John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

'I was born when Xenophon, at Farbeyond Station, erected a radio laser at a point in distant space where the noise and interference of the Golden Oecumene had been left behind. Xenophon had been mapping Phaethon's possible routes for him, through the dark matter clouds, the particle storms which fill interstellar space. And he found a hole, a gap, a thin spot, in the clouds of dark matter which surround the Cygnus X-l Nebula. Radio conditions were good. Xenophon's receivers were very powerful. He used your money to create them. He sent a signal. Then he slept. Xenophon had constructed the machineries and antennae out of his own body substance, as is the tradition among Nep-tunians. Xenophon woke only when a signal, carrying what it carried from the Second Oecumene, entered his body, and entered his brain."

"You are that ghost? You were transmitted here from the Silent Oecumene?"

"Surely you have viewed the Last Broadcast. Surely you have wondered who was the subject who made that broadcast. Surely you have wondered why, at the last moment, he is so afraid, and then so overjoyed, to realize that he is infected with a mental virus, to realize that his mental virus now possesses him, and will possess anyone who properly receives his message. Your Golden Oecuemene received a corrupted version of the original message, the signal strength was weak, and the subtextual channels, where the mental virus was hidden, did not arrive. Pity! Had the signal been strong, all people in the Golden Oecumene would now be what Xenophon is; all would now be me! As it is, only Xenophon enjoys this privilege."

"Are you a copy of the man who made the Final Broadcast from the Silent Oecumene? Or are you the virus? Or what are you?"

"He is called Ao Varmatyr. He was the son and creation copy of Ao Ormgorgon Darkwormhole, our culture hero who founded the Second Oecumene. He is now part of the oversoul of which I was once part, as is Ormgorgon, and all others. But I do not claim to be him. I am as much him as I am any other. Questions of identity are immaterial."

Phaethon realized he had not asked a central question: "Why are you doing this? What is your motive?"

"To aid and help Phaethon. We are the children of the first successful star colony. Now there will be more. We knew where your first port of call would be, had to be, even if you yourself have not yet acknowledged this. Where can this great starship go most easily to refuel?"

"You think the Phoenix Exultant is going to Cygnus X-l first?"

"You admitted as much when you spoke to Kes Notor-Kotok. Had it not been for our interference, Gannis and the Hortators would have dismantled this ship for scrap, after taking it from you. We expected you to go in person to visit your drowned wife at the Eveningstar Mausoleum. We were ready to reveal ourselves and our purposes to you, to take you and your armor, take this ship, and go to Cygnus X-l.

"But you deceived us. Our model was inaccurate. Something distorted your normal behavior. Instead of coming in person, you telerepresented yourself."

Phaethon remembered. He had turned bis pride up. He had used an Eleemosynary self-consideration table to alter his emotional nature, and that had made him too impatient to wait to see his Daphne in person.

The ghost of Ao Varmatyr continued: "Because of this we were caught off guard. As an emergency measure, we sent a mannequin to inculcate a mental virus into you, which would cause you to open your memory casket, and force the Hortators to exile you. We anticipated that, after a period of trial among the exiles, you would nevertheless rise to the occasion, begin to gather money and equipment, contact the Neptunians, and join with them.

"Then, a second thing happened which we did not expect. Daphne chose exile and death to come to you. The danger to us mounted, as Daphne brought Atkins out of retirement. We are fearful of discovery. Desperation forced our hand; the unit bidden in Daphne's horse exceeded his instructions, and attempted to bring you by speaking threats. This was miscalculation; we underestimated how rashly and how violently the Sophotechs who control your civilization would order their assassin Atkins to respond. You, by your actions, have shown mat we had good reason to be fearful of discovery."

"Your story doesn't ring true. Why all this deception? Why didn't you come to me directly?"

"I did. You rejected my entreaties. Furthermore, your capacity for independent judgment has been altered by the Sophotechs to suit their own purposes, sometimes obviously, sometimes subtly. Your thoughts have been altered by them; your sense filter would edit out any evidence I might present to convince you; redaction programs would make you forget. This has happened several times during our interaction. We could not reason with you because your capacity for reasoning had been tampered with. We had to act in secret because we feared the Sophotechs."

"Feared them? Why?"

"Because your Sophotechs destroyed the civilization of the Second Oecumene."

The Second Oecumene was a paradise, rejoicing in the most abundant goods, the most amiable prospects imaginable; no limits were defined on any of our energy budgets. There was little need for private property, no jealous competition, no cause for anything other than perfect generosity: what goods we wished could be replicated endlessly out of the endless energy the singularity fountains produced.

"But it was not a perfect paradise. There was death. There was fear of death.

"And there was misunderstanding. The Second Oecumene was settled during the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure. The Warlock neurofom, the Invariant neuroform and the Basic neuroform could not comprehend each other. As a by-product of fundamental differences between neurology, there were fundamental differences in psychology. There was no bridge to this gap. no common ground, no common foundation for interaction.

"But, did we need understanding? We had privacy instead. In our paradise, with our endless abundance, no person had any need to interact with any other he found incomprehensible, or even distasteful. There were no centripetal social forces. Space habitats could be constructed by reverse total conversion to produce hydrogen gas, which, compressed and ignited with additional energies, could be nucleogenetically burnt into carbon, and nanotechnologicaUy spun into diamond, webbed with organics and brought to life. Anyone impatient with his neighbors could create a mansion of smart-carbon crystal, staffed by a thousand ferro-vegetable servant machines, and float into an orbit far from any concerns.

"At her height, the Second Oecumene had several hundred small artificial suns and nucleogenesis stations orbiting very far from the black hole, and tens of thousands of diamond habitats, belt upon concentric belt of asteroid mansions, as if the rings of Saturn, expanded to encompass an area greater than your Solar System, were made of inextinguishable fire and glittering fields of endless, living jewelry!

"Your Oecumene, the First Oecumene, is very small: even your Neptunians are near neighbors of your little system. How far from the center is the farthest habitat of your polity? Four hundred A.U.'s? Five? Our narrowest orbits of our most heavily shielded palaces were wider than that.

"The core of our system is hell. HDE226868 is a blue-white supergiant star, and he circles the singularity once each five days. He is a monster sun, thirty-three times the mass of Sol, pulled into a tormented egg shape by the tidal stress of his close orbit around the black hole: and bands and belts of plasma are pulled in ever-lengthening spirals out from the giant, tendrils of flame, forever falling into the pinpoint of nothingness hidden in the X-ray halo of the accretion disk. Our ancestral instruments once watched as the masses of fire fell inward, slowing, reddening, flattening, becoming frozen in time by the relativistic effects: and that frozen fire is there still, though we watch no more. Above this, a permanent belt of white-hot condensate circles the event horizon, and the magnetic aura from the singularity's hidden core, forever spinning, churns it to incandescent froth. This equatorial belt of radiation, potent enough that even astronomers in the Third Era detected the endless shriek of ultra-high-energy, renders the plane of our ecliptic uninhabitable.