John C. Wright - Golden Age 3 - The Golden Transcendence

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TOR BOOKS by John C. Wright

The Golden Age

The Phoenix Exultant

The Golden Transcendence

THE GOLDEN TRANSCENDENCE

Or, The Last of the Masquerade

JOHN C.WRIGHT

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that

this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the

publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment

for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

thereof, in any form.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-765-34908-6

EAN 978.0765-34908-8

First edition: November 2003

First mass market edition: June 2004

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

To my beloved wife,

dearer than my soul,

mother of my children

in whom my whole delight is summed

Orville, Wilbur, Justinian

THE SHIP

Personality and memory download in progress. Please hold all thoughts in

abeyance until mental overwrite is complete, or unexpected results may obtain.

Where was he? Who was he?

Information unavailable—all neural pathways occupied by emergency noetic

adjustment. Please stand by normal thinking will resume presently.

What the hell was going on? What was wrong with Us memory? He had been

dreaming about burning children as he slept, and the shadow of aircraft

spreading clouds of nano-bacteriological agent across a blasted \

landscape....

This unit has not been instructed to respond to com-mands until the noumenal

redaction palimpsest process is complete. Please hold all questions until the

end: your new persona may be equipped with proper emotional responses to

soothe uncertainties, or memory-information to answer questions of fact. Are

you dissatisfied with your present personality? Select the Abort option to

commit suicide memory-wipe and start again.

He groped his way toward memory, to awareness. Whatever the hell was happening

to him, no, he did not want to start all over again. It had been something

terrible, something stolen from him. Who was he?

He had the impression he was someone terrible, someone all mankind had

gathered to ostracize. A hated exile. Who was he? Was he someone worth being?

If you elect to commit suicide, the new personality version will be equipped

with any interim memory chains you form during this process, so he will think

he is you, and the illusion of continuity will be maintained. ...

"Stop that! Who am I?"

Primary memories written into cortex now. Establishing parasympathic paths to

midbrain and hind-brain for emotional reflex and habit-pattern behavior.

Please wait.

He remembered: he was Phaethon. He had been exiled from Earth, from the whole

of the Golden Oec-umene, because there was something he loved more than Earth,

more than the Oecumene.

What had it been? Something inexpressibly lovely, a dream that had burned his

soul like lightning—a woman? His wife? No. Something else. What?

Thought cycle complete. Initiating physical process. "Why was I unconscious?"

_ You were dead.

"An error in the counteracceleration field?" Marshal-General Atkins killed

you. The last soldier of Earth. The only member of the armed forces of a

peaceful Utopia, Atkins commanded godlike powers, weapons as deadly as the

superhuman machine intelligences could devise. Strangely enough, the machines

refused to use the weapons, refused to kill, even in self-defense, even in a

spotless cause. Only humans (so said the machines), only living beings, should

be allowed to end life.

There was a plan. Atkins's plan. Some sort of plan to outmaneuver the enemy.

Phaethon's exile was part of that plan-, something done to bring the agents of

the Silent One out of hiding. But there were no details. Phaethon did not know

the plan. "Why did he kill me?" You agreed.

"I don't remember agreeing!" You agreed not to remember agreeing. "How do I

know that?"

The question is based on a false-to-facts supposition. Mind records indicate

that you do not know that; therefore the question of how is counterfactual.

Would you care to review the thought index for line errors?

"No! How do I know you are not the enemy? How do I know I have not already

been captured?"

Please review the previous answer; the same result obtains.

"How do I know I am not going to be tortured, or my nervous system is not

being manipulated?" Your nervous system is being manipulated. Damaged nerves

are about to be brought back to life tem-perature and revitalized. Would you

like a neutralizer? There will be some pain. "How much pain?" You are going to

be tortured. Would you like a dis-"What kind of discontinuity? An

anaesthetic?" Pain signals must be traced to confirm that the in center of

your brain is healthy. Naturally, it would be counterproductive to numb the

pain under these circumstances, but the memory of the pain can be redacted

from your final memory sequence, so that the version of you who suffers will

not be part of the personal continuity of the version of you that wakes up.

"No more versions! I am I, Phaethon! I will not have my self tampered with

again!"

You will regret this decision.

Odd, how matter-of-fact that sounded. The machine was merely reporting that he

would, indeed, regret the decision.

And, just as he blacked out again, he did.

Phaethon woke in dull confusion, numb, heavy, paralyzed, blind. He could not

open his eyes, could not move.

For one suffocating moment, he wondered if he had been captured by the enemy,

and was even now a helpless and disembodied brain, floating in a sea of

nutrient muck.

He was glad Atkins had not told him the plan. He remembered that he had agreed

to it; but this was all he remembered.

Where was he? A short-term memory file opened: He was aboard the ship. His

ship.

His ship.

A long-term memory file opened, and he saw the schematics of the mighty

vessel. A hundred kilometers from prow to stern, sleek and streamlined as a

spear blade, a hull of golden adamantium, an artificially stable element of

unimaginable weight: immeasurably strong, inductile, refractory. The

supermetal had an impossibly high melting point: plasma could not make the

adamantium run; it could dive into a medium-sized yellow star and emerge

unscathed.

The core of the ship was all fuel, hundreds of cubic acres of frozen

antihydrogen. Like its positive-matter cousin, antihydrogen took on metallic

properties when condensed to near-absolute-zero temperatures,

and could be magnetized. Millions upon millions of metric tonnes of this fuel

were held inside endless web-works of magnetic cells throughout the hollow

volume of the great ship. Less than 1 percent of her interior was taken up

with living quarters and control minds; everything else was fuel and drive.

It was the ship mind he was interlinked with now. Somehow, he sensed his

wounded half-finished thoughts were being played out by the near-Sophotech

superintelligence of the ship. But what a mind it was! A perfect map of the

galaxy was in its memory, or, at least, the segment of the galaxy visible from

Sol. The massive core, a hell of dust and radiation hiding a black hole

thousands of light-years in radius, blotted out light or radio or any signal

from the far side of the galaxy. Even with such a ship as this, those places

were thousands or millions of years' travel away, a mystery that even

immortals would have to live a long time to solve.

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 be 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

Earth-mind, 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. Somethings 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 pseudo-matter, 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 consumption-pleasures 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

unthink-able 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 to 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 the rate of deceleration (jerk, as it was called)

proved more dangerous than the deceleration 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 Oec-umene. 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-fcrward,

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 Laocoon, 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: Sed-ulous 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,

map-ping out some strategy now gone from memory.

Phaethon examined the memory casket on the sym-bol 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, was 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. The inner ring, in microgravity, housed the

Eremites amd Frost Children, at one time, servants, children, and

bioconstructs of the Neptunians, but now equal part-ners in their ventures,

intermingled in more ways than

one, and indistinguishable, these days, except as a different form of body.

These too were part of the strange mass-mind of the Duma, representing the

interests of the moons, outer colonies, and those Far Ones who dwelt in the

cometary halo. Hanno said, "We are at dock, milord." The Phoenix Exultant was

not going to couple with any dock, of course. "Docking" for a ship of her

immensity merely meant that she would come to rest relative to the Neptunian

station, surrounded by such beacons and warnings as traffic control required

to warn other ships away from her volume of space.

Ulysses, pointing to one of the mirrors, exclaimed, "Others vessels close with

us. Will they be hospitable or no?"

Armstrong reported, "We have radio contact with Neptunian vehicles. They are

initiating docking rendezvous."

Other mirrors showed the view port and starboard. Clusters of radar noise

betrayed the presence of ships. Doppler analysis showed they were beginning

maneuvers to close with the Phoenix Exultant.

And the sheer number of Neptunian ships was astonishing. There were thousands,

some of them over a kilometer in length. Why were so many vessels, equipped

with so much mass, closing with him?

Jason, from behind him, spoke up: "Sir. Messages from yonder boats. The

Neptunian crew is ready to come aboard." Crew? Come aboard?

Jason said again, "Sir! The Neptunian owner, Neop-tolemous, is ready to take

possession of the Phoenix Exultant. He requests you open the channels leading

into the ship mind, so that he can load his passwords and routines to

configure the mental environment for the disembodied members of the crew. The

supply boats are coming alongside, and requesting you open

your ports and bay doors. The physical crew are maneuvering to dock. What is

your answer?"

Neoptolemous. The combine-entity built from the memories of his friend

Diomedes and the Silent One agent Xenophon.

Phaethon saw swarms of enemy closing in on his ship. Perhaps some of them,

perhaps most, were merely innocent Neptunians. But the command staff, and

Neoptolemous, no doubt were controlled by the Nothing Sophotech. That meant,

in effect, that they were all enemies.

Countless jets of light, flickers from maneuvering thrusters, were twinkling

near the hundreds of prow air-lock doors, near the scores of midship docking

ports, near the four gigantic cargo and fuel bays aft Other energy mirrors,

tuned to other frequencies, showed the connection beams radiating from

off-board computers and boat minds, pinging against the receivers, radio

dishes, and sensory array which ran along the lee edge of the great prow

armor. The off-board systems were trying to make contact with the ship mind.

Preliminary information packages showed hundreds and thousands of files and

partials waiting to download into the ship and into her systems.

All waiting for him. The enemy.

"Sir? What is your answer?"

Phaethon reached over and opened the memory casket.

Inside the memory casket were three cards. They were a drab olive green in

hue, with no pictoglyph or emblemry at all upon them. They were labeled

"SDMF01—Spaceship Defensive Modification Files.

Government Issue Polystructual Stealth Microcorder and Retrieval (Remote Unit

Control)."

Phaethon raised an eyebrow. The Phoenix Exultant was certainly not a mere

"spaceship." She was a .star-ship. And what ugly names and colors! Did this

Atkins fellow truly have no taste at all? Perhaps the military burned the

artistic sections of the brain away and replaced it with a weapon or

something.

He looked into the Middle Dreaming, and the information about the stealth

remotes flowed into his brain. There were three sets or swarms of remotes. The

first was gathered around the air locks; the second had interpenetrated the

ship-mind thought boxes and established overrides at all the

machine-intelligence switch points and circuit resolves; the third were a

group of medical remotes hidden under the floor of the bridge. There were no

further instructions or details about the plan.

But there did not need to be. Phaethon was an engineer; he knew tools could

only be shaped for one purpose. He studied the specifications on the last

group, the medical group, of stealth remotes, and saw the particular

modifications that had been made to them, including special combinations to

allow them to make transmission connections between Neptunian neurocircuitry

and noetic reader circuits.

The grisly and efficient deadliness of the little mili-tary remotes should

have horrified him. Instead, for some reason, he found himself admiring the

ruthless simplicity of the design.

And so it was not without some relish that Phaethon answered his mannequins.

Phaethon said, "Okay, boys. Open communication. Let's get this show on the

road."

The identification channel opened: The radio encryption bore the heraldic code

of the Neptunian Duma, but also of the Silver-Gray.

The visual channel opened: a mirror to his left lit with an incoming call.

Here was an image of a tall, dark warrior in Greek hoplite armor, a round

shield in his left hand, two spears of ashwood in his right.

For a moment of hope, Phaethon thought it was Diomedes. But a subscript to the

image introduced this as Neoptolemous, who merely had inherited the right to

the icons and images Diomedes once used to represent himself.

"Behemoth of nature," Neoptolemous said, "Exemplar of all this Golden

Oecumene, at the zenith of her genius, can produce, Phoenix Exultant] We are

impatient for your welcome. Open your doors and locks. We have material, and

manpower, gallons of crew-brain-swarms, software, hardware, greenware,

wetware, smallware, largeware, sumware, and noware, all waiting now to merge

with you. This is a fine day for all Neptunians! Already the Duma consumes

parts of itself, and moves the thoughts of your high triumph— and my own—to

selected parts of longr-term memory! Come, Phaethon! Welcome me as befits the

fashion of the Silver-Gray! We will exchange no brain materials through any

pores, but I will form a hand, after the ancient fashions, and curl your

fingers around my fingers, and pump your arm first up, then down, to show we

bear no weapons, after we have first agreed upon an up-down axis. I suggest

that, if we are under acceleration, the direction of motion always be

considered 'up'!"

Phaethon was caught between amusement and horror. wonder and fear. Amusement,

because this odd speech reminded him somewhat of the dry and ironic humor of

Diomedes. But that was Diomedes before his marriage of minds with Xenophon,

before he commingled himself to create this creature, Neoptolemous.

And the horror was that Diomedes must have had no notion of what kind of mind

he had been marrying. Xenophon, either an agent or a puppet of the Silent

Ones, must have had redaction traps and thought worms ready to capture

Diomedes, a marriage of minds turned into a brutal rape, with noetic readers

primed to rob Diomedes of any useful information, ready to turn his

personality, imagination, and memory into tools and weapons useful to the

enemy.

Was there some part, some ghost, of Diomedes, still alive inside the horrid

maze of an alien brain, perhaps aware of what his body now was doing, aware of

what vile purposes his thoughts and memories now served?

Neoptolemous said: "Why do you not respond? Why do you not flex the muscles in

your cheeks so as to draw skin flesh away from your teeth, just enough to show

the teeth, yet not so much as to cause alarm? I know that a face contortion of

this kind is the way to show friendship, and welcome."

The enemy attempt to seize control of Phaethon's armor made no sense unless

they were going to take possession of the ship. And Neoptolemous was the

entity who presently held title to the ship. Logically, therefore,

Neoptolemous, and Diomedes before him, had been absorbed by the enemy.

Neoptolemous was talking: "Speak! Your ardent admirers and loyal crew

hyperventilate with pleasure at the thought of flying to the stars! We have

gathered crew partials and full personas from each part of the Neptunian

Tritonic Composition. The materials we bring are gathered. Open your ship mind

that we may intrude the specially designed routines, useful to our purposes,

into your secret core. Then, as soon as all things are aboard, what obstacles

would dare to skew our course? We shall all climb far away from the light and

gravity of the burning sun, ever upward (for the direction of motion, I have

already said, is 'up'). Yes! Up and away into the dark of endless night, and

there, far from where any eyes can see, far away from where any hand could

stop us, particular desires of our own will be accomplished."

Phaethon hesitated. Was he actually planning to let his enemies onboard? Was

he supposed to fight this war himself, alone, armed only with what the three

olive drab cards in the memory casket had given him?

But then, he had to be alone. Who else had a body that could adjust to such

intolerable gravitational pressure?

If this hypothetical plan required that Phaethon, pretending innocence, allow

Neoptolemous aboard, any hesitation now would alert the Nothing Sophotech, and

perhaps send that entity permanently into hiding. He had to decide

immediately.

Phaethon did recall that both the horse monster and Scaramouche had been

killed by Atkins in swift and decisive strokes, under circumstances suggesting

that Nothing Sophotech could not have heard news of the deaths of bis agents.

At best, Nothing would be suspicious because messages from Scaramouche were

overdue.

But if Nothing's purpose was to seize control of the Phoenix Exultant before

her launch from the Solar System, then this moment now was the evil

Sophotech's last Opportunity to act. No matter how suspicious the enemy might

be, Nothing had to get Neoptolemous, his agent, aboard, and now.

And so should Phaethon, acting alone, and on the blind faith that he would be

able somehow to overcome the agent sent by an unthinkably intelligent enemy

Sophotech, the last remnant of a long-dead civilization, an agent armed

perhaps with powers and sciences unknown to the Golden Oecumene, should

Phaethon knowingly let that agent aboard? ...

But it seemed it was his duty to do so. Better to follow orders, and do his

duty, even if he did not understand that duty, rather than let those duties go

undone.

He directed a thought at the mirror.

"Welcome aboard, owners and crew. I am happy to serve as pilot and navigator

of this vessel. We shall explore the universe, create such worlds as suit us,

and do all else which we have dared to dream to do. Welcome, Neoptolemous of

Silver-Gray. Welcome, all."

The hatches and docks all along the miles of the Phoenix Exultant hull slowly,

grandly, began to cycle open.

The enemy came aboard swiftly and slowly.

The antennae and thought-port array along the Phoenix Exultant's prow opened

to the radio traffic. Phaethon tracked the invasions of the enemy software,

and saw the readout begin to register the flows of poison into the hierarchy

of the ship's pure mind. This took a matter of seconds.

The prow air lock doors admitted those Neptunians (and there were scores)

whose "bodies" were spacewor-thy. Gleaming blue-gray in their flexible

housings, these masses of heurotechnology fell across empty vacuum, slid

across the hull toward the air locks. Phaethon consulted ship diagrams, and

sent a message to gather the high-speed elevators into the living quarters,

and lock them there without power. Those Neptunians entering by the forward

air locks would have miles to travel before they reached the living quarters,

or any system of the ship where they could do any damage.

At the scores of midship docking ports, smaller vessels, space caravans and

flying houses, were arriving. The docks here were wide spaces, half a

kilometer wide and five kilometers long. Fortunately, the caravans arriving

here also were mingled with the arriving biological material, canisters of

Neptunian atmosphere under pressure, and acres of Neptunian jungle crystal

held in greenhouses. Phaethon simply deactivated half of his robot stevedores

and longshoreman, and cut the intelligence budget available to the supercargo.

Then he directed the supercargo to ask all the incoming persons and materials

to submit to examinations for viruses, prank-craft, explosives, or

self-replicating aphrodisiacs. Being Neptunians, they would not think these

precautions odd or insulting. If anything, they might think Phaethon's

precautions were lax.

An estimator in his armor allowed him to calculate the average confusion or

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TORBOOKSbyJohnC.WrightTheGoldenAgeThePhoenixExultantTheGoldenTranscendenceTHEGOLDENTRANSCENDENCEOr,TheLastoftheMasqueradeJOHNC.WRIGHTNOTE:Ifyoupurchasedthisbookwithoutacover,youshouldbeawarethatthisbookisstolenproperty.Itwasreportedas"unsoldanddestroyed"tothepublisher,andneithertheauthornorthepublis...

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John C. Wright - Golden Age 3 - The Golden Transcendence

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