La Trascendencia Dorada (68 page)

Where strands of the web crossed were instruments and antennae, refrigeration lasers, or the wellheads of deep probes. Along the lengths of these strands hung endless rows of field generators, coils whose diameters could have swallowed Earth’s moon. From other places along the strand flew black triangles of magnetic and countermagnetic sail, thinner than moth wings, larger than the surface area of Jupiter.

Seen closer, these strands where not fragile spider-webs at all but huge structures whose diameter was wider than that of the ring cities of Demeter and Mars. Each strand looked, at its leading edge, like a needle made of light pulling a golden thread. For they were growing, steadily, hour by hour and year by year. At the reaching needle tips of the strands were blazes of conversion reactors, burning hydrogen into more complex elements, turning energy into matter. A fleet of machines, smaller than microbes or larger than battle-ships, as the need required, swarmed in their billions, and reproduced, and worked and died, around the growing mouths of the strands, building hull materials, coolants, refrigeration systems, dampeners and absorbers, and, eventually, filling interior spaces. In less than five thousand more years, the solar equator would have a ring embracing it, perhaps a supercollider to shame the best effort of Jupiter’s, or perhaps the scaffolding for the first Dyson Sphere. The strands were buoyant, held aloft in the pressure region between the chromosphere and photosphere. Here, the temperature was 5,800 Kelvin, much less than the 1,000,000 Kelvin of the corona overhead, a sky of light, crossed by prominences like rainbows made of fire. There were a hundred refrigeration lasers roofing every square kilometer of strand, pouring heat forever upward. The laser sources were even hotter than the solar environment, allowing heat to flow away. Each strand wore battlements and decks of laser fire, like a forest of upraised spears of light. Inside these strands, for the most part, was empty space, meant for the occupancy of energies, not men. The strand sections looked like ring cities, but were not these strands were more like capillaries of a blood-stream, or the firing track of a supercollider. These strands held a flow of particles so dense, and at such high energy, that nothing like them had been seen in the universe after the first three seconds of cosmogenesis.

The symmetry of these superparticles allowed them to be manipulated in ways that magnetism, electricity, and nucleonic forces could not separately. These symmetries could be broken in ways not seen in this universe naturally, to create peculiar forces: fields as wide as gravitic or magnetic fields, but with strengths approaching those of nucleonic bonds.

To control these hellish and angelic forces, the circumambient walls of the inside of the strands were dotted with titanic machines, built to such scales that new branches of engineering or architecture had to been invented by the Sophotechs just for the construction of these housings. These machines guided those energies, which, in turn, and on a scale not seen elsewhere, affected the energies and conditions in the mantle and below the mantle of the sun.

The Solar Array churned the core to distribute helium ash; the Array dissipated dangerous “bubbles” of cold before they could boil to the surface and create sunspots; the Array closed holes in the corona to smother sources of solar wind; the Array deflected convection currents below the surface photosphere. Those deflected currents, in turn, deflected others, and current was woven with current, to produce magnetic fields of unthinkable size and strength. These magnetic fields wrestled with the complex magnetohydro-dynamic weavings of the sun itself, strengthening weakened fields to control sunspots, maintaining large-scale magnetostatic equilibrium to prevent coronal mass ejections, hindering the nested magnetic loop re-connections that caused flares. The strength of the sun was turned against itself, so that all these activities, flares, prominences, and sunspots, were defeated, and turbulence in the energy flow was deflected poleward, away from the plane of the ecliptic, where human civilization was gathered. The corona process by which magnetic energy became thermal energy was regulated. The solar winds were tamed, regular, and steady.

It was an unimaginable task, as complex and chaotic as if a cook were to attempt to control the individual bubbles in a cauldron of boiling water, and dictate where and when they would break surface and release their steam. Complex and chaotic, yes, but not so complex that the Sophotechs of the sun could not perform it.

The number and identity of the electrophotonic intelligences living in the Array was as fluid and mutable as the solar plasma currents they guided. And there were many, very many Sophotechnic systems here, hundred of thousands of miles of cable, switching systems, thought boxes, informata, logic cascades, foundation blocks. A census might have shown anywhere between a hundred and a thousand Sophotechs and partial Sophotechs, depending on system definitions and local needs, composed into two great overminds or themes. But by any account, the Sophotech part of the population here was in the far majority.

The part of the Solar Array that was fit for the habitation of Sophotechs was so small, compared to the part set aside for the occupations of energy, as to almost be undetectable: the part set aside for biological life was smaller yet, but still was larger than a thousand continents the size of Asia.

The biological life consisted of specially designed bodies, built for the environment of the station, and of use nowhere else; and of such other forms of life, built along the same lines, plantlike or beastlike, as served their use, convenience, and pleasure.

Even though other forms would have been more convenient, the master of this place was a Silver-Gray, and the founder of the Silver-Gray, and he had decreed that the things that swam through the medium that was not air should look (to their senses, at least) like birds; and that the immobile forms of life (being made of molecular fullerene carbon structures rather than being, as Earthlife was, mostly hydrogen and water, and drawing the building materials out of a substance more like diamond dust than earthly soil) should nonetheless look like trees and flowers.

And so there were parks and gardens, aviaries and jungles, in a place were no such thing could exist. No limit was placed on their growth: they could not possibly come to occupy surface area faster than the army of construction machines (hour by hour and year by year, running down along the ends of each strand, burning solar plasma into heavier elements and fashioning more strand) could create more room for them.

In this vast wilderness, larger than worlds, were some small parts set aside for human life. Here were palaces and parks, thought shops, imaginariums, vastening-pools, reliquariums for Warlocks and instance pyramids for mass-mind compositions. The large majority of human living space was set aside for Cerebellines of the global neuroform, whose particular structure of consciousness allowed them most aptly to comprehend the nonlinear chaos of solar meteorology. The weird organic-fractal architecture favored by the Cerebellines dominated the living spaces.

Of the Base neuroforms, however, the humans here were made to look (to their senses, at least) like men, and their places were made to look like the places of men, with chambers and corridors, windows, furniture, hallways. The Master of the Sun had willed it so.

All this immensity was, with one exception, deserted. The army of craftsmen, meteorologists, artists, rhetoricians, futurologists, sun Warlocks, data patterners, intuitionists, vasteners and devasteners, who formed the company and crew of the Solar Array and all its subsidiaries, were flown or radioed away, called to celebrate in the Grand Transcendence.

Even the Sophotechs, it could be said, were gone, for all their activity and attention was poured into that single, supreme webwork of communications, orchestrated by Aurelian, which spread from orbital solsynchronous radio stations (constructed for this occasion) out to the dim reaches of the Solar System, one continuous living tapestry of mind and information that would form the basis of the Transcendence.

One remained behind. All others celebrated: he did not.

At the intersection of several long corridors, roads, and energy paths, was a wide space, where ranks of balconies were made to look as if they were opening out upon the sea of fire burning endlessly outside. In the middle of this space, where several bridges ran from balcony to balcony and road to road met in midair, was a rotunda, looking out over the dark roads, silent corridors, empty balconies, and the immeasurable hell of fire beyond.

In the center of the rotunda, like a small stepped hill, tier upon tier of thought boxes rose. Each box held high an energy mirror, raised toward a central throne as flowers might raise their faces toward the sun. The mirrors were dark.

To either side of that throne, jewel-like caskets holding thoughts and memories, governors for distant sections of the Array, and vastening stations for mind-linking with the Sophotechs, were arranged. All were still.

Helion sat here alone, his armor pale as ice.

His eye was grim, and graven lines of bitterness embraced his mouth. At his jaw, a muscle was tight. He Mated without seeing.

Now he stirred. “Clock,” he asked, “what is the hour?”

The clock to his left woke at his voice, and spoke. “How can we, who live in the coat of the fiery sun, measure the shadow of a gnomon to attest the time? It is ever forever midnight here, for the sun, to us, is ever underfoot. A pretty paradox!”

A wince of irritation twitched in his eye, but his voice was low and level. “Why do you mock me, clock?”

“Because you have forgotten the day, mighty Helion! It is the Night Penultimate, the last night before the Transcendence, the night that was once called the Night of Lords.”

The Night of Lords, on the last day before Transcendence, by tradition, was the time when each man, half-man, woman, bimorph, neutraloid, clone, and child was given, in simulation, control of all the Oecumene. Each became, in his own mind, at least, Lord of the Oecumene for a day. Each saw all his idle wishes fulfilled. Each was allowed to act upon his private theories about what was wrong with the world, each allowed to put his theories into effect. And the consequences of his actions were played out with remorseless logic by the simulators.

The tradition was first begun during the First Transcendence, many millennia ago, under the tutelage of Lithian Sophotech. However, after repeated disillusionment, failures, and tragic results (which were played out by people who had not thought out their theories of the world very well), the Night of Lords became instead the night when the Earthmind gave gentle advice as to how to improve and make realistic some of the extrapolations so soon to be presented to the Transcendence for consideration.

In effect, the night before the Transcendence was the last trial period for all the extrapolation candidates, the preliminary weighing of possible futures before the real work of choosing a future was begun.

Helion had no need for such a preliminary. His vision of the future, sponsored by the Seven Peers, had already undergone a much more thorough review than any Penultimate Night test was likely to be.

The clock continued: “Why are you awake, alone, instead of deep in dreaming? Aurelian Sophotech promised that this Transcendence would extend further into the future and deeper into the Earthmind than any millennial attempt before has done! Together, all humanity and transhumanity as one may reach beyond the bottom of the dreaming sea; surely you will need more than a day to pass from shallow into deeper dreaming, to prepare yourself for what is next to come! Why are you still awake?”

There was no point in arguing with a clock. It was a limited intelligence device, not a true Sophotech, and had been instructed, long ago, to remind him of his appointments and engagements. In this case, with a holiday almost upon them, the clock was in a mindlessly cheerful mood: such were its orders. Pointless to grow irked.

“I envy you, moron machine. You have no self, no soul to lose.”

The clock was silent. Perhaps its simple mind dimly understood Helion’s grief. Or perhaps it had been given the dangerous gift of greater intelligence during the Sixth-Night, the Night of Swans, when the Earthmind bestowed wisdom and insight onto all “ugly duckling” machines, those with more potential for growth than their present circumstances allowed.

The clock said cautiously: “You are not going to kill yourself again, are you?”

“No. I have exhausted every possible variation on that scene. I have replayed my last self’s final immolation so many times, it seems as if all my memory now is fire. But in that memory, I cannot recall, I cannot reconstruct, what it was I thought then which I cannot think now. What insight was it which I had then that made me laugh, though dying? What epiphany did that dead part of me understand, an understanding so deep it would have changed my life forever, had I lived? An insight now lost! And, with it, all my life…”

He sank into grim silence once again. The resolution of Phaethon’s challenge to Helion’s identity was merely one of many things that would be decided during the manifold complexity of the Transcendence. Since both he and the Curia, and everyone else besides, would be brought as one into the Transcendence, and be graced with greater wisdom and wholeness of thought than had occurred for a millennium, Helion had, as a courtesy to the Court, agreed to let the Transcendent Mind decide the issue.

That had been when he still had hope of reconstructing his missing memories, of finding his lost self.

But now that hope was gone. He knew the Court’s decision would go against him.

Helion spoke again. “I lost but a single hour of my life. But in that hour, I lost everything. I said I saw the cure for the chaos at the heart of everything. What was that cure? What did I know? What did I become in that hour, my self which I have now lost…?”

Silence.

The clock said in a slow and simple tone: “Does this mean you won’t be going to the celebrations tomorrow?”

Helion did not answer.