The Golden Transcendence

NOTHING

Atkins stood alone within one of the wide corridors of the carousel, only a few miles from the bridge. The light was dim. The curving deck underfoot was paneled in an endless checkerboard of black thought boxes, all quiet as a mausoleum now, empty of any mind. The bulkheads to either side were crisscrossed with a tapestry of crystal cables and motionless leaves of dark purple glass, a type of technology or branch of science Atkins did not recognize. The carousel through which this corridor ran was at rest, and solar gravity made the local "down" not quite at right angles to the present deck underfoot. Because the deck curved, it seemed to Atkins as if he stood on the slope of a tall hill, a concave hill, whose slope grew greater the higher one climbed. Above him, the corridor rose, becoming vertical, then curving further to become ceiling, with inverted furniture and formations hanging head-downward overhead. Far below, in the distance, at the bottom of the slope, the deck was level, and he could see the glint and glimmer of some rapid activity, silvery nanomachines and diamond-glinting microbots swarming from one bulkhead to another, looking for all the world like a little stream of water babbling. Beyond this stream, the curve of the corridor rose again, like the opposite slope of a valley, narrowing with the distance, until it was blocked from sight by the curve of the overhead.

Because it reminded him of wilderness, because the ship was so unthinkably vast, so empty, Atkins felt alone.

He drew his soul dagger and spoke to the mind it housed: "Estimate the feasibility of seizing control of this ship. What are her defenses against an orchestrated mutiny?"

The dagger said, "Sir! Seizure by what party, how armed, and when?"

"By me. Right now. Before the lunatic owner flies the ship straight down into the hands of the enemy and turns her over to him."

"Sir! The thought-box ports have been jammed open. We, or anyone else, can insert any routines or mind information we wish without any fear of hindrance. Operating time will depend upon volume of information given. However, the system controls have been physically isolated from the ship mind, and every single connection (there are roughly four trillion circuits involved) would have to be reestablished into order to affect the operation of the environmental, configu-rational, drive, and navigational controls. More time would be required to reconnect secondary drives, tertiary drives, retrorailguns, communication hierarchies, internal system monitors, detection dishes, dynamic weight distribution, and balance controls, et cetera. The time involved is significantly greater than the useful lifespan of the ship, since each connection would have to be made by hand while the ships onboard systems attempted to dismantle it, and some of the main connections are behind adamantium hull armor, which would require the staff and equipment of the Jovian Equatorial Supercollider, as well as Gannis's staff and effort, to dismantle and repair. Sir! The project is not feasible."

"Make alternate suggestions." "Sir, yes, sir. Suggestion one: Mine the antimatter fuel cells to destroy all internal decks and quarters. Confront the pilot and threaten to destroy the ship unless he turns control of his armor over to you. This threat is not viable as it would destroy the workings of the vessel to be seized.

"Suggestion two: Threaten Daphne. Again, not a viable strategy, as there is a portable noetic reader aboard, easily capable of transmitting her noumenal brain information to any thought box aboard. Since none of the thought boxes are in operation at the moment, the number of hiding places for such backup copies in the case of Daphne's death far exceeds any search capacity. Of course, if you had the armor which contains the ship-mind hierarchy, you could find this hiding place easily, but that assumption defeats the purpose of the exercise.

"Suggestion three: Seize Phaethon in his armor, carry him to Jupiter, and have Gannis and his staff dismantle the armor with their supercollider. It should only take forty-two hours to dismantle the thinnest part of the armor plate beneath the supercollider's main beam, assuming Phaethon does not open the armor voluntarily, and does not move, resist, or struggle. "Suggestion four..." "Stop making suggestions." "Aye aye, sir."

"What about sabotaging the ship so that she cannot leave her present port, or disabling her to render her unable to tolerate the temperatures and pressures of the radiative layer of the sun?"

"Feasible. A sufficient charge of antimatter stolen from the fuel cells and delivered against the valves and back-pressure cylinders of any of the drive shafts would prevent the proper seal integrity needed for the ship to survive further descent, while not exposing the decks or internal structures to the solar plasma presently in the outside environment. The stealth remotes still aboard are in and among the ghost-particle array in the fuel bays, and could perform the theft and demolition in twenty minutes. Alternate suggestion: Have the stealth remotes destroy the ghost-particle array. Phaethon must rely upon the discharges of this array to pinpoint the position of the enemy vessel, or to use the array to form a scanning beam of some particle capable of penetrating the dense plasma of the solar core. With this array disabled, he will not be able to find the enemy. The stealth remotes could accomplish this sabotage within .05 second after your written order was recorded."

"Would he be able to repair the ghost-particle equipment?"

"Yes."

Atkins looked disappointed.

The knife continued: "Phaethon would have to make a voyage of ten thousand light-years to Cygnus X-l to find archeological records or reports on the technology involved. I strongly suspect such archeological evidence is available. This would enable him to repair the equipment. I estimate the voyage will take seventy years ship time and ten thousand years Earth time, one way."

Atkins looked up and down the corridor. Translucent indigo leaves glittered like glass. Endless black thought boxes stretched to the antihorizon overhead. Away underfoot, busy nanomachines gleamed and flowed like water.

She was a magnificent ship, truly. She should not be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy, and grant the enemy its victory.

He had heard Phaethon's insane plan, based on the insane idea that moral codes were some sort of law of nature. The whole plan was based on the faith that any sufficiently logical mind would reach the same conclusions about matters not of scientific fact, but about what was right and wrong.

Atkins knew that what was right and wrong was not written in stone. What was right and wrong were matters of policy, of expediency, of strategy. They were the tactics one used to win the struggle against the evils in life, against blind stupidity and relentless danger. Especially when everyone else was blind, and no one else cared to see the danger.

And tactics had to be flexible.

"Very well. Do it."

Daphne found Phaethon on the shining bridge, in his captain's chair. A fabric of white nanomaterial was draped around the shoulders of his gold-black armor, over one arm, and plugged into the floor. This cloak was making last-minute adjustments to the control hierarchies in the armor, and checking for any traces left behind in the now-vacant ship mind.

Phaethon was not wearing his helmet. He sat, leaning his chin on his hand, watching an image in an energy mirror, a faint smile of concentration on his lips.

Daphne spoke as she approached the throne, her voice echoing across the wide space: "Diomedes decided not to come. He's betrayed your trust in him."

He looked up from the mirror he was studying, and observed her.

She was wearing a version of Atkins's scale-mail, copied from the patterns in the bloodstains he had left on the auxiliary bridge. The chameleon circuit was tuned to a silvery gray hue, and the scale had been molded to fit her curved form, pinched in tightly at the waist. She carried a plumed helmet in the crook of her elbow. A low-slung web belt was draped around her rounded hips, flintlock dueling-pistol holsters swaying as she walked. In her other hand she held a naginata. (This was a short curve-bladed fighting staff traditionally used by the noble wives of Japanese samurai. It was hardly Victorian, British, Third Era, or Silver-Gray.)

As a decoration (or perhaps a feminine joke) she wore a cape made of the white silken sensory-web material Warlocks used in their sensual rituals. As she walked, the cape floated like rippling snow, the armor shimmered softly, jingling, sliding glints of light from thigh to thigh, and her heels clattered brightly at each footstep. The plume from her helmet bobbed behind her elbow at her motion, reaching almost to the deck.

She struck a wide-legged pose in front of Phaethon, grounding the butt of her pole-arm near her heel, raised her chin, assumed a regal expression, as fierce as a she-falcon about to fly. "Well?"

Daphne saw a look of easy and untroubled mirth in Phaethon's eye. He said, "Not coming? Diomedes is a fine fellow nonetheless. But he is, after all, a Neptunian. They don't have Sophotechs. Don't expect him to understand a plan which is founded on a faith in logic." She wondered why he looked so happy. She smiled to see a silver throne had been grown next to his gold one, draped in her heraldic colors. "What are we supposed to be? Jupiter and Juno?"

"I trust I will be truer to my wife that he was to his." He inclined his head, nodding to the right-hand throne. "Please."

She grinned and showed her dimples and hopped up into the seat, telling her pole-arm to stand upright nearby. "Nice. I could get used to this." She wiggled a bit on the seat and stretched like a kitten.

He watched her arch her back and looked at the play of light on her shapely limbs. He said, "Actually, Vulcan and Venus might be more apt."

"Not Minerva, me dressed this way?" She spent a moment tucking her hair into her helmet. "Besides, I thought he was lame."

"You must recall my sense of humor. That should count. Besides, you surely are my Venus."

She favored him with a little pout. "Well! Thanks a lot! As I recall, she cuckolded him, and slept with the war god."

Then she leaned forward. She saw a picture of Atkins in the mirror, speaking to his knife. When her eyes focused, a text of his dialogue appeared in the Middle Dreaming.

She said in shock, "What the hell does he think he's doing?"

Phaethon said softly, "The same thing Mars did to Vulcan in the myth. He's trying to steal my bride."

She looked at Phaethon in amazement. "And you're just sitting here? Haven't you done something? He's about to sabotage the expedition!"

"He has no chance of success. The weapon I intend to use against the Nothing Machine will also work against him. Watch."

"Very well. Do it."

The knife replied, "Sir, please record the order in writing, before I carry it out"

"What-?"

"Any subordinate may request an order be given in writing, and a true copy recorded and notarized under seal, in circumstances such as these, sir. Please see the Received Universal Code of Military Procedure Systems and Program Manual at-" and it recited a section and code number.

Atkins understood. The only time, really, a subordinate would ask for a notarized copy of an order would be to preserve a copy as evidence for an Inquest hearing. No subordinate would dare to make that request if the order were lawful.

Atkins had, after all, been directly ordered by Prime Minister Kshatrimanyu Han, his commander-in-chief, to cooperate with Phaethon, not to sabotage him.

He said, "You think I'm afraid of a court-martial, is that it? Don't make me laugh."

"Sir, is the Marshal-General asking me to speculate about the Marshal-General's state of mind, sir?"

"Well, I am not going to sit here and fret about my career (ha! if you can call it a career) while an idealistic fool is planning to give the enemy control of the only invulnerable warship in the Oecumene. Don't you think I'm willing to sacrifice my career to do what I know is right?"

"Sir, is the Marshal-General asking me to estimate the Marshal-General's ability to distinguish proper from improper conduct, or to comment upon the Marshal-General's bravery, Sir? I do not think the Marshal-General is afraid of a court-martial in and of itself, sir."

" 'In and of itself ? What the hell does that mean?"

But he knew what it meant. A court-martial as such did not awe him. But what the court-martial represented, did. It represented a human attempt to enforce and to protect those values for which soldiers lived and died: honor, courage, fortitude, obedience.

He looked at the dagger in his hand. In the pommel was imprinted the insignia of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth: a sword bound into its sheath by the windings of an olive wreath. Within the circle of that wreath, a watchful eye. The motto: Semper Vigilantes. Eternal Vigilance.

The eye seemed to stare back at him remorselessly. Honor. Courage. Fortitude. Obedience.

He said aloud, "I was born in the drylands, back when Mars was still red, on the slope of Olympus Mons, and my father was killed by a warren breaker who drilled into our run for our ice. My father's two clones were my uncles, and twins. They all used the same passes and prints, because Mars, in those days, was controlled by the fiefs, who would rather be safe than be free, and they metered our water, and IQ and air, and they tried to keep track of everyone, everywhere. But we were Icemen. We lived by the pump and the pike. And we didn't bother to obey any regs we didn't like. The fiefs were Logicians, what we now call Invariants, but we just called them the Un-dead.

"The plan was that Uncle Kassad would lie down in the coffin they sent for my dad, and take a retarder, and pass himself off for dead, till he got out of monitor range in the grave stream. Then he would wake up, dissolve his way to the surface, and set off south after the warren breaker. He had his filter pike with him, folded on his chest like a spear, which he was going to use to pierce the breaker's dry suit to pump out his blood and filter the moisture, till he got a volume equal to what we had lost from our ice.

"The Sophotechs, way back then, we all thought they were gods, and no one understood them, or tried. But I was studying for a wardenship, and was a cadet, and I believed what the Sophotechs preached, so I told my uncle that he was wrong. Wrong, because the breaker came from the garden belt the Irenic Composition controlled; wrong, because the breaker probably wasn't aware of what he had done; it wasn't a man, just a part of a mass-mind, a cog in a mob. Wrong, because the Undead police had already ruled the death an accident, and paid the insurance.

'He showed me his pike, and pointed the field spike at my eye, so I could see down the bore to the extraction cell. And I sweated (even though sweat was a waste under our water laws) because I knew how quickly, if he touched the trigger, the field could suck op the moisture in the tissues of my eye, my veins, my brains. I was looking right at death.

"And Uncle Kassad, he told me that this was where right and wrong came from. It came from a weapon's mouth.

"Then he turned off his heart and lay down. And Uncle Kassim opened the floor, and we lowered Uncle Kassad to the sewage to drown.

"We only got one cast from him later, a silent picture of him in his suit, emerging safe from the disassembler pools, and heading off overland, south.

"Later, we got the liters of water, the death payment, sent by post. It was the moisture from the body of the one who had killed my father. But it was sent by the Irenic Composition, our enemies. After Kassad killed their breaker, they took and embraced him, and drained his mind into theirs.

"My half-sister once, years later, after the Commonwealth consolidations, said she saw a body which looked like my uncle, tending a tree in the plantations down south. She said he looked happy. But I never went to look.

"Maybe the Irenic Composition, back when it was still intact, thought it was as right, as justified, as Uncle Kassad thought he was, and repaid the murder of one of their human units by turning him into one, and forcing a life of hopeless bliss on him. But I never went to ask.

"But I learned, back then, that there was no such thing as right or wrong, not that anyone could agree upon; or if there was, it did not make a damn bit of difference, if someone did not have the might or wit or luck to make right things go right. My uncle Kassad told me. Right and wrong come from the mouth of a weapon."

The weapon Atkins carried spoke, and it said, "Sir? Permission to speak frankly?"

"Granted."

"If your uncle had been right to say that might makes right, then the mere fact that his enemy was stronger, by his own theory, makes him wrong. Is this what the Marshal-General believes? That there is no reason for duty, honor, obedience? No reason to live a life such as that which the Marshal-General has led?"

Atkins frowned.

After what was a short time, but which seemed very long to him, he softly said, "Very well. Belay that last order. Stand down."

And he returned the dagger, asleep, to its sheath.

Phaethon, with a gesture, banished the image off the mirror, and commanding one of his crew mannequins, said, "Drake, please go see Marshal Atkins, give him my compliments, and escort him off my ship before he commits any mischief."

Daphne was gazing at Phaethon in mingled speech-lessness, impatience, amusement, and outrage. She demanded, "Were you actually going to sit here on your lump and just watch him sabotage your ship? What if you had guessed wrong about him?!"

"A good engineer always has a backup plan."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that I would not care to cross swords with Marshal Atkins on any field of combat, land, space, sea, dream, or air, except here. Any other place, he would have such weapons and such advantages that anyone would be helpless. Except here. Aboard my ship, I'm in my element. I built this place. I control what happens here. That's why he did not know I was spying on him."

"And what would you have done?"

He smiled expansively. "The stealth remotes are a fascinating piece of technology. Each one has an artificial molecule in its inertial navigation system, completely shielded from the outside, which registers movement by electron shell displacement in the surface atoms. The shielding normally protects it from tampering. Because, normally, there is no ghost-particle array system in place to teleport electrons through the base vacuum directly into the heart of the little machines and disable them."

"You figured out how to control the ghost-particle array?"

"Not entirely. There are circuits I cannot trace till they activate. But the machine is on my ship, and it is a machine, and, well, it is on my ship, so I suppose it is just a matter of time."

Daphne smiled, sharing his emotion, and delighted to see him so happy. She pointed at the now-blank mirror that had been focused on Atkins. "You really like him, don't you?"

Phaethon looked a little surprised. She knew he did not have many friends in the Golden Oecumene, and few men he admired. He said, "Yes. Actually I like him a great deal. I'm not sure why. We're opposites. I am a builder and he is a destroyer."

"Not opposites. Two sides of the same coin. And you both wear spiffy armor."

He laughed out loud. Then he said, "My system checks are almost done. Helion has returned to his tower, and has generated a low-pressure area in the plasma below us, a whirlpool to carry us down toward the core, and he is pulling most of the energy in this magnetic hemisphere to run the force lines parallel to our line of motion, in order to minimize resistance." Two mirrors to his left and right lit up. The one on the left showed an X-ray picture of the plasma below, with . a vast swirl of darkness and relative coolness yawning beneath them, a slowly turning red-lit well of inconceivable fire.

The mirror on the right displayed an upper image. Here, like a tiny arrowhead of gold, hung the Phoenix Exultant beneath the slender bridge of the Solar Array lateral dock. Down from space loomed a titanic pillar of flame, directly above the black well, and centered on the Phoenix. This column stretched far into space, and majestically curved to the east. It was a prominence, with one foot atop the sunspot beneath the Phoenix, the other atop the sunspot's magnetic sister to the east. This prominence was created by plasma trapped in the magnetic field lines Helion had torn from the sun's huge aura and pointed down vertically here.

The sunspot below was larger than the surface area of most planets; the prominence held up an arch beneath which giant planets could have passed with room to spare. The mirror also carried a sound of sinister hissing; this was a representation of the noise of the wash of particles descending through the vertical tornado of the prominence, and ringing against the invulnerable hull.

"So," said Phaethon. "We are almost ready to cast off. See? We are just waiting for the currents creating the tornado below us to build up more energy. Shall we celebrate the launch?"

She blinked. "Did you say 'celebrate' ... ?" "Of course! It is the Night of Lords! Transcendence Eve! A time of high exploits and splendor. What shall we have . .. ?" He signaled for his servants. "Champagne ... ?"

Daphne said, "Do you think that is appropriate? We might be about to die!"

"Better to die in style, then, isn't it?" She looked at him, and narrowed her emerald eyes. "I know what it is. You're free. After three hundred years of building and dreaming and working and doing, this ship is finally ready to fly. Oh, I know that over the last day or so, she's been flying. But she was not owned by you, then, not really. And it was Atkins at the controls, not you. And you had Hortators to worry about, or missing memories, or someone trying to stop you. Well, no one is trying to stop you now, are they?"

"If you don't count the unthinkably evil and super-intelligent war machine sent out from a dead civilization for incomprehensible reasons, which I am about to descend into hell in an unarmed and completely open ship to go confront, exposing the woman I love and my whole civilization to horrid danger, why, except for that, no, I'm fine! Who would care to stop me?"

"Don't you think we should be more gloomy? I mean, considering the circumstances? The heroes in my stories always make grim and noble speeches, saluting wan sunsets with bloody swords, or blowing last defiant trumpet blasts from empty battlements when they are going off to die."

He held up his delicate glass to toast her, and the light sparkled mirthfully along the dancing bubbles in the wine. "But I am not the hero here, my dear. Ao Aoen, just before my Hortator trial, told me that. I am the villain. And I think I am going to prevail against this Nothing Machine. That hope and confidence delights me; nor do I believe that fate is more cruel to those who fret than she is to those who laugh. And so I laugh. Comic-opera villains always vaunt and gloat, do they not?"

And she laughed too, to see him in such good spirits on the brink of such deep danger. Daphne said, "Well, if you are the villain, lover, who is the hero?"

"You mean heroine. Yes. Who else? Born in ugly poverty among the primitivists, tempted by wild hedonisms in her youth, sultry Red Manorials and mysterious Warlocks; then for a moment, married, and yes, happily, to a handsome (if I may say so) prince: but then! Cruelty! Evil fairies! She wakes to discover it is all a dream. That she is no more than a doll and plaything of an evil witch, who has stolen her prince and name and life! The witch kills herself and the prince goes into exile. Who is brave and fair enough to save him? Who else but Daphne? Our heroine risks everything to save her man, embraces exile and poverty, survives being anywhere near a gun-happy Atkins, finds him, turns him back from being a toad, and voila! He gets his ship back and he, at least, lives happily ever after. I, of course, am still hoping you will share that life and happiness: but I do not seem to recall you actually answered my proposal, did you?" "Yes."

"Yes, what? Yes, you agree to wed me, or yes, you didn't answer the question?" "Yes!"

"Which yes?"

But, at that moment, the disembarking klaxon sounded, and their thrones grew up around them to embrace them in protective layers, and so he did not hear her answer.

The Phoenix Exultant closed hatches, shut valves, withdrew fuel arms and tethers, paused, and then dropped like a falling spear down from the dock into the swirling madness of the whirlpool of fire underneath.

The pressure was at once inconceivable, and the mir-rors on the bridge grew dark. No outside view was possible, by light or radar or X-ray, because the density of plasma was so great, at once turning the medium opaque.

The great ship was being pulled downward between two granule currents. The hot substances, a thousand miles to her left and right, were flowing upward, and a relative layer of coolness was pulling her irresistibly down and down.

Daphne said, "Why does it look dark? Aren't we entering the upper layers of the sun?"

Phaethon said, "We are presently passing from the photosphere to the convective zone. This is one of the cooler parts of the sun, the outer fifteen percent of the core. There are more ions in the plasma outside than occur more deeply, and they are blocking the photon radiation. Most of the nuclear heat here is being carried by convection currents. But the mirrors are dark only because the environment is homogenous. Lower, we should achieve a different ratio of gamma and X-ray radiations, we can formulate some sort of picture. Here ..."

A mirror lit to show a darkness interrupted by a vertical white line. The line trembled slightly, "What's that?" "A view from my aft cameras, an ultra-high-frequency picture. That line of fire is the discharge from the main drive. I might be able to adjust the picture to make the turbulence caused by our wake visible. The rest of the picture is black because our sun does not generate any cosmic rays at this high wavelength. My drive is hotter than our environment, which is why the plasma is not rushing backward into the drive tubes."

Daphne stared at the pitch-black forward mirrors, the shivering white line in the aft view. "It's not much to look at, is it?" she said in a subdued tone. Something of the lightheartedness of the Champagne moment a moment past was gone. Phaethon's face and tone had become cold, intent, rock steady. Time went by. An hour. Two hours. Daphne shut off her sense of time with orders to wake her when something changed.

She woke when they were deeper. Back-pressure estimations from the drive showed that the subduction current had carried the Phoenix Exultant far, far lower than any prior probe had gone. They were, perhaps, a thousand kilometers or so above the radiative layer, moving through a medium so dense that light required untold centuries to cross the space, so thick that even the Phoenix, driving with all the force of her main drives, was crawling forward at a speed measured in kilometers per hour.

There was a chattering hiss from one of the mirrors nearby.

"What is that?" Daphne asked. Phaethon said, "The ghost-particle array is still giving off periodic bursts. That was the most recent one. I cannot interpret the codes embedded in the ghost array, but I think it is using neutrino sources from distant quasars as orientation points, and is continuing to track where the Silent Phoenix (as I call her) might be. I cannot block out the transmissions with my drives open. But since I want the Silent Phoenix to find us, I don't really mind." Daphne looked at him skeptically. "This really is a crazy idea, isn't it? There is something out there in all that fiery darkness, looking for us, an enemy hunting us?"

"Maybe. Unless the enemy left a long, long time ago, and we've been chasing shadows all this time."

Daphne looked around at the shining golden chamber of the bridge, jewel bright. Then she glanced at the mirrors showing the outside: utter blackness. She shivered.

"I'm going back into null," she said. "Wake me if anything exciting happens."

Phaethon, his eyes fixed on the featureless darkness of one of the mirrors, nodded.

Time passed.

Daphne woke again. "What day is it? Have I missed the Transcendence?"

"It's only been two hours while you slept."

"What happened? Why did you wake me?"

"Ah! Something exciting. While you were asleep, I did some tests on the ghost array, and I think I can pick up neutrino deflections with it."

Daphne blinked. "Oh."

" 'Oh'? All you have to say is 'oh'?"

"Oh. Please define the word 'exciting' as you are using it, so there will be no ambiguities in our future communications."

"Well, I did this so you could have something to look at while we are waiting to be attacked."

"Dear, did I ever tell you that there is something about you which really does remind me of Atkins?"

"Look at these mirrors. There. I can use a filter to calculate heat gradients from neutrino discharges...."

The black forward scene was now broken by sparks or stars. Little discharges of intense white light, pinpoints or shimmers like heat lighting, now gave the darkness a three-dimensional aspect, like seeing lightning through storm clouds, or watching the flows of molten lead in some deep, pressurized furnace. Below and beyond the field of sparks, like a fire in the far background, was a dull angry red color, reflecting from the boils and currents of what seemed intervening streams or clouds of darkness.

Phaethon said, "Those sparks are called Vanguard events, named after their discoverer. The number and volume of hydrogen fusions here is so great that, at times, by accident, neutrons fuse into superheavy particle pairs, but which decay instantly back into simpler particles, releasing neutrinos and other weak particles back into the medium. We're at the boundary of the radiative layer. The medium here is dense enough that even some of those weak particles are trapped and fused, which all adds to the general entropy. Farther down, toward the core, Vanguard events are much more common. Here is a longer-ranged view..."

And she saw, down beyond the haze of iron red, a shading toward orange, and yellow-white, all knotted with snakelike writhings of black and blue-black, colder areas raining through the endless nuclear storm.

He said, "This view is actually several hours old. Photons are blocked here, absorbed and reabsorbed endlessly; but even photinos and protinos are slowed by the density."

The view was hellish. She said, "Can't you give these gradient images a nicer color? Taupe maybe, or lime green?"

A shiver ran through the room at that moment, and a sound like clicking and screaming. Phaethon's face went blank, and his helmet came up out of his gorget and folded over to cover his face.

Daphne said, "I don't think I like this___Why did I volunteer to come along here again... ?" And emergency paramaterial fields snapped a cocoon in place around her, while superdense material poured forth from high-speed spigots in the ceiling, to flood the bridge.

It was dark in the cocoon. When she looked into the ships dreaming, to see what was going on, her time tense sped up enormously. Phaethon had activated his emergency personality, and had sped himself up to the highest level his system could tolerate. In order to see what it was he was doing, Daphne's high-speed per-ionality (called Rajas Guna, a prana she had acquired back when she lived with the Warlocks) equalized her time sense.

Phaethon was at the center of a huge flow of information, like a fly trapped in a web of light. The stresses and pressures on the hull were higher than he had predicted. Helion had never created a vortex as large as the one he had made to send this ship toward the core; it had created a back pressure or countercurrent of some sort, a region of turbulence where the convective zone met the radiative zone.

There was normally no convection or current in the radiative zone. It was too dense there for anything but pure energy to exist. But the tornado of low pressure caused by Helion had suctioned an area larger than Jupiter upward out of the radiative zone into the convection, as if a mountain had dislodged from the bottom of the sea, and risen up to strike the ship. The eruption had come quickly enough to outrun its own images of approach.

Suddenly, the pressures and temperatures were as great now, instantly, as Phoenix Exultant had been expecting to encounter hours from now. During those hours, the internal fields and bracing systems would have had time slowly to adjust to the mounting pressure. Now there was no time.

Phaethon was directing the internal magnetic and paramaterial fields of the Phoenix Exultant to brace against the pressure shock, receiving information from every square inch of the hull. The temperature was approaching 16 million degrees; the pressure 160 grams per cubic centimeter. Phaethon was using the magnetic field treads that coated the adamantium hull to pull magnetic forces out from the energy shower raging around them, to stave off the pressure by repulsion, adding in some places, subtracting it in others, so that the stress was even on all sides.

Since the Shockwave was passing over the ship in a microsecond, Phaefhon's accelerated time sense required him to measure, to calculate, and to redistribute forces. For each square meter of the hundred kilometers of hull, another calculation was made, another field was increased or decreased in tension, orders were given to fluids in the pressure plates. Movement was frozen in this silent and timeless universe, but every element and every command would need to be in place when time resumed.

In Daphne's mind's eye she could see a view of Phaethon's calm face, carried to her from the monitors inside his helmet. In the Warlock dreamspace inside her head, information from his thalamus and hypothal-amus, the neural energies that (had time been flowing) would have been shown by changes in his facial expression, were displayed to her as a system of colored light, as a menagerie of animals in a field, each beast representing a different passion or emotion.

But as nanosecond after nanosecond crawled by, as the subjective hours passed, those lights that she saw burned pale white and unwavering. Lambs and birds and wolfish dogs, representing Phaethon's meekness, cowardliness, and anger, lay still and restful on the grass. Only the icon of a large gold lion was on its feet, and it stood regally, its gold tail lashing.

Daphne could have, at any moment, shut off her high-time, and allowed the next event to simply happen to her. The ship would either be destroyed or saved in a moment too quick to be seen. It did her no good at all to stay on the line with Phaethon, saying nothing, watch-ing. just watching him work, unable to assist him in my way.

Toward the end of the third subjective hour, she said, "How are we doing?"

His face showed no change of expression. "Not great. The hull has been breached. A gap about twenty angstroms wide. I'm trying to get the outside fields to collapse against each other destructively at that spot, to cancel out and create a bubble. If the magnetics are dense enough, normal plasma cannot enter. We might make it."

Daphne was thinking that, buried in the midst of this opaque plasma, no possible noumenal signal or infor-mation could be transmitted out. Even if they both recorded their minds anywhere on the ship, if the ship were destroyed, there would be no record of what had happened here, ever again.

"What broke the hull? I thought it was invulnerable."

"Gravitic tides in a concentrated point source. Not something I've seen before. Of course, no one has ever been this deep before."

In her mind's eye, she saw a stir of uneasy ten-sion through the beasts her format used to represent Phaethon's emotional and neural tensions. She switched to a traditional Silver-Gray human face format, and saw the same emotion depicted as a narrowing of Phaethon's eyes, a twitch of the muscles in his cheek, a sigh. He said. "There is nothing more I can do at this point. Either I have balanced the overpressure across the hull or I have not. If I have, the forces will cancel each other out, and the pressure will pass evenly across the hull surface. If I have not, greater pressure along one sec-tion will cause a rupture along other sections, because the Shockwave will be traveling normal to the hull rather than parallel. All the models I've run say I have done as much as I can do. Either we can watch this thing happening to us in terrible slow motion, unable to affect the outcome, or we can return to our normal time rate. That way, if I've made a miscalculation, we will be dead before either of us feels any pain or alarm. Which would you prefer?"

" 'Twere best done quickly," she said.

"I'm returning us to normal time rates. Any last words?"

"Do you think this is an enemy weapon? That we simply miscalculated and that the Nothing does not want, or cannot risk, to take over the Phoenix Exultant!"

"Believe it or not, no, I don't think this is a weapon. I think this is a natural phenomenon, created by the low-pressure funnel Helion is using to drive us down this deep. If this had been a weapon, the Shockwave would have struck into a vital spot in the hull, or with a pressure imbalance too great for me to counter balance with my hull magnetics. It's a random action. Chaos. Besides, my neutrino radar shows an homogenous temperature gradient in every direction. If there were a ship our size, or made of the hull material one would need to withstand this depth and pressure, it would be as obvious and unusual as an icicle in a furnace, and give my probes a hard return. There's nothing around us. We're alone."

"So if we die now, it's just one of the universe's little ironies. But I'm not afraid. Because you're wrong: we're really not alone." And she sent a tactile signal that his sense filter could interpret as the feeling of her hand sliding into his grasp, and squeezing his fingers.

He said, "I love you."

With a roar of noise, the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, the roar of blood, returned to her. She realized that she had her eyes squeezed shut, as if to shut out a bright light. She thought, A lot of good that will do in the middle of the sun. Then she thought, By the time it takes you to wonder if you are still alive, the question has already be- come moot. She laughed, gagged on antiacceleration fluid, spat, and cycled her cocoon to turn back into a throne and release her.

There was a long moment while high-speed pumps cleared the bridge of antiacceleration gel, and other circuits swept the deck.

She looked over to see a diamond shell around Phaethon's golden throne also dissolving in a cloud of steam. He still had his helmet faceplate down, but on her internal channel, she could see the emotional monitors, and saw the interior view of his face. He looked haggard. His eyes had that fatigued, red stare that men who've spent a month or more in highspeed time are likely to get.

She said, "You bastard!"

He said, "Hello, my darling. Nice to see you again"

Ah. I mean, of course, it looks like we are still alive-"

She said in a voice of hot fury, "How dare you!"

"How dare I what?"

"Spend days or months in subjective time-how long was it?-just waiting around to see if I would die, without doing me the courtesy of asking if I wanted to wait with you?"

Daphne thought that Phaethon was the least expert liar alive. He said lamely, "What, um, gives you such a quaint idea? I remember specifically telling you it would all be over in a split second...."

"Oh, good grief! If you came out of your cocoon with a nine-year growth of beard, two children, and a new hobby it could not be more obvious! Well! What in the world were you thinking?!"

He spread his hands, puzzled. "I do not see why you are upset." He spoke in a voice of infinite, calm reason, "I wanted to spare you the anxiety. And it would have been negligent of me not to watch the explosive shock-wave crawl, inch by inch, across the hull, just in case, after all, it turned out that I could have done something. As it was, the Shockwave did even less damage, and was more perfectly balanced, that any model predicted. Sort of strange, actually...."

She stood up, hands on hips. "Not as strange as you're going to feel when I yank out your lying tongue four feet, wrap it around your neck, and strangle you with it! I came along with you because, out of everyone, Atkins, Diomedes, your father, everyone, I was the only one who believed in you. And now you don't believe in me! Do you still think I'm a coward, is that it? Or do you think I would not have had anything to offer, no ideas, not even comfort or support, while you spent a month by yourself waiting to see if we would die? If you don't think I can take what you can, why did you bring me along? Why?"

Phaethon held up his finger. "While I would really like to continue this argument-it makes me feel like we're already married, you know, and that is comforting-why don't we store this conversation in a back file and play it out later? We can store our emotions so that you'll be just as mad and I'll be just as tired. Because there is something very bad happening right now, and I'd like your advice and support on the issue." "Well. Okay. But no backup files. I hate old conversations. Since there is nothing but empty ship mind all around us, why don't we send two partials to finish that conversation for us, provided we agree to abide by the results? We still have the portable noetic unit right here." Phaethon agreed, and they established copies of themselves to continue the argument on another of the ship's channels. Meanwhile, Phaethon showed Daphne what he had found during the hundred hours (for him) that had taken place during the split second (for her) it had taken the Shockwave to pass across the ship.

He pointed to a mirror that now showed a yellow-white haze rippled by feathery clouds of red and dark red.

"The Shockwave threw us out of the funnel of He-lion's low-pressure area," said Phaethon. "And I do not know where we are. Helion may have also lost track of us." He pointed toward the mirror. "The environment here looks like we have dropped into the radiative zone, but we may still be inside the bubble of higher-density plasma that erupted over us."

Daphne said, "How bad is that? I mean, all we were doing was waiting until the bad guys found us."

"I had been hoping to get to the location to which the ghost-particle machine was sending its periodic broadcasts. But since I do not know where we are, I will not know where that point is, until the machine broadcasts again."

She said, "The plasma outside is about twenty times as dense as solid iron. The magnetics you had been using to bore through the material you are now using (now that we are lower that we had planned to go) to reinforce the hull against a breach. So how can we be moving?"

"I must keep the drives firing at full blast, in order to overcome back pressure and dump waste heat. That is actually adding relatively little movement to our vector, because of the density of the medium. But even if we are at rest relative to the current of superdense core plasma around us now, we do not know where or how quickly that current is moving. An area of plasma a hundred times the diameter of Jupiter just closed around us; if that area is moving at the speed of some of the equatorial currents, we could be an immense distance away from where we were a few minutes ago. So the question is: How do we find out where we are, how do we get to where we want to go? And we do not have all the time in the world. Six days from now, as soon as the fuel runs out, the plasma from the sun pours into the drives, atomizing everything inside, including us."

She said, "Do you have any magnetic power left over to put to the treads, to dig us out of this super-dense area?"

Phaethon said, "No. I'm using every erg to brace the ship against the internal currents here, within the area. Just to make this clear: we could be inside the radiative zone, falling toward the core, or this sphere of plasma could be rising like a bubble up through the convective zone, and it has not yet dispersed because of its immense size. It seems very ironic-silly, actually-to get killed this way by some accident of internal solar meteorology, without ever seeing the enemy." He sighed and raised his hand toward his faceplate, as if about to open it, saying, "Perhaps I should not have kept watch for so many subjective, hours during that Shockwave. I do feel very tired...."

Daphne felt the nape-hairs of her neck stir. She felt as if she were being watched.

She reached out and grabbed his hand. "Keep your helmet on, you fool!"

Phaethon paused, startled. "But why-?"

Because Daphne had been trained by Warlocks, she could trigger pattern-finding intuitions from nonverbal sections of her brain, and deduce insights from partial information. So somehow she knew: "It's the only thing saving us!"

Phaethon froze. He said, "Check the ship's brain."

Daphne called up a status report on the mirror next to her chair arm. "Still empty. No one's in the ship mind except our two copies. Otherwise it's empty."

"Why are you so sure the enemy is aboard?" For some reason, even though the brightly lit bridge was wide and empty around them, his voice had dropped to a whisper.

It took her a moment to find the words, to bring the Warlock intuition to the forefront of her mind, like tempting some wild beast out from its dark cave. She said: "Too many coincidences. We know the enemy can manipulate solar currents and raise storms just like your father does; that is what killed Helion Prime. So we're caught by a super-dense current. It may be carrying us, helpless, to the surface, just where the enemy wants to go, if they are aboard and if they want to escape the Golden Oecumene. If the enemy cannot escape, they wait a few days until the fuel runs out, and kill us both, so, at least, our side doesn't have the ship. The current that caught us cannot be natural: it breaks the hull, but it somehow is more careful, more evenly balanced, that you expected; and at the same time, it puts on just enough pressure, no more, no less, to neutralize the hull magnetics we need to use to maneuver."

He said, "But there is no evidence of anything reed through the thought ports I jammed open. How did their ship transmit any crew-mind information aboard the Phoenix?"

She said, "That I do not know. Maybe the ghost-particle machine acted like a Trojan horse, and was receiving information from an outside source."

"Through the hull...?"

'Your drive ports are open. Besides, you were using it just now to send and receive neutrino bursts. If it can receive information from inside, it can receive it from outside. And probably send as well. Just because your closed hull stops some of the particles the ghost array puts out-the particles you detected-does not necessarily mean there were not other groups of signals you did not detect. The Nothing Sophotech probably did actually receive Ao Varmatyr's dying broadcast, and knows everything he found out about the ship, your plans, and you."

"I don't really mind if the Nothing knows everything we said and did. Our strategy, in fact, relies on total honesty. But I wonder why it did not take over the ship's mind. One would think it would welcome the higher thought-speeds, if for no other reason. Maybe the conscience redactor has given it some specious reason to fear the ship mind.

"Are you sure it's not in there?" Daphne asked. "Our read-out here could be an illusion. Run a line check."

He tapped the mirror with a fingertip, gave a command. "Well, there is something strange here. According to this, you won the argument, and I apologized. Something must be manipulating the data. Best two out of three?"

"Very funny. You don't think the Nothing is aboard, do you?"

"I think it would have initiated conversation with us."

"Why? All it has to do is wait until you open your armor to scratch your nose or get a nonsimulated kiss, and zap, it sends an information beam through your skull and into the inside-crown thought ports."

"But if a Sophotech was transmitted into our ship, where did it come from? It's not as if transmissions can travel so very far through the dense solar plasma. The enemy ship must have been nearby, practically alongside. But we did not detect a foreign ship. It has to be a starship, not just a spaceship. Why didn't we see her?"

When she did not respond, he glanced at her. She was sitting in her throne, staring upward, a blank, thoughtful look on her face.

"Well?" he said. "If the Nothing Sophotech is actually out there, why did we not see the foreign starship?"

She spoke in a slow and dreamy voice: "Because the Silent Oecumene starship is very, very small." "What? Why do you say that?" She raised her finger slowly and pointed. "Because it is here."

At first Phaethon was not certain what he was seeing.

Across the deck, tall pressure curtains and overmind formation poles rose vertically toward the dome. At first, it seemed as if something had distorted the second balcony. The wall was puckered. The reaction boxes were crowded oddly toward each other and the angles of the cubes were no longer right angles. The poles were warped in the middles, bending toward each other, left and right, no longer parallel.

Then the distortion moved. The vertical rods to the right straightened, like harpstrings plucked, now released. But the straight rods to the left were bending, their midsections crowding toward a moving point. It looked as if the whole scene had been painted on an elastic sheet, and the elastic were puckering toward a small moving point, or as if a distorted sheet of convex glass were moving between Phaethon and the far wall.... Or as if... "There is a black hole here on the bridge with us," said Phaethon. 'The singularity is bending the light from the wall beyond in a gravity lens. Look."

He draw an energy mirror up from the floor and focused it on the center of the distortion. Through the amplified view in the mirror, the reddish haze from the microscopic gravity well was clearly visible. Light moving near the singularity was retarded, lost energy, and Doppler-shifted toward the red.

According to the mirror, the singularity itself was only about the diameter of a helium nucleus, a few angstroms wide. Extending an inch or two in diameter was an outer sphere of ozone and charged particles formed from stripped air molecules, attracted by gravity, spiraling down and through the point-singularity, and disintegrating into constituent electrons and protons. If he turned his hearing up, he could hear the high-pitched, steady tea-kettle whistle of escaping vanishing air, being pushed at fifteen pounds per square inch into a point smaller than could be seen.

Phaethon threw pressure curtains across the chamber, in case the surface area of the black hole grew, or the rate of air loss became noticeable. The distortion in the air, seeming to bend all things behind it toward it, hazed in reddish light, haloed by hissing X-rays, moved with slow majesty across the bridge, toward them.

It passed through the pressure curtains without slowing. Their powerful fields were helpless to stop the black hole. There were electric discharges as the pressure curtains' field flows were twisted out of parallel and canceled out. Sparks guttered for a moment along the hull beneath.

Daphne said, "Is it my imagination, or is the deck tilting toward that thing?"

"It's your imagination. I think. The gravimeter says it has less mass than a large asteroid, only a few thousand million tonnes or so. We would not be able to feel that amount of gravitic attraction. But the light is being bent as if there was something the size of a galaxy or three at that pinpoint. How much light distortion does it take to be visible to the naked eye like that? For that matter, how is it floating? How is being controlled? Why isn't it dispersing? Classical theory says that black holes that small only have a life of a few microseconds before they evaporate in a wash of Hawking radiation."

Daphne stared at the impossible twist of reddish light. It was like staring down a well, or the bore of some cannon made of bent space. She said in a calm voice: "This is he. Or should I say 'it.' The Nothing Sophotech is housed in the interior of the black hole. It is controlling the gravitic fields, somehow. How it communicates to the fields around the singularity, the ones which determine its position in space, that I do not know. Hawking radiation? Gravitons? It might give orders by altering black-hole rotational spin-values in a sort of Morse code, which the surrounding field can pick up. You're the engineer. You tell me how it's..."

"I am still trying to figure out how it can be bending the light when it's only the mass of a large city...

Daphne said, "That I know. Think like a mystery writer for a moment, not like an engineer. It's a trick. An illusion."

"Illusion? How?" She said, "Could a ghost-particle array inside the event horizon manifest particles outside?"

"Theoretically, yes, through the quantum-tunneling effect."

"Photons? Red-colored photons? If a Sophotech were tracing the path of every lightwave, and weaving them together in a hologram, could it create the appearance of a deep gravity well, when there was no such well?"

"By making highly complex fields, of photons ap-pear out of nowhere? I think I'd rather believe they somehow discovered gravity control. Neither technology is one I thought was possible. Why bother?"

The reddish light vanished. As if the elastic sheet on which the scene were painted had suddenly returned to true, the vertical rods on the far side of the bridge now straightened, and the angles of the evenly spaced boxes on the balconies were right again. At the same time, the door motors hummed, the air lock opened, and a section of floor rose up into view. Through the door rose a figure wearing a pale mask, robed in floating peacock-colored hues, crowned in feathery light antennae. The figure glided across the wide expanse of shining deck toward them, making no noise as it approached.

"Now what... ?" whispered Daphne.

What approached them seemed to be a man. The robes were peacock purple, shimmering with deep highlights, bright with woven colors of green and scarlet, spots and traceries of gold and palest white. The man's folded hands were hidden in silver gauntlets, gemmed with a dozen finger rings and shining bracelets of Sophotech thought ports. The mask itself was a face-shaped shield of silver nanomaterial, pulsing and flowing with a million silver-glinting thoughts. From the upper mask rose whiplike slender fans, like the tail feathers of a quail, perhaps antennae, perhaps odd decorations. Similar decorative antennae spread from the shoulderboards, floating rosettes of white, long feathery ribbons of many colors, freaked with gold and shining jet, like the wing feathers of some extinct tropical bird. The eyes of the mask were lenses of amethyst.

The apparition approached and was a score of feet away. It was taller and more slender than an Earth-born man, not unlike a frail lunarian, and the headdress towered taller yet.

No, not like a lunarian. Like a Lord of the Silent Occumene. This was the regal garb and ornament and dreaming-mask to which those ancient and solitary beings aspired. Ao Varmatyr, before he died, in his tale, had hinted at something of this style. The Silent Ones, living alone in their artificial asteroid palaces of spun diamond, in microgravity, had no doubt been as tall as this phantasm. Daphne and Phaethon both stared up, fascinated. The figure stood erect, motionless except for the slow seafernlike bob of his feathery antennae, and still, except that a web of bright and soft blue shadows fled across his pulsing gown, as if the apparition were seen through changing shades of rippling water.

And music pulsed softly, elflike, from the robes, a hint of chimes, a laughter of distant strings, a dreaming of soft sonorous horns, slowly breathing. (This more illusion,") Phaethon sent to Daphne on a secure side-channel, like a whisper. He showed her that. the mirror to his left was still detecting a gravitic point source in the air where the singularity hung. Electric circuits in the door motors had opened and closed, but no signals had entered the circuits from outside: ghost teleportations of electrons, no doubt. Radar indicated no physical substance in the shining, fairy-shimmering robes of light, no body underneath. Daphne sent back an image of her own face, bug-eyed her shoulders shrugging, as with text saying: If this is a hologram, where is the music coming from? Phaethon sent back that perhaps ghost particles, is-suing from the singularity, were forming uncounted trillions of air molecules, enough to form pressure waves, and create sound vibrations. If so, the feat was staggeringly complex, casually impossible, one impossibility built upon another, to create something as simple as a sigh of strings and woodwinds.

Daphne whispered on their side channel. ("What? Is this meant to impress us?")

Phaethon sent back that this entity had already displayed its power. The super-dense plasma gripping the ship could easily, if the pressures changed, rupture even the Phoenix Exultant's nigh-impregnable hull.

This display, no doubt, was meant to show the Silent Oecumene machine's delicacy, its fine control.

("Yes") Phaethon sent back to her. ("It's trying to impress us.")

("Okay,") sent Daphne, looking fairly unafraid. ("I think it might be working")

From the mask now came a stately swell of horns. A timpani of drums and deep majestic strings gave tongue. And in the midst of the music, there came a voice: "Phaethon of Rhadamanth, unwitting Earthmind's tool: you have been utterly naive. All your plans are transparent. Examine them, and you will find them illogical, worthy of pity. The war between the Sophotechs, the Wise Machines, as you call them, of the First Oecumene, and the Philanthropotechs, the Benevolent Machines, of the Second Oecumene, has its roots three ages in the past, since the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure, and shall not be concluded till after all stars turn cold, and universal night engulfs a frozen cosmos. You cannot guess the magnitude of this war; you know nothing of the issues involved. And yet you have been placed here, the pawn of minds greater man your own, trapped between opposing forces, and forced, in ignorance, to choose. About the fundamental nature of the Sophotechs, of philosophy, and of reality itself, you have been wickedly deceived. Now, at the final hour, despite all you have done to render yourself deaf, and blind, and numb to truth, nevertheless, the cold, inhuman truth will speak. Your choice now is to understand, or perish."