The New Space Opera 2 (74 page)

Prologue

Ours is a Seyfert galaxy. Painstaking engineering operations continue to galacto-form the war-torn main disk once again to comfortable conditions, and restart the nebula-nova cycle of stellar evolution.

The Doppler-distorted reddish smears from the boiling core of the galaxy, the tens of thousands of supernovae flaring into deadly magnificence, the ashy clouds that streak the Orion Arm as if the breath of dragons passed there, scattering constellations, and leaving nothing but sullen red dwarves and exhausted red giants behind, all portray an interstellar environment wasted by war
.

We occupy the satellite galaxies of Lesser and Greater Magellan, the star clusters above and below the damaged main disk. We have leisure to beguile the passing millennia. This tale is among the ones we recite, reconstruct, and, from time to time, revive.

1. The Tale

Once there was a world who loved a forest-girl.

The planet was named Ulysses. When she was a forest, she had some other name history forgets. When manifested as a girl, she was called Penelope. No other name will do.

The lovers were parted when their existence proved fictive, but reunited and reified by a strange act of suicide on the part of avowed enemies. In that sense, love proved itself stronger than hate, fiction stronger than reality.

Much of this tale has been lost, or hidden.

2. At That Time

At that time, there was war in heaven but there was peace on Earth.

Strictly speaking, the latest replica was not Earth; but it had been con
structed to resemble the mother world, even down to the fine details of core convections, plate tectonics, and Gulf Stream movements. Lovingly copied were mountain contours, coastlines, temperature ranges, weather patterns, ozone behaviors, magneto-atmospheric field fluctuations, and all the biology and botany from the Quaternary period.

Therefore it could be said and celebrated that the long-awaited End of History had come, if not to Earth, at least to an acceptably indistinguishable replica.

It was at or near the end of an eon. The Era of the Seventh Mental Structure, the mental structure built upon the technology of noetic-mathematic immortality, either had ended or would end shortly: perhaps in one or two hundred thousand colony-frame-of-reference years, no more. Therefore the Age of Deathlessness had died—unless, of course, it had not yet.

Many found that troubling.

3. Peace on Twenty-first Earth

This world, informally known as Twenty-first Earth, formally known as Eta Carina XCIX, was the dwelling of the Penelope Myriad.

Even at sixty-three thousand AU's away, the double star Eta Carina was still brighter and hotter than Sol. The re-created Earth was shielded from her insane primary both by the immense dimension of her orbit (just shy of a light-year in radius) and by a system of space-borne parasols, larger than worlds, which hung sunward from her, tinting the light from the swollen suns of Eta Carina to an earthly yellow, painting the sky sky-blue. Timed albedo variations across the parasol fabric gave the world seasons.

Penelope occupied no city of the surface or hovering in the cloud, no shell structure of the undersea or node base below the crust; instead, the biosphere itself was hers.

The infrastructure of her consciousness occupied strands in trees and specialized input-output cells in the nervous systems of flocks of birds, coded molecules in the glands of insects, and radiation pulses absorbed and retransmitted by coral beds or dots of machinery in the bloodstreams of she-wolves and vixens, and does and hens.

Some of her were bound to the brain stems of millions of her pets, and she knew their passions and fears. Some of her were countless motes carried on the winds and fogs, so that she could feel the world breathe, and
know the rhythms of rainfall. When she dispersed among the evaporations as chemical spores, she fell again as downpours along the contours of mountains, gathering messages encoded in atoms, swirling together as she rushed down rills and rivers, waking again to consciousness, as if after sleep, when this part of her settled to the bottoms of sea or lakes in sufficient mass.

Much of her, where most of her work was done, occupied earthworms or seeped as chemical filaments through the topsoil, making dust and sand and lifeless rock pregnant with possibilities, and conserving the rich soil of a whole world she wore as a garment.

In short, she was a Cerebelline, a multi-valued and global consciousness.

Penelope indeed was a fitting name for her: in maintaining the funerary memorial of Earth, hers was a task as melancholy as weaving a father's burial shroud; to maintain the ecostructure in a star system so unsuited for Earthly life, a task as endless as unweaving and reweaving that shroud nightly.

She was something of a melancholy girl, dreaming of the past, uncertain of the future.

Penelope did not know if the Seventh Mental Structure had been superseded.

4. The Oecumene of Keel of the Ship

Her Earth was in the Sagittarian Arm, in the Great Carina Nebula, beyond the obscuring cluster called Trumpler-16, in the roaring star system of the variable B-class hyper-supergiant Eta Carina.

Here the Chrysopoeian Oecumene had established its seat, eight thousand light-years from Sol: far enough (it was hoped) to escape the woes of her mighty parent civilization.

Eta Carina A and B together were one hundred times the mass of Sol, and four million times the luminosity, tied together by incandescent spiral rings of erupted material. The binaries shed one Earth mass per day of ejected matter, at speeds of twelve hundred miles per second. The solar winds from the two mighty stars met in shockwaves where temperatures reached several thousand million degrees Kelvin: when at aphelion, the collision of these shockwaves produced sustained X-ray bursts of unparalleled ferocity.

Early astronomers had thought Eta Carina to be merely a double star. Ultra-long-range robotic probes in the late Fifth Era discovered, hidden
in the glare of the two massive supergiants, not two or three, but dozens of white dwarf stars in close orbit, as well as hot super-jovians hovering on the brink of ignition, failed stars themselves. All this had coalesced out of the most massive pre-solar nebulae yet known.

These many secondary suns and half-melted gas giants went careening in their million-year-long highly eccentric orbits, their scalded atmospheres trailing in the titanic solar winds like the tails of comets, along with a scattered hundred or so lesser planets, multiple asteroid belts, and strange protoplanetary whirlpools of coalescing interstellar gas unlike anything found near Sol.

Surrounding all was a colossal two-lobed cloud of ejected material, the famous Homunculus Nebula: one reddish, slowly expanding gas ball occupying a volume of light-years to the galactic-north of the binary, one to the south. The nebula was expanding at five hundred kilometers per second; but it was in turn merely a small part of the Greater Carina Nebula.

It was perhaps these riches that finally tempted the colonists here rather than to a gentler star system; within this nebula, clouds of heavy and superheavy molecules had been ionized, and this allowed them easily to be detected, gathered, sieved, and maneuvered by manipulations of the giant magnetic fields surrounding the supermassive binary. It was as if nature had laid out the treasure trove of elements merely for the delight and benefit of megascale molecular engineers.

And benefit they did. Far from complete was the Dyson Sphere meant to surround the multiple stars of Eta Carina: an effort as massive, for its time, as the Great Pyramid had been for the Pharaoh Cheops. A start had been made; for a significant fraction of the Homunculus Nebula matter had been gathered into a single but very wide orbital strand of charmed matter, denser than neutronium, which ringed the gravitational center of the Eta Carina system. Several high-speed information processes lived there, able to manifest themselves, at need, anywhere along the radius of that immense orbit. To either side of this ring, fine as spiderwebs, the Dyson scaffolding was growing, year by year.

Smaller rocky planets had been nudged into stable orbits or Lagrange-sextets clinging to the radiation-shadow of the equatorial information strand. These worldlets had been blasted down to sub-terrestrial size and flooded over with oceans, the water to act as a radiation buffer protecting core systems. On many of these dwarf worlds, semicircular fountains (forceful enough to act as surface-to-orbit elevators in those weak gravity wells) ran from one hemisphere to the other. These allowed space-goers
fancifully shaped like whales or dolphins to lift off tangentially from the midpoint of the arch with minimal fuel expense. These cetacean bodies themselves, though made of sterner stuff than flesh and blood, did not last long in the high-radiation environment; so most minds wearing them changed flesh regularly.

This space-dolphin, sleek and beautiful, was the favorite shape for most biotic people of any neuroform in the Chrysopoeian Oecumene. No one needed hands. It was not as if self-aware tools had handles to grab or buttons to push.

Few enough people came to visit Penelope's Earth, or transmitted a download. Hers was the most distant of the many occupied planetary bodies of the system, too small to be dismantled for the Dyson project, too large for space-cetaceans to land and launch easily. It had only antiquarian interest, and the happy peace-lovers of the Chrysopoeian Oecumene found the lessons of history increasingly disturbing to their serenity, as the mathematical crisis surrounding the onset of the Eighth Mental Structure continued to be investigated.

5. Ulysses

The planet Ulysses was an antique himself, and while he knew Penelope through various media channels (his partials had met her partials in thought-space, either in the information strand, or in various asteroid brains posted a score of light-years away in the Eta Carina nebula), the acquaintance had been passing, formal, and incomplete.

Their first meeting was one of those accidents that are merely random chance, unless they were arranged by sophotechs for benevolent reasons of their own.

One of the gas giants, comically named Orotund, had been dismantled for mass to add to the Dyson scaffolding. The construction schedule, for obvious reasons, was tight, since the project had to be completed before Eta Carina went nova, which was predicted to happen in a period that both astronomers and immortal beings would call “soon.”

Tight schedules meant the planetary engineering market was flooded with futures trade: since the Dyson sophotechs were buying up available resources, prices were high.

Orotund had been sweeping up dust and asteroids over the millennia, which now would form traffic hazards. Ulysses, who had orbited Orotund for thousands of years, suddenly found himself in a dangerous neigh
borhood. The increased danger raised his insurance rates. Any asteroid strike near a surfaced city (and most of his cities grew ever more reluctant to dive, since the real-life tourist trade depended on surface views) would raise a tidal wave, and he would have to pay for the reincarnation of all his tenants out of the pooled account set aside for that purpose.

Meanwhile, his dependents had increased. Ulysses also had maintained a fleet of very ancient remote units for atmosphere mining of that jovian world (atmosphere mining was an easy operation in a violent star system, where solar winds threw gas giant's gas up out of their escape velocity in rich plumes), and these remotes had to be retired at the same time that his income from tourism was dropping. Ulysses had to find new bodies or new work or both for any remote unit that belonged to his self-identity.

In many cases, the remotes were partials, running on part of his personality and memory templates, but too simple to emancipate, too complex to reduce to scrap. He was not the kind of man who would shoot a dog just because it was too old to hunt.

Some of them had been his escort ships since the time of the Diaspora, and their battered hulls still wore plaques and badges he had awarded them for special acts of bravery or initiative displayed during the dangerous and lonely days of the First Survey.

His ecology—even simple as it was—also suffered, because a series of solar storms, one after another, erupted from the unquiet heart of Eta Carina B.

The highly refractory machines dwelling inside the sun were allegedly able to tame the monstrous collapse of the iron core before it ignited, but the volume of the star, after all, was greater than the volume described by the orbit of Saturn back in the old system. And these were young and colonial sophotechs, after all, not the old and wise and heavily interlinked systems of the Golden Oecumene back home. Intelligence was a commercial product like anything else, and when you could not afford it, you went stupid. So it was with a comparative IQ. In the millions rather than in the billions, sometimes the solar-storm predictions were off, and sometimes the solar sophotechs died without backup, just like a fireman in some children's tale of the pre-machine days.

Now, Ulysses was no fool; he had set aside money and resources in three different currencies against this possibility. But there is a chaos in any predictive model: between the increased navigation hazards, the radiation storms, the increase of his dependents, and the decrease of his
tourist trade, he suddenly found himself without enough money to be able to afford to clear his navigation hazards and retool his oceans.

So Ulysses needed to find a new orbit, and needed help with his ecology, and, frankly, needed to do something with his life that the economic system of the Chrysopoeian Oecumene would prioritize.

So he polled his tenants, and they agreed or paid the early cancellation fee. He found a way to afford a tug to take him far out-system, and within the shadow of the parasol of Earth. (The trip took twenty-two years and cost him, at his mass, 10^27 kilowatt-hours in the energy currency, and the tug did not even reach 2 percent of light-speed.)