The New Space Opera 2 (80 page)

Atkins looked again at the nearby Neptunian world. He recognized it as Elpenor, the giant he had seen in transit between Canopus and Eta Carina. The Swans at that time, not certain whether Atkins was part of the Renunciant Diaspora, had held their hand.

Elpenor was only a gas giant down to about thirty thousand feet beneath the surface. The remainder of the world was hollow, the core having been compressed down to the diameter of an atom, to give the Swans the singularity they needed for their Infinity Fountains. The mass of the world was unchanged. Maintaining a hollow shell of that size and shape was nearly impossible, but with an endless supply of energy, what was nearly impossible was practical.

He said, “We suspected you were heading toward the galactic core. There is an immense black hole there, larger than any of the merely stellar masses you so far have had at your disposal. But why did you think the war would last long enough for you to get there, do what you meant to do, and return?”

She said dismissively, “We are more concerned with our disagreements among our circles and covens than anything to do with you. It is intensely painful to us to contemplate that there are minds beyond our control that show no respect for our dreams. There were those who said we mortals could not wage long-term war against you. Here is the counter-proof. We can wage a war to last as long as we wish to wage it. The Armada was to serve as an example to prove that certain conflict-types would outlast history.”

He laughed himself at that, a bitter, small laugh. “What is your name, ma'am?”

She said, “We do not have names. All who address me are my servants, and merely call me Milady. Our machines assign names only to speak one to another about a third not present. If you speak to others of me, call me Ao Ahasuerus; but call me not that.”

“Well, Milady, you are one crazy, sick egomaniac, but we can agree on this one point. There will always be war. It is the natural condition of man.”

“No. There will always be war, but there will not always be man. Observe again.”

Again, images appeared in the crystal bulkhead above and below him. Again he saw the asteroid-clouds in the familiar scattered pattern. One after another after another passed before his gaze. One hundred, two hundred, five hundred. They occupied a volume of just over eighteen light-years.

Eventually, he saw what was wrong. “Insufficient mass. We did not get you all, did we? How many world-ships in your Death Armada survived?”

“Some were sacrificed that other might survive. The survivors are enough to create tidal distortions in the galactic core, altering the shape of the event horizon. It is enough to ignite an accretion disk and create the final weapon. It is easy to calculate the maximum volume the Golden Oecumene might occupy in fifty-two thousand years from present, and wipe out all those stars, every one, using the energy from infalling stars swept up by an unstable, and geometrically growing, galactic-core singularity. Even to begin retreating now, at ninety-nine percent of light-speed, the shockwave progressing at light-speed would eventually overtake you.”

Atkins frowned. “This is what you wanted to show me? It looks like the Silent Oecumene will win the war, and nothing we can do will stop it.”

She said, “And yet, I am not delighted, not amused, and my enjoyments are spoiled.”

He looked at the Swan where she floated, a thin, elfin shape curled in on herself, surrounded by luxurious yards of shining fabric, such robes as could never be used in planetary gravity. Colors pulsed in delicate half-tints through the layers of filmy cloth, but he did not have the aesthetic to interpret it. She had no face, no expression.

Eventually, she spoke again: “The thought-machinery of Elpenor was damaged in the fighting. My Benevolences cannot edit out of my mind disquieting, even painful thoughts, as they were once programmed to do, nor can they satisfy my every yearning.”

“For what do you yearn?”

She said, “You have within you all the techniques needed to build a sophotech and a noetic circuit, and immortality system, in your thought-space. I have access to the surviving singularity in Elpenor, and a working Infinity Fountain. We cannot cooperate: not you and I, for you and I are enemies. But we can defeat the Armada of Dark Worlds, even though it is now too late for the main galactic disk.”

“Are you surrendering? Helping the Commonwealth?”

Pinpoint receptors in her mask uttered a scornful laugh. “Surrender to whom? The images I show you are thousands of years old, corrected for im
mense redshift. The Armada may already be at the galactic core. We could not reach Sol before the Seyfert wave overtook it. Nothing will be left.”

Atkins drew his fan, unfolded it, and swam back through the air until his feet were near the clear diamond bulkhead. He loosened the blade in its scabbard, but did not draw it. Instead he paused, waiting, as tense and as patient as a cat before a mouse hole.

She said, “If you and I are the last, we can destroy each other.”

He said, “Is that your wish? It seems a poor recompense after you let me out of your prison. Ungrateful, even.”

She said, “You are the last and only soldier of your utopia. We must kill each other. Is this not what you were programmed to do?”

Atkins said, “Do I actually need to explain the difference between a soldier and a murderer? I don't kill for pleasure. You were talking about surrender a moment ago. Will you?”

“Yes,” she said, “But not to you. I will surrender only to what is greater than either of us, greater than what divides us.”

Atkins, crouched near the bulkhead, stars behind his feet, one hand at his sword hilt and the other on the vanes of his gold fan, merely waited, eyes narrowed. He honestly had no idea what this strange creature would say or do next.

Ao Ahasuerus said, “In a war between immortals, and those who seek to stay mortal, the only equality condition is for the immortals to perish, for this makes them mortal. However, my people betrayed me. I cannot be the real Ao Ahasuerus. I am a copy, a fake, a doll. Over and over, I have calculated and recalculated the parameters, using both your mathematics and my own, both your rational logic and my transrational logic, and I can come to no other conclusion.”

Atkins realized what had happened. “The two of us were the only ones who knew the aiming elements of the nova weapon. I was sent to meet with copies of Atkins hidden in your fleet, and you were sent to stop me. You had to send a real Swan, and you only had yourself to send. The only transmission you knew your fellow Swans would trust was one hidden in a living personality, wasn't it? The Eighth Mental Structure is a code that cannot be cracked. You yourself are not aware you hold it.”

Ao Ahasuerus said, “If I am a created being, and not a Lord of the Silent Oecumene, I owe them no loyalty. They betrayed our way of life. I must answer this treason with treason! I cannot rest, knowing that I am immortal. To prove my mortality, my humanity, I must die.”

“Be my guest,” said Atkins, puzzled and wondering. “All those life
time-tortured versions of me—I assume you killed them all—would be gratified. So what is stopping you?”

“Unlike you, vermin of the Golden Oecumene, as cold and unchanging as the metal for which you name yourselves, I am human. I cannot die save for a cause. I cannot overwrite my memories save for the sake of a woman better than I am.”

Atkins opened his mouth and closed it again. He said nothing.

The Swan said, “It was always a trap from the first, was it not? You do not understand us, but you understood that much. To destroy your own Earth, Old Earth, which we revered above all things, and then to tempt us, to lure us in with versions of the Earth, with replicas of all the ancient things, the human things, we so prize. Even in the Eighth Mental Structure, there is still a leakage, a seepage from the hidden self out into the outward awareness, is there not? I could not help but be lured to the Earth. You could not help, even when you were encrypted to think of yourself as Ulysses, falling in love. Your own psychology tricked you, did it not?”

“Maybe. I went through a messy divorce a few years back—millennium to you, I guess—and that must have bubbled up to the surface somehow. Penelope was just me in disguise, of course, and regulations should have prevented me from falling in love with myself. But when you invaded her, some alien element entered her thought systems, so, yes, I suppose something in me was lonely.”

“Admit it.”

Atkins said, “Yes. We destroyed the Earth deliberately as a psychological ploy, and set up copies of the Earth in star systems where I was waiting. Twenty-one of the star oecumenes were completely fake, and there was no one inhabiting those places but me.”

“How could you burn your own home? Our common home?”

“It is just an object made of matter. We have a digital copy. I can build another one.”

“And will you?”

It was at that instant that Atkins saw what the Swan was saying, but it was many minutes, perhaps even years, before he agreed.

20. The Suicide of the Swan

He said: “As for what is hidden within me, whatever is behind the barrier of the Eighth Mental Structure, that I do not know. Perhaps my superiors encoded whole populations of noumenal personalities, copies of
every one on Earth. Obviously you could not get those people out of me by torture, since I do not know myself.”

“Was Ulysses a real person, or fiction? Is a copy of him inside you?”

“I don't know. Could be. If you build a logic diamond large enough to house him, maybe he'll come out. Or lure him out with something he wants. But we cannot know beforehand. We are acting blindly.”

Her last words were these: “My machines can no longer edit my thoughts and satisfy my yearnings. I am no longer a Lady of the Silent Oecumene, since to be a Swan means to control all reality. I repent that we have destroyed the galaxy together, you and I. If we do not make peace now, if we do not love each other now, then all human life must die.”

By the time she was done speaking, Ao Ahasuerus was obliterated, her memories and thoughts overwritten and deleted, and, in her thought-space, wondering, astonished to find herself alive, was Penelope.

And Atkins felt Ulysses stir inside his thoughts and begin to wake.

21. The End of the Tale

From these simple foundations comes our current culture.

The lovers sailed Elpenor, over the next eighteen millennia, to a nearby globular star cluster called Omega Centauri, well out of range of the Seyfert effect, which, even as they watched, they could see behind them, sweeping the main disk. Where it passed, stars were fed unaccustomed energy, and gained reaction mass, larger stars expanding to red giants before their time and superlarge stars going nova. Where too many superlarge stars were clustered, one nova would set off the next, so that whole star groups were ignited just as (to compare great things with small) a critical mass of uranium isotopes ignite in chain reaction, each atom setting off his neighbor.

Their new home was a cloud of fifty million stars some eighteen thousand light-years from the main disk of the Milky Way. Omega Centauri was not merely a star cluster, but the remaining core of a dwarf galaxy long ago stripped of its outer stars by the hungry gravity of the Milky Way. Unlike most star clusters, it contained a rich population of many star generations, promising abundant metallic elements. The black hole at the core of the cluster provided the young lovers with the singularity they needed to initiate an Infinity Fountain.

It is hard to say which star they first colonized. Many is the star who wishes to make that boast, but archeologists have yet to quiet the debate
with unambiguous evidence. In truth, the stars of the core of Omega Centauri are so thickly clustered, on average a mere tenth of a light-year apart, the interstellar travel could be performed merely by robust interplanetary craft, without the elaborate launching laser systems of the Golden Oecumene sailing vessels, or the inefficient matter-antimatter drives of their powered vessels.

The earliest antennae were no bigger than the size of the orbit of Pluto, but later generations made larger and ever larger, until some sheets of the charmed matter fabric stretch from star to star across light-years, so gossamer-fine that suns and worlds can orbit through the film and take no more notice of it than they would notice an equal mass of neutrinos. These antennae were built as acts of faith, hoping against hope, knowing that if the two oecumenes destroyed each other, refugees would have themselves broadcast to every point of the compass.

And that hope was rewarded. Wave after wave of refugees were caught in the antennae of the Omega Centauri, and woke in astonished laughter to find themselves alive. They were shown whatever local version of Earth was made for the nearest star, for Penelope loved creating and re-creating Old Earth, a task she delighted in, since it was an endless task. As for Atkins, not just Ulysses, but every one of the characters he had played in Eta Carina, he was spread across the worlds, using the same method he had used at Canopus for quickly re-peopling planets.

And so the human experiment was started again.

The strangest and most dangerous element in the experiment was the reintroduction of the Swans, his enemies, taken from the template of Ao Ahasuerus. It was not the intention of Atkins or of the military authority to let the mental information of the Silent Oecumene pass forever out of existence, and their unique, outlandish culture to be lost.

Ulysses and Penelope were reunited. Even though it was at first merely a fiction played out by mutual enemies, their love was real enough that it was the one thing to which the Lady of the Silent Oecumene, Ao Ahasuerus, was willing to surrender. For who does not surrender to love?

Epilogue

Modern copies of Ulysses have been so often self-altered to fit the popular conceptions of this culture hero as to be valueless to the serious paleo-psychologist or dramaturge. He remembers only the public version of the story.