"John C. Wright - Golden Age 3 - The Golden Transcendence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

Another file opened: and there came a dim memory of a portable noetic reader,
something Aurelian Sophotech had made, something done at the request of the
Earth-mind, who was as much wiser than other machine-minds as they were wiser
than mere men.
Why wasn't his memory working properly?
One star burned black on the star-map in the ship mind. A sensation of cold
dread touched him. The X-ray source in the constellation of the Swan; Cygnus
X-l. The first, last, and only extrasolar colony of man, ten thousand
light-years away. At first, merely a scientific outpost was set there to study
the black hole; then, infuriated by an intuition-process dream of a group of
Mass-Warlocks over many years, a Warlock leader named Ao Ormgorgon chose it as
the destination for an epic voyage, lasting tens of centuries, aboard the slow
and massive ships of the Fifth Era, to colonize the system. Immortality had
not yet been invented in those far-past days: only men of alternate nervous
system formations, Warlocks who were manic, Invariants incapable of fear, and
mass-minds whose surface memories could outlast the death of individual
component members, went.
For a time, a great civilization ruled there, drawing upon the infinite energy
of the black hole. Then, all long-range radio lasers fell quiet. Nothing
further was heard. It was known after that as the Silent Oecumene. They were
not dead. They were the enemy. Somethings someone, some machine, or perhaps
millions of people, had survived, and, somehow, silently, without rousing the
least suspicion, after lying quiet for thousands of years, had sent an agent
back into the Home System, Sol, back to the Golden Oecumene.
Back to him. They wanted his ship, the mightiest vessel ever to fly.
The Phoenix Exultant.
It was the only ship made ever to be able to achieve near light-speed. Due to
time dilation, even the longest journeys would be brief to those aboard; and,
to an immortal crew from a planet of immortals, there need be no fear of the
centuries lost between stars.
Few people in the Golden Oecumene wished to leave the peace and prosperity of
the deathless society and fly outside of the range of the immortality
circuits. Of those few, none had been wealthy enough to construct a vessel
like this one. If Phaethon failed, the dream of star travel would fail,
perhaps for millennia. But these others, these Silent Ones, they came from a
colony where immortality had never been invented. They were the children of
star pioneers. They knew the value of star flight; they believed in the dream.
The wanted the dream for themselves. They were coming for him. They were
coming for his ship. The Lords of the Silent Oecumene. The beings, once men,
now strange and forgotten, who came from the black hole burning at the heart
of the constellation of the Swan.
Then an internal-sensation channel came on-line. He became aware of the
condition of his body.
The sensation was one of immense pressure. He was under ninety gravities of
weight. The circuit told him that his body was adjusted to its most
shock-resistant internal configuration; his cells were more like wood than
flesh, his liquids and fluids had been turned to thick viscous stuff, able to
move, barely, against the huge weight pinning him in place. The jelly of his
brain had been stiffened artificially to preserve it in this supergravity. His
brain was now an inert block, and all his present thought processes were being