The New Space Opera 2 (75 page)

It was quiet there, with little or no radiation from the primary, almost nocturnal.

Romantically, Earth and Ulysses had almost no neighbors. They were alone in the conical shadow of their comfortable little parasol.

As it turned out, by one of those coincidences so unlikely that only random chance (or a meddling sophotech) could have arranged it, Twenty-first Earth had no Luna. Although Ulysses was of greater volume (for the honeycombed logic diamond occupying his vast interior was much less dense than the ferro-metallic core of Old Luna), he was roughly equal in mass to the moon, close enough to create the tidal stresses Twenty-first Earth needed to maintain her proper shape. A close orbit would help not merely the core convection, which in turn would help the magnetic pole behavior, but it would also allow Penelope to retire the very expensive system she had been using to create ocean tides, so that the little animals dwelling along the shore would have their accustomed environment.

(Meanwhile, his tenants, who once had gloried to the sight of storm-swirling Orotund rising in the east, now rejoiced instead to the visions of a rising blue world that, despite the years and light-years and the far voyages across strange psychological topologies, men still found beautiful.)

Penelope sent her Warlocks and ecologists to look over Ulyssian oceans. And he spent his time trying to cheer up the melancholy living biosphere of replicated Earth, both with radio signals and with remotes.

They talked about the war.

6. War in Heaven

Instruments turned toward the home stars detected that Sol had been struck by a singularity weapon, and sent into paroxysms far from the normal routes of stellar evolution. Other stars near Sol, Alpha Centauri, Bernard's
Star, Wolfe 359, Tau Ceti, 72 Ophiuchus, where colony-oecumenes of the Immortals had been placed, also showed disturbances in stellar output. Still other stars had vanished from the normal wavelengths, dimmed to red or to infrared, indicating that the colonies there had completed Dyson Spheres, hording the output of their suns against the coming days of war.

For their part, stars near Cygnus had suffered observable changes as well, redshifting, and, over the centuries, being absorbed into accretion disks, as the Swan technology ate suns and fed them into their controlled-horizon singularities. However, bursts of Hawking radiation, and sudden interruption of gravity lenses (seen when such objects passed across the brighter background of the Orion Arm), told of events where the black holes had been disrupted, or, somehow, their internal mass unfolded back into normal space. No technology known to the Chrysopoeian Oecumene could possibly affect or be affected by anything inside a black hole: the standard model of physics held this to be starkly impossible.

All this news, needless to say, carried by various wavelengths of light, told of events between six and eight thousand years ago.

7. By the Light of a Personal Moon

We will never know if the impulse that sent Ulysses to visit Penelope “in the flesh” (as the quaint old Manorial expression has it) was one that arose naturally from his psychology, or if it was a manifestation from a hidden thought-singularity of the Eighth Mental Structure. Nonetheless, we can re-create, with some artistic license, what that first meeting involved.

We know, for example, from the mass-payload records of the surface-to-orbit remotes, that an object not far from the base-human standard norm of three hundred pounds and ten feet tall was ferried from Ulysses to Twenty-first Earth. Radio traffic records, albeit encrypted, nonetheless show a volume of data comparable to a kenosis format typical of that era. In other words, Ulysses himself, occupying a 10^24 kilogram logic diamond (something approaching sophotech levels of intellect), transmitted a severely stepped-down caricature of his personality template to a 10^8 kilogram space station, which, in turn, constructed a personality template inside the circuits of a relay (one-tenth that size) orbiting Twenty-first Earth, and this satellite was in high-volume communication with a flesh-and-blood-and-diamond brain of about four hundred grams. Each segment of the fourfold brain system carried a constantly updated representative of the other three segments.

The thought structure was a recursive hierarchy, working something like the secondary brain in a dinosaur's tail. Whatever was too complex or significant for the human brain of Ulysses Partial Four was sent to the relay for high-speed review and confirmation by Ulysses Partial Three; and higher-priority signals were sent (with a one-and-a-half-second delay on each end) to the space station whose circuits held Ulysses Partial Two; and anything
really
important was narrowcast down to the surface of Ulysses Prime.

This was not an unusual mental hierarchy for its time, and the three-second turnaround delay due to light-speed limits on brain-connection distances could be edited out of playback. Besides, the laws and customs of those days made Ulysses Prime liable for the actions and agreements of his remote partials: men were strange then, and family honor was cohesive. For good or ill, a man would live up to the vows and mistakes of his partial selves.

So: here was Ulysses Recursive Hierarch Four, Linear Step-Down Kenosis, Base Neuroform (with Secondary Template for Isolation Psychology (Cold Duke) in Potential), housed in a Human-Modified Phenotype. He was a ten-foot-tall cyborg with a dozen input responders peppering his spine and skull, naked as Adam, with hair not past his manly shoulders broad, and in one hand, a guitar.

8. Serenade

It was night, and Ulysses saw himself rising above the lake waters brighter than the full moon seen from Old Earth. A rippling path of un-moonlight reached toward the horizon, as if a road to the stars were offered him. Because he (Ulysses the planet) was covered with ocean, he had a brighter albedo than Old Luna, as well as being larger and closer. The light from Eta Carina (subdued to merely solar vehemence by an intervening parasol, whose location he deduced by occlusion of stars and streamers of bright nebulae) formed a pinpoint of reflection on his oceans, dazzling bright, and painted his visible crescent silver. Between the horns of the moon could be seen with the unaided eye (or, at least, with such unaided eyes as Ulysses the man possessed), lights from the floating cities of the Ulyssian tenants.

Because he (Ulysses the relay) was below the Earth's horizon at the moment, he (Ulysses the man) was momentarily out of communication with himself (Ulysses the space station).

So he seated himself (let us assume with a slight, purse-lipped smile)
in a grove not far from the shore, perhaps on a tree stump or perhaps on a stone, and let us imagine that Penelope has placed a picturesque ruin, perhaps a circular colonnade, nearby, with marble Doric pillars rising ghostly in the un-moonlight, and their connecting architraves ornamented with a frieze of nymphs fleeing satyrs, a frozen footrace endlessly circling the grassy space embraced by the pillars. Here and there were tall, slim poplars, sacred to Heracles, or pharmaceutical trees whose bioengineered balms cured numberless diseases in a form of mankind long-extinct, but which were still kept for the fragrance of their leaves, or for the sentiment of things past.

His skin thickened on his soles when he walked, or his buttocks when he sat, or perhaps he had a long, loose mantle of thinking-cloth to act as cushion to his rustic throne, or to wrap his muscled limbs against the cold, rather than simply increasing his skin-heat levels. He could adjust his eyes to the night vision of a fox, of course, but let us assume he is in an old-fashioned mood, and merely has his thinking-cloth emit a cloud of floating sparks, a type of controlled St. Elmo's Fire, tiny as lightning bugs, and balanced by magnetic monopoles so as to form no danger to him (the man). Or perhaps he is feeling even more old-fashioned and dashes the little sparks against some kindling he has gathered, and now there is a cheery campfire near his large, jet-black feet.

He sang in Portuguese, of course. There were other languages, to be sure, but in Portuguese
coracao
(heart) rhymes with
violao
(guitar) and
can-cao
(song), making it particularly easy to versify about singing on a guitar to win a lady's heart (which was indeed what he ended up doing, as was perhaps his plan from the first). He wanted to use a long-dead language, considering the surroundings. (He had not selected English, lest he be reduced to singing about the stars above shining on the dove perching on the glove he was dreaming-of, ending the lyric on a preposition. He could not tell from the historical records whether this was a strict rule for this language, or something he did not need to put up with.)

Melody haunted the moonlit glade. Sparks flew up from his campfire or from his electrostatic aura, as the case may be. A few deer stepped silently from the forest, long ears twitching. In theory, the individual deer did not comprehend the meaning of music, but as five or six of them came within earshot, the logic chips scattered through their nervous systems were within intercommunication range. His eyes were dialed down, not night-adapted, and so the rustle in the nocturnal woods might have been another doe or two.

The gathering of deer, kingliest stags and fawns most shy, song-enchanted, all knelt couchant near a guitar-strumming man, was an event sufficiently odd to trigger responses from local-area ecological subsystems, what we may call the unconscious mind, the midbrain, of Penelope.

At this point, imagine her like a maiden reclined on a couch in a bower, who hears a distant measure but does not wake; and yet the song was found in her dreams, threading its way like elusive smoke upward through nocturnal thoughts.

The system sent a blinking owl or two to investigate, and when the simple on-board thought-codes in the owls could not resolve the puzzle, diurnal birds woke up unexpectedly, to flock to the area and land on nearby branches, finches yellow as gold, cardinals red as blood.

(Imagine that the maiden in the bower opens lavender eyes, and sees the woven emerald leaves forming the roof of her wigwam, and smells the blooms threading through its sides, but still thinks the song is an echo from sleep.)

Ulysses increased the light output from his mantle, so then the fabric was shining bright as day; this comforted the birds, who settled close to hear his guitar, one landing on his knee or shoulder; but his splendor provoked a day-night query cycle from some of the plants not far away, which called a swan (huge in the gloom of the lake, and as serene as a ghost), which in turn stirred up a chorus of frogs, and, finally, these in turn disturbed the thick, colorless, and odorless gel at the bottom of the lake.

Between the swan and the frogs and the gel, a healthy amount of Penelope was now concentrated in the area, enough for self-awareness. The lake ooze surfaced as liquid, like an oil-slick, and sublimated immediately to a fine mist.

He saw the vapor rising like a Brocken Specter from the lake, and knew she was here.

She was in the mist, and in the swan, and the owls and songbirds, and through many eyes, she saw herself, in the form of does and vixens, all nuzzling this strange man. She was the serpent coiled around his ankle, the nightingale on his wrist.

Penelope (in the mist) looked on, each droplet gathering light into microspore receptors. Perhaps she wondered why she (in her pets) was nuzzling this man.

The mist settled and condensed, and soon clear liquid was dripping from the leaves and threading its way, microscopic rivers, down channels in the poplar bark. The warmth of the air was gone, the stillness was
clammy: Ulysses interpreted this behavior through a series of conventions called the Green Symphony Aesthetic; as if in his mind's eye, he saw an olive-skinned dark-haired Mediterranean beauty giving him a cold, unfriendly glance.

And she dripped a cold drop of herself, or two, down his neck, making him wince. One need not employ a foreign aesthetic to understand this gesture.

She addressed him. Of course, Penelope probably sent a radio signal from some nearby poplar tree or local node of her information system, but we are allowed a certain poetic license, so let us say a magpie, or some other Quaternary biotic of Old Earth, whose vocal passages can be used for this purpose, flapped near and landed and addressed him in human speech. One is tempted to say it is a gay-plumed parrot, but they are not normal to the temperate zone, and poetic license can only reach so far.

So, then, a bird that was certainly not a parrot spoke.

Cerebellines are famous for their composure, and the complex inscrutability of their thought, which is said to be able to regard every point of view at once: but let us assume for the sake of drama that Penelope addressed him with arch exasperation or coldly worded coyness. Romances are always sweeter if the girl and the planet do not at first get along. Let us take the opening lines from Ao Aerolith Wolfemind One-Nine's famous sonnet-cycle on the topic:

“Strange sir, I am neither in any wise proud, nor do I scorn you, nor yet am I too greatly amazed, but right well do I know what manner of man you seemed, in days past, when you went forth without fanfare from our glad company at Canopus. Far ahead of the Diaspora you sailed; and were given, in a casket, such thoughts, and such a soul, as could endure the endless solitude uncaring. Now is this, the clamor to disturb my nestling's slumber, and beguile the sleeping trees with dreams of day, a sign of such an uncaring heart? No doubt you opened your memory casket, changed your personae, and are now an Eremite, habituated to hear no voice but your own.”

This elegant speech provoked indignation from Ulysses. Had his satellite been above the horizon, perhaps, the wiser and swift brain there, Ulysses Three, would have seen the hidden jest of the comment, but the slower Ulysses Four, the human, reacted in a human fashion: “Madame! A mere hundred years would not try my patience even as deeply as your untruthful words. I have opened no casket, and loaded no isolationist template.”

But then he caught himself, or perhaps (after a three-second delay) his posthuman space-station self, Ulysses Two, found a dogleg signal path to put him in contact with his higher versions. If so, let us imagine (as Alexander Scriabin, Hypothetical Revenant, imagined in his composition for color-clavier “The Blush of Ulysses”), a burst of reddish gold in D major, to symbolize the wry resignation with which Ulysses the Planet recognized that blush of anger as his own, and, with a green shrug in A minor, the planet wrote the corresponding memory-emotion of the man into his own logs and mind.