France? Who needs to avenge the persecution of the Christians by Diocletian, the persecution of the pagans by Constantine? No one! The merciful cycle of endless death has wiped all their crimes away. But if Philip, if Diocletian, if Constantine were all still alive, then their intolerable crimes would never, not ever be punished!
"But you have stopped the cycle of death, you have rusted the turning wheel of the generations! And every cruel act, every harsh word, every slight, and petty domination done to a child, now, now that you have inflicted immortality upon us all, all those crimes will last forever!
"My father, Gannis, was cruel to me as a child! There were things I wanted which he did not provide. Desires I had which I wanted satisfied! Toys and games and contests; I wanted to command the respect of others; I wanted to change the world for the better. I was not con-lent to be made to feel inferior to the Sophotechs. Were any of these desires satisfied? Not one!
"And so, when I was young, because I knew that I might change my mind as I grew older, one night, when no one was alert, I used my father's unregulated self-consideration circuit to fix my emotions in place, vowing that I would never forget, never forgive, the insults and indifference heaped on me! What kind of cruel, endlessly cruel civilization is this, when the tears of a child cannot be wiped away? I hate you all!
"Filth of the Golden Oecumene (or the Rusted Oecumene, as I call her)! Now I have forced you to kill me, to kill a hundred innocent versions of me, so that your lily-white hands run red with the blood of children! Your pious fraud stands exposed in all its cruelty: this civilization, built on reason and logic, is nothing but an endless state of oppression, an endless charnel house, and you are all an endless line of rubber-faced man-' nequins. Slash your faces all with razors and you will not bleed! Out of all this great civilization of which you are all so proud, only my desires, my human desires, could not be satisfied! Only I suffer! Only I am human! I am the last human being alive in all the Solar System, and you vile machines and pets of machines and pretend-humans have finally found the guts to kill me! Now you are murderers; now I have made you human, too! Here, in death, is victory!"