Xeelee never had access to the Configuration space, Transcendence was close
Have you read all the books or are you just going from a single one? Because the books are from the perspective of humanity and take place across thousands of years- what we read is only what humanity perceives and most of our knowledge comes from their
speculation about the other races of the universe, which might not always be true. Baxter has disproven humanity's take on a subject wrong multiple times.
Reth stalked back and forth, arms spread wide. 'We remain human, Hama Druz. I cannot apprehend a multidimensional continuum. So I sought a metaphor. A human interface. A beach of reality dust. A sea of -entropy, chaos. The structures folded into the living things, the shape of the landscape, represent consistency - what we time-bound creatures apprehend as causality.'
'And the rising sea -'
The threat of the Xeelee,' he said, smiling thinly. The destruction to come. The obliteration of possibility. Even there, threats can reach... but life, mind can persist.
- Reality Dust
The very reason why Xeelee sought to leave their multiverse for another one using the Ring was because the existence of a reality in which the Photino Birds wouldn't be victorious could not be found in their own configuration space thus requiring for the Xeelee to seek something that is beyond the set of universes mapped in their own multiverse, meaning they had already mapped the entire infinite timelines in the Configuration Space.
The Xeelee are so capable of sensing even a single interface made to it in a single reality by the humans in Reality Dust that they sent a Nightfighter to deal with it before it even happened. They also have dealt with the humans uploaded into the configuration space by causing the sea of chaos that is present there to start rising and engulf local parts of the configuration space.
Heck, even a previous version of humanity infinitely weaker than the Transcendence could access the configuration space-
Nomi said, 'At first I thought the Xeelee must have lit up some exotic super-drive and got out of here. But I was wrong. That thing must be half a kilometre down. How did it get there?'
'I don't think it did,' Hama said. He turned away and peered at Jupiter. 'I think Callisto moved, Nomi.'
'What . . . ?'
'It didn't have to be far. Just a couple of kilometres. Just enough to swallow up the Xeelee craft.'
Nomi was staring at him. 'That's insane, Hama, what can move a moon?'
Why, a child could, Hama thought in awe. A child playing on a beach - if every grain on that beach is a slice in time. I see a line sketched in the dust, a history, smooth and complete. I pick out a grain with Callisto positioned just here. And I replace it with a grain in which Callisto is positioned just a little further over there. As easy, as wilful, as that.
- Reality Dust
And their control over it was so great that they could modify the universe through it to essentially wrap reality- think Almighty from Bleach on a universal scale.
Then where are the Fotino Birds? They are literally on the same level as Xeelee, and even slightly bigger. Where are they?
You misunderstand something, they don't exist
inside the configuration space but instead can manipulate it however they want, the quote shows the presence of Xeelee and their technology in the Configuration Space. It does not say that Xeelee themselves are bound to it, they actually live on Black Holes where time and space collapse infinitely into a singularity.
Moreover, it's a literal plot point that Photino Birds cannot be interacted with unless you use gravity which is a force that exists in all dimensions. What makes you think that the Photino Birds would be able to detect their presence in Configuration Space?
So Xeelee Nightfighter almost destroyed human civilization, including the Transcendents. I'll ask a tricky question right away. Can you tell me why he never destroyed humanity? He didn't stop himself
Because it's a plot point that Xeelee are
kind and their ultimate goal is the preservation of all forms of Baryonic Life- in fact, they actually saved mankind from destroying itself and even created infinite universes for every matter-based species to have ever existed before they left their multiverse through the Ring to explore the wider Bulk.
The very goal of their race is to preserve life, and this even answers your question of why they did not just destroy humanity. It's because mankind was never more than a nuisance to them, and when they started to get too overbearing they simply created a new timeline where humanity never even started a war against them in the first place.
"Look, it might not have felt like it while the Xeelee was rampaging through your Solar System. But its basic motive, and that of its whole species, has always been to preserve life, baryonic life, and its diversity. That was even true when it tried to eliminate humanity, and created a new timeline in which we did not extirpate half the Galaxy's inhabitants, and throw billions of our own children into a pointless war at the Core."
Here is Xeelee creating an infinite universe for the Silver Ghosts to live inside.
'Olbers' paradox,' he whispered.
'Yes,' said the Ghost. 'A key moment in the evolution of human thought, a philosophical fossil preserved by exiles through the Qax Extirpation … If the universe were infinite and static, every line of sight would meet the surface of a star, and the whole sky would be as bright as the surface of a sun. Even occluding dust clouds would soon become as hot as the stars themselves. That was evidently not so, observed those thinkers of old Earth. Therefore their universe could not be infinite or static.'
'But here—'
'But here, things are different. This appears to be a pocket universe, Jack Raoul. We believe it is a bubble of spacetime pinched off by a singularity. The heart of a black hole, perhaps.'
'Infinite and static.'
'Yes.'
'It doesn't make sense,' Raoul said. 'If the whole sky is as hot as the surface of the sun – Ambassador, how do you keep cool?'
The Ghost rolled, shimmering. 'There is another pocket universe at the centre of the colony. Our heat is dumped there.'
Raoul gaped. 'You have a whole universe for a heat dump? And is that how the stars keep shining?'
'We think so. Otherwise, immersed in this heat bath, simple thermodynamics would soon cause the stars to evaporate. We have only recently arrived here, Jack Raoul; there is much we have yet to explore. But it is clear to us that this cosmos is heavily engineered.'
'Engineered? Who by?'
'The Xeelee,' the Ghost said.
'Ah.' The Xeelee: aloof from the petty squabbles of lesser kinds, even of sprawling, brawling humanity. The Xeelee, as remote as clouds.
'It is not certain,' said the Ghost. 'But there are certain signatures we have come to recognise … Such universe-modelling does appear to be a characteristic Xeelee strategy.'
Raoul laughed, wondering. 'At last you've found yourselves an inverted sky, Ambassador. A Cold Sink.' Considering their evolutionary history, shaped by cosmic betrayal and cold, this place was like a Ghost wish-fulfilment fantasy.
That answers your 'tricky' question.
I'll even let go of the Transcendence and Nightfighter bits. I don't know them that well.
In the original timeline, the Transcendence destroyed itself and set humanity on a path to destruction. But mankind was bent on a genocidal race to eradicate all of life from the universe even after hundreds of thousands of years, and it took the single Nightfighter to retcon everything and change the past so that it never even happened in the first place.
We do know for a fact that Transcendence was present in the version of reality seen in that duology 'prior' to the Xeelee's intervention into Humanity's history- Alia, who was a member of that being at that time had her meeting with Poole in 2048, this being the very same meeting that we get to see in
Transcendent. The presence of the Kuiper anomaly, which was a probe constructed by the Transcendence, was also noted in the records from that era along with its sudden disappearance.
Skipping to 'after' the Xeelee's intervention in the past and analyzing the consequences of those events we get to know that all of the human factions that should have been around, including the Transcendence itself, were simply no longer present. By the time Michael Poole and company were traversing the Xeelee-made ringworld in the galactic center the plethora of observable things that would indicate their presence which were noted to be absent
From the star-sized neutrino clock which was a symbol of the presence of the Commonwealth, to the colony worlds in the galactic centre of the Transcendents themselves All of that was simply not present around- this is something noted. As such we have a rather straightforward series of observations here:
- The Transcendence influence and actions are noticeable around 'prior' to Xeelee's intervention.
- A Xeelee conducts an intervention into the past, which is time and time again described as resulting in the Humanity's future being drastically changed by altering the timeline so that humans never spread through the universe in the first place.
- The Transcendence presence is no longer noticeable in any fashion whatsoever.
The simple conclusion emerging from those observations is that the Transcendence has met the same fate as every other Human faction post Michael's Poole era. In fact, I really struggle with how you can interpret this in any other way.
By the way, this is what the Transcendence could do at the peak of their power and I think you should read the quotes I've posted this time.
This sounded wonderful to Alia, if scary, but baffling. "How can you plan to be infinite?"
"What do you know of infinities, Alia?"
"What do you think? . . ."
"Infinity is a way of thinking, not so much a number as a process." And the processes of infinity haped the way the Transcendence was laying its plans for the future," he said. "Infinity gives you room.
"Imagine this. Suppose you owned a starship, bigger than the Nord, an immense ship with an infinite number of cabins. You number the cabins one, two, three. . . . You have one passenger in each of the cabins—an infinite number of passengers. But now another ship docks, with a second infinite set of passengers, all of whom want lodging. What do you do?"
"Turn them away. I'm already full up."
"Are you? Try this. You work along your infinite corridor. You tell the passenger in room one to move to room two. The passenger in room two goes to four. The passenger in room three goes to six. . . ."
"Everybody shuffles up," she said. "To the cabin with the number twice their old one."
"Is there room for them all?"
She thought it over. "Yes. Because I have an infinite number of even-numbered cabins."
"And how many cabins have you freed up?"
"All the odd ones." She thought about it. "An infinite number of them, too."
"So what do you do with the new set of passengers?"
"Welcome them aboard . . ."
He smiled. "You see? Infinity plus infinity equals infinity. Infinity lets you do things finitude would forbid.
Infinity is a mapping; it is a way of doing things, a way of thinking, apparently paradoxical. The Transcendence is not yet infinite, but after its singularity it plans to be. So this is the way the Transcendence thinks, Alia. And if you wish to understand the Transcendence, it is the way you must think, too."
"There isn't an infinite amount of room in my head. So how can infinity fit in there?"
He held up his thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart. "How many real numbers are there between zero and one?"
"An infinite number?"
"An uncountably infinite number, in fact . . . There are many orders of infinity; we won't go into that. So you can cram infinity into a finite space."
"All right. But this is the real universe! What about the granularity of space and time, of matter and energy? What about quantum uncertainty?"
He winked at her. "I won't worry about that if you don't." - Transcendent
"First there is the Witnessing—a trillion tiny viewpoints like yours, Alia, each studying some corner of the past, some tiny lost life, and integrating it into a greater awareness of the whole. The next level of awareness is the Hypostatic Union, in which your consciousness is merged with your subject in the past—and you express your love for her by sharing every particle of joy in her life, absorbing every morsel of pain. A full Hypostatic Union of every soul in past and future with every other, the ultimate logic, would require an infinite effort. But the Transcendence will be/is infinite and eternal; for such an entity an infinite recursion is possible, and so it will/ mustcome to pass. You understand that now. - Transcendent
"History was changed," she said.
"A defect in the tapestry of the past was repaired. Think of it that way."
"But Poole knew Morag had been restored to him. It is not as if her death was eliminated from reality. He remembered her dying."
"Of course. This is not some mere toying with reality strands. This is Redemption, Alia. Its purpose is atonement. And there can be no atonement for Poole's loss if he isn't aware of that loss. Morag was saved from death, and given back to him, who remembers that death."
But that wasn't the end of it. "In saving Morag you saved her child. So that child will now live out a life that should have been, was, terminated at a premature birth."
"Yes. That life, too, will be redeemed in the fullness of the Restoration."
"But there's a second-order effect. That child will now go on to father children of his own, children who would never have existed. And those children in turn will bear more children, the actualizing of more lost possibilities . . ." A wave of shifting, of change, would wash down the river of history, as a new population of never-weres attained a life, a reality that had been denied them. All rising out of this one change, the restoring of Morag.
And even that wasn't the end of it. Think it through, Alia, think it through to the end, to the fulfillment of the Transcendence's infinite ambition. If this goes on . . .
Some hundred billion humans had lived and died before the birth of Michael Poole, and most of those lives had been miserable and short. If you added infants who had died in the womb or at childbirth you might multiply that number by ten or twenty. If the Restoration was carried through, then all of those lost billions would be restored to time. And the descendants of all those restored ones would in turn be actualized from a universe of lost possibilities.
It wasn't as if the Transcendence were meddling with alternate histories, spinning off different realities branching from decision points, from the life or death of an individual like Morag Poole. It was as if every possibility was being generated in some meta-reality, every human who might ever have lived under any contingency was to be born—and all these possibilities folded down, regardless of logic, into a single timeline.
"History will be meaningless," she murmured. "The world will be a hall of mirrors, crowded out by the shining Restored. . . ."
"All wrongs righted," Leropa declaimed. "All injuries averted. All deaths eliminated. Every human potentiality actualized, the realization of entelechy!"
Even cushioned by the Transcendence, Alia felt bewildered. For a start it would be the ultimate in overpopulation. How could all those crowding Restored be fed, even find room to stand on Earth or the human planets of the future?
But such problems were trivial for the Transcendence. The number of the Restored would be huge but finite—and any finite problem was trivial to a power of infinite capability. It could be done.
Through the Witnessing and the Hypostatic Union, it tried to bring the suffering of the past into its full awareness, and so to atone. But mere watching could never be enough. So the Transcendence went further. In the Restoration, every human that possibly could have existed would be brought into reality. It would be a stunning, shining moment of rectification. Such trivialities as causality and consequence would be abandoned—but the Transcendence would be infinite, I reminded myself; and to an infinite being even infinite tasks are trivial.
Transcendence's plan was to ensure that all possible humans, that could live, would have lived in a single timeline. This is simply insane if you think about it since there would be an infinite amount of repetitions of possible humans existing in an infinite multiverse. They are also acausal and exist above time itself.
Despite having enough power to collapse an infinite number of timelines into a single one and existing as a higher order of infinity, the Transcendence still considered Xeelee to be a looming threat which was proven right when their entire history was retconned by a single Nightfighter from the future.
But I'll still point out that you just demonstrated how Xeelee Wank works.
This is ironic coming from someone who just claimed that a Nightfighter was destroyed by a
solar flare. If anything you're the one demonstrating how battle-boarders tend to twist the narrative to their side just to make their favourite verse win. My claims are all backed up by quotes, yours are not.
Anyway, I would stop here and if you really want to have this debate then create a thread. I would respond there.
