But the nugget of consciousness that always lodged behind Alia’s eyes seemed to have dislodged, to float freely through the rooms of her mind. And the walls of those rooms were porous—flimsy, translucent—so that a brighter light shone through them, and she heard voices, many of them. It wasn’t the formless clamor that had upset her before, but like distant singing, a massed choir perhaps, the merged voices sweet but scattered by the winds. The glow out there was warm and welcoming, the voices gentle and harmonious.
With an effort of will she pushed her way out through the walls of her head.
Her mind threw up analogies for what she experienced.
She was floating over a landscape. It was dark, but over that velvet ground lay patterns of light, like a system of roads, a glowing threadwork in multiple colors that connected a multitude of brilliant points.
She wanted to see more. She rose up effortlessly.
The floor below was like a starry sky, but inverted, with a vast constellation map written over it. Here and there the links gathered more closely around tightly connected clusters of nodes, which glowed like cities. She saw that the map was not infinite. It closed on itself—not like a sphere, that would be much too literal for this dreamy vision, but with every point connected to every other. The map was dynamic, the links sparking, twisting, reconnecting, and changing constantly. The constant flux was part of the pattern, too; this was a map in time as well as space.
And though the topology of the network changed constantly, none of those shining points was ever left isolated. Each was always joined by two, three, four links to its neighbors, and through them to the totality.
This was the Transcendence,the shining nodes human minds, the links that joined them channels of shared thought and memory. This visual map was a crude analogy, and incomplete, for the merged mind was greater than a simple aggregate of individuals. And yet it helped her to begin to see. Reath had been right: location in space or even time was irrelevant to the Transcendence. This abstract realm was where the Transcendence existed, this no-place, and it was governed not by time or distance but merely by an effort of will.
-Transcendent, Ch. 27