Penelope was older than Ulysses. Parts of her, the oldest archival strata in her memory systems, still recalled the Old Earth of the Golden Oecumene.
Like many Cerebellines of her school, in youth she had been a quintet of two men and two women, and one phaen, a member of a third positive s** invented by the biosculptors of the late Fourth Era; and her auxiliaries were leopards, golden lion marmosets, and saber-horned antelopes with beautiful, dark eyes.
She had walked the slopes of Mount Fuji, whose loveliness is recalled forever in verse and image, and swam in the waters of the Caspian Sea, into which the Volga, celebrated in song, once flowed; and terns and gulls and seals who never saw the ocean swam and dived and soared. Beneath the waters, shining and magnificent, she saw the thousand diamond towers of Hyrcanianople, that drowned metropolis of legend, ablaze with artificial moons and stars, built by amphibious Warlocks who, prompted by a dream, anciently foreswore the surface of Old Earth and sought a return to the primal sea-life they claimed their blood cells and genetic introns yet recalled. That submerged Persian city, that lofty mountain of Japan, the terns and seals and white-winged gulls, were lost.
Where had she been when the news of Old Earth's destruction came? She could play the scene for him in her memory, and write it into his, so that, in effect, it happened to him.
He found himself on a hundred ships, each weighing less than a pound, trailing behind star-sails thin as gossamer, wide as continents. Penelope was sailing to Canopus. During the centuries while the Renunciant Diaspora were still under way, the small golden star called Sol had flickered, and all signals from Venus, Earth, Mars, and Demeter were lost, and from the Jupiterian moons, the capital of the Solar System.
With the mother world destroyed, the simulation of Earth in the dream libraries seemed mere mockeries. Radio broadcasts from Tau Ceti (more than a thousand years old by the time they were overheard) spoke of a Second Earth that the Shakudo Oecumene there had built, a replica meant to serve as a mortuary mask of the great, lost world.
The Orichalc Oecumene at the yellow star 72 Ophiuchus made a similar announcement. Even the grim and laconic commonwealth at Lalande 21185, called the Hepatizonic or the Black Corinthian Bronze Oecumene, broke radio silence to announce it had also reconstructed, molecule by molecule, an Earth in tribute to the lost Earth, from one ice cap to the other, with each famous mountain and many- mythed rivers in place. The Electrum Oecumene at Delta Pavonis, the Molybdochalkos Oecumene at Mu Arae, and the warlike Prince Rupert's Metal Oecumene at 61 Cygni all followed suit.
Even the humble and poverty-stricken Alpha Bra** Oecumene at Proxima attempted a re-creation. Their Luna-sized replica held nothing but Fourth Era Australia, surrounded by a little world-ocean slightly bigger than the Antarctic Sea, so that sea-vessels could sail across an Eastern hemisphere uninterrupted from the Brain-Hives at Brisbane to the Great Gla** Cube at Perth.
By the time the Diaspora of the Renunciation had reached Eta Carina, and tens of thousands of years had witnessed the foundation of many more colonies in the near neighborhood of Sol, there were twenty known replicas of Earth, restocked from biotic libraries.
While the rest of the ships sailed the beam from Canopus to Eta Carina, Penelope's gossamer ships, leaving the beam-path of the Diaspora, lingered on the far side of the Great Carina Nebula, straining to catch the ever-weaker signals of the interstellar radio chatter. Whole libraries of information were pa**ed to and fro, including the gene patterns for all earthly life still in record, images, sensations, smells, and noumenal memories of Earth, all locked in fractal format. The Earth- makers were comparing notes, confirming and correcting. Penelope, because she tarried and heard, became the custodian of their local version of Earth.