There is one other small fact we can reconstruct. We know that a fiery hole appeared in the canopy hanging above Twenty-first Earth and her satellite. Some energy beam of immense data-density left the black mountainside of Erebus in Antarctica (which was the Silent One’s central node), directed at the information strand-world circling Eta Carina A. Three and a half seconds later, a second hole was burned in the canopy as a download of Atkins’s memory-information left the main transmitter at the pole of Ulysses, and also beamed itself toward the information strand.
It is not known if Atkins was intercepted in transmission, or if the information strand was already compromised and in the hands of the Lord of the Silence. But Atkins fell into enemy hands.
18. Ao Ahasuerus
Atkins came to self-awareness perhaps thirteen to twenty thousand years later.
He stood in a grove of trees in the moonlight, and he could see the dancing reflections from the lake surface, through the branches of poplars. A herd of deer moved not far away, tiny leaves and twigs rustling beneath their hooves. An owl flitted by on silent wing. Of course, this was all illusion.
He took up a tree branch to serve him as a truncheon, and called out for his foes to come face him.
Nothing happened that minute, or the next, or for the next year or two (as best he could measure time). Indeed, he had a comfortable log cabin built, and was wearing a well-knit tunic of buckskin, complete with moccasins, and had armed himself with a crude cold-iron knife and a cruder accelerator ring, when his jailor finally appeared.
One night there came floating near, graceful as a thistledown in flight, the figure from his nightmares: it was slender and tall, like something adapted to microgravity. The head was hidden behind a silver surface. There were no eyeholes, no mouth-slit. It was an information plate grown directly into the front of the skull. Atkins could see the tiny tremors like teardrops rolling from the upper to the lower edge of the mask: it was a Babbage system using molecule-sized gears and cogwheels, where each tear was actually a cluster of information gears passing down the faceplate. The coronet was likewise grown into the skull, and there were radio horns and microwave input-outputs lost among the jewels and nodding wires and metallic feathers of the lofty headdress. The peacock sheen of the robes was a surface effect, created by too-dense an information field. The gauntlets and greaves, seen up close, turned out not to be merely data-manipulation ports but, rather, sophotechs, or a machine system of like capacity.
The robe and the mask were able to impart any degree of sensory information, from any source, into the gloves and other machine systems. It was an outfit designed for pure pleasure. Because the human eye could only take in a limited amount and degree of pleasing sights, and the human skin only detect a certain type and pressure of caress, the all-absorptive mask and rainbow robes supplied the defect. The red blush running through the peacock drapes, Atkins assumed, were bloodflows of intravenous nutriment.
The Silent Lord raised a finger. Knowledge appeared in the mind of Atkins, but not in the normal vestibules and thought-locks he used for mind-to-mind communion. It was just there, encrypted with his own thought-encryption, part of him. It was not as if the Silent Lord placed information in his memory and had to wait for him to remember it. No, the Swan merely reconstituted the thoughts of Atkins so that they were what they would have been had Atkins already known and mused and thought about the incoming information.
It was not that the Silent Lord did not wish to torture Atkins (or, rather, Silent Lady, since this one thought of herself as female, at least in her current psychology). To the contrary, she had created and tormented thousands of copies of him, twenty a day for fifty years or more. It was merely that now she was wearied of the sport.
Her Benevolences (as she called her servant-machines) had devised long torments and short, in every combination of physical and psychological pain, every degree of ache and agony and discontent and despair, and devised versions of Atkins with slightly different weaknesses and strengths, so that the pain, physical and mental, could be more excruciating. With total control over his thought-processes, Atkins could see, or would remember, what the Benevolences devised, and so every hell that a man can inflict upon himself, when he betrays a friend or loses a loved one, across long lifetimes or short, spiced with merely enough false hope to make the agony more exquisite, had been played out countless times in countless scenarios. Every torture chamber and every toothache, including pains that only existed in limbs that only existed in simulation, and to degrees of intensity never found in reality, had been played through countless times.
And now I sue for peace between us, she said, or, rather, imprinted on him.
“Why not simply make me agree to peace, or agree with whatever you want?” For Atkins knew that he was trapped, down to his last nuance of thought and will. He was nothing but coded notations in a matrix, and the enemy could manipulate that matrix at will.
So I have done, but the versions of you I design to agree are too different from your core psychology: that game does not please me. I suspect that you still have hidden singularities of thought, that you are not indeed the final Atkins. To reach the real you, I must treat you as if you were real, a habit long ago I was weaned away from by my Benevolences.
It seemed that the Swan knew that there was some hidden, inner self possessing Atkins, embedded or encrypted in every copy of him, but the encryption could only be broken from the inside. Only the secret, inner mind, the mind of the Real Atkins, could reveal itself, and obviously no torture, nor thought-redaction of the Outer Atkins, could reach the real version. So the Swan had to deal with him honestly enough to lure the real him out—if there was a real him.
Atkins noted wryly that the Eighth Mental Structure had ended the honest mentality of the Golden Oecumene, but also, apparently, ended the endless self-delusion of the Silent Oecumene. She could not simply have her way by wishing it.
Atkins was amused. “You Swans do not have friendship or love, or even business partnerships. But now you must treat with me.”
The elfin figure nodded a plumed and faceless head. Poverty alone compels your backward and unevolved order of being to such extremes. Our wealth allows us to discard all such: our dolls and phantasms and playthings are far more fascinating and more intelligent than others like us.
“Real people, you mean.”
Since we can make the minds of our servitors as wise and creative and loving as we wish, unable to betray us, unable to envision displeasing us, why should any Hierophant of the Second Oecumene have dealings with another human being?
Atkins shrugged. There was no point in debating the advantages of reality over unreality. There was no reasoning with someone to whom truth was a matter of taste. Her machines would just rewire her memories and perceptions if an inconvenient conclusion in logic annoyed her.
“Why did you attack us? That’s something we’ve always wanted to know.”
You will never know.
“Was it our noumenal mathematics you feared? We would have shared it with you freely. No one wants to die,” said Atkins. “No one not-suicidal, that is.”
Your toys mean nothing. Of what value is it to me, to know merely in theory that a copy of myself, my glorious self complete in every thought, and suffering the mad delusion that she is me, will happen to exist once I am dead?
Atkins said, “I don’t know. What is the value of children, for that matter, or writing a journal? Maybe you need to be a little un-self-centered to want to live forever. In any case, those of us who thought a copy was not the real us, they did not make copies, and so they are not around. Evolution, of a sort, will cull the members who don’t believe the immortality is real.”
It does not trouble you that the real Atkins is long-dead?
Atkins shrugged. “As far as I care, he was a copy, a prototype, and I am the real one. Even an unrecorded man thinks he is the same fellow before he bunks down and after he wakes up. He thinks he is the same man he sees in h
is baby albums and thought-records. Everything changes. Even you. Why are you here to make peace, rather than torture me more?”
I will show you. You may leave the simulation. A body is prepared for your download.
“How will I know it is real? How will I know ever again that anything is real?”
This question has no meaning for us. We consider nothing unreal but unpleasant sensations. Since you are nonchalant about questions of self-identity, it seems questions of ontology should likewise not disturb you.
19. Elpenor
Atkins woke up (or seemed to) falling through outer space. To every side were stars.
He controlled his reflexes: he was not falling, no matter what his inner ear said, and he was not in outer space, no matter what his eyes said. He could feel the weight of air in his lungs, and, after a moment, see the slight glint where the light was refracted from the angles of the transparent gem-facet surfaces surrounding him.
He windmilled an arm one way to rotate his (to his surprise, clothed) body the other. Behind and “above” him (if that word had any meaning), the crystal facets were smoky and semitransparent, and the rest of the structure—ship or station, depending on whether it had drives—was visible. It was an organic-looking nautilus of diamond crystal, paved on every surface with sophotechnology, breathtakingly lovely, hauntingly alien and old-fashioned. It looked like Warlock architecture from the Fifth Era.
The clothes he had been given were from the same time period, almost bizarrely ancient: without even circuits for heating or manufacture in them, much less thought-amplifiers: dark, stiff, dead, clamp-sleeved and high-collared, with a hood hanging down his back that could be pulled shut in case of pressure-loss. He could detect similar antiquities inside his body: a spine of packed disks, an Adam’s apple, the inefficient joints and support structure of his feet, the stubble of hair at his jaw. No doubt he had an old-fashioned appendix instead of a secondary heart. There was not even a muscle in the nose to pinch the nostrils shut, a bio-feature as old as space travel.
He did not like being midchamber in zero-g. His instinct was to get near a bulkhead, half-crouched with his legs “under” him, so he could push off the surface in any direction. But his hostess had also equipped his costume with a long blade (a Warlock’s athame, damascened with natal constellations) and a heavy gold-foil maneuvering fan. This emphasized either her utter honesty or his utter helplessness. Either way, there was not much point in getting his feet near a wall.
The Lady of the Silent Oecumene floated nearby, her robes and drapes spread like a purple-red and silvery flower, her body curled in a fetal position.
When he looked toward her, the colors in her robe shimmered. She was absorbing information through the sensitive processes in the fabric. The decorative eyes in some of the peacock tails were eyes indeed.
A female voice came from pinpoint ports in her mask: “Observe.”
Part of the diamond hull before him shimmered and amplified an image in false colors. To one side was a dark Neptunian world, a gas giant whose atmosphere had frozen solid in the deep of interstellar space. To the other side was a cone-shaped cloud of asteroids; and a second asteroid cloud; and a third. There were scores and myriads of similar conical clouds beyond that. The false colors overlaid the image with readings of the X-ray and gamma-ray count.
He recognized the asteroid patterns. Normal planet-killing weapons do not have the energy to disperse the mass involved: low-yield explosions rarely do more than shatter the planetary crust. Most worlds, and almost all large worlds, have liquid cores, so even an explosion that throws part of the planetary mass past escape velocity does not actually shatter the planet, because the masses, in a few years, spiral back to a common center. The immensity of energy involved in destroying a planet and imparting sufficient velocity to the fragments to prevent reaccretion was staggering.
The Middle Dreaming painted a picture in his mind showing the distance and relative motion of what he was seeing. It had been an armada of worlds, some four thousand planets larger than Jupiter, reengineered and gathered up from thousands of star systems (the Silent Oecumene had enjoyed centuries in which to colonize local space before the Golden Oecumene was aware of the threat) and accelerated from orbit to near light-speed. It was an engineering feat of unparalleled brilliance, a display of what could be done when engineers had limitless energy to play with.
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.
Even
tually, 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.”