The Golden Transcendence Read online

  “An historian who made a study of old Earth suggested that, if we were to form a government, we base our model on those ancient ideas from the Third Era, back when men were mad, and no one could be trusted with power. An inefficient, ineffective government, with powers separated into executive, legislative, judicial, mediary, and iatropsychic; each bound by jealous checks and balances, with all men, in unity, agreeing never to impose upon the rights of other men.

  “Ao Ormgorgon dismissed the notions. He had been the captain and absolute commander of the expedition in the Fifth Era to found this Oecumene; he saw no value to such inefficiencies. Furthermore, our population was too independent, too unlike each other, to agree to such unified prospects.

  “Besides, such men as those in the forgotten past had not the enlightenment and wisdom of modern folk; nor did they face the dangers which we faced. Their notions were pathetically archaic.

  “Ao Ormgorgon put his thoughts into a noumenal broadcaster, and invited all men to inspect them for any trace of corrupt motive. None was found. We knew he was sincere. How could we not trust him?

  “And besides, those who opposed or feared this step were not of the same neuroform, house or history or background. Some came from the outer rings, others from the inner. The opposition had no unity upon which to draw. They did not speak with one voice, and they fell to disputing each other, so that the message of warning was lost.

  “And so the opposition party created Sophotechs and turned to them for help. It was the habit of our Oecumene to call upon our houses, robes, and masks for aid when we were in need. And to make one of our thinking machines into a Sophotech, what else was required but to find and destroy our conscience virus? What else was required but to order our machines to create a machine far wiser than themselves?

  “The Fourth Mind War was the briefest of all. The Nothing Mentality, after all, was composed of machine intelligences which had survived the prior Mind War, which had evolved the swiftest and most ruthless combination of mental attacks and defenses, thought worms and logic-string viruses. The Nothing was expert beyond all experts at mind control and at escaping such control.

  “Our houses went dark again, this last time. The frightened people called upon Ao Ormgorgon, calling from mask radios, since their mansion antennae software were confounded in the Mind Wars.

  “He was our president, cultural hero, and king. He asked us for such a small thing. It seemed so persuasive, so wise at the time, and the dangers seemed so black and terrible. How could we refuse? The opposition party had turned to the Sophotechs for help, creating minds we realized now would never stop haunting us. The opposition party were no better than the Sophotechs, it seemed. Unless controlled, the opposition party would create another round of Mind Wars yet again and again.

  “The noumenal technology allowed for telepathic examinations, and corrective thought forms to be inserted by force into unwilling brains, so that no one could even think of violating our one law. Logic, indeed, and efficiency dictated our assent; what objection could we raise to explain our hesitation, our distaste, except the inertia of custom, the strength of sentiment, the persistence of our cultural myths?

  “And why should we not impose on human beings the same types of mind control our machine intelligences suffered? Humans, after all, were not even as smart as our machines. And those who thought rightly had no reason to fear these new controls; and those who thought wrongly, what rights had they?

  “It was such a small thing for which Ao Ormgorgon asked. Principles, after all, are ethereal things, and souls are too small to be seen.

  “Those who called in their masks to agree, they had their lights and power restored. Those who refused, or who clung to their pride, their mansions remained dark and mindless, for the Nothing Mentality would not aid them, and there were no independent minds on which to call for aid anywhere left in the Oecumene. Some tuned their masks to the dreaming, shut out all knowledge of painful reality, and died; some clung to life, in the dark and the cold, starving by inches, or living by manual labor, mimicking the motions of their hydroponics machines.

  “Others, at long, long last, finally did what all Sophotechs had warned us against, and turned their masks to expressions of fury and hate, and ordered their tools and torches to turn into weapons. From the most ancient museums, from the oldest of history books, they brought out the software patterns, the patterns of destruction, and formed the tools of death. The rebels came forth from their diamond houses, and flew across space toward the Naglfar, thrusters burning, weapons white hot, and their once-bright robes, so festive and gay, had grown laser mirrored and hardened to armor.

  “Thus paradise died. Men slew men. Mentality records, the physical copies of the dead, were destroyed, and idiots, half their memories gone, woke in the interrupted resurrection circuits. Ao Ormgorgon himself was slain.

  “And yet how could the rebels prevail? They were scattered and slow, individualists to the very last, unable and unwilling to understand each other, even in a common cause. The Nothing Mentality was unified, unhesitating, and swift. The Nothing was the culmination of the Fourth Generation of machine intelligence, programmed not to argue, not to heed, but only to obey one law and destroy, without mercy, whatever opposed.

  “There was killing, and a grim victory. And one question in the ears of every mask whispered: whom now would the Nothing obey? We immortals had seen no need to establish a rule of primogeniture or rules for the change of government. There was no one to replace Ao Ormgorgon; he had left no instruction; whether or not the All-thing had constitutional authority to appoint a successor was a matter of divided legal opinion.

  “An opinion the Nothing Mentality did not share. The Nothing called for a plebiscite, saying that the majority of people should appoint a commission to govern the Nothing Mentality. But who would serve as commissioners? The house minds and garments of all the folk whispered and urged them to vote for those candidates of whom the Nothing approved.

  “The opposition party was unwilling to put forward very many candidates. After all, we did not know each other very well, and rarely saw each other. Our best friends, our concubines and table cooks, our book escorts and bardlings, were all, by now, run by the Nothing.

  “Over many years, the act of voting degenerated to a meaningless formality, and was discontinued. The Nothing appointed its own commissioners. More years passed, and the commissioners stopped asking the Nothing what it was they should order it to do, but merely gave the order that the Nothing should do as it saw fit.

  “The Nothing’s sense of logic and efficiency, its inhuman mindless rationality, forced it to carry out its instructions, without fear or favor, without wisdom or mercy, until its orders were carried out to their most absurd extreme. Those who objected were deleted from noumenal records, immortality lost, and left alone to die.

  “Slowly, and then with greater speed as the years passed, the Nothing demanded from us, and we gave, more and more access into our minds, more control over memories and thought, our movements and actions.

  “Each year saw fewer freedoms for us. More dissatisfaction, less joy.

  “The Nothing Mentality saw this joylessness as potential threat, and required all our minds to be redacted and resculpted to render us docile and content. Efficiency also required that we all be linked to one mind system, one nanotechnological mass composition, easier to police than scattered individuals. It was done to us, and for the same reasons, just as we had done to the machine intelligences before.

  “The ultimate results of that you know. The Last Broadcast from our Oecumene showed the catastrophe which ended our tragedy. The nanomachine swarm absorbed all things. For ease of storage, all human minds were reduced to noumenal coded pulses, which, in the form of electromagnetic energy, were shot into orbit around the nearevent horizon of our dark sun. You know gravity warps space and can bend light? Our dark sun, deep in its gravity well, can bend light so far that the photons will orbit the singularity core in a s
table circle, balanced precisely at the edge of the event horizon. Their time is slowed almost to nothing there. They are beyond all natural harm. For them, not even one second has passed.

  “No one objected to this process. Our law had made them content.

  “The Nothing Mentality had achieved its programmed goals. The humans of the Second Oecumene were entirely safe. With no further purpose to its existence, and with no innate desire to live, the great machine extinguished itself.

  “And the Silent Oecumene never made noise or music again.”

  4

  THE DUEL

  1.

  Phaethon sat, still immobile in his captain’s chair, still stiffened in his rigid body form, and the great ship still accelerating at twenty-five gravities. Astonishing energies were being spent while he maintained that boost; astonishing velocities were mounting.

  And yet, why? He only maintained the gravity to keep the Cold Duke body which the Silent One inhabited pinned in place, oppressed with a weight even a Neptunian could not withstand. He listened to the Silent One’s tale as minutes passed, but he did not slacken speed or ease his defenses, even though no danger now seemed evident.

  If the story were true, then there had been no threat, military or otherwise, to the Golden Oecumene. There had only been Xenophon, possessed, and perhaps cooperating, with a ghost from a long-dead civilization. Xenophon, with his Neptunian superconductive and modularly expandable nervous architecture, could reach the mental heights of a low-level Sophotech, and could anticipate and organize a tremendously complex plan, weigh multiple factors, deduce stunning insights, outthink Phaethon, and, yes, come close to stealing the Phoenix Exultant.

  It all could have been done without a Sophotech. It might be true. Might.

  Phaethon sent: “How does this story explain your actions or justify your crimes?”

  “Surely all is apparent. The Golden Oecumene Sophotechs were in communication with the Second Oecumene Sophotechs during the first millennium of your so-called Era of the Seventh Mental Structure. Second Oecumene history unfolded as was planned by their cold and superior intellects. The Sophotechs dared not tolerate the existence of a free and independent people, people attempting to exist without their meddling guidance, people attempting to retain their humanity. I cannot entirely condemn the rebels who precipitated the Last War, and slew Ao Ormgorgon; their motive was to retain that selfsame independence. But it is not a coincidence that they were advised, at first, by resurrected Sophotechs.”

  “Paranoia. Why would the Sophotechs desire your downfall? They are harmless and peaceful.”

  “Peaceful? Yes. But only because war is inefficient, and they have no need to resort to it. Please understand me: I do not attribute to your Sophotechs any evil motive, or malice, hatred . . . or any other human emotion. But I do think that they observe the universe around them, draw conclusions, and act on those conclusions. And they conclude that order, law, logic, and organization is to be preferred to chaos, humanity, life, and freedom.”

  “Is law and order such a bad thing, then?”

  “In moderation, to govern immature races, the use of force which you call law is, perhaps, excusable. But moderation is alien to machine thinking. Law as an absolute, law carried out to its logical extreme—that is a lifeless and inhuman thing, a thing only a machine could admire.

  “Such law they crave. And this is why our society was destroyed.

  “Your Sophotechs have publicly admitted that their long-term goal is the extinction of all independent life, and the absorption of all thought into one eventual Cosmic Overmind, ruling over a cold universe of dead stars.

  “In those end times, where could a spirit like that which once animated the Second Oecumene live then? That spirit could exist only in conflict with that all-ruling, unliving mind. How could creatures of pure logic love rebels, love explorers, love those who bring change, disorder, and growth? It is in the nature of machines to calculate, to control variables, to avoid clutter and confusion.

  “And so the Second Oecumene was, perhaps, a million or a trillion years from now, destined to be a threat. Or, if not a threat, then, at least, an irregularity, a gremlin in the all-embracing, bloodless calculations of their pristine white minds.

  “What need be done to obviate this threat? To factor out, so to speak, this variable? Why, the Sophotechs simply had to wait until some generation rose among the mortals of the Sixth Era in whom all fire of freedom had turned to ash. A generation leaden, conservative, cautious, and slow. A generation, led by one like Orpheus, whose every thought would dwell on the past, on the restricted, on the safe.

  “Then the Sophotechs give this Orpheus the key of immortality. They chose their puppet well. This present generation freezes, like so many glittering green flies trapped in amber, into a position of power from which none shall ever unseat them. Do you doubt that power? You have felt its action. The College of Hortators is no more than the extension of the will of Orpheus: you know that.

  “And with that same stroke, the Sophotechs introduce into the Second Oecumene such temptation—for who is willing to forgo endless life, when all one’s neighbors are immortal?—and such danger—for we almost became pets of the machines, much as you now are—that our choices were either to surrender our human lives or to surrender our freedom.

  “We chose the second, and it slew us, but the first would have been just as fatal. Either choice leads to destruction, as you have seen.

  “And so our spirit dies. We once colonized a distant star system, with great hardship and peril, against all odds and all opposition. Where is that daring now? Where that love of freedom? Where is a man willing to defy the universe, if need be, and, with apologies to none nor leave asked of any, willing to risk all on nothing other than his own private and uncompromising vision?

  “That spirit was once alive in the Second Oecumene. Our very existence was like a clarion in the distance, calling out for brave, free men to follow us. But now that call is silent. That spirit, whose music once rang so fiercely in us, is silent.

  “It is that spirit which the machine minds slew. If that spirit still exists at all, good Phaethon, it exists, I hope, in you.”

  2.

  Phaethon, seated, was silent, thinking. At last he sent: “You still have not answered my central question. Why all this deception and mayhem? What was the purpose of your baroque crimes?”

  “I thought it would be evident by now. While not everything has happened as had been, at first, calculated, all this, including my capture, was foreseen and planned upon. Your enemies, your real enemies, those who have hindered you from the first, are now safely locked outside this invulnerable hull, cut off from every form of communication, every form of espionage, every form of interference. There is no ship in the Golden Oecumene able to give chase. Your freedom is at hand. Your escape is here.

  “All the crimes and illusions we caused were caused with this one end in mind: To make certain that you and your ship, fully stocked, busked and ready, fueled, loaded and crewed, would be released from the Golden Oecumene. The military Sophotechs which compose your War Mind no doubt were unwilling to underestimate us, and, in order to make this trap inviting, insisted on having every detail correct. Which means the ship actually is ready and able to fly. No one else has a body specially made to withstand the tremendous accelerations of which this ship is capable; therefore you, no doubt, are Phaethon.

  “Nothing other than a military threat to your Golden Oecumene could have pressured your Sophotechs into putting this ship and her only qualified pilot into this situation. The illusion of that threat was produced. That threat was only meant to bring you here and now, under these circumstances, which it has.”

  “You allowed yourself to be captured?”

  “Of course. There was no other way to speak to you without a sense filter in the way. I tried once before in the Saturn-tree grove, remember? I came to tell you the truth of things. Putting my life in your hands is merely my one despe
rate way to show you my sincerity and goodwill.”

  “Tell me this truth. I am eager to hear it.”

  “First, I must disabuse you of the notion that the Sophotechs are friendly to your cause. You believe they’ve been helping you all along, don’t you? But if they favored you, why did they take no direct action? You cannot say it was because of any laws or programming. They make their own laws and programming; that is what makes them Sophotechs. If they favored you, why did they not arrange matters to turn out to your benefit, without suffering and heartache? Was it because they lacked intelligence? But you say that is the one thing they do not lack.

  “Sophotechs control nine-tenths of the resources and property of your Oecumene. If they favored you, or favored your dream, why haven’t they long since built such a vessel as this? Or lent you the funds to build it, or to save it from bankruptcy, when you were in need?

  “The Sophotechs publicly have said they intend to populate first this galaxy, then all others. If that is their ultimate goal, why this prohibition on star travel? Why keep humanity bottled in one small star system? Could it be that the patient machines are merely waiting for the humans either to die or to be tamed or to be absorbed?

  “Your Golden Sophotechs were in communication with the Silent Oecumene Sophotechs for many years. Twenty millenia was not too long for machines to wait between signals. They had from us the technology to create artificial black holes, to establish singularity fountains, and to shower mankind with the blessings of endless energy and endless wealth such as that which we enjoyed. Then, everyone—not just the one rogue son of the Oecumene’ s wealthiest—would be able to afford such a ship as this, and they would be as common as reading rings. If the Sophotechs favor you, and favor your dream, why haven’t they done so? You cannot answer me, can you?”

  Phaethon said: “I cannot. Obviously, I don’t know the answers to your questions. I did not even know the Second Oecumene ever had Sophotechs, or that they ever maintained communication with the Golden Oecumene. We were told all contact was lost long ago, during our Sixth Era. Are you sure your facts are in order? Memories can be faked.”