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- cla** 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 ma** of Sol, and four million times the luminosity, tied together by incandescent spiral rings of erupted material. The binaries shed one Earth ma** 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 ma**ive 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 ma**ive 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 superma**ive 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 ma**ive, 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-s**tets 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 bu*tons 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.