John C Wright - Chapter 5: Ulysses lyrics

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 pa**ing, 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 ma** 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 neighborhood. 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 ma**, 10^27 kilowatt-hours in the energy currency, and the tug did not even reach 2 percent of light-speed.) It was quiet there, with little or no radiation from the primary, almost nocturnal. Romantically, Earth and Ulysses had almost no neighbors. They were alone in the conical shadow of their comfortable little parasol. As it turned out, by one of those coincidences so unlikely that only random chance (or a meddling sophotech) could have arranged it, Twenty-first Earth had no Luna. Although Ulysses was of greater volume (for the honeycombed logic diamond occupying his vast interior was much less dense than the ferro-metallic core of Old Luna), he was roughly equal in ma** to the moon, close enough to create the tidal stresses Twenty-first Earth needed to maintain her proper shape. A close orbit would help not merely the core convection, which in turn would help the magnetic pole behavior, but it would also allow Penelope to retire the very expensive system she had been using to create ocean tides, so that the little animals dwelling along the shore would have their accustomed environment. (Meanwhile, his tenants, who once had gloried to the sight of storm-swirling Orotund rising in the east, now rejoiced instead to the visions of a rising blue world that, despite the years and light-years and the far voyages across strange psychological topologies, men still found beautiful.) Penelope sent her Warlocks and ecologists to look over Ulyssian oceans. And he spent his time trying to cheer up the melancholy living biosphere of replicated Earth, both with radio signals and with remotes. They talked about the war.