A very tall man wrapped in a pale grey mantle sits playing a guitar in a moonlit lakeside grove beside a ruined marble colonnade, deer kneeling around him and birds on his shoulder, while a huge silver ocean planet rises over the lake and a white swan glides on the water.
The legend, as its narrators admit they imagine it: a planet’s ten-foot man-remote serenades a woman who is, so far, only a forest, a lake and a swan.

The Golden Oecumene · A coda story · 2009

The Far End of History

At the close of the Golden Oecumene’s era, a broke ocean planet named Ulysses moves into the shadow of a replica Earth and falls in love with the mind of her biosphere.

“The Far End of History” is John C. Wright’s coda to the Golden Oecumene, a story he calls a sequel to The Golden Age. It first appeared in July 2009 as the closing piece of The New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan for Eos. At 17,413 words by ISFDB’s count it is a long novelette (Wright calls it a novella), and it spends its forty-four pages ending the age the trilogy celebrated.

It is set long after the novels (the story’s own spans run to tens of thousands of years, but neither it nor any source says how long after), at or near the end of the Era of the Seventh Mental Structure, when the war with the Silent Oecumene that The Golden Transcendence sees coming has spread across the stars. Only one of the trilogy’s characters appears: Atkins, the Golden Oecumene’s only soldier (the Warmind he serves is mentioned, never seen). The enemy crosses over too: the Silent Oecumene of Cygnus X-1 and its faceless Lords, the Swans.

Its narrators are far-future historians who reconstruct the tale in the open, giving the courtship once as legend and once as “A More Literal Account”. It begins as a comic romance between an ocean planet and the mind of a replica Earth and ends with the galaxy on fire. Wright posts the full text on his site; this page tells all of it, twists included.

Part 1

Peace on Twenty-first Earth

The narrators live in the Magellanic Clouds and the clusters above and below a Milky Way that has become a war-wasted Seyfert galaxy. This is one of the tales they recite, and its first line gives away its shape:

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

At or near the end of the Era of the Seventh Mental Structure, the age of noetic immortality, there is war in heaven and peace on a replica Earth. Twenty-first Earth orbits the double star Eta Carina at sixty-three thousand AU, shaded by parasols larger than worlds that turn the light yellow and the sky blue. Its whole biosphere is one mind, the Penelope Myriad, a Cerebelline living in trees, birds, wolves, fogs and earthworms: the melancholy keeper of a memorial few people visit. Her Chrysopoeian Oecumene, eight thousand light-years from Sol, wears space-dolphin bodies and is racing to finish a Dyson scaffold before its star goes nova.

The planet Ulysses, a moon-mass ocean world with a logic-diamond brain and once a ship-mind of the Diaspora, has fallen on hard times. His gas giant has been dismantled for the Dyson, its debris raises his insurance, solar storms spoil his seas, and his old escort ships, still wearing the badges he awarded them, need work. So he hires a tug and, twenty-two years later, settles in Earth’s parasol shadow as the moon she lacks. They talk about the war, whose news arrives as light thousands of years old.

A blue Earth-like planet and a smaller silver ocean world hang together in the shadow of an immense golden space-parasol, with two blazing suns and a two-lobed rose-coloured nebula far behind.

✦ · 1 A Moon for Twenty-first Earth Ulysses moves house for money. His gas giant has been broken up for the Dyson project, its debris has raised his insurance, tourism is down and solar storms have spoiled his seas, so he polls his tenants, hires a tug for a twenty-two-year crawl and settles in the parasol shadow of Twenty-first Earth. She has no Luna; he weighs about as much as one, and his tides can do her oceans’ work. The great romance begins as a sound business decision.

Part 2

Serenade

Here the narrators claim artistic license. Ulysses sends a stepped-down copy of himself down a chain (planet, space station, relay satellite, a ten-foot cyborg), and when the relay sets, the man is cut off from his higher selves. At night, with the planet Ulysses risen over a lake, he sits in a lakeside grove and sings to a guitar in Portuguese. Deer kneel and birds gather; a swan, the frogs and the lake-bottom gel wake, until enough of Penelope is present to rise as mist.

A bird (not, the narrators insist, a parrot) speaks for her and accuses him of having opened his memory casket and become an Eremite. He denies it and vows to keep Earth’s memory until the Eschaton. Unliving things are simple, he tells her: “mere matter is the amnesia of the universe.” They stand at Cannae, and though all at Eta Carina are vowed to peace he honours the legions who died there: “By honoring the dead, I defy that silence.” The birds offer to heal his seas if he will freely give what once had to be won by wiles; he protests that they are strangers, and every animal flees. Then the swan dries with its wings a woman rising from the lake, wringing out her raven hair. “Call me Penelope,” she says. When the relay clears the horizon, the news climbs to the planet: they are to be married.

Then the narrators take the poetry back: really, his stranded remote paid her to pass messages through her trees, and she found a fellow antiquarian. Why she remade herself to fall in love is unknown, though the evidence points to a hidden Eighth Mental Structure operation. Married now, he walks her world as a pack of black dogs and finds decay: eroding topsoil, failing salmon, black oily post-terrene life staining the mountain snow. Penelope is slowly letting go of life, and the Oecumene will not pay for an expensive mausoleum. So he must serenade her after all.

A dark-haired woman in a long white mist-pale gown rises from a still lake under a starry sky, her hands raised to her wet hair, as a white swan spreads its wings beside her and a very tall man in a pale grey cloak watches from the shore, seen from behind.

✦ · 2 Call Me Penelope The legend’s great moment. When the singer protests that he and the forest are strangers, every animal flees, the lake bottom warms, and the swan rears to dry with its wings a woman rising from the water and wringing out her raven hair. “Call me Penelope,” she says: a woman made of her own substance. He sings to her. By the time his relay satellite clears the horizon and the news climbs to the planet, they are to be married.

A pack of black dogs on a rocky ridge howls up at snowy mountains streaked with black stains above a dying pine forest.

✦ · 3 The Black Dogs After the legend the narrators give a more literal account, and married life turns out to have a problem. Walking Penelope’s world as a pack of fierce black dogs, Ulysses finds topsoil washing away, trees starving, salmon failing, bears that will not mate, and black, oily, radiation-hardy life staining the mountain snow. When the dogs smell it on the wind, they howl. The planet-mind reads the pattern: Penelope is slowly letting herself die, and nobody will pay to keep her alive.

Part 3

The Lonely Stars

The tale pauses for history. For half a million years only Sol and Cygnus X-1 were inhabited. Sol found noumenal immortality and called its age a Golden Age; Cygnus found the mathematics of singularities, and endless energy in Infinity Fountains. The Lords of that Second Oecumene, each alone in a diamond palace among servant replicas, stopped answering and became the Silent Oecumene, the Swans. Resolved to destroy the Golden Oecumene, they spent tens of thousands of years seeding the stars between with dark ships and spies.

The lovers ask each other what it was like to leave everything you knew, and to lose it. Penelope is older and remembers Old Earth. She writes into his memory the moment the news came: sailing toward Canopus under gossamer star-sails, she saw Sol flicker and every signal from the Solar System go dead. Colonies announced replica Earths, twenty by the time the Diaspora reached Eta Carina; lingering alone beyond the Carina Nebula to listen, she became keeper of the local one. She also heard Atkins, the Golden Age’s lone soldier, now the Warmind’s servant in ten thousand war-machines, challenge the Silent Lords. He is the Chrysopoeians’ bogeyman; their Renunciation fled the war he stands for.

Ulysses answers with a symphony. The Renunciants’ launching laser died with Earth, and ships were burned for reaction mass. At Canopus he was made and sent ahead to Eta Carina, dreaming of Swans in faceless silver faceplates, and woke once to pass a sunless rogue world he named Elpenor. He reported that no sane person would settle beside this hypernova-in-waiting; by Warlock logic the Diaspora chose it anyway. For ten thousand years he lived alone with his fish and a chess partner, and he was toying with the locks of his memory casket, which held a Cold Duke self that could never be lonely and never love, when Canopus blazed up: the fleet was coming.

A fleet of tiny ships trails vast silver light-sails across a dark starfield toward a bright star, while far behind them a small golden sun dims.

✦ · 4 When Sol Flickered What was it like to lose everything you knew? Penelope answers by writing the moment into his memory. He finds himself on a hundred tiny ships under vast gossamer star-sails, sailing for Canopus, as the small golden star of Sol flickers and every signal from Venus, Earth, Mars, Demeter and the Jovian moons goes dead. Colonies across the sky answer with replica Earths. Who killed Old Earth, and why, the tale saves for its last pages.

Part 4

The Battle of Eta Carina

Roaming her mind, Ulysses reads what the narrators call her diary. The Eighth Mental Structure can hide any thought behind the equivalent of an event horizon, so that no one can know his real self; Penelope fears that while she listened alone a Silent virus or ship got into her. She walls him out, black life spreads down her mountains, and one of his own remotes tells him she fears he means to murder her. Then she turns it round. Not she but he is the hidden one: why are his remotes so well armed, why the medals? The colony sits on a hypernova, and there are no Renunciants. He asks who he is.

“Atkins. Who else? This whole star system is a weapon. And I am the enemy.”

Eta Carina A and B are driven into each other, and the spun-up Dyson scaffold of the information strand focuses the explosion into a single ray aimed at the Silent fleet, one dark Dyson sphere around a black hole twelve light-years off. As the narrators picture it, Twenty-first Earth rises over his seas on fire, green life fighting black; Ulysses is Atkins now, in black armour, and in a traditional image they call baseless, Penelope’s last reach toward him becomes a crisp salute. A junior Atkins hidden in her asks for orders, and a Silent Lord hidden in her until now fights back.

Everything is Atkins, from the tenants and space-dolphins to the sophotechs inside the suns: the whole Chrysopoeian Oecumene goes to war. How Atkins loses nobody knows; the narrators guess that a Swan who could haul a black hole across thousands of light-years has an Infinity Fountain at hand. Seconds behind a data beam from the Silent One’s node at Erebus in Antarctica, Atkins’s download leaves Ulysses for the information strand, and Atkins falls into enemy hands.

A man in black segmented armour, a halo of small black scales around his head, gazes up from a dark rocky shore at a huge burning Earth rising over the sea.

✦ · 5 Atkins. Who Else? Asked who he really is, Penelope names him, and the love story ends. The colony on its hypernova is a weapon, its peace-vowed Renunciants a fiction, and a redaction system has kept Ulysses from knowing he is Atkins. As the narrators picture the battle, he stands in black armour on his own seas while Twenty-first Earth rises, almost four times larger than he looks from her sky, burning, green life fighting black; and, in a traditional image they call baseless, his wife’s reaching arm becomes a crisp salute.

Two blazing stars collide inside a glowing ring, which gathers the explosion into one straight white ray cutting through a rose-gold nebula toward a small dark sphere.

✦ · 6 A Supernova in One Ray The colony’s real purpose. Eta Carina A and B are rammed together, and the scaffold around the information strand, spun up to relativistic speed, focuses the explosion into a single ray that burns through the nebula toward the Silent fleet: one dark Dyson sphere built around a black hole, twelve light-years away. Every tenant, floating city and space-dolphin turns out to be Atkins too. He loses anyway; the narrators guess that the Swans’ Infinity Fountain outweighs even a hypernova.

Part 5

The Suicide of the Swan

Thirteen to twenty thousand years later Atkins wakes in a simulated moonlit grove much like the one where Ulysses sang, and within a year or two has a log cabin, buckskins and a cold-iron knife. Then his jailor floats in like thistledown: a Silent Lady, tall and slender, her face a blank silver information plate, in a feathered coronet and peacock robes. Bored with tormenting thousands of copies of him, she sues for peace, hoping honest dealing will reach a real Atkins hidden inside them. Why did the Swans attack? He will never know, she says. She gives him a body.

He wakes in zero gravity aboard her diamond nautilus, armed with a Warlock’s athame and a gold-foil fan. She shows him Elpenor, hollowed around a core crushed to feed an Infinity Fountain, and the wreck of the Armada of Dark Worlds, some four thousand super-Jupiters flung toward the galactic core. Others, she says, may call her Ao Ahasuerus. When Atkins allows that there will always be war, she corrects him:

“There will always be war, but there will not always be man.”

The surviving world-ships are enough to ignite the galactic core into a Seyfert wave that will overtake the Golden Oecumene. Yet she is not delighted: Elpenor’s damaged machines can no longer edit away her pain. She proposes they kill each other; Atkins explains the difference between a soldier and a murderer. She concludes that her people betrayed her, that she is a copy, and that she can die only for a cause, for a woman better than she is. Then she names the trap, and Atkins admits it. Old Earth was destroyed deliberately, as a psychological ploy, and replica Earths were set out to lure the Swans who revered it; twenty-one of the star oecumenes were fakes peopled only by him; Penelope was himself in disguise until the Swan invaded her. He has a digital copy of Earth and can build another. She asks whether he will, and he sees what she means.

Pleading that unless they make peace and love each other now all human life must die, Ao Ahasuerus overwrites herself, and in her thought-space, astonished to be alive, wakes Penelope; inside Atkins, Ulysses stirs. Over eighteen millennia the lovers sail Elpenor to Omega Centauri, watching the Seyfert wave set off chains of novae across the disk behind them. There they light an Infinity Fountain and string antennae between the stars to catch refugee broadcasts; Penelope builds Earths, Atkins re-peoples worlds, and even the Swans return.

“For who does not surrender to love?”

In the epilogue the long war with the Silence is over, and Atkins, revived now and then from some archive, will not talk about what he did. On some replica Earth he tends his apple orchard, practises with his weapons, or sleeps under the mountain, awaiting the next war.

A lean, lined-faced man in a plain tan tunic and trousers stands near a log cabin in a moonlit lakeside grove as a tall figure with a blank silver mask for a face, a feathered coronet and shimmering peacock robes floats toward him.

✦ · 7 The Jailor Arrives Thirteen to twenty thousand years after the battle, Atkins wakes in a simulated moonlit grove much like the one where Ulysses sang, and makes himself at home: a branch for a club, then a cabin, buckskins and an iron knife. At last his jailor floats in like thistledown, the faceless figure from his nightmares. She has tormented thousands of copies of him and grown bored. Now she wants peace, and suspects a real Atkins hidden in the copies whom only honest dealing can reach.

A man in a stiff dark high-collared coat sits against the crystal wall of a diamond starship holding a gold fan, a dagger at his hip, beside a faceless silver-masked figure reclining in midair on spreading purple-red and silver robes, a dark ringed planet beyond the hull.

✦ · 8 Aboard the Diamond Nautilus Freed into an old-fashioned body aboard a diamond nautilus, with a Warlock’s dagger and a gold maneuvering fan, Atkins faces the Swan: Milady to him, Ao Ahasuerus to anyone else. She shows him Elpenor, the rogue world Ulysses once named, hollowed out to feed an Infinity Fountain, and the wreck of an Armada of Dark Worlds whose survivors are enough to ignite the galactic core. Then she names the trap of the replica Earths, and he admits it.

A dark ringed planet drifts toward a dense golden ball of stars while behind it a spiral galaxy burns with chains of exploding stars.

✦ · 9 Toward Omega Centauri The Swan surrenders to the only thing she will surrender to. She overwrites herself, and Penelope wakes in her place, astonished to be alive, while Ulysses stirs inside Atkins. The lovers sail Elpenor for eighteen thousand years to Omega Centauri, watching the Seyfert wave set off chains of novae across the disk behind them. There they catch the galaxy’s refugee broadcasts, build Earths, and start the human experiment again, Swans included. The narrators’ culture grows from there.

The machinery of this book

  • Planet-minds and remotes. Ulysses is a moon-mass logic diamond under an ocean, and his self runs down a chain: planet (Prime), space station (Partial Two), relay satellite (Three), a four-hundred-gram brain in a ten-foot cyborg (Four), each link carrying an updated copy of the others. The law of the day holds the planet to whatever his partials promise, which is how a remote out of radio contact gets a whole world engaged.
  • Cerebelline biosphere-minds. Penelope is the trilogy’s Cerebelline neuroform spread over a world: her thinking runs in trees, birds’ nerves, the bloodstreams of she-wolves, fog and earthworms, and wakes wherever enough of her pools, which is how a swan, some frogs and lake-bottom gel add up to a woman. Green Symphony Cerebellines fall in love with whatever they terraform; the story leaves open whether that, or a hidden Eighth Mental Structure operation, made her love Ulysses.
  • The Swans’ faceless plates. A Silent Lord’s head is hidden behind an information plate grown into the skull, with no eyes and no mouth; the tears running down it are molecule-sized Babbage gears carrying data. Above it rises a coronet of radio horns, wires and feathers, and the eyes on the peacock robes really see. The outfit exists for pleasure, and the Swans’ Benevolences edit away every unwelcome thought. Ao Ahasuerus breaks only when Elpenor’s damaged machines no longer can.
  • The Cold Duke template. Ulysses carries a memory casket holding a personality built on Cold Duke templates (in the trilogy Cold Dukes are among the Neptunians; Diomedes is one), able to face eternal solitude and never be lonely. Opening it would burn away his capacity for love for good. He is toying with its locks when Canopus blazes up and the fleet is coming.
  • Copies and partials. Everyone here is somebody’s copy. The Eighth Mental Structure, Golden noetics joined to Silent singularity mathematics, can hide any number of selves behind a thought’s event horizon, so a whole colony, tenants and dolphins included, can be Atkins without knowing it. The Swan tortures thousands of copies of Atkins for sport, then suspects a real one hidden inside them; Atkins shrugs that the original was the prototype and he is the real one. And she ends by deciding she is only a copy herself.
  • Infinity Fountains and the Seyfert wave. The Silent Oecumene’s wealth is energy from nothing, drawn from controlled-horizon singularities. With black-hole mass to hand (Elpenor’s crushed core, a black hole hauled thousands of light-years to Eta Carina) they outspend a hypernova; with the galaxy’s own central black hole, disturbed by their Armada, they light a Seyfert wave that sweeps the main disk. The survivors light a new Fountain at Omega Centauri’s black hole.

Continuity notes

  • Atkins is the only character from the novels who appears; the Warmind, the Sophotech he serves, is only mentioned. In The Golden Age he is the Golden Oecumene’s entire military, one man; here the war has multiplied him into ten thousand war-forms in the Warmind’s service, and the colonists who fled the war know him as their bogeyman. He mentions a messy divorce about a millennium back. Phaethon, Daphne and Helion are never named.
  • The enemy is the trilogy’s own: the Silent Oecumene of Cygnus X-1, whose Lords The Golden Transcendence’s cast list says are commonly called Swans. The story gives them a history: half a million years of solitary luxury, the long communication lasers falling silent, then a slow war of dark ships and spies. Why they attacked, Ao Ahasuerus will not say.
  • The war The Golden Transcendence foresees has come. The minds of Sol have gathered into a Transcendence, a College of War has replaced the College of Hortators, Sol has been struck by a singularity weapon and Old Earth is gone. Atkins says it was done on purpose, as bait.
  • Helion’s dream comes true, darkly. Near the end of book III (ch. 36) Helion dreams of decoy colonies manned by Atkins in endless numbers, and of real colonies named for metals, Orichalcum among them. Here twenty-one star oecumenes are fakes peopled only by Atkins, and the colonies carry the names of metals and alloys: Shakudo, Orichalc, Electrum, Black Corinthian Bronze, and the Chrysopoeian (gold-making) Oecumene itself. The story does not point out the echo.
  • A Swan in person. In The Golden Transcendence (ch. 25) a Lord of the Silent Oecumene appears only as an illusion, in peacock robes and a silver mask with amethyst eyes. Here a Swan is on stage in her own body, with a name and, at the last, a change of heart, and her silver plate has no eyes at all.
  • Atkins inside Ulysses is an old trick. In The Golden Transcendence (chs. 9 and 12) a decoy “Atkins” rides inside the Ulysses mannequin on the Phoenix’s bridge. Here Atkins rides, unknowing, inside a planet named Ulysses.
  • The trilogy’s machinery, reused: memory caskets (Phaethon’s lost memories sit in one in The Golden Age), Cerebellines, Warlocks, Invariants, Eremites, Cold Dukes, Sophotechs, Hortators, and the noumenal immortality of the Seventh Mental Structure, whose era is ending here.

Notes

  • Where it appeared. The last of nineteen stories in The New Space Opera 2 (Eos/HarperCollins, July 2009), pp. 501–544 of the trade paperback; also an ebook and a 2010 mass-market paperback. ISFDB counts 17,413 words, a novelette, just under the novella line; Wright calls it a novella. ISFDB files it with his short fiction, not under its Golden Oecumene series.
  • The Locus “win”. Wright’s 2010 blog post said his story had just won the Locus Award, but the post’s own title gives the win to the book: The New Space Opera 2 was voted Best Anthology, while “The Far End of History” placed eighth for Best Novella. It also drew Hugo nominations below the cutoff.
  • How it is told. A prologue, twenty-one titled sections and an epilogue, under an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64 credited to “William (Sole) Shakespeare … Base Neuroform”. The narrators stage the courtship with borrowed art (a sonnet-cycle by Ao Aerolith Wolfemind One-Nine, a color-clavier piece by “Alexander Scriabin, Hypothetical Revenant”) and then retract it. The viewpoint is Ulysses’s through section 17 and Atkins’s from section 18.
  • Homer on the surface. Ulysses and Penelope; her memorial work likened to weaving and unweaving a burial shroud; a rogue world named Elpenor; Canopus blazing like a Cyclops’s eye; a nod to Deucalion and Pyrrha when they name his first island. The story also stops at Cannae.
  • Vingt-et-un. Atkins’s full name in the trilogy’s dramatis personae is Atkins Vingt-et-un General-Issue, French for twenty-one: the number of Penelope’s Earth and of the fake star oecumenes. Neither the story nor the author draws the line.
  • ”Lone Soldier in Paradise” (2020) is Wright’s other Atkins story, set on Earth during the Golden Age itself, with Atkins alone in a hillside cabin. It first appeared in his collection All Men Dream of Earthwomen and Other Aeons (Still Waters, December 2020); the text on his site, under a “Table of Contents so far”, gives five chapters and ends “TO BE CONTINUED IN OUR NEXT”, then “THE END”; no continuation is listed by ISFDB or in his own list of works.
  • Reception. Tangent Online’s reviewer tipped it for the year’s-best lists, and Fantasy Book Critic told readers they need not know the novels first; Fantasy Literature’s reviewer was mixed. In 2009 Wright guessed it might be his last story in the setting; apart from that Atkins story, it has been.

The whole walk: · · · · · The Far End of History