Betrayals: twentynine

Max stood before the small group of mourners in the deepening twilight. His bushy black beard was half a metre long, and streaked with white; he was a little shorter than most of the others there, even the women, but not the children.
Children, yes; that was the most important thing, he thought. We stranded ourselves here for the opportunity to have real families with kids, not just barren partnerships. 

   "You might think it strange that I was his friend; as most of you know when we left the Arm I wasn't even a human. But Gus and I, ah, Gus and me, we had a long and close relationship back in the Arm, of a kind which is no longer possible. Our minds were linked with the sort of technology that seems almost like magic today.
   "Gus persuaded me to abandon all that technology, all that magic, and to become human like him; like all of us. It wasn't easy for Gus either; he had been augmented by technology to the point where he was something more than human too. It all seems like a long ago dream today; yet in other ways it seems like yesterday.
  "And when we came to this world, beneath this star that shines so benevolently upon us-"

Max put this in for the younger crowd, the youth of his world, who were taking up the new cult of Sun-worship in all the small towns of the colony.
  "-Gus was one of the first leaders of our new world, and helped to guide us all through the first difficult years. He acted as go- between for our people and the Departed Gods; it was Gus who argued for a much more natural lifestyle and persuaded us to reject the old dependencies on magical technology.
  "Some of you were not too happy about that; mostly the ones who came straight from the Necklace, as I remember, rather than those who had spent time in the Tilted World. But it was for the sake of our descendants that Gus spoke out; the children that have been born since we settled here have never known what it is like to be no more than a god's plaything.
   "At the last, Gus persuaded most of us that we would be happiest with no gods in the sky at all, and the ships of the gods departed long ago, away down the stream of stars and out of our lives for ever."

With luck, Max thought. 

  Max had become deeply distrustful of the Machiavellian schemes of the transapients over the time he had been working with them. The silent, imperious ArGartha town mind, the sardonic Alrami, the unpredictable and inscrutable Keterists in the surviving pursuit ship. Here on the other side of the wormhole the transapients seemed set to found a new civilisation which was a microcosm of the old Orion Arm. Gus Gienah had persuaded the transaps, against all the odds, to leave the human colony here to its own devices. Only a few near-baseline humans went with the transaps down the stream of stars that stretched into the alien sky.
  This strange new region of space was very different to the local Group of galaxies that they had left so far behind; here a great collision between two galaxies long ago had spread a streamer of new stars for a million light years across the heavens,

  Waving his arm vaguely towards the dark eastern sky, Max indicated the direction that the ships of the gods had taken.
  "They are out there somewhere, along the Great Stream, getting further away with every year. Perhaps one day we will make our own ships and follow them; or perhaps we will choose a different path.
  "But it will be our choice; and no gods will tell us what not to do. I think we all agree that we can thank Gus Gienah, my friend, for that freedom to choose."

 The widow Gienah sprinkled flowers on the barely covered body crouched in the pit; Max followed suit. Then the eldest Gienah son and a couple of other young adults began to fill it in.

Zero plus eighty two years

~Greetings, vec Handy, thank you for calling me back.
~No problems, po Lesova. I am honoured than you should contact me. But I don't know if I can help you at all.

~I was only a bystander myself in many ways; I did meet my augmented later version, but it was not a very joyful encounter. Apart from that, I only know about those events from the account the later version of Gus gave me in the short period I knew him.

~I have read your downloaded memories of that day; thank you for submitting them.

~Oh, did they give them out to...to your people as well? I confess that I feel a little uncomfortable with the idea of my memories being disseminated around the cosmos.

~Don't worry; as an involved individual I took it on myself to examine your memories personally.  Apart from the abridged report I gave to the blessed Fluke that data has gone no further.

~So, as I said, I really can't give you any more information; neither can my present symaiote, zar Auguste ret Gienah. He was restored from a point long before any ArGarthan tampering. Earlier than myself, in fact. Gus knows nothing. 

~Well, there are still some interesting aspects to this case, and I hope to write a suitably discreet exposition on the subject eventually. For instance the later version of Gus came very close to discovering the ArGarthan ship beneath the surface of Rendell Ring long ago, when he was caving in the subterranean regions beneath the city. If he had not been primed to attack the Blessed fluke during his ascension ceremony, it is likely that She would have been able to deduce the existence of the ship from his memories alone.

~It seems to me that without the influence of my later version he wouldn't have been down there in the first place.

~That is what makes it so fascinating, vec Handy; a textbook study in misdirection. You have no idea how complex the behaviour of transapients can be when they want to hide things from each other. Many of the bizarre cults and political scandals of the Arkab necklace seem to have been part of the smokescreen.
But this all this gratuitous complexity can cause chaos among the ordinary people left behind. That is really the reason I want to talk to you. 

~How's that, then? 
 Max was perched on a low shelf in the Gienah living room, which was quiet (this entire exchange occurring in silence), but there was movement and sound elsewhere in the apartment.

~This new… acquaintance of Gus's, the warrior woman. What is she like?"

~Very fierce. Oh, I see. You want to talk to her about life in the Tilted World sim. Well, she seems to either have a short memory, or she doesn't like talking about it. But she is certainly throwing herself into Necklace society with enthusiasm.

~What is her name again?

~She calls herself Goosta, as it happens. She hit it off with Gus straight away.
Oh, my; you don't think…

~Yes, it seems very likely. With about 97 percent confidence I can say that she was originally a back-up copy of zar Gienah when she was a woman. I estimate this 'Goosta' , or Augusta as we should perhaps call her, was active inside the Tilted World simulation for many thousand subjective years. She will remember little of her former life.

~Gus is not going to like this.

 Zero plus eighty five years

  "You have no idea how glad I am to see you. "

  "How are you faring, my cousin?"

  "I think you can dispense with the formalities, Sallie."

  "I am sorry. It is so long since we were in real time contact. Oh, Kibban. I am so isolated out here; this is a cruel and unusual punishment that I have been given."

  "Well, I have at long last been allowed by the Powers That Be to come out here and give you some assistance. If you succeed the benefit to our entire civilisation will be great."

  "But what hope is there of success? Do you know what I have to do here?" 

  The Negentropist patrol ship was drifting a hundred yards from the superobject that held Sallie Huan Chang prisoner. She was the principle conscious remnant of the former Arkab Prior Necklace Librarian, although that entity was not diminished in processing power otherwise. In fact Her database was as extensive and her processing power as large as it ever had been, and busy to boot. But the personality of the Librarian had been deemed culpable for the loss of the strange primeval wormhole out here in deep space, and subsumed into the much smaller and less culpable personality of Chang.

   "I have been told the basics. You are searching for a grey hole in the subatomic foam."

  "Oh, Leftenante- have you heard the story of Tartarus in the legends of Old Earth? The demigods and heroes were punished there for their crimes, given endless tasks or endless torments. King Danaus had fifty daughters, all of whom but one killed their husbands; they were sentenced to forever fill bottomless barrels with water. I am the one remaining daughter, forever shepherding my billion sisters in a hopeless task.
 "The wormhole that was destroyed here, beneath the surface of the false brown dwarf, had apparently existed since just after the creation of our universe. Some of the models which have been put together to describe this phenomenon suggest that the topology of the hole itself might have been conserved, and there could be a single nanoscopic remnant of the wormhole out here amongst the debris left behind.
  "They call it a grey hole. I call it hell.

  "I have billions of sub personalities scouring the dust here, Kibban; if the hole still exists it might have retained a charge, and if it retains a charge it might adhere to a fragment of the metal shell of the faked dwarf. We have a thousand cubic A.U. to search here- that was one heck of an explosion all those years ago, although the cloud is starting to collapse again somewhat.
  "This search would drive me mad, but that too is denied me. I can find no solace in dementia; the punishment requires that I remain sane." 

  "Well, I have volunteered to help you with your task, Sallie. My higher self has negotiated an agreement; if we find this hole together our civilisations can use it in concert. Both the Negentropy Alliance and Mutual Progress desire to gain access to this new, unknown galaxy."

  "You know that this will not be enough, don't you. The population of the Orion Arm is already expanding into our own galaxy at nearly the speed of light; even with wormholes that expansion is only made a little faster. We can't expand any faster than the speed of the fastest wormhole linelayer. All the power of persuasion of the myriad Archailects of our civilisation is bent upon limiting our growth here, near the centre of the expansion. If they were unable to persuade us to restrain our growth, we would use all the resources of the Inner sphere- stars and all- in a few thousand years. Space only knows, but that sort of unrestrained growth might have condemned countless earlier civilisations to destruction long ago."

   "I think that at least one civilisation might have escaped that fate, Sallie; the one which found this fargate hole, and concealed it within the false star. Perhaps they are still there, on the other side; perhaps they found others. I can tell you that the entire Arm is being searched anew for similar structures. Brown dwarfs have been neglected for so long, tossed aside for the backgrounder societies to exploit. Now we have a new reason to be interested in them."

 "Well, you are welcome to join me in this hopeless task, Leftenante. I hope you brought plenty of assistance with you."

"Just a few," Kibban said, and he smiled warmly. The Negentropy ship opened a thousand hatches, and out poured hundreds of  millions of shiny black remotes.

 

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