And what about the future? To a mind as wide as the Transcendence, this came as an afterthought, and yet, to the humans Basics, Warlocks, Invariants, Mass-Minds, Cerebellines, and the odder structures inhabiting Neptune and Circum-Urania, the mind sculptures of Deme-ter, and the energy shapes of the solar north pole, this part of the Transcendence was what they deemed the whole Transcendence to be.
And yet each cherished member of the Transcendence, filled with as much wisdom as he could bear, felt the whole affair had been conducted for his own self's single benefit. The part of his life he Transcended was the most precious part of the most precious life in the universe, because, of course, it was his own.
Lovers were reunited, old quarrels healed, forgotten wrongs were righted, justice was done. Strangers in the myriads (who otherwise never would have met) were singled out, introduced to each other, to become compatriots, partners, friends. Businessmen tangled in long-delayed arbitration reconsidered the entireties of their lives, found new projects to which to apply their efforts, resolved their disputes, and were either satisfied or were content to be dissatisfied. Students of the arts and sciences received new insights, saw new visions, vowed great vows.
Sleepers were woken from their graves, and were shown reality, and asked, yet again, to forget their dreams and accept their lives. Many refused, and sank back down again into inescapable hallucination. But a few, like bright sparks struck from dying embers, flew up, rising from deeper to lesser dreaming, opening old memory caskets, encountering forgotten pains, recalling themselves, putting on their true personas; and the dreamers folded their dreams, their false-selves, their invented worlds, and put them into their memory caskets to forget them, tike childhood dresses, worn and precious with age, folded away with lavender petals into a cedarwood box.
During the Transcendence, Earthmind and Old-Woman-of-the-Sea met and had a long talk, shared thoughts, and came to a decision. But humanity was not involved in that matter, and no human discovered what had been discussed.
THE AGE IS DONE
Human affairs were loaded by the supervisory fragments of the Transcendence into the human memories, for them to contemplate as they woke into their separate identities again.
Even before the Closing Ceremonies were truly begun, members and elements of the Eleemosynary Composition, all across Southeast Asia and South America, in hives and arcologies and mile-high pyramids of imperishable metal, descended back into non-Transcendent consciousness.
Eleemosynary contained the oldest set of living memories in the Golden Oecumene; he-they had suffered each and every Transcendence from the very first exper-imental ones. A mass-mind, he-they were well versed in methods of attaching and detaching from greater segments of consciousness. Hence, Eleemosynary woke before other neuroforms or Compositions woke; for a bole over a week, he-they had the planet to himself-themselves.
In Venice, in Patagonia, in Bangkok, Eleemosynary eggs floated to the surface of canals and thinking-fools, sending out signals and coordination webs to the hives. New members in fresh bodies rose from undersea nurseries, changed from dolphins to mermaids to the frail blank-eyed waifs the mass-mind preferred when not in costume. In perfect lockstep, in many bodies, the mass-mind walked streets utterly deserted and quiet.
The Composition did not let slip the economic advantages his-their early waking offered; Eleemosynary spent the days preparing houses and formulations to welcome other devastened souls as they woke, so that the weeping millions would have comfort and ease as they made the transposition back to merely normal consciousness. Money lending was also not far from the Eleemosynary's thought: people would be eager to invest in those projects the visions had shown, extrapolations had predicted.
He-they also hurried to publish the first diaries, synopses, and briefs of the Transcendence (which, since the tail-end of the Transcendence was still ongoing, could be checked against the Aurelian record-keeping sub-mind for accuracy).
Eleemosynary Composition recalled a decision (or prediction) from the Transcendence regarding his fellow Peer Helion. The Transcendence had wanted to give the man a gift.
To carry out the will of the Transcendence, and to become the giver of this gift, the Eleemosynary Composition wrote Helion's noumenal information a prioritizing routine so that, the next time Helion had to download himself in a hurry, the most recent parts of his memory would be transmitted first, and his fear of losing himself would be transmitted last. Thus, if the transmission were interrupted midway, the Helion who arrived would be a version who was not unduly distressed by the incompleteness of his memory.
At the same time, with the quiet precision of an army, members of the Eleemosynary mass-mind began neatly to take down the banners and decorations decorating the streets, to dismantle the elaborate dream-systems shining on the public channels, to sweep the gardens clean of those dead flowers meant only to live during the festivals, and to help dull-eyed early risers out of their costumes and out of their costume parapersonalities.
One member of the Eleemosynary Composition came upon an early riser disguised as Vandonner of Jupiter, sitting alone on a deserted hill overlooking the Aurelian Palace-city. The man sat with his play helmet thrown to one side, his now-lifeless illusion-cloak to the other. The long pole he had once used to guide his storm craft was broken in two, and lay on the grass.
The sky above was blue and fine, clean of any cloud or speck, and the man wept. This member of the Eleemosynary, a thin big-eyed girl, sat for a time next to the him, her arm around his shoulder, saying nothing.
Kshatrimanyu Han woke and devastened in his gold coffin in the midst of the Aurelian Palace-city. As the Speaker of the Parliament, and the advising programmer of the Shadow Parliament, it was he who presided over the many melancholy ceremonies and closing rituals of the Month of Fasting. There were no more entertainments, no parades, no public spectacles. Even during this brief period, he reminded his fellow parlimentarians of the decision, or prediction of the Transcendence.
The Parliament resurrected an ancient custom. In august service held on the deck of the Fourth Era warship Union, the Parliament issued Marshal Atkins a medal of the Order of the Commonwealth High Honor, not just for his actions during the fighting itself, but, more so, for his persistence, all those long years, in maintaining himself in battle readiness, when so many told him so fiercely that he was no longer needed, or wanted.
This was accompanied by a brevet increase in rank (though not an increase in pay).
During the Month of Delayed Forgetting, many Alternative Organizations, whose odd arrangements of consciousness allowed them, without great pain, to recall and to forget inexpressible events from higher states of consciousness, returned to quotidian mind state before the Basics or Invariants.
In his many-warded coven-cells, Ao Aoen woke, and diminished himself, using an antique ritual of the anti-Buddha, called the intricate and entangling robe of the Illusion of Maya. In mediation, one thread at a time, he rewove the robe in his mind, and rewove his mind into the normal life he had known and forgotten. Thoughts from the Transcendace too bright and fierce for him to keep, in his imagination, he turned into butterflies of fire, and sent them to whirl around his chamber of visualizations.
Taking up his athame knife, he cut the palm of the body he wore, and caught the drops of blood he shed and gathered them into an envelope, which he had familiar carry through the real world to the center of the Wolf-mind coven. This coven was one of the few Warlock groups who had always been loyal to Atkins, and who had contributed regularly to his upkeep. Hitherto, they had been obscure, and shunned. No longer.