The Golden Transcendence

THE FALSEHOODS

Diomedes and Phaethon were seated at the wide round wood-and-ivory table grown out of the bridge deck. Both were dressed in severe and unadorned black frock coats with high collars and cravats, according to the Victorian conventions of the Silver-Gray. Around them, shining gold decks, tall energy mirrors, overmind formation pillars, and pressure curtains blue and lucent as the sky, gleamed and blazed and glowed, like a world of cold and silent fire. One anachronism: Diomedes held a bronze-headed ashwood spear in one kid glove, and toyed with it, staring at the spear tip, and waving it slowly back and forth, metronomelike, trying to acclimate to the binoc-ular vision a human-shaped body and nervous system afforded.

Atkins, seated opposite them, was wearing a suit of Era reflex armor. The chameleon circuit was disengaged, and he had tuned the color to a brilliant blood red, a sharp contrast to the umbrageous black walnut of the high-backed, wooden chair in which the soldier sat. The suit substance looked like fiery elfin scale-mail, with overlapping small plates of composite, which were programmed to stiffen under impact, and form blast armor, locking into different bracing systems to protect the wearer no matter from which direction the stroke came. The routine to make this primitive armor had been coded within the black-body cells in his blood, and the armor itself had been woven out of the broken deckplates of the old bridge, where his blood had spilled.

In the center of the table was an imaginary hourglass, measuring the estimated time till the next broadcast from the ghost-particle array.

The three sat watching the sands run.

Diomedes drew his eyes up to the glinting spear point of the weapon he held. "Here is cause for wonder! I live and breathe and speak and see, incarnated by a new machine, a portable noetic unit with no more support than glorious Phoenix Exultant's mind could give. No Sophotech was needed for the transfer! No large immobile system was required. Does this mean immortality shall be common hereafter even among the Cold Dukes and Eremites and Ice-miners, among all us nomads too poor to afford Sophotechnology? It may be the death of our loved and cherished way of Me! Hah! And, if so, good riddance to it, say I!"

Phaethon said, "Good Diomedes, it is that way of life which has made the crew here on the Phoenix so unthinkably tolerant of the secrecy which now surrounds the antics on the auxiliary bridge, and the murder of Neoptolemous. Who else but people born and bred to utter isolation and invincible privacy would tolerate not to know what's going on? Atkins still fears spies, and now insists all these doings be obscured, until the Nothing Mastermind be brought to bay. Who would be so crazed, except Neptunians, to accept the idea that there were things which, for military reasons, the citizens who support the military are not allowed to know!"

Atkins leaned forward, hands on the tabletop, and said to Diomedes, "Speaking of death, are there other copies of Xenophon or Neoptolemous loose in the Duma whom we have to track down, or was the one brought aboard this ship the only copy?"

Diomedes said, "Were you thinking of hunting the others? The exercise is futile. While I was Neoptole-mous, I saw the Silent One's mind in action, Ao Var-matyr as we might call him. He tried to send copies of himself to corrupt as many Neptunians as he could do. Despite his boast, his virus weaving was not enough to penetrate the concentric privacies with which each Neptunian surrounds himself. Unlike you in your world free from crime, we are used to mind hoaxes, hackers, hikers, highjackers, bushwackers, thought worm-ers. sleepwalkers. Had Ao Varmatyr been received on Earth, rather than at Farbeyond, your nonimmunized world would have been flooded with virus at the first public posting. With us, we who have no public, all he did was irk his fellow Dukes of Neptune, who sent back casts and aphrodisiacs and core swipers and other irritants and viruses whose names you would not know.

There was a cold twinkle in Atkins's eye, a look of professional amusement. He obviously thought that he. at least, knew the names and more about the Nep-tunian thought weapons, their viruses and information duels. But he said nothing.

Diomedes concluded: 'There are other copies of Neoptolemous in the Duma, yes: but none of Ao Var-matyr. I have been in him since a fortnight past; nor did he hide any secrets from me, accounting me as one already dead. I think I would have seen a successful transfer of his template. There was none. He was far more alone and scared than his tale to you would have led you to believe."

Phaethon wanted to ask if that other version of Neoptolemous held the lien on the title to this ship, but he held his tongue. Other matters took priority.

Atkins was asking: "Did Ao Varmatyr ever communicate with his superiors?"

Diomedes said, "In the early hours, right after my capture, he made a nerve-to-nerve link with me. This was before he imposed complete control over the Neoptolemous host, and cut off my unfiltered outward sensation."

Diomedes made an easy gesture and continued: "What next occurred was not so strange. Xenophon, fine fellow that he is, was an Eremite. I am a Cold Duke. Compared to the scattered Eremite iceholds of the Kuiper belt, we Dukes, down in the S and K methane layers of Neptune himself, are much more densely populated. Sometimes, as little as a thousand kilometers would separate the outliers of our palace swarms and sink houses from each other, and the shells and turrets of a deep Neptunian Cold Duke are ringed with firewalls and false reflections to hinder the badworms which tend to pepper our speech when we share thoughts with each other. You understand?"

Atkins said "Meaning Xenophon engaged you in mind-to-mind and you whipped bis little behind."

"Inelegantly put, but essentially correct. I had access to his deep-memory files for a few seconds, enough to make a cipher copy into my own brainspace before Ao Varmatyr put me into sensory deprivation. It made interesting reading during my lonely hours. From it I could extrapolate the information about everything Ao Varmatyr knew."

Phaethon said, "My dear friend, you will not keep us in suspense, I trust?"

Diomedes smiled easily. "No more than is necessary to build up dramatic tension, my friend."

"I tingle with the appropriate tension, good Diomedes, I assure you."

Atkins, hearing this exchange, shook his head. He bought: No wonder these snooty Silver-Gray guys just get on everyone's nerves. And, then, aloud, "Gentle-men! Time's running! Let's get on with this."

Diomedes spoke with slow emphasis: "First, Xenophon was cooperating consciously. Second, Ao Varmatyr was unaware of any superior.

"There were two times, both times when Ao Var-matyr was hooked into the long-range communication nerve link, when his memory went blank, and his internal clock was reset to mask the missing time. Xenophon noticed it and Ao Varmatyr did not and could not. Xenophon was puzzled by this, but, lacking a suspicious imagination, did not realize what it implied: namely, that Ao Varmatyr's mind was set up the same way he described the minds of the Silent Oecumene thinking machines. An invisible conscience redactor, unknown even to him, forced him, from time to time, to perform certain acts of which he was not afterwards aware. Ao Varmatyr (unbeknownst to himself) communicated with his superior, this Nothing Sophotech, but they did not 'speak.' I suspect the superior merely fed operating instructions into Ao Varmatyr's conscience redactor, the loyalty virus inside of him."

Phaethon muttered, "How horrible!"

Diomedes, with a grim smile, fingered the haft of his spear, and said, "Indeed. But it was no worse than the Silent Oecumene had been doing for years and centuries to their own thinking machines. So why not do the same to their human subjects? The step is small Atkins said, "How did you resist being taken over by the Last Broadcast loyalty virus when Xenophon did not? You were entirely isolated, and Ao Varmatyr had complete control over your input."

"Part was lack of time and attention of his part, I think. But part of it was, in all modesty, strength of character on my part. It is true that I was convinced, perhaps for up to an hour at a time, that the Nothing philosophy was correct, and that there was no reason to resist, and that I had to cooperate for the sake of the Silent Oecumene. But never for longer than an hour.

"You see, I suspect the Last Virus was intended to work on the minds and mind-sets typical of the Silent Oecumene. The core value which the target mind must accept before it will accept the Nothing philosophy is that morality is relative, that the ends justify the means, that right and wrong is an individual and arbitrary choice. This strips the target mind of any defense: for who can rightfully defend his own prejudices against another's if he knows, deep down, that both are equally arbitrary, equally false?

"But it did not work on me, because I had, not so long ago, uploaded a copy of the Silver-Gray philosophy tutorial routine into my long-term memory. The tutorial kept pestering me with questions. One I liked was: If a philosopher teaches you that it is not wrong to lie, why do you not suspect he is lying to you when he says so? Another I liked was: Is it merely an arbitrary postulate to believe that all beliefs are mere arbitrary postulates?"

Phaethon asked: "What convinced Xenophon? Was he exposed to the same thought virus?"

"No. He believed the story Ao Varmatyr told without prompting. The same tale told to you; Xenophon believed in the implacable inhumanity of the Sophotechs to begin with. Many Neptunians do."

Atkins said, "So where is this Nothing Sophotech now? Have any clues as to where those instructions came from?"

"None. But since Ao Varmatyr was programmed to make his 're-ports' unwittingly, he did not choose time or circumstance under which to make them. (Nor the content, which probably consisted of an unedited information dump from his memory.) Hence they come at regular intervals." Diomedes nodded toward the hourglass in the middle of the table, and smiled again.

Phaethon said, "I haven't lived through as many spy dramas as my wife, but one would think enemies trying to hide would not fall into such predictable patterns."

Diomedes said, "Such weaknesses are an inevitable result of the Silent Oecumene way of doing things. If you treat people like machines, you must give them mechanistic orders. Hence we know when the next broadcast will take place."

They all watched the running sands in the glass for a quiet while, each with his own thoughts.

Diomedes spoke up. "There is still much I do not understand about what happened just now. Marshal? May I ask, if it is not one of these military secrets in which you put so much stock ... ?

Atkins raised one eyebrow. "You can ask."

"How did you survive inside Phaethon's armor? You decelerated toward the Neptunian embassy at ninety gravities. But only Phaethon has a specially designed body to withstand those pressures. That was precisely why Ao Varmatyr did not suspect you were not Phaethon. How did you survive?"

Atkins said curtly: "I didn't."

"I beg your pardon?"

Phaethon said: "His body was crushed into bloody paste inside my armor. Meanwhile his mind was stored in the noetic unit. It was not until we were at rest, and my suit lining had a chance to reconstruct the military-basic marine body it was carrying, that I transferred and reincarnated him. Everything he 'saw' before that was merely sent from my armor cameras into his recorded mind. He wasn't inside the armor, looking out, until later, when he drew his first painful breath."

Diomedes looked impressed. He asked: "Who was inside the Ulysses mannequin? The one that was incinerated by Ao Varmatyr?"

Atkins said: "One of. my sparring partners. A training-exercise routine."

"Programmed to lose?"

"Not really. But I had only given it ancient weapons and techniques, dating from the early Sixth and late Fifth Era. In other words, weapon systems the Silent Ones knew we had. So it lost. Only when Ao Varmatyr was convinced that he was in complete control did he show his true colors, and start ordering the Phoenix Exultant into a military posture."

Phaethon spoke up. "I suspect that even Ao Varmatyr himself did not know, until he did it, what he was going to do with the Phoenix Exultant when he achieved control of her. Using her as a warship to strike a deadly blow against the Golden Oecumene was not, I think, what he would have done had he believed his own tale. I can only conclude the decision to kill came from the Nothing Mastermind; perhaps some buried command overrode his normal judgment and conscience."

Atkins said, "I disagree. Ao Varmatyr had nothing but violence in mind from the first. Why else was he so tricky? He pretended to be Xenophon as long as he could, and then stayed quiet until I found him hiding."

Phaethon nodded. But there was a thoughtful, perhaps wistful, look on his features.

Atkins, seeing that look, said, "You believed him, didn't you? You would have gone with him, had it been you, and not me, being you, wouldn't you?" Phaethon said "Perhaps" in a tone of voice that meant certainly yes. "I wasn't sure-I am still not sure-how much of what Ao Varmatyr said was a lie. But there may be people to rescue at Cygnus X-l, people of a spirit like my own, and there may be great deeds to do there. It might have been worth the risk to go, just in case he was telling the truth."

Atkins said, "Then I'm just glad it was me who was you, and not you. Otherwise, Ao Varmatyr might have convinced you."

Phaethon said reluctantly, "No. His story was a lie."

Diomedes leaned forward, and said, "But Ao Var-matyr believed his own story."

"What?"

"The tale, at least to him, was true. What few of his thoughts I could understand made that clear. I suspect the Silent Oecumene did have her downfall in just the way he described, and that the people there, good Phaethon, were, perhaps once, not unlike you." Phaethon said, "I would like to believe that-I would like it very much. But at least part of the tale was a lie." Diomedes said, "How so?" "The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?"

Diomedes said, "Aren't men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intel-lectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant." Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how of-ten it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking pa-tience, he said: "Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works, Take me. for example. Look around: I employed par-tials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it's the same with me and the Sophotechs.

"Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable-exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour)-then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do.

"And I get the lion's share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear of or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together.

"So you see why I say that not a thing the Silent One said about Sophotechs made sense. I do not understand how they could have afforded to hate each other. Machines don't make us redundant; they increase our efficiency in every way. And the bids of workers eager to compete for Sophotech time creates a market for merely human work, which it would not be efficient for Sophotechs to underbid."

Diomedes spoke in a distant, haunted voice: "But, friend, I have been inside the Silent One's mind, and you have not. You did not see his memories of luxury and splendor.... They were the Lords of the Second Oecumene, the masters of the singularity fountains! They did not work. They did not compete. They did not bid, or buy. They did not have markets, or money. The only thing of value to them was their reputation, their artistic verve, their wit, their whimsy, and the calm dignity with which they welcomed their inevitable fall in darkened coffins into the blood red supergravity well of their dark star."

There was silence around the table for a time.

More sand fell through the glass.

Diomedes said, "It's odd. Their society was not un-like our own. A peaceful Utopia, but, unlike ours, one without laws, or money. What strange, incomprehensible force of fate or chance or chaos ordained her downfall?"

Atkins snorted. "It seems strange only if you believe that garbage Ao Varmatyr believed. His society was not set up the way he thought it was. No society could be."

Diomedes looked surprised. "And by what psychic intuition do you know this?"

"Its obvious. That society could not exist," said Atkins.

"Nor will it ever," added Phaethon.

The two men exchanged smiling glances.

"We are thinking of the same thing, aren't we?" said Atkins, nodding.

"Of course!" said Phaethon.

The two men spoke at once:

"They certainly had laws," said Atkins.

They certainly had money," said Phaethon.

The two men exchanged puzzled glances.

Atikins nodded. "You first."

Phaethon said, "No civilization can exist without money. Even one in which energy is as cheap and free as air on Earth, would still have some needs and desires which some people can fulfill better than others. An entertainment industry, if nothing else. Whatever efforts-if any-these productive people make, above and beyond that which their own idle pastimes incline them to make, will be motivated by gifts or barter bestowed by others eager for their services. Whatever barter keeps its value best over time stays in demand, and is portable, recognizable, divisible, will become their money. No matter what they call it, no matter what form it takes, whether cowry shells or gold or grams of antimatter, it will be money. Even Sophotechs use standardized computer seconds to prioritize distributions of system resources among themselves. As long as men value each other, admire each other, need each other, there will be money."

Diomedes said, "And if all men live in isolation? Surrounded by nothing but computer-generated dreams, pleasant fictions, and flatteries? And their every desire is satisfied by electronic illusions which create in their brains the sensations of satisfaction without the substance? What need have men to value other men then?"

"Men who value their own lives would not live that way."

Diomedes spread his hands and shrugged. He said softly: "I don't believe the Silent Ones did either of those things...."

Atkins said, "They certainly did not value each other's lives. Didn't you notice what kind of society Ao Var-matyr was describing? The clue was right there in everything he said. What was the one thing, over and over, Ao Varmatyr kept complaining about with the Sophotechs?"

Diomedes said, "That the Sophotechs would not obey orders."

Atkins nodded. "Exactly."

Diomedes looked back and forth between the two other men. "I do not grasp your point."

Atkins tapped his own chest with a thumb. "You know me. What would I do, if a subordinate of mine disobeyed a direct order, and continued to disobey?" Diomedes said, "Punish him." Atkins said, "Can you think of a circumstance under which I'd be authorized and allowed to kill him, or to order them to kill himself?"

Diomedes looked blankly at Phaethon. Phaethon said, "The war mind not long ago said something of the sort. I don't know enough ancient history to know the details. Can't you court-martial a subordinate for cowardice in the face of the enemy, or high treason, or force him to commit ritual suicide for letting the flag touch the ground, or something like that... ?"

"Something like that," said Atkins. "But you, Phaethon. What is the worst you can do to a subordinate if he disobeys orders?" "Discharge him from employment." Atkins leaned back, looking grim and satisfied. 'You and I are from different cultures, Phaethon. You are an entrepreneur. I am a member of a military order. You make mutually agreed-upon exchanges with equals. I take orders from superiors and give orders to inferiors. Your culture is based on freedom. Mine is based on discipline. Keep that in mind when I ask the next question: Which kind of culture, one like yours or one like mine, do you suppose the Silent Oecumene was like? A Utopia without laws? Or a slave state run by a military dictator?"

Diomedes said, "Toward the end, yes, they had degenerated to a slave state. That was the tragedy of their downfall, they who had once been so free, falling so low."

Atkins shook^his head and snorted. "Nope. They were corrupt from the start. If they were so free and Utopian, why didn't they just fire any Sophotechs who wouldn't obey orders, and hire a new one? Their Sophotechs weren't employees. They were serfs."

He paused to let that sink in. Then he said, "I wonder if they just kept intact the same discipline and hierarchy they had evolved with captain and crew over the generations of their migration aboard the Naglfar, and the descendants of the captains and officers kept control over the technology, the singularity fountains, which supplied everyone with power. Or maybe they had a monopoly over the information flows and educational software. Or just controlled the money supply. You don't need to control that much to control everyone's lives."

Phaethon said in dark amazement, "Why didn't they rebel against such control? Were they disarmed?"

Aktins shook his head, coldness in his eyes. "Rebellion requires conviction. Once conviction is destroyed, slavery is welcomed and freedom is feared. To destroy conviction, all it takes is a philosophy like the one I heard Ao Varmatyr telling me. Everything else is just a matter of time."

The sands in the glass ran out.

Phaethon's face took on that dream-ridden, distant look that people who forget to engage their face-saving routine were wont to take on, when their sense filters are turned to absent things. The overmind formation rods, which reached from deck to dome, showed furious activity as the ship mind divided or recombined itself into several different architectures, rapidly, one after another, attempting to solve the novel problem of detecting the unfamiliar ghost particles in flight. Energy mirrors to the left and right, shining from balconies or rising suddenly from the deck as additional circuits engaged, flowed with changing calculations, drew schematics and maps, argued with each other, compared information, performed rapid tests. Each mirror was filled with stars as different quadrants of the surrounding space were examined.

Then, silence fell. One energy mirror after another went dark. The various segments of the ship mind, operating independently, all arrived at the same conclusions. All the maps changed until they were iterations the same map; all the schematics vanished except for one; all the screens went dark except the one focused at the center of the Solar System, pointed at the sun.

There was a cutaway image of the sun's globe prominent in the mirror nearest the table at which the men sat. A triangulation of lines depicted a spot far below the surface of the sun, at the core, between the helium and hydrogen layers, far deeper than Helion's probes and bathyspheres had ever gone.

The men around the table stared. They all three spoke at once, talking aloud to no one in particular.

Atkins: "You've got to be kidding___"

Diomedes: "My! That looks uncomfortable! How in the world did they get there?"

Phaethon: "I should have known. It was obvious! Obvious!"

Atkins: "What kind of weapon can destroy a thing that can swim in the core of a star?"

Diomedes: "Poor Phaethon! He doesn't realize what's coming next...."

Phaethon: "That's what tried to kill Father. It manipulated the core currents somehow, created a storm, and maybe even directed a discharge at Mercury Equilateral Station in the attempt (which Helion foiled) to destroy the Phoenix Exultant. Obvious! Where else to hide an object as large as a starship? Where else would mask all energetics, discharges, and broadcasts? But how did they enter the system unchallenged ... ?"

Now they started speaking to each other:

Atkins to Phaethon: "They came in along the sun's south pole, at right angle to the plane of the ecliptic. That's where you always come in when you're sneaking in, and they could not have come in along a line leading to the north pole of the sun, because that's where a community of those energy-formation dust clouds live, grown up around Helion's waste-discharge beam. Space Traffic Control would not care about anything so far away from normal shipping lanes, not if it merely looked like a rock or something. A lot of debris falls into the sun. It's where most of the garbage in the system ends up."

Diomedes to Atkins: "You know there is only one ship in the system, perhaps in all the universe, that can chase that enemy ship down into the hellish pressure and infinite fire of the sun, don't you? But the law may not suit your military convenience. You see, I do not think I am legally the owner of this ship any longer, ever since I stopped being Neoptolemous. Possession of the lien would revert to the version of Neoptolemous still in the Duma. Are you going to ask his permission? Or seize the ship like a pirate, as I know you're hungering to do? Or fight him in a law case? In either instance, how will you keep this whole thing secret, if it needs be secret?"

Phaethon to Diomedes: "Secret? What madness has possessed you, friend? Here finally we have found the foe: Let us raise the whole strength of the Oec-umene against the enemy! Secrecy, indeed! We should be sounding trumpets from the rooftops! Wait, you don't have rooftops in Neptune, do you? We should be sending deep echoes against the heavy-band layers, and sending signals reflecting from peak to peak of every iceberg at the bottom of the liquid methane sea!"

Diomedes to Phaethon (smiling behind his hand):

"That's really not the way we do things in Neptune. That's only in a scene from Xanthippe's opera."

Atkins to Phaethon (glumly): "And that's really not the way we do things in the military. In the first place, I... am... the gathered strength of the whole Oec-umene. Just me. And in the second place, I'm not going to expropriate this ship. We don't seize private goods for public use anymore, thanks to that stupid Nonag-gression Accord which should have been repealed long ago, if you ask me. Besides, when Ao Varmatyr's broadcast went out, if it held the information in Ao Varmatyr's last memories, then Nothing Sophotech, or whatever is on that ship drowned beneath the sun, already knows we're onto him."

Phaethon to Atkins, warily: "I hate to admit this, Marshal, but no signal was sent out from this ship."

"What? Explain."

"The broadcast was meant to shine out through the main drive while the ship was under way. All I did was lower the aft shield and close the drive. If the ghost particles could have penetrated Chrysadamantium, Ao Var-matyr would not have found it necessary to trick you into opening the thought ports on my armor you were wearing. He would have simply dominated your internal circuit through the armor plate. So I knew lowering the ship's armor would stop the broadcast. I tracked the projected path of the ghost particles by extrapolating from their reflections along the inside shell of the closed aft shield. No one and Nothing knows we are coming."

"'We'... ?"

Phaethon drew a deep breath. He thought about this mighty ship of bis, and the mighty dream that had inspired it. He thought of all he had been willing to leave behind him-wife, father, home. He wondered what duty, if any, he had running to that society which had, because of that dream, ostracized and exiled him.

He asked, "Marshal-honestly, do you have any ship, any vehicle at all, which might be able to make a ran into the outer core of a middle-sized sun? Any weapon which can reach there? Any way to hunt this monster if I do not lend my Phoenix Exultant to you?"

"The only weapon I have which could reach there would take sixty years to finish its firing action, and it would probably snuff out the sun in the process. That would not be my first choice."

"Then it is 'we' after all."

"Well. I'm not sure I want to take you into a fight. We could just-"

"No. I saw how badly you played me when you were me. I think you need the real me to run this ship properly. I will ready the ship for flight. But-" Now Phaethon raised his hand. "But I want no part of the killing which will need to be done! I will be there as I was here, hidden in a dog, perhaps, or under a couch. I will bring you to the battlefield, Marshal, but no more. I will do what needs to be done, but war is not my work. I have other plans for my life and other dreams for this ship."

Atkins said grimly, "If you do what's needed, that's fine. I didn't expect more from you."

Diomedes raised a finger, and said, "I hate to be an obstructionist, but we do not have legal title to the ship at the moment. I realize that it is quite heroic and graceful, in the operas, for invigilators and knights-errant merely to seize whatever they need whenever they wish, or to just steal golden fleeces, other men's wives, parked motor carriages, or communal thoughtspace as the emergency justifies. But this is not an opera."

Atkins said to Diomedes, "The threat is real, the need is present. If we can't use this ship, what do you suggest we do?"

"Me? I would steal the ship, of course! But, after all, I am a Neptunian, and when my friends send infected files to corrupt my memory or make me drunk, I take it as a joke. A little random vandalism can do a man a world of good. But you? I thought you Inner System people were filled with nothing but endless respect for every nuance of the law. Have you become Neptunians?"

Phaethon raised his hand, "The point is moot. As pilot of the ship, my instructions from the owner allow me to refuel under what circumstances and conditions I deem necessary. I hereby deem it necessary. Tell the crew to disembark, and that I am taking the ship for a practice run down below the surface of the sun."

Diomedes smiled. "You are asking me to lie? I thought, in these days, with so many noetic machines at hand, that type of thing was out of fashion."

"I am asking you to trick them. You are a Neptunian, after all, are you not?"

Diomedes had gone off to oversee the disembarkation and mass migration of the crew. He had been more than amused by the fact that, in a human body, he could not merely send parts or applications of himself away to do the work. And so he had gone away across the bridge deck, seeking the bathhouse on the lower level of the carousel, to find a dreaming-pool from which he could make telerepresentations. He had gone skipping and leaping and running, much as a little boy might go, having never before been in a body that could skip, or leap, or run.

The energy mirrors to the left and right displayed the status of the great ship as she prepared herself for flight, redistributing masses among the fuel cells, preparing the drive core, erecting cross-supports both titanic and microscopic, putting some decks into hibernation, dismantling or compressing others.

These procedures were automatic. Phaethon and Atkins sat at the wide wood-and-ivory table, both reluctant to bring up the topic on which they both, no doubt, were dwelling.

It was Atkins who broke the embarrassed silence.

Atkins took out from his pouch two memory cards, and slid them with his fingers across the smooth surface of the table toward Phaethon. "Here," Atkins said. "These might as well be yours, if you want them."

Phaethon looked at the cards without touching them. A description file appeared in his sense filter. They contained the memories Atkins had suffered when he had been possessed by Phaethon's personality. He was offering, in effect, that Phaethon could graft the memories into his own, so that the events would seem to Phaethon as if they had happened to him, and not to someone else.

Phaethon's face took on a hard expression. He looked skeptical, and perhaps a little sad, or bored, or hurt. He put out his hand as if to slide the cards back to Atkins without comment, but then, to his own surprise, he picked them up and turned them over.

The summary viewer in the card surface lit up, and Phaethon watched little pictures and dragon signs flow by.

He put the card down. "With all due respect, Marshal, this was not a good depiction of me. I don't wish for a weapon in my hands the first thing when I wake up in confusion, I can do rapid astronomical calculations in my head, and I would have been very interested, and I still am, in the technical details of the ghost-particle array Xenophon built."

Atkins said, "I just thought it would be nice if-" And then he stopped.

Atkins was not a very demonstrative man. But Phaethon suddenly had an insight into his soul. The person who had defied the Silent One on the bridge of the Phoenix Exultant, the person who had had Phaethon's memories but Atkins's instincts, had been denied the right to live, and had been erased, replaced by Atkins when Atkins's memories were automatically restored.

And Atkins did not necessarily want that person, that false-Phaethon, that little part of himself, entirely to die.

Phaethon thought about his sire. A very similar thing had happened to Helion once. And it was not, perhaps, uncommon in the Golden Oecumene. But it had never happened to Phaethon before. No one had ever wanted to be him and stay him before.

And that Phaethonized version of Atkins, with Daphne's name on his lips at the last moment of existence, had passed away, still crying out that he wanted to remain as he was.

Phaethon said, "I'm sorry."

Atkins snorted, and said in voice of bitter amusement: "Spare me your pity."

"I only meant... it must be difficult for you ... for any man ... to realize that, if he were someone else, he would not necessarily desire to be himself again."

"I'm used to it. I found out a long time ago, that everyone wants an Atkins to be around if there's trouble, but no one wants to be Atkins. It's just one more little thing I have to do."

Phaethon's imagination filled in the rest of the sentence: "... in order to keep the rest of you safe."

The picture in Phaethon's mind was of a solitary man, unthanked and scorned by the society for which he fought, who, because he was devoted to protecting a Utopia, could himself enjoy few or none of its pleasures. The picture impressed him deeply, and an emotion, shame or awe or both, came over him.

Atkins spoke in a low voice: "If you don't want those memories, Phaethon, destroy them. I have no use for them. But I have to say not all the emotions and instincts that went on were mine. Those weren't my instincts talking."

"I am not sure I understand your meaning, sir.... ?"

Atkins leaned back in his chair and looked at Phaethon with a careful, hard, judicious expression. He said in an icy-calm tone of voice: "I only met her but once. I was impressed. I liked her. She was nice. But. To me, she was no more than that. I certainly would not have turned back from the most important mission in my life for her. And I wouldn't break the law for her, and I wouldn't have tried to ruin my life when I lost her the first time. But I'm not you, am I? Think about it."

Atkins stood up. "If you need me, I'll be in the medical house, preparing myself for the acceleration burn. If the War-mind calls, put it through to me there." And he turned on his heel smartly and marched off.

Phaethon, alone, sat at the table for a time, not moving, only thinking. He picked up the cards and turned them over and over again in his fingers, over and over again.

The realization should have been swift in coming, but for Phaethon, it was slow, very slow. Why had Atkins, when Atkins was possessed by Phaethon's memories, cried out his love for Daphne? Was it because Atkins was fond of her, or because someone else was ... ?

"But she is not my wife," muttered Phaethon.

No matter what he thought of Daphne Tercius, the emancipated doll, no matter what his feelings, no matter how much she looked and acted like his wife, she simply was not his wife.

His real wife, now, how clearly he recalled her! A woman of perfect beauty, wit, and grace, a woman who made him feel a hero to himself, a woman who recalled the glories of past ages. He remembered well how first the two of them had met on one of the moons of Uranus, when she sought him out to interview him for her dramatic documentary. How unexpectedly she had come into his life, as swiftly and as completely as a ray of light from the moon turns a dismal night into a fairytale landscape of silver-tinted wonder. Always he had been apart from the others in the Golden Oec-umene. Always men looked at him askance, or seemed somehow embarrassed by his ambitions, as if they thought it was unseemly, in the age of Sophotechs, for men of flesh and blood to dream of accomplishing great things.

But Daphne, lovely Daphne, she had a soul in which fire and poetry still lived. When they were on Oberon, she had urged him never to let a single day escape without some work accomplished on some great thing. She was as brave in her spirit as everyone else still huddling back on Earth had not been. And when the cool reserve of her professional interest in him began to heat to a more personal interest, when she had reached and touched his hand, when he had grown bold enough: to ask to see her, not to exchange information but to entertain each other with their mutual company, her sudden smile was as unexpected and as glorious and as full of shy promises as anything his bachelor imagination could hope for....

But no. Wait. That Daphne, the one who had first met him on Oberon, that had not been the real Daphne. That had been the doll. Daphne Tercius. This Daphne.

The real Daphne had been afraid to leave the Earth.

The real Daphne had been a little more cool to his dream, and had smiled, and had murmured words of absentminded encouragement when he had spoken of it. She had been a little more sardonic, a little less demonstrative, than her ambassador-doll had been.

But she was the one he had married. She had been real.

She too, believed in heroism, but thought it was a thing of the past, a thing not possible these days ... not allowed.

He had entered into full communion with her on many occasions. He knew exactly what she thought. There was no deception or misunderstanding between man and wife, not in the Golden Oecumene, not these days. He knew her love for him was true. He knew that his ambitions made her a little uncomfortable, but not because she thought they were wrong (certainly not!) but because she thought they were so terribly right. And she had slowly grown afraid he would be stopped. Afraid he would be crushed. The years had passed and he had smiled at that fear. Stopped by what? Crushed by whom? In the Golden Oecumene, the most free society history had ever known, no peaceful activity was forbidden.

Years and decades passed, and Phaethon told himself that his wife's fear for him was a sign of her love for him. He told himself that, as time proved he could accomplish the great deeds for which he had always longed, she would grow to understand; he told himself that, on that bright sunlit day, her fears would melt like nightmares upon waking.

And then he had failed at the Saturn project, defeated by the desertion of his financial backers. At the same time, the Hortators started to take notice of him. Neo-Orpheus and Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne had begun circulating public epistles condemning "those who take the settled opinions and sensibilities of the majority of mankind lightheartedly" and upbraiding "any reckless adventurers who would, for the sake of mere self-aggrandizement, create disharmony or raise controversy within the restful order of our eternal way of life." He was not mentioned by name (he doubted the Hortators were brave enough for that), but everyone knew whom they were condemning. During his trip back to Earth, many of the speaking engagements, thought-distribution sequences, and colloquies to which he had formerly been invited were suddenly canceled without explanation. Certain of the social clubs and salons his wife had insisted he join returned his membership fees and expelled him. He was informed of their decisions by radio, given no chance to speak. There was nothing official, no, it was all silent pressure. But it exasperated Phaethon beyond words.

He remembered how, on his first day back on Earth, he had returned to the Rhadamanth Mansion outbuildings in Quito, and his wife had been waiting in a pool of sunlight just inside the main door.

Daphne was reclining on a daybed, wearing a Red Manorial sensation-amplification suit, which hugged the curves of her body like a second skin. Atop the sensitive leathery surface of the suit, a gauze of white silken material floated, ignoring gravity, a sensory web used by Warlocks to stimulate their pleasure centers during tantric rituals. In one leather-gloved hand she held a memory casket half-open, set to record whatever might happen next. Her sultry eyes and pouting lips were also half-open.

"Well, hero"-she had smiled a sly and wicked smile-"I was sent to make your homecoming back to poor old Earth memorable, so maybe this day won't be all bad news. Ready for your hero's welcome?"

It was that day, that afternoon, in fact, when he had determined to build the Phoenix Exultant. This was sparked by something Daphne had said: that giants never noticed obstacles, they just stepped over them. And when Phaethon had replied in bitter tones: "I did not make this world," she had answered back that all he needed to make a world of his own was space un-crowded enough in which to make it. If the Hortators were in his way, he should just step over them into some wide place where they could not be found....

That small speech of Daphne's had planted the seed from which the Phoenix Exultant, over the next three centuries, had grown.

He recalled her smile on that day, the look of love and admiration in her eyes.... "She was not my wife."

It was true. That had not been his wife, not that day. That day, it had been the doll again. She had been sent to welcome him home and to keep him happy, while his real wife, away at a party thrown by Tawne House, had been trying to placate Tsychandri-Manyu, trying to minimize and mask the damage done to Phaethon's standing in polite society, and to her own. That, to her, was more important.

"But I love my wife___"

That also was true. He loved her for her many accomplishments, her beauty, and for that secret core of hers, a spirit unlike the placid spirit of this tame age, an heroic spirit, a spirit that...

A spirit that she praised in her dramas and her writings, but never displayed in her personal life. A spirit that she knew he had, but never supported, never encouraged, never praised.

"That's not true! She always wanted the best in Me for me! She always urged me upward!"

Didn't she ... ? Phaethon recalled many pillow conversations, or secret lovers' files, filled with worried words, urging caution, reconciliation, warning him to worry about his good name and his precious reputation....

"But underneath it all, she wanted what I wanted out of life! Didn't she just this week demand that I stir myself out from the slumber and seductive dreaming in that canister, when she and I were on our way from Earth to Mercury Equilateral? I was ready to forswear it all, in that weak moment, but it was she who steeled my resolution! It was she who reminded me of what I truly was! It is she who loves me, not for my reputation, which I've lost, not for the shallow things in me, my status and wealth and fine position, but for what is best in me! It was she, in that canister with me, who told me I had to ..."

She was not his wife.

That had been Daphne Tercius again.

It was she.

It had always been.

Daphne Prime, the so-called real Daphne, had turned herself into a dreaming nonentity, cutting herself off from the reality in which Phaethon lived, leaving him as thoroughly and finally as if she had been dead. That was his wife. The woman who had married his name and wealth and position left him when those things were lost.

Daphne Tercius had been emancipated and had become a real woman. She had the memories of Daphne Prime, the core, that same spirit that Daphne Prime had had.

But Daphne Tercius had never betrayed her spirit. Instead, she had left her name and wealth and position, and even her immortality, had left them all behind her when she came to find Phaethon again. To help him, to save him. To save his dream.

But she was not his wife.

Not yet.

Silently, suddenly, warm green light shone softly from every communication mirror. Here were images of forests, flowers, grainfields, gardens, covered bridges, rustic chemurgy arbors, golden brown with age.

Midmost was an image of a queenly shape, garbed in green and gold, throned between two tall cornu-copiae hollowed from the elephantine tusks, and, above her throne, a canopy of flowers of the type bred to recite prothalamia and nuptial eclogues. This was the image, when she appeared to the Silver-Gray, assumed by the Earthmind. This was neither an avatar nor a synnoesis, but the Earthmind herself, the concentration of all the computational and intellectual power of an entire civilization, the sum of all the contributions of ever-operating systems throughout the Golden Oecumene.

Wondering, Phaethon adjusted his sense filter to edit out his awareness of the seventy-nine-minute delay between call and reply that light-speed would impose on messages traveling between the Phoenix Exultant, in her present position, and Earth. He signaled that he was ready to receive.

And the Earthmind spoke, saying, "Phaethon, hear me. I am come to describe how to murder a Sophotech."