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inflowing nanomachines was still conforming to his predictions.
It was Sachio who finally lost control and interjected angrily, "Cartan Null
is some ghostly image of a scape, full of ghostly icons, floating through the
vacuum, down into the hole?"
Prospero seemed more startled than outraged by the interruption. "It is a city
of light. Translucent, ethereal . .
."
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The owl in Sachio s skull puffed its feathers out. "No photon state would look
like that. What you describe could never exist, and even if it could it would
never be conscious." Sachio had worked for decades on the problem of giving
Cartan Null the freedom to process data without disrupting the geometry around
it.
Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. "An archetypal quest
narrative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities
"
Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead, downloading
information from the polis library. "Do you have any idea what archetypal
narratives are?
"
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"Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul;
who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious "
Sachio cut him off impatiently. "They re the product of a few chance
attractors in flesher neurophysiology.
Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral
culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once
writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who
failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity s greatest statues
had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable
spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal
pebble the pinnacle of the artform.
What you ve created is not only devoid of truth, it s devoid of aesthetic
merit."
Prospero was stunned. He looked around the room expectantly, as if waiting for
someone to speak up in defense of the
Ballad
.
No one made a sound.
This was it: the end of diplomacy. Gisela spoke privately to Cordelia,
whispering urgently: "Stay in Cartan! No one can force you to leave!"
Cordelia turned to her with an expression of open astonishment. "But I
thought " She fell silent, reassessing something, hiding her surprise.
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Then she said, "I can t stay."
"
Why not?
What is there to stop you? You can t stay buried in Athena " Gisela caught
herself; whatever bizarre hold the place had on her, disparaging it wouldn t
help.
Prospero was muttering in disbelief now, "Ingratitude!
Base ingratitude!" Cordelia regarded him with forlorn affection. "He s not
ready." She faced Gisela, and spoke plainly. "Athena won t last forever.
Polises like that form and decay; there are too many real possibilities for
people to cling to one arbitrary sanctified culture, century after century.
But he s not prepared for the transition; he doesn t even realize it s coming.
I can t abandon him to that. He s going to need someone to help him through."
She smiled suddenly, mischievously. "But I ve cut two centuries off the
waiting time. If nothing else, the trip did that."
Gisela was speechless for a moment, shamed by the strength of this child s
love. Then she sent Cordelia a stream of tags. "These are references to the
best libraries on Earth. You ll get the real stuff there, not some watered-
down version of flesher physics."
Prospero was shrinking the podium, descending to ground level. "Cordelia! Come
to me now. We re leaving these barbarians to the obscurity they deserve!"
For all that she admired Cordelia s loyalty, Gisela was still saddened by her
choice. She said numbly, "You belong in
Cartan. It should have been possible. We should have been able to find a way."
Cordelia shook her head: no failure, no regrets. "Don t worry about me. I ve
survived Athena so far; I think I can see it through to the end. Everything
you ve shown me, everything I ve done here, will help." She squeezed
Gisela s hand. "Thank you."
She joined her father. Prospero created a doorway, opening up onto a yellow
brick road through the stars. He stepped through, and Cordelia followed him.
Vikram turned away from the gravitational wave trace and asked mildly, "All
right, you can own up now: who threw in the additional exabyte?"
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"
Freeeeee-dom!
" Cordelia bounded across Cartan Null s control scape, a long platform
floating in a tunnel of color-
coded Feynman diagrams, streaming through the darkness like the trails of a
billion colliding and disintegrating sparks.
Gisela s first instinct was to corner her and shout in her face:
Kill yourself now! End this now!
A brief side-branch, cut short before there was time for personality
divergence, hardly counted as a real life and a real death.
It would be a forgotten dream, nothing more.
That analysis didn t hold up, though. From the instant she d become conscious,
this Cordelia had been an entirely separate person: the one who d left Athena
forever, the one who d escaped. Her extended self had invested far too much in
this clone to treat it as a mistake and cut its losses. Beyond anything it
hoped for itself, the clone knew exactly what its existence meant for the
original. To betray that, even if it could never be found out, would be
unthinkable.
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