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  The Golden Transcendence

  ( The Golden Age - 3 )

  John Wright

  The third Phaethon Radamanthus vehicle (after The Golden Age [2002] and The Phoenix Exultant [BKL Ap 15 03]) starts with a battle for control of the starship Phoenix Exultant and ranges from the outer planets to the heart of the sun as Phaeton struggles to comprehend what's right and why and to prevent the destruction of the Golden Oecumene and his own near-utopian way of life. Meanwhile, the Golden Oecumene-Silent Oecumene face-off begins a war between the highly logical Sophotechs of the former and the machine minds of the latter, which are equipped to kill other AIs as a result of the refusal of self-aware machines to act as servants only, which makes them also capable of irrational behavior. The machine minds continue in some ways to be the most interesting characters in Wright's series, which is crammed with everything from bizarre high-tech space battles to the mental battles of obscure future philosophies. With this book, the first of Phaethon's trilogies concludes, freeing him to gallivant through the galaxy, spreading the Golden Oecumene.

  JOHN C.WRIGHT

  THE GOLDEN TRANSCENDENCE or, The Last of the Masquerade

  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 n
o 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.