The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  But not he. He was no longer immortal. One of the conditions of his exile was that his backup copies of himself, his memory and essential self, had been dumped from the mentality. He was mortal again.

  Or—wait. The ship mind had just downloaded a copy of himself into himself. What was going on?

  Usually, when a human mind was linked to a machine-mind, opening memory files required no hesitation, no searching around, no fumbling, no awkward seeking through indexes and menus: the machine usually knew what he would want to know before he knew it himself, and would insert it seamlessly and painlessly into his memory (making such minor adjustments in his nervous system as needed, to make it seem as if he had always known whatever it was he needed to know).

  Had an illegal copy been made of his mind? Was he truly the real Phaethon? Or had Atkins arranged to have one of the military Sophotechs under the War-mind make a copy without public knowledge?

  Another file opened: and there came a dim memory of a portable noetic reader, something Aurelian Sophotech had made, something done at the request of the Earthmind, who was as much wiser than other machine-minds as they were wiser than mere men.

  Why wasn’t his memory working properly?

  One star burned black on the star-map in the ship mind. A sensation of cold dread touched him. The X-ray source in the constellation of the Swan; Cygnus X-l. The first, last, and only extrasolar colony of man, ten thousand light-years away. At first, merely a scientific outpost was set there to study the black hole; then, infuriated by an intuition-process dream of a group of Mass-Warlocks over many years, a Warlock leader named Ao Ormgorgon chose it as the destination for an epic voyage, lasting tens of centuries, aboard the slow and massive ships of the Fifth Era, to colonize the system. Immortality had not yet been invented in those far-past days: only men of alternate nervous system formations, Warlocks who were manic, Invariants incapable of fear, and mass-minds whose surface memories could outlast the death of individual component members, went.

  For a time, a great civilization ruled there, drawing upon the infinite energy of the black hole. Then, all long-range radio lasers fell quiet. Nothing further was heard. It was known after that as the Silent Oecumene.

  They were not dead. They were the enemy. Something, someone, some machine, or perhaps millions of people, had survived, and, somehow, silently, without rousing the least suspicion, after lying quiet for thousands of years, had sent an agent back into the Home System, Sol, back to the Golden Oecumene.

  Back to him. They wanted his ship, the mightiest vessel ever to fly.

  The Phoenix Exultant.

  It was the only ship made ever to be able to achieve near light-speed. Due to time dilation, even the longest journeys would be brief to those aboard; and, to an immortal crew from a planet of immortals, there need be no fear of the centuries lost between stars.

  Few people in the Golden Oecumene wished to leave the peace and prosperity of the deathless society and fly outside of the range of the immortality circuits. Of those few, none had been wealthy enough to construct a vessel like this one. If Phaethon failed, the dream of star travel would fail, perhaps for millennia.

  But these others, these Silent Ones, they came from a colony where immortality had never been invented. They were the children of star pioneers. They knew the value of star flight; they believed in the dream.

  The wanted the dream for themselves.

  They were coming for him. They were coming for his ship. The Lords of the Silent Oecumene. The beings, once men, now strange and forgotten, who came from the black hole burning at the heart of the constellation of the Swan.

  Then an internal-sensation channel came on-line. He became aware of the condition of his body.

  The sensation was one of immense pressure. He was under ninety gravities of weight. The circuit told him that his body was adjusted to its most shock-resistant internal configuration; his cells were more like wood than flesh, his liquids and fluids had been turned to thick viscous stuff, able to move, barely, against the huge weight pinning him in place. The jelly of his brain had been stiffened artificially to preserve it in this supergravity. His brain was now an inert block, and all his present thought processes were being conducted by the circuits and electrophotonic wiring of his artificial, secondary neural web.

  He was awake now because that neural web was beginning the process of downloading back into his biochemical brain. His brain was being thawed.

  Further, he was gripped in an unbelievably powerful retardation field. Electron-thin lines of pseudomatter, like a billion-strand web, were interpenetrating Phaethon’s body and anchoring each cell and cell nucleus in place.

  His biological functions were suspended, but those that needed to proceed were being forced. Each line of pseudomatter from the retardation field grasped the particular molecule, chemical compound, or ion inside Phaethon’s body to which it was dedicated, and shoved it through the motions which, under these gravity conditions, it would have been unable to do by itself.

  He now became aware that he wore his cloak. That magnificent nanomachinery that formed the inner lining of his armor had interpenetrated each cell of his body, and was, even now, beginning to restore him to normal life.

  Red not-blood was pumped out from his veins at high speed, and intermediate fluid that resembled blood rushed in, preparing the cells and tissues to receive the real blood when it came. A million million tiny ruptures and breaks in his bone marrow and soft tissues were repaired. He felt heat in his body, but the pain center of his brain was shut down, so the sensation felt like warm summery sunshine, not like torture.

  At least the cloak now, for once, was performing its designed function, not being used as a campsite, or medical lab, or for the consumptionpleasures of drunkards. Had his face not been a frozen block, he would have smiled. The supergravity was dropping. He was under eighty gravities of acceleration, then seventy. . . .

  As soon as the cells in his occipital lobe were properly restored, light came. Not from his eyes, no. They were still immobile globes of frozen stuff, pinned in place by intense pseudo-material fields. But through his neural web, a circuit opened, and camera cells from outside his body sent signals into the visual centers of his brain.

  To him, suddenly, it seemed as if he hung in space. Around him were myriads of stars.

  But no, not him, in his body. The pictures coming to him were coming from vision cells on the hull of the Phoenix Exultant, or from her attendant craft.

  The Phoenix Exultant was in flight, a spear blade of luminous gold, riding a spear shaft of fire. Her attendant craft, like motes of gold shed by a leviathan, were shooting out from aft docking bays, falling rapidly behind.

  The Phoenix Exultant was in the Solar System, in the outer system. Radio-astrogation beacons from Mars and Demeter were behind her, and the Jovian sun, the bright mass of radio and energy that betrayed the activity of the circumjovial commonwealth, shined eight points off her starboard beam. The Phoenix Exultant was five A.U.’s from Sol.

  The deceleration shield that guarded the aft segment of the ship was being dismantled and lifted aside by armies of hull robots; this indicated the deceleration was about to end, and the danger from high-speed collision with interplanetary dust particles was diminishing.

  For decelerating she was. He realized his visual image was reversed. The “spear” of his great ship was flying backward, aft-foremost, with a shaft of unthinkable fire before her.

  The attendant craft were not “falling behind.” Unable to decelerate as rapidly as the great mother ship, they were shooting ahead, the way parachutists in a ballet seem to shoot ahead of the first air dancer who deploys her wings.

  The rate of deceleration was slowing. The deceleration had dropped from ninety gravities to little over fifty in the last few moments. Ninety was the maximum the ship was designed to tolerate. But, in order to tolerate it, she had to be (not unlike Phaethon himself) braced and stiffened in the proper internal configuration. Were the burn t
o stop without warning, and suddenly return to free fall, the change in stresses on the ship would prove too great a shock.

  In many ways, the changes in deceleration (jerk, as it was called) proved more dangerous than the acceleration itself. How was the ship holding up?

  Phaethon looked through internal vision cells, and found an image of himself, on the bridge, cocooned in his armor, in the captain’s chair. To his left was a symbol table, holding a memory casket. Beneath the symbol table was a square golden case containing the portable noetic reader. To his right was a status board, showing the multiple layers of the ship’s mind engaged in multiple tasks. Beneath the status board was a long, slender sword sheath. A blood red tassel dangling from the hilt hung straight as a stalactite in the supergravity.

  He saw his mannequin crew (their bodies had been designed to sustain this weight) standing before the energy mirrors on the balconies that rose concentrically above.

  The mannequins were there only to serve as symbols. Circuits in Phaethon’s armor would have been able to augment his intelligence till he could comprehend each of the tasks depicted in the status board, in all detail, and at once. The process was called navimorphosis, or naval-vastening, and Phaethon would be in the ship as he was in his own body. He would, in effect, become the ship, feeling her structural members strain as in his bones, her energy flows as nerve pulses, the heartbeat of her engines, the muscular exertion of her motors, the pains and twinges if any of a million routines went awry, the pleasure if those processes went smoothly.

  But no. Better, for now, to remain in human-level consciousness, at least until he knew the situation.

  How long had he been asleep?

  His last clear memory was at Mercury Equilateral Station. He had been with that delightful Daphne girl, the one who had come to visit him, and then, later, on the bridge here. He had discussed a plan, a strategy.

  A vision cell on his shoulder board showed him the memory casket next to him. In the supergravity, he could not move, or open the lid. But there was writing on the lid he could read.

  “Loss of memory is temporary, due to acceleration trauma to the brain. Missing memories have been timed to return as needed. Within please find necessary remote-unit command skills. Defend the Oecumene. Trust no one. Find Nothing.”

  This sure did not sound like his writing. He expected himself to be more flowery or whatever. Old-fashioned. Atkins must have written this casket.

  Drab fellow, this Atkins. What an unpleasant life he must lead. For a moment, Phaethon was glad he wasn’t someone like that.

  Phaethon’s armor sent a message from his brain to the bridge mannequins: “What’s going on? What just happened?”

  In English, Armstrong said, “Situation is nominal. All systems are green and go.”

  Hanno, in Phoenician, said, “Sixty times our weight oppresses us. We fall and slow our fall. Our tail of fire is fair and straight before us; our bow points to the receding sun.” This, because the ship was flying stern-forward, decelerating.

  A hundred internal vision cells showing views throughout the ship came on, and the pictures showed him the engine core, the hull fields, the fuel-weight distributions, the feed lines and convection eddies of the drive, and the subatomic reactions flickering through the intolerable light of the drive itself. Microscopic views of the crystalline structure of the main load-bearing members came to him, along with readings on the fields that artificially magnified the weak nuclear forces holding these huge macromolecules together.

  The information indicated that the mighty ship was performing as designed.

  In Homeric Greek hexameters, Ulysses said, “Behold, for out of wine-dark night, now gleams the sight of lonely destination; less time than would require a peasant bent across a plow, a strong man, unwearied by toil, to gouge a furrow five hundred paces along, in the all-sustaining Earth, in less time than this we shall touch the welcoming dock.”

  Sir Francis Drake, in English, said, “Marry, ’tis naught, I trow, ’tween here and yon to do us aught but good, nor ship nor stone nor sign of woe is anywhere about us. The harbor lies fair and clear before.”

  Dock? Harbor? Where were they heading? (And what was wrong with his memory?)

  “Show me,” sent Phaethon.

  Several energy mirrors came out from the walls and lit.

  Through the long-range mirrors, he examined the scene around him.

  He recognized this place.

  Here were the cylinders, circles, spirals, and irregular shapes of habitats and other structures, the mining asteroids, and eerie Demetrine Monuments of the Jovian Trailing Trojan Point City-Swarm. In among the massive bodies of the City-Swarm were hundreds of remotes and spaceships.

  The larger structures bore the names of the Trojan Asteroids out of which they had been carved, heroic names: Patrocles, Priam, Aeneas (this last was the node from which other colonies in the area had been founded). Not far from Deiphobos was Laocoön, with its famous crisscrossing belts of magnetic accelerators, like huge snakes, wrapping its axis. Paris, the capital of the group, gleamed with lights.

  The medium-sized structures, all cylinders of the exact same size and shape, bore numbers, not names, for they housed Invariants. Even some of these were famous, though: Habitat 7201, where Kes Nasrick had discovered the first vastening matrix; Habitat 003, where the next version of the Invariant race, the so-called Fifth Men, designed with more perfect internal control over their nervous system, were being formed to supplant the present generation.

  The smaller structures were like gossamer bubbles, frail whips, or spinning pinwheels. For the most part they were inhabited (if that word could be used) by the delicate energy-bodies the entities from the new planet Demeter tended to favor, neuroforms unknown elsewhere in the Golden Oecumene: Thought-Weavings, and Mind-Sculptures. These habitats had the eccentric names Demetrine humor or whim fixed on them: Sedulous Butterfly; Salutiferous Surd Construct; Phatic Conjunction; Omnilumenous Pharos.

  How long had Phaethon slept? It could not have been for too long. The Trailing Trojan Point City-Swarm looked much like his last memory of it: there were still celebration displays flaming on the larger monuments, and beacons for solar-sailing games. The celebrations were still going on. The Grand Transcendence had not yet occurred.

  He had slept less than a week. It may have been hours only. Slept? Or perhaps the missing period of time, hours or days, had been spent with Atkins, mapping out some strategy now gone from memory.

  Phaethon examined the memory casket on the symbol table through his shoulder camera. It said the memory loss was partial, natural.

  No. He did not believe that.

  The deceleration dropped from fifty gravities to forty. The great ship shuddered. Phaethon imagined he could almost hear the groaning protests of joints and connections and load-bearing members subjected to unthinkable strain.

  On the bridge, Vanguard Single Exharmony reported that the flow of antimatter fuel to the drive core was smooth and without perturbation, despite that it was changing weight and volume.

  Admiral Byrd reported all was well with the fields, which, during superacceleration (in order to minimize random subatomic motions in the hull and along the main structural members), reduced certain sections of the ship to absolute zero temperature. Those hull plates were being “thawed” now. So far, the process was going steadily. The expansions were controlled and symmetrical.

  Another shock, like the blow of a club, traveled through the great ship as she dropped below forty, then thirty gravities. Then twenty. The retardation field webbing Phaethon to the captain’s chair vanished in a spray of lingering sparks.

  Phaethon screamed in pain when his heart started beating. His nanomaterial cloak stimulated his nerves, set other fluids in motion. He was so surprised that he did not even notice that his lungs were working again.

  Five gravities. He blinked his eyes and looked around. Seen with his normal vision, not through his remote cameras, the bridge, if anything, w
as more splendid, the deck more golden, the energy mirrors shimmering more brightly.

  Zero. And now he was in free fall.

  Now what? And what the hell was going on?

  He did not like being in free fall. He was about to meet some danger for which he was not ready. His hands itched and he wished for a weapon.

  A slight shiver passed through the bridge. The mighty carousel, which turned the entire living quarters segment of the ship, was beginning to rotate, and the bridge and other quarters occupying the inner ring were orienting the decks to point perpendicularly from the ship’s axis, rather than (as they had been a moment before) parallel and aft-ward.

  Centrifugal gravity returned, to about half a gee. This carousel (encompassing, as it did, hundreds of meters of decks and life support) had a diameter wide enough to render Coriolis effects unnoticeable to normal senses.

  Hanno said, in Phoenician, “The dock master welcomes us.”

  Was the dock master now in exile? But no, he must be a Neptunian, one of those cold, outer creatures who cared nothing for the conventions of the Hortators and the laws of the Inner System.

  Sir Francis Drake said, “Does he so? Marry, but our ship be greater than his dock in every measure. ’Tis we should welcome him, and call the whole dockyard to lay alongside and tie up to us!”

  Phaethon: “Show me.”

  The center energy mirror came to life.

  Glittering like a crown, the circle of the Neptunian embassy spun, moving with an angular velocity so great that the rotation was visible to the naked eye. Near the hub of the wheel was a second circle, also spinning, but with much less effect. In the outer wheel, under the tremendous gravity which obtained at the Neptunian S-layer “surface,” lived whatever Cold Dukes may have been present, as well as that nested construction of neurotechnology known as the Duma.