The Golden Transcendence

THE SHIP

Personality and memory download in progress. Please hold all thoughts in abeyance until mental overwrite is complete, or unexpected results may obtain.

Where was he? Who was he?

Information unavailable-all neural pathways occupied by emergency noetic adjustment. Please stand by normal thinking will resume presently.

What the hell was going on? What was wrong with Us memory? He had been dreaming about burning children as he slept, and the shadow of aircraft spreading clouds of nano-bacteriological agent across a blasted \ landscape....

This unit has not been instructed to respond to com-mands until the noumenal redaction palimpsest process is complete. Please hold all questions until the end: your new persona may be equipped with proper emotional responses to soothe uncertainties, or memory-information to answer questions of fact. Are you dissatisfied with your present personality? Select the Abort option to commit suicide memory-wipe and start again.

He groped his way toward memory, to awareness. Whatever the hell was happening to him, no, he did not want to start all over again. It had been something terrible, something stolen from him. Who was he?

He had the impression he was someone terrible, someone all mankind had gathered to ostracize. A hated exile. Who was he? Was he someone worth being?

If you elect to commit suicide, the new personality version will be equipped with any interim memory chains you form during this process, so he will think he is you, and the illusion of continuity will be maintained. ...

"Stop that! Who am I?"

Primary memories written into cortex now. Establishing parasympathic paths to midbrain and hind-brain for emotional reflex and habit-pattern behavior. Please wait.

He remembered: he was Phaethon. He had been exiled from Earth, from the whole of the Golden Oec-umene, because there was something he loved more than Earth, more than the Oecumene.

What had it been? Something inexpressibly lovely, a dream that had burned his soul like lightning-a woman? His wife? No. Something else. What?

Thought cycle complete. Initiating physical process. "Why was I unconscious?" _ You were dead.

"An error in the counteracceleration field?" Marshal-General Atkins killed you. The last soldier of Earth. The only member of the armed forces of a peaceful Utopia, Atkins commanded godlike powers, weapons as deadly as the superhuman machine intelligences could devise. Strangely enough, the machines refused to use the weapons, refused to kill, even in self-defense, even in a spotless cause. Only humans (so said the machines), only living beings, should be allowed to end life.

There was a plan. Atkins's plan. Some sort of plan to outmaneuver the enemy. Phaethon's exile was part of that plan-, something done to bring the agents of the Silent One out of hiding. But there were no details. Phaethon did not know the plan. "Why did he kill me?" You agreed.

"I don't remember agreeing!" You agreed not to remember agreeing. "How do I know that?"

The question is based on a false-to-facts supposition. Mind records indicate that you do not know that; therefore the question of how is counterfactual. Would you care to review the thought index for line errors?

"No! How do I know you are not the enemy? How do I know I have not already been captured?"

Please review the previous answer; the same result obtains.

"How do I know I am not going to be tortured, or my nervous system is not being manipulated?" Your nervous system is being manipulated. Damaged nerves are about to be brought back to life tem-perature and revitalized. Would you like a neutralizer? There will be some pain. "How much pain?" You are going to be tortured. Would you like a dis-"What kind of discontinuity? An anaesthetic?" Pain signals must be traced to confirm that the in center of your brain is healthy. Naturally, it would be counterproductive to numb the pain under these circumstances, but the memory of the pain can be redacted from your final memory sequence, so that the version of you who suffers will not be part of the personal continuity of the version of you that wakes up.

"No more versions! I am I, Phaethon! I will not have my self tampered with again!"

You will regret this decision.

Odd, how matter-of-fact that sounded. The machine was merely reporting that he would, indeed, regret the decision.

And, just as he blacked out again, he did.

Phaethon woke in dull confusion, numb, heavy, paralyzed, blind. He could not open his eyes, could not move.

For one suffocating moment, he wondered if he had been captured by the enemy, and was even now a helpless and disembodied brain, floating in a sea of nutrient muck.

He was glad Atkins had not told him the plan. He remembered that he had agreed to it; but this was all he remembered.

Where was he? A short-term memory file opened: He was aboard the ship. His ship.

His ship.

A long-term memory file opened, and he saw the schematics of the mighty vessel. A hundred kilometers from prow to stern, sleek and streamlined as a spear blade, a hull of golden adamantium, an artificially stable element of unimaginable weight: immeasurably strong, inductile, refractory. The supermetal had an impossibly high melting point: plasma could not make the adamantium run; it could dive into a medium-sized yellow star and emerge unscathed.

The core of the ship was all fuel, hundreds of cubic acres of frozen antihydrogen. Like its positive-matter cousin, antihydrogen took on metallic properties when condensed to near-absolute-zero temperatures, and could be magnetized. Millions upon millions of metric tonnes of this fuel were held inside endless web-works of magnetic cells throughout the hollow volume of the great ship. Less than 1 percent of her interior was taken up with living quarters and control minds; everything else was fuel and drive.

It was the ship mind he was interlinked with now. Somehow, he sensed his wounded half-finished thoughts were being played out by the near-Sophotech superintelligence of the ship. But what a mind it was! A perfect map of the galaxy was in its memory, or, at least, the segment of the galaxy visible from Sol. The massive core, a hell of dust and radiation hiding a black hole thousands of light-years in radius, blotted out light or radio or any signal from the far side of the galaxy. Even with such a ship as this, those places were thousands or millions of years' travel away, a mystery that even immortals would have to live a long time to solve.

But not he. He was no longer immortal. One of the conditions of his exile was that his backup copies of himself, his memory and essential self, had been dumped from the mentality. He was mortal again.

Or-wait. The ship mind had just downloaded a copy of himself into himself. What was going on?

Usually, when a human mind was linked to a machine-mind, opening memory files required no hesitation, no searching around, no fumbling, no awkward seeking through indexes and menus: the machine usually knew what he would want to know before he knew it himself, and would insert it seamlessly and painlessly into his memory (making such minor adjustments in his nervous system as needed, to make it seem as if be had always known whatever it was he needed to know).

Had an illegal copy been made of his mind? Was he truly the real Phaethon? Or had Atkins arranged to have one of the military Sophotechs under the War-mind make a copy without public knowledge?

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 conducted by the circuits and electrophotonic wiring of his artificial, secondary neural web.

He was awake now because that neural web was beginning the process of downloading back into his biochemical brain. His brain was being thawed.

Further, he was gripped in an unbelievably powerful retardation field. Electron-thin lines of pseudo-matter, like a billion-strand web, were interpenetrating Phaethon's body and anchoring each cell and cell nucleus in place.

His biological functions were suspended, but those that needed to proceed were being forced. Each line of pseudomatter from the retardation field grasped the particular molecule, chemical compound, or ion inside Phaethon's body to which it was dedicated, and shoved it through the motions which, under these gravity conditions, it would have been unable to do by itself.

He now became aware that he wore his cloak. That magnificent nanomachinery that formed the inner lining of his armor had interpenetrated each cell of his body, and was, even now, beginning to restore him to normal life.

Red not-blood was pumped out from his veins at high speed, and intermediate fluid that resembled blood rushed in, preparing the cells and tissues to receive the real blood when it came. A million million tiny ruptures and breaks in his bone marrow and soft tissues were repaired. He felt heat in his body, but the pain center of his brain was shut down, so the sensation felt like warm summery sunshine, not like torture. At least the cloak now, for once, was performing its designed function, not being used as a campsite, or medical lab, or for the consumption-pleasures of drunkards. Had his face not been a frozen block, he would have smiled. The supergravity was dropping. He was under eighty gravities of acceleration, then seventy...

As soon as the cells in his occipital lobe were properly restored, light came. Not from his eyes, no. They were still immobile globes of frozen stuff, pinned in place by intense pseudo-material fields. But through his neural web, a circuit opened, and camera cells from outside his body sent signals into the visual centers of his brain.

To him, suddenly, it seemed as if he hung in space. Around him were myriads of stars.

But no, not him, in his body. The pictures coming to him were coming from vision cells on the hull of the Phoenix Exultant, or from her attendant craft.

The Phoenix Exultant was in flight, a spear blade of luminous gold, riding a spear shaft of fire. Her attendant craft, like motes of gold shed by a leviathan, were shooting out from aft docking bays, falling rapidly behind.

The Phoenix Exultant was in the Solar System, in the outer system. Radio-astrogation beacons from Mars and Demeter were behind her, and the Jovian sun. the bright mass of radio and energy that betrayed the activity of the circumjovial commonwealth, shined eight points off her starboard beam. The Phoenix Exultant was five A.U.'s from Sol. The deceleration shield that guarded the aft segment of the ship was being dismantled and lifted aside by armies of hull robots; this indicated the deceleration was about to end, and the danger from high-speed collision with interplanetary dust particles was diminishing.

For decelerating she was. He realized his visual image was reversed. The "spear" of his great ship was flying backward, aft-foremost, with a shaft of unthink-able fire before her.

The attendant craft were not "falling behind." Unable to decelerate as rapidly as the great mother ship, they were shooting ahead, the way parachutists in a ballet seem to shoot ahead of the first air dancer who deploys her wings.

The rate of deceleration was slowing. The deceleration had dropped from ninety gravities to little over fifty in the last few moments. Ninety was the maximum the ship was designed to tolerate. But, in order to tolerate it, she had to be (not unlike Phaethon himself) braced and stiffened in the proper internal configuration. Were the burn to stop without warning, and suddenly return to free fall, the change in stresses on the ship would prove too great a shock.

In many ways, the changes in the rate of deceleration (jerk, as it was called) proved more dangerous than the deceleration itself. How was the ship holding up?

Phaethon looked through internal vision cells, and found an image of himself, on the bridge, cocooned in his armor, in the captain's chair. To his left was a symbol table, holding a memory casket. Beneath the symbol table was a square golden case containing the portable noetic reader. To his right was a status board, showing the multiple layers of the ship's mind engaged in multiple tasks. Beneath the status board was a long, slender sword sheath. A blood red tassel dangling from the hilt hung straight as a stalactite in the supergravity.

He saw his mannequin crew (their bodies had been designed to sustain this weight) standing before the energy mirrors on the balconies that rose concentrically above.

The mannequins were there only to serve as symbols. Circuits in Phaethon's armor would have been able to augment his intelligence till he could comprehend each of the tasks depicted in the status board, in all detail, and at once. The process was called navimorphosis, or naval-vastening, and Phaethon would be in the ship as he was in his own body. He would, in effect, become the ship, feeling her structural members strain as in his bones, her energy flows as nerve pulses, the heartbeat of her engines, the muscular exertion of her motors, the pains and twinges if any of a million routines went awry, the pleasure if those processes went smoothly.

But no. Better, for now, to remain in human-level consciousness, at least until he knew the situation. How long had he been asleep? His last clear memory was at Mercury Equilateral Station. He had been with that delightful Daphne girl, the one who had come to visit him, and then, later, on the bridge here. He had discussed a plan, a strategy.

A vision cell on his shoulder board showed him the memory casket next to him. In the supergravity, he could not move, or open the lid. But there was writing on the lid he could read.

"Loss of memory is temporary, due to acceleration trauma to the brain. Missing memories have been timed to return as needed. Within please find necessary remote-unit command skills. Defend the Oec-umene. Trust no one. Find Nothing."

This sure did not sound like his writing. He expected himself to be more flowery or whatever. Old-fashioned. Atkins must have written this casket.

Drab fellow, this Atkins. What an unpleasant life he must lead. For a moment, Phaethon was glad he wasn't someone like that.

Phaethon's armor sent a message from his brain to the bridge mannequins: "What's going on? What just happened?"

In English, Armstrong said, "Situation is nominal. All systems are green and go."

Hanno, in Phoenician, said, "Sixty times our weight oppresses us. We fall and slow our fall. Our tail of fire is fair and straight before us; our bow points to the receding sun." This, because the ship was flying stern-fcrward, decelerating.

A hundred internal vision cells showing views throughout the ship came on, and the pictures showed him the engine core, the hull fields, the fuel-weight distributions, the feed Lines and convection eddies of the drive, and the subatomic reactions flickering through the intolerable light of the drive itself. Microscopic views of the crystalline structure of the main load-bearing members came to him, along with readings on the fields that artificially magnified the weak nuclear forces holding these huge macromolecules together.

The information indicated that the mighty ship was performing as designed.

In Homeric Greek hexameters, Ulysses said, "Behold, for out of wine-dark night, now gleams the sight of lonely destination; less time than would require a peasant bent across a plow, a strong man, unwearied by toil, to gouge a furrow five hundred paces along, in the all-sustaining Earth, in less time than this we shall touch the welcoming dock."

Sir Francis Drake, in English, said, "Marry, 'tis naught, I trow, 'tween here and yon to do us aught but good, nor ship nor stone nor sign of woe is anywhere about us. The harbor lies fair and clear before."

Dock? Harbor? Where were they heading? (And what was wrong with his memory?)

"Show me," sent Phaethon.

Several energy mirrors came out from the walls and lit. Through the long-range mirrors, he examined the scene around him.

He recognized this place.

Here were the cylinders, circles, spirals, and irregular shapes of habitats and other structures, the mining asteroids, and eerie Demetrine Monuments of the Jovian Trailing Trojan Point City-Swarm. In among the massive bodies of the City-Swarm were hundreds of remotes and spaceships.

The larger structures bore the names of the Trojan Asteroids out of which they had been carved, heroic names: Patrocles, Priam, Aeneas (this last was the node from which other colonies in the area had been founded). Not far from Deiphobos was Laocoon, with its famous crisscrossing belts of magnetic accelerators, like huge snakes, wrapping its axis. Paris, the capital of the group, gleamed with lights.

The medium-sized structures, all cylinders of the exact same size and shape, bore numbers, not names, for they housed Invariants. Even some of these were famous, though: Habitat 7201, where Kes Nasrick had discovered the first vastening matrix; Habitat 003, where the next version of the Invariant race, the so-called Fifth Men, designed with more perfect internal control over their nervous system, were being formed to supplant the present generation.

The smaller structures were like gossamer bubbles, frail whips, or spinning pinwheels. For the most part they were inhabited (if that word could be used) by the delicate energy-bodies the entities from the new planet Demeter tended to favor, neuroforms unknown elsewhere in the Golden Oecumene: Thought-Weavings, and Mind-Sculptures. These habitats had the eccentric names Demetrine humor or whim fixed on them: Sed-ulous Butterfly; Salutiferous Surd Construct; Phatic Conjunction; Omnilumenous Pharos.

How long had Phaethon slept? It could not have been for too long. The Trailing Trojan Point City-Swarm looked much like his last memory of it: there were still celebration displays flaming on the larger monuments, and beacons for solar-sailing games. The celebrations were still going on. The Grand Transcendence had not yet occurred.

He had slept less than a week. It may have been hours only. Slept? Or perhaps the missing period of time. hours or days, had been spent with Atkins, map-ping out some strategy now gone from memory.

Phaethon examined the memory casket on the sym-bol table through his shoulder camera. It said the memory loss was partial, natural. No. He did not believe that.

The deceleration dropped from fifty gravities to forty. The great ship shuddered. Phaethon imagined he could almost hear the groaning protests of joints and connections and load-bearing members subjected to unthinkable strain.

On the bridge, Vanguard Single Exharmony reported that the flow of antimatter fuel to the drive core was smooth and without perturbation, despite that it was changing weight and volume.

Admiral Byrd reported all was well with the fields, which, during superacceleration (in order to minimize random subatomic motions in the hull and along the main structural members), reduced certain sections of the ship to absolute zero temperature. Those hull plates were being "thawed" now. So far, the process was going steadily. The expansions were controlled and symmetrical.

Another shock, like the blow of a club, traveled through the great ship as she dropped below forty, then thirty gravities. Then twenty. The retardation field webbing Phaethon to the captain's chair vanished in a spray of lingering sparks.

Phaethon screamed in pain when his heart started beating. His nanomaterial cloak stimulated his nerves, set other fluids in motion. He was so surprised that he did not even notice that his lungs were working again.

Five gravities. He blinked his eyes and looked around. Seen with his normal vision, not through his remote cameras, the bridge, if anything, was more splendid, the deck more golden, the energy mirrors shimmering more brightly.

Zero. And now he was in free fall. Now what? And what the hell was going on? He did not like being in free fall. He was about to meet some danger for which he was not ready. His hands itched and he wished for a weapon.

A slight shiver passed through the bridge. The mighty carousel, which turned the entire living quarters segment of the ship, was beginning to rotate, and the bridge and other quarters occupying the inner ring were orienting the decks to point perpendicularly from the ship's axis, rather than (as they had been a moment before) parallel and aft-ward.

Centrifugal gravity returned, to about half a gee. This carousel (encompassing, as it did, hundreds of meters of decks and life support) had a diameter wide enough to render Coriolis effects unnoticeable to normal senses.

Hanno said, in Phoenician, 'The dock master welcomes us."

Was the dock master now in exile? But no, he must be a Neptunian, one of those cold, outer creatures who cared nothing for the conventions of the Hortators and the laws of the Inner System.

Sir Francis Drake said, "Does he so? Marry, but our ship be greater than his dock in every measure. 'Tis we should welcome him, and call the whole dockyard to lay alongside and tie up to us!" Phaethon: "Show me." The center energy mirror came to life. Glittering like a crown, the circle of the Neptunian embassy spun, moving with an angular velocity so great that the rotation was visible to the naked eye. Near the hub of the wheel was a second circle, also spinning, but with much less effect. In the outer wheel, under the tremendous gravity which obtained at the Neptunian S-layer "surface," lived whatever Cold Dukes may have been present, as well as that nested construction of neurotechnology known as the Duma. The inner ring, in microgravity, housed the Eremites and Frost Children, at one time, servants, children, and bioconstructs of the Neptunians, but now equal partners in their ventures, intermingled in more ways than one, and indistinguishable, these days, except as a different form of body. These too were part of the strange mass-mind of the Duma, representing the interests of the moons, outer colonies, and those Far Ones who dwelt in the cometary halo. Hanno said, "We are at dock, milord." The Phoenix Exultant was not going to couple with any dock, of course. "Docking" for a ship of her immensity merely meant that she would come to rest relative to the Neptunian station, surrounded by such beacons and warnings as traffic control required to warn other ships away from her volume of space.

Ulysses, pointing to one of the mirrors, exclaimed, "Others vessels close with us. Will they be hospitable or no?"

Armstrong reported, "We have radio contact with Neptunian vehicles. They are initiating docking rendezvous."

Other mirrors showed the view port and starboard. Clusters of radar noise betrayed the presence of ships. Doppler analysis showed they were beginning maneuvers to close with the Phoenix Exultant.

And the sheer number of Neptunian ships was astonishing. There were thousands, some of them over a kilometer in length. Why were so many vessels, equipped with so much mass, closing with him?

Jason, from behind him, spoke up: "Sir. Messages from yonder boats. The Neptunian crew is ready to come aboard." Crew? Come aboard?

Jason said again, "Sir! The Neptunian owner, Neop-tolemous, is ready to take possession of the Phoenix Exultant. He requests you open the channels leading into the ship mind, so that he can load his passwords and routines to configure the mental environment for the disembodied members of the crew. The supply boats are coming alongside, and requesting you open your ports and bay doors. The physical crew are maneuvering to dock. What is your answer?"

Neoptolemous. The combine-entity built from the memories of his friend Diomedes and the Silent One agent Xenophon.

Phaethon saw swarms of enemy closing in on his ship. Perhaps some of them, perhaps most, were merely innocent Neptunians. But the command staff, and Neoptolemous, no doubt were controlled by the Nothing Sophotech. That meant, in effect, that they were all enemies.

Countless jets of light, flickers from maneuvering thrusters, were twinkling near the hundreds of prow air-lock doors, near the scores of midship docking ports, near the four gigantic cargo and fuel bays aft Other energy mirrors, tuned to other frequencies, showed the connection beams radiating from off-board computers and boat minds, pinging against the receivers, radio dishes, and sensory array which ran along the lee edge of the great prow armor. The off-board systems were trying to make contact with the ship mind. Preliminary information packages showed hundreds and thousands of files and partials waiting to download into the ship and into her systems.

All waiting for him. The enemy.

"Sir? What is your answer?"

Phaethon reached over and opened the memory casket.

Inside the memory casket were three cards. They were a drab olive green in hue, with no pictoglyph or emblemry at all upon them. They were labeled "SDMF01-Spaceship Defensive Modification Files.

Government Issue Polystructual Stealth Microcorder and Retrieval (Remote Unit Control)."

Phaethon raised an eyebrow. The Phoenix Exultant was certainly not a mere "spaceship." She was a .star-ship. And what ugly names and colors! Did this Atkins fellow truly have no taste at all? Perhaps the military burned the artistic sections of the brain away and replaced it with a weapon or something.

He looked into the Middle Dreaming, and the information about the stealth remotes flowed into his brain. There were three sets or swarms of remotes. The first was gathered around the air locks; the second had interpenetrated the ship-mind thought boxes and established overrides at all the machine-intelligence switch points and circuit resolves; the third were a group of medical remotes hidden under the floor of the bridge. There were no further instructions or details about the plan.

But there did not need to be. Phaethon was an engineer; he knew tools could only be shaped for one purpose. He studied the specifications on the last group, the medical group, of stealth remotes, and saw the particular modifications that had been made to them, including special combinations to allow them to make transmission connections between Neptunian neurocircuitry and noetic reader circuits.

The grisly and efficient deadliness of the little mili-tary remotes should have horrified him. Instead, for some reason, he found himself admiring the ruthless simplicity of the design.

And so it was not without some relish that Phaethon answered his mannequins.

Phaethon said, "Okay, boys. Open communication. Let's get this show on the road."

The identification channel opened: The radio encryption bore the heraldic code of the Neptunian Duma, but also of the Silver-Gray.

The visual channel opened: a mirror to his left lit with an incoming call. Here was an image of a tall, dark warrior in Greek hoplite armor, a round shield in his left hand, two spears of ashwood in his right.

For a moment of hope, Phaethon thought it was Diomedes. But a subscript to the image introduced this as Neoptolemous, who merely had inherited the right to the icons and images Diomedes once used to represent himself.

"Behemoth of nature," Neoptolemous said, "Exemplar of all this Golden Oecumene, at the zenith of her genius, can produce, Phoenix Exultant] We are impatient for your welcome. Open your doors and locks. We have material, and manpower, gallons of crew-brain-swarms, software, hardware, greenware, wetware, smallware, largeware, sumware, and noware, all waiting now to merge with you. This is a fine day for all Neptunians! Already the Duma consumes parts of itself, and moves the thoughts of your high triumph- and my own-to selected parts of longr-term memory! Come, Phaethon! Welcome me as befits the fashion of the Silver-Gray! We will exchange no brain materials through any pores, but I will form a hand, after the ancient fashions, and curl your fingers around my fingers, and pump your arm first up, then down, to show we bear no weapons, after we have first agreed upon an up-down axis. I suggest that, if we are under acceleration, the direction of motion always be considered 'up'!"

Phaethon was caught between amusement and horror. wonder and fear. Amusement, because this odd speech reminded him somewhat of the dry and ironic humor of Diomedes. But that was Diomedes before his marriage of minds with Xenophon, before he commingled himself to create this creature, Neoptolemous.

And the horror was that Diomedes must have had no notion of what kind of mind he had been marrying. Xenophon, either an agent or a puppet of the Silent Ones, must have had redaction traps and thought worms ready to capture Diomedes, a marriage of minds turned into a brutal rape, with noetic readers primed to rob Diomedes of any useful information, ready to turn his personality, imagination, and memory into tools and weapons useful to the enemy.

Was there some part, some ghost, of Diomedes, still alive inside the horrid maze of an alien brain, perhaps aware of what his body now was doing, aware of what vile purposes his thoughts and memories now served?

Neoptolemous said: "Why do you not respond? Why do you not flex the muscles in your cheeks so as to draw skin flesh away from your teeth, just enough to show the teeth, yet not so much as to cause alarm? I know that a face contortion of this kind is the way to show friendship, and welcome."

The enemy attempt to seize control of Phaethon's armor made no sense unless they were going to take possession of the ship. And Neoptolemous was the entity who presently held title to the ship. Logically, therefore, Neoptolemous, and Diomedes before him, had been absorbed by the enemy.

Neoptolemous was talking: "Speak! Your ardent admirers and loyal crew hyperventilate with pleasure at the thought of flying to the stars! We have gathered crew partials and full personas from each part of the Neptunian Tritonic Composition. The materials we bring are gathered. Open your ship mind that we may intrude the specially designed routines, useful to our purposes, into your secret core. Then, as soon as all things are aboard, what obstacles would dare to skew our course? We shall all climb far away from the light and gravity of the burning sun, ever upward (for the direction of motion, I have already said, is 'up'). Yes! Up and away into the dark of endless night, and there, far from where any eyes can see, far away from where any hand could stop us, particular desires of our own will be accomplished."

Phaethon hesitated. Was he actually planning to let his enemies onboard? Was he supposed to fight this war himself, alone, armed only with what the three olive drab cards in the memory casket had given him?

But then, he had to be alone. Who else had a body that could adjust to such intolerable gravitational pressure?

If this hypothetical plan required that Phaethon, pretending innocence, allow Neoptolemous aboard, any hesitation now would alert the Nothing Sophotech, and perhaps send that entity permanently into hiding. He had to decide immediately.

Phaethon did recall that both the horse monster and Scaramouche had been killed by Atkins in swift and decisive strokes, under circumstances suggesting that Nothing Sophotech could not have heard news of the deaths of bis agents. At best, Nothing would be suspicious because messages from Scaramouche were overdue.

But if Nothing's purpose was to seize control of the Phoenix Exultant before her launch from the Solar System, then this moment now was the evil Sophotech's last Opportunity to act. No matter how suspicious the enemy might be, Nothing had to get Neoptolemous, his agent, aboard, and now.

And so should Phaethon, acting alone, and on the blind faith that he would be able somehow to overcome the agent sent by an unthinkably intelligent enemy Sophotech, the last remnant of a long-dead civilization, an agent armed perhaps with powers and sciences unknown to the Golden Oecumene, should Phaethon knowingly let that agent aboard? ...

But it seemed it was his duty to do so. Better to follow orders, and do his duty, even if he did not understand that duty, rather than let those duties go undone.

He directed a thought at the mirror.

"Welcome aboard, owners and crew. I am happy to serve as pilot and navigator of this vessel. We shall explore the universe, create such worlds as suit us, and do all else which we have dared to dream to do. Welcome, Neoptolemous of Silver-Gray. Welcome, all."

The hatches and docks all along the miles of the Phoenix Exultant hull slowly, grandly, began to cycle open.

The enemy came aboard swiftly and slowly.

The antennae and thought-port array along the Phoenix Exultant's prow opened to the radio traffic. Phaethon tracked the invasions of the enemy software, and saw the readout begin to register the flows of poison into the hierarchy of the ship's pure mind. This took a matter of seconds.

The prow air lock doors admitted those Neptunians (and there were scores) whose "bodies" were spacewor-thy. Gleaming blue-gray in their flexible housings, these masses of heurotechnology fell across empty vacuum, slid across the hull toward the air locks. Phaethon consulted ship diagrams, and sent a message to gather the high-speed elevators into the living quarters, and lock them there without power. Those Neptunians entering by the forward air locks would have miles to travel before they reached the living quarters, or any system of the ship where they could do any damage.

At the scores of midship docking ports, smaller vessels, space caravans and flying houses, were arriving. The docks here were wide spaces, half a kilometer wide and five kilometers long. Fortunately, the caravans arriving here also were mingled with the arriving biological material, canisters of Neptunian atmosphere under pressure, and acres of Neptunian jungle crystal held in greenhouses. Phaethon simply deactivated half of his robot stevedores and longshoreman, and cut the intelligence budget available to the supercargo. Then he directed the supercargo to ask all the incoming persons and materials to submit to examinations for viruses, prank-craft, explosives, or self-replicating aphrodisiacs. Being Neptunians, they would not think these precautions odd or insulting. If anything, they might think Phaethon's precautions were lax.

An estimator in his armor allowed him to calculate the average confusion or friction caused by these inefficiencies. It would be long minutes before everything entering amidships was loaded or stored.

But a different story obtained at the four gigantic cargo and fuel bays aft. These spaces were so large that there was no crowding, no opportunity to cause confusion. Even the kilometer-long superships of the Neptunian colonists could fit in the vast aft bays with ease.

And Neoptolemous was on one of those ships. Analy-.sis of the signal traffic showed the communication centers, and, presumably, the brains of the operation, were there.

That communication fell silent when all these ships came close enough to the Phoenix Exultant that her hull blocked the line of sight from ship to ship. All the units of the Neptunian crew were now, in effect, isolated from each other.

Phaethon watched the lead supership move from an outer to an inner aft bay. The locks on the doors could not be programmed to deny Neoptolemous access anywhere, since he was the legal owner of the Phoenix Exultant at this point.

But since the other officers and personnel were not owners, of course, they were held at their various outer bays and deck spaces, unable to proceed farther. The kilometer-long ship of Neoptolemous, all alone, wandered forward into the vast gulf of the inner bay.

This lead supership opened like a flower, disassembling itself in a confused rush of nanotechnic writhings, surrounded by waste steam. Globules and arms of the nanostuff attached themselves to the inner bay walls and began constructing the houses, laboratories, nurseries, and conglomeration chambers for the Neptunians who would be residing there. Greek pillars and Georgian-style pediment and roofs grew out of the bulkhead, all oriented along the Phoenix Exultant's main axis (the direction of motion being "up").

Phaethon examined the utterly non-Neptunian architecture with interest. A monumental pillar in the middle of the city was erecting a Winged Victory holding up a laurel crown; this was the emblem of the Silver-Gray.

Out from the newly made and still-steaming palaces and peristyles, past the smoldering pillars, steaming English gardens, glowing Egyptian obelisks, and smoking French triumphal arches, came a cavalcade of pike-men leading the carriage of Queen Victoria.

The horses and men of the cavalcade, outwardly shaped like humans, were constructed of Neptunian polymer armor, gleaming like statues of blue glass, and seething with strands and globules of complex brain matter and neurocircuitry throughout their lengths, visible beneath the semitranslucent skin. The image of Queen Victoria was more realistic, as only her face and hands shined with the ice blue Neptunian body substance. The black dress and high crown were real. Unfortunately, a human body was too small to hold all the mass of which a Neptunian Eremite was composed, so the body of the queen was the size of the Colossus of Rhodes, and her huge head overtopped some of the pillars lining the roads, and her crown brushed the triumphal arches under which the cavalcade passed.

Neoptolemous's ownership override opened the great doors leading from the inner bay to the fuel area. Here, the insulation space surrounding the drive axis extended seventy kilometers or more. When the ship was not under thrust, this space was cleared of any obstructions or dangerous radiation. It was actually rather clever of Neoptolemous to enter by this shaft: this was the quickest way to get to the living quarters from the aft of the great ship.

Phaethon thought: It would require only a simple command to the machines controlling the main drive. One-hundredth of a second of thrust would sweep that area with radiation. No complex subatomic particles would remain.

But Phaethon did not issue that command. While all his other men were delayed, out of contact with him, an left behind, Phaefhon allowed Neoptolemous to come closer, ever closer.

It seemed the cavalcade, horses, men, carriage and all. were all part of one master organism, which had, built into it, the same engines and thrusters which Phaethon had seen the Neptunian legate use so long ago in the grove of Saturn-trees: for, once the caval-cade moved into the wide and weightless insulation shafts surrounding the main drive, it began to rocket down the shaft toward the bow of the ship. Men-shapes and horse-things were half melted by the stress of acceleration, and bits of Neptunian body substance be-gun to drop off along the way.

The giant holding cells of the fuel, like an endless geometric array of snowballs, loomed around them for a hundred kilometers. The living quarters and ship's brain, even though it was a large as a good-sized space colony, larger than most ships, was absurdly dwarfed by comparison, not unlike the acorn-sized brain of the original, prehistoric version of a dinosaur.

Neoptolemous was coining.

Phaethon activated the olive drab cards he had found in his memory casket. Information from the three groups of stealth remotes poured into his brain.

The ship was under attack. The attack had been under way for several minutes.

The first attack, of course, had been through thought contamination. Viruses had been introduced into the ship mind with the first communication download; those viruses had been editing every recorder and vision cell of which the ship mind was aware, and blocking all knowledge of the attack from Phaethon.

But the ship mind was not aware of the military remotes monitoring ship-mind actions, and editing out of the ship mind all evidence and awareness of themselves and their two brother swarms.

Swarm One, which had been positioned in the air locks, had followed Neoptoiemous and his cavalcade, and showed Phaethon the picture that the ship-mind vision cells were not showing.

Certain of the flecks of substance falling from Neoptolemous's cavalcade floated to nearby bulkheads, clung, grew, and became Neptunians. These Neptuni-ans (or perhaps they were Neptunian partials, remotes, or servant-things; it was impossible to tell merely by looking at the glassy blue-gray shapelessness that housed them) scattered throughout the insulation space, and began affixing magnetic disrupters to the frameworks holding the fuel cells in place.

The stealth remotes were smaller than bacteria. Some flew into those the disrupters planted by the enemy. Once inside, they emitted radiations, vibrated, probed. Phaethon's many eyes recorded and analyzed. He had his own engineering programs as well as a military demolition routine (part of the stealth remote's threat-assessment software) examine the information. Both civilian and military demolition partials in his mind agreed that there was little or no threat here.

The ship's vision cells showed Neoptoiemous arriving along the outside rim of the living quarters. Here were the ship-mind decks, a nested circle of enormous thought boxes forming the outermost layer of the living quarters. The main group of the cavalcade headed "up" (toward the center of the carousel) elevator shafts and maintenance wells toward the bridge. But the stealth remotes (seeing what the ship mind was not al-lowed to see) showed a second group breaking off from the main group.

This mass of Neptunians spread out across the floor once they were out on the ship-brain decks. They, or it (Phaethon could not guess at the number of individu-als inhabiting the blue-gray nanomachinery mass), sent a dozen tiny tendrils of substance sneaking across the bulkheads, looking for unshielded jacks or thought ports. They interfaced with the ship's mind and checked on the progress of the original poisonous thought-virus invasion.

The Neptunians were mazed in the complexity of the ship logic. So, of course, they consulted manuals and help guides to discover the addresses and locations of the vital centers of the mental architecture they wished to examine. They opened the shipboard thought shop, downloaded certain tools and routines to accomplish their checks, and began further acts of sabotage.

Phaethon was bitterly amused. He had designed that architecture. He had written those manuals. He had stocked the thought shop, and, in many cases, had designed those tools. Therefore the ship's mind showed the saboteurs only what they expected to see.

The real ship's brain, of course, was in Phaethon's armor, and always had been. What the saboteurs were accessing were merely secondary systems, repeaters and backups. With the help from the second swarm of stealth remotes (those who had grown in and around the thought-box connective tissues and circuit resolves) Phaethon was able to maintain the masquerade with ease.

This ship, this beautiful ship, was his. He knew her every line and point, every joint and joist, every nut and bolt. He knew the ship and they did not. She was the child of his mind. Did they actually think they could take her from him by force?

The intermediate doors on this level had opened and shut. Neoptolemous was approaching. The air lock leading to the bridge was cycling. The ship's vision cells showed that Neoptolemous was mutating the outer surface of his blue-white armored body, making the adjustments necessary to enter a chamber held at Earth-normal temperature and pressure.

Phaethon activated the third and final group of stealth remotes.

Inside the bridge air lock, the third swarm of microscopic and hidden remotes landed on the surface areas of the Neptunian bodies, finer than the finest dust, unde-tectable. During the moment when the Neptunians' armored surfaces were changing, the remotes penetrated through the cell layers, infiltrated the Neptunian internal systems, bonded to neural tissue, gathering near the node points that controlled the external signal traffic.

Phaethon waited, tense as a cat watching a mouse-hole. If Neoptolemous had any Silent Oecumene technology to detect or counter these remotes, he would probably employ it now. Neoptolemous certainly would not enter the bridge if he knew it was a trap.

Evidently, he did not know.

A panel in the deck was already beginning to slide open.

The remotes inside Neoptolemous began making their medical assessment of how much acceleration pressure each particular nerve group and brain mass could withstand.

It was all so easy, so sweet, that Phaethon would have laughed out loud, except that he was already ordering his cloak to stiffen his body into its tough, immobile, supergravity-resistant form, and his face had grown as immobile as a block of wood.